Chapter 5 - Settling In
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"Basically, there isn't much to this job except for helping customers find what they are looking for and knowing correct method of stocking things." said Chris as he led Amy over to a rack stuffed with books. He grabbed a book and turned it around to the back and pointed out the scan tag on the bottom left corner.
"Every book has a tag like this. The category and subcategory is right here, and it's all a matter of taking it to the right section. Now this one goes to the Mystery section..." Chris began his brisk walk over to the Mystery section, as I half ran to try to keep up. "Everything is stocked by the first letter in the author's last name." Chris selected the appropriate location and spent a moment squeezing the book in. "Except for when the book is part of a licensed series. For example..." Chris turned around to the shelf opposite mystery. "Stuff in the fantasy section like the Forgotten Realms series or..." Chris pulled out a book titled City of Heroes. "Stuff based off videogames or TV series', all of them are stocked not by author but by the first letter in their name. Got it?" I nodded my head in affirmation.
"Excellent. And that's all there is to it. You will find..." Chris began briskly walking to the end of the aisle as I again tried to keep up to where a computer monitor and a keyboard sat on a table. "...these terminals. Now anytime you absolutely can't find a book the customer is looking for, you can check to see if we actually have it here. You can do a search by title, author, or series. You can find out if we have the book in stock, which other stores have the book in stock, if we carry it in our warehouse, ect. If we don't have it in the store, we can direct them to another store where they have it in stock or the customer can place an order and we'll ship it here or to their home address from our warehouse. If it's out of print, there are several links in our system from which you can check and order from a used books vendor. You won't have to worry about this all now, you'll get trained in this later. They like to break in new employees slowly here."
Chris adjusted his glasses. "Any questions?"
"I'm good." I responded with a nervous smile.
"Excellent. Now I'll give you the grand tour of our store." He once again began a brisk pace as I tried to keep up.
Chris, an 19ish looking employee at the Book World bookstore seemed like a nice enough guy. He also seemed to eternally have a cup of coffee on hand or in the area around him so he was always quite wired and hyperactive. Still, he was very helpful and knowledgeable and an interesting conversationalist when you got to know him. But unless you were talking about a piece of conversation that actually interested him he normally kept quiet and to himself.
Chris led me around the bookstore naming off each section as we went along. "Now in the middle of the store are the general fiction books. Mystery, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Romance, Thriller, Action... ecetera...
"In the back of the store is the kids section." He pointed. "You don't have to worry about that section too much since we always have at least one employee specifically staffed for that section. Still, you should make a point to memorize where everything is. On this back corner over here..."
"...is nonfiction. Stuff like Science, Physics, Cars, Cooking, Sewing, Animals, ect. In the opposite corner is Classic Literature. Everything from Charles Dickens to Mary Shelley. And of course..." He said gesturing. "You've noticed our cafe. Conveniently hidden here on the second floor where we are less likely to make as much of a profit. Just another typical corporate goof up"
Chris started going off on a tangent about how retail corporates were full of imbeciles who only looked at the numbers and were always making dumb changes to the store because they...
"...don't do our jobs and have no idea what it's like at our level. Every now and then some bigwig will come to visit and gripe about what they think is being done wrong and will start telling us to reorganize stuff for no good reason..." Chris went on for a few minutes while I stood there with a plastic smile and nodding.
I wasn't sure I agreed with him. I considered all people to be basically good. And everybody made mistakes. It wasn't always their fault. Everyone was just trying to do their job the best they could and couldn't help messing up every now and then. It was a big company with a lot of people and everyone had different points of view. Actually, I would come to notice over the next few years in retail just how widely different people's personalities were and just how much everyone's points of view frequently clashed. Chris was a bit of a cynic who seemed to think most management and customers were stupid and it tended to reflect a bit in his interactions with them. I didn't really share that viewpoint.
After getting off his speech about the idiocy of corporations, he went back to naming everything again. "Right next to the cafe are all of our maps and atlases. To the right of the maps are the humor section, and on the left is our World Travel and Language sections." He started walking to the front of the second floor to the corner opposite the stairwell leading down.
"Foreign Language books, Architecture, Maps, Graphic Novels..."
"And the aisles in between all that are Audiobooks, Computers, Programming, Manga, Magic, Metaphysical, New Age, and my personal favorite..."
He gestured to a small area towards the bottom of the Metaphysical shelf. "Speculation."
"Speculation?" I asked.
"Yep. Or to be more accurate; "Conspiracy Theories By Morons."
He pulled out a book entitled; 'Are Aliens Brainwashing Our World Governments?'
"I don't think I need to give a better explanation." He proceeded to give one anyways. "UFO plots to take over the world, bizarre alien theories of the origin of the universe, ect. There are even several different books here which predict several different dates that the world is going to end. There are always new books coming out that predict the end of the world is going to end the current year, and when the year passes, those books go out of print and more pop up to take their place. Stupidity or just trying to make money off of gullible people, I'm not sure which is the case. I think both. Check this piece of crap out."
