A/N: Sorry for the hold-up. I've been totally encased by writer's block at Chapter 18, and so I've decided, for now, to totally skip it. I'll put up a placeholder when I go to upload Chapter 19 (which I finished not even five minutes ago), but that won't be until I have Chapter 23 or 24 written, however the math works out on that one.
This story will be eighteen months old on October Tenth of this year (2013). I'm hoping that I can have it finished around the time of Hallowe'en so that I may move on to other projects that I wish to jump into. In case I haven't made it clear before, this one story is the only piece I'm working on at the moment, and I promised myself (and, by extension, my readers) that I would finish this massively long piece of work before moving into another story. I have a one-shot in the works for Hannah Montana (which may end up being the last thing I ever post in that category), I have an idea for a new story here in Jimmy Neutron, I have an idea for a Kick-Ass fic (inspired by the second film and the newly-acquired comics that I now have in my arsenal), and I kinda want to start trying to write an actual novel that'll, I dunno, SELL.
There's a small bit of fan-service in this chapter. See if you can find it. If anyone's still reading this late in the Neutron cycle, that is.
City: H-405
Chapter 14: The Cold Boot
Cynthia jolted awake and tossed her head about, glaring at everything in the room as though it were apt to kill her. Her head flicked from machine to machine, settling on the scrap pile and then shifting down to her body. The sight of a sleeping mane of red hair snuggled up to her left arm disconcerted her greatly, and she yelped as she leapt to her feet, calling her blade on reflex. The hair squeaked and ducked as low to the ground as possible.
"You really need to be more aware of your surroundings when you open your eyes," a dry voice drawled.
She finally recognized the girl from the previous night and retracted her blade. A pair of eyes the color of a robin's egg gazed frightenedly outward from within the curly reddish-orange locks.
"You aren't dangerous, are you?"
The girl shook her head, terrified of the armor-clad woman before her. Cynthia blinked, then knelt. "You alright?"
The girl bit her lip and nodded shyly, eyes never breaking contact with the helmet. Cynthia found herself uncertain what to do; she'd forgotten how to interact with the traumatized. She held out her hand, almost as if offering food to a stray cat.
"I'm not going to hurt you. You just gave me a fright."
Her lip trembled. "I think y-you gave me a bigger one," she whispered fearfully.
Cynthia sighed, frowning. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help you. I'm here to stop the one who hurt you."
"Then why is he w-working on it?"
The girl pointed with a trembling hand off over Cynthia's shoulder. She turned and caught sight of James bent over the body of what appeared to be a human made of wires and carbon-fiber plating with the head of a canine. A rather familiar canine.
"Goddard?"
"You know its name?" the girl cried.
Cynthia stood and stepped carefully over to the android. "I'm not from this world. Where I come from, Goddard is a mechanical dog. Harmless. And he can do eleven million and four things...except clean up his leavings."
She noted that James had removed the cybernetic cap atop the robot's head and was toying with the nanoscopic circuitry located on a circuit board no larger than a credit card. Millions of tiny chips, capacitors, and resistors all sparkled as they caught the half-light caused by the dim glow of the unseen sun trickling through the windows.
"What exactly are you looking for?"
She could only guess that he had the magnification on the visor set extremely high to observe the electrical passageways that were invisible to the naked eye, so intensely complex was his masterpiece creation.
"I'm counting how many processors I fried. I have the ability to replace the board; I always carry a spare, and none of his critical operating data would be compromised. I'm presently only assessing the damage, perhaps to enhance my Goddard's advanced security protocols when we return."
She noted his use of 'when' rather than 'if' with a sense of renewed confidence; he at least seemed more convinced than he'd been even a few hours prior that they would be able to return home at some point in time. She also watched quietly as he gently touched his gloved fingers across the board, tapping tiny ravines and mountains of wiring and electrical components that still boggled her mind, even as his near-intellectual equal.
He finally removed one wire the thickness of a human hair from the side of the board and slipped it into the hypercube at his waist, digging about within for what Cynthia presumed was the new board.
