And the third episode of the third story. (Note: rewrite from E1 to E3, so re-read previous 2 chapters too)
Bhar: Sorry this took so long. I was really really stuck. What happened was that even though I had the overall storyline, I didn't really have the details, especially for the Earth part - all my imagination went to what was happening in the alternate universe far far away. The problem with flashbacks writing is always that it would be boring because the reader already knows, in this case, Joe lives... that is, unless I can infuse it with enough of a sense of a mystery, or have something in the past that can threaten the future. Furthermore, I never like the way I wrote it the first time. Thought it was too crude and a little over-done. It took me deleting everything and restarting on an almost clean slate... gone through 35 pages worth of words before I got this out. So I hope this would be better, hopefully a little more personal too... should have next chapter up in 48 hours, then I must head back to gingerbread house if I still want to meet the Halloween deadline.
To Come Home on an Alien Land
By Jolly
Episode 24
Destiny: Godson to The Old Man
And four people appeared in The Old Man's room, comfortably sprawled out on the floor around a little coffee table laden with steaming hot Tarik Tea and sweet cakes.
Silence and stillness reigned in the room.
Both Joe and The Old Man looked like they were lost in their own world. Banz and Frank, on the other hand, were still digesting what they were told about Runescape and what they saw there.
Suddenly, The Old Man spoke, shattering the silent stillness.
"I suppose, Joe, it is time Frank knows what happened to him."
Frank looked up at them both, surprised. What happened to me? What happened to me?! Nothing. Nothing, right? He turned to Joe, but his brother continued to stare unseeingly into the nothingness before him.
Then Joe spoke to the ceiling above him. "I made him what he is, far more powerful than I expected."
Frank felt a chill settle in his heart. What does that mean? Made me what?
The Old Man chuckled. "A reflection of how much power you are capable of wielding, my son."
And silence resumed.
As much as Frank would like to ask the multitude of questions he had, he held his silence and waited. This was the time for patience. Patience he once was known for, and patient he would be now. And most importantly, being patient was the only way he would be getting answers.
"Do you remember The Church of the Corporate God, Frank?" Joe suddenly asked.
Frank frown a little as he searched his memories.
"It is one of the greatest mysteries of the century. One day it was one of the fastest growing cults in America, and the next day the church leader Father John Bishop and several thousands of the senior members just simply vanished without a trace. That missing-list included a good number of well-known politicians and celebrities. That incident sparked an entire slew of conspiracy theories…" Frank recalled.
Then he turned to his younger brother. "Now that you mentioned it, they disappeared just days after you vanished. I didn't pay much attention to that since Dad and I was both too busy searching for you… are you telling me your disappearance is link to that cult?"
It was then he remembered the enemy they were currently at war with was called The Corporation. Was everything all connected somehow?
The Old Man smiled. "What do you think, Frank?"
"My dad always said that there is no such thing as a coincidence." Frank said.
"Fenton is a wise man, and yes, they are one and the same."
"And what do you remember of my disappearance, Frank?" Joe asked again.
What do I remember? Frank mused. He remembered everything. How could he forget? He searched for Joe for months, and he remembered it all again and again every single day for three years.
"It was the first day of school at Bayport High. You left home and never returned. The last person to see you that day was the football coach. Coach Becker said you left his office at half past four. You never reach your car. There was nothing else. No signs of struggles, no witnesses. No one knew what happened. All we could conclude was that you disappeared somehow somewhere between the coach's office and your car." Frank recalled.
"What happened to you, Joe? What happened back then?" Frank finally asked.
"I ran into the Terminator somewhere between Coach Becker's office and my car." Joe replied dryly.
At first, Frank thought Joe was joking. But his brother's serious expression told him otherwise. "Terminator? As in an assassin sent back in time?"
"A very high tech assassin; with limbs that could morph into guns and blades. Just like in Terminator 2, the movie." Joe confirmed. "Terminator was one of my all time favorites, until that day."
"Then how did you…" Frank could not help but to ask. He could not imagine Joe surviving such an Assassin back then. "Or were you retrieved before the assassin gets to you?"
"No to both questions, big bro." Joe answered. "It was Jorcan who came to my rescue."
Jorcan? That was the first time Frank heard of that name.
"Jorcan was my son." The Old Man said. "Three and the half years back, I sent him out to investigate a strange anomaly at the edge of our galaxy. He never came back."
"I searched for Jorcan for months," Banz added his voice hauntingly soft. "I traveled this galaxy from end to end; pushed Amaterasu to the limit. I never found him. I never saw him again."
And silence again returned to the room.
It was a while before Joe started to speak again.
