Microstory 2280: Peaks and Valleys

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I’m back home, and feeling much better. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in a lot of pain, and it’s difficult to move around, but this is a far superior environment. Man, I feel like I’m so out of touch these days, bragging about my large house, and private medical team. I never wanted to become this, but you have to admit, healthcare is better without all those other sick people. Jesus, what the hell! Why did I just say that? And why am I not deleting, and starting over with a more relatable tone? It would be really nice if this were how everyone lived. Or would it? How would that even work? Everyone’s rich, so they can hire a private home staff, but then who are these home staffers? This sounds like a caste system. So maybe there’s a happy medium between traditional healthcare, and private. I suppose things could get better and more comfortable for more people by improving the ratio. Fewer patients per medical professional would make it easier for each one to focus, and not be spread so thin. Maybe they could work shorter shifts, and have a better work-life balance too. Is that what I should do? Should I be concentrating all my money on healthcare reform? I’ve always thought that I should be distributing it across a number of causes, relatively evenly, but I’ve heard that it’s more productive in the long run if everyone chooses one or two causes to be passionate about. I dunno, I’ll need to see some numbers. In the meantime, despite my circumstances, things are looking up today. Watch, now people will start taking bets when the next bad thing will happen to me, and maybe what it will be. That’s how it always seems to go. Peaks and valleys. Peaks and valleys. Anyway, I’m going to put all that out of my mind, and just try to live in the moment. Nobody’s rethinking their charitable contributions today. Best not to make any big decisions while you’re on drugs, right?

Microstory 1448: Ecrin’s Return

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When the final battles of the war against the time monsters began, the source mages retreated into their special hidden dimension. They took with them nearly a hundred and fifty people, who could theoretically restart the population, assuming the rest of the humans on Durus were killed in the attacks. It would be a long time before anyone knew what happened to these people, because only one of them returned to the main dimension. Her name was Ecrin Cabral, and she was one of the first town mages ever. She protected Orabela Vinci when the latter chose not to be proverted to an older age. In reward for this, Orabela gifted Ecrin with the power of agelessness. So she was eighty-nine years old when she returned to the main dimension in the year 2101, but she still looked as she did when she was seventeen. She was horrified to find the world she once loved had been destroyed, and not by the war, but by the survivors. As a woman, as a mage, and as a human being with a conscience, she did not feel like she could stand by, and let things go any further. So she fought. She used the skills she learned over the course of six decades to fight against the establishment, pretty much all by herself. She tried to take the leaders down, and open up people’s eyes to the damage they were doing to civilization. Unfortunately, people had already made similar attempts before, and they had always failed. She didn’t really have anything that the other rebels didn’t. The authorities snatched her up, and stuck her in a room, so they could ask her where she had been for the last eleven years. Well, she wouldn’t tell them anything. No matter who asked, or how they asked, she literally remained silent. She would not tell anyone what happened to the source mages, or where they were now. The interrogators couldn’t even be sure that she knew the answers to their questions. They kept her alive for her time power, and because she was useful in many other ways.

They wanted Ecrin to propagate her species. It was already clear that the children of former mages had powers of their own. These powers were weak, however, and often not all that helpful, which was why this new class of people was called mage remnants. Ecrin never lost her powers, however, so if she had children, the assumption was that they would be full mages in their own right, and could bring Durus back to its former glory. At this point in history, there were a lot of things that men were allowed to do to control the women around them, but rape wasn’t one of them...yet. Ecrin didn’t want to bear children for anyone, and no one was going to make her. So they locked her up in a very uncomfortable cell, and every single day, someone would come back, and ask her if she changed her mind. She never did. She took the torture, and never budged. The world had changed so much while she was gone, though, and there was no reason for Ecrin to believe they would magically get better while she was in hock. She feared the government would only get worse, and policymakers would make her do what they wanted. There were a few options. They could keep rape illegal, but not enforce it strongly enough, or deter it. They could twist the wording of the laws, so that their way of forcing her to have children couldn’t be construed as rape at all, but something else. Or they could simply make rape legal, or legal under certain circumstances. She couldn’t take the chance that any of these would end up happening, so she took dramatic action. Luckily, her doctor was sympathetic, so he agreed to a medical procedure that the government wouldn’t like. He performed a tubal ligation, which served to sterilize Ecrin’s body, so that she couldn’t have children anymore, even if she wanted to. This didn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t be raped—in fact, she figured the chances were high someone would do that to her as punishment—but it did prevent her oppressors from getting what they wanted. The truth was, had the world turned out differently after the war, she might have considered settling down, and starting a family. But she couldn’t do it if it benefited a misogynistic government, or really anyone but herself. They moved Ecrin to a slightly more comfortable cell, right next to her doctor. She wasn’t released until 2161, when the Republic finally came crashing down.

Microstory 1447: First Elections

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When the Republic first gained traction, the leader of the movement declared himself the first president. He did this with the promise that he would step down, and make way for a replacement in a few years, after the first elections decided on the first official regime. That was exactly what he did in the year 2100. He didn’t even run for reëlection, or allow loyalists to start a write-in campaign. He firmly believed in the government they were building, and didn’t want anyone to be in power who did not deserve it, and did not prove to the people that he did. The system was staunchly misogynistic, but within its own parameters, a fair meritocracy; well...maybe not quite at first. Anyone who wanted to run for a particular position was free to do so, as long as he fit the initial criteria, number one being that he had a penis. Every candidate was given equal opportunity to announce their platform, and raise awareness. Seeing as money was a new thing on this world, they weren’t quite sure how they were going to prevent the wealthiest from having an unfair advantage, but they knew they wanted to protect the elections from it. They didn’t want it to be like it was on Earth. It was the preliminary administration’s responsibility to figure this out. There were technically around twenty thousand eligible voters living in Aljabara at the time of the election. When it came to voting itself, there was a secret rule about who was eligible, and who wasn’t. Bear in mind that formal misogyny was only beginning to take hold, and the Republicans feared that a rebellion would rise up once more if they did not at least pretend to make things fair. Everyone over the age of fifteen was allowed to vote, but that didn’t mean every vote was going to be counted. The voting committee left themselves under no obligation to reveal the final tally of the votes. All they were required to do was announce who won which race. Voters did not place their ballots in the box themselves. They handed it to one of the poll workers, who dropped it into the box in front of their eyes. This gave the appearance of equality, but there was something else they were doing at the same time. Each worker wore a special stamp ring on his finger, which he used to mark the corner of each ballot he received from a woman. Every ballot bearing one of these markings was simply thrown into the recycling bin at the time of counting. The counters didn’t even bother looking at who the woman voted for, because to them, it no longer mattered. Their opinion stopped being valid six years ago. The first official administration would go on to make voting illegal for women, and this was always the plan, but the Republicans didn’t want anyone to know that. There was actually a lot they had planned for the future that they realized they couldn’t introduce all at once. Had they wanted to do that, they would have needed a monarch, and if there was one thing all monarchs from history had in common, it was that they were always—be it sooner or later—overthrown. While things had been bad for years now, this was the day freedom truly died on Durus.

