Microstory 1269: The Tortoise and the Rabbit

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A rabbit was bragging to a tortoise about how much faster he could run. He kept goading the tortoise, and challenging him to a race. The tortoise was wise, and he understood his own limits, so he kept refusing. But the rabbit did not let go of this. He had already beaten all of the other animals in the forest in races, and the tortoise was the only one left. He knew he could beat him too, but he desperately wanted to prove it, so there could be no question. He also wanted to see the look on the tortoise’s face after he ran all the way to the finish line, and then ran back to mock him further. Finally, the tortoise agreed to the race, and of course, he lost. He barely made five steps before the rabbit came running back to laugh at him. Some of the animals laughed at him too for trying, even though they too had lost to the rabbit. The tortoise merely walked off, and carried about his life, not even bothering to reach the finish line. Meanwhile, the rabbit tried to move on as well, but he couldn’t. He was still stuck in the glory days. Now that he had become fastest in the forest, there was no more to accomplish, and it hadn’t really gotten him anywhere. The tortoise ended up living forty times longer than the rabbit, but even so, his life also ended in death. All the other animals who had tried to race the rabbit died as well. No one remembered them, nor cared who was the most skillful. Over the years, more rabbits raced more tortoises, and it always ended the same.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Hare and the Tortoise.

Microstory 1268: The Fables and the Introduction

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At some point, on or before March 2, 2015, I read an Aesop Fable called The Scorpion and the Frog. It’s about a frog who tries to help a scorpion cross a river, but before they reach the other side, the latter stings the former, which of course, drowns them both. The moral of the lesson here is that people can’t change, but I call bullshit on that. In fact, this whole series is going to be about calling bullshit on some of the terrible lessons I found during my research. I only have room for thirty-one fables, so I can’t cover them all, but that’s not the point. By reading these, as well as the original texts—which I’ll link for you—maybe it’ll help you become a more critical person. You see, when the average individual reads this fable, they accept the lesson it gives them, but just because someone wrote it down for you, doesn’t mean it’s right. I’m not talking about misinterpreting the moral here; I’m talking about a bad moral, which I believe is harmful to society, even in some small way. The reality is that fables are by no means indicative of the way things are in general, even though they purport to be. If you read a single news article about a black man going out and stealing a car, you might conclude that black people are bad, and/or that they’re thieves. What the article doesn’t do is tell you about all the white people that steal the cars, or—more importantly—all the good things that black people do, or even the good that that particular man has done in his life. You’ve only read one article, and no matter how many articles you read, you haven’t read everything about everybody. You can’t read these little #MondayMotivation, #TransformationTuesday, #WednesdayWisdom, #ThursdayThoughts, and #FearlessFriday posts, and expect to truly learn something from them. Life is not a series of snapshots, sewn together to tell a story, and easily teased apart when you want to tell a shorter part of the story. The whole story is what holds the lesson. Don’t take me to mean you can’t ever share stories. Just be careful. Everyday is a chance for improvement, but more to the point, all days combined are available for improvement.

So when I read that story about the scorpion and the frog, I decided to rework it into a fable that I believed to be superior. In the end, the scorpion does not sting the fox. (I likely changed the animal just because I like foxes.) The lesson here is that you can’t put people in boxes. Each individual is an array of characteristics which, even knowing every entry into the array, is not enough to understand them. If you think you know a person, you are doing them, and yourself, a disservice by presuming they could never do anything unexpected, or perhaps better. So while I hope you get something out of these updated fables, don’t focus on any one of them too much. Use them to question the world a little more, and not simply accept what’s been put in front of you. There are people out there, especially on social media, who are working really hard to find some way of summarizing some incredibly complicated issues in 280 characters or less. Be wary of these. Even if they come with some truly good advice—and aren’t just meaningless aphoroids (look that word up, and keep it in the back of your mind at all times)—they only give you part of the story. Life is complicated, and you can’t boil it down. It takes a hundred years to understand a hundred years of it, and despite what people tell you, there aren’t really any shortcuts. Those people are trying to sell you something. Even if they’re not asking for your money, they’re asking for your attention. That’s what I’m doing right now, and this installment keeps getting longer, because I keep realizing how impossible it is to simplify the lesson. So I’ll end it here, so you can move on, and I hope that these Revised Fables aren’t just as absurd as the ones that I’m trying to improve.

