Author Notes: I'm so incredibly sorry for the month long hiatus on updates for this story. I don't know what the hell happened to me, but every time I tried to sit down to write something for this I found nothing coming out of my fingers. I could stare for hours at the few paragraphs I'd written thus far and think of nothing further to write. But just today all tat seemed to come to an end. today alone I wrote seven pages, finishing a chapter that started out a month ago as only a couple paragraphs. I can only hope this continues.
Story Notes: in regards to a certain map, every name you'll see written on that map actually refers to a character, place, or creature in a fantasy horror mythos I'm creating based on personal accounts of other peoples nightmares. the more astute among you will catch the reference to the other mythos which served a great inspiration for my own.
The buzzing has long since become inaudible, at least to Sapphire who'd been hearing it for the past six hours. For all that time he'd been sitting on the couch in the living room, the one with the pink cushions, hardwood back, and bamboo armrests. It wasn't the most comfortable thing, but to a creature as small as Sapphire, a few well placed pillows would turn it into a recliner.
That's what he looked like he was one, leaning against pillows stacked behind him arms on smaller pillows stacked on either side, feet fully extended but not even reaching the end of the couch. Sapphire looked out toward the coffee table in front of the couch, and toward the small ovoid laptop and its dull blue screen that gave off that particular buzzing he no longer heard. Scrolling down that screen in three separate columns were innumerate mathematical formulas in nearly every major branch from common algebra to quantum field theory. But Sapphire didn't see numbers or variables or functions or graphs. All he saw was… specks of hydrogen, cosmic rays, radiation spikes, the occasional bit of germ sized space dust, and the background EM noise. It was all very much worth Sapphire's attention, as was indicated by glazed over, his half closed eyes and the tiny string of saliva dripping down the corner of his mouth.
Sapphire blinked at last in how long he couldn't tell. He glanced up from the screen of the Laptop. He'd been staring at it, unblinking, for so long that the world now looked like a spinning, blinking TV screen with the tint turned all the way toward the weird end. He rubbed his eyes. His arms were stiff and shaky, again from the six hours of total motionlessness. He tried to stand up only to find that his whole body had undergone the same stiffening and shakes as his arms. He reach up as high as he could, trying to stretch what little could be stretched from such a meager posture. His arms and legs tingled and he collapsed back down into his former posture, though now with some feeling back in his body.
Sapphire wiped his mouth with his paw and looked out toward the big window across from he couch. The rain was so thick it didn't even sound like it came down in drops anymore. It now just sounded like static white noise, albeit blaring static white noise. The visibility that night was virtually zero, even with flashlights and street lamps, at least to a human anyway. Sapphire could see more though. He could see small chairs tumbling across the ground, the giant leaves of palms and birds of paradise whipping and twirling through the air, and the occasional floppy square tumbling slowly to the ground -shingles being torn off the roof-. Occasionally some small object like a shingle or a giant leaf slammed against the window with a thud. Other times lightning would strike so close that the window would flash and the power would flicker for an instant. After the first few hours of this nobody jumped at these things anymore. Stitch and Ruby even sat next to each other on the windowsill looking out at the storm only inches from the barrier protecting them from it.
Sapphire went back to staring at the readouts on the computer screen, looking for the telltale signs of a warp jump of something weighing over a million tons, the surefire sign of the arrival of the Zodiac in the solar system.He tuned out the conversation taking place in the kitchen.
It was there that Nani and Lilo were at a standoff. Each one leaning forward toward the other with one arm out front and the other swept back, with one foot forward digging as hard as possible into the floor, and the other dragging behind, barely touching it, and both trying their damndest to make sure the other was never able to get a word out.
"You know what that's called Nani?" Lilo shouted. "That's called hypocrisy! That's called double standards!"
"It would be," Nani shouted back. "If they were the same thing, but they're not."
"What do you mean not the same thing?" Lilo shouted right back. "Didn't I risk my life every time I went out to catch another experiment? You let me do that!"