Microstory 1445: Four Witches Stand

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By the time the Mage Protectorate fell, there were three women who were largely responsible for saving the human race on Durus. Hogarth Pudeyonavic sent the Springfielders through the Deathfall portal in the first place; this much was common knowledge. It wasn’t until later that people learned that, had she not expedited the process with her machine, the portal still would have pulled them through, but it would have chewed them up, rather than swallowing them whole. She was also instrumental in protecting the town following the thankful disappearance of its first leader, Smith. Councilwoman Hardt was a true leader, and continued to protect the people, even after all the terrible things they put her through. Jayde Kovac was a young girl with immense powers, who ended the war with the time monsters, and rescued the entire current population of Durus in 2092 when all of the oxygen disappeared for thirty seconds. Other women were involved in helping make sure humanity survived, including Hilde Unger, but these three were the most famous. Well, not everyone saw it this way. Councilwoman Hardt was a carryover from the old world, she always went against Smith’s decisions, and she didn’t let men push her around. Some didn’t appreciate that. Though the truth about Hogarth’s actions eventually came to light, she would always be associated with the Deathfall, and would always be blamed for it. It didn’t matter what good she did, people could only remember the bad, because that was what certain voices screamed about all the time. Jayde was in the same boat, because winning the war came at a great cost. Experts could try to explain that things would have been much worse for them had they lost that war, but again, it didn’t matter. In The Republic, none of this would matter, because reason didn’t matter, because truth didn’t matter, because women didn’t matter. Kovac, Hardt, and Pudeyonavic were later collectively called The Witches of Durus, and they were destined to be joined by a fourth historical figure. They didn’t know who this fourth woman would turn out to be, but they were told she would one day spell the downfall of the Republic—which was true. They used people’s fear of this in order to justify their decision to forge the Republic in the first place.

The Witches, along with other women, had done—or will do—so much to hurt the world that a small group of men decided they could no longer be trusted with authority, or responsibility. They had to be controlled—nay, managed. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the right to be safe, happy, and free, but they needed to be told what to do, and they weren’t allowed to tell anyone else what to do. Even a mother could not be left alone with a child, for she may instill them with values such as equality, social harmony, or good trouble. Like, literally. If the man needed to leave the house, the children had to go with him, or the mother did, but she could not supervise without being supervised herself at the same time. Some husbands didn’t let their wives out of earshot, even if they didn’t have children, but that kind of thing didn’t happen until later. For now, the new system was just beginning. It started as a vision amongst a very select few, but they whispered their warped ideas to anyone who got too close to them, like a viral load to an unmasked person less than two meters away. It would have stopped here, but the republicans, as they liked to be called, had something major on their side. They were in charge of Watershed, and its dam. They controlled the water, and the moderate amounts of electricity that Aljabara had, and that was enough to give them the influence they needed to pretty much just dictate whatever they wanted. Their ideas would evolve over time, just like it did for any governmental body, but the basic tenets were clear: women can’t be trusted, and...well, I guess that’s mostly it. Under the new laws, you could do anything you wanted, save killing, stealing, being antisocially dishonest, or having a vagina. This was the way things were in The Republic, and they didn’t change for over sixty-five years.

Microstory 1361: My Mother

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Nick Fisherman: I see the tables have turned.

Tavis Highfill: I don’t own a table anymore. We got rid of it, because it was taking up too much space, and I just use TV trays.

Nick: You know what I mean. I’m the one interviewing you today.

Tavis: That’s right.

Nick: Was this planned from the very beginning?

Tavis: It was not. The other day, my sister suggested I write a piece about our mother for Mother’s Day. She arranged her own piece of music for her, and this will be my gift. And bonus, that’s one less “suitability interview” that I have to come up with.

Nick: Oh, that’s a nice idea. So, how about it? What can you tell me about your mother—our mother—uhh...

Tavis: I was diagnosed with autism when I was twenty-seven years old. But, of course, I was autistic my whole life; it just wasn’t something that we knew. My family had to make a lot of accommodations for me, because of how I was. I didn’t like certain foods, loud sounds bothered me, and my biggest problem was that I didn’t understand people. I don’t see the world the same way others do, and I just didn’t get why. None of us did. Had I received my diagnosis early on, I think it would have been easier for them. Even in the 1990s, they would have had resources. They would have been able to speak with mental health professionals, and had me speak with them. When I acted out, they would know why, and would be able to deal with it accordingly. But that isn’t what happened. My family had to develop ways to communicate with me on their own, with no help. My mother was particularly patient and compassionate, and I can never thank her enough for it. I’ve always had a very relaxed relationship with her. I can talk to her about anything, knowing that she’ll give me the best advice—not for just anyone—but for me specifically, because I require some very specific advice. Our relationship has only grown stronger with time.

Nick: Oh, interesting. Full disclosure, though; I’m only jumping in, because this seems like a logical place for a paragraph break.

Tavis: Yes. So, when my sister conceived this project, she said I could write a piece about mothers in general. But when I tried, I realized it probably wasn’t possible. There is just no comparing my mother to others. She’s special, and I know a lot of people say that, but she is. When I was very young, I heard something on TV about gay people, and at that point, that was a word I was not familiar with. I asked my mother what it meant, and she told me that some boys feel more comfortable with other boys, so they date each other, instead of girls. She said that the same is possible for girls. She never so much as hinted that it was wrong, or that I should treat such people differently. Diversity was celebrated in my family, and I don’t know how my parents did it. I don’t know how they freed themselves from the prejudices of their hometowns, in the time that they were living in them. However they did it, I grew up without those prejudices. I wasn’t raised to feel that I shouldn’t talk to the black children in my class. I wasn’t made to feel that there were certain expectations of me because of how I was born. They signed me up for tap dancing and gymnastics, and let me quit baseball when I wanted to. They never had to teach me to treat women with respect, because at no point did I make a mistake. They never needed to sit me down, and explain why women were equal. I didn’t realize until I was much older that women aren’t actually treated as equals in this world, because my parents created a world where that wasn’t true, and simply let me be in it. I hear about people trying to figure out how to teach their kids how to behave, but the best way to do that is by example. Raise them in a loving family, like I was, and it will just come naturally to them. That is what a mother does.