Chris pulled out a book called 'The History of the Xorda: The Origin and Necessary Apocalypse of the Anthro Humans.'
"It was written by a Dr. Jonathan Kintobar. This book has been banned in a lot of places; and you definately won't find it anywhere that large populations of anthro humans live. Kintobar was an huge racist who presented the belief that at one point on Earth, humans were the only dominate species until extraterrestials landed on our world. The Xorda were supposedly part of a Galactic Federation that sought out intelligent life on other worlds and gave them a chance to enter the Federation. But when the Xorda landed on Earth, they were horrified at the war and debauchery that took place on our planet and instead decided to destroy Earth. They shot some kind of chemical onto the Earth that was supposed to kill all life, but instead it mixed with the gases on our planet and had a backwards chemical effect. Life began too thrive, maybe a little too much. Some animals on the planet began to evolve and gained intelligence, and that's where anthro humans come from.
Dr. Kintobar was a Human Supremist that believed that half our world was unjustly taken from the humans by the anthro humans and it is a crime that we now have to share it. He considered them outsiders who needed to be removed indefinitely. Otherwise, he stated, humans may someday no more be the 'dominate species'. Kintobar was eventually found by GUN intelligence to be the head of a sect of a particularily violent Human Supremist organization and was linked to several dozen senseless murders of anthro humans. He was tried and sentenced to the electric chair."
I was a little horrified. I had never heard of anything like this. Catching my look, Chris said,
"Apologies. I didn't mean to upset you. There are lots of evil people in this world, worse than Eggman even."
"It's okay. I just never heard of anything like that before."
"When you read a lot, you learn a mix of fascinating and disturbing things about the world. If you really want your pleasant world view shattered, try giving the stuff in True Crime section a shot. You can find a ton more stuff on Human Supremism."
I nodded warily.
Deciding to change the subject, he said
"Now to be fair, not everything in this section is complete and utter crap. There is actually some pretty decent stuff. Take this one for example..." He pulled out a book.
The title was 'The Millennium Planet. How Time Travel Is Not Only Possible, But History As We Know It Is Not Secure.'
I took a moment to try to digest the huge title.
"This was written by a Dr. Julian Korvac. He has a lot of reputable books in the Science section and he's a highly brilliant man. Unfortunately, the theories presented in this particular book tend to be considered rather farfetched and were rejected by every scientific board across the nation."
"But could time travel really exist?" I asked, my curiosity piqued. It was something I only thought existed in science fiction. Of course, I had once thought that superheroes only existed in science fiction as well.
"It not only could but it does." Chris said. "Einstein proved it. He found that the speed of light is constant and outside of everything else. Say you are on a train going 100 miles per hour and you throw a ball at 20 miles an hour. Because your gravity is centered in the train, while you are standing still you are actually moving as fast as the train. So when you throw the ball, the ball is actually traveling at 120 miles per hour. Light is not like that. Light travels at its own constant speed no matter what. So if you turn on a flashlight on a train, the speed of light is not affected by outside variables such as how fast the train is going. So, the theory is, if you travel at the speed of light, you can bypass everything including time. Say you are on a space shuttle orbiting the Earth at the speed of light for four years. Well, when you return to Earth, you would find that not four years had passed, but twenty."
"Wow." I said, fascinated.
"But the thing about time travel is, there is no way to harness and control it. And that's what Dr. Julian has dedicated much of his research trying to find out. Dr. Julian is not only a scientist but an archaelogist in his spare time. He likes to specialize in the ancient tribes and cultures of our nation before it was settled by the first civilized settlers centuries ago. God knows there are still enough ruins and relics still just lying around here in modern day UF. Well, he was studying a tribe called the Abkantis. The Abkantis are one of the hardest tribes to study because they lived in seclusion from the outside world. No one from any other tribe could enter their land without certain death. They were eventually wiped out by the first settlers after huge war.
There are many ancient manuscripts describing this tribe in great detail, but no one has ever seen what this tribe was like on the inside. In fact, any useful information about them is very scarce.
Dr. Julian managed to stumble on some ruins of which he believed was the long lost location to the Abkantis tribe. In fact, its actually not that far from this town. The Abkantis were not only secluded from the outside world, but they had their own language and writing system too. Their language was a strange mix of the common language that the other tribes around them used but mixed with their own words. They also took a lot of common words and gave them entirely different meanings. Even their written language is screwed up..."
He opened the book and flipped several pages.