PS: Speaking of length, these stories will be a lot shorter than normal, but still probably longer than most original fables.

Microstory 1267: Harlan Baer

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Harlan Baer was a criminal, and he never tried to get anyone to believe that he wasn’t. He was a very low-ranking member of the Business Ends gang of Kansas City in the 21st century. When he was caught selling drugs on the corner, his superiors made no attempt to help him in any way. Nor did they ask him to do things for them while he was inside. He just wasn’t important enough to them, and this lack of mutual loyalty made him a perfect candidate for a new gang. While he was in jail, a very powerful temporal manipulator called The Cleanser pulled him out of his cell, and relocated him to several decades in the future, along with a small group of other guests. He had no strong feelings about these other criminals, and they had no strong feelings about him. The Cleanser had conscripted them for a mission, but because none of them was a salmon or choosing one, the trip itself could eventually kill them. And so the man they were asked to kill arranged for them to be transported to a special place called Sanctuary. There they would be allowed to recover, serve out their likely sentences in more humane conditions, and remain in the hotel forever. Harlan wasn’t interested in this, though. He wanted to go back to the real world, and armed with the knowledge that there was more to life than peddling drugs, do something good. So he asked to go back to Kansas City, where he soon became one of the first members of the Tracer gang. He never intended to start a movement, but more rehabilitating criminals followed suit over the course of the next few years. Harlan had few further interactions with people who could manipulate time, but he did help make the world a better place in his own special way.

Microstory 1266: Defirnod Taggart

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As it turned out, the source mages had a little bit more control over who received which time powers than they led their people to believe. They were certain this was a necessary deception, however. They couldn’t be honest about what they were doing, both because  it could be dangerous, and because they didn’t want any accusations of favoritism. The truth is that they never gave certain people certain abilities, but when the truth came about about what they did, convincing people of this was the most difficult part. Some powers are more useful than others, and some aren’t really useful at all. For instance, Alyssa McIver was born with the ability to create illusions. She couldn’t simply create something out of her imagination. She could only show people things that existed somewhere, at some point in history. All she was doing was taking a magical video recording of some remote event, and overlaying it on reality to make it look like it was happening somewhere that it wasn’t. Her illusions were extremely precise, and impossible for the average person to detect, but as amazing as that is, the people of Durus had little use for it. The monsters they were fighting didn’t care who or what it was they were attacking; if they wanted to attack, they would. Yeah, someone with this ability could turn an entire town invisible, but the monsters could probably see right through the false image, and then nothing would matter. The source mages had to be careful not to let anyone get this power, or say, the ability to see what someone will look like when they’re older. They just could not risk wasting an entire mage for something they didn’t need. In order to keep the lie about the complete unpredictability of town mage powers, they created a special mage called a holistic diagnostician. It was his responsibility to identify a new mage’s powers, and to examine the extent of their gifts. As the diagnostician grew older, the source mages knew that he would one day have to pass the torch onto someone else, so they selected his two grandchildren, and made up an ancillary lie about this one ability, for whatever reason, being hereditary. While Elasy and Defirnod Taggart were both chosen, it was really only the former who fully embraced her role in society. Though the boy didn’t reject it, he would rather be doing something else. They found that his sister was much better at the job than he was. He was skillful, to be sure, but he had terrible bedside manner, and he didn’t much like it. That was fine; she could handle everything on her own. He had his own goals in life. Powers or no, he wanted to be a fighter. It was his dream to one day rid the entire planet of time monsters, and if they couldn’t ever figure out how to stop them from coming through the portal altogether, he wanted the mages to change tactics, and always stop them from even getting anywhere near the towns in the first place. Why bother protecting the towns when the enemies always came from the same place? His new plan was never realized, and before the humans won the war for good, a lot of innocent people had to die. He grew angry about this, and he blamed the source mages for their inefficient use of resources. Sadly for him, his outrage ultimately got him killed, along with a few more innocent people.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 26, 2264

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All right. So Mateo and some of his friends were stuck on a planet as many light years from Earth as they were in the past. Leona could have been delivered back to the future, or really any point in time and space. There was just no way to know. He scanned the beach, just in case a real life message in a bottle had made its way to him, but no such luck. They didn’t have an exact date of when it was, but he would end up staying there for days. But before all that, they had to receive a visit from an old frenemy.