Nick: That’s lovely. Thank you for this, self. And to our readers, you can watch a special edition of my sister’s video series I-Miss-You Music Mondays right here.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 23, 2261

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A couple months ago, Hogarth and Hilde decided to use the Nexus replica to visit the planet of Dardius, and prepare for the living memorial services. They were met with suspicion and reluctance, as no one there knew who they were. They had no choice but to return to Glisnia, and retrieve the only two people on the planet who could help the situation. It didn’t matter that Vitalie no longer possessed her memories, or that she technically had never set foot on the distant world. She was a respected friend of the planet’s owners, as was Étude. This left Pribadium alone with her thoughts, and according to Pribadium, that was usually when she invented things. While Holly Blue was a choosing one with the ability to intuitively build technology that exploited loopholes in spacetime, Pribadium was smart enough to come up with such things on her own. Hogarth and Hokusai had proven themselves capable of doing it on their own as well, through science and hard work, but there was one ingredient they were never able to do without. They required a special part called the cylicone. It was present in all temporal objects, in some capacity. No one truly understood how it worked, but as long as it was integrated properly, it always did. More importantly, whatever the object was, it wouldn’t work without the cylicone. Until now.

Pribadium built a teleportation machine. These weren’t too terribly uncommon, of course. The people of Durus used them in their everyday lives, and Kolby Morse carried a gun that could banish his targets to Beaver Haven Rehabilitation Center. But again, they all required the cylicone, and were all based on people with abilities. What Pribadium accomplished was astonishing not only because she had come up with the idea, and executed it to completion, within a matter of weeks, but also because it was done through science alone. It didn’t attach itself to natural tears in the spacetime continuum. It didn’t adapt a chooser’s ability to teleport. It was a genuine invention, which they came to learn could have terrible consequences.

“What’s the big deal?” Mateo asked.

“Okay,” Étude began. “You’ve heard of the internet.”

“No,” Mateo joked in deadpan.

Étude ignored the snark. “There are bad corners of the internet, where bad people do bad things. They may be hard to get to, but they’re all part of the same network. Everyone uses the same network; same cables, and signals, and whatnot. If you want a separate one, then you’re kind of limited to a single building’s closed intranet. What Pribadium did was build a separate network. A new one. It’s small; it’s like an intranet now, but it could potentially be scaled up, and that could change everything. I honestly can’t tell you what that means.”

“Well, what does it change?” Cassidy questioned. “Isn’t the end result the same?”

Leona shook her head. “It could even the playing field,” she said cryptically.

“Explain.”

“Why can only some people travel through nonlinear time?” Leona posed.

“I don’t know, why?” Mateo asked right back.

“I don’t know,” Leona echoed. “We call the people who can’t do it humans, or regular humans. They get sick, and they may even die. It could be a genetic thing; it could even be environmental, but the powers that be appear to have limitations of their own. They can’t just call anyone they want to duty. If they could, they would probably stick to people they know will do their bidding, and won’t question orders.”

No one responds.

“Look at it this way,” Leona continued. “Let’s imagine that time travelers didn’t exist. No choosers, no powers, no salmon, no chosen ones, no spawn. You can’t be born with powers, and you can’t be put on a pattern. Before you found out about all this, that was the world you thought you were living in. That was normal. But what was also normal was scientific advancement. No one here is old enough to remember a time before cell phones existed, but some of us were close. They didn’t exist, and then they did, and then they got better, and now we’re so far beyond the form factor that holding a little rectangle in your hand seems laughable to people living in the 23rd century.”

“What’s your point?” Pribadium asked. She had been impressively quiet while she tried to figure out whether everyone was upset with her for what she had created.

Now Leona focused her attention directly on her. “You invented time travel, Pribadium. You had been exposed to some of the concepts, but not a lot, and none of it had anything to do with teleportation. I mean, you just figured this out. Regular humans can now do what we do. No apparent side effects, no downsides. That’s, quite frankly, dangerous. It’s bad enough that some people can do the things they can, but if we just let that get out into the world—nay, the galaxy—then what does the timeline look like?”

“I didn’t invent time travel,” Pribadium defended. “You can’t go backwards, and change history. You can just jump to the other side of the world, at the farthest.”

Leona smiled. “The people who invented the cell phone couldn’t use it to access their emails, if they even had email accounts by then. This is a step, and we can’t be sure it’s a good one.”

“Are you telling me to destroy this?” Pribadium asked.

“Why did you build it?”

She shrugged. “I was just trying to get to the Nexus easier and faster. I didn’t give it much thought. I wasn’t trying to change the galaxy,” she said with airquotes.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Étude cautioned.

“Why do people say that?” Cassidy asked. “Yes, you can. It happened, like, every episode of the show that was dedicated to a man and his genie slave girl.”

“It’s just an expression,” Étude clarified. “The lesson holds. You’ve done something that can’t be undone.”

“Hmm,” Vitalie began, “well, that’s not true, is it?”

Étude scoffed. “We’re not going back in time to prevent the invention of time travel. If we’re gonna base all our decisions on movies and TV, then when has that plan ever worked?”

“We just have to keep quiet about it,” Mateo suggested. “Hardly anyone else lives here, and the nearest colony is miles and miles away, on the other side of a mountain range. We’re not telling anyone about the Nexus either, right?”

For some reason, that made everything really awkward.

“It’s not like we don’t trust each other with this information, right?” He pressed.

Still awkward.

“I’m so stupid, I’ll forget about this in a week. I know I can trust Leona. Cassidy can trust her mother, and vice versa. Étude trusts Vitalie. Hogarth and Hilde trusts each other. Leona can trust both Hogar—”

“Me,” Pribadium interrupted his rant. “They’re worried about what I’ll do next. If I don’t tell anyone about this, I could still do it again, or something like it. I’m the flight risk.”

“We don’t think that,” Leona said with a shake of her head.

“It’s okay,” Pribadium lied. “I don’t belong in this group. I fell into this, and I understand that.”

“We all fell into this,” Cassidy tried to comfort her. “I spent most of my life oblivious, until someone sent me to the future. Hogarth exploded herself accidentally. Vitalie jumped through a hatch, after being rediscovered in another universe without her memories. My mom is really the only one here who was born into this life.”

“It’s true,” Étude agreed. “No one thinks you don’t belong here. We’re just worried. Holly Blue regrets a lot of the things she invented.”

“Lord knows I do too,” Hogarth chimed in.