"Their written language is like no written language you've ever seen. It contradicts itself at every turn. Take an Abkantis paragraph. For no reason right in the middle, the symbols start suddenly taking on the opposite meanings of what they are supposed to stand for. Then, towards the end, the symbols start switching places and you have to start reading each word backwards. Just to add a little more punishment, the symbols frequently change their meanings entirely as you are reading. The language is impossible to crack. It's like the Abkantis were deliberately writing everything in code to make absolutely sure that no outsider could possibly understand it."
The part of my brain that was a writer immediately formed a hypothesis.
"They were protecting something!"
Chris grinned. "Bingo! That was Dr. Julian's thoughts exactly. Now, he hypothesized that a language as messed up as this would obviously have its own 'Rosetta Stone' to avoid confusion by its own people. So Dr. Julian spent two years trying to find it. Eventually, they managed to tunnel into a hidden chamber. It was a large room decked out like some kind of temple, but there was no altar. The walls were covered with giant symbols and pictures. The most interesting picture was of a giant sphere in the center of the back wall. It was surrounded by stars and there was a smaller sphere at the top which looked like it was dispersing drops of something out of it. Dr. Julian hypothesizes that this is a picture of the universe and the giant sphere is Earth. The drops coming out of the smaller sphere are going out into the entire universe. Here's a picture..."
He flipped to the page. "Notice anything?"
"The smaller sphere and the drops are a different color than everything else."
"Yes. And there was a paragraph of writing underneath the picture. Dr. Julian eventually figured out that the Rosetta Stone he was looking for was right in this chamber. The symbols on the left and right walls were the key to cracking the language. It took quite some time, but Dr. Julian was eventually able to start translating the paragraph in the temple and the various manuscripts left around by the Abkantis.
He found that the Abkantis believed in something called the 'Little Star', or 'Little Planet'. The Abkantis believed in the 'Power that sustains time' and they considered themselves the protectors of it. According to myth, every one thousand years, a tiny planet would appear above a lake at the center of the Abkantis tribe. It would disperse what they called 'seeds of time' that supposedly were used to keep the time stream in check.
Dr. Julian considered this to be nothing more than a myth himself except that several months later they tunneled into another chamber where they found a strange stone. When he ran a diagnostic on it, he found it contained a very unusual energy source. When he modified the machine to detect other similar energy sources, he found that there were strange energy particles that showed up not just on our world but in space as well.
Dr. Julian came up with a hypothesis. What if there is a main universe from which everything comes from, and in this place, there is no such thing as time? A place where everything is neverending and eternal? And what if there are multiple dimensions that come from this master universe, and we are simply one of them? Time exists here because time was something created for our universe. The theory behind the legend of the Chaos Emeralds, now only known to be an actual reality thanks to Dr. Eggman, is that they hold the elements of the world in check. To keep our world in balance and not chaos is the very definition of the Chaos Emeralds. So, what if time was capable of being just as unstable and needed a system to help keep it in balance?
If you think about it, the future is really not set. In a planet filled with several billion people all capable of free will, anything can happen. But here's something scary: If the future can be changed, the past could be just as subject to change in ways that would never be known to us because we would just change along with history. And what if time were something like a rope, and every now and then it started getting a little weathered and started unraveling just a tiny bit, little by little?
Dr. Julian proposed thinking of the Little Planet in terms of something like a debugging program for a computer. It's a cosmic traveler that goes from universe to universe checking each time stream for errors and then making corrections. According to the Abkantis manuscripts, the appearance of the little planet occurs every one thousand years on the dot. The whole book goes into a lot more detail on this stuff but that's the basic gist of it."
"That's incredible!" I said. "Do you really think it might be true?"
A glum look crossed his face for a second. "To be honest, I hope not."
"Oh? Why not?"
He reached down and pulled out another book by the same author. It was called. 'The Apocalypse of the Millennium Planet.'
"After publishing his first book on the subject, there where still some questions that nagged at Dr. Julian constantly. If the Little Planet only appears every one thousand years and only stays for a few minutes, then why protect it? The Abkantis didn't utilize a calender for when the planet would appear. The date would always remain a mystery, even to them. Dr. Julian translated a parchment that appeared to be part of the law that governed the tribe that stated: 'Speak not of the planets appearance the day after, do not even speak of it at all.' Dr. Julian found it worrisome that the tribe would even go as far as keeping the date a secret from themselves so that even long after their demise, the existence and appearance of the planet would remain a mystery. Dr. Julian thought that maybe they were worried that someday people might gain the technology to travel to the planet..."
"...and then be able to control time!" I added. "Yep." He said. "And in such a scenario, who do you think in our present time might be the most logical scenario?"
I thought of Eggman. The thought of Eggman controlling time chilled me right to the bone.
Chris saw by my look that we were on the same wavelength.
"Now, I don't want to seem alarming. It's a very unlikely scenario. There is no actual proof that this planet exists. It's all theory. But, not long after publishing his previous book, Dr. Julian found something that scared him to death. He was preparing a lecture for a university on the history and prophecies of Nostradamus. He was thumbing through some of the Century X prophecies when his eyes landed on something that he had never paid attention to before.