"What's the final count?"
"He has a total of six-hundred forty-two built-in micro processors, each with twelve processing core threads to calculate information for a total of seven thousand, seven hundred and four processing cores. I shorted out four-hundred eighty-six of the processors, leaving him with less than twenty-five percent of the processing power he typically runs at. This left him almost one hundred processors shy of his base processing necessity to function properly."
"Is that the reason he was acting so crazy?"
"While you were distracting him, yes. Before that, no. I've determined that the suit he was attached to had an override executable code that remote-controlled his processing strains and blocked certain processes from running, such as the sympathy and compassion strains. It essentially focused his command processing to become an efficient, ruthless machine."
"How do you plan on disabling the code?"
"As it is a remote code being broadcast to the suit with a hashcheck every few minutes, I can't disable the code itself. I can create a counter code within the operating system, but that could take weeks. Or, I could walk the simpler path and just destroy the suit."
"Which could take a while?"
"It's as easy as disabling the activation command. The android just won't be able to use the suit anymore."
"But the broadcast code...won't disabling the suit alert the broadcaster?"
"Disabling the suit has nothing to do with disabling the receptor."
He drew the torch from the hypercube and strode over to the opened capsule of the suit, in which resided an odd sort of chair reminiscent of an electric chair used to exterminate prisoners, complete with straps and a neck collar to bind the user in place. James placed the torch nozzle inside the first arm strap and ignited it, dialing it to a blue-white flame. He then began slowly burning the shackle, creating an acrid smell that made the girl cough loudly.
"Cover your nose and mouth to breathe. Silicon poisoning could kill you."
Cynthia looked to the girl and blinked. "James, that dress of hers is nearly shredded off. If you intend her to plug her nose, she needs some other form of clothing or garment to wear in place."
The man moved to the second manacle. "Perhaps the android will be able to provide some answers."
Rather than prod the man for more information, Cynthia strode to the girl and knelt, leveling their faces. The soft blue eyes still widened fearfully at her closeness. "Relax, sweetie." The word tasted foreign in her mouth; it had been a long while since she'd last used a pet name for anyone, and certainly longer still since doing so with a near-stranger. "We aren't here to hurt you. I want to help you."
"We," James called. He drifted to the third shackle and more of the silicon cloud began to rise through the air.
"Eh...we want to help you," Cynthia corrected, a half-smile on her lips and unseen by the girl. "The first thing we need is to get your lungs out of this atmosphere."
"We're more or less safe from radiation hazards in here; the windows and walls all have lead within them and the ground heat is almost that of our planet."
"I meant for when she goes with us."
This got the man to stand, the torch clattering to the ground. "Absolutely not. It was one thing to offer that grown woman the opportunity, but this child is out of the question. She will only be a hindrance and will most likely freeze to death before reaching the next city."
"Priscilla wouldn't have been any different, James. She knew nothing about us, nothing about fighting or physique."
"Priscilla?"
Both Alumni turned to face the girl.
"Priscilla? Did she...have red hair?"
Cynthia blinked. "You're kidding me."
"It seems we have a rather interesting conundrum on our hands. I must say, I never would have guessed that the girl before us is the sister to the leader of City: L-051 in the north-west."
"You met my sister? How is she? Is she alright?"
"She's fine. She's actually a leader of a city."
The girl looked immensely relieved. "We were separated when I was younger...I haven't seen her for a long time."
"What's your name?" Cynthia asked gently.
"Chérie. Chérie Serafie."
She then looked to James. "We never got a name from Priscilla, did we?"
He tapped the antenna on his head. "Alpha, you there?"
A groggy moan came over the line. "Unlike you guys, I still have to sleep at night to stay awake during the day."
"Nevermind that. Did you complete the database search for Priscilla, age twenty, red hair?"
"Only one match listed a woman, last name Sera...Sora...Surfee...Survey?"
"Serafie. It seems we have her sister."
A yawn. "Name?"
"Cherie."
