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I stop at the library on my way home from work, the librarian waving me over when she spots me.
Alice is nice, if not a little exuberant. She's my age and I vaguely remember her from some of my undergrad classes-just the gen ed requirements freshmen take before they decide to drop out.
Like me.
"Hey, Bella! Your books are in. Interesting picks. It's a cool story, but I'm more of a civil war romance kind of gal myself."
I nod, examining the books she's extending to me. A Brief History of the Real Ones. The Age of Old Reality. Real Ones: The Great Hoax?
"You gonna take them and go or hang around for a bit? I've got a spinach salad for dinner that I'm never going to finish. My husband acts like just because I'm pregnant, I could eat enough for a small army."
As tempting as the food is, I admit that I have a headache and I'll probably just go home and go to bed.
Alice's brow wrinkles in concern, but she doesn't say anything as she checks my books out and offers a friendly, "feel better!"
The books are dusty, older editions than the last titles I checked out, but the new ones don't have as much information.
They're all like, "The Real Ones used to rule our world but the humans got mad and hunted them to extinction. The end. Don't you have anything better to do?"
The books I checked out tonight though, especially The Age of Old Reality, seem to actually have some substantial information.
Which is exactly what I need.
Because I think that the Vigilante is a Real One.
The last One.
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Back in the beginning, once evolution took hold of our ancient ancestors, there were humans and then there were the Real Ones. An ancient race of beings that were more than human. They lived long, so long that some called them immortal. Invincible, even. There are accounts of them fighting in old wars and walking through enemy fire, unfazed. Some books say that they were more animal than human, driven by instinct and emotion, while others paint them as scholars, so brilliant that all of early invention was thanks to them.
The Real Ones harnessed fire while the humans were like, poking each other with sticks or whatever it was cavemen did.
Witch hunts and religious persecution took place in tandem with the culling of the Real Ones from our world, and overlap was surely happening. Humankind was jealous, angry, suffering from shit like the plague while Real Ones prospered, taking land recently vacated by the diseased. It was problematic, sure, but who else was going to grow crops as entire cities were dying?
I think people just want someone to hate.
Anyone different and strange from them.
Call it fear, call it jealousy, call it whatever you want-but by the time the Age of Enlightenment ended, so did the Age of Reality.
It turns out, the Real Ones weren't invincible. If you could behead them and then burn them, they were gone.
Poof.
Dust.
The world was content to forget them, to gloss over that part of our history, painting those great minds and beings as humans, taking over the narrative.
It's left to conspiracy theorists now to keep the memory of them alive.
Today everyone is happy to call the Vigilante an alien, a cyborg, a military experiment gone wrong.
But I know the truth.
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thanks for reading! and big thanks to LayAtHomeMom for mentioning this in her latest chapter for Beneath the Branches-if you haven't checked that out yet-GO GO GO! It's amazing.