“You knew we were going to be here?” Mateo asked.

“I had my suspicions,” Arcadia Preston replied.

“You had Kayetan create the merge point between this time period, and the 22nd century for this purpose.”

“Who said anything about Kayetan Glaston? I never said he was the one who created the merge point.”

“Did he not?”

Arcadia just shrugged.

“You can get us back to Leona, though. All we have to do is cross the merge border, and you can take us anywhere we need to go.”

“Why would I do that?” Arcadia questioned.

“Because you’re in love with me.” He didn’t want to say it, and it might have been too strong a word to use, but it was the only card he had left to play.

Arcadia seemed notably upset by this, which almost made him regret saying anything. “You’re right. The problem is that I spent centuries in a higher plane of existence, where there was only one person there who I wasn’t related to. And Athanaric was more into my sister, Nerakali.” She tilted her head, then continued, “and also my mother, but we don’t talk about that. The point is that I don’t know what to do with my feelings, in any situation. I’m crazy.” She bobbed her head around, and rolled her eyes to demonstrate her supposed insanity. “So those feelings you’re referring to are enough to keep me from killing you and everyone you care about, but that doesn’t mean I have a healthy way of handling them. If you want me to help you, you’re gonna have to help me first.”

“Another expiation,” Mateo guessed.

“The current one,” Arcadia corrected. “You only have twelve friends right now. The math on that just doesn’t add up. When I brought Xearea to the island, I promised the powers that be, that I would personally see to it that Earth would enjoy comparable replacements for the years that she was missing.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Mateo said.

“Well, twelve friends, plus you; three years each. That’s not quite enough. I need three more people to fill in the gap from 2148 to 2356.”

“Xearea didn’t return to the timestream from non-existence until 2158,” Mateo warned her, but was worried about her reaction. None of that had happened to Arcadia yet, unless she knew more about the future than he realized, which wouldn’t ever explain how he ever bested her at anything.

“No, I’m going to give her an early release.” She jerked her head up to Cassidy, Pribadium, and Vitalie, who were watching their conversation suspiciously from twenty meters away. “If you can convince your new friends to pick up the slack for your old friends, I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”

He wasn’t worried about Pribadium very much, and definitely not immortal Vitalie. Cassidy didn’t deserve this, though. He looked back at them sadly, not knowing whether he should agree to this, or if he should just hope Pribadium figures out how to get out of here.

Arcadia obviously picked up on his hesitation. “Okay. Give me two. I will...actually...release Xearea even earlier. Don’t expect me to tell Past!Mateo about it, though.”

“That is acceptable,” he agreed, “as long as it is acceptable to them.”

And so Mateo returned to his friends, and explained the situation to them. He didn’t say that he was trying to protect Cassidy further, but claimed her being on Mateo’s pattern simply disqualified her from being able to help. He also didn’t say Arcadia was accommodating them in this regard by scratching three entire years of Savior duty from the schedule. Pribadium agreed to the deal, likely hoping to redeem herself for what she believed to be all her fault. Vitalie agreed to it too, but that was because she no longer cared what she did anyway. Even though she didn’t have memories any further back than fifty-six years, she was still billions of years old, and her soul still felt that. Three years out of her life was negligible.

After Arcadia apported the ladies to meet with the First Savior, Sabra, she turned back to the two remaining. “You’re not getting off that easy, though. I still need you to do something.”

“What is it?” It wasn’t always bad, so he didn’t want to sport a bad attitude before he even knew what she was going to ask of him.

Arcadia removed the Compass of Disturbance from her back pocket, and handed it to them. “I’m just borrowing it. I’ll give it back to Juan when you’re done.”

“What do I need this for?”

“This merge point is unstable,” Arcadia began to explain. “Since you’re from the future, you obviously know what I need it for; what Lita needs it for. There is evidently some interference coming from Lorania. It is apparently a natural merge point. I need you to find it, and destroy it.”