A noise that sounded like a whump and a loud scraping of plastic on steel rang over the line. Cynthia noted that the girl was looking between them in confusion. Cynthia knelt beside the girl and nodded at her in acknowledgement.
"Say that again?"
"Chérie. Chérie Serafie?"
"That's a name I haven't heard in a long time."
"Alpha?"
"She and I were neighbors and good friends until we were dragged away and sold."
Cynthia looked to the girl, stunned. "You were friends with Gavin?"
Not even the curly mane of red hair could stop her jaw from falling open. "You're talking to Gavin?!"
"Small world," James mused.
"Well, um...this makes things different," Alpha spluttered. He cleared his throat. "She is indeed related to Priscilla; I can't believe I didn't make the connection right off."
"Time has a bad habit of causing the mind to forget. Go get some rest, Alpha. Uranus and I have some discussing to do."
He severed the link and grasped the torch from the floor. He slipped it into the hypercube and drew out an object that looked like a steel collar.
"Aspirator. Wear it and it'll feed you clean oxygen. The radiation won't affect you as long as you don't step on the soil for any reason."
The girl nodded and clipped it about her neck. It hung lightly like a dog collar, as though she were someone's possession; up until the night before, that hadn't been far off the mark. She inhaled gently and her eyes lit up in recognition.
"I'm sure that smells better," James stated plainly. He then moved back to the robot and slotted the new circuit board into the cybernetic cap, sealing the head back into place with a simple flick of his fingers. Sparks of a myriad of colors spiderwebbed across the inside of the glass cap and the eye sockets flickered dimly to light.
"Reboot. His system needs to assess the overall damages and recognize that a new board has been inserted."
"If his circuit board is so powerful, why can't you use it for anything else?"
"Security encryption designed by my eight year old self. While I know how to break it, every year since I've added several more layers of the code, including several daisy chain cycles so that hackers get lost running in virtual circles. It would actually take me a great deal of time to break the encryption and access the system's core functions to even make the board worth using. Certainly more time than we have to lose."
"Do you think Goddard will have answers?"
"Perhaps. It's unclear exactly what he would know, as the suit may very easily have been configured to rid him of all long-term memory storage and recording. If a simple code could chain him into a chair as an intelligent battle unit, I'd shudder to think just what the code would be truly capable of."
A loud grating echoed from the table. All three humans directed their attention to the humanoid robot sitting on the edge of the table, eyes flickering and sparking as fresh bulbs mingled with the fresh surges of electricity. The light housings then fixated on the Alumni and the mane of red hair cowering behind them.
"You're…not from here," the dog spoke.
"Is that so?" James returned.
The dog squinted its eyes. "Master?"
"Nice to reunite, Goddard."
The mecha stood on uncertain legs and trudged slowly toward the man, spreading his arms. When he was within reach, James held up a hand to stop him.
"Affections are wasted on me. I don't need gratitude. I need answers."
The dog did the equivalent of blinking. "Answers as to what?"
"What happened out here. Who you became. What we're up against."
Puzzled. "You mean, the One?"
"Yes. Your memory banks are still in-tact, I presume?"
"I have several bad sectors, but those are mostly in the oldest chips in my chassis. Your code seems to have the sectors automatically reoriented and relocated until the bad sectors are replaced with fresh ones."
"I lack new circuitry for you. Have you lost anything?"
"Pieces."
"We'll have to make do. Start talking."
"Where should I begin?"
James turned and wandered slowly toward the heap of shavings. Without a moment of hesitation, he jumped and spun to crash back-first into the pile, relaxing on the coils without injury or pain. "Why not start back when I was still alive?"
"You mean, when this world's you was still alive."
The man inclined his head. Cynthia sat down on the floor and leaned against her hands planted behind her, Chérie on her lap in a cautious ball.
"Let me see…the only things my DNA scanner can detect about you are that you're still the same James Isaac Neutron you've always been and that you're about halfway through your twenty-first year."
"Go on."
