Chapter 1:

It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn

My name is Lucius Andrew Werner and this is my story. When I was 5 I developed the ability to move through space; to anywhere I had been before. It came as quite a shock and threw me for loop. I didn't know how or why I was afflicted with this curse, and I didn't care. I just wanted to be normal; to have a normal life, to have a normal family. But on that day that I first jumped, I learned a terrible truth. A grave consequence was the price to pay for that truth.

And now once again, 28 years after that fateful day I find myself in a state of pure shock. What....what the fucking hell? There's no damn way. There's just no fucking way! Why can't I be fucking normal? My mom, Luann, knocked on my bedroom door and kept knocking, each time louder than the last. After three minutes of the repetitive knocking I answered. "It isn't locked," I replied. My mom came in and looked me straight in the eyes. She could see the anger that was welling up within. "What's wrong sweetie?" she asked.

I felt my eyes get hot. I got up from my bed, where I was doing my homework on a lap desk and yelled. "Honey, talk to me." I felt like putting my fist through her chest and ripping out her still beating heart. "I hate you," I exclaimed, "I Hate you, I hate dad, I hate school, I hate this neighborhood and I especially hate my life," the words came pouring out without remorse for her feelings. I could see her starting to tremble. "Ma...," I started, but before I could finish she stormed off to the master bedroom.

She slammed the door hard, so hard it rattled the walls. "You need to talk to him, right now, before he finds out that it's only going to get worse." I've always had excellent auditory facilities and I could hear every word she was saying. Worse? I thought for a second. How the hell could it get any worse? "You need to tell him about the next step of his 'curse'. You need to tell him before it's too late and he messes of the temporal continuity. Temporal continuity? Just what the hell is that?

"Luann, you need to settle down. There's no guarantee that he's able to. You know just as well as I do that that power can skip up to two generations." That's my dad Charlie talking. "That power," I questioned aloud. I puckered my face in confusement. "Okay, enough rope-a-dope," I said as I logged into my Yahoo account. With a few keystrokes I entered temporal continuity into the search field and got hit with over fifty-four hundred results. I found a link and the bottom of the page that looked interesting. I clicked on it and the hyperlink pulled up a pdf of a document called Recursive Non Linear Estimation of Discontinuous Flow Fields. "Fine, I'll talk to him tomorrow," my dad said dryly. "I must've missed what else was said between them," I whispered to myself.

I looked over the PDF and came to an equation. Lovely....why is it always mathematics? I hate math. I also hate what I don't understand. The document looked like French to me; and considering that I don not know a single word of French I got pissed.

I looked over at the clock; it was three till five pm. I turned on my television and tuned the cable box on to channel 130; that's the Hallmark channel here. Of course you have to have Cox digital cable to get it. My favorite show was about to come on. I grabbed my laptop off my desk and sat on my bed and finished my college homework while watching M*A*S*H.

After about an hour I finished up my homework and then laid down and finished watching the rest of the show. After another hour I was tired enough to go to sleep. I can't fucking wait to see my dad has in store for me tomorrow. I got undressed and put on my drawers, tied up my long hair and slipped on my eyeshades. I got into the covers and waited for sleep to overtake me.