Chapter 1: Bronzor
"Behold, I am making everything new."
Bradley looked through his mail and he saw that the September issue of his Game Power magazine had arrived. Board games and trading cards were very popular in his generation, because personal computers had accessibility problems. Sitting on his bed, he flipped through advertisements for facilitative gloves, strategy guides, new releases and reviews.
A page that caught his eye was advertising a contest for his favorite franchise.
In bold cyan letters it read "Win a deck from the Third Generation of cards before its wide commercial release!"
Below in bigger red letters it read "Essay Contest".
Everything below that was in small purple lettering.
"What does Ash's franchise mean to you?"
"Tell us and you might win a deck from the third generation of cards! There will be only 100 winners.
Entries will be judged by their length and content. Send your answers to the address below."
The address was in the island country of Brytho.
There was a five-dollar entrance fee, which was more than justified in the eyes of Bradley by the fact that he would be getting the cards EARLY. Immediately he began to formulate the essay in his head.
He was determined to win that contest by any means possible.
In less than a week Bradley had finished his essay and now, on a warm Wednesday afternoon, he was walking to the mailbox at the corner of the office building close to his house. He dropped the envelope in the slot, aided by a nearby stepladder. There was no way that he could lose this contest, he thought to himself. What was he going to do while he waited for a response?
Bradley stared at the color television in his living room. It was showing a live feed from the lunar base.
Despite their natural weight, the astronauts hopped about with ease. Neal Hendricks, the leader of the three currently stationed at the lunar surface, disappeared back into the stairs below the glass dome. It was time for them to go to sleep, as confirmed by mission control. It was interesting how all the messages seemed to have a delay more than a second long. Bradley knew that the moon was far away enough from the earth that the radio waves took a significant amount of time to propagate through the space in between.
Kenneth, his father, was an Electronic Technician. He was actually involved with the lunar communication team—Bradley could be proud of that.
A pile of opened letters was set next to the oaken desk of the company president. Inexplicably, there was a mannequin set up next to his desk. On the wall just behind the desk hung a large painting of Rosa, the president's wife.
"Gerald, is that the last of the entries?"
"Yes, there are no more deserving of your attention, sir, for violating our entry requirements."
"Good. You can go back to your desk."
The president's childhood friend disappeared behind the office doors, leaving Ashton alone.
He spent a few hours looking through the letters.
Yes, this was the kind of essay that he would like to see…
(He went into a sort of judging reverie.)
As Anthony came to perceive again, he noticed that he had no eyes. Direct channels to his mind with information were opened up. Actually, he wasn't exerting any effort in floating. He was completely weightless—yes, he lacked a body! The memories were all coming back to him, but it felt like here, he had no cloudiness of memory, as if his physical brain had been replaced with some kind of spiritual memory apparatus. Space and time were not limitations from his vantage point; he was occupying only a single point in space, but there was something surrounding him… with no eyes, it was a sort of joyous aura, like the color of a sunrise that never ends.
Except for lacking a body, it felt as if he were somehow… meant to live here.
It was as if it were twilight and daytime at the same time. He wasn't seeing things with light, he was seeing them with… something else, something more fundamental to his existence and the existence of all things.
He had sacrificed himself, hadn't he? But what of his sister, his dear sister? Anthony hoped dearly that Ash would take care of her, since she seemed to have taken a liking to him.
Oh, there were so many, many things that he had not gotten to do—like leave Alto Mare and visit that country on the continent with the noodles and the pasta…
(He loved to eat spaghetti while he was still living.)
Here, it felt like everything was reduced to the idea or conception of itself, like a story being reduced to mere words on a screen, but with everything. When reduced to mere ideas, dreams and reality become the same thing.
It was as if his very essence were reduced to an infinitely long barcode—totally unique and never ending, like the mantissa of an irrational number.
But it seemed that nothing here was tainted by corruption, that everything here was in its ideal state, notwithstanding the lack of a corporeal body.
Ashton finished looking at the letters, and arrangements were made to send the prizes to the winners.
A ship brought its cargo into the docking bay at the large city of Der Toffel. One of its packages made its way onto a truck driven by Philip, who drove through Mesaland and its capital of Cansand, travelling through hundreds of miles of desert before stopping at the Breaking Point. There, it was inexplicably taken into the air northeast before setting down in the city of Potumaris.
Archibald the deliveryman knocked at the door of Bradley's house.
He opened it a few seconds later and thanked Archibald for coming to his door.
"I have a package for Bradley Fritz."
"I am he." Archibald handed the package over to the excited Bradley, who thanked him again as he shut the door and ran across the hall toward his bedroom.
Archibald shrugged, turned around and walked away.
Bradley shut the door of his room and he set the package on his bed. He was going to enjoy every second of this; he had even planned how he was going to do this.
He ripped off the wrapping, revealing a shrink-wrapped deck and a letter written by the company president.
He beheld them as if they were sacred objects and chuckled nervously.
Bradley looked at the letter first, cutting it open with a letter-opener.