"The memories are a bit fuzzy at first, but I will attempt to analyze and reconstruct as best I can. Keep in mind that you will only receive my viewpoint of the goings on and that it may be inaccurate with actual events.
"So your counterpart updated me shortly after he turned twenty-two, giving me an android body but retaining the canine head. He decided a lab assistant should be more humanoid to best help with experimentation and data acquisition. He also tried to avoid using his friends as test subjects, though there were several different experiments within that time frame that not even he would subject himself to. He lacked the stamina, the physique, and the grit to stay with it.
"His first step, a major one, was to ask his girlfriend of four years to aid him in the experimentation, given that whatever ailments she suffered were curable and that counter-measures were already foresighted and in place.
"Jimmy married Cindy when they reached the age of twenty-six, after dating and courting for eight years. I always secretly thought it took him much longer than it should have to figure himself out and get his head on straight, but it wasn't my place to say. They were almost perfect for each other: he was the cold to her hot, the soft to her hard, the Jekyll to her Hyde. An almost perfect combination. Almost.
"Cindy found out she was pregnant at the age of twenty-eight, something which they both welcomed with open arms; they'd been trying to have a child since before their marriage became official, though they were so enveloped by one another that the ceremony was merely a formality. Her pregnancy took them both by surprise: she'd had a miscarriage much the way Jimmy's mother had, although there didn't seem to be any correlation between the two. The child was in the womb when things started to shift.
"Jimmy could have in no way predicted the circumstances that were to follow, nor could Cindy, and as such I don't blame either of them for what happened. It seems that during one of the trials Jimmy placed upon Cindy, in which she was beta-testing a new antibiotic that would essentially block the common cold virus from entering the body's bloodstream, the test went slightly awry and the antibiotic addled with her brain just a hair. Enough that it off-set her, but not enough that Jimmy could ever find it in a personality or DNA scan.
"This change triggered a heat reaction within Cindy that shifted her feelings for Jimmy just enough to make him desirable, but not someone she could show love to. She had the child out of her desire to try and return to her former state of infatuation, but when the nursing and aging of the young boy failed to produce her desired state of emotional balance, she took more or less drastic measures."
Hearing these things caused a pang of guilt and hurt within Cynthia's heart. She didn't think she could ever have it in her to hurt the man she'd followed so faithfully through the torn world they had been forced to call home for the years they'd been there, but it seemed her doppelganger had envisioned a different agenda.
"Nicolas Dean happened to be dating a certain Beatrice Quinlan whilst Marcus Alva Neutron was growing up, and the couple had had a rough spot and put their relationship on hold to focus on their individual careers for a while so that they might reunite a year or so later and rekindle the fire. It was during this lapse in relationship that Cindy went to Nick and laid with him, feeling her familiar infatuation resurface, though this time at a different face. Betty had heard rumor, but hadn't confirmed it for herself until she'd walked in on them the night she'd gone to Nick's to try and woo him again. She fled silently, not even revealing her presence to the entwined couple, and arrived at the Neutron doorstep quite late in the night. She told Jimmy what she'd seen, though he sent her away after failing to believe it.
"Of course, cosmetic products can only go so far to cover up a hickey on the side of one's neck."
Cynthia gasped. I would never do that!
"Naturally, a divorce followed. Marcus went with Jimmy, as Nick wanted nothing to do with the child. Jimmy turned to Betty for comfort while Nick and Cindy moved to New York to live their happy lives. Jimmy, however, remained devastated and unhappy in a relationship he'd promised himself was only a schoolboy fantasy so many years before.
"Jimmy also found himself more stressed. While Betty was content being everything for him, save for holding the title of his wife, Jimmy felt that he wasn't good enough and that Betty was unhappy caring for a child that wasn't her own, for a man who tried and failed to love her unconditionally. He found himself distraught that he'd failed as a father, a husband, a friend, and a person. He felt that he'd hit rock bottom.
"Naturally, his fascination with science dwindled and nearly died. Money continued to come into the house due to his contracts with the government and the licensing of his patents, but he stopped making anything new.
