TJ listened as Gus continued to list off the names. After fifteen long minutes of hearing the names being called out and responses being hollered back, TJ was bored out of his mind. His legs were starting to feel uncomfortable after standing in that position for so long, and not being able to move. He started to bounce on his knees, but got a lot of stares so he stopped. He started to zone out of the whole place when...
"Hunter Wilson... Hunter Wilson!?..." TJ heard from the far end of the hall. He along with almost everyone else in the line up tried to suppress their laughter, not entirely successfully. There were now distant running footsteps running accompanied by the sound of panting coming down the hall. "Where the heck is Hunter!?"
A smaller looking boy ran frantically toward the hallway. While trying to turn into it, him momentum only carried him forward, making him slip sideways and land with a dull thud on the floor. The whole hallway turned backward to see what happened.
"And there the heck is Hunter" said Gus as he walked over to the tardy boy to help him up. "What are you all looking at? Get back in line!" ordered Gus to the lined audience. Everyone quickly did what they were told. He offered a hand down to Hunter, who took it and half heaved himself up off of the ground. "Now you get why I don't want people running in this concrete death trap?" asked Gus. Hunter nodded looking up at his general with a smile. He brushed himself off and got into line. "Jake, you've got to set a good example for you're brother here, get him and yourself back in line" said Gus, walking to the next person in line. "He's almost always tardy, and you being lazy mannered isn't helping him". Closer to the front end of the boy's line, John giggled. If you had to label anyone in the resistance as the couch potato, it'd be Jake Wilson.
"Yes sir" growled Jake, glaring at his younger brother for giving him more responsibility.
"Alright, it seems everyone is here and accounted for, let's get started with the swearing ceremony. Ted, come up here!" said Gus turning back to the occupants of the hallway, and walk ing back toward the front end of the line up. TJ did what he was told. He stepped out of line and slowly followed the general up, taking in all of the sideways glances with discomfort. They reminded him of two days ago. Well, twenty years ago. He reached the end of the hallway and stood beside Gus, looking up at the general to find out what would happen next. Gus took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it carefully. "This is the vow sheet Ted" said Gus, handing the sheet of paper to the boy next to him. "And you might want to read the rules first" he said, poi ting to the wall where there was a sheet of paper stuck to it. TJ read each one, and agreed that they were fair. "Every single person you see in this hall has sworn by the vow sheet" continued Gus. "If you wish to join the resistance, you must swear by the words written on this sheet".
TJ smiled and read the handwriting. He knew it could have only been made by Gus. "I do sir. Very much" said TJ, looking up at Gus.
"Well don't just tell me, tell them too" he said, gesturing out to the two lines of children, who were all looking at him attentively.
TJ took a step forward and took a deep breath to help calm his nerves. He put his right hand over his heart and held the vow in his left hand, so he could read it aloud to the people in the hallway. "I, Ted Jacobs," he began "do solemnly swear, that I will stop at nothing to help bring the rule of Theodore J. Detweiler to an end" said TJ, a little awkwardly. "Reverting the world to it's former state, to maintain my position as a part of the United States Resistance until death, unless sooner discharged, and to abide by all rules of the resistance as a part of it".
"You understand that any infraction of the rules will result in immediate revocation from the United States Resistance?" Asked Gus.
"Yes sir, I do" replied TJ, looking back.
Gus smiled. "Well then, Ted Jacobs, welcome to the resistance!". A huge cheer erupted in the hall. Most of which TJ knew was completely fake. "Ted, come with me, we'll get you put into the system. Every one else is dismissed. Have a good breakfast!" said Gus walking down the hall, TJ following behind. He looked back and saw John slowly shuffling into the cafeteria, almost getting lost in the mob of people headed through the double doors. He was looking at him and smiling. He gave him another thumbs up, to which he responded with a thumbs up and subtle smile of his own. He then turned back and continued down the hallway and looked around. It was the next hallway down from the west wing.
"So, is this the east wing?" asked TJ curiously.
"No, the girls rooms are in the east wing" said Gus. This is the north wing, where all my rooms and the com center is. The wing behind us is the south wing, where all of the recreational rooms are".
"Recreational rooms?" Asked TJ, surprised. "Wow. First I find there's hundreds of these secret underground forts all over the world, next I find you've got recreational rooms. Some laid back resistance".
"Well, we spend a lot of time here. When me and the older kids are planning out our strategies, the others aren't doing anything, and operations tend not to occur very often, so kids are left bored out of their minds. Even with six hours of training every morning".