“How am I meant to do that?” Mateo asked. “It’s not that I don’t want to; I know how this story ends, so I don’t feel like you’re asking me to do something evil, but I don’t know how to destroy time rifts.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Arcadia said. “Use the compass.”

Mateo didn’t argue the mission. He and Cassidy just walked out to the driving track where he once attempted to teach Xearea how to drive. It was here that they found a nice 2016 Nissan Rogue, waiting for them just inside the garage. He chuckled, assuming this to be a reference to The Rogue, Gilbert Boyce, who currently did not exist. It was July 2, 2117.

They drove the car over the magical oceanic highway, until reaching the nearest bit of land to Tribulation Island, which was Lorania. Just after they shut their doors, they jumped forward in time one year. He kind of wished they had gotten there early enough to stop the actually insane immortal, Ambrosios from quite nearly killing Xearea, but her near-death experience had set of a series of events, the altering of which could lead to disaster. It was best to let things play out as he knew they did, and stay on mission. Cassidy followed him as he opened the special compass, and started walking, hoping he eventually learned how to make the damn thing work. It took him all day, but he did finally understand, to a minimal degree, how to make the object direct him towards the merge point. By then, Cassidy needed a personal break, but he was determined to find the source of this merge point that Arcadia was so bothered by. In doing so, he nearly ran into something. No, it wasn’t something, it was someone.

The newcomer had presumably been focusing on eating his lionfruit, which he recalled doing months ago. It was Mateo Matic himself. He had run into his own doppelgänger. The two Matics stared at each other for a few seconds. The younger Mateo cleared his throat and wiped some juice from his chin. Navigator Mateo looked back at his compass and walked past without saying a word. It was only then that he found his breath again. Leona’s fourth rule for time travel, avoid alternate versions of yourself. The other one would try to forget about the encounter as best he could, paranoid that anything short of total obliviousness could result in the collapse of the spacetime continuum. The tactic clearly worked perfectly, because he had totally forgotten about this incident.

He wasn’t worried about Cassidy running into the younger version of him, because everything seemed to be playing out just as it did before, and that never happened. He was right when she caught up with him a few minutes later, and didn’t know what he was talking about. Soon thereafter, the compass found what they were looking for. The merge point was large, and easily accessible simply by taking one step forward. But the source of this tear in the spacetime continuum was infinitely smaller. The compass acted like a flashlight, illuminating the slight ripples in space that gave it away. These ripples were all streaming from the same place, where they became tighter and tighter, until it looked like a t-shirt that someone was trying to stuff into a thimble. Mateo placed the compass just under this point, and then snapped it shut. He knew he wasn’t actually capturing the tear, but it did effectively repair it. Unfortunately, it appeared to have done much more than that.

Now that this was finished, Mateo and Cassidy went straight back to the beach, where their car should have been waiting for them. But it wasn’t there, and neither was anything else. Nothing around them looked familiar. Trees were trees, and grass was grass, but he could have sworn all the plant life around them was different than it was when they first arrived. If he had to guess, he would say that closing the natural merge point had a side effect, and that was trapping them in the past. There was no way to know whether it was anywhere near the time Pribadium and Vitalie would be returning to, or if it was another three million years prior. He should have asked Arcadia for details, or spent more time learning how the compass worked. Well, perhaps he would have the time now. He worked on it for a week before Pribadium showed up in a spaceship to rescue them.

“Well, then we could rescue them,” Hilde suggested.

“We can’t rescue them with the AOC,” Leona tried to explain.

“Can’t it go really fast?” she argued. “How long would it take to get to Dardius with the ship?”

“Four thousand years,” Hogarth answered instead.

“Oh,” Hilde said. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Leona assured her. “I’m on edge, because I’m powerless. I mean, this just keeps happening to us. He runs away, I’m taken out of time, he’s taken out of time, the Halifax grave isn’t big enough, someone steals our ship, he dies. I feel like everything the powers that be did to us in the beginning was to get us to fall in love, and then everything after that was to torture us. Even Mateo’s indiscretion drove us apart a little bit. So I’m just wondering, when we finally do find each other again, how long will it have been for one of us, and what’s gonna happen next?”

“We can’t get to Dardius from here,” Hogarth said sadly. She was holding to mangled pieces of what was once this planet’s Nexus replica. “These things keep getting destroyed, but there’s one thing I know will never be destroyed.”