"In a nutshell, Jorcan saved me that afternoon. We escaped through a portal Jorcan created. Unfortunately, that terminator managed to fire a few shots at us. I was hit, very badly hit. One of the projectiles shattered my spine while another grazed my heart. In a sense, Frank, you can say, I died that day."
"But you didn't…" Frank said.
Joe closed his eyes and let the old memories rise again. And he continued his narration.
"When I woke up, I was in a dusty motel somewhere in Nebraska. Jorcan healed me. I felt totally exhausted, but Jorcan looked wearied to the soul and to the bone. We both needed rest, and while resting, Jorcan told me how he got to Earth. He accidentally fell through a space-time anomaly in his world. Then he told me what he found out about that cult, and that he saved me because of a Vision he had. But it was what he found out that was a shock to my system. The Space-Time Anomaly had also extended to a galaxy that The Corporation had recently conquered. They sent a scouting team through the Anomaly and found Earth, home to the only Humanoid race in our galaxy. They studied our history and culture, set up that cultic church, and were slowly gathering resources to build the machine that could magnify that Anomaly into a huge portal for entire armies to cross over."
Joe chuckled a little at that memory.
"It took a bit of getting use to. But it did not take long for me to come to believe Jorcan's story. I mean, once you put everything into perspective, what he said was simply scarily possible. America was the military power on Earth. A cultic church with hundreds of thousands of followers backing a presidential candidate. Not that hard to takeover Earth at all, and no one wiser until the aliens arrive through the portal. Very effective strategy. And Jorcan said he needed me to help him shut down that portal construction."
"How could you be of help?" Frank queried, curious. His younger brother was not exactly scientifically inclined back then. Joe's talent's in the arts based subjects.
"That was exactly what I told Jorcan, Frank. I mean, I read sci-fi fantasy stuff, but space age physics? But Jorcan insisted he saw me destroying the portal in his Vision if he could keep me safe from that Assassin. Anyway, that was about as far as we got in our conversation then, since that terminator guy found us again. We barely escaped that time, and Jorcan took a bad hit. And that was when things started getting really bad."
Joe's eyes darkened at that memory.
"Why would Jorcan want to help Earth by getting rid of that Portal? Why didn't you come home?" Frank asked, and then he wanted to bite his tongue. Of course Joe would not want to come home. Not with that killer on his heels. His brother would not want to risk his family's lives. In fact, Frank would have done the same thing. As for his first question, he already knew the answer to that one. It was all there in Valkar's tomes on Space Wars. There was no such thing as sub-space in the emptiness between galaxies, so one had to travel from galaxy to galaxy at light speed. That mean normal inter-galactic travel could take centuries. Inter-galactic conquest would be extremely difficult given the logistics requirements. A portal could enable instantaneous travel, giving the conqueror tremendous advantage. However, portal generation took huge amount of resources and was usually only large enough to allow a small ship and a handful of beings to cross over. That was why Reiko had to use the energy from the solar flare to generate the portal when retrieving him. But if a natural Space-Time Anomaly could allow the creation of a huge natural portal….
"Very good, Frank," The Old Man complimented.
"Was Jorcan's Vision correct? Did you destroy that portal, Joe?"
"Yes, I destroyed that portal; and a lot more… A lot, a lot more…"
That pain in Joe's voice… Frank wished he could wash away whatever caused that. But he could help his brother carry that burden.
"How?" He asked. "Tell me, Joe. Share it with me…"
Joe laughed a little bitterly.
"We ran and that terminator chased. Jorcan did not have the time to heal himself properly. The few strangers who tried to help us were all killed. Finally we were cornered. We were desperate, and desperation begets desperate actions. Jorcan was badly hurt, but I was relatively whole. He did what he called a Mind and Soul Merge and something else I did not understand but knew how it was done. Then he sacrificed himself, vaporize his body and utilizing the energy from there to open a portal to send me back to Long Island, close to where the portal was being constructed. And close to Bayport.
I spent almost a whole day in the dumps on the East End in rags looking like I was recovering from a hangover. I could hear voices in my head and was trying to sort them out while battling a monster of a migraine. I knew then I wasn't quite me anymore. I'm changed somehow, but I don't really know what changed. I could feel Jorcan in me. It was just rather overwhelming and terrifying. And I know that terminator guy's still after me. I could not help but wonder how it is that he could track me so effectively?
When I felt in control again, I got down to work. From Jorcan's memories, I figured out he was tracking the location of the portal construction by tracking disturbances in the Earth's energy fields. I traced it to the Church building right there on the outskirts of Bayport. So I took one of the undercover IDs we developed with dad and joined the cult as an initiate. I know I did not have much time, and that I had to find and destroy that portal generator before the killer finds me again…"
"There is one thing that still doesn't make sense. So what if you destroy the generator? They could build another one, right?" Frank asked.
