Aquarius

What a Wonderful World

10 years later


I see trees of green, red roses, too,
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.

Louis Armstrong


It was the year 2025, and the small town of Amity Park, Ohio had never been better.

Well, let's be clear in saying that this town wasn't small. It was a small town originally, with a total of five streetlights and a solid four hundred people - with a primarily upperclass demographic on the outskirts a gargantuan forest. There was a single gas pump, and a sheriffs office, if memory served correct. There was a killer diner on a street corner that a passerby or two would stumble upon and then forget about an hour later.

Nothing ever happened here. Once in a blue moon, Old Man Rodgers (who has long since passed - may he rest in peace) would rear-end some snooty rich couple's sports car with his five-thousand pound, solid steel pickup truck, seemingly on "accident." It never failed to make the local news, until the old man finally croaked on one fateful Tuesday night and no one was ever really sure how.

The town proceeded to run his story for weeks following the death.

As Rodgers was the only viable source of town drama, the only other notable thing to happen in this town happened just weeks prior to the Great Crash.

A snail crossed the road near the capital building. It made it all the way across and only barely managed to get away with not being hit by a truck passing by. The city proclaimed that the survival of the snail was a sort-of metaphor for the town, and thus that day was declared a holiday.

To put it simply: a little over a decade ago, the people of Amity Park were bored.

It was a damn good thing Amity Park wasn't so small anymore.

Ever since the Great Crash and over the course of the last ten years, Amity Park became one of the nation's biggest and most successful cities. As one can imagine, it was a huge jump for the town of three-hundred-ninty-nine. When small shoppes turned into skyscrapers, and the vast uninhabited forests became industrialized and thrown into the next technological century, citizens were more than a little shocked.

To everyones surprise, or given the circumstance, lack thereof, Amity Park became a major tourist destination, and the town-turned-city had visitors from all over the world roll in just about every day of the week.

The town's council was even discussing the opening of an international airport just outside of town, but the idea was quickly shut down due to the proximity of Columbus, the state's capital, and the security procedures necessary to proceed with the idea.

And just like the city, the residents grew too.

That is where this story actually starts: on the streets of Amity Park, where a not-so-little girl sat under a gigantic maple tree in the local park, reading quietly as the day passed around her, unnoticed. Well, one would have thought she was reading at first glance. Until one realized that her eyes were closed and her breathing was deep and even.

That is, until the roaring sound of an armed white Hummer passing by jolted said girl from her slumber.

Sam jerked awake, her eyes wide and her muscles corded in surprise. Upon noticing that no threat presented itself before her, Sam yawned and stretched and put her book aside.

"Wow," Sam Manson commented to herself, cracking her knuckles. She sat up straight. "How… how long've I been out?" Eyebrows crinkling, Sam pulled out her cellphone and glanced at it. She gasped in surprise. "Two and a half hours?!"

No, no, no, that wasn't good at all. If Sam were allowed off the property, she was to check in every two hours on the dot. And here she was, two hours and a half hours since her last check in and she was still across town.

Sam bolted into a standing position and she hastily placed her book back into her backpack. The girl grabbed her water bottle and with that, took off in a run.

When one says that Amity Park did some growing over the past decade, they would not be kidding. Two-story shops turned into skyscrapers and they towered over Sam's head as she bolted past them, her combat boots splashing in the puddles of leftover rainwater from a storm that had only just passed.

She ran along the sidewalk, shoving past bystanders with hasty apologies thrown every which way. It was in times like these that Sam thanked the heavens that she had grown to be quite athletic over the past six months. At least slightly. But even if she wasn't, Sam knew these streets well enough that she could run them backwards.

She's done it before.

Sam sprinted past buildings, restaurants, streets, and even through traffic on one occasion – a rather baffled owner of a navy-colored sedan honked angrily at her as she sprinted past his car.

But there was a moment when Sam slowed down. On the Saint Elms Bridge, to be exact. It was one of the few places connecting the East End of Amity Park to the West End; where the fast-running stream water that fed directly from Lake Eerie rushed down the incline on which Amity Park was precariously located, flowed freely.

Sam slowed to a stop and gazed at the West End of Amity Park.

The West End was far less urbanized than the East. There were certainly more houses and human-service institutions like hospitals in the West, whereas the East housed most of the city's skyscrapers, restaurants, businesses, and the majority of the night life.

Despite the lively advantages and vivid colors of the East, located in the West End was what made Amity Park so famous.

Sam could see it from there, on Saint Elms Bridge. She could see that tall, monstrous silver skyscraper that lay waste to the far north of the West End. It was placed at an awkward incline, like the Tower of Piazza in a sense, but it didn't look quite so elegant, nor as stable.

