 
To the producer, Junko Forbes. Always two steps ahead of me.

NIGHTHAWKS AT THE MISSION (PART ONE)

64% LOST AND 36% FOUND AT IKEBUKURO STATION EDITION

By Forbes West

Text copyright © 2013 Forbes West

All Rights Reserved

Published by Bonzai-Manny Team

Smashwords Edition

Design and illustration by Chris McGuire

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Thanksgiving

Chapter Two: Network Interview

Chapter Three: Queen Mary

Chapter Four: Solomon's Bay

Chapter Five: To Mission Friendship

Chapter Six: The Ritual

Chapter Seven: Mission Friendship

Chapter Eight: The Flashstorm (When the Levee Breaks)

Chapter Nine: First Day

Dunbar-Weiss English Dictionary

Published January, 1999, Cape Town, South Africa

Ori·chal·cum

Function: noun

Etymology: Latin (from the Greek όρος, oros, [mountain] and χαλκός, chalkos, [copper or bronze])

Definition: a strong metallic element obtained only from THE OBERON (OFF-WORLD). In spite of the etymology of its name, ORICHALCUM is always blue, with shades and imperfections that can only be discerned by certain machines and individuals with TETRACHROMACY before actual use. When the element is connected to a small electrical charge and placed next to a person's body, he or she may exhibit extraordinary power(s) or influence from an unknown, possibly supernatural, source (e.g. summoning of fierce creatures, production of lightning, ability to heal the sick or dying, shapeshifting, control over fire, control over localized weather conditions) with the proper mental focus. Each shade of the element denotes a different extraordinary power or ability. Its usefulness for modern society was discovered by FRANK MORGAN (see NETWORK, history of) in 1995.

— See element table.

# Chapter One: Thanksgiving

Sipping on your third beer of the evening, staring out at the off-world night sky just outside your bar's little patio space, you think about how far away from home you are, how you've become increasingly crazy, how you've fallen in love with a person that you barely know who is officially in love with someone else, and how you've ended up millions of miles away from your adopted hometown.

You dimly realize through the alcohol and Adderall-induced haze that it all kicked off one not so fine Thanksgiving at a beach house in California.

~~~~

IT is last Thanksgiving. You're at Tyler and Jaime's beach house (well, their parents' beach house) and the semester for City College is done; you've just managed to grab an associate's degree. Tyler and Jaime's parents are good people. They like having any friends of the family to stay over at the beach house for Thanksgiving, and so you are there instead of being at home.

Tyler and Jaime are twins; they look alike, they sound alike, but are nothing alike whatsoever in their personalities and their moods. You like Tyler—the funny one, the out of control one—and you've been dating him since high school ended, but he's an ass and perhaps you should find someone better. You see him currently being an ass out past the pool area downstairs. Tyler is wrestling his old friend from high school, Steve, and his other buddies are cheering them on. Tyler and Steve are older than you, still in a four-year college doing their degrees in "Business Communications".

Tyler is picking Steve up and then slamming him back onto the grass area by the pool with a barbarian scream. Steve is laughing maniacally. Tyler looks to you and says, "My woman! My woman, Sarah, do you like what you see? Are you not entertained?"

You shake your head, in a mix of fake and real disgust. The two of them go back to wrestling.

You are the only girl there besides that stick creature Courtney who has a room-temperature IQ and who constantly insists that the waves are caused by flying fish and not the wind, "like, you know, everyone, like, thinks." Courtney mentions this to you as you are watching the waves break on the beach outside instead of the on-going wrestling match.

You smile and nod, then leave her, pretending to have to go to the bathroom after rolling your eyes so hard that they make a sound. "Tell my boyfriend, after he's done beating on poor Steve there, to come and grab me."

You pass other partygoers who are sitting on couches and chairs sipping wine and other drinks and jabbering about whatever white, Orange County adults in their thirties to fifties jabber about. They are complaining about the Mexican illegal help they've hired and the President of the United States all in the same breath, hitting the highest and the lowest of society in one blast of white upper middle class bitterness. This rich house you are in is decorated in a comfortable little fall motif, and little turkey decorations dot the living room's landscape.

You decide to wander upstairs, your bare feet bouncing up the carpeted steps, where Jaime, Tyler's mellower and stranger clone, sits at a computer in the hallway office. Tyler jokes it is strange European pornography that he watches on the computer. In actuality, Jaime just likes to research whatever he can about off-world. You found this out when you slept over one night when Tyler and Jaime's parents weren't there. Jaime doesn't go to Long Beach City College like you or the University of Southern California like Tyler—fact is, he could have gone to Harvard if he'd wanted to, but it seems he is always biding his time, waiting for something. His parents always let him be on that subject for some reason.

Jaime is deep in thought. You come up to the side of him and clap your hands hard next to his ear, making him jump nearly fifteen feet into the air. Jaime wears button-down shirts and designer jeans, unlike Tyler, who is currently dressed like a trailer park drug dealer in a ragged, black T-shirt and old, faded jeans.

Jaime holds his ear and whines in his most conspicuously not-Tyler-way, "Ow! Christmas goose! What did you do that for! I'm looking up stuff that's really important."

Your eyes become slits. "You looking up people doing the wild thing, huh? Naked pictures of European people being naked together, Jaime? Hmm?"

Jaime ignores you for a moment, licks his lips and says, "Some stuff like that. No, no Sarah, I'm looking, I'm looking—was looking—for off-world photographs."

You cross your arms. "Those are illegal, Mr. Jaime."

Jaime shrugs. "Doing illegal stuff can be amusing."

"So you really are Tyler's twin brother." You look over at what Jaime is busy picking out. Authorized drawings of those Antediluvian cities and orichalcum batons and sketches of Ni-Perchta agents, or Ephors, come up on his Google search for images.

Jaime turns to you as if reminded about something and has a very serious look in his eye. You wonder what exactly has gotten into Jaime. He says, "Come on back to my room."

"That's a little forward, Mister," you say with a smirk.

You walk down the hall to Jaime's room which is covered in off-world stuff including maps and sketches of places, plus an Off-World Network recruitment poster for the first temp settlers back in Settler's Campaign, 1995. His bed is unmade, his clothes and underwear strewn about as if he put a bomb into his laundry hamper and let it explode inside the room. Jaime closes the door behind you, giving you privacy.

The advertisement seems to be brand new and fresh, and reads in very noticeable block letters:

ADVENTURE AND A NEW LIFE AWAIT YOU.

START YOUR MOVE TO THE OBERON TODAY! CALL 1-800-OFFWORLD TO SEE IF YOU QUALIFY FOR SETTLING! (AGES 18-45 ONLY)

The stylized symbol of the Off-World Network, the blue and white circles overlapping each other, takes up the rest of the poster's space.

In a different, smaller type face under the symbol are the words:

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE NETWORK: NEW WORLD, NEW FRIENDS.

The Network is a chartered and owned corporation of the Federal Government of the United States.

Jaime sits at his desk with his dark, open laptop and swallows compulsively.

You feel a sort of sinking feeling in your stomach. You know something bad is coming but you don't want to hear about it; you don't want this bad idea brought out into the not-so-fresh air of Jaime's bedroom. You idly finger the crucifix necklace around your neck.

"Tyler's made love to Courtney on the side. Is making love to Courtney on the side. Present tense," Jaime says simply, staring at you.

Your world drops out from under you. It feels like your head is full of sugary soda, with fizzes and pops that block out your thought processes. You drop the cross, letting it swing from your neck.

"Making love? As in?" you say, weakly.

"Recreational sex," Jaime says, biting his lip. "Here. Well, not here, in the bedroom, you know, but here, in the house. I can hear 'em around 2:00am when they think I'm asleep but I'm not asleep. Courtney's loud. Did you know she thinks that flying fish cause the waves here in Seal Beach? That's really amazing."

You sit on Jaime's unkempt and unmade bed. You let out a big sigh, as if your whole body is full of air and you've just expelled it all at once. "I, actually, I'm actually a- Well I haven't done that, yet, Jaime. I kind of thought, marri-" You let the word drop in mid-air.

"Me too. Oh, and I think Tyler made, made love with your friend Christine. She's your best friend," Jaime says, not picking up on the social cue you have just provided him. He looks around, as if unsure about what to do next. You don't cry, not yet.

"Well, this is a very happy Thanksgiving." You feel as if a part of you is hot, embarrassed, and angry all at once. You know of Tyler's personality and his troubles but he has always seemed, deep down, beneath all the play-acting and the crap, to be a good person. That is obviously a lie. You've put up with Tyler for so long because you thought, well, he is about four years older than you, perhaps he will, one day, maybe, just maybe, grow little by little.

Jaime looks suddenly worried. "Don't tell Tyler, please, but I had to tell you."

You shrug. "Yeah, sure thing Jaime." You look around his room at all the sketches and artwork about The Oberon; part of your mind has shut down from the information overload. There's an artistic poster of a wintry, tundra-like scene showing blasted-out black castles, woolly Afer cattle, and pine trees scattered around craggy gray peaks under a perpetually overcast sky. "Looks like the Wicked Witch of the West's castle," you say, staring at the poster. In bold, black letters it says Castle of Kadath and has the symbol of the Network stamped on it. The sight of the poster sends little chills up your spine.

Jaime follows your gaze. "It's a place I'd like to go to. Actually, I can go there, technically, but I have a problem. A big problem. It's an issue I have that's preventing me from getting into The Oberon. You know my family has money?"

You smile. "No, really? With this beach house in Orange County? I thought, gee, I never-"

"Well, it's true," Jaime deadpans, again not picking up on the now less than subtle social cue. "My father has money, and I've got a little bit that's all mine. I saved some of my Best Buy pay."

"Uh huh," you say, half-listening, the impact of what Jaime has just told you now hitting you hard and deep right in your guts. A tear leaks out.

"My cousin Steve just got LR'd from The Oberon because he went, well, insane, and so he doesn't have anyone to leave his little house to," Jaime continues, even though a flash flood of tears is now coming down your cheeks.

"I'm s-sorry," you stutter out, weeping now. You wipe your eyes with the end of one of Jaime's blankets, and then smell it by accident. Stunned by the amazingly weird smell, you put the sheet back onto the bed in disgust.

"You don't have to cry over him, Sarah. He just got LR'd—leave requested—since he's completely insane. He's had issues," Jaime says, and you look up incredulously.

Jaime keeps speaking. "No one apparently liked him. But he likes me a lot since I always asked him questions about The Oberon and his life there. So he left me his property. There's a Triumph motorcycle, ori-modified for infinite range. And I always—"

You are now staring at the carpet, still crying as Jaime rambles on. You look down on your well-manicured feet with purple painted toenails that are wrapped up in expensive sandals. Tyler bought that little treat for you.

"Well, I got my money, and I want to move to The Oberon to sketch and draw all that's there—something that's still legal to do. But the new immigration rules from the Network say all new immigrants have to be married couples between eighteen and twenty-five years old if they don't have any sort of college degree. So I can immigrate to The Oberon now and live out my dream right now, but I have to be married since I don't have a degree. And I got to marry someone fast because the solstice portal will be open on the 22nd of December. I'm just- Marriage is such a big deal; you want to find the right one, you know, and I have to make a decision right now... I don't want to wait two to four years through college."

You rub your temples, sniffling. "Sucks for you," you say. All the memories of Tyler keep flooding into your head, making you feel worthless and embarrassed and stupid all at once, like how a child would feel if they were struck after wetting their pants. You know it isn't your fault but a part of you—that unforgiving part—says that you probably did something to attract it, to deserve it.

You look at the Witch Castle of Kadath poster again through bleary, tear-filled eyes. The scene really does look like that black rock castle that the Wicked Witch of the West lived in. You wonder if that poster depicts a real place.

"So would you leave for The Oberon right now, if you could Ty- Jaime?" You sniffle again, curse to yourself, and wipe your nose with Jaime's bed sheets. Jaime catches you doing that again and frowns.

"Uh, well, yes. Yes of course. It's my dream. I mean, it's a new world there, a real new world. No more Starbucks or McDonald's or terrorism or global warming—it'd be like a real life fantasy adventure every day for. I want to be a dayhawk too, you know, on the side, if I get the chance—that's their nickname for legal salvagers."

"And we, I mean you, you could make lots of money?" that mercenary part of you enquires. "People make a lot of money off of ori and all the salvageables, don't they?"

Jaime nods up and down rapidly. "Oh, indeed! It's like the California Gold Rush all over again! It'll be fun for anyone! I can't wait to get out there and just, just wander and explore and sketch."

Part of you is so disgusted with your surroundings and so angry and so disturbed all at once that you blurt out: "You wanna get married, Jaime? Go to The Oberon? Have a little adventure away from it all?"

Jaime looks stunned and shocked. "Well, well, I am going to ask this Chinese girl I sorta date, Pachinko. If she says yes by tomorrow, I'm in and we're gone. I know her; she's a math tutor over at Cerritos College, but, well, yes in answer to your question, yes I would. I would definitely. And I'm sort of with her."

You nod, deflated. "I have—had—a sister who lived in The Oberon."

"Raquel?" Jaime says.

You shake your head. "No, no. Rachael. Married a man, Ian Zur. She was one of the first doctorates from Solomon's House University. Xenoarchaeology. She always said it was a good place to be..."

Jaime raises an eyebrow. "Quite the sister—but she's dead, I mean, passed on, isn't that right? I didn't-"

Tyler bursts into the room at that moment, sweaty and with his arm around Steve. All of his other douchebag buddies are around him too, standing around like the absolute goons they are. Tyler whispers loudly, "Who's up for drugs? Who wants drugs? Drugs? Drugs for you Jaime, Sarah? Steve here just got his medicinal marijuana card, and so everyone's doing drugs on the roof tonight, right?" Tyler sees that you are in tears and looks concerned. "Hey. What's going on, sugary sweet? Sweetie McSweetums, Cutie McCutes?"

"You've been with Courtney. You've been with Courtney, that's what's going on. And Christine."

The look on Tyler's face, eyes flicking to Jaime, tells you everything in a moment.

You stand up, wiping your eyes, and slam Tyler hard right in the balls, making him double over in pain. Your right arm is pretty strong from all those softball practices. "Cheat on me with Courtney, you bastard!"

Courtney, who is standing near the back of the group, takes off as you plow through the rest of Tyler's friends. You chase her a little down the hallway, and she squeaks in fright. You stop running and wipe your nose with the back of your hand, laughing as she almost jumps down an entire flight of stairs.

Jaime manages to pop his head out of his bedroom for a moment, looking concerned.

"Well, maybe I'll see you off-world? Let's make that happen, right, Jaime?" you say, as Tyler's confused friends look in amazement.

Jaime gives you a thumbs up. "It's a deal!"

You give him a thumbs up back and leave the house. As you exit, you see Tyler's new pure black 2012 Maserati; California license plate TylerIs1. You pick up a loose red brick from the small garden outside the front door, feel the weight of the brick with your right hand, and then throw it through the windshield in one epic smash, sending a thousand little pieces of glass all over the place and setting off the alarm.

You walk down the street under the afternoon sun, feeling chilled but also strangely liberated at the same time. You shake out your arms, punch the air directly in front of you a few times, and keep walking.

You walk to your car, which is a beaten down Honda Civic POS from 1995 that doesn't even have its own original paint, instead that ugly post-apocalyptic primer. You get three feet down the partially sandy beach road only to find out that the engine light you have been unfortunately ignoring is right about something; your car's just died.

You leave the thing in the middle of the street, making the quick calculation that if you are in The Oberon by next year, which is fast approaching, no one's going to be bothering you about abandoning the car. So you leave it here, in the middle of a suburban street, and hop on a piss-smelling bus.

You remember that you are poor and without a father who can gift you a Maserati.

You chew on a fingernail on the bus ride to work. You see a large billboard across the street. The advertisement is already fading from days of sun and rain but you can just make out the block letters:

ADVENTURE AND A NEW LIFE AWAIT YOU.

START YOUR MOVE TO THE OBERON TODAY! CALL 1-800-OFFWORLD TO SEE IF YOU QUALIFY FOR SETTLING! COLLEGE GRADUATES WANTED!

The stylized blue and white symbol of the Off-World Network takes up the rest of the billboard's space.

You take out your cellphone and start to dial. After ten minutes on hold, you speak with a helpful operator. You talk all the way to Subway, being told what you need to do in order to apply.

YOU stand half asleep behind the counter in Subway; as lifeless as a doll you wait for the customer to make up her mind about whether she wants pepper jack or provolone on her sandwich. You wear your green shirt and hat that are covered in grease stains and probably bits of mustard that have been misplaced.

"I want pepper jack." You start to put on provolone by accident, and then ask if she wants bell pepper and onions with that.

You look up, not even hearing what she is saying. She's a tall woman, forty years old, beefy but not fat. Thick glasses cover her face. She is someone who can definitely put you down pretty quickly. "I asked you a question. I asked you a question, Miss. Why are you putting provolone on my sandwich? Did I say provolone or did I say pepper jack?"

You blink a couple of times. "Oh, sorry, I'll take it off..."

"I want you to start over. I want you to start over right the hell now."

You look up, confused. "You want- wait, what? A new sandwich?"

"Damn right I want a new sandwich. You got that provabone crap all over my sandwich."

"Provolone. Not provabone," you reply. You start to smolder, looking angrier and angrier. One eye is starting to twitch a little. You reflexively grab onto the cross on your neck.

You notice that the customer behind her is snickering and muttering something to his friend. A few "Yo, dawgs" are thrown about in muttered whispers.

"I can just take it-"

"Is there a manager here? Is there a manager here? I want to talk to a manager here right damn now," the customer says, raising her shrill voice. She is slapping her side of the counter with her palm. "You have not been concentrating on my meal at all. This is just poor customer service Miss, and I believe that some compensation is in order."

You stand quietly for a second, biting your lip. "Look, I'm sorry, but I can just take the provolone off." You start to remove the little triangle slices from the wheat sandwich bread. "See? There?"

The customer snaps her fingers in the air. "I don't see a thing except for poor customer service."

You smolder for a moment and notice that one of the other customers is filming the exchange with an iPhone; you hear snickering again.

Your manager, an Indian man in his late forties by the name of Rajendra, comes out and starts to talk with the customer, apologizing. The woman asks for compensation, stating that she is there every day (which is not true, this is the first time you've seen her). The manager apologizes and offers to give her a free set of three cookies. You watch this in absolute disgust.

You mutter to yourself about this being bullshit.

"What did you say to me Miss? You want to say it to my face? You want to say that to my face?" One of the other customers is cracking up about the whole exchange while still filming with his phone.

The manager asks you to finish making up her sandwich.

You smile a little, a pained and small smile, and just leave Subway, walking straight out of the front door after tossing your apron into the garbage.