“What’s that?” Hilde asked.

“It’s on Earth,” Hogarth replied. “It’s protected by the oldest linear immortal besides The Concierge.”

“The Pyramid,” Leona realized. “It can get me to Dardius.”

“Present-day Dardius,” Hogarth reminded her of the caveat. “Mateo isn’t there, but if you go, you could find Étude, tell her where our friends are, and have her jump you back.”

“Why are you talking in second-person?” Hilde questioned. “We’re going with her.”

Hogarth shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to this thing, but it’s the backup plan, and even if Leona doesn’t need it, someone may in the future. I have to rebuild it. I have to figure out how.”

“It’s okay,” Leona promised. “I can go alone. It’s just one day.”

Hilde frowned. “I don’t care how long it’ll be for you. That’s days of travel time the ship has to operate on its own. What if it blows up while you’re out of the timestream? You’ll just be coming back to your death.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Leona said, recalling when the Vosa was sabotaged, leaving her exposed to the vacuum of space. It was what led to her unborn babies’ deaths.

Hilde was shaking her head. “I just don’t like you going out there alone. It’s not just you either. I don’t like when people are alone; it’s always bothered me. The scariest horror movies are when there’s only one victim being terrorized. If they’re in a group, I feel a lot safer.”

“It’s okay,” came a voice that Leona knew. “I’ll go with her.”

“Nerakali,” Leona said. “What have you experienced?”

“Well, your friend, Étude recently tried to shoot me on Proxima Doma.”

Leona was mortified.

“Oh, no. It’s okay,” Nerakali claimed. “I asked her to do it. It was the only way for me to help her find her daughter. I’m currently on my fifth life, and I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking someone really bad. I need your help. Something is happening in the timeline, and I think it’s partially my fault.”

“What did you do?”

“The hundemarke, these Nexus replicas that keep getting destroyed,” Nerakali began. “Someone is messing with people’s lives, and I recognize the pattern.”

“Is it you?” Hogarth asked. “Is a younger version of you screwing things up?”

Nerakali laughed. “That would be a funny twist, but no. Close, though.”

“I already know the answer to this,” Leona believed. “I don’t know about the Nexus replicas, but Arcadia is the one who’s been sending the hundemarke all over time to kill people permanently.”

Nerakali shook her head. “No, it’s not Arcadia, but you can be forgiven for coming to that conclusion. Out of the three Preston kids, Arcadia’s the one who looks the most like our mother. She’s the one causing problems, Leona. I need you to help me find Savannah Preston. We’re gonna need Mateo’s help too.”

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Source Variant: Moving On... (Part XV)

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“I’m sorry about your friend,” Hokusai Gimura says. “Is there anything we can do to get him back?”

“No,” Saga!Two says sadly. “This is fate. It’s his fate. I was hoping to stave it off as long as possible, but the truth is that he’s already dead.”

Hokusai nods her head reverently. “Well, maybe you’ll see him again one day. For now, we should get to work.”

They all eye her cautiously. “Get to work doing what?” Saxon asks her.

“I don’t know,” Hokusai answers. “You’re the ones who called on me.”

“You stepped over the threshold,” Vearden!Three points out, “like you thought you were supposed to be over here.”

Hokusai gestures towards both versions of Saga. “My friend obviously needs my help. I don’t know with what, or what I can do, but I trust that.”

“We’re not gonna hold a memorial, or something?” Zektene questions.

“Miss Gimura is right,” Saga!Two says. “We have too much work to do.” She directs her attention to Hokusai herself. “Saxon Parker here can fill you in on what we’re after, and hopefully you’ll have everything you need to handle it. This facility is equipped with a Calibre 8 industrial synthesizer, but the humans left a megastructure synthesizer in orbit, so you’re only limited by your imagination.” She’s trying to hold it together, but recent events have forced her to relive one of the most tragic moments of her life. She didn’t exist when her Vearden died, which was perhaps worse, because they always kind of thought they would die together. She remembers feeling bad when she was returned to the timestream, and her first thought was that she wasn’t there to see it happen. It really just made her feel powerless, and rational or no, seeing Arcadia take him to meet his destiny gave her the same pit in her stomach.