Dear Bradley Fritz,
Your dissertation on how these cards were like friends to you, and how you used them to write stories was unique and also very inspirational to me. Please accept this prize.
P.S. I am writing stories too. Keep up the good work.
The Company President, Ashton John Jones
Wow! His friends Sextus and William would never believe him unless they saw it with their own two eyes.
Next, he tore open the shrink-wrapped cards, careful to not even let a single scratch upon their glossy, mirroring finish, and he set them all face down upon his bed in the pattern of a grid, until they formed a reflective surface that put a bright spot on the wall.
He then flipped them all over, one at a time, being excited the whole time.
This was the best day in his life that he could remember in quite a while—perhaps a birthday party was better, but this was also unexpected. You knew when a birthday party was going to happen, but winning a contest was unpredictable.
He couldn't waste such a good mood—when he was feeling good, he was a good writer too.
So, he got out his compositional notebook and immediately put his mind to the paper.
"Written on the happiest day of my life (possibly):"
He couldn't think of a title yet; he would do that later.
"Eric was an E.T.—
an Electronic Technician, who was living in the (fictional) city of Paris when it went under siege."
"Paris is like Lumiose City in Kalos, but with a derelict suburb and lots of problems with criminals…"
Bradley continued writing the story which he would later come to call "The Five".
The next day, Bradley went over to the house of Sextus to play cards with him and William.
He showed them the letter.
"No way." William said in disbelief.
"Congratulations on winning!" Sextus said, happy that something good had happened to his friend.
"Can you show us the cards?" William was impatient.
"Sure, I have them right here."
He set the deck out on the table.
The way the game of humorous animals was played was quite versatile—there were many game modes.
Sometimes it involved construction, other times competition or fighting battles, wars and skirmishes.
It was fun to use these cards to do peaceful battles rather than experience the violence in the real world.
"Oh, and Sextus…" Bradley lowered his head and removed his baseball cap.
"I must thank your sister Tulla for allowing me to win this contest. She was the one who inspired me to write my stories in the first place."
"Really?" Sextus knew that his sister was a lousy writer, but a wonderful artist.
"Yeah, she said that she draws as if the paintings live in their own world, that they are already in the canvas of her mind and she just needs to draw them out. When I told her my idea about writing stories based on this game of humorous animals—even before the official cartoon came out, she was very supportive, even though she was not very interested in it herself."
Sextus knew that his sister wasn't as interested in trading cards as he was, so he felt even more grateful toward her, thinking about all the things that she had done selflessly.
"That was the biggest part of my essay—that I could use the humans in my own stories."
I wonder if it's also because she found out that she's the company president's fourth cousin? That may have had something to do with it.
Tulla watched the conversation downstairs, unseen.
She thought that it was actually because Bradley had a personality similar to the company president, that he had won the contest. She could see him as a reflection of his personality—like a mirror.
She decided to draw a picture of Bradley looking in the mirror. She went to the desk in her room and grabbed the yellow paint.
That evening Tulla went over to Sunset Park, on the south side of Potumaris.
It started to rain, but that didn't matter to Tulla.
Getting wet would not stop her from visiting the war memorial.
Duke, Bryan and Buddy all popped out of the water, swimming to the shore of Morrino Creek.
Today—the first of October—was the anniversary of an important battle in the Samiyan Sea.
It tragically cut short the lives of many men several decades ago.
They walked down the cobblestone path leading out of the creek.
A brown sign on the side of the road mentioned something about a statue.
They walked contemplatively for half a mile before reaching their destination.
Tulla reached the large bronze statue. A winged figure eight feet high reached down a hand to a prone turtle with a broken shell reaching back.
The turtle seemed to be sinking into the metal waves of the sea as its face showed desperation. He was wearing the armband of the Fifth Empire. A plaque to the right side read,
"DEDICATED TO THOSE SOLDIERS LOST AT SEA IN THE SECOND GREAT WAR"
"How could we be so foolish, as to kill one another for what? Our pride?" Duke lamented.
"There was no other way, Duke. They started the fight, and we retaliated." Brian responded.
"There HAD to have been another way, a way that would have saved the lives of so many more."
"The government isn't made to save lives, Duke. Whatever it is made to control, it can also take away." Buddy was cynical.
"How do we throw away the sanctity of life at the first opportunity? Because it would be a minor inconvenience?"
"Speak for yourself. Egg-breaking is still legal in this nation, you know. People will harden their hearts when it seems pleasurable enough," Brian said, despondent.
"But we… may have betrayed our blood-brothers and sisters, and they, us…"
"Put your total faith in no man, Duke," Buddy says with certainty.
The three sat at a bench facing the statue.
Tulla interjected. "I agree. It doesn't matter what other people think about you, as long as you're doing the right thing."
"In big cities, everybody loses sight of each other's… createdness."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, Brian… when people are packed more densely together, and they see less of the natural world, they start to aim for the lowest common denominator."
"They begin to tell themselves, 'nothing that I shall do will make any difference—so I don't need to take responsibility for my actions.'"
"You're an educated lass, aren't you?"
She giggled. "Oh, Brian…"