~~~~

YOU arrive at your apartment, a small two bedroom, one bath over in Marina Pacifica that you share with your mother. You trudge up the side stairs after a half hour bus ride that would normally have taken you just five minutes if you'd had your now broken down car.

You open the door to your home; bare, sparse, cold to look at. It's not dirty per se, it's even got a little bit of a view, but it has a soft prison cell décor: old, bland furniture and a bland carpet within soft beige walls. You sit down on the couch, turn on MTV, cry a little, and stare at meaningless television. You hear footsteps outside your apartment after a little bit, little stomps, and realize almost instinctively that your mother is now coming home.

Your mother opens the door almost as if she is bursting into the apartment to make an arrest.

"Sarah! So your car's broken down again? And how are you gonna fix it without me paying for it?" your mother cries, her voice shrill. As she gets closer, you can see the lines on her face and her perpetually watery eyes. However, the years can't take away her good looks that she's definitely passed down through her genes to you.

You don't say anything at first. Your mother relents for a brief second, sitting down at the dining room table a small distance away from where you are sitting on the couch. You don't say anything but turn the TV off.

"Oh just go goddamn mute, I don't give a rat's ass," your mother says, blowing out her breath and taking a moment to look through the contents of her purse for something. "I'll call Triple A tomorrow but..." Your mother slaps her hands together. "Next time I'm going to really kick your ass, sweetheart. You don't take care of anything. Anything."

"I took care of it and I can pay," you say and your mother just waves her hands around, humming at the top of her lungs so she doesn't hear you. She does this all the time, making you want to scream. It's so childish and surreal you now just feel a sort of crazed pity and hatred for your own mother. "Could you listen?" you ask, dejectedly. "I broke up with Tyler."

Your mother replies with a dismissive, "Thank you for telling me that. It's really fascinating the love life of a teenager."

"I'm twenty." Your mother stares at you for a moment, looking like she wants to ball up her fists and take a swing at you. "I'm moving to The Oberon," you add, off-handedly.

Your mother looks like all the life has left her body for a moment but she raises up her defenses again and her angry self quickly returns. She walks over and flips the muted channel to something else. "What on earth for? You really hate being around normal people?" she says, her voice sharp as she sits in the loveseat watching an old pirate movie—Captain Blood, you think, with Errol Flynn. Swashbuckling pirates are fighting each other, slashing with cutlasses and shooting cannonballs at each other's ships.

"Jaime sort of turned me onto it. I called the local Network office, and I qualify since I have an associate's degree. I have to go in for an interview, but they have a lot of settling slots available." You cough into your hand.

"Fantastic." Your mother rolls her eyes, saying the word like it is loaded with poison. She steps out of the room.

Unconsciously, you take a look at the framed picture of your smiling sister that's hung on the wall behind the TV for the past few years. It's actually a framed copy of TIME Magazine with her face on it with the headline Professors of a Different World next to it. She was a tall, attractive brunette with hazel eyes, and the picture was of her on a balcony somewhere.

You stare at the picture for a while and listen to your mother return to the room. The television is now showing flickering images of the game show Jeopardy before switching to a line of jabbering commercials for random products, cars, and orichalcum for everyday use.

"Your sister was a professor—a professor of xenoarchaeology—and she's missing. She knew everything—and I mean everything—about The Oberon and she died out there. You are just a naïve little bitch of a twenty-year-old girl who doesn't know her asshole from a hole in the ground. I'm sorry to talk so crude, but you know it. You know it."

You stare at her for a long time. "I'm twenty years old. I don't need to listen to you," you say coldly. "Since Rachael disappeared and Dad died, I'm just your punching bag."

"You are not going to The Oberon. Period."

"I'm going," you say, staring right into her eyes.

Your mother lights up for a moment, smiling. "Sure! Sure, just go, go on out, go to The Oberon. Enjoy that life. Be like your sister—someone who thought they knew how to handle anything and everything until they wound up missing one day. You go and do that." Your mother has this hideous smirk on her face that makes you hate her even more, which you didn't know was possible.

Your mother squints her eyes. "I say it's wrong. There's nothing for a little girl there. It's nothing for a girl to be dealing with, I just know it. There's only—what's the word I'm looking for? Promises of money and death. But you go ahead, my little girl. Go ahead."

Your mother sits right next to you on the couch. Her eyes look straight into yours. "Sarah, you need to remember something. Something very specific."

"What nonsense do you want to-?"

Your mother slams your arm hard with a closed fist, making you yelp with surprise and fear. "There'll come a time, little girl of mine, when you won't have me or anyone else to tell you what's right and what's wrong. Remember that! There's only that small, still voice inside of you that can tell you what's right and what's wrong. You can either listen to it or ignore it. You can't just have some outside person tell you that. And what does that still voice say to you now? Does it say to play around in The Oberon, make your mother sick with fear? Or does it say to stay here?"

You start to shake a little and cry. Your mother tells you that she's taking a nap because she's tired after work, but catching the look on your face, her voice softens a little. "You will never do it, because you are weak. Right, sweetheart? You are a weak person. You are not like your sister at all. She was strong, and you are weak. You are weak compared to her." She holds your chin for a moment in her hand, looking you in the eye. "You will never do anything like going to The Oberon because you are weak. Unlike your sister, unlike your father—it's no fault of your own." She caresses your cheek for a moment and then lets you go. "We can go to Hof's Hut. They have a Thanksgiving deal, two for one. We'll split it, real cheap and good. You like that, right, sweetheart?"

You nod.

~~~~

YOU pretend to go to sleep early that day, occasionally looking at your phone. Text after text from Tyler are coming in, at first apologizing about cheating, then wanting to talk, then calling you a bitch, and then calling you something that rhymes with punt and starts with a C.

It's midnight and your mother is asleep in her bedroom, with earphones still in, listening to some odd relaxation music. You sneak into her room, grab a prescription bottle of Vicodin off her bathroom counter, and sneak out again. You sit in your lonely little room, a muted TV playing old episodes of MASH on the screen. You pop a couple of the pills and wash them down with a gulp of water from the sink. You sit down in front of your computer, boot it up, and start deleting photograph after photograph of you and Tyler during happier days. You then eliminate him completely from your Facebook account. You change your status to "single".

After a little bit, the Vicodin starts to hit your system and you get a bit angrier in your mind. You find a box of letters from Tyler, and before you know it, you are ripping each and every one in half with a dull, drug-induced slowness, muttering curses to yourself as you shred every bullshit little note, every scripted lie. You take a moment to read one letter where Tyler talks about marriage a little, in hesitant and specifically vague terms. You rip it up.

When you are all done, you look at the prescription bottle of Vicodin, thinking of what you could do with that right now, what you could do to yourself with that... You take another pill and put the bottle back into your mother's room. Stoned on prescription pills, you jump back on the computer and start cruising the Internet, coming upon the Off-World Network's settler recruitment site.

~~~~

GOOD Morning LA

ABC 7 KABC

Aired November 21st, 2012

David Ervine: Anchor

...Seen ten months ago, it has been confirmed that it should be seen over The Oberon skies around June of next year. And now, Karen, I think we are getting what has become the most popular part of the show. Let's take a look at California Weather Control over at Grissom Island in Long Beach.

*CUT TO*

Karen Whitemore: Presenter

Thank you, David. Sorry, Southland, even though you were looking at a nice weekend full of sunshine, here's Aaron Sizemore from the Off-World Network...

Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)

Good morning.

Karen Whitemore: Presenter

Now Aaron is an experienced orichalcum user with a level five rating. He is here with his orichalcum baton, embedded with the rarest type of orichalcum to be found in The Oberon. Now, Aaron, the Department of Agriculture is looking for a small storm for the area because we are a little bit behind in rain volume, is that correct?

Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)

That's correct Karen. The Department of Agriculture is concerned about what little rain we have had so far, so it's our job to make up some ground so we can avoid a drought. Now, I know everyone watching now is probably going to hate me for doing this, but I'll have to begin.

Karen Whitemore: Presenter

Literally raining on their parade?

Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)

[Long pause] Sure. Now I'm going to ask you to back away about one hundred feet—you and your crew there—and I will begin the process in—checking my watch here—in exactly two minutes.

Karen Whitemore: Presenter

Now, David, as I am sure you are watching right now, we are moving away from Aaron who is now in this wide open space on Grissom Island. This island is open and uninhabited. It gives the ori user the best view of the sky and keeps the ori user away from all the possible interference that can happen if this were to be done in a city environment. Now, as you can see behind me, Aaron is exhibiting the ori glow—which, since he is highly skilled and trained to conduct weather control, is turning the air around him to a deep green. Weather control has been, of course, the most successful ori practice to come from off-world and is responsible for those perfect summers that have been such a boost to tourist areas like Long Beach or San Diego.

However, as much I think everyone would love to be consistently rain and cloud free, we do have to ensure that agriculture in the area is taken care of, and so we do need maintenance storms like the one Aaron will be creating. The Weather Service tells us that every time an ori user takes control of the weather for the area it costs the taxpayers $44 million dollars. This includes the user's training and time and also that this particular ori is worth $43 million for every gram, which is always spent after the weather has been controlled.

I'm now turning and seeing behind me that Aaron is levitating several feet above the ground; his arms are outstretched and his eyes have now taken a strong appearance of almost pure white light... If you can still hear me right now, David, beams of green, almost like lightning, are spreading from Aaron's chest, eyes, and hands and are now bouncing across the entire sky. Now Aaron is descending downward, and the green bolts are disappearing. He is back on the ground and back to his usual self. I'll give him a moment to rest, and then we can go over there as ask him. Oh, he's come over here David, and he's-

Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)

It's a rush, it really is, I tell you that much. I don't think anyone will understand—but it's something else. Phew... It's a feeling that you are actually one with the Earth, but it's a bit much. It's very exciting...

(Loud thunder clap drowns out audio.)

# Chapter Two: Network Interview

You end up on a street corner in downtown Long Beach the very next day, outside the Off-World Trade Center building, staring up at the height of the place. The sign confirms that you are in the right place. You look in desperation at your watch, and Mickey Mouse is letting you know the unfortunate—five minutes late to the interview, 11:35am. You get a face full of warm, wet wind and diesel fumes as you move down the sidewalk. The rain is coming down hard, soaking your dress clothes and coat you have worn for the interview. The heels you wear hurt your feet.