“Come on,” Saga!Three says kindly. “Let’s go talk this out alone.”

Vearden!Three leaves when the two Sagas do, because he doesn’t know how to feel about all this. It’s another Vearden, and not one he’ll become, or once was. He was a completely different person. But it’s still him, right? I mean, it’s like he died as well. How is he meant to live his life now, knowing what he knows, and having witnessed what he did? This is all too confusing, and he wants to talk with the Sagas about it, but this isn’t about him, so he just goes off on his own. He returns only minutes later, because everywhere in the building he tries to go to feels uncomfortable, or unsafe. Saxon is in the middle of explaining to Hokusai what’s going on.

“You want to move the planet?” Hokusai asks.

“No, the solar system,” Saxon clarifies. “They’re still gonna need a sun.”

“Well, I can’t do that,” she contends. “I can’t even do the first one.”

“They say you did it before, with the rogue world, Durus.”

“Yeah,” she admits, “I had a magical object called a Rothko Torch to do it for me. Everyone seems to give me credit for it, but all I did was switch it on, and point it towards the sky.”

“You can’t build this torch again?” Saxon suggests.

“I didn’t build it; I found it.” She looks around, but knows she won’t find anything. “I don’t imagine you have another one just lying around.

Vearden!Three continues to half-listen to them discuss the early stages of the plan, even though he has no idea what they’re talking about. His mind wanders as he’s thinking about everything that’s happened since that day he had the urge to travel to Kansas City, and met his first two time travelers, Serkan and Ace.

“I suppose we could use an adapted Caplan thruster. I’m sure the designs are in your database somewhere. I would need to modify it to account for this properties of this star, and it’s not going to be easy, but also not impossible.”

“Won’t that take too long?” Saxon figures. “Those operate in the millions of years.”

“Well, what’s our time table for this Ochivari invasion?”

“We don’t know,” he says, “but probably not millions of years.”

Hokusai takes a deep breath. “We could skip acceleration. I could design a cylicone-dependent velocity jumper that gets us to maximum speed in a matter of weeks. Months would be safer, but either way that’s only a light year every fifteen hundred years. I might be able to make it go a little faster, but not too much. There’s also the issue with the overall design of the Caplan.”

Saxon nods, knowing exactly what she means. “The dyson swarm we use for energy redirection would be visible from the surface of the planet. The Orolak would know we’re doing something.”

“Can’t you make this swarm thing invisible?” Vearden!Three didn’t know he was going to say anything until he already did.

The two geniuses seem open to the concept. “We have to make the system invisible anyway,” Saxon acknowledges. “It doesn’t matter where we move it if the Ochivari go looking for what they see is missing. We could blanket the atmosphere in a hologram to make it look like everything is copacetic.”

Hokusai smiles. “One glitch, and it’s over. They could wrap their religion around it.”

“Yes,” Saxon says, “we’ve seen that already. We accidentally made them worship a rock.”

They keep talking over the possibilities, while Vearden!Three tunes them out again, knowing he probably can’t contribute much more than he already has. Thirty minutes into it, Saga!Three comes back into the room. “Where are they?” Her eyes are puffy and red, indicative that she’s been mourning with her alternate self. Hopefully it was a productive cry for the both of them.

This whole time, Zektene has been looking through the Maramon database, in case the good monsters left anything behind that might help. “Where are what?”

“The Ochivari,” Saga!Three clarifies. “Where is their home planet? What planets have they conquered?”

“We don’t have that information,” Saxon replies. “We know where Worlon is, but we lost all quantum communication when I had to destroy the uplink back at the vonearthan base, so we don’t know anything beyond that.”

“But they’re really advanced,” Saga!Three presumes. She steps forward slowly as she’s talking. “They have spaceships, and aerosol cans, and firearms.”

“Yes,” Saxon says. “Where are you going with this?”

Vearden!Three stands up, also wanting to know the answer to this, and worried about what she’s saying.

“If they have all these amazing things, then they probably have really simple things. Things like...doors?”

Zektene looks horrified. “Saga, don’t think like that.”

“Doors like that one?” Saga!Three jerks her head over to the door that leads to the section of the facility that once housed the Gondilak growth pods.

“Don’t even think about it.” Zektene almost looks defensive.