"Jeez" remarked TJ, walking a couple feet behind his old friend.
"I know" said Gus, slowing his pace and walking up to a black door on the left and sliding his room card in the slot and waiting for the telltale click of the door unlocking. He opened the large black metal door and used his heel to keep it open, inviting TJ to come in the room first. TJ entered a large un furnished room with a desk and an entire wall of filing cabinets. He stood at the center of the room. Gus walked past him and sat in a swivel chair behind the desk. He opened a number of drawers and pulled out an ink pad, a pen, and a sheet of paper, and slid them toward TJ. "Here I've got a form for you to fill out, the ink pad is for your fingerprint. We scan it into the computers so that the fingerprint scanners will let you in when you use them".
"Okay," said TJ as he walked up to the desk, picked up the pen and began to fill out the form. "So if you've got fingerprint access if you've got these cards?" He asked.
"A card's easy to lose. Our most important rooms we have fingerprint access to" explained Gus.
"Alright", said TJ, finishing his name and moving on to his birthday, May sixth nineteen eighty eight, age, 9, gender, male, height, four feet two inches, weight... why'd they need to know that? He filled it in anyway. 76 lbs. Room, 34, West wing. He then looked below this line to find two boxes with text over the top lines saying "thumb prints here". He rolled his right thumb in the cold black ink and then rolled it in the right box, and repeated the process with his left thumb in the other box.
"Here" said gus, pulling a tissue from the box on his desk and handing it to TJ.
"Thanks" said TJ, taking the tissue and rubbing his thumbs, getting the majority of the ink off. He looked around for a trash bin.
"I've got one down here" said Gus, pointing to under his desk as he took the tissue from the boy. As he brought his hand back up, he accidentally hit a picture on his desktop, sending it flying through the air. He gasped. TJ gasped too and lunged to a spot on the floor where he knew the picture would land. Gus stood up to see over the edge of his desk so he could see if Ted was okay (he did just dive onto a concrete floor), and sighed with relief as he realised that both the boy and his treasured picture were safe.
"What's this?" Asked TJ, he fell silent when he looked at the picture and realised with a pang of homesickness what it was. It was the gang. All six of them together the summer after third grade. It was the picture his mom had taken when the friends had decided to go to the pond to skip rocks. After an hour they had taken a break from rock skipping and sat under a low tree, and drank lemonade. This is what the picture was of. Just the six of them, chilling out in the shade on a hot day with their ice cold glasses of lemonade, smiling. He couldn't help but smile himself as he saw all of his companions together, like he knew they never would be again. He slowly walked back over to Gus's desk and set it back up.
"That's a very old picture" said Gus. "This is of me and my old friends before... before things happened". TJ was beginning to worry. What had happened to the others? Surely they all had to be here in this time too. Were they alright? Were they still alive even... No. That didn't bear thinking about.
"Looks like you had some great friends" remarked TJ, hoping that even with there being a picture of himself right in front of him, Gus wouldn't recognise him. But another part of him hoped his friend wasn't that stupid.
"Yeah. I did" said Gus, picking up the picture and holding the last fragment of his happy childhood in his hands. "But, that was all in the past. This is now" said Gus, snapping out of his nostalgia and putting the picture back down on his desk and adjusting it to just the right angle. "I'll take this" he said, sliding the filled out form over to himself to scan some things into the computer system, and as he looked at the handwriting, he realised he knew this penmanship. It belonged to one of his old friends. He blew this off as just seeing things through nostalgia. He really needed to forget about the past... No. He couldn't do that. Then he'd lose his motivation to lead this organization. He woke up his computer by shaking the mouse, and began to code in the information. All of which seemed familiar somehow. The as he began to analyse the information he had typed into the computer, he realised something. He frowned and brought up another profile labeled Theodore Jasper Detweiler. TJ noticed this and internally began to panic. He knew. He KNEW! Gus wasn't surprised to find that the birth dates matched and the rough physical description was pretty much identical. He looked at the boy's name and something popped out to him. The initials. Ted's initials were T.J.. No. It couldn't be. His jaw dropped and he turned and compared his old friend's face in the picture, to that of Ted's. He stood up and walked out from behind his desk and over to TJ, looking straight down into the boy's eyes. They were the same. He frowned. "By any chance, is Ted Jacobs an ALIAS?"
WHOMP! "Um, uh n-no sir, why would you think that?" said TJ, with a waver in his tone that gave away the fact that he was lying.
Gus squinted his eyes. "TJ?" He asked suspiciously.