You walk into the first floor of the Trade Center and past the glass doors that separate a very small throng of protestors proclaiming "Stop the settling!" and "No Blood for ori!" A statue of a Ni-Perchta warrior in full armor with an ori-staff and a model of the Ni-Perchta city of Solomon's Bay laid out on what looks like a giant stone palm are centered in the lobby.

You pass them without a glance, rushing inside, and see a glass elevator that can lead you to the fourteenth floor of the building.

~~~~

WAITING outside Christopher Lee's office takes two hours; you have to stand in line with other prospective settlers and candidates for direct employment with the Off-World Network. It's a very motley group, mostly women though, ranging from your age to their fifties.

You made the mistake of getting a free cup of coffee earlier and now you have to pee. You'll have to hold it until the interview is finished since your name has just been called. You get that feeling of fullness in your bladder but Christopher Lee, the recruiter, is asking you inside, holding a manila folder in his hand. "No, there is no relation between myself and the other Christopher Lee," he says, after he shakes hands with you. Mr. Lee states this in a delightfully British accent as you step inside his large, almost football field wide office that looks over the Long Beach Harbor. Christopher Lee is a slightly bucktooth man, middle-aged, no wedding ring on his finger. He sits behind his desk, his gut slightly extending over the smooth mahogany desktop. A new Macintosh, flat screened, is perched on top of his desk. He wears, to your non-surprise, the blue jumpsuit uniform of the Network. It's that goofy NASA flight suit wannabe outfit that apparently all the Network employees off-world dress in. On his left breast are the two overlapping circles of the Network, and on his right shoulder is a British flag patch.

You notice that there is a female employee in his office, off to the side, click-clacking away on what looks like a courtroom stenographer's machine. The employee is Japanese; you can tell by her round features and the rising sun flag on her right shoulder. She never speaks to you once or interjects in any way.

"I-I'm sorry?" you say, not understanding what Mr. Lee is talking about, not understanding what being related to "Christopher Lee" means. You nervously pat your damp head, shifting in your seat, with your plastic-covered resume held uncertainly in your hand. The Japanese stenographer click-clacks away on the machine every time someone speaks.

"Christopher Lee? Dracula? The Man with the Golden Gun? The Wicker Man? Saruman? Count Dooku?"

You swallow nervously. "The Shit- I mean Sith Lord?" you ask, vaguely remembering something.

Christopher Lee shakes his head. "No. If popular culture was something to be graded on, Miss, you really would've been docked a few points there. Never heard of Lord of the Rings? Really? The Hobbit?"

You start to freak a little bit, thinking to yourself that you should have. "I don't know anything about Dracula or uh, uh a Syrup-man, I'm sorry!"

Christopher Lee shakes his head and says without emotion, "I am teasing you. That's what we call an 'icebreaker' in the corporate world. Something to liven up the mood." He looks at you again, not knowing what to make of your little outburst. Mr. Lee brings a pen out and starts marking something on your file.

Your heart starts beating faster and faster, your hand shaking a little. "Huh."

Christopher Lee clicks a few things on his keyboard, and checks out the application you submitted online before you went to bed last night.

Mr. Lee keeps speaking, looking over your file that is on his screen. "Now, where it asks for your job objective statement, you've put down, and this is a very interesting quote for me. 'Livin' in fear ain't livin' to me. I'm armed with a gun defending the free. They blew it in 'Nam, shot up my friends. I'm back in the street, the fight never ends. I was born with a gun in my hand. I'll die for my country but I'll die like a man.'"

A moment of dead silence. The recruiter stares at you, looking straight into your eyes.

Your jaw drops. "Oh shi- I mean, shoot, that's, heh, heh. I was copying and pasting lyrics to a Manowar song for my friend online as this, well, well, it's a funny story. It's a not a funny story, really, well, I guess it's funny... I actually wanted to use my SSR position so I can gain that free slot into Solomon's House University, and then maybe into xenoarchaeology. Like my sister."

"That's a shame, really. We don't have many twenty-year-old, female, Vietnam veterans/vigilantes prowling the streets," Christopher Lee says without batting a single eyelash. A slight curl on his lips suggests that he wishes he could laugh but he can't.

You slowly raise up your hand and start to speak. Mr. Lee informs you that this isn't a classroom and that you can put your hand down.

"While that objective statement was—original—to say the least, you left out your hobbies. We like to know everything about our settler candidates, within reason and within the law, so please, enlighten me."

You have to think, and then you make the mistake of being too honest. You look to the mahogany ceiling. "I like to do LARP," you squeak out.

Massive silence. You can even hear the slight hum of the computer booting up an application.

"You think doing a drug would be an acceptable hobby?" Mr. Lee says.

"It's, it's not a drug, it's-"

"Ah, a sick sexual deviant thing? You're just a young woman barely out of your teens, I mean, what is this country going to...?" the recruiter continues, his face turning red. Mr. Lee bites down on his lip openly as if he wants to say something but can't.

"No! No, no, please, it's about role playing," you almost yell.

"Role playing?" Mr. Lee says looking more disturbed, his eyes half-lidded.

"Wait, it's like, like D-Dungeons and Dragons, except we go outside and act it out live. Well, actually, what I like the most is Dagorhir—you use foam swords, foam javelins, and you have to be in character. You make your own uniform; it's like theater but with sports mixed in, but you have to stay in character. I was Queen of the Realm for one day. Tyler and everyone used to make fun of me, but..."

After a moment, Mr. Lee clears his throat. "Continuing on, then." Mr. Lee writes something down with his red pen this time.

"There are three hundred and seventy-six different people looking to get official settler status in The Oberon, and that's just today. We ask that those who wish to settle with us directly and work for us directly be of the highest caliber and highest character. The Oberon is a place unlike anything of this Earth, indeed it is not of this Earth, hence the common name 'off-world'. The Oberon is a very different place, a golden land of opportunity and advancement. We accept only the best there, and those who are the most open-minded, to be a part of our Network system."

"You are serious that The Oberon is that great? Because I only wanted to go to a dangerous and unstable place myself..." You chuckle nervously, trying to retrieve the situation.

You say something else, taking a leap into the dark to see if you can land on the other side. A moment passes and you feel this horrible need to rush out and use the toilet. Your gambit works.

Christopher Lee laughs after a moment, seeing you are joking. "That's good. That is good." Mr. Lee turns serious. "But no more joking, Miss Sarah. Laughing time is over, as the Simpsons would say. You have an associate's degree from Long Beach City College but you are single, which barely qualifies you to even have this meeting for possible settling. Now, based on your age, prior work experience, which is, ah, Papa John's Pizza for three months due to what you term 'wrongful termination', currently at Subway, and your associate's degree, the only position I can guarantee you as a probationary settler is to be a Settler Service Representative, or SSR, at one of our Missions, one of our tower settlements. Your job there would to be help maintain the tower's settlers and see to their needs, and to attract other human settlers to live inside the settlement so we can expand. Immigration is still open to everyone who can charter a boat out to Point Nemo, so there are many settlers still outside the Network system. Your job would be to help attract the undocumented into The Oberon for their own safety and protection. We are looking to fill our homes at Mission Friendship, Mission Hazelden, Mission Passages, and Mission Wonderland."

"Oh-oh, I see, you mean, like, like renting them houses inside the settlement? I heard about this on Discovery, the Network is basically like a human housing authority."

"We do more than that," Christopher Lee says. "We do a lot more than that. We are not some simple property management company. The Network..."

Christopher Lee launches into a five-minute monologue on what the Network does exactly, but since you are so nervous and have to pee, you barely pay attention to what he is saying.

"...chartered by the mandate of the Witch-Lord and the United States Government to fund and run all human police, all human settlements, and all large mines and salvage operations. We work closely with the natives. There is no colonization here. We are under the Witch-Lord's law."

"Of what?" you ask, fidgeting a little. You really need to pee.

"Miss Orange, what did I just say?" Christopher Lee taps the capped end of his pen against his teeth for a moment.

"Well, that, that the Network has to do what it has to do and there is a lot of ins and outs and complications to the situation, but that you need all the help you can get," you reply, praying that you've hit it on the head, or near enough.

"Indeed," Christopher Lee says, slowly nodding. "Indeed. Well put." You don't know if he is joking or not. "Let us run over a few situations and see how you would handle them..."

After a few scenarios are given to you about how to rent a place, how to deal with a fire emergency, or how to deal with an attack by Ni-Perchta, you think your answers, in comparison to what has gone on before, are correct and sound. Then again, you're not sure.

Christopher Lee sits back in his leather chair and tells you, "Well, we are making settler assignments and choices by 4:00pm today. We will give you a call back by 5:00pm today. If you do not receive a call, it is because we have found a better suited candidate on the list."

You look around to see if you should stand up. You do, slowly. Mr. Lee shakes your hand deliberately. "Be seeing you," he says, smiling.

~~~~

YOU are sitting alone at the In 'N' Out next to the Pacific Coast Highway in Seal Beach, watching new drops of rain splatter against the window—another day of the orichalcum-produced maintenance storm. You are downing a Double Double (hold the lettuce) and sipping on a Coke with too much ice, staring at your Mickey Mouse watch. You've just paid out your last eight dollars for this meal.

A cheesy container and a box of dwindling fries sit in front of you. If Christopher Lee was telling the truth, it will be around 5:00pm that you'll find out if you're going to The Oberon.

It is now 1:30. The lunch hour rush has passed so you are virtually alone, except for the anonymous attendants working the drive-through window. Time will drag out. Every hour will not be quick enough. You stare out the window, thinking of Tyler, your mother, and your future here on Earth disappearing.

The window faces Pacific Coast Highway turning into Main Street, and you are watching the cars splash and stop their way through the downfall. Cheap-looking old Buicks, brand new Fords, and little curvy Toyotas swing by; a limousine drives on by as well. A bus comes and discharges its already soggy patrons onto the street. They rush across the long crosswalk towards a once-white, now gray, office building next door, ignoring the old, homeless man soaked to the bone holding a Will Work For Anything sign.

There is a very long line of people waiting to get into that gray government-style building across the street; they're mostly young, some older, with umbrellas out or hooded sweatshirts covering their heads as they shuffle forward, one sneakered or flat shoe at a time. The blocky office monument on the small green lawn outside the government building reads: California Unemployment Services.

You think for a long while about your sister. She is—was—a smart woman who thought a lot about the world and what it meant to be alive in it. She was philosophical without pretension. She won scholarship after scholarship in school, was always athletic, driven, always focused, and different—in a word: scary. She graduated UCLA, then Yale; already mentioned in a small article in the New York Times about the up and coming women of the Ivy League by the time she was just eighteen. And then she got married to that Ian Zur and had been in The Oberon for the last ten years, doing god knows what. She never called and never wrote past your thirteenth birthday. It was as if she had moved to the dark side of the moon, which you guess The Oberon really is.

If they say no to you joining, if you don't get the Network job, where could you go? Back to your mother and her bullshit? You aren't going to college next year—you and your mother are broke—and you've finished City College. Tyler had talked loosely of marriage, maybe, in the summer, and somehow you'd read more into that than you should have, making no real, decent, future plans. Besides, college is bullshit for a bachelor's degree in this economy—four years and $40,000 later to find out you're qualified to work in Starbucks.

You watch as a young, fresh-faced couple step out of the rain and into the restaurant—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl, about your age. They are smiling and laughing, shaking off the rain, enjoying each other's company. They make their order, sit down, and the boy brings the girl her soda fountain drink. They look at each other, touch each other's arms, laugh at what you are sure is nothing.

You pick up your food and toss it out, not hungry anymore. You leave the restaurant at that point and step out into a gust of rain, umbrella in hand.

You remember to put up your umbrella and start walking, trying to avoid looking at all those poor faces queuing in the unemployment line, each face full of dull despair mingled with dying hope. You wait for the bus going in the opposite direction and then head back towards home.

~~~~

WITH the jerk of your key, you open your apartment door, walking into your bedroom after a few moments. It is empty and dark; the bed left undone. The blinds are drawn, and there is only the slightest drumming of rain against the window. A bed unmade, a low-volume TV left on an Evangelist station, and a chair with your cat Slinks perched on top of it.

Slinks blinks twice, looks at you, and falls back to sleep, a curled-up classic tabby. You look at your watch as you close the door. It's 2:05pm, according to Mickey Mouse.

"Hello," you say. Slinks looks up, blinks again, meows something, and goes back to sleep. "Good to see you."

You lock the door behind you and crawl into bed, your wet coat still on, though you manage to kick your heels off. You pull the covers up to your head and try to sleep. You roll over to your side, still damp from the rain.

You look at the red digital alarm clock, 2:07pm.

You start to cry a little, a sort of mild sob. You think of Tyler and his cheating. It makes you finally look at where your life is going—your precious life, your one life, and you are here, in miserable Southern California, going nowhere, getting nowhere, feeling nothing, and doing nothing, and with an unfeeling, unloving mother. What should you do?

You don't sleep but you aren't fully conscious either. The cat decides to get up, stretch, and then perch himself near the top of your head. He begins to purr the day away.

"Thanks for that," you say sarcastically, as you feel his furry body brush your head. 2:15pm.

You start to think too much. Your dead father wouldn't mind you joining him in Heaven, would he? You think not. Why are you thinking this?

Slinks abandons his position. 2:38pm.

You turn over and stare at your cellphone. They will call at 5:00pm, you remind yourself.

You could decide to go to Heaven if they don't call; a place of eternal whiteness and warmth, where the trees always give cool shade, the water is fresh, and there is no work to go to, only sweet music to listen to. The days never end and all the people you have ever known sit together in perfect understanding and silence... 2:52pm.

If you don't get this "job", what will you be?

An eternal nothing; a young woman with no future worth mentioning nor past worth studying? Why are you making this job into something bigger than it is? It's a CSR job—customer service—a rental agent job. But there is a feeling, a feeling just at the back of your skull, a feeling that by getting to The Oberon, somewhere so different than anything on Earth, that maybe just getting your foot into the door will lead to something very, very great. This is not a rational thought but a feeling that is struggling and tugging at you.

You drift off to sleep and wake to find that some time has passed, and it is now 4:57pm. Three minutes until their phone call. Time moves oh so very slowly forward. You grow more scared and rationality leaks away from you.

You think strange thoughts. When it is night and perhaps storming outside, you will take off all of your clothes, let the cool rain wash over your skin. You will walk out into the waves; you will start to swim ever forward. When it gets too cold, you will fall asleep in that mother ocean... and you will let the sea take you. You will only see the moon before you slip under... 4:59pm.

They should be calling. One minute from now, you will know how the entire rest of your life will play out.

5:04pm. You sit upright in bed, your fists clenching and unclenching over and over again. You start to mutter under your breath. "Call... Call... Call you bastards, call... Call..."

5:05pm. A ring. You grab the phone. "This is Sarah Orange."

A voice comes on. Christopher Lee. "Hello, hello, Sarah, this is Christopher Lee. You are hired..." His voice seems a million miles away. You fake your way through the rest of the conversation, saying everything appropriately, then thanking him.

Shaking, you hang up the phone and lay it back down, pulling the covers up tighter.