“We need intel,” Saga!Three reasons. And if we can, we need to slow them down, or hell, even destroy them.”

“You’re not going to be able to do that with a door,” Saxon tries to reason right back, “unless you can find one large enough to fit the Death Star, or Lexx.”

“I have to do something,” Saga!Three explains. “I can’t just sit here. I can’t help you build your magical protection machines. I don’t even care much about it. This is so much bigger than this one little planet. Has anyone on Earth ever considered that? Are they going to war?”

“Way I understand it,” Saxon regrets saying, “no. Some disagree, but the vonearthan leadership has decided against interference.”

“You mean they’re sticking their heads in the sand,” Saga!Three spits. She drew closer to the door.

Zektene jumps a few meters over to block her path.“Do not go through that,” she nearly orders.

“I wouldn’t mind having a teleporter at my side,” Saga!Three says to her.

“We can’t fight these creatures by ourselves,” Zektene excuses.

“You’re right, which is why I’m not going straight there. We need a few things; fighters, scientists, weapons, maybe even transportation.” The list is obviously not comprehensive, but she couldn’t have been thinking about doing this for very long.

“I can get you transportation,” Vearden!Three volunteered. “You may need to travel to other universes, and I happen to know a little bit about that.”

“We don’t want to take The Crossover from whoever’s operating it, or The Prototype from the Laymen,” Saga!Three says.

“No,” Vearden!Three says. “Those wouldn’t help you much anyway. They can make jumps, but they’re not spacefaring ships. What you’ll need is The Transit.” He steps over, and opens the door for them. There’s a room on the other side, but not the one that’s meant to be there. “If you truly want to do this, that’s where you should start.”

“Wadya say, Zek?” Saga!Three offers. “While they go on the defensive, you wanna help me take offense?”

Zektene sighs, and considers it. “If you’re going to anyway, I guess I have to.”

Saga!Three smiles, and wipes her face of the remaining evidence that she was crying. “Are you coming too?” she asks Vearden!Three.

He shakes his head. “I have my own mission.”

Saga!Three nods. She takes Zektene’s hand, and leads her through the portal. Vearden!Three waves one last time, and closes the door behind them.

“Are they gonna be okay?” Hokusai asks.

“You can count on it,” Vearden!Three replies.

“You’ve already seen it, haven’t you?” Saxon guesses. “You know what happens to them.”

Vearden!Three smirks, and prepares to open the door again, but this time for himself.

“What’s your mission?” Saga!Two has just stepped into the room, but she was listening to the conversation the entire time from around the corner.

Vearden!Three looks back at her. “I’m gonna go get your friend.”

“No, don’t,” Saga!Two reaches out towards him. “You can’t change the past. I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t. My experience, it’s...it led me here. It resulted in my daughter.”

He smiles at her. “Vearden!Two doesn’t have to die. You just have to think he died.” He looks back at the door that had the potential to take him anywhere in time and space, as long as he was worthy of making it do that. “I finally know my purpose.” He opens the door, and closes it behind him before the other three can see much of what’s on the other side, other than the woods, presumably on Tribulation Island, where he plans on switching places with his alternate self.

A second later, the door opens again, and Vearden!Two walks in from the beach. His face is unreadable. “Saga?”

“Vearden,” is all that Saga can say.

“What did I just agree to?” Vearden asks.

“Self-sacrifice,” Saxon answers.

“What do we do now?” Saga wonders. She’s still trying to work up the nerve to hug her best friend.

“There’s nothing more you can do here,” Saxon says. “Why don’t you try to open that door too, and see where it takes you?”

“Everybody’s doing it,” Hokusai adds.

They laugh. And then Saga walks over to try what they’ve recommended. She and Vearden take hold of the handle together, and pull it open.

Two beautiful and amazing women are waiting for them on the other side of it. “Mom?” one of them asks.

“Grandma?” asks the other.