"It ain't just a matter of risk and no risk Lilo, there's levels of risk! This one has too much."
"How's it different!?"
Nani stood back up straight. She put her hands on her back and bent backwards trying to get out the kinks from leaning in toward Lilo for so long. She breathed deeply as soon as she righted herself.
"You, Stitch, and Jumba, against one experiment at a time is a risk I'm willing to let you take. And I know Stitch's first priority is always your safety. That and you both know this island like the back of your hands, so you're always at the advantage.
"But this is totally different! Going onto an alien ship, big enough to be its own island, not knowing what you're going to go up against, not even knowing what you're looking for! That's too much."
"It's not too much" Lilo shouted again. "and I know more about this situation than anyone!"
"Oh really? How much do you really know about this, psychotic rat, as a person I mean? Do you know how he thinks? How much could you really know about what he did in the future, what with it taking less than ten minutes to hear the story? Can you honestly tell me what kinds of things the rat thing has waiting or you up there? What he's capable of?"
Lilo stood like a statue for several seconds. She blinked and straightened back up, looked down at the floor and sighed.
"No." She whispered.
"That's how it's different." Nani said nonchalantly. "Whenever you and Stitch go up against an experiment, you know exactly what you're getting into. But here, you have no idea. And unlike the experiments, the rat can't reasoned with, and can't be rehabilitated. The only thing he wants is for you, and all of us, to be dead."
Lilo blinked and looked up, not quite shocked, as the lights flickered. A split second later the roar of thunder echoed through the house, rattling the windows and vibrating the floors.
"They keep getting closer." Lilo whispered.
"I wonder if the dome'll get hit?" Nani talked to herself.
Lilo looked back at Nani. She stiffened slightly at the words. Her hands were clenched loosely while her face was pulled tight and her lips closed hard.
"I think I'll sleep in the laundry room tonight." Lilo muttered. "Is it okay if I dumped all the clothes into a pile for me to sleep on?"
"Sure, go ahead." Nani muttered right back, only half paying attention.
The argument and ensuing mumbling left more than one party distracted.
Emerald sat op top of the bookcase next to he front door. A black cordless phone was held to her right ear by two tendrils, while another two tendrils tried to plug her left from the noise coming from the kitchen.
"What?" Emerald squeaked into the phone. "Okay now I think their done."
Emerald took her tendrils out of her ear and shook her head briefly.
"I was saying about the satellites." She continued. "… what do you mean what about them?… … Well the Zodiac is over fifteen kilometers long, and I need you to somehow make sure out satellites don't see it… … I know it's an off chance but it's not one in a hundred, hell it isn't even one in ten! That's too much of a risk to take… … Well yeah they'll find out eventually, but when that happens the blockade will be there to stop them from doing any damage, and there's no telling what'll happen if they see it today… … What do you mean you have no influence? … … Why the hell didn't you tell me that in the first place!?… … Damnit, this is neither the time nor place for ego stroking!… … Well do you know anyone who does?… … Well I know exactly what he can do; he can send a power surge through the network… … Would it be more costly than the world being shown footage of an alien ship the size of a large city coming right at them?… … I don't know, tell him to tell them it was a solar flare or something… … Of course no one'll believe it, but that's not the point… … The point is to close the investigation ASAFP… … Well let them. At the very least no one'll get pictures of the Zodiac, and that's the important thing… … Well the amateur pictures can be dismissed easy enough… … No need, we have a cloaking device… … Then recruit them or something… … I don't know, find some way of dealing with them… … Has anyone ever told you how much of an ass hole you are!?… … Well I'd just like to be added to the list… … Thanks Cobra."
Emerald pulled the phone away from her ear and pushed the power button with her hand. She dropped the phone from her tendrils, which hit the corner of the bookcase before falling to the floor causing several high pitched smacks to alert those in the house.
Emerald dropped her face into her hands and wrapped her tendrils around herself. She shivered from nervous fatigue before bringing her feet up off the sides of the bookcase and sitting cross-legged.