"Marcus, too, could feel it, though he was only a normal child who lacked genius characteristics and thus couldn't readily identify the stress. He knew that Betty wasn't his mother, but didn't know where his mother really was or why she'd left. Betty explained to him that his mother still loved him but had gone on a very long trip to try and show him her love, claiming that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Eventually, it seemed that Marcus had given up on ever seeing his mother again, as he'd begun calling Betty 'mom' rather often and comfortably.
"Betty confronted Jimmy one night while Marcus was out seeing a film with his friends at the theater. She told him to shape up and figure out what he was so down about, to go identify the source of his trouble and try to remedy it.
"Jimmy then did something more or less illegal: he flew to New York, found Cindy's place of residence, and hid within her domicile until she and Nick were both home. He'd gotten incredibly lucky that night: Nick had left for a meeting and Cindy stayed home alone. He waited until she'd fallen asleep before readying the sterile needle and alcohol swabs.
"He used a chloroform cloth to keep her unconscious while he siphoned a small phial of blood from her jugular artery. He then fled back to his home in Retroville and began performing sample analysis on the blood. What he'd found shocked him immensely.
"According to the DNA within Cindy's blood, they were related on their mothers' sides. It seems Sasha Vortex and Judy Neutron both shared a great-great-grandfather who'd sired two sons who hated one another and distanced themselves as much as possible before fathering offspring, who fathered offspring, who fathered offspring. Naturally, the two women had a mother who at some point had been born with the great-great-grandfather's maiden name, and it was only through a long, extensive search through several verified genealogical records that Jimmy was able to successfully conclude that he and Cindy were indeed related, albeit via a familial gap that was almost too wide to see across.
"As he had used his own blood as the host for the original antibiotic that had initiated the change within Cindy, he then returned to the antibiotic specification sheets and research reports. He spent months in the lab researching, engineering, cultivating, destroying his work and starting over once again with dogged determination. Finally, he had his answer. The antibiotic he'd developed had been based on his own genetic sample taken from his blood, and as such had had an adverse effect at being introduced to blood cells with semi-similar genetic make-up. As he'd not administered the antibiotic to himself, he hadn't become witness to the severity of first-hand effects which would have totally reconfigured his personality. Even five generations later, the shared strain of DNA between Sasha and Judy had recognized the antibiotic and manipulated it adversely; it then tweaked Cindy's affections and shifted her away from Jimmy.
"He figured out his answer as he was approaching his mid-forties, far too late for anything to be done. By that time Marcus had found himself a girlfriend and had decided to marry her if he got the opportunity, which he did. She was smarter than he was, more clever, and far more manipulative, though Cassandra was hardly related to anyone from Cindy or Nick's family. She wasn't intelligent enough for that. Where Marcus found her, no one is certain. What we do know is that she was openly fornicating with three other men and a woman while Marcus attempted to win her heart. She treated him like trash. He regarded her as a goddess.
"By stroke of luck, good or bad, she ended up pregnant with his child. Their marriage was a happenstance formality that only took place because the child could not legally be under Marcus's jurisdiction unless they were wed and shared a surname; new laws had come into place making such transference of names much more difficult and time-consuming, probably to dissuade people from trying to do it.
"Strangely, Cassandra began to show affection for Marcus, something which greatly surprised the young man. He spoke to his father about it and, with another illegal blood sample from a sleeping woman, Jimmy concluded that the change in her attitude had to do with the hormonal changes her body was undergoing from the pregnancy. The changes were permanent, and what started as a rocky relationship actually evolved into one that was more or less functional. The child, Lucy, was a wonder child. Jimmy was fifty when she was born. It was the happiest he'd been since Marcus's birth, though he never really came out of the hole he'd dug into. He at least became more lively and wholesome with the idea of a grand-daughter to keep him company.
"She showed every bit of his genius in her sparkling blue eyes. He loved her to death, more than he'd loved Marcus, it seemed. Marcus wasn't jealous, though; he'd always known somewhere that he wasn't as smart as his dad and probably never would be, though he never let it get him down because he knew he was more emotionally stable and physically fit than his father had ever been. He loved his father, knew his father loved him, but was more than pleased to find that his daughter and father got along so well.