Hilde finally decided to speak. “Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a good thing? Maybe we humans deserve this? Maybe this technology can put an end to the powers that be’s...power.” She tilted her head at the odd grammar, but moved on. “Maybe the choosing ones won’t feel so special anymore, and thusly, not so violent and annoying.”

Even though Mateo was salmon, he had always been bothered by the us versus them mentality. Even calling people without powers or patterns humans seemed so, well...racist. He never let go of his original identity. He always preferred to treat everything he had gone through, and had yet to go through, as the conditions of his life, rather than the nature of his self. All of this was what he did, not who he was at his core. It was less about being a time traveler, and more about being a person who traveled through time. So he felt for Hilde’s position, and couldn’t say that he disagreed with her on this issue. Maybe everyone else was blowing it out of proportion, and things would only become bad if the people in this room remained so nervous about it.

“Let’s set this aside, and focus on Mateo’s funeral,” Vitalie mediated, knowing that if the conversation were to continue, things could get pretty heated; worse than they were on the ultimately detoured way to Dardius last year.

“Oh, yeah, we’re not doing that today,” Étude explained. “You really need to pay attention when we go off and do things, and talk to people.”

“I’m just gonna forget it anyway,” Vitalie argued. Well yeah, in a half century.

“The Dardieti government is dealing with some internal matters right now that make holding a global memorial service too complicated. They intend to hold off on the news. As sad as it is, the event could unite the peoples, but only if they handle with care.”

“How long do they wanna wait?” Leona asked.

“For you?” Étude asked rhetorically. “Three days. Estimate.”

“Whatever,” Leona said. Mateo thought she was taking this too lightly, and was probably underestimating how traumatic the experience would be for her, even though he was as of yet, still alive. He couldn’t say that to her, though. This was her journey, and he would support her during any emotional crisis that did or didn’t come her way.

“Well, that’s good,” Pribadium said. “I have some other ideas I’m working on, and to prevent anyone from freaking out about them, I need Hogarth to help me with them.”

“What are they?” Hogarth asked, concerned but curious.

For whatever reason, Pribadium looked over at Cassidy. “I was thinking we could do something to help her.” Help her how?

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Microstory 1201: Ira Park

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Ira Park was one of the good guys. He wasn’t raised to be a good person, so it was something he had to develop on his own by rejecting society’s outlook, particularly on women. He was probably autistic, though the field of psychology was severely lacking on Durus, since people were really just focused on surviving, or on oppressing half the population. Either way, he didn’t see the world in the same way he was expected to, and once his mage remnant time powers manifested, he knew how he was going to help. He had the ability to generate wards over a specified area or building. These protected the rightful owners of the space—which Ira could assign—against all intruders. They prevented unauthorized access using time powers, or just physical force. They were basically magical locks that limited admittance. Needless to say, his skills were in high demand for people looking to protect themselves, or just enjoy a higher level of privacy. At first, Ira worked for anyone who would hire him. He knew he had to develop his reputation, and grow his business, before he could use his powers for good. It was only after a few years that he started secretly protecting the rebel thicket. The thicket was an organization comprised primarily, but not exclusively of women. They fought against the oppressive abuses of the phallo-centric government, and sought a world of political and social equality. They weren’t violent, or even all that loud, which was probably why change came at such a slow pace, but they were not wholly ineffective. Their main responsibility was to rescue and harbor enemies of the state, and abused women who managed to find the courage to leave the men around them. In this capacity, Ira’s warding powers were priceless. He didn’t ask for any form of compensation for these services, and didn’t support the rebellion in any other fashion. Both he and the thicket leaders felt it was prudent for him to do this one wildly valuable thing for them, and nothing else. Any more noise would have painted a target on his back, and made it that much harder for them all to remain secret and hidden. It was of absolute importance that he remain a free man, so he could continue to help him in his best way. Once the phallocracy was toppled, the truth of Ira’s involvement with the thicket came out to the public. He suddenly had a whole bunch of enemies who now understood why the former government never made any headway in putting the rebels down. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t like they had any means of retaliating. His wards protected his person at all times, so he perpetually walked around with an impenetrable shield. He was only ever rewarded for his noble actions, by people grateful for his bravery in a world that did not always appreciate it. He continued to work as a ward creator, though he could now be much more open about it. His power increased as well, as did the powers of many others, like it was the existence of the corrupt government itself that was keeping them down. He never used his gifts to help criminals, or anyone with known backwards ideas about how the planet should be run. He provided safety and security to a lot of people on Durus, and he did it for next to nothing. They even named a new wildlife reserve after him, located in an area once overwhelmed by thicket. Fittingly, they simply called it Ira Park.

Microstory 1182: Poppet Drumpf

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When what would later be called the First Republic of Durus fell, something new needed to be formed to replace it. Completely transforming the way a society works, however, takes time; years of it. In the meantime, a provisional government had to be formed to keep things running smoothly. Though this transitional period was a necessary one, it did not come without its share of problems. The history of elections was marred by inequality. Women weren’t allowed to vote at all, lower-class men were only worth half a vote, most other men enjoyed one vote, and a male mage remnant voice counted for one and a half votes. It was a mess. Before they could figure out how to fix this—which was made to be much harder than it really needed to be—many of the leaders from the old system were simply carried over to the new one. They may have changed positions or roles, but they were predominantly the same men who were always in charge. From the outside, they appeared to be agreeing to the new policies of inclusion and equality, but they were also being clever and deceptive. They worked in loopholes and lax enforcement programs so that things weren’t getting too much better. Sure, women were no longer technically being treated as property, but they still lacked fair access to leadership positions, which would provide the world with a much more diverse and representative governmental body. The male-dominated provisional government was primarily concerned with maintaining power, even if it meant changing a few oppressive laws here and there. They secretly figured they could revert these laws once the planet saw how terrible and ineffective they were. Unfortunately for them, the people saw right through that, and realized that the leaders themselves were the ones who were ineffective. Not all of them were bad, but they were all falling in line to one man, who was absolutely refusing to change his worldview. Professional moron, Poppet Drumpf wielded more power than he should have. He scared bigly all of his contemporaries, forcing them to do what he wanted without further question, simply because he supposedly possessed a lot of money, despite zero proof that he, at any point, had the claimed millions and billions. Believe me, he was not the only member of the old guard who did not like progress, nor could they collectively have done anything on their own. This was an incredible systemic problem that needed to be corrected with proper elections, and a fair legislative process. But Provisor Drumpf was a huge problem, and Durus would not be able to move forward if he was allowed to remain in office. Fortunately for the world, it was not without those who were as passionate about equality as Drumpf was about discrimination and fake news. They weren’t afraid to take him and his ovisian acolytes on, despite his threats of fire and fury. Many in the provisional government were ultimately allowed to remain for the first term of the Democratic Republic. But not Poppet Drumpf. No, he wasn’t allowed anywhere near his platform, nor any other, for that matter, ever again. He died a teremendously bitter, stupid loser. Winning.