In fact, the "skyscraper" wasn't even a building at all. It was a ship, actually. A spaceship. And it didn't come from Earth.

It was the cause of the Great Crash.

The spaceship was deteriorating more and more with every passing year, and it was sad for Sam to see. But it wasn't what Sam stopped to gaze at, despite the excellent view. No, in fact, what she stopped to see was not too far away from where she stood, maybe to the northeast of the spaceship-made-tourist-acctaction.

What she was really looking at was a four-story tall, concrete, ugly-looking compound surrounded by a ten-foot-tall, chain-linked electric fence. The whole thing had to be the size of about twenty football fields, and was designed like a prison. If Sam didn't already know what was on the inside, she would have no idea what lay beyond the walls.

But then again, everyone knew what was on the inside. It wasn't, by any means, a secret.

She'd never been on the inside of the prison herself, but she's seen the widely publicized, low to the ground bunkers on the inside and the ratty, industrialized excuse for a society attempting to thrive from her television.

The efforts made by the government to keep this place locked up were ridiculous. There were countless security measures taken in order to get in and out, those atrocious walls and fences, and something else the Guys in White added to the mix rather recently - about six months ago, to be exact.

Even from here, Sam could see it. There was a slight greenish hue about the compound. It shimmered in the light and created something that looked a lot like a dome that coated the whole site. A shield. Sam scoffed at the sight of it.

White vans, jeeps, and Hummers like the one that woke her from her slumber paraded around with guns mounted on the roofs and bars on the windows. Bulky men in white suits scurried about the compound with massive guns adorning their persons.

The sight of the military base being so close to the hospital where she took residence made her sick to her stomach. In fact, the very existence of the military base made her want to vomit.

Human beings were cruel and vile, sometimes. Sam almost hated being a part of a society that orchestrated this kind of oppression.

Sam had half a mind to sit outside that fence and protest until they arrested her. She wanted to stir the pot and maybe jostle the citizens of Amity Park out of their illusion of safety and realize the actual oppression they were enforcing onto an entire group of people. A whole species!

This species, which people have been calling "ghosts" since day one for reasons Sam wasn't quite sure of, were the people aboard that gigantic spaceship that now lay waste on the northern horizon.

From what she gathered, being only six at the time and not understanding the entirety of the situation until it was explained to her some years later, the initial arrival of the ghosts was violent in nature. Well, more accurately the crash itself was violent, as with the nature of any other crash.

Naturally, the federal government immediately took action to ensure the "safety" of the American people, thinking the crash was orchestrated purposefully and with the intent to kill the people of Earth - as the ship originated from somewhere unrecognizable on any database anywhere in the world.

Of course, Sam found this reasoning to be extremely illogical and irrational. She personally believed the Guys in White, a sub-section of the federal government specializing in non-human affairs, was looking for an excuse affirm their relevance and assert control over something.

Many people, like Sam, believed the ghosts meant no harm in their arrival. The violent nature of the crash was nothing more than an accident that could be throughly described by a passenger aboard the ship at the time, if given the chance to explain.

But of course, instead of letting them explain their sides of the story, the Guys in White and the rest of that useless group of over-dressed government officials took immediate action and maimed, captured, or killed any ghosts they could get their hands on, on the day of the Great Crash.

Then, they built that compound as a prison for them - a containment sector dubbed by the citizens of Amity Park as the "Ghost Zone." Since that day, no ghost has been allowed a breath of freedom beyond that electric fence, and many of the people Sam grew up around took great pride in that fact.

Since the day of the Great Crash, Sam hasn't seen a ghost in the flesh. Sure she, like everyone else around the world, has seen the footage of the inside, with an occasional glimpse of a generally pissed-off looking ghost passing through the halls, along with a containment unit or two, but that was just about it.

Of course, this was expected - as no one aside from law enforcement officers, government agents, guards, scientists, and designated camera crews were granted entry to the inside of the Ghost Zone, and even that access was restricted by some countless amount of rules and regulations Sam didn't want to know about.

That was why Sam stopped in her tracks, and stared at that compound. She always did when she crossed the Saint Elms Bridge. She always hoped – vainly, sure - that she would catch a glimpse of a ghost. After all, right in that spot, she had the best view of the Ghost Zone in the entire city, without getting too close.

Then, Sam held her chin high and continued walking. Every time she laid eyes on the Ghost Zone, her resolve to free the ghosts hardened further.

One day, she thought, one day, I'm going to see that place burn.


A/N: One of my shorter chapters, yes I am aware lol. But regardless, I hope you enjoyed anyway. Not much happened, I was just setting the scene. Or, actually, re-setting the scene. Whatever.

Please leave your thoughts, whatever those may be, in the reviews! Thank you for reading!

Peace

- Rookey