INFINITE WHOMP! TJ froze with fear and after a short pause, slowly nodded, looking down, not wanting to see the look on his old friend's face. He saw the generals shoes step closer to him and he closed his eyes. This was it. The end of him. He was going to be locked away, or beat to death by a person who's life was ruined because of him. His old friend Gus Griswald.
He was taken by complete surprise when he found himself in a tight hug, being half squeezed to death. He could hear Gus half laughing and half crying. "Oh, TJ!" He was saying over and over. He opened his eyes and saw that Gus seemed... overjoyed at the prospect of being in the same room with the person who ruined the lives of nearly everyone on earth, and it was kind of weird to see the Gus he knew and loved in the body of who looked like his dad. He began to nervously laugh along with the general. " hahaha ha ha wha?" He asked, confused. And then let out a quick yelp of pain as he felt Gus's grip tighten.
"What? Oh! Sorry. Even after years I'm not used to being this strong" he said, letting the boy go.
"You're not going to lock me away?" asked TJ, dumbfounded.
'WHAT? Why?" Said Gus, suddenly becoming serious.
TJ began to tear up as well, bu not for the same reason. "Because of what I did to billions of people world wide! Because of what I did to the planet! Because of everything I did to YOU! Because I'm the Tyrant!" He said hysterically.
"No" said Gus. "YOU are not the Tyrant. YOU did none of those things. You did nothing to me. It's HIM" he said, pointing to the computer screen at the picture of the older man. "He's not you. He doesn't have the... TJ, where's your cap?" Asked Gus. TJ, still dumbfounded, jaw dropped, eyes wide, and staring straight ahead pulled out his red baseball cap from his back pocket and meekly placed it on his head. Gus sighed with relief. "Well, as I was saying, he doesn't have that cap, he has this one" He said, pointing to TJ's old maroon hat. TJ gasped. The personality in his maroon cap on the picture of the Tyrant's head. It was him who had done all of this. It all made sense now. In this time, he had succeeded in switching hats. He had become a monster because of that. But he hadn't succeeded in his because of the time vortex that would only have appeared if he had become the tyrant in this time. So it was terrible that in this time he had become the Tyrant, but if he hadn't, he wouldn't have been spared from the same fate. He was confused. Very confused.
"But... but" was all he could manage to squeak out.
"C'mon. I haven't talked to any of my best friends for years and in five thousand eight hundred and forty days all I get is bu... bu...?" Gus joked.
TJ managed a faint smile, but inside, a tornado was blowing through. A bad one.
"But I still know I'm capable of evil" said TJ, losing the smile again, in fact, starting to sound a little angry. "And I don't know if I can live with that".
"TJ..." Gus was trying to say, but was cut off.
"Stop calling me that!" said TJ in a more than upset tone. "That's... HIS name" he said, pointing to the computer screen. "And I want as LITTLE TO DO WITH HIM AS POSSIBLE" he said.
"You already do. His name is Theodore J. Yours is TJ. Call HIM TJ and he goes ape on you. He only accepts Theodore, and Mr. Detweiler" explained Gus. "You aren't anything like him. You aren't even the same person. The hats remember? Just like you told me in fourth grade. The hats make you who you are. You aren't in control of that".
"Still. Physically he's the same person. That's enough to make me want to kill myself!"
"DON'T!" screamed Gus, making TJ jump and look up at him. "I'm sorry, it's just, I've lost everything, and now that you're here... I can't lose you too. Not again".
It took a couple minutes for anyone to speak again. TJ was still going over the fact that maybe he wasn't as bad as he had convinced himself he was. Maybe he was okay. Gus sure seemed to think so, and it seemed his old friend wanted him to think so too. Gus just hoped that what TJ chose to do didn't hurt either if them.
"Alright, just don't call me TJ in front of the other kids. I won't live two seconds if they find out" said TJ grimly. "They won't get the thing with the hats y'know?"
"Yeah," said Gus. "To be honest I never really didn't understand it until you switched the hats. Then it all started to click. I remember only me and Mikey understood it, so about fifteen years back, before the memory wiping ray... you know about the ray right?" TJ nodded slowly. "Alright. So, it was only the two of us out of the entire gang that didn't want..." Gus trailed off and looked down.
"To kill me" TJ finished. Gus said nothing and continued to stare at the concrete floor. "Just say it. They wanted to kill me". Gus still remained motionless. "I don't blame them. Not after what he did to them. And speaking of them, where are they? How are they now?" asked TJ. Gus looked up with a look on his face which promised something terrible."Gus? What happened to Spinelli, Vince, Gretchen, and Mikey?"