Microstory 1154: Lamar Prebensen

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When the town of Springfield, Kansas was swallowed up by a portal, and spit out on a rogue planet that would come to be known as Durus, much of Earthan culture tried to go with it. Smith was an unfair tyrant, but he wasn’t particularly creative, nor intelligent. He didn’t come up with a new system of government and law; he just corrupted and exploited what he already knew. Over the decades—as society stabilized—many policies and laws had to be changed to accommodate the new environment. People with time powers, and people with the power to give people time powers, were not things any Earthan government had to deal with—at least not in an official capacity. As time marched on, and social equality was dismantled, the laws changed again, until the system only resembled its predecessor in superficial ways. They still had judges, attorneys, juries, and trials, but they were discriminatory, biased, and ineffectual. When the phallocracy was finally overcome, the Provisional Government worked to resolve these issues, but it was a slow and messy process, and their biggest problem was finding people who knew what they were doing. Law professionals from yesterday weren’t very good, because they were stuck in their old ways. New refugees from Earth weren’t all that helpful either, for Durus and Earth had diverged from each other around a hundred and fifty years ago. This meant law enforcement for them had become a streamlined process, which required little interpretation and daily interference; not none, but not much. Still, they did their best, and everyone just kind of had to be patient with the transition. One thing they had going for them was their newfound transparency. A woman with the ability to provide remote viewings to anyone in the world allowed court proceedings to be witnessed by the masses on LoaTV. This allowed for crowd-sourced checks and balances, and kept further corruption at bay. Lamar Prebensen loved to watch these, hoping to learn a thing or two about the field, because it was something he didn’t have the opportunity to do before. Of course, watching television, even of real life, is not an effective means of learning something new. The deck was stacked against him from the beginning, and he didn’t feel things would ever get better as long as he remained on this planet. Gender-based inequality was not the only kind of discrimination on Durus. Lamar chose to leave, because he was never afforded a decent education. But if he had asked, someone might have told him that lawyers didn’t really exist on Earth anymore. It would seem that he was wasting his time in the attempt to make a better life. On his way to his new home, however, he used his limited knowledge to help solve a murder, which earned him points with the crew. When they finally arrived at their destination, most of the passengers were given new identities, so they could live out their lives as they wished, but they decided to make an exception for him. Since he would not be able to fulfill his dream in that time period, they sent him back to 2019, and set his identity up there instead. He was then able to go to law school, pass the bar exam, and apply for a position at a law firm. He went on to have a full and happy career.

Microstory 1141: Bruna Pereira

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Bruna Pereira was born on Durus under the First Republic, which would retroactively be called the phallocracy. As a woman, she was not allowed to practice medicine in any form. Doctors, nurses, and emergency technicians were all positions filled by men, because women could not be trusted. All they would let her do was clean up the medical facilities after they were done, though even that was humiliating, because a man would have to come in afterwards every single time to check her work. She studied at the library every day before or after work, learning what she would had she attended their culture’s version of university. One of the first things Hokusai Gimura and her rebel friends from the thicket did was overturn all discriminatory educational and employment policies. She immediately registered for classes, as did many of her contemporaries, first testing out of most college courses within a year, then going on to the four-year medical program. She wasn’t the first woman on the planet to become a doctor, but she did graduate in the first class. She ultimately decided to specialize in obstetrics, believing that it and gynecology were the two fields in most need of female representation. She hadn’t even been a practicing obstetrician for a year when she started getting mixed up with some of the Earthans visitors. Many people from Earth were sent up to Durus when the two worlds nearly collided in 2161, but there were a few others here and there who had the means to escape. These people had different rules, and in order to protect her patient’s lives, Bruna had to break some as well. Durus had changed by then, having fully entered the Democratic Republic, but equality was only the official position of the government, and plenty of people were still around who remembered what they believed to be the good ol’ days. Had a man made similar questionable decisions to value patient over policy, he would have been suspended for a brief period of time, at worst, and he probably would have had the option to spend it in another temporal dimension, so most people wouldn’t have even noticed that he was gone. Bruna was not so lucky. She was harshly reprimanded the first time, but as she continued to color outside the lines, her superiors felt they had no choice but to let her go. To make matters worse, they dragged the process out so long that the visitors had by then left, and returned to Earth without her. Lots of people, past and present, possessed powers, but not a one had the ability to take her offworld. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t move to somewhere more accepting. Worried something like this might happen, she had procured illegal access to a database of paramounts; one of whom could send her to the future. She didn’t know exactly how things would turn out, but she strongly believed life there would get better in the future, so she just skipped over all the struggle in between. She landed thirty years later, when Durus had traveled so far through interstellar space that it had been picked up by a new binary star system. It was finally  a real planet, capable of sustaining its own atmosphere, and forming a water cycle, and this gave residents hope for peaceful lives, in a good society. This prompted greater change in policy, and she was quickly reinstated as a medical professional, following a year’s worth of studying to catch up with biomedical advances, of course. And from there, she continued on doing what she did best, ushering life into the world.

Microstory 982: Antiseptic

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Most people think I’m a germophobe, because I carry a bottle of hand sanitizer on my belt loop. I haven’t always been this way. In some ways, I’ve gotten worse, but from my side, I’ve gotten better. I’m a firm believer in letting kids go outside and get dirty, so they can boost their immune system naturally. I watched the first episode of an old scifi series called Earth 2. One of the plot points was that, in the future, children born in pristine environments easily contract diseases because their bodies don’t know how to handle the invaders. Now me, I used to get sick all the time, and I think if a pandemic spread through the world, I have a pretty good chance of being completely immune to it. I was 24 years old before I started carrying hand sanitizer around, and not too terribly much younger when I finally discovered it existed in the first place. The truth is that I’m not actually scared of getting sick. Like I said, it used to happen to me all the time, and I always got through it. I’ve known elderly people who spent all their lives in perfect health. You would think that would be the best way to live, but until such time that we conquer all diseases, no one escapes death. Everyone who doesn’t die from some external trauma, like a vehicular collision, or a bullet, dies from an illness. It’s impossible to die from old age itself; something always comes for you, and if you’ve never experienced anything like it before, it’s probably going to be a lot harder for you to cope. I’m not worried about some deadly pathogen, because I understand what’s happening there. I know how to seek treatment, and I would be able to wrap my head around the concept of hopelessness, if I were to be told that there’s nothing the medical professionals can do. No, I carry hand sanitizer around with me because I have trouble with cross contamination, because when I’m clean, I want to stay that way. And if I go around touching dirty things with my hands, I can’t then go around touching clean things, because then those things are also dirty. This has just reminded me that I’ve already been over this, so I’ll move back to what this entry is really meant to be about. Donnie Darko once pointed out that the greatest invention in history was soap. Antiseptic is still considered one of the most important ways of preventing the spread of disease. As with many rampant pathogens, scientists still can’t be sure exactly how the Spanish Flu began, but we know why it got so bad. I use this as an example, because I’m preparing to explore this time period in a story. One thing we do know about it is that its spread could have been halted with a little more soap. If you’re reading this, you’re probably lucky enough to live in a region with unimpeded access to antiseptic, but not everyone lives like this. So just don’t forget to be grateful for that.

