The Supernatural World of Vladimir and Viktor, Chapter 1
Late in the morning, Sam Winchester and Castiel took the tunnel from Kansas to Eddie Timms's Indiana barn. Eddie and the boys were already up, and Scraps with Captain Fyter had arrived.
Scraps was presenting Viktor with his own teddy bear, a gray one with brown button eyes, which she had promised Eddie was made totally of fire-proof materials. She flipped the bear over to show she had stitched on its back a black dragon wings pattern.
Vladimir insisted his should have fangs, so Scraps pulled out from her drawstring bag some white thread to stitch in white fangs on his bear. As she started on the bear, Captain Fyter took charge.
"Okay, men," he told Vladimir and Viktor. "Today we are going to learn our first weapon, so present you claws!"
Vladimir and Viktor proudly held out their hands and extended their claws. The captain presented a handful of rocks and three stretch bands with a loop at each end.
"Here's what we will do." Captain Fyter took one of the bands and, with the palm of his left hand facing away from him, used his right hand to hook the loops over two fingers. Then he took a rock, put it against the pad the middle of the band, pulled back and let the rock fly into the air. It bounced off one of a row of empty bottles sitting on a bench.
"Slingshots!" exclaimed Sam.
Vladimir and Viktor eagerly armed themselves and shot rocks at the other bottles. "When you get good enough," the captain added. "you will battle each other with these paint balls." He showed them a clear bag full of green and pink half-inch spheres and a couple of goggles.
"Someday," the captain explained to Eddie, Sam, and Castiel, "the stones and balls can be replaced with harpoon-tipped spheres that will inject dead man's blood into vampires or the treatment for your witch-killing bullets for witches."
Sam wanted to hang around to watch, and maybe even participate, but he had an appointment and climbed down the hatch in the barn that would take him to Eddie's Tennessee barn to meet the elf Daniel.
Castiel followed Eddie into the house. They had a destination to go to themselves: Heaven - the part of Heaven in which human souls resided and angels could not cross into. If their plan worked, Castiel would be the first angel to do so.
Eddie laid on the couch in the livingroom and closed his eyes. In less than a minute he asked Castiel if he could see the golden cord. Castiel could. The cord ran from Eddie's body up and through the ceiling.
"We all have them but the living don't see them. My core soul Timothy is at the other end. Just follow it as I make my connection." In a moment Castiel saw Eddie's spirit rise and follow the golden cord. He rose and followed Eddie.
There was not a sense of distance, as much as a sense of change of thought, and the form of a man appeared. One that looked much like Eddie but tall with curly brown hair and dressed in the robe of one who lived in Galilee two thousand years ago. With him, but less visible were figures of both sexes and many races of humans and beings somewhat other than human. Castiel remembered Eddie had said he was the latest of thousands of incarnations of this soul.
Stricter concentration revealed the golden cords. They connected each entity and each entity had more such cords that reached away and towards other souls and memories of those souls and towards the physical realm. His thought returned to Eddie and he noticed Eddie had several of the golden colds that led back to Earth. He figured they connected to Vladimir and Viktor, and probably the Winchesters. He followed where one cord led directly to him and that others led from him back to Earth, one of them to Dean Winchester, he sensed, and another to Sam Winchester. Could that mean when these humans finally died that his essence would continue with them even if he should lose his grace?
"Castiel, I want you to meet another past incarnation of mine," he heard Eddie say. His thoughts returned to the central figure to see it was now a tall tanned woman with long black hair smiling pleasantly at him.
"This my Zoroastrian incarnation from ancient Persia. She was a recorder and librarian for the faith and is our primary link to the Hall of Records. That's where all history of all souls and their incarnations are recorded. See if she can find Sam and Dean for you."
"Call me Shebbeth," the woman said and she led Castiel through an entrance into an elegant hall lined with shelves of books. "Of course there are no physical books. This just feels like there are because, during my life, that is how information was recorded. I imagine other incarnations would walk up to a computer instead and say, 'Siri, take me to my former home in France."
'She retained her sense of humor,' thought Castiel, imagining how she would have been in life.
They found the tome for Dean Wincheter right off and Castiel saw Dean outside the bunker playing an impromptu game of mumbly-peg with a dagger. Shebbeth pulled out a volume from nearby and opened it up for Castiel to see Sam in Tennessee, just now passing the "BEWARE OF THE FAIRIES" sign with the elf Daniel at his side. He decided to read along for a while.
"I don't have the sensation that I'm about to be swarmed by 'tinks' this time," Sam was saying.
"They've been informed this time that you are a 'friendly,'" said Daniel. "You'll be fine when we see them."
As they progressed, Sam noticed the trees on either side began to be lined up at either side forming an archway over them. Soon the mountain began to rise up on either side and the trees were replaced with forest creeper, ferns, jewelweed and wild hydrangea. Once the mountain closed over them forming a tunnel, Sam could see light in the distance.
The passage ended at a large reflective pool under a mass of crossvine with huge red trumpet-like flowers from which the tinks emerged and flitted about, lighting up the area with the sparks they produced. At Sam and Daniel's feet, stone steps led down into the pool and beyond.
"Follow me," said Daniel as he walked down the steps. The surface of the pool did not respond as he walked down into it, and as Sam followed and his eyes went below the pool's surface he realized it was not a pool of water at all. Above the men was just darkness and the passageway continued a short distance to its opening.
The first thing Sam noticed were that the tiny fairies – the 'tinks' as he knew them as – were fluttering about. He looked at the craggy wall behind him to see the lights in clusters all along the wall and above as far as he could see.
When his eyes adjusted, he noticed he was also on a walkway along the wall and that, as it extended in both directions, it curved up into the darkness. On the opposite side of the walkway, a low wall extended along its entire length. Beyond the wall was vast openness and in the distance, a spectacular view. Below, a bright landscape stretched in a slight curve from right to left and far into the darkness beyond. From Sam's view it looked like an airliner view of the green, brown and blue patched surface of Earth that disappeared into darkness in four directions. Above and out front of them was a long rectangle of light.
"Ready for me to explain what you're looking at?" asked Daniel.
"Yeah, I am."
"Okay," Daniel continued. "We are moving though space inside a planet-sized ship. From the inside it is shaped like a barrel that is rotating, causing a centrifugal pull that holds against it everything you see down there. The rectangle of light you see above is the mid-day view of a non-rotating cylinder on which only this side produces light. The side of the barrel rotates around the middle cylinder so the landscape lit up below will ride up into the darkness on the unlit side of the cylinder and back around to come into the light again from the other side. Day, night, day, night..."
Sam squeezed his eyes tightly shut, trying to wrap his mind around the image. "Okay, so the wall beside us is the top of the closed barrel and the bottom of the barrel is in the darkness straight across from us. Because the barrel spins the walk we are on is being pushed towards what appears to us to be the ground below us. And the ground we see down there is on the barrel's inner side that presses outward, which to people down there seems like 'down' while the light-producing cylinder seems like 'up.' in the sky."
"That's it in a nutshell. And this whole thing floats somewhere out in outer space. It's 'barreling' through space, you might say." Daniel hoped Sam caught his pun.