"Nothing"
"TELL ME!" screamed TJ screamed desperately.
"You'll find out soon enough".
"GUS!"
"No TJ" said Gus. "It's best you don"t know right now".
TJ knew whatever it was had to be terrible. Once again. If Gus didn't say something, it was for good reason. He believed them to be dead. Killed by the Tyrant himself because they rebelled. That wouldn't surprise him. How could he? "I... He killed them didn't he?"
"No" said Gus. "No he didn't". TJ sighed with relief. "But what he did do wouldn't be any better". Oh no.
"You're still not telling me?" Asked TJ. Gus shook his hanging head.
TJ became angry "Why? Why not? They're MY friends too, I have the right to know!"
"I know you do, but if you did..." Gus trailed off.
"I'd be worse off knowing there's nothing I can do?" guessed TJ. Gus looked up sadly and nodded.
"But uh, let's not talk about this right now okay" said Gus as he sat back down at his desk and pressing the enter key on his computer. As he did, a printer next to him began to crank out papers, and a laminated card from the top. He took the card and put it on his desk. He bent down to a bottom drawer behind his desk and pulled out a manila folder. He took the papers off of the tray on the printer and carefully slid them inside. On the label tag, he wrote Ted Jacobs. He got up and went over to the wall of filing cabinets. He opened one of them, inserted the folder into the front, and closed it. "You're enlisted as Ted Jacobs and that's what it says on your card". TJ took the card off of Gus's desk and looked at it.
"Tender" he said half heartedly, caring more about his friends'... situation than an official ID card. He pocketed it and stared somewhat angrily at Gus. He knew it was for his own good, but still. He hadn't told him what had happened to his friends.
"Hey, look at it this way. You've still got your childhood. Everyone else's was taken away from them a long time ago" said Gus, walking over to a giant black box in the other corner of the room, and beckoned TJ over. Gus opened the box. And TJ peered inside. There were a bunch of the black sticks that he had seen used last night.
"Gus, I don't have any control over anything, and from what I've heard about my future self, I won't any time soon" he said, realising what Gus wanted him to do.
"No, it's possible you might later on. Like I said, you're not him, and you have to be the one chose your sticks, I can't do it for you. You need to be the first one to touch them or they won't orientate themselves to your DNA".
"Oh, okay" said TJ, reaching for two sticks. As he did so, he felt them beginning to heat up, and start to glow a bright electric blue. He gasped and felt as they started they started vibrating and a humming sound began, increasing in pitch and velocity, and the blue glow, becoming more defined. After about ten seconds it all calmed down and a transparent, rubber like substance had secreted from the thin black sticks and formed a cylindrical five inch long handles on the end of each wand. "Oh, I thought they'd be dark blue, like John's" he said.
"No. The handles are colored to represent the element you have control over. John's are blue because he's aquadominant. Pyrodominants have red handles, aerodominants have yellow handles, and teradominants have green handles. Since you can't control yet, your's are transparent" Gus explained.
"What about omnidominants?" Asked TJ. "What color are the handles for them?"
"White" said Gus.
"Oh" said TJ.
"Well, I'd better let you go back to breakfast, you'll need it" said Gus, "you've got six hours of training ahead of you".
"Jeez, six hours every day's a little excessive don't you think?" asked TJ.
"Nope" said Gus smiling
"Whatever" said TJ, walking toward the door. "And later, I want to know what happened to our friends". He said, opening the door, about to leave.
"Later" said Gus. "And it's nice to talk to you after twenty years Teej" and then realising the door was open, "Oh! I mean uh, Ted".
"Yeah, nice talking to you to" said TJ in a low tone, not doing as much as looking at the general as he slipped out the doorway, leaving Gus to wonder if it really was best to keep the the information of the others from his old friend.
As TJ walked alone down the long north wing, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his ID card. He looked at it. Everything seemed to be in order. The alias, Ted Jacobs, was printed in the top right corner of the card. The other information was listed below it. He sighed, and stuffed it back into his pocket. Now that that was taken care of, he could use all of his brain to focus on the other thought. His friends. Where were they? How were they? Both of these questions had been risen and rejected by Gus, which he hated. If he was going to induce questions, he might as well answer them, not just leave him hanging. He frowned. Why was he letting himself be bossed around by a grown up? Was it simply because he was Gus, his old friend? Why was he letting that stop him. He needed to know! And one thing was certain, he was sure gonna find out, and he was willing to do whatever it took.