Microstory 981: Upcoming Equality

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In my research for a topic I originally called Growing Equality, I learned that inequality is actually on the rise, much like violent crime, both of which I found surprising. While I can’t actually give you the statistics proving my supposition that things are getting better, I can promise that trends do not necessarily predict the outcome. When you’re watching a sports competition, and things start looking bad for your team, you don’t immediately turn it off and assume you’re going to lose, do you? Well, maybe you do, as I’ve heard fans nauseatingly recount to other fans what they missed when they did this. But you shouldn’t, because there is always hope for a shift. While recent data demonstrates that inequality has increased in every single region of the world, that doesn’t mean we won’t win in the end. The rich are getting richer, the poorer poorer, and hostilities are adding up, but we are working on ways to fix these problems. I keep bringing up automated labor, and universal basic income, because tests have proven that they work, when implemented properly. I believe strongly that they are the future of our global economy, and I won’t believe otherwise unless I find myself on my deathbed, having lost out on the opportunity to use other technologies to become immortal. Basically, if we don’t progress enough to conquer death by the time I’m old enough to die of age-related medical issues, I can’t be sure it will ever happen, because we are on course to solving that problem. It won’t matter how much richer the rich are when we decide money is worth nothing anyway, and the first step towards that is increasing the value of material objects that really matter—like computers, 3D printers, and nanotechnology—decreasing the value of pointless trinkets and wasteful machines, and decreasing human labor. The reason there is still so much inequality is not because that’s what the people want, but because most of our governing systems were built on a foundation of injustice. The majority are, at the very least, tolerant of people who are unlike them. Many accept our differences, and some even love diversity. It is the system that’s working against us, but systems can be changed within the span of a political campaign. If a bad candidate can suddenly wrest control over a state from its people, than certainly a good candidate can do the same thing next time. No, equality may not growing, but it doesn’t have to, because the strongest opposing actors are operating under borrowed time. They will die soon, and we will prevail, but only if we keep preaching our love, and not giving into discrimination. Love trumps hate.

Microstory 969: Holidays

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This one’s is going to be a bit negative, which is not all that surprising, because I’ve gone there before with this series, and I’m kind of a negative person. To be clear, I’m not just angry and cynical; in fact, I’m pretty optimistic. I see the Trump era as the last-ditch effort of a dying race of racists and other pieces of crap, and I see a lot of good coming right after it. After the democrats take the White House in 2020, that will be it for the Republican party. Seriously, January 19, 2021 will be the last day conservatives have any real control in this country, and I legitimately believe that. I’ve not come to this out of nothing. 2024 will mark a shift of power from the old guard, to the younger millennials, and Generation Z. There will be more of us voting than them, and the disparity will only grow over time. Despite the horrific images of college students with tiki torches, the world is maturing, and we will not let it regress. The midterms—which have traditionally not been taken so seriously—proved that we are ready to fix what’s broken, and the people we elected will ensure more enfranchisement than the nation has ever seen. I got off on a bit of a tangent, because I don’t have much to say about holidays. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure how it got itself on this list, except maybe because most people love holidays. I generally don’t, because I generally don’t observe them. Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, and Halloween all involve arbitrary traditions promoted primarily by the profit-bearing organizations which benefit from them most. Easter and Christmas are religious holidays for religions I’m not part of, so I don’t care about them. “Oh, but Nick, Christmas is all about family and love.” I don’t need a day to love my family; I love them all the time, what about you? You can’t both say the true meaning of Christmas is Jesus, while claiming I should celebrate even if I’m not Christian. That’s insincere. Thanksgiving is a lie, and I think we all know that by now. I accept New Year’s, but my critical mind agrees with Neil deGrasse Tyson that the year could start at any point—but should maybe change, because it’s weird our calendar doesn’t match up with the seasons. I might get into that tomorrow. I also support Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, though again, I love my parents all the time. Independence Day is when all white land-owning men declared themselves to be free from tyranny, and excluded everybody else, so there’s no way I’m celebrating that bullshit. For this reason, the closest approximation I would respect is Juneteenth, but even that misses some of the mark, because freedom from slavery is not the same thing as true equality. It’s been over a century and a half since abolition began, and black people are still treated poorly. The reality is that no single day can truly encapsulate the complexities of anything that matters. The point of the story of Jesus was his life; not his birth, or his death. Even I know that, and I’m about as Christian as a stack of wood is a pipe. Look, I like time off from work as much as the next guy, but if you ever catch me observing a particular holiday—be it Arbor Day, or Boxing Day—just know that I’m doing it for someone else. 

Microstory 965: Renewable Energy

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I’ve spoken so much about renewable energy, in this series, and in others, that I’m almost not sure I need to go over it again. It’s frustrating that so many people believe in clean energy, but apparently not the right people. I wasn’t aware until recently that the official political stance on climate change, for democrats and republicans alike, is tha—next question, please. Seriously, if they don’t outright deny climate change, then they still won’t explicitly admit that it’s real, or at least not that humans are the main drivers for it. I remember talking about this years ago with a conservative “friend”. He said that electric vehicles, for instance, require charging from the grid, which are powered by coal, natural gas, and other not-so-renewable sources. His reasoning was that they couldn’t help the environment as long as this true, so we might as well not try, and “hey, look at my gas guzzler, the hubcaps keep spinning!” And he’s not entirely wrong. The energy grid is a terribly inefficient system, and all but the worst way of accomplishing our energy requirements. Instead of building a giant central plant, and piping it all over a massive area, why don’t we build a bunch of tiny ones? In fact, why don’t we just let each household supply its own energy? The libertarians should be jumping all over this one, because instead of relying on the only power option available to me, solar and wind power companies can all vie for my business, no matter where they’re based. If I place solar panels and miniature wind turbines on my roof, and store excess in a wall battery, I can be energy self-sufficient. If I collect and filter my own rainwater, farm my own small garden, and print my own clothes using additive manufacturing, then I don’t need nobody but me. Some would call that a dream. Last year, power went out all over the city. I don’t even know how bad it was, but for some, it lasted for days. My parents and sister had to stay at a hotel one night, and at my place for another. I nearly slept in my downstairs twin bed, of all places. A twin bed! It was horrific. And it only happened because we’re all connected, so one thing goes wrong, and we all get screwed. So let’s fix these problems before they even happen, by investing in microgrids. The more people who start buying renewable solutions, the cheaper it becomes, and the more affordable it will be for people like me. In the end, isn’t that what really matters; what’s best for me?