It was a quatrain that stated;
'Then the Little Planet shall appear and exude a great light; Before the Man of Darkness comes to extinguish the light, And He attempts to crush the will of all humanity'."
A tinge of fear began to rise up in my stomach, and I tried hard to suppress it.
"Dr. Julian was so freaked out that he begin researching ancient prophecies for anything else that might relate to the Little Planet."
"Did he find anything?"
"A LOT. Prophecies that were often ignored or misinterpreted because scholars often assumed 'Little Planet' was a metaphor for a certain kingdom, nation, or continent. But take this one for example; it was a prophecy penned by an ancient seer who is credited with predicting the fate of Atlantis:
'And the Small Planet on the Dawn of the New Millennium shall be ravaged in its Past, and so shall its Future be forever Doomed, and it shall spread out into the entire breadth of the Heavens.'
Or yet another one:
'And the corruption of the Little Planet shall sow seeds of Evil throughout the Universe.'
Dr. Julian believed that the ancestors of the Abkantis forsaw this event and migrated to this land to protect it."
I had a question. "But, if it's prophecy, doesn't that mean it has to come true?"
"Not necessarily. Scholars have long questioned the existence of apocalyptic prophecy. I mean, think about it. If the world is going to end anyways, why tell us? Why not just let us go about our normal daily lives without a worry in the world right up until the end? Why be cursed with it for generations to come? The general theory of apocalyptic prophecy is that its not entirely canon but a warning. It fortells of horrible events that humanity will have an opportunity to overcome and survive. But it's not going to come easy. There will be battles, and things will probably get their darkest before the dawn."
"If Eggman tries to conquer time, Sonic will save us." I said with certainty.
"I wish that could be the case." Chris said. "But I'm not as optimistic. Sonic is one superhero against a madman with an entire army at his disposal. As we've already seen in recent news, he can't be everywhere at once. What happens if another terrorist like Eggman pops up? And another one?
What would happen if Eggman were to take over the Little Planet simply because Sonic was too busy elsewhere?
Until Sonic isn't fighting with the weight of literally the entire world on his shoulders, I'm going to continue being concerned."
"But in typical superhero lore, when one superhero appears, another always appears!" I argued back.
"But this isn't science fiction. This is real life. Sonic is a one in a several billion mutation of nature. I really hope more heroes do appear. I really do. But at the moment, nothing is certain."
He glanced at his watch.
"And... I've spent a little too much time shooting the breeze." He returned the book to its shelf. I need to finish giving you the rest of the tour, then we'll get you started on stocking some books."
"Alright." I said, wanting to debate just a little more.
I had faith in Sonic. I didn't feel like Eggman and Sonic appearing around the same time was coincidence. And if Sonic really did need help, Fate would send him some. Right?
I felt kind of worried about the things Chris had told me. But that stuff was only speculation, right? Just because it was in a book didn't mean it was canon. It was only a theory. Besides, even if it did happen, it might not even be till the distant future.
Yes, there was nothing to worry about.
Chris said those ruins were not far from town. Maybe I should go there on a day off and check it out. Just a look. There would be nothing there and I would feel better.
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Shortly after arriving in Oakfield, I had immediately gotten a place to stay at the room and board and then gone and applied at Book World and interviewed for the job. I was posing as a student and got by telling everyone that my parents were archaeologists who were globe trotting while I stayed here and got an education. It wasn't a total lie. I would stick here for a while, keep writing, and keep monitoring Sonic's activities. I kept hoping that Sonic would settle down somewhere, then I might just move to that place and make a life there and cross my fingers that someday we cross paths.
I felt very proud of myself for what I had accomplished already and was beginning to gain more confidence that I could do anything I wanted. I started seriously thinking about what I might do as a career someday. As much as I would have liked to become a superhero myself, I knew the odds of that would be incredibly unlikely, and if I were to be Sonic's housewife someday *giggle* I would want to show how responsible I could be and get a decent career.
But sometimes at night I would feel different. As I would lie awake at night I would begin to feel scared. I would suddenly ask myself what the heck I was doing and what was I trying to accomplish. I felt kinda scared of the secure life I had left behind.
Screw it, no one ever wanted to adopt me anyways. Why should I care?
I felt scared of the future.
Just what do I think I'm trying to pull off? I don't have a shot...
I even felt scared for Sonic's safety. And mine.
What if he were to die one day? What if the city I'm in gets attacked and blown up or what if the world suddenly ends tomorrow?
I thought about what Chris said. I thought about what I believed in. I thought about what I wanted to believe in.
And in the end I would do my best to push the voices out of my head and replace them with a much more comforting one:
Look at how far I've come. I'm going forward and nothing can stop me...