I woke from my passage outside time and space via way of a near slingshot orbit past Thanatos’ gates, and counted myself blessed. Not sure, even skipping over the years or decades or even centuries lost in my amnesia, just how many times I’ve died, and come back, but its surely been more than a hundred.
A quiet gasp brought my eyes open, and an Uzi loaded with unfoldable honeycomb fletchette rounds into my right hand while my left traced out the High Mages Fourth Conjuration of Defense, and inside my head I wailed to the Most High for protection.
He laughed at me inside my paranoid skull, and I focused on a kid who stood in front of me, perhaps eight, dirty cheeks standing in a tunnel mouth. The skinny little urchin with ripped sleeves, and a belt knife slung on a bit of electrical cable about his waist pointed a scabbed finger at me in accusation.
"Heya Mister, you’re not supposed to be there. That’s meya sputa."
Either English drift or a close variant of English, I noted with interest and some relief. Its always hard arriving in a new world, and finding everyone speaks some particular pattern peculiar to only their own dimension.
"Sorry. Its your spot, you say?" I said softly and distinctly while I slipped to my feet, and into the half-crouch that was all the ceiling allowed. I’m well over six foot, some natural, some as a means of finding space for the cyberwear that I had installed at various places and times.
My undesirous host nodded vigorously with some relief that I wasn’t going to fight him for it, and I decided on the basis of this slim evidence that it was language drift.
And I’d be willing to bet on ten to one odds this was the case. Some worlds WILL surprise you as I’ve met beings that looked human, for instance, a trapdoor spider had more in common with me than I with the representatives of the Sarian?? Demo-Pseudo?Collective. But the safe way to bet is the safe way to bet.
I am also willing to wager you’re dissapointed right about now. After all, I’m a centuries old, vastly powerful and learned person, and the best I can tell you is "This looks to be the case." I’m sorry to disapoint, but thats the nature of living in a finite reality. You never do find out for sure, unless you simplify the problem down to an absurdly reduced level like with mathematical proofs.
Furthermore, he looked human. Caucasian-esque except for the slant eyes. He backed up, and got a good look at me.
His eyes widened as he surveyed me from the tip of my bland, leather-like boots which are beyond durable, they’re armored with a tough, multi-cellular foam that can take a shotgun blast at close range, and all the way up to my longish sun-bleached blonde hair which tented down over the sides of my high forehead to the level of my implacable dark eyes.
I’ll give him props. He didn’t wince, or stammer or back up. I’ve looked combat vets and martial artists in the eyes, and seen just such a reaction. Maybe it was a lack of imagination on his part. I’ve killed more people than I can count, and thats not counting the megadeath scenarios I’ve been involved in.
"See ya’ around, kid." I said as I walked out into a more open tunnel passage. It felt shallow, near the surface. A bit of root poking out a wall gave substance to my theory.
"Wait." He asked, and I turned back. No, he pleaded. His eyes did anyways.
"What do you want?" I asked knowing that I was already bought and paid for.
"I need your help." I thought about it for a second. He had seen a good bit of what I was. The options for what he wanted were…
"I want you to help me get the Gem of Brilliance from the surface."
Mmmm. Okay, Not what I was expecting.
"Why?"
"Will you help me or …" He started, and I glared at him. "Okay. All the elders want to do is sit around and play games on the porties, and I want to get enough power, enough booty to make them listen to me."
I very vaguely understood him.
"Show me." I commanded.
And so over the next two hours he did. We walked through the adults in the midst of caverns that orbitted a decrepit underground parking garage with rusted and decayed masses of metal and plastic in the parking spots and went to the side cavern where most of the kids were playing computer games with each other in direct imitation of their parents, and declaring victory in various games in what looked like ‘god-mode’ to me. What was worse, they flinched when I came by.
Some were obvious, but everyone was scared. Adults and kids.
I met his parents, or those he thought were his parents. They gave me their blessing on taking him with me. So I was happy until as we were climbing out he pointed out something.
"They were too scared to say no."
"But I told them that it was okay for them to do so. I wouldn’t do anything to them."
"They knew better. They could see the lie in your heart."
"I wasn’t lying." I protested. He shrugged, like it did not matter. Actually it did, a great deal. And I shuddered at the level of sickness of the mind here. To be so cowardly, you won’t protect your children, and to be so dishonest that you impute to yourself false gifts of psionic potential (which none of them had, I who am a Seventh Level Master in Pjorg, and listed on the Galactic Empire of Andromeda as Grandmaster Telekinetic should know) so that you can lie to cover up your own cowardice.
It sickened me, and for a moment I wondered if God had sent me to judge these people. To literally pull a Samson, and drop the roof on their whole perverted society. But I felt no call for such a distasteful job, and I am not such to do that without trying every other option first.
No, my job seemed to be to follow the kid, and to leave these barbarians who imagined themselves civilized behind in the squalor both mental and physical of their decayed lives. And so it was with pity limning my lips that I walked up and out into the Chicago sunlight, near the Magnificent Mile, after the place had undergone urban renewal via a massive point-source overpressure.