Microstory 964: Women

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I was born a feminist, and cannot at all relate to people who aren’t. It’s unclear how much of my position on the matter is because of my parents, and other strong women in my life, and how much is due to my autism, but one thing that’s clear is that it’s not just one or the other. I know a lot of people say that they’re “colorblind” even though that’s not entirely accurate. We judge the people around us on the regular, and not all of that is bad. Judgment is an important evolutionary trait that is often vital to our survival, even today. A caveman that welcomed without question any rando who walked into his cave was at risk of being bonked in the head by a club. Judgment allows us to gauge how people might receive us, and how to interact with them the best way possible; so that it’s safest for everyone. The problem comes when we start making blanket statements about say, how black people generally act, or how women think. Fortunately, my autism has been known to prevent me from making those unhealthy judgments, because it’s difficult for me to adjust my behavior to social cues as a whole. I’m pretty good at sensing other people’s emotions, but not so good at anticipating their needs. So basically, I know what you’re feeling, but I don’t know how to help you. Not once have I encountered a woman, and thought, “there’s something—beyond biology—about her that’s different than me. She would do better doing such-and-such work, whereas I’m better at this other work.” When I meet someone, I simultaneously assume they know everything, and nothing. It sounds contradictory, but I believe it’s important to acknowledge from the beginning that you don’t know what this person has been through, or how they see the world. I was recently talking about mansplaining with my sister, and struggling to understand the difference between that, and just explaining things in an appropriate way. As a man, am I simply never allowed to be an authority on a subject if a woman is around? But that’s not really the point. Mansplaining occurs when a man presumes the woman he’s talking to doesn’t already know whatever it is they’re discussing, and/or condescends to her in a sexist manner. It would be great if feminism didn’t have to exist, but it does, because women have been treated as second-class citizens for thousands of years, and when I try to fathom the timeline, it’s obvious that progress has been sluggish, and we still have far to go. So the best way to avoid mansplaining to a woman is to open a dialog of equals, which is exactly the best way to engage with others anyway, so it works out. I love women, and not because they’re pretty, or because of their body parts. I love women because they kick ass. I’m so glad that we have some really good feminist movements going on right now, and that fiction is currently tackling the issues at a higher intensity than ever before. The Bold Type, the Charmed reboot, and well...pretty much anything on The CW are some of my favorite programs, because they’ve had enough of the patriarchal bullshit. So have I, and if you have too, then come these next two elections, #votethemout.

Microstory 953: Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris

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I don’t know everything there is to know about Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, and do not have time to research them, but I encourage you to do so. As far as politicians go, they’re two of the good ones. They fight for the rights of underprivileged and disenfranchised. They are persistent and unrelenting, and I am grateful that there are still some people in the government that want to actually make things better, instead of going back to the way things were. I have a few people on this list, but there are so many more that aren’t on here. Some individuals belong within a category of people I admire, and though I didn’t just want this to be a list of people I like, I did want to single out a few who stick out the most. To do otherwise would require a level of care and consideration I can’t commit to, since I still have a full-time job. These two deserve recognition for their efforts on the inside of a society that does not want them to succeed. They’ve had to work harder than any man, and prove themselves worthy to a degree no one should be expected to exemplify. As a woman of color, Harris has had to work even harder just to be accepted, and she’s still disregarded by so many. I was so moved by one of the speeches they each respectively gave. Of course, these aren’t the only things these two have said, but they’re the speeches that caused me personally to take notice. We all remember the nevertheless, she persisted meme, which was a classic case of an offense being co-opted by the targets as a point of pride. Yes, Warren persisted, because women have too long been silenced, and that’s exactly what they need to do. They have an intrinsic right to be heard, and anyone who doesn’t agree with that needs to try their own hand at silence. Harris’ outrage at the farce that was the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings was one of the most dazzling interviews I’ve seen. Her poise in the face of such insolence showed just how unfit for the position he really is, and though everyone’s efforts to stop his appointment failed, at least the public has all the facts. Without Harris, and others like her, we would be stuck under the burden of ignorance. I’m impressed by these two ladies, and their contemporaries, and will continue to support them despite the twisted opposition from the libertarian right. I went so far as to name a fictional spaceship in one of my stories The Elizabeth Warren, and I intend to name one after Kamala Harris as soon as the need arises. We need more people like them, and I hope their actions have inspired young political warriors to one day take up the fight for truth, if they haven’t already.

Microstory 845: Trapdoors Galore

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The Legend of Trapdoors Galore is something everyone in the county knows, but I’m not from around here. I found out because haunted houses, and other location-based mysteries are a passion of mind. I don’t believe in ghosts, or other supernatural occurrences, but I don’t go around debunking myths either. I just love researching the history behind these stories, and the superstitious beliefs people have for them. I’ve been wanting to come here for awhile now, but I only make so much money, and only have so much vacation time, so I have to be very choosy with every trip. Built in 1813, the mansion first served the wealthy family who founded the town of Rower, appropriately named for them. The Rowers were famous for being kind and compassionate people, even going so far as to purchase an abundance of slaves, for the express purpose of housing them. They used them as labor, but treated them well (read: equally), provided them gourmet food, and paid them competitive wages. Slaves technically built Rower, Missouri, but they did it while secretly independent. Townspeople today claim Rower was designed to become a haven for former slaves; fortified from foreign threats, and autonomous from the rest of the U.S. While this is a questionable assertion, the fact that the Rowers were abolitionists is undisputed. Whenever an employee wanted to quit their job, the Rowers gave them a handsome severance package, and helped them travel farther northwards, to avoid southern backlash. After the end of the war, the entire project was abandoned, and Rower eventually began to suffer from the same population decline as any other small town. No longer with the need for so much space, the family downsized to a smaller house, and later generations started flocking to the big cities with everybody else. No Rower lives anywhere near the area. Decades later, in order to revitalize the town, and try to attract some tourism, a descendant returned to her roots, and started a massive remodeling effort on Rower Manor, hoping to establish Trapdoors Galore as what would have surely been the world’s first ever escape room. Unfortunately, the spending ran a bit too much higher than the budget, and the building was once again left to rot. Her daughter grew up and attempted to convert it to a museum to showcase its history, but she grew tired of the work, and gave up too.