~~~~

LATER that day you hear a knock at the door. It's Jaime, looking frantic and in need of something. "Pachinko, Pachinko is out."

"Pachinko is out?" you ask, confused at first and then remembering exactly who Pachinko is. "Oh, Pachinko. Are you sure you are pronouncing her name right? Seriously?"

Jaime ignores your enquiry. "Pachinko is out, Sarah. She attacked someone at the Math Lab with a pair of scissors. I need to get married to get out there." Jaime lowers himself onto one knee.

"Sarah Orange, will you marry me?" Jaime says. For a moment you almost forget it is Jaime—you look at that face, that kind face with bright blue eyes, and slide into a different reality where it's actually Tyler asking you for marriage. That charming Tyler is asking you and you say-

You snap out of it, biting your tongue for a moment. It's just Jaime, his slightly-off twin brother.

# Chapter Three: Queen Mary

You sit by your apartment's broken Jacuzzi at night-time, bundled up in a sweatshirt, looking up to the stars you can barely see through the orange haze of city lights. You are thinking things over, haunted by your mother's words from days earlier. You have been slowly and secretively preparing for your off-world escape.

Tyler has called you twenty-three, now twenty-four, times. No one else is around; you sit by the lit-up pool on a cold deckchair by yourself, thinking over your life.

The constant city sounds, sirens, cars driving by, televisions, and your neighbors talking, do not distract you in the slightest from your meditation.

Coming over the small wooden bridge shaded by the oak trees that lead into your apartment's courtyard area is a thin, older man, maybe in his early sixties, in a three-piece old style suit as gray as his face and his hair. He is whistling into the wind. You can't help but notice that there is a burnt-out electrical smell—like a socket has burnt out or when your TV pops a fuse—when he appears.

He stops midway on the bridge over the small creek. "Feeling alone, Miss Sarah Orange?" he says.

You swallow, feeling very alone now; there is no one there at this particular moment except for the people in their apartments around the courtyard. "No," you call out.

"May I step over and speak with you?" He waits before making his move.

"Of course."

"Good," he says, smiling, walking over to where you sit on the deckchair. Before you can say anything, he speaks again; a voice of cultured ooze pours out of his thin lips. "Oh the things I know about you, Miss Orange."

You stand up, ready to do a little bit of fight or flight. "P-pleased to meet you, Mr.?"

"My name, well, for now, let's say it's Scratch. I often go by that name in New England." He titters like a girl. "Old joke."

"Oh," you say, looking for an easy escape route. That sixth sense that something is very wrong is needling the back of your head. Thunder cracks, very close by.

"Oh I wouldn't leave, Miss Orange."

"Wh-what do you want?" you say, barely hearing yourself as the thunder starts up again. The wind and the city noise that are picking up make it hard to be heard. You wonder where the storm has come from, it was seemingly peaceful just moments ago.

The old man's eyes light up and he smiles, revealing a set of yellowing, uneven teeth. He puts a finger up to his lips, shushing you.

From his pocket he takes out a small, gray, dented, and very old-looking box with a small, white button that has a large crack running through its middle. Scratch presses it, and you suddenly find that all sounds from the outside world have stopped—no city sounds, no sound of the wind, not even the chatter of your neighbors or the sounds of their televisions. He puts the device back into his pocket. The whole world has been muted except for you and him.

"That's better. Why, Miss, I'm here to congratulate you! Your sister has left to you this particular item in her will."

"My sister is not dead," you say.

"She's not only dead, she's really most sincerely dead." Scratch laughs and then catches the look on your face, a look of pure horror. "Apologies."

Scratch motions for you to sit down on one of the poolside deckchairs. He sits down opposite you on another deckchair.

"Oh, Miss, I do apologize, but this item was left in her will for your family in particular. Unfortunately, it did take a long time—she had to be considered legally dead and the item had to clear Network customs and well, you know how bureaucracy is. Someone took its listing, put it to the bottom of the pile and then forgot that the pile existed in the first place." He laughs with that titter again, frightening you. "She went missing leading an illegal expedition to somewhere on the other side of The Oberon, maybe even past the Burzee, no? Quite the explorer she was."

He gives you a small leather book of parchment that has a cloth strip binding it together. It is about the size of a thick wallet.

"It's the Voice of the Four Winds, or the Book of the Witch-Lords of Mir. It's an original made out of Afer skin. It has inside of it pages of prayers, spells, a complete map of The Oberon itself, the Rosetta Stone page—where it translates fourteen Earth languages into the Antediluvian standard hieroglyphics... It's a rare book to have outside The Oberon."

You open it carefully. On the first page is a collection of circles and lines drawn in black ink. Little thunder bolts sign the corners of each page.

Scratch, looking at what you are seeing, reads what it means. "And over the world, nor stop, nor stay, the winds of the Storm King go out on their way..."

The simple nature of these words and the unknown that lies behind them is suddenly terrifying. You suddenly don't want to take it. You bite your lip. "If I r-refuse to take it?"

Scratch tilts his head in amusement. "Refuse?" After a moment you can see that his eyes have turned a deep green after being a light hazel. "Of course you can."

"H-how much?" you ask quietly.

"How much is it worth? How much is it worth? Oh, it's worth a good amount of pennies... But never sell it. You must never sell it. Keep it on you at all times."

You feel as if something has slapped you hard across the face. "I will never sell it. I will always keep it."

Scratch begins to walk away, humming to himself, and then turns back to you. "Be seeing you." You notice for the first time that Scratch has companions with him—three tall men in black coats and black fedora hats with almost bone-white skin.

As you watch them leave, you start to shake a little, not sure if what just happened actually happened or was only in your mind.

~~~~

THE private gym that a long time ago Tyler gave you access to is empty at this hour, as it mostly always is, and time stretches out; you can't sleep and don't want to think anymore. So you work out by yourself.

You throw your sweatshirt off, stretch and, just because you can, you do a random handstand, letting the blood flood your head and push out all those thoughts that come up like little poisonous buoys floating in the surf on your mind. You roll onto the floor, catching a glimpse of your slightly sweating self in the mirrored wall, and spot the hanging boxing bag.

You go over, fall into the fighting stance you were taught a long time ago, and start to lightly kick at the bag, kicking it once, twice, three times with your right foot. You throw in some medium punches. You wish to keep it to an easy exercise but as those thoughts start to finally intrude, you start to go at it, biting the inside of your lip hard. You start punching the bag, kicking it, as hard and as fast as you can for a minute straight. Both your hands and both feet sting like hell. You finish with a little combo, hurting your right hand a little. You taste blood in your mouth.

You stare at the bag, sweating profusely now, thinking of Tyler and wishing that the bag were your ex-boyfriend's face. You start to cry a little again, but you shrug it off with another combo thrown at the bag.

You walk away and run for five miles on the treadmill; the only sounds you hear are the running of the tread's motors and your feet slapping against the belt.

~~~~

YOU steal your mother's Volvo that morning. You've packed two suitcases: one with your personal stuff, like pictures of your sister and father as well as yearbooks and other things; the other suitcase is full of clothes. You managed to pack up everything in the middle of the night, silent as a ninja.

You drive through the deserted streets of Long Beach and Seal Beach, seeing your old hometowns for the last time; you're killing time until the sun comes up and Tyler will be awake. You throw your phone into the bushes near the PCH once you get hold of him and set up a time and a place to meet, which is at his house of course. You've been calling him over and over since three in the morning.

It's 7:00am when you arrive at Tyler's beach house, which is empty and cold compared to how it was at Thanksgiving. You stand in the living room staring at the waves as you wait for him to come down from his bedroom. When he comes down the stairs you look at him oddly, like he is a completely new person. His hair is disheveled and his eyes are red with heavy bags under them.

"Sarah," Tyler starts, swallowing compulsively. "Sarah, I'm- I am sorry about that, about what happened."

You sit on the leather couch in the living room, listening to him spout on about his need to apologize and that it was "just sex, just sex." You stare at him for a good moment, saying nothing; Tyler finally chokes up a little.

You tilt your head. "Yes?" you ask.

Tyler shrugs his shoulders. "Look, we don't- We haven't had sex, you know, and that's, that's something- You need to have that in a relationship."

"I was waiting until, until marriage, Ty," you say coldly. "We were going to be married, weren't we? We never said it totally, but there was that—I don't know what you want to call it—implication, there."

Tyler starts to cry a little. "But I'm a guy, Sarah. I need it. I want it. Sorry if that sounds selfish, but shit, I do. Your friend Christine, and Courtney, they understood... They weren't, uh, weird about sex, you know."

You stand up suddenly. "I need to use the bathroom, Tyler." Tyler nods and sits down on the couch you've just left.

You go upstairs and pass by the bathroom, ignoring it. You make it into Tyler's bedroom. On the dresser next to his king size bed is a nightstand, and on it is a wallet with Bad M*F*cker embroidered on it. You open the wallet and take out all the money in there—a good collection of hundreds and twenties, equaling $1,240. You put it into your jacket. You also see his Rolex watch, gold, and snatch that—he once told you it was a gift for turning eighteen and was worth $8,000 new, so you could probably get a third of that at a pawn shop. You think of something and immediately walk down the hall to the guest bedroom.

Lying in bed, stomach down with bare back showing, is Courtney.

You reach into your jacket and slowly take out the heavy gun you've brought with you. You cock it and even point it at the sleeping Courtney. You stare down the gun sight and aim it right at the back of her pretty little head, savoring the moment just a little.

You pull the trigger and the gun makes a dry click sound. Courtney snuffles something in her sleep. You smile thinly.

You walk downstairs again, seeing Tyler on the couch. "Goodbye Tyler," you say evenly. You take one last look around his house. "Oh, here's your little present back."

You hand Tyler the gun. Tyler sniffles a little. "You can keep it. You were the only crazy Wild West girl around here. Every week you'd be out there." Tyler has a weak, sad smile on his face.

"I wanted to give it to you and Courtney so bad... " you reply coldly. "But I can't keep it. Goodbye."

Tyler feels the gun, pops the cylinder, and drops the bullets into his hand. "You brought it over, uh, loaded?"

"Oh I guess I did," you say and walk away without turning.

~~~~

YOUR cab pulls up to the Queen Mary. You had dumped your mother's car off in a parking lot next to the Courthouse. The Queen Mary strikes you as a stately throwback of a cruise liner. The Network brochure you got at their local office in Long Beach mentions that the old ship, which looks to you to be kissing cousins to the Titanic you've seen in movies and books, was originally launched back in the 1930s, retired in the 1960s, and then re-furbished and re-launched a few years back since all the other, newer, ocean liners with all their electronics would have full mechanical meltdowns every time they went into The Oberon. The ship is a majestic piece of black, white and red machinery, and its four smokestacks are already pumping out a sizeable amount of pollution into the gray and very overcast afternoon air. A thousand seagulls and their cries fly around the parking lot next to the launch.

You hold the brochure tightly in one fist, your tickets tucked inside, and you hold your small crucifix in the other.

The yellow cab pulls up behind idling buses and cabs and other random cars that swing in and out to drop off a passenger or three. Jaime says awkwardly that he has forgotten his cash, and you dig some out from your purse.

"No problem, honey," you say sarcastically. You pay off the cab driver who pulls out with a screech.

"Did the courthouse thing feel, you know, strange? We are actually married, Sarah, that's, that's something. That's really something." Jaime looks at you sheepishly, one of his eyes slightly blackened. He holds up his left hand; new golden wedding ring in place.

You hold up yours and you clink your ring against his. "We are married," you marvel. "Your uncle the judge was very nice to come in on his day off. How's your eye, Jaime? Tyler didn't hurt you too bad, right?"

"Meh. What did you think of the- of the wedding? Weird, right?"

You nod. "It was kind of the opposite of every girl's dream. Look, Jaime, no offense, but this is, uh, an open marriage, you understand that right? No offense? We'll work together as partners, like we said. We'll figure that out when we get out there."

Jaime has to think over what you've just said. "Oh, no, no, none taken. You're not really my type anyway," Jaime says. "We have to do that again, though, you know that? 365 days later we have to do it in a Witch-Lord Temple in order to stay."

You feel sort of slapped in the face by his earlier comment and are about to say something when you see something amazing. You and Jaime watch as a couple of Long Beach longshoremen, in their black and yellow safety vests with red hard hats, are lifting a couple of large metal crates the size of cars into the front hold of the Queen. The thing is, though, they are not lifting these crates with cranes, but telekinetically. A telltale green glow is coming from these telescoping batons that have orichalcum stones embedded into their grips. The two longshoremen are pointing at the crates with their batons but they are not touching them; the crates are just floating upwards towards two more longshoremen who are standing on the Queen. These two are "grabbing" the crates in mid-air, again with that telekinetic power coming from their telescoped batons. The large crates, that must weigh thousands of pounds, bob for a moment in the air as the second team of longshoremen grabs hold of them.

"That's orichalcum power. The longshoremen now use telekinesis ori, which is cheaper and more cost effective than cranes..." Jaime says. You are both pretty young but the orichalcum thing is still a little off-putting to the both of you—you and Jaime didn't originally grow up with it like kids are nowadays, so there's always that little moment of reality disconnect when you see something on the news or someone using it in real life. A couple of other people are quietly watching the scene go by, as red-capped valets and bellboys scurry about with pieces of luggage and other random items.

"Stuff like that is going to be all over the place in The Oberon," Jaime says and then starts walking to one of the metal platforms that leads into the Queen. Jaime almost disappears into the darkened interior of the ship, but stops by the line going inside. A couple of baseball-capped security guards wait nearby, as does an aged stewardess charged with checking passports.

You wait on the edge of the giant gangplank that leads into the Queen, having a bad feeling. A cool breeze blows by your face, caressing your skin for a moment. You think to yourself how irresponsible this is, how impulsive this is—but then you realize, what's to stop you? There's nothing really there for you in the O.C., no real future expectations that are great. The sad fact of the matter is that you were just planning to go to college and help Tyler grow up a little (despite him being older than you), and that fell apart. Jaime, in his own almost criminally-nerdy way, is leading you towards something better than what is waiting for you in Long Beach. You know it inside; you feel it inside.

But, at the same time, there is a slow and awful dream-like sensation; this feeling of upcoming danger you can't exactly shake. Your palms sweat a little and your heart starts to pound. This is an adventure, you admit to yourself. This is something more extraordinary than anything you've ever done—and all because you got burned by a relationship with a man who looks exactly the same as the one you are now in a sham marriage with.

Suddenly the salty smell of the sea and the whiff of diesel that permeate everything in the air become stronger, the scents carving themselves into your memory.

And, with that last thought, just as Jaime is waving for you to come on in, you step onto the metal platform. It clangs heavily under your sneakered feet. There is no one to see you off.