Emerald jumped ever so slightly as she felt something large on her shoulder. She unwrapped herself and looked up to the side to see Nani staring down at her.
"What's wrong?" Nani asked.
"I can't believe I just talked to him like that." Emerald whispered back.
"So what?" Nani jeered. "I talk like that to people all the time."
"No wonder you can't get a good job." Emerald mumbled. The instant after she squeaked and covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes pulled wide open. "Again." She sighed through her fingers. "I haven't acted like this since I was seven!"
"Well is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Nani asked.
"I'm not sure." Emerald answered, slowly shaking her head. "I need to think about it."
Emerald looked around on the bookcase but found nothing of interest. She stood up and hopped off the bookcase, falling only a foot before her tendrils caught the floor and slowly lowered her down. She looked up into the bookcase this time finding, among other things, a stack of printer paper and a cup full of pens and pencils, she grabbed both in her tendrils and turned around. Her arms folded and head down in thought, Emerald walked over to the corner of the room and sat laid down on her stomach next to the TV stand. Pulling out a pen and sheet of paper, she started to draw irregular grids with blocks and lines and circles and stuff. Soon into her efforts, it was clear Emerald was drawing a map, a map of some fictional town labeled as Las Aguilas in unnecessarily fancy cursive. The town revolved around a large tower in its center labeled the Tower of Mr. Showers. There was a massive, single story warehouse called the Forge of the Sorrow Fish. There was a mansion called Villa of Eli Rosario overlooking a youth center apparently also owned by him.
Soft pattering brought Emerald's gaze up to see Stitch just then sitting down next to her. Stitch looked down at his own clasped hands and their twiddling thumbs.
"Hi." Emerald said.
"Hello." Stitch answered, nodding his head. "Gaba Emerald Toka?"
"I'm just drawing a map." Emerald answered, going back to the paper.
"Gaba Ba-ba?"
"I don't know." Emerald shrugged. "It's just a place I'm making up off the top of my head. I don't even know what most of this stuff is supposed to be."
"Gabaga?"
Emerald blinked and breathed deep. "Well, drawing maps of strange places always helped me focus, kind of like meditation you know."
Stitch looked down at the map being created before his eyes. She'd clearly been doing this for many years. It looked just like one of those fantastic hand drawn maps found in fantasy novels, complete with the symbols of creatures and coats of arms and other stuff like that. Stitch sat down in front of the map, looking down at it, mesmerized by it.
"Umm… Emerald?" Stitch asked, briefly looking away. "What is future like?"
Emerald immediately stopped what she was doing and put her pen down. She blinked several times before answering.
"Well there's a lot of stuff I can't tell you." Emerald answered. "But I'll do my best with what I can. The future is… its very crowded. At least on the Hawaiian islands. Between the Birds of Paradise and the Federation Embassy, the island became a hub for billionaires and political conferences, even bigger than Geneva in the respect. Every day you have to fight your way through the crowds of xenophobic protesters just to get to work. But at least the school systems are some of the best in the world, what with all the money that goes through Kauai. Social services too. I seems they've solved Hawaii's economic crisis at the price of its quiet comfort. There's not much of that anymore on Hawaii. Thankfully the Birds of Paradise owns half the states wilderness as private sanctuaries."
Emerald looked up into the air while dropping the pen tip up onto the floor and catching it as it bounced back up.
"What about… Angel." Stitch asked.
Emerald grasped the pen. Before dropping it and letting roll in a half circle on the floor. "Oh, mom. That's one of the things I can't tell you much about."
"Tell me… what you can."
"Well," Emerald huffed. "She doesn't talk much. I guess its what the experience with Hamsterveil did to her, but she refuses to talk about it, except for your part in it that is. She still has nightmares about it twenty years into the future, and she says she'll have them the rest of her life. But she does seem happy, for the most part, especially when she's near you."
"What about, rescue?" Stitch asked.
"All I can tell you is, it's less than a year from now."