Now it remains alone on the hill, cordoned off, and forbidden to be entered by trespassers. I’m pretty determined, though, so I recruit a horde of crazy townies, and sneak in under cover of darkness. It’s even larger and harder to navigate than I thought it was. I’m even considering the possibility that it exists in another dimension, like some kind of 1940s police box, and it’s literally bigger on the inside. We quickly find ourselves lost, and soon after that, we’re separated. While Trapdoors Galore never opened, it was meant to be self-sufficient, requiring little setup from any staff members. Apparently the Rower descendant was further along with the engineering than anyone knew, because walls would move, and actual trapdoors would drop us to dark windowless rooms. The few brave souls I managed to stick with and I just keep going, trying not to panic. We have no doubt we’ll find an exit before we die of starvation, so we’re even trying to have a little fun. There’s never been any gossip about ghosts, or demons, but it still feels creepy, and then we start hearing someone come after us. None of us can agree what the sound sounds like, or where exactly it’s coming from, and this only reinforces some of our concerns that it’s not human. We start running through the rooms, desperate to get out of there, all the while fairly certain that what we’re worried about is completely in our imaginations. We meet up with a couple other people experiencing the same fears of being chased, so we decide to circle the wagons, and fight, if it comes to that. They’re standing in a circle, insisting on keeping me as safe as possible in the center, since I’m a visitor. A woman none of us recognizes casually bursts into the room from a trapdoor no one noticed, holding a candle. She’s wearing an anachronistic outfit, and just has this look about her that screams she’s from the past. She also looks exactly like the famed matriarch of the founding Rower family, Marthanna. She looks directly at me and says, “Lois Vivianne Rower.” My name is Lois Vivianne, but I am not a Rower, as far as I know. “We have been waiting for an heir to show up ever since King Dumpster was elected president. We think it may be time to start the Rower Haven Project. Your friends can help us too.” As we’re standing there, stunned, people begin to materialize around the room, wearing similar outdated garb, and smiling. Most of them are black. “Meet the rest of your family.”

Microstory 844: Remake a Killing

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In the old days, there were virtually no rules when it came to what you were allowed to do when it came to art, and what you couldn’t. Basically, the only things prohibited were things that were illegal anyway. One guy tried to film a dog literally starving to death once, but his local law enforcement put a quick end to that experiment. In the film industry’s heyday, there was almost no originality. Nearly everything released was a remake, reboot, sequel, or adaptation. When you thought you were watching something you hadn’t seen before, there was often a small article that proved it was actually ultimately based on something prior. When the New Rule came to power, they made a lot of decisions that harmed people’s ways of life. They created inequality, and made it harder for some to find steady work. While rebels were fighting against these atrocious conditions, they largely ignored the smaller changes the New Rule made, because they didn’t threaten anybody’s life, or livelihood. Though one could argue that hindering what type of art an artist is allowed to make does indeed damage our freedoms, their reasoning was not completely absurd. There is something to be said for requiring every new entry in the pantheon of films to be fresh and new. Once the rebellion successfully put an end to the New Rule administration, the Originality Clause was left in the revised Constitution, because there wasn’t enough outcry against it, and we were already changing too much of the document, which has been through oh so many iterations throughout our entire history. So now we live in a world without remakes, except for one...well, seven.

A Killer Remade was the last remake to be released before the New Rule instituted their laws, its fitting title a mere coincidence. Its predecessor was created only one year prior, but audiences and critics were disappointed in it, so the filmmakers hastily shot a new version that was even worse than the last. It involved an all new cast, save for the actor who played The Rainbleeder; a chiefly ad-libbed script, built from what the new actors simply recalled by having seen the original a few times; and a wildly different ending. At the time, this debacle was ignored by most the majority of moviegoers, because they were too busy being oppressed to worry about it. Shortly after the government stabilized, though, a particular fan decided to remake it for a second time, even though this was still against the law. In a surprising turn of events, our interim leaders decided to not prosecute the filmmaker, but instead declared that this would be the only legal remake in existence, and that it would continue to be remade year after year, until there was no longer anyone interested in being part of it. The same actor still plays The Rainbleeder, but that’s not part of the agreement; it’s just an interesting bit of trivia. And so this is how it started, the Curse of A Killer Remade. A new version is made every single year, and every single year, at least three people are killed in parts surrounding the annual festival where the film is screened. No matter how much security, or how many cops, are placed at the scene, a serial killer will always find his targets, and never be caught. Some call him a maniac, others a genius...but we just call ourselves The Council of Killers. We’re not sure why no one has figured out that there’s a whole group of us yet, since that was the twist ending from the second version, but we’ll keep doing this until someone stops us.

Microstory 608: Replace Eido Andrea

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The Sacred Savior, Sotiren knew that he would not be able to manage the entirety of the galaxy himself. For he was humble, wise, and aware of his own limitations. There were five star systems he deemed to be the most important, and would be central to galactic activity. He chose these because each carried with them exactly three habitable planets. Though they are referred to as the “central” worlds, they are actually nowhere near each other. And so he took from his followers, and appointed eleven eidos to protect his interests distantly. Over the course of the taikon, these will all need to be replaced by new eidos. Though the central planets have been under the rule of one person, group, or another since the beginning, there has been no singular vision since the time of the eidos. This is not a mistake; it is by design. The whole purpose of moving to this galaxy was so that our people could live their lives without being interfered with by some sort of unifying government. The only reason the eidos existed in the first place was so that we would not lose sight of what we wanted, and didn’t fall into the same traps that earlier cultures have. We sprouted from a dirty communist society, and many of us fear every day that we will ultimately turn back to this. It was foretold that a small group of irritants would arrive in Fostea one day and attempt to revert us back to a time when all men were equal; when we just lived in the dirt, like animals. We have so far been unable to hold them back, for their silver tongues are thick and convincing. What we need now are a new set of eidos to protect us from these foreigners. The new Eido Andrea was chosen from the House of Ulaire to fulfill this purpose.