~~~~

YOU stand on the starboard side of the ship with Jaime after having settled into your cheap little cabin that has cigarette burns on the carpet and smells like vomit in one particular corner. When you saw the room, you and Jaime gave each other a look about the one bed. Jaime laughed nervously. He then shut his mouth after the look on your face.

Jaime has left to grab you two some coffee, and you stand next to the railing, feeling a chill as a fresh breeze blows in. You put on your headphones, so you're listening to your iPod when a red-capped valet, an older black man with a kind face, comes by and taps you on the shoulder gently. You turn down the volume on the iPod and stop the Manowar that's ringing through it.

"Miss, make sure you stuff that away with the purser by the time we get to the Nemo Gate. Otherwise it's gonna cook, okay?"

You look uncertainly at your iPod with its Hello Kitty cover. "It's gonna cook?"

The valet nods. "Honey, with all that EMP out there it'll pop the moment we go through."

You look confused.

"You know, EMP? It's like a signal that comes off the A-bombs when they blow 'em up? Well, The Oberon is just full of that signal bouncing around and it blows out all the electronics. I mean, why d'ya think we are on the Titanic's younger sister? This thing should be a museum, not an ocean liner, but all the new liners are almost like NASA built 'em, too much electronics—they would break down two seconds after they crossed."

"Is this thing safe, then?" you ask, suddenly uncertain.

The valet looks around at the ship as if seeing it for the first time. "Well if it's not, I'll save you a seat on one of the lifeboats." He winks and starts to leave, but then turns around to say another word to you. "Oh, and make sure you don't get caught with a camera—it's a UN rule. No pictures allowed!"

Jaime skips around the corner, his steps almost bouncing down the old deck, carrying two cups of coffee.

Jaime gives you a cup and you thank him passively. "No electronics? No iPods, no laptops?"

Jaime sips his coffee a little bit too quickly and dribbles some down his sweatshirt. "Uh, yes, yeah. I forgot about that whole thing..."

You squint at him. "I didn't know that, Jaime, jeez."

Jaime grows quickly defensive, not making eye contact. "You didn't read up anything about The Oberon? I mean that's like, like the first thing they say, Sarah, really..."

"How do people get around?" you ask. "Horses? No cars? Sending mail by carrier pigeon, maybe? Is there electricity? Hopefully there are toilets..."

"Sometimes," Jaime says, giving you a sidelong glance. "There's books inside, Sarah. A really good one is The Oberon by Frank Morgan."

You stare out into the ocean, glancing at the skyline of Long Beach, California. "We really doing this?"

Jaime starts to nod but then has to step to the side a little bit as the Queen Mary lurches forward and a foghorn blares out three times.

"I guess we are, Sarah," Jaime says, brushing his black hair back with his hand as it is blown around in the wind. "I'm so excited I could almost spit!" Jaime exclaims.

You, being in a dark mood, mock him to his face. "Oh goodie!" you say, and clap rapidly.

You walk away down the deck with your coffee. Jaime looks hurt when you glance back at him. You feel bad for a moment, but just for a moment. You take a gulp of your coffee and spit it out over the railing just as Jaime comes up and switches coffees with you. "I usually put in about six sugar packets and fill half of the cup with cream. I am sorry about that."

You nod, say thanks, and sip away.

The knowledge that you are going to a completely different place is unreal and heavy all at once. The feeling of thin ice under your feet is there as well, unpleasant. Perhaps the cracks are already forming.

As the Queen Mary chugs out into the open ocean, the briny smell of seawater steadily streams into your nostrils. You hear seagulls crying and the continuous blasting horns of tug boats. You watch as the Long Beach skyline, full of condo towers and high-rises, cranes and floating docks, gradually diminishes. The coastline of the world slowly disappears into the distance and you feel a sort of relief, a sort of stillness in your chest, as you realize that you have done it.

A pre-recorded, cultured female voice comes over the loudspeakers. "The Off-World Network and the Witch-Lord of The Oberon welcome you aboard the Queen Mary and wish you well on your journey to The Oberon off-world settlements. And now your host, Morgan Freeman, who will join you at certain stages of the journey."

People begin to clap and cheer, thrilled at their upcoming journey. There's a slight pause and then Freeman's deep voice speaks; an uplifting soundtrack plays in the background. "Today, you begin your voyage to a place once found only in the imaginations of the writers of fiction—a place like no other, a place only opened to outsiders after centuries of isolation.

"Fifteen days from now, you will have crossed the great blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean to the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the furthest point in the ocean away from all landmasses, or as the sailors once called it, Point Nemo, in reference to Jules Verne's Captain Nemo.

"And there, on the day of the southern hemisphere's summer solstice, December 22nd, you will see the phenomenon that Frank Morgan, the discoverer of The Oberon, famously called 'God Moving Over the Face of the Waters'—the opening of the great Nemo Gate, the largest one in the universe.

"As we start our first steps towards going off-world, let us take a moment to appraise the potential fruitfulness of that far-off place you are going to."

The Queen Mary steams towards a massive structure that sits in the middle of the ocean, a technological monstrosity that is the new ori-reactor, a sixty story, quarter of a mile wide steel pyramidal structure that tapers off into a narrow flattop. Blue and orange lights dot the structure, and the reactor center has the telltale whitish hue around it noting the active use of power-producing orichalcum. Waves crash and crest onto its base. Small ships with construction cranes and other equipment are docked next to its sides.

"This project, if successful, will be a Network reactor, Solomon's House One, built with the plans of the Antediluvian civilization that has been extinct for 6,000 years. When fully constructed and brought finally online, this first reactor will potentially be able to generate enough electrical power to light every household, factory, shop, and school from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Pure white orichalcum, the mineral used for energy consumption, will be this and other reactors' lifeblood, delivered to all of us by the sacrifices and discoveries of young prospectors and young free settlers who live life on a new frontier."

Freeman's recording continues as you pick up on a couple's conversation, just barely though as the wind begins to pick up. You notice that nearly everyone on-board is as young as you or only slightly older.

You take a deep breath, enjoying these moments of absolute freedom but also feeling like you've just been cut adrift.

You feel very much alone at that moment, though Jaime is beside you. Jaime is too interested in the reactor to be of much company to you.

Jaime notices you staring off into space. He pats you on the shoulder twice and then gives you a little hug, and you find yourself responding.

~~~~

YOU wake up on your end of the bed in the little cabin. Jaime sleeps with his feet towards your head, and your feet point towards his head. Jaime's feet smell, and you're a little disgusted every time you spring awake. You have been doing this little routine for a couple of weeks now, as the liner makes its way across the South Pacific. You're sick of it and sick of yourself for having set up this whole thing to begin with. What the hell has just happened? is now your running mantra.

You flip on the cabin bathroom light, brush your hair, and stare at the mirror for a few moments. You roll your eyes at the mirror image of yourself.

You put on jeans and a jacket and step outside into the deck's hallway; the lights flicker for a moment. It's almost like walking through the lobby part of that Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride you went on with Tyler a few months ago. Tyler was so scared he ditched you in line because he heard about the drop and was too much of an effing you-know-what to go on. The hallway is vintage 1930s horror—dust covers all the beautifully ornate crown molding and the almost-Victorian style lighting.

Up ahead, you see that the door leading to the outside deck has been left propped open, and you step through the heavy doorframe. From the deck you look out onto a millpond ocean. There is a full moon highlighting the lack of new waves.

Partially illuminated by the moonlight and the glow of lights streaming through cabin windows is a young man, older than you, with slightly ruffled blond hair and a pair of white Ray-Ban sunglasses tucked into the neck of his black T-shirt that sits under a black cloth jacket. He stands there, waiting alone, as if he knew you were coming.

You say hello to him curtly and he says, "Good evening," right back at you.

You look over your shoulder towards the wide, expansive ocean. Dry white lightning rolls out over the horizon without a single thunderclap to be heard. Little balls of lightning, blue and orange in color, begin to dip into the far distant ocean, rise again, and disappear back into the greater darkness. "G-Good Lord," you say, startled. There is a spread of three green balls of lightning that each fly towards different points of the compass and disappear.

"What is it?" you say.

Guy Farson, who looks at you sideways, speaks his first full sentence to you. "Ball lightning phenomena coming out near Point Nemo. It is starting to open. I knew we could see it now. It will be like this for a few hours, then nothing. And then something incredible, like God opening a hole in the universe... You did not hear the orientation stuff with Morgan Freeman narrating? About what happens when we actually go into the Gate?" Guy says with innocent wonder, not mocking you.

You blink several times. "I wasn't paying attention." A strong wind blows from somewhere far off, pushing Guy and you further to the right, towards the outside deck walls. He doesn't say anything further.

"Sarah. Sarah Orange," you say. "I'm sorry, what's your name?"

"Guy Farson," he says. You shake his hand up and down with one fluid motion, and Guy continues to watch the display happening outside the ship. "First time to The Oberon?"

"Ye-yes," you say. "It should be fun."

Guy smiles, looks like he wants to say something but holds his tongue. "That is one way of putting it."

Guy rubs the thin layer of stubble on his cheeks, as if thinking about something. "I have no idea why I am volunteering this information. I sort of 'dayhawk' for a living. What do you do?"

You wonder what the hell a dayhawk is, but then remember. "Oh?" you say, chuckling. "Me and my, my, uh, Jamie, are goin' to be dayhawkin' too. I guess. Well... At a place called the Super Sargasso region."

You keep talking despite Guy's obvious lack of interest. "He'll be, uh, grabbing salvageables, is that the right word? It'll be a hoot." You realize how retarded that sounds and so does Guy, but he doesn't say anything.

"Maybe I will be seeing you out there. I go out that way sometimes," Guy says back to you.

Guy Farson then takes out a silver flask and has a sip from it.

"Is that alcohol?" you ask timidly.

"No. Not at all," Farson says, looking at you sideways, seeing if you get the joke. You nod quickly, feeling a chill, laughing a little. "Goodnight." Guy leaves, watching the electricity play out over the far waters as he continues to walk down the deck.

~~~~

DECEMBER 22nd, 2012

Summer Solstice (Southern Hemisphere)

Point Nemo

You sit on the bed, feeling the top of Jaime's head. "You are not burning up with fever, at least. That's a good sign-"

Jaime interrupts. "I feel like I got to throw up again." Jaime gets out of bed, wanders in his pajamas to the bathroom, and closes the door behind him. You hear a vile noise come out of him, and it makes you wince.

Jaime stumbles back to bed looking a pale green. He compulsively wipes his mouth. "You go on ahead to the party. I'll, I'll be here until this calms down. I won't miss it, I swear I won't miss it..."

You sigh and stand up. "Look, Jaime, if you need anything, please, uh, well you can't call me, but call the porter, okay? Don't suffer with being sea sick..."

Jaime groans and closes his eyes. "Please get me up when the portal opens, okay? Please?"

After a moment you leave the cabin, closing the door quietly behind you.

~~~~

THE party is in full swing, the chants of well-wishers and the clanging of glasses echoing throughout Winston's Lounge. Happy "Summer" Solstice reads the large white and blue banner that hangs across the mirrored wall directly behind the bar. The lounge you are in is towards the bow of the ship, facing the darkness of the ocean ahead of you all. Cigarette smoke fogs every corner. Couples dance on the large tiled floor in the middle of the space while a Huey Lewis and the News cover band sing something about a new drug. The set of TVs for the lounge are being taken down into storage by men in grim, gray overalls armed with ladders. They are precariously trying to get the equipment out amongst a sea of partygoers and the curious.

You are sipping on a Shirley Temple and watching the people mingle, dance, laugh, drink, and celebrate as time ticks down towards the portal opening at exactly 3:00am, as it does every solstice. It is 12:18am right now, according to Mickey Mouse. You slept most of the day in anticipation of the late night. You are lost in thought, thinking about where you are going. Anxiety fills every pore of your body. You sit there with a sick stomach and an aching and racing heart.

A lit cigar hangs out of one side of his mouth, and he has a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label scotch in one hand. He is in a sort of business-casual suit, complete with loose tie. Guy Farson, of course, wearing his sunglasses. "Oh god, I love Huey Lewis and the Blues," he says, trying to be heard over the music as he sways to every beat.

"N-news," you say, nervous. The young man you've only just met the night before seems drunk.

"What?" he almost yells, sitting himself down at his table with a thump. Your Shirley Temple almost tips over onto the white tablecloth before you grab it.

"It's uh, uh News. Huey Lewis and the News."

"Jews?" he says. "I always thought that was an odd name for a band, innit? Huey Lewis and the Jews." You look around desperately for an easy out.

The band finishes up their song and tells everyone that they'll be back in ten minutes to play up to the opening of the Nemo Gate. The noise level dies down a bit.

Farson takes your glass, drinks all that is left of the Shirley Temple, and pours the Walker over the leftover ice. He flips over an unused white coffee mug that was on a plate and splashes some into it for himself. "I don't drink a-alcohol. I'm underage," you say with firmness in your voice. You stare at him for a good moment.

"And I'm really twenty-eight. I don't drink except on weekends. I don't lie to friends, borrow money from family, and I go to church only on Christmas and Easter. Anything else you want to share? You ever do drugs with a stranger?"

You begin to shake your head and stand up. He holds up a hand and takes a drink of his scotch from the coffee mug. "Look, Sarah." He licks his full lips as if thinking for a moment, trying to get over some sort of hurdle to speak what is on his mind.

"Let me tell you something, Miss Orange. I'll leave in just a minute, but I think that you must be a very interesting girl." He looks around for a moment and then put his head forward, closer to you. "Let me explain."

You cross your arms, hopefully looking tough. He keeps speaking. "You're by yourself here—no friends that I can see. You just signed up, no problem, by yourself. So you must have quite a sense of adventure—going by yourself, as a young lady. Not a lot of people can do that. I mean, money is tight back in the USA but still... I was watching you from the side as you came in. Everyone here is with somebody, 'cept you and me. And I know why I am alone."

You say nothing for a while. "Maybe you're right. I always wanted to have an adventure. But you are also wrong—I'm here with my husband."

Guy tilts his head. "Who isn't here now, is he? On the biggest night of the voyage?"

You shrug. "He's sick."

Guy nods his head up and down, grinning, clapping his hands together. "Sick or not sick I'd be with a pretty girl like you. You know, I'm sick of cake ass niggas like him."

You laugh a little and look away from him.

Guy continues. "I love meeting people who want to break the mold. I was the same way too. Or still am, I suppose. Well then, do you mind if I spend this solstice talking to you? I am by myself."

You look down for a long moment and then straight into Guy's eyes—well, sunglasses. "What exactly do you do in The Oberon?"

He pauses and downs the contents of the coffee mug. He licks his lips. "I'm the point man for a co-op called Tokyo Sexy Whale. I didn't make up the name, I swear, I know it sounds just, well, anyway. I'm the first one into the old buildings in the cities. I get first look at old Antediluvian-made stuff that would just blow your effing mind. Incredible stuff is just lying around, waiting for the absolute taking. I'm the guy in the radiation suit with the pistol and the orichalcum baton jumping down dark holes, doing things that are questionable in retrospect."

Guy looks out the window for a moment, as if lost in thought. You look at your watch, 12:30am.

"In a few hours, you're going to have left the US for the first time and will be doin' something very different to anything you have ever experienced before," Farson says, almost as if talking to himself.

You have to choose between leaving and just letting the man talk. Guy leans back. "Have a drink with me, dear." He pours you a drink, the very first full drink of alcohol you've ever had in your life. "To the Winkie Country!"

"What?" you say, holding your glass up. "Winkie Country?"

"Never heard of that? From the Wizard of Oz. That's the nickname for The Oberon. Winkie Country—one fourth of the land of Oz—the part of Oz where the Wicked Witch lives. People call the Ni-Perchta natives Winkies because some asshole thought it was funny a long time ago."

You and Guy clink glass and mug together and you slug the scotch down. It burns your throat and makes your eyes water. You cough long and hard.

"Good stuff, no?" Guy says, with a mischievous smile. "Like Gene Hackman says, don't get too used to good scotch, it's more expensive than drugs."