"Lucy turned ten when Marcus and Cassandra found out they'd be having another child. From what I can deduce, she then became a brooding child and spent much of her time away from the newborn, preferring to speak more intimately and privately with her grandfather about things her parents could never dream of talking about. They even began developing methods of exploring and tampering with the fundamental quark mechanics and properties that governed the entire universe, developing equations and theories as to how they could create and destroy matter at the move of their hand with the right combination of time, space, and entity.
"Lucy then turned fourteen and essentially disappeared off the face of the planet. She had gotten a full-ride scholarship to the critically-acclaimed Atomix Science University and took up dorm there, perhaps because her grandfather's revenue had enabled him to build a technical school dedicated entirely to the sciences and technology. AXSU reported wonderful things from Lucy, but no letters or phonecalls ever came from her after she left. Four year old Gavin never really knew her sister."
"Gavin? Alpha Gavin? He's a Neutron?" Cynthia felt her eyeballs nearly fall out of her skull.
"Surely you didn't guess? How else could he build such a powerful antenna? I always thought it was blatantly obvious," James stated quietly.
"Yes, Gavin Nikola Neutron. When Lucy left, he became the apple of his parents' eyes. He grew to the age of eight before my memories become scattered."
"Why is that?" James inquired.
"Around Gavin's eighth birthday, I was confronted by an individual wearing a suit similar to those you possess now. The suit told me it was time to wake up. After that…everything is more or less a blur. My memory from there is so fuzzy that I don't even know who this little girl is or how she came to be here."
"She was strapped into the electrocution housing below your control chair. Any damage dealt to you or the suit would translate equally over to her to painfully shock her to death."
Goddard sighed and hung his head. "An apology won't suffice, I'm afraid. All I can really offer any of you is assistance with anything you may need. My entire time spent in that control unit is unclear to me, and I remember nothing clearly after the suited figure first approached me."
James nodded. "Understandable; the coding within the chair blocks many of your primary and secondary functions while heightening your ancillaries and response times. I'd be shocked if you remembered anything of the past six years beyond a hazy lens of false reality."
He then turned to Cynthia. "One way or another, this child needs to be reunited with her sister. The crafts should be strong enough to carry two passengers each to L-051, but I can't say for certain what our ETA would be. I only have one thing I can think of that would keep her warm long enough to reach the city, but it may not succeed."
He drew a thick white winter parka with fur lining from within the hypercube and held it out. "This is what I've got to offer. It might not suffice."
Chérie timidly took the offered coat and slipped into it, hunkering down into a warm ball with only a red clot of hair atop the white mass. Cynthia scooped the child into her arms rather easily and nodded once at James.
"Two per unit."
He nodded in confirmation and turned to Goddard. "I hope you haven't forgotten how to work your android body."
"Not in the slightest. Computers never forget their functioning unless the sectors fail."
"Then hold on tight. The ride will be a bit lengthy."
The frozen door swung silently open and an appropriately dressed Priscilla stepped from within the airlock, looking rather confusedly between the Alumni.
"You left two days ago. Who's he? And what's that?"
She pointed to everything and everyone all at once. James gestured to the bipedal canine.
"This is Goddard, a cybernetic canine my counterpart created for this world."
He then nodded at Cynthia, who blinked.
"I think you'll be a fair bit more interested in that little bundle there."
Cynthia set the bundle down on the ice and watched as pale, skinny legs drew from within, limbs and head extending outward to fill a coat that barely hung to the girl's knees. Priscilla gaped.
"Is that…?"
The girl nodded. "Prissy…"
"Chérie! Oh!"
She jumped at the girl and embraced her tightly, spinning them both in a wild circle of merriment.
"Oh, how I missed you! Where have you been? And…and…"
The woman then lowered her sister to the icy floor and latched onto James in a fierce embrace. "Where did you find her?"