The Old Man answered. "It's not exactly simply destroying the generator, but to use the generator to create a cosmic backlash totally wiping out or negating that Anomaly."
Then Joe continued. "I found the generator and was getting close to resetting that generator for self-destruction. Then the Church Elders, or those Corporate Aliens, discovered me. It was then I found out that they were less advanced models of that terminator killer that was sent after me. I fought them for a while, and then escape, leaving them to try to figure out what I did to their equipments. The only problem I had was that now I have a few more terminator-bots after me. Which was really, really crappy… Then that terminator arrived in Bayport. Using the skills and knowledge given by Jorcan, I managed to elude him for the next 24 hours. That was when he went for you, Frank…"
Frank looked surprise, for he did not remember any such incident at all.
"Of course you wouldn't. He didn't let you, and neither did I." His brother told him.
Why not? He wanted to ask. And then Joe was talking again, and Frank listened. He did not want to miss anything.
"The truth was both Jorcan and I were caught by surprise. We had not expected that move. But that terminator guy got you, and the game changed. I went to meet him at the cliffs at midnight as instructed. He was there waiting with you. He tried to kill you, Frank, as I watch. I managed to telekinetically move you just a fraction of an inch. The blade missed your heart but the wound would still be considered fatal by Earth Standards. I fought with the Terminator and defeated him, much to my surprise. But I couldn't kill him. My hesitance allowed him to open a portal and disappeared into it. Somehow I knew he would not be back. I rushed over to you and tried to heal you, but I couldn't get the healing energies to flow correctly. I was distraught and frantic, and you were technically dead at that point. Then I remembered, and I thought I could duplicate that…"
What did you remember, little brother? Frank wondered as he wished he was there too, so that Joe did not have to go through all that alone. The fact that Joe was narrating the entire incident in such flat monotonous voice instead of with his usual animated flair told Frank how deep these emotional wounds were.
"But those terminator-bots from the Church had to appear at the cliffs and interrupted my attempts to heal you. And I snapped. I got really mad and turned on them. I reached out with my mind, found out about those nanites implants that gave them all those enhanced capabilities. I broadcast that signal to flick that switch that causes the nanites to turn on their host, and the terminator-bots before me vaporized, totally annihilated. I didn't know that they already implanted that many of their human congregation. And with a single thought, five thousand six hundred and twenty four lives were snuffed out, just like that."
And Joe started to laugh a little bitterly, a little regretfully. His voice softens so much Frank had to strain to hear.
"They never even have a chance to scream, but I can still hear their screams after they realized they were gone, that they were dead, their ghost haunts me every day" Joe whispered.
"I didn't feel anything then. I did to you what Jorcan did to me, tweaked the DNA a little, enhance the self-healing bit, and then returned you home to your room. No one even realized you'd gone missing. After that I return to the Church and headed down to the labs where the portal generator was being constructed. It was totally deserted. I destroyed the thing, but was caught in the backlash. That was how I ended up here in this world…"
Frank reached over to engulf Joe in a bear hug as soon as his brother finished his story. It wasn't really Joe's fault those thousands of people died. He didn't know…
But for some reason, Joe refused to meet his eyes. That worried Frank.
"Joe did successfully destroy the generator, and also negate the anomaly. Without that, it would take many thousand years for The Corporation to make their way to your galaxy. It also closed off the backdoor into our galaxy, so that we would not have to fight our war on two fronts." The Old Man said to Frank. "Jorcan, in his attempt to save Joe, made Joe what he is today. And Joe, in his attempt to save your life, created a very powerful Storm Shielder. That was why we had to retrieve you despite the cost involved. You're too valuable to be left to your fate back on Earth."
The room fade back into silence once more, as each were lost in his thoughts and memories and regrets. It was a long while before anyone moved.
"I think its time to go to bed," Banz said. "We all have a long day tomorrow."
Everyone agreed.
As the three brothers were leaving, The Old Man motioned for his godson to stay behind.
After the other two left, the Godfather did not bother mincing words.
"You should have told Frank the whole truth, son. He should know because it affects him more than anyone else."
Joe did not respond to that, but a shadow passed over his face.
The Godfather sighs. "Frank's not stupid, he'll figure out, and sooner than later. Better it comes from you than him figuring it out."
"I know." Joe mumbled.
"He can handle that, Joe, and he can help lighten your burden a little." The Godfather added.
Joe stared at his feet and twiddled his toes, as he was wont to do whenever he felt uneasy.
Finally, he responded.
"It's not him, it's me. But you're right; I'll tell him by tomorrow. I bid you goodnight, father."
And he left.
The Old Man stared at the door for a long time, a worried frown on his face.
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