~~~~

YOU and Guy talk the evening away. He tells you about what he's done, where he's been, where to go in the Winkie Country. You try to light your first cigar but Farson's cheap lighter keeps blowing out. You give up and let the cigar just hang there. You take another sip of scotch and probably make an awful face. Guy Farson keeps on; it's like a one man, one audience member show.

"Somebody said that the whole thing, being in Winkie Country, is like this old David Gilmour song. The lyrics go like this: 'When you've come in you're in for good, there's no promises made, the part you've played, the chance you took, there are no boundaries set...'"

You nod, making as much sense out of it as you can. You can barely hear him at this point, between the people and the steady pop beat of some fast Huey Lewis song from the band. After a moment the band transitions into something slower and sweeter; the physical gyrations of the crowd break down into slow dances.

"Let's, let's do this thing that all the screwing kids are doing. Let's dance to whatever this song is," Farson says, slamming the table with the flat of his hand and almost knocking over the bottle of whiskey.

"Sure." You get up, putting the unlit cigar into your pocket. It is now 2:45am. Farson looks pleased with himself. You get up and stretch. "Happy to be stuck with me."

He stares at you. "Excuse me?"

"Name of the song," you croak.

Guy takes you by the hand and starts dancing with you, leading you awkwardly. "My sister taught me to dance a long time ago, and told me not to go for the ass grab until thirty seconds into the song."

You raise an eyebrow.

"She was a weirdo," Guy says, caressing your ass for a second before you take the hand off. "Still got what I wanted."

You giggle a little.

The lights dim and brighten, signaling something is about to begin. Farson puts his blazer back on then takes you roughly by the hand. "Let's go get a good bird's eye view, shall we?"

You follow dutifully behind him as he elbows or otherwise slams others out of the way, and you make it through the heavy doors that lead to the deck outside. The warm Pacific wind blows steadily, increasing in power. You feel slightly drunk after your one and a half drinks. Children in pajamas, slightly-to-fully-intoxicated adults, and the crew are all hands on deck, waiting for the big show to begin. You can see the other lights of the small fleet, waiting, each ship full of settlers to The Oberon. Guy takes out a cigar and lights it and lights yours as well. Your cigar blows out after a second.

A crack of thunder rolls out. Guy points to the crow's nest, that single white tower that juts up and above the deck. He goes over to it, nonchalant, and climbs up the ladder, ignoring the obvious Do Not Climb sign tied to a rung. After a moment's hesitation, with the wind blowing your hair this way and that, you spit out the cigar and begin to climb, looking at all the white stars that mark the thick black sky. You get all the way to the top, thirty feet up from the deck, and without being detected. Everyone is looking out over the ocean instead. Even the crew, who are mostly away from their posts at this time.

There is a strong and heavy wind from the west, almost blowing you and Guy completely to the side. Deafening metallic horns, a mix between a foghorn and the cry of a whale, echo out over the entire ocean. The wind and the horns then stop. And lights in the sky begin to flash.

The once black sky begins to fill with a bioluminescent cloud of blue and gray light. The cloud takes over the southern horizon you are all staring at. This light comes from the right hand side and quickly passes to the left. Streams of gray clouds, partially obscuring the original light, are generated from some far-off source. Others coming from the opposite direction meet these streams. A red and orange cloud—long, thick, distorted—begins to cruise over the ocean with little pinpricks of white flashing in its core. The cloud is the size of an island, maybe thirty or forty football fields across, and high up into the heavens. Where it came from you cannot tell. It has just simply appeared. Guy Farson, standing next to you on the crow's nest, whistles out loud. He's taken his glasses off.

A rumbling begins and the cloud stops in front of you all. Dry lightning flashes all around. As the cloud begins to dissipate, a thick column of water rises up to the sky, something so large and awe-inspiring that it reminds you of something out of those old newsreels that would show the hydrogen bomb detonations in the atolls.

After the water descends, it appears. There is utter stillness, no lightning, no clouds, no horns. No sound again.

Miles upon miles wide, blacker than the night it is framed against, stretching from one end of the horizon to another, is the primary Nemo Gate. It is a superstructure so large that it seems it has enveloped one end of the Earth, with a distinguishable peaking towards the middle. At its center it is blacker than black, emitting no visible light.

The Nemo Gate is the height of the Empire State Building in New York. Its perimeter is covered in fantastical and frighteningly large sculptures of creatures, either strange dragons or cephalopod in shape with long and terrible tentacles. Smoke trails from each sculpture's mouth. Designs of armored humans and Ni-Perchta wielding serrated swords are also on its sides. The sea does not lap against the Gate's sides; it has stopped dead in its tracks against the massiveness of the thing that has just appeared.

Finally, as if the whole entire Gate is a giant television slowly switching on, the utter blackness that has been at the center changes. Lights flash in its dark center.

As if you are looking through one incredible window, you can see another world in the middle of the Gate. A portal is open. You can see that the ocean leads into some other incredible ocean, and that on the other side there is not a night sky, like in our world, but a brightening morning sky with seven ghostly moons shining through the heavens. Strange manta ray-like creatures fly in the far-off distance, their tails trailing across the sky. "Good Lord," you whisper, your hand over your mouth.

Farson smiles. He has these beautiful gray-blue eyes.

"We will go through and dock at Solomon's Bay, and in seven weeks, the Gate will disappear like it was never here. You won't see the Gate up and open until next June." Your eyes meet, and you look at each other for a moment too long. You kiss him lightly on the lips.

"Hee hee," Guy says. "Your husband doesn't know..."

He motions for you to climb down from the crow's nest. You do, then endure a scolding from an officer or someone official-looking. Guy disappears into the crowd.

You find Jaime there, in his pajamas and jacket. He looks slightly upset. "You didn't wake me up," Jaime says in a sad whisper. His forehead is glistening with fever sweat.

No one dares to be the first one to move away from deck as everyone drinks in the incredible view of the Nemo Gate and its sight into another planet.

"Oh, snap, sorry. Sorry about that. Jeez, did you see it?"

"I did. Barely in time," Jaime says. "Who was the guy?"

You shrug. "That guy was Guy, Guy Farson."

Jaime mutters a, "Meh," and then explodes into an excited burst of energy. "Wasn't that freakin' awesome? Oh my god, we did it! We're gonna cross! We are going to cross big time!"

Jaime looks much healthier and happier now, much more himself. He takes in the view with a sigh as he looks over the shoulder of another girl your age. Jaime starts talking to her, smiling and laughing. You excuse yourself and walk back to the now empty and cleared lounge. You suddenly feel a little ill.

You make it to the women's bathroom where you are by yourself. You stare at the mirror for a long moment, seeing a slightly disheveled, tired-looking young woman with brunette hair. You splash some, thankfully, cold water onto your face and exit the bathroom, only to run into him again, Guy, walking down the hallway. Guy sees the look on your face.

"I'll see you on the other side," Guy says with a kind smile. His eyes look over your shoulder. You follow his gaze and see a massive black wall advancing forward, seemingly eating every part of the Queen Mary. Your ship is passing through the Nemo Gate, you realize with a start, and Guy puts a hand on your shoulder. "It'll be over in just a moment. It doesn't hurt."

The black wall keeps advancing and advancing to the point that it is just a few feet away from you. You inadvertently step backwards onto Guy's left foot, and he hisses a little in pain. Then the wall hits you. You have this particularly strange feeling of being pinched on every square inch of your body. You see only blackness for one moment, and then you feel like you are watching stars explode and a white ring grow and grow.

A moment later you are again standing next to Guy, who pats you on the shoulder and turns to leave. Reality hits you very hard—you are now in The Oberon, millions of miles away from anything you've ever known.

Guy turns back to you, waits a moment, tilts his head and asks, "I will see you back at the lounge?"

You slowly nod, and then shake your head. "No, no, Jaime. My Jaime is going to be- well..."

Jaime comes into the corridor, happy as can be. "Eighteen more hours to Solomon's Bay! Eighteen more hours! I'm going to go take a nap! So tired and so sick!" Jaime squirts out, leaving you standing there with Guy Farson.

You tell Jaime's back, "I'll, I'll be taking a nap soon."

Jaime, who makes an exaggerated yawn, states, "Okey dokey!" He claps his hands together twice.

Jaime continues to walk down the corridor; you wait until he is well out of earshot. You turn to Guy Farson. "I'll see you back in the lounge."

~~~~

GUY asks you if you want something to drink but you shake your head as you meet him back in the lounge. The room is now full of bright morning sun, filling every inch of the lounge that is still in full party mode as dawn streams in. You breathe in the air of the new world, feeling a sense of accomplishment—a minor sense of accomplishment, but one all the same.

You are lost in thought and don't notice that Guy has just bought you a glass of champagne and placed it onto the bar's counter right in front of you. There are couples dancing around to the new wave of music coming from the band that's playing during this early off-world hour.

"All of our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them." Guy raises his drink to you and you clink your glass of champagne against his.

"Cheers." You sip the champagne. "Thanks for the drink I didn't want. Whose quote is that?"

"Motherfucking Walt Disney. But it rings true, eh?" Guy leaves his now emptied glass on the counter after taking one mouthful. "See you in Winkie Country." He leans forward and kisses you for a long time. "Good luck out there."

"You taste like alcohol, schoolgirl," Guy says with a wink.

# Chapter Four: Solomon's Bay

You make it back to the bow where the Queen Mary, now under a darkening and dusky but still very much daytime sky, is steaming forward to your first stop, that medieval city you once saw as a model back on Earth.

You find Jaime again, looking so happy and excited, until he looks at your face and seems to remember something very important. The look on his face of shock and horror scares you so badly that you immediately and unconsciously touch the little crucifix hanging from your neck. "What, what is it?" you ask.

Jaime swallows a few times and says. "I forgot. Well, Sarah, I forgot about the whole, uh, well-"

"The computers and the iPods, right? You forgot to give them to the purser. Oh Jesus, I even talked to the purser Jaime. People still use their computers carefully out there, now my Hungry Birds scores, my Manowar songs-"

"Angry Birds," Jaime interjects.

You are too annoyed to keep speaking for a moment though your mouth keeps up a sort of speaking motion. "Whatever."

Jaime looks at you. "Hey, hey, you forgot to wake me for the coolest part of the trip! So there!"

Jaime's stupid mistake here has put you into a really nasty mood now, squashing away any fear and trepidation and replacing those feelings with anger and annoyance. You keep your face in a tight frown for the next few moments until the first firework goes off in the sky, welcoming you into The Oberon.

You notice that there are now large bonfires lit on that far-off shore. The bonfires are flickering under this massive statue you see in the distance—a statue so large it almost seems to block the setting sun. The statue is of a creature with two faces: one angry, one calm. It holds with one slightly lower hand what looks like an entire medieval city. The back of the hand is just above the ocean. In the center of its large palm, on a real or artificial hilltop, is a very large temple or castle made out of a dark wood that looks to you like a Japanese temple set on top of a giant wooden barge that still has oars sticking out of its sides. Giant flags or sails are at the four corners of this temple, facing towards the almost-set sun.

In the other hand, forever floating above its palm, are seven massive stone spheres, representing the permanent moons. A crown of demonic looking skulls is on the statue's brow. The stone has been cut to look like flames are surrounding the statue.

Jaime points out the city. "Solomon's Bay, Solokon-Bi in Perchta. First stop."

You start to see these custom fireworks, spruced up with orichalcum, being set off in celebration of the first ship coming through the portal. There is a fireworks explosion that is made to look like little robots that dance across the sky, while other fireworks, detonated just seconds before, keep burning in the sky for minutes afterwards. Fireworks made to look like scary bats and dragons fly back and forth over the sea. You watch in awe.

At the very end, right after a gigantic finale when it seems to you like every firework in the world is shot off at once, the blue and white overlapping circles of the Off-World Network symbol appear in the sky.

~~~~

THE Queen Mary, by ascending somehow, is now docked next to the palm of the statue's hand, which holds the city of Solomon's Bay. The Queen is in actuality floating in the air next to the city in the statue's palm, bobbing on top of sheer nothing. Other ships from the portal fleet are nearby too, as well as some strange others that are also floating in the air next to the palm. Small wooden ships with red Chinese-style sails that seem to jut out from their sides, hang from strong ropes that are wrapped around large blimp-like balloons. Some you see are heavily modified and even have a couple of cars hanging from their sides on hooks; the cars are either being used for ballast or being transported, you really are not sure. One of these airships floats out over the ocean, disappearing into the distance.