Stitch closed his eyes and smiled as his ears flopped down. It was one thing to have it implied that Angel would eventually be rescued, but it was quite another to have it stated directly. The implication only gave Stitch so much comfort. The doubt was still there, the fear. But to hear it directly said, Angel was going to be saved, did something rather strange to him. Stitch felt his muscles relax. He didn't even know that he was tense. Suddenly his body started aching and throbbing with mind numbing pain. Stitch collapsed onto his side shivering and clenching his teeth and eyes. How long had he been holding that tension for it to do this when he let it go? It was so long that he didn't realize he was holding it at all.
Stitch felt two rope like objects wrap tightly around his shoulder. He looked up to find Emerald standing over him with two tendrils reaching down.
"Are you okay?" She asked.
The pain started to subside, something that would take the rest of the day for most other creatures took mere seconds for him. When the pain was gone his body felt like rubber, an eerie though not entirely unpleasant sensation.
Emerald pulled Stitch back up to sitting.
"Ih." Stitch answered.
Stitch suddenly realized the strange thing that happened to him. Angel was now only in the back of his thoughts. For the first time in a long time, he was not concerned about her. Angel was only a passing thought, at least for the moment. And she would come and go from his mind as he pleased. It was like stopping a broken record that had been repeating in his head for the past year.
With this newfound freedom, Stitch's thoughts wandered somewhere else, toward his children. One of them was standing right above him. He looked at her curiously. He knew next to nothing about her. But at the same time, he wanted to do something with her that would be meaningful. He had no idea what that might be. The only thing he could think of was what was right in front of him.
Stitch looked down at the map and back up at Emerald. "Can I join?"
Emerald looked down at the map and back up at Stitch. "Sure."
Stitch flopped down onto his stomach opposite Emerald and grabbed a pen from the cup. The chatter between them grew faster and faster as they each drew more parts of the map, arguing over what they should be, what they should be named, and what they should look like. More places emerged on the map, a cave on the town outskirts called the Nest of the King Longlegs, an impossible maze of dirty alleys and gutters called the Zone of Jim Blair.
The chatter, all in Tantalog, drew the attentions of both Ruby and Sapphire. Both stared intently at Stitch and Emerald's newly unfolding map. They both smiled as they both instantly recognized what it was.
The chatter drew others as well. From the kitchen, Lilo entered the living room barefoot, holding a small bowel of pralines and cream ice cream. From the hallway, Pleakly entered in a dark blue nightgown rubbing his head. They all stared curiously at Emerald and Stitch, who were by then totally engrossed in the map they were drawing.
Lilo set her bowl on the shelf of the bookcase and walked over them.
"What are you doing?" Lilo asked.
"You're not going to get an answer out of them." A voice came from her side. "Not until their finished anyway."
Lilo turned around. It was emerald, still sitting on the windowsill. Ruby pushed herself off and wrapped her two right arms around Lilo's shoulder, guiding her away from Stitch and Emerald.
"What are they doing?" Lilo asked again, this time with a slight disagreement in her voice and eyes.
"When we were younger, Dad would draw the maps with us." Ruby answered.
"Maps of where."
"Anywhere, nowhere, we always made up the places we drew. Some of those maps got to be more complicated than some real maps we had."
Sapphire paid full attention to both the words between Stitch and emerald, and between Ruby and Lilo. He looked over toward Pleakly and hastily waved his hand toward him. Pleakly looked twice and then waddled over toward Sapphire. He looked at the laptop as Sapphire pointed toward it.
"Can you watch that while I'm busy?" Sapphire asked before hopping off the couch and walking brusquely toward Elerald and Stitch.
"Watch it!?" Pleakly yelled. "I don't even know what I'm looking for!"
"Tachions!" Sapphire yelled back. "Lots of them!"
"How am I supposed to know what they look like?"
"They'll be labeled!"
With that sapphire walked past Lilo and Ruby, briefly slowing to take the time to say, "We always thought he got us into that turns out it was the other way around."