"I'm quite certain Goddard can explain to you; our time here is short, but he will be staying to ensure that you're making the appropriate changes necessary to run an effective city. We, however, must depart to ensure our own success and survival."
"Take us with you! Please! It's one thing to let me stay here, but you can't do this to my sister! She's just a little girl!"
"I'm not that little…"
"Chérie, they're the answer. They can get you out of here, away from this godforsaken place. They can help you, and they can help me."
"Goddard, if you'd be so kind as to inform everyone of what you told me on the journey over?"
The dog cleared his throat. "Somewhere below the spire at the center of City: H-405, the esteemed leader had an interdimensional warp gate constructed based on old blueprints and part salvaging from my former master's original Chrono-arch. The arch allowed the user to visit a point in time forward or backward of the original time, with the ability to return to the original time to close the portal. This concept requires a much larger portal and is based off the idea of a 'tear' in which objects and organic lifeforms can be parsed between two remote universi, meaning that there exists the distinct possibility that, with some tweaking and a bit of repair work, the portal could become operational."
"And it isn't operational now because?" Cynthia queried.
"First, the portal is entirely incomplete. It would take quite a few fixes and redirects to repair the fragmented portal to a workable order. Second, the portal is under lock-down, meaning it can only be accessed with the proper code. Only three instances of the code exist, and all of them require manual data entry. The code can be found within me, within the esteemed leader, and in an encrypted file located on a remote drive that not even I have access to. As it is a manual entry, this means that the code requires a keypad to input, not a download unit; such a procedure classes as a hack and a security breach, which will render the room unusable by detonating a several megaton bomb within the room's tiled floor. And third, the enormous power draw of the arch to transport even one object for five seconds would be enough to disable the entire city's power grid, let alone attempting to parse a group of humans across five universes. The immeasurable gap that spans the void would take time to pass; if you even live long enough to survive the journey, you'd be lucky to make it far enough into the void for the portal to safely close behind you. Unless the esteemed leader is removed and a suitable solution developed, I'm afraid that returning you to your home is nothing more than a pipe dream at this stage."
Cynthia felt her shoulders slump. She'd wanted to return home and take a nice, long shower and eat some nutritional food and use a toilet for the first time in more than three years, and the promise of all the wonderful tasks she'd come to take for granted in her prior life dangled before her, the unattainable luxury of self-service and preservation.
"I will have a link with Goddard. If systems retain their former functionality, Fly Cycle mode should still be part of the protocol."
"Yes. The Cycle is bigger, but the protocol is the same as its initiation sixty-plus years ago."
"I will alert you if we are successful in our endeavor to locate and access the portal. If we are, you will have one hour to bring yourself and these ladies to the city before I activate the portal and pass all of us through. At this time, that portal is the least of my worries. It's getting to the portal that's the trick."
He then turned to Cynthia. "We'd best be on our way. Waste not, want not."
He scaled the hole in the ice and disappeared from sight. Cynthia watched him go before turning back to the pair of red-heads and the android.
"We'll call for you. Trust me. James won't go down without a fight."
And without a word of goodbye, she too scaled the hole and disappeared into the near-dark of the day.
It's been so long since I've last seen this chapter that I honestly forgot that it existed. Woah. This thing was last edited by my beta a month ago...maybe two months ago. I'm not holding chapters back to be a dick, I'm holding them back so that I give Seas plenty of time to read and critique them before I submit them. That, and I want a bit of an arsenal to fall back on in case I'm slacking, which I have been.
So, now you've met Goddard, Chérie, and we've re-met a slightly different Priscilla. Now what? Where will the Alumni go next? Can they finish their quest to eliminate The One? Will Goddard and the red-heads remain loyal to them, or will they stab them from behind? And what of the purported portal to the home they so desperately want to return to? I can't promise answers in the next chapter, but you should definitely attempt to tune-in next time for Chapter 15: Multi-Directional Opponents. I love you all, my gentle snowflakes, and I'll see you all soon. ~Kyttin