You and your "husband" Jaime disembark amidst a sea of other humans stepping off the gangplanks and platforms and onto the stone docks of the city. The area right outside the docks is listed in your brochure as the Free Market. It is a large space full of open shops that are under three or four story stone towers where you assume the city's Ni-Perchta live. Most of the towers have flat tops. There are a few that are ten stories tall with slanted, wooden roofs of premium craftsmanship. Only a few buildings have glass in their windows—the rest just have shutters and silk curtains that flap in the sea breeze. You follow Jaime, who is carrying all the bags.

"Sarah, Sarah, could you carry some of this?" Jaime whines.

You respond, "Consider it penance for the computer screw up back there. I just lost all my Mano- I mean Bieber songs. All my Justin Bieber songs."

You catch something from Jaime saying Bieber sucks donkey you-know-what, and you shoot him a look. "When did you start talking like that?" you ask.

Jaime shoots you a look back and says nothing.

You see your first Ni-Perchta up close. This one is helping a couple of humans into the back of his horse-drawn wagon, which is not so much a wagon as an old El Camino station wagon on moldy rubber tires being pulled along by horses.

Bunches of Ni-Perchta aliens are standing around, doing business in the same way they have for hundreds of years—their fantastical and medieval lifestyle mostly seems unchanged; their clothing and demeanor are things from a fourteenth century golden age. People and Ni-Perchta wander about. No store has walls or doors to keep anyone away—they are all counters and tables and open spaces under the apartment buildings and the pillars that hold up each structure. Only a couple of buildings have some electricity. The smell is incredibly strong—a mix of random spices, Ni-Perchta candles, and the steamy smell of tasty things cooking.

Some of the shops are makeshift cafes. You see one where a couple of people and Ni-Perchta are cracking open the boiled shells of trilobite-like things. The trilobite things' shells are bright red like boiled lobsters. A sign showing a painted picture of one of the creatures reads Boiled Trilos in English. The restaurant-goers are stripping the shells off and chowing down on the meat. It looks like the entire things are composed of one giant lobster tail underneath the shells.

Seeing a Ni-Perchta close up after years of hearing rumors and reading explanations of their features is frightening to you—here are beings in front of you as intelligent as any human being, but they are not human.

Their skin color is something else, a gray-white, making them look almost as if they are the inverse of a photonegative. Their eyes glow a little red in the darkness, but you find out later that in regular daylight they are a dull gray color. Their ears are slightly pointed. Other than that, they are very human-looking, though everyone seems to be on the tall side. From all the "scientific" reports you've read in Cosmopolitan magazine, you know that it is possible to have kids with them, though the Ephors, the police of the Witch-Lord, will kill or abduct any product of such relations.

You nudge Jaime along, quietly berating him for staring at the Ni-Perchta driver and say, "Look around for a cab. We are going to Nikh-Cunm Station for the steam mono." He nods in understanding, but then Jaime trips over something that is sticking out of the cobblestone street and falls over, right onto your bags.

You curse under your breath, picking him up as a few people and Ni-Perchta look over at you. "Quit making a scene, Jaime," you say.

He replies loudly, "You quit making a scene!" attracting even more attention.

At this moment, you see the Ephors for the first time; there is a group of five heading over. They come from nowhere, walking past a very large art deco-type building. On its wall, a neon sign powered by electricity reads: Ori Wholesaler 1 and Network. You see dirty and dusty humans carrying boxes and bags into the building after unloading all the things from an old 1950s semi-truck.

The Ephors, the Ni-Perchta warrior-police of the Witch-Lord of The Oberon, are dressed in golden and green armor that is as ornate as it is tough, made of individual plates that almost look like hand-crafted leaves or feathers. Each wears a half-mask made out of black cloth to cover their mouths, and the one in front wears on his head a half-crown with one wing. Each is armed with a long, serrated blade and an ancient-looking black ori-staff with a few small orichalcum stones embedded in the hilt.

Jaime looks so happy to see them as they come up to you; they're about six feet away. You unconsciously touch your little crucifix necklace.

"Oh wow, Ephors! I've read about them," Jaime says before the lead Ephor lowers his half-mask and stares at Jaime, who suddenly shuts up for a moment. Then he says, "I've read about you. Hi, I'm Jaime Van Zandt and this is Sarah, er, Sarah Orange. I don't think we changed the- well sorry, let me start again." Jaime spoke further in accented and stilted Perchta. You can recognize only his name and your name in his mini speech.

The lead Ephor holds up his right hand and speaks in clear, if accented, English. "I am Dwelka Storma, and I am the Ephor inspector of off-world barbarians and their customs."

"I was talking," Jaime says, annoyed, and you look at him as if he has just grown another head.

You put out a hand nervously which the Ephor pointedly ignores. "You bring Jesus Christ and his teachings here?"

You and Jaime look at each other, confused, and then Jaime panics. Jaime leaps in, "Um, no, no, Morgan Freeman on the loudspeaker told us, uh, not to bring any Bibles or Korans or the secret books, and we haven't. You- your people-" Your eyes grow wide and Jaime makes a motion like he has this all under control. "Your people do not like converting, people being converted."

Dwelka Storma smiles a little. "So there isn't a group of packages marked 'oranges' that contain thumb-sized Bibles made in San Antonio, America, on that ship you just came in on?"

You shake your head repeatedly. "I only go to church at Christmas. I'm not a Bible, Bible smuggler, if that's what you think."

Storma comes forward and grabs your crucifix necklace in one armored hand, twirling the little cross piece. "Of course that's what I think." Storma lets go. He calls out in their Perchta language, a sort of lyrical language. It sounds to you like Japanese being spoken by someone with a Russian accent. The four Ephors back up as Storma steps to the side.

You notice that humans and Ni-Perchta in that crowded place are watching this scene play out. Your heart starts beating hard. You think something awful is about to happen, which it does. One of the Ephors expands his ancient steel staff, which extends out nearly three feet and glows a grim green.

Lightning shoots out from the Ephor's orichalcum staff, striking you and Jaime down with one concentrated bolt. It succeeds in knocking you out for a moment. You fall on your back, your body quivering from the shock, your teeth rattling. Jaime took most of the blast and is completely out. You taste blood in your mouth. Someone in the crowd is screaming.

Tall, dark shapes that you see through your clouded vision march towards you quickly in a tight formation. You can barely move; half of your body is numb. You try to scream but only a slight squeak of air gets past your lips.

One of the Ni-Perchta Ephors comes over carrying a white rope and flips you over onto your stomach, hog-tying you as you pass out.

~~~~

YOU wake up on a straw bed in a small stone cell that's maybe the size of Tyler and Jaime's bathroom back on Earth. It takes you a while to come out of it, and your head hurts as bad as when you fell off your bike and knocked your head on the ground two years ago at Sandy's. You ask Jaime to turn off the goddamn radio, but then you notice that Jaime is messing with the lock on your jail cell door with a small screwdriver and, you think, the hairpin that used to be in your hair.

There's someone screaming in an alien language in a way that scares you. You shake with adrenaline and start to breathe heavy.

"Where are we?" you say in a raspy, dry voice. Jaime drops his screwdriver and looks around. He then shuffle-crawls away from the bars of the jail cell door. Dark shadows cross his face as he moves away from the meager torchlight that illuminates the dungeon. You sit up and take some straw out of your hair. "Where are we?"

"Temple of the Witch-Lord. We are under arrest for Bible smuggling," Jaime says, kneeling next to you. "Crazy." You look at him incredulously. Jaime pats your shoulder. "I asked for the Network rep, but they seemed to ignore me... Can you believe this?"

Jaime mutters something about this being exciting.

The screaming stops.

"Plenty exciting," you respond, palms sweating and your heart increasing its pace. "What's the penalty for Bible smuggling?" you ask. "Oh god, we stay here for a few years?"

Jaime shakes his head. "Oh no. No, it's either being released in Gug territory to be eaten or decapitation. They don't do trials here. I'll just have a hand chopped off because I'm the accomplice; you're the actual suspect. And you'll be..." He doesn't finish his sentence.

You swallow. Jaime rubs your shoulder. "I have a plan. I break the lock on this door, and then we sneak down the hall. The Ni-Perchta are not really on top of proper law enforcement procedures I've noticed, because I have this still," he gestures to the screwdriver, "and then we get to the American Residents' House in the Forearm Quarter and-"

You look at him like he's lost his mind. "Are you nuts? This isn't a video game. They could kill us for escaping, oh my god."

Jaime nods rapidly. "I'm- I know, but god, I'm scared Sarah and we... Really-"

You hug each other. You feel a large and bloody gouge on Jaime's back. "Something bit me in here. You believe that?" Jaime says. "When I was asleep."

You nod, hugging him tight and then letting go. You feel in your back pocket that book you were given by Scratch, ages ago it seems. You take it out for a moment, and then put it back. You think about how it would be back home—the cops would take everything out of your pockets any time you were arrested. Jaime is right—law enforcement procedures are really lacking here.

"Wait, wait, you don't need to pick this lock," you say. "Let me look."

It's a simple combination job, from Earth, something you remember from high school. Kneeling down face to face with the combination lock, you notice it has forty digits, so you think. At least it's not something strange like a Ni-Perchta lock. It's just a rudimentary, run of the mill lock that can be cracked.

"Are you serious? They lock their jail cells with these? I had that lock in high school on my locker," you whisper.

"Los Alamitos High did have these locks too—The Oberon is amazingly third world," Jaime says. "So advanced yet so behind."

Jaime continues to speak. "Forty digits means, of course, 64,000 combinations. Which leaves us S.O.L., initially."

You lean back as Jaime holds the lock in his hand.

"Look, Jaime, I want you to follow what I have to say, okay?" you say, your voice trembling. "I'll keep an eye on the corridor. We can hack this cheap thing. Here's what you need to do."

You don't want to touch the lock yourself as your hands shake too badly.

Jaime puts his hands on the lock, looking at you with amazement. "First thing, dial the lock back to zero. Okay. Pull down on the shackle thing, Jaime. I remember that. Turn the dial to the right and find the first point where it starts to stick. Okay and it's, uh, 23, right." You hear boots click-clock down the stone floor of the dungeon, coming closer at first and then just fading away.

"Continue holding that latch down, turn it left as much as you can. It's 22. So between 22 and 23, it's 22 and a half, okay, that's the point where it sticks. Remember that, Jaime. I'll remember it too."

As you have nothing to write with you just have to grab that number and keep it in your head-you think, until you get a better idea. "Okay, okay," you say to yourself.

"Release the shackle, turn past the point where it got stuck at, one number higher. So that would be between 23 and 24."

Sweat starts to bead up on your forehead as you remember this trick. You hear some voices, and you think for a moment that the Ephors are coming. You listen, still crouched next to Jaime, your knees hurting.

"Okay, pull down the shackle Jaime." He does so and then starts slowly spinning the combination dial clockwise. "Find where it gets stuck twelve more times..." you whisper.

"Okay," Jaime says, still looking at you like you've just lost your mind. He seems to be going through the motions now. Jaime reads the numbers back to you. You and Jaime jot down the rest of the numbers by writing in the dust of the dungeon floor.

"Okay. Ignore all the ones that are between numbers. So you should have only five left because seven of those numbers are in-betweeners. 6, 16, 26, 28, and 36. Okay. Which number is the odd one out, Jaime?"

"28, Sarah."

"Okay. Jaime, this is the third number in the combination. What's 28 divided by 4? 7. Any remainder, Jaime?"

You look at Jaime, who is incredulous that you are asking these questions instead of just telling him the goddamn answer. "No."

You stand up, stretching your legs. "Next step is that you take that remainder number, which was 0, and keep adding 4 until you have gone around the entire dial."

You think for a moment and carefully put those numbers down in the thick dust of the dungeon cell to help you remember.

"Jaime, one of those numbers is now your first number. Last step here—to find the second number—what do you have again, what's that remainder number?"

"0, Mom," Jaime snaps at you.

"Add 2 and that's your answer, so add 4 to that until you are all the way around the dial. So what's those numbers? Uh, 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, 30, 34, 38, that's it. And now you have your second combination number. Write it down in the dust if you need to, Jaime. Now, instead of 64,000 combinations, you have something more reasonable." Panic sets into you a little bit, eating away at any remaining confidence as you think of the Ni-Perchta returning.

"Try 'em out. Remember, your third number is 28."

Jaime starts to spin the combination dial as quietly as he can. Jaime runs through the gamut for a couple of minutes straight before you hear some footsteps get closer. He spins the dial twice but has no luck. He tries the next combo, and this time the lock pops open with a snick. You luck out big time.

"Isn't the Internet the best?" you say, as you slowly open the cell door.

Jaime kisses you on the cheek, stunning you. "Okay, then," Jaime says, wiping his mouth.

~~~~

YOU and Jaime almost tiptoe down the corridor. You walk deeper into the dungeon; it has a funky smell, like an over-chlorinated pool mixed with mildew. You see other humans and Ni-Perchta in their small stone cells, some looking beaten and neglected and one person with terrible burns all over. There are no guards down here; the Ephors seem not to worry at all about their prisoners.

At the ends of each corridor are long halls, softly illuminated with blue light that echoes with the sound of water. You almost scream and pee your pants when you look down one corridor hall and see what looks like a spider the size of a Volkswagen suddenly move by, its red eyes jutting out from meaty stalks that follow you with dull interest. Jaime steadies you with his hand on your arm.

At the end of one hall is an open room with a wooden table and one large wooden chair. You see a Ni-Perchta hanging on the back wall in chains, passed out or dead.

"Okay... Okay, where do we, how do we?" you ask Jaime, who is looking around to see if there's any way to get out of here, an exit or something. You remember your book but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to be working or active in any way—it's "off" for lack of a better term.

You see something, a doorway; a strange one, unlike anything you have seen before. It's a doorway made out of red and orange light that's sunk into the stone of the dungeon. It glows incredibly brightly, but you notice that Jaime is not taking any notice of it or even looking in its general direction. You point to it. The door is shaped in the same manner as the Nemo Gate between the two worlds—it's large and peaked at the top with elaborate sculptures of dragons, people in armor, and, oddly frightening to you, squids.

"Jaime, Jaime, you seeing this? What's this?"

Jaime looks at what you are pointing at and then at you as if you have become mentally challenged. "Rock, Sarah."

You ignore him, walking up to the doorway. The doorway seems to become brighter as you walk up to it. You begin to step through the door, and you hear Jaime yelp behind you.

You have stepped through the door and seemingly through the stone of the dungeon's wall. You are now outside the dungeon and out in front of the Witch-Lord's Temple, standing on the edge of a black band of cobblestones that rings the courtyard of the temple structure. Jaime appears a moment later, stunned at the change of location.