Sapphire sat down aside Lilo and Ruby, immediately grabbing a pen from the cup and jotting down his own streets and landmarks on the ever growing map. The chatter immediately went three ways, and in seconds it was hard to tell only two people, let alone one were once drawing the map.
Ruby turned toward Lilo and smiled briefly before she too took off and took her place on the one free side of the map, her own pen in hand and her own additions slowly unfolding. Soon all four pens were drawing all at once on the single sheet of paper, often all on the same thing. All four of them rambled on at once in Tantalog, discussing at length what was to be drawn.
Lilo stared at them with a look of surprise and disappointment. This was one of the few times in her memory Stitch did something truly interesting without involving her. It was confusing at least, and distressing at most. She walked toward them fully intent on joining, even though she didn't know what it was they were doing. As she approached, three fingered hands grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back. She struggled, trying to hit whatever it was that was behind her. It pried harder at her, which only made her struggle harder, until…
"Lilo stop it!"
Lilo did as Pleakly had commanded. She turned around giving him a perplexed look.
"Lilo," Pleakly said. "Just let them be for now."
"Why?" Lilo asked annoyed.
Pleakly sighed. "Because after this is all over, Stitch won't see his kids for the next five years. And even then it won't be until years later that he'll be able to play with them like that. Just give him the time, just this once."
Lilo looked back at Stitch, Emerald, Ruby, and Sapphire. They babbled back and forth, often three at once, sometimes all laughing at something one of them said. The map kept growing. There was a swirl of energy atop the tower called the Portal to Realis. There was an icon of an athlete in tights named Ray the Runner, who sprinted along the outskirts of the town. There was a campus of huge buildings called Freak Hospital. There was a fenced off field of Olympic sized swimming pools filled with some vile muck called the Pupal Catalyst. They were totally engrossed in what they were doing. They weren't even aware of anything else around them.
Lilo remembered what Stitch was like when he first met those… not quite experiments. He hated them with a passion. She could never tell why, but everything they did, and even their mere presence, infuriated him. When he first discovered they were his children, he snapped into a kind of hatred she'd never seen in him before. But now, only days later, this happened. She knew Pleakly was right, and for once in situations like these, she didn't even want him to be wrong. Lilo smiled at the quartet by the TV stand.
"You should go to bed Lilo." Pleakly said.
Lilo nodded and wriggled her shoulders free of Pleakly's grip. She turned around and walked back into the kitchen, stopping to grab her bowel from the shelf of the bookcase.
Pleakly continued to look at them for a few more seconds before waddling to the couch and flopping himself down in front of the ovoid laptop, staring into the blue screen while impossible mathematical strings scrolled faster than his eye could register. He had no idea what the hell he was looking at, or looking for, only that it would be labeled 'Tachions'.
The room was dark. All that could be made out clearly were outlines of large shapes and he windows where the rain beat down mercilessly, sounding like the static of a TV on the wrong channel. A creak was barely audible. From the creak, came a crack of light from the adjacent room. I was just enough to make out what the room was like. There were blue and white checkered linoleum floors, strings tied across the ceilings, plain white cupboards across the upper walls, and of course, the washer and dryer.
Lilo pushed the laundry room door the rest of the way open with her shoulder. She loosely gripped her bowl in her hand that hung by her side. As she walked into the laundry room, Lilo reached with her other hand toward the wall beside her, above her head. Stumbling several times, her fingers found what they sought. With a click, the lights went on. Seconds later, they flickered from the surge of a bolt of lightning flashing through the windows. Lilo didn't wince at the lightning, merely blinking at the flash.
Lilo set her bowl down on the floor and closed the door with her foot. She walked over to the dryer and opened it. She pulled out its contents and dumped them onto the floor. Tossing clothes aside, Lilo found what she was looking for. A pair of black canvas retro sneakers, black sweat pants, a black long sleeved shirt, and a black winter cap. Lilo took off her green mumu, and put on the new outfit she'd selected.