« < » > Entire Story

Microstory 1265: Allen Tupper

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Allen Tupper wanted very little out of life. He saw it as a lack of entitlement, while his family saw it as a lack of ambition. He dropped out of college during his sophomore year, not because it was too hard, or because he was struggling with his grades, but just because he didn’t feel like he was getting much out of it. He didn’t have a thirst for knowledge, and he wasn’t much into the party scene, so higher education was a waste of his time, and a waste of parents’ money. At first, they were disappointed in his choices, but they came to realize the wisdom, and became thankful that he didn’t end up with mountains of student loan debt he would never be capable of paying off himself. His aunt owned a restaurant within walking distance of the house, so he started working there instead. He started out at the bottom, as a busser, but eventually made his way into the kitchen, where he became a line cook. He wasn’t astonishingly good at the work, but the menu wasn’t astonishingly complicated either, and he picked it up pretty quickly. His aunt was generous, and since the place was doing quite well, she kept it overstaffed, which afforded each worker more time off than most restaurants would be able to handle. Most of his coworkers didn’t take much time, since they weren’t getting paid to do it, but Allen didn’t care about the money. He worked to pay his bills, and as long as the number in his checking account stayed over zero, he didn’t feel the need to tire himself out. Instead, he took trips. He had this dream to go on a camping trip in every state in the country. Well, it wasn’t so much a dream as it was a long-term goal that his therapist suggested he come up with. She wanted him to worry a little more about the future, and not let himself get in a rut. It worked, because the only times he truly felt happy were when he was out there in nature, far from other people. There was one person he didn’t want to be apart from, however. Richard Parker had the exact same long-term goal, though he was a little less apathetic about it, and more enthusiastic. To make things even weirder, they had each already camped in the same states, so it was almost as if time were waiting for them to meet each other. Allen never believed in much, and he didn’t think anything happened for a reason. He couldn’t help but question his position, though. It was just too perfect, like they were already leading parallel lives, and just needed to notice each other. They exchanged information, and connected on social media upon returning home from Colorado. Richard was nine years younger, but it didn’t seem to bother him, so Allen decided to not let it bother him either. They took things slow, first moving to the same city to be closer to each other year-round, then moving in together, and finally marrying after a three year relationship. Unfortunately, they were only able to enjoy one year of marital bliss before their lives got really crazy.

Microstory 1264: Cecelia Massey

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When a choosing one discovers their abilities, they often realize that they can help others with it. They don’t necessarily think they should become philanthropists, or superheroes, but they do see a market for their abilities. And so they adopt jobs within the time traveler underground. Some take payment for their services, but generally only when their power doesn’t inherently give them free access to whatever resources they need. For regular people, like Cecelia Massey, being part of the workforce was not a choice at all. She was an average human who had no time powers, and no knowledge of anyone who did. She was born in Hays, Kansas and attended an in-state school, because it was cheaper. After graduating from college, she stayed out East, moving around the Kansas City metropolitan area for various reasons, like following a boyfriend who got a better job, or wanting to be closer to extended family. She might have pursued a career with that sociology degree of hers, but she barely passed her classes, and never felt competent enough to go for it. The truth was that she probably would have been fine, and her biggest hurdle was her own lack of self-confidence. So she played it safe, accepting only entry-level jobs, until one day she blinked, and realized that she had been a shoe store clerk for the last six years. She didn’t even always work at the same place. She applied to a new job while she still had the old one, and it wasn’t until she did a little math that she realized she wasn’t making any more money than before, because now she was spending a lot more of it on gas. It was around this time that she also realized that this was one of the worst places for her to be. She hated working in sales, but she knew it could’ve been worse. At least she wasn’t peddling something stupid or harmful. Still, her job’s only purpose was the keep her going while she looked for something better; for her wallet, and her soul. It was time she remembered that, and actually got back on those career sites. This proved to be extremely disheartening, as she kept failing to secure interviews, and the interviews she did manage to land didn’t get her anywhere. Finally, her family had basically had enough of this. They were fine with her spending the rest of her life as a clerk, but they weren’t okay with her being unhappy, and she wasn’t listening to their words of encouragement, so they needed to be clear with her. Her best course of action was to go back to school, and really think about what she wanted out of life. It took her a few months, but she finally made a plan. Her degree alone wasn’t enough to get her a job as a high school guidance counselor, but it was a good start. Being a senior sales representative gave her the freedom to adjust her work hours according to her new class schedule. It might have taken a little longer than it did for her peers, but she found her calling, and she didn’t even need time powers to do it.