Turning her head from place to place, Lilo eventually located the round tin of black shoe polish right in front of her, on he shelf above the washer and dryer. She climbed the dryer, using the open door as a stepstool, and grabbed the tin from the shelf. She twisted it open and smeared the corrosive smelling polish in streaks beneath her eyes. She left it on the shelf still open.
Lilo hopped off of the dryer and approached the back door. She looked up at it. The trees where convulsing in the wind and rain. The trip from here to the ship was not going to be pleasant. But Lilo verbalized her rationalizations.
"Sorry Nani," She said. "I'd never get over the regret if I didn't see this with my own eyes. But that's just something you couldn't understand."
Lilo grabbed the handle of the door. On twisting it, the door almost immediately flew open, nearly hitting Lilo in the face and sending her clamoring back. The water sprayed into the laundry room and onto Lilo. She wrapped her arms around herself from the cold, backed up a few feet, and dashed toward the door, grabbing the knob and pulling it shut as she ran outside.
The piece of paper was completely covered in scribbles and shapes and titles and pictures. Somehow, despite the mishmash of ideas and efforts of four different graphers, the map seemed somehow concise, as if it could be a real place in some fantasy horror author's mythos… or at least everything within it could be, it was doubtful they'd all be in the same place like that. But despite this, the town looked somehow fluid, like it was a real town that grew and shaped itself around the terrain as real towns did.
Stitch had a hard time getting over this as he held the new map above him as he lay on his back along the windowsill. It was less than five minutes into drawing that map with his children that it seemed as if it were something they'd always done.
Stitch set the map down on he windowsill behind him and folded his arms across his chest. He closed his eyes and smiled. It wasn't an intense smile like he did when he got excited or laughed. It was a very slight smile, something that barely registered as such. Stitch realized there was only one other time he was ever as content as he was then, and that was the very first time he ever went surfing with Lilo, and unlike then, this time it wouldn't end with a crisis. Stitch opened his eyes and leaned his head toward the inside of the room.
Emerald sat on the couch opposite Pleakly, with her nose in a quite large hardcover book pulled off the bookcase next to the front door. It was simply titled 'The Stand'. She would flip a page every five seconds, clearly able to read faster than any normal human, though still no where near as fast as himself. He thought to himself that maybe he should start reading novels, if nothing more than as a means to master written English.
Sapphire was wall asleep on his back on the chair, his arms and legs splayed out to the sides. His mouth hung open and his ear twitched every few seconds. Stitch giggled to himself at this.
Ruby sat right in front of the TV watching old anthropomorphic Saturday morning cartoons from the mid eighties. Her face was way too close to the screen for her own good.
Stitch turned his head toward the window and looked out into the storm. Simply knowing that they were there made him relaxed.
Another flash of lightning struck in the distance. Seconds later, the low rumbling came and engulfed the house.
Pleakly stared with his eye half open at the screen in front of him. His eye almost closed several times, but suddenly shot open at a startling sight. Pleakly sat up straight and stiffened his body.
"Sapphire?" Pleakly asked.
Sapphire snorted in his sleep.
"Sapphire!" Pleakly shouted.
Sapphire jumped up awake, feeling in front of him as if unable to see.
"Wha, Wh, what?" sapphire grumbled. "What the hell is it."
"It's saying tachions on this screen." Pleakly answered, pointing to the ovoid computer while looking at Sapphire."
"Tachions!?" Sapphire mumbled loudly, trying to wake himself up as fast as possible. "How many?"
"I don't know! I can't understand any of this! It just keeps saying tachions over and over again."
Sapphire shook his head and arms wildly trying to wake himself up fully. After several seconds of that, he blinked for several more seconds. He stood up and jumped from the chair straight onto the couch. Standing next to Pleakly he stared intently at the screen of Jumba's laptop. When he looked up, his immediate family had all stopped whatever it was they were doing and pointed their eyes at him.
"It's the warp jump signature of a mass of over a thousand megatons." Sapphire said. "It's the Zodiac."