There is a flashing red light coming from three of the cobblestones. Each are displaying a Ni-Perchta hieroglyphic which slowly fade away into little red blurs that you can barely make out.

Despite it being daytime, torches are being lit in the courtyard of the temple by robed temple servants dressed in purple and black.

Dwelka Storma and another Ephor stand nearby, discussing something in their language. No one else is about. Storma immediately spots you. The other Ephor, a younger apprentice you guess by his youthful look, quickly covers his shock. Storma looks as if this happens all the time.

"Do not move. This will be short and to the point. I will personally execute the two of you within a minute unless you give me your contact in the Christian underground. When we took in the barbarian hordes under the order of the Witch-Lord, we did not ask for a religious takeover of the entire Four Lands. You will give me your contact or be killed," Storma says, looking very cold and dangerous in his Ephor armor and by the look in his eyes. You start to shake and feel truly helpless, and Jaime lets out his breath. You take an involuntary step backwards. You've almost passed the black band of cobblestones now; you've been slowly creeping back since Storma began his speech.

Storma blinks quickly for a brief second but keeps up the stony facade. The other Ephor cannot stand it any longer and tries to pick you up telekinetically by snapping out his staff containing orichalcum stones in different shades of blue. Jaime quickly makes a move and falls backwards with you, knocking you to the ground and barely past the black band of cobblestones.

Storma screams out a curse in his language and then recomposes himself. "This Ephor and I offer our apologies. We have no excuse for our actions. We have improperly imprisoned you." Storma takes out his serrated blade that's almost as long as you are tall. He gives it to you. "We offer our lives in apology."

The other Ephor gives his blade to Jaime, who takes it in both hands, looking over it, amazed at actually touching one.

"Thank you, but, but no," you say simply, happy to be alive. You drop the sword onto the temple's courtyard with a clang, and Jaime places his sword on the ground as well. "May we leave?" you ask, wiping your sweaty brow.

Storma looks incensed, crazed even. "Of course. You will be escorted to the mono station," Storma spits out, and you back away slowly. Jaime grabs your shoulder, and you walk quickly out of the courtyard. Other Ephors start to walk towards you both.

Storma picks up his blade from the ground, you notice as you walk away, and then chops off the head of his companion in one fell swoop, sending up a geyser of blood out of the other Ephor's bloody stump of a neck. You scream, and Jaime yelps and jumps back.

Storma walks away, leaving you speechless.

# Chapter Five: To Mission Friendship

You wait in the steam monorail station. It has a wooden platform like something out of the Old West. It is located on the utmost end of the statue's palm. You and Jaime only have one bag with you. You have been led here by some Ephors who haven't spoken a word or made a gesture, except to pat your arm or drag you to the side so you can hop the mono to where your job is—Mission Friendship. They say nothing except muttering a few words of Perchta to Jaime, who chatters something back.

"Next monorail is 12:00pm." Jaime points to a very large and oddly-made clock standing in the middle of the platform. Hundreds of people, and a few Ni-Perchta helpers, are scattered around the clock with luggage and supplies (like little pickaxes and home-made dynamite). Each numeral on the clock has a picture from The Oberon—a single prospector for a 1, two pictures of the steam mono to represent a 2, and so on. The two hands of the clock are almost on the 12, which is a picture of twelve Baleen dragons in mid-flight.

The steam mono pulls up, a strange barrel-shaped train covered in glass on all sides except for the almost-bottom of the train, which looks like stainless steel riding along a series of iron wheels. A miniature choo-choo engine pulls along the entire contraption, and a car marked with a red 5 is yours to take all the way to the end of the line, Mission Friendship/Funeral Breaks.

Jaime bows to the Ephors and helps you on-board the train, saying, "What a neat monorail! Better than Disney."

You both have big cushioned seats that can recline. You're seated behind a hairy and slightly chubby Englishman with a red beard who is speaking a thousand words a minute to his tiny girlfriend. They both wear protective clothing and are sporting crossbows, knives, and (you have to check twice) grenades on their belts. These two are laughing and pinching each other, looking as happy as a pair of clams and sharing what you hope is a cigarette.

You sit down next to a very pale Jaime who quietly says, "Well, that, that was interesting back there."

"Yep," is the only thing you can say at the moment. You feel the slightly cracked leather under your bottom and stare at the peeling pieces of red leather, afraid to look out the window for some odd reason, believing somehow that if you do, you will attract more attention to yourself and lead the Ephors back to you.

The train car reeks of a million cigarettes, and the leather seat has abrasive cracks that dig into your back. "What, why did they let us go? Christ, what was it?"

Jaime speaks in a very serious, very scholarly tone. "We made it past the black band that rings around the Witch-Lord Temple. To the Ephors, who never allow escapes, it means that the three gods of the Witch Lands guided you to freedom. Your escape proves that the gods favor you and is a presumption of innocence. All of your crimes are forgiven. Mine too, I guess."

Jaime smiles and pats your knee and says, "Holy cow, that was interesting. Did you see those cobblestones light up? I think that's a combination to get in and out... Thank God we got out of that."

You stare forward, still shell-shocked. "There is no god," you mutter. You notice your crucifix is gone.

Jaime breathes a sigh of relief and puts his hand on your shoulder, but only for a moment. "Good move finding that hidden door and screwing with that lock. When we got past the black band, they had..."

You take a deep breath, still shaking a little, repeating back what Jaime had said. "They had to let us go. The Ephors allow no one to escape, but if you do, it's the will of the gods and all is forgiven. That's incredible. That's really incredible."

"I'm really, really happy to move off-world with you, Jaime," you say, nodding away, and then beginning to tear up a little.

"By the way, how did you know how to work the lock?" Jaime says, before you shoot him a look that tells him very clearly to stop talking.

"I'll tell you later."

"You are full of surprises, Sarah Orange."

"We have only your bag with some of my stuff, Jaime. They burned all the rest." You think of your whole history burning up in minutes. All of your past burning up, leaving you with nothing to tie you back home. You are a ship without an anchor in a unchartered sea.

"Oh, I know. Sucks," Jaime says, touching his bag. "Well... Your computer is here." You swallow your anger against Jaime for ignoring your pain.

The train lurches forward and starts to chug its way north into another Nemo Gate at the edge of the statue's palm. After an explosion of white light and a thunderclap, you find that the train has passed through the Nemo Gate and has appeared somewhere farther away from the statue city of Solomon's Bay. As the car is completely covered in clear plexiglass, you can see Solomon's Bay drift away behind you.

After the train travels at thirty miles per hour for two hours, you start to see the great, green expanses of The Oberon and the white- and iron-colored mountains. Pine trees and odd rock formations jut out of the land like knives stabbing at the sky. A green reflector sign, like something you'd see hanging on top of an American freeway, states from its position above the train tracks that you are entering the Super Sargasso Sea region, with its three Antediluvian cities and its prohibition of Ni-Perchta alcohol use. No Night Salvaging Permitted is splashed across the sign in bold white letters, as well as No Unregistered Firearms.

Jaime has fallen asleep already and his head rests your shoulder. You stare out the window, a little shaky still from the whole possible-decapitation-then-escape thing.

The train's chugging motor runs and runs and you feel increasingly sleepy. Outside, bugs splatter against the glass walls of the mono car. You can see a long black highway covered in yellow Xs far away from the train tracks you are traveling on, running over the next hill and beyond. Each yellow X is flashing under the overcast sky, and you see a single yellow car, a small one, traveling in the same direction as your train. Thick and dark clouds stream across the sun-filled sky, casting long shadows onto the grasslands your train is passing through.

The radio being piped into the car from unknown speakers keeps you occupied for a while with its selection of "old man rock 'n' roll". Dull, flat news is reported every two hours. The opening bars of the ELO song Here is the News plays as its opening theme.

A random person is reading off the news in an over-professional and over-cultured voice. Fireworks and festivities are still permitted until a week after Bonfire Night and the Network warns yet again that alcohol is illegal in The Oberon unless you have a personal liquor consumption license. Failure to pay the license is punishable by fine or a stay in a Witch-Lord Temple and eventual LR-ing. By the sixth reading of the same report you have memorized every word.

The train travels for hours in the high grass along a large river. Chunks of rock and little mesas dot the plains, breaking up the land into large bits. The river is wide, blue, and almost surreal. Its current is impossibly quick. It is as if it is being forced out of a water cannon; there has to be something artificial for it to be churning as quickly as it is. Every inch of its flow is like the worst rapids you can remember from back home. Little canyons are cut into the land, this way and that, breaking the ground up here and there.

You start to nod off, little by little.

The radio plays an old song:

" _My love is a-miles in the waiting_

The eyes that just stare, and the glance at the clock."

You fall asleep to Robert Plant's melody.

~~~~

THE cool air of the underground along with a smell of moisture and mold flows into the car, waking you up. Jaime is already awake. Somehow almost everyone else in your train car has gone, although the Englishman and the girl he is with are still on-board. The train car is ablaze with light; hidden lights in the glass frame of the steam mono illuminate the interior. The train is going through some sort of giant subway tunnel filled with looming statues. The statues look over everything that is bathed in constant shadow. You are pretty confused as to where you are in particular. Jaime looks very happy.

"Just went into an old subway tunnel for Sargasso-uh, Sargasso-3. Thousands of years old. Pretty nuts, huh?"

As you pass through another tunnel, your train has switched tracks. You see a giant hole in one side of the tunnel that leads into a greater darkness. You look out of the window into the dark of the tunnel, and you are scared by what you see.

Tens, if not hundreds, of deep green eyes watch from the deep shadows. They're far away, maybe a few hundred yards away from the train you are on, which you notice has picked up steam and is now going faster. In the gloom you can see shadows with green eyes moving and then nothing—blackness again. You hear a howl and a moan as the train pulls forward.

"Mummies. The Antediluvian people weren't all wiped out. Some got into shelters and, unable to feed on any fresh blood, all those human turned vampires went feral and turned into sort of mummified zombies. They just go on and on unless someone puts them down—just forever mad... They are desperate for other humans' blood," Jaime says, way too matter of fact and way too happy about the subject matter he is discussing.

"Your sister died of Bevan's disease, isn't that right? That's basically what these guys have," Jaime says quite innocently.

"No, she went missing but had the symptoms of that disease before she went missing..." you mention. "And thank you for reminding me."

Suddenly you see a surge of green eyes rush forward from the side, coming closer and closer to the train itself and its plexiglass casing.

You see them rush forward as Jaime is looking in the other direction. In the light reflecting off the monorail train you see one of them up close for a second. The thing's features, once human, are grotesquely pale; deep, dark shadows ring this female mummy's eyes. The eyes themselves are bloodshot and as yellow as custard, filled up with complete and hateful rage. The tears are of blood, dribbling down the ragged remains of whatever clothing the mummy had been wearing. You are too scared to even scream—you sit there and shake. You reach for your crucifix, which is long gone, and feel nothing but thin air.

"Another two hours to Mission Friendship." Jaime yawns. "Two hours! I can't believe it!" The train pulls out of the tunnel and back into the light of day, passing through another round of grasslands. Only the occasional tree, like one of those out of an African safari picture or documentary, breaks up the endless plains ahead of you on either side of the river. Each tree has a wide, umbrella-like canopy which is the hiding place for things that could be mistaken for birds.

The Englishman with the red beard sitting in front of you turns around, saying, "Did you just- I'm sorry, Miss, did you see that?"

You nod up and down as Jaime pipes in. "I saw it, too! This is the greatest trip I have ever been on! You know this is the most exciting thing—we got a story for you guys..."

The English punk nods vigorously. "Actual zombies, Lord above, I have been waiting for this my whole life! I said to myself back in Liverpool, I said, 'Well, now, John Boston, here's-' Are you crying?"

You are. This little trip is turning into an unmitigated nightmare. You're finding things out that perhaps you should have researched before you left. You didn't because you were, well, under the weather emotionally.

John puts out his hand, a little nervous around you. "I'm John Boston." You shake hands with Red Beard.

"Keira Love." You shake hands with the woman.

"Anyone else want to do a Valis wheel? Hmmm? Got off a dealer in Stonetown," Boston says, taking out a silver pipe that has what looks like a miniature electrical fan set into its end. The strong odor of ozone and sound of atonal music start to fill the train car as Boston sucks at the end of the tube. Blue smoke comes out of the fan as it whirls around.

John takes out a match, lights it with his thumbnail, and puts it inside the silver tube. John offers the tube. "This'll help calm you down. You want it?"

As Jaime looks on, you decide to take a hit, your hand shaking. You decide that anything that helps you relax and forget what had just happened is worth it. You have smoked pot a couple of times before; this would not be a real change in pace. You take a hit and shake your head, feeling as if you are light-headed and happy, and also sort of scared that reality has suddenly become a little more real all at once. You start to cough after taking another drag off the Valis wheel. Your coughing barely obscures the atonal music coming from the pipe. "Oh shit! That was—hoo boy." You give the pipe back to John. Jaime pats you on the shoulder.

"This is fun! This is what couples do!" says John, then he offers the pipe to Jaime.

Jaime shakes his head. "No, no, I couldn't. I've read three online accounts about doing a Valis wheel. One post said that you feel very relaxed, and the other two said you won't stop screaming for the next forty-eight hours." You look at Jaime in horror.

Keira Love takes a hit and then starts screaming loudly for a long, uncomfortable moment, before giving the pipe back to John. "Always good." The sound of her voice is a little strange, as if she is oddly trying to mimic an English accent.

It is dark now, and through the soft illumination inside the monorail car you see for the first time the seven moons of The Oberon. The white forms peek down from high above in the star-filled sky.

There is a slight rumble of thunder, perhaps the beginning of a storm coming out of the Sargasso Breaks, perhaps something else. Dry lightning plays out against the western skies, illuminating at times a flock of luminescent manta ray-like creatures, their tendrils drifting behind them in the wind as they make their way back to the Sargasso coast for the winter.

You are very close to the Mission Friendship/Funeral Breaks. Regular pine trees are now making their appearances, and the mountains seem to be closer than ever, crowding out the rest of the land. Your train begins to ascend a little bit, going up the single track.

"Up." Boston laughs to himself. "Spelled backwards it's fuck you."

The train begins to slow down as you hear the Ni-Perchta begin to sing something, a cappella, in almost funeral dirge tones, somewhere off. You can hear this music thump through the monorail.

John and Keira are passing the Valis device back and forth. You are feeling more than a little light-headed at this point. The world is beginning to run a little on the slow side. That ozone smell and atonal music sound from the Valis wheel are getting to you. It is fully dark now, the only illumination comes from the seven moons and what you begin to see in the distance.

First, you see a stone palace in the middle of a green grass field. It's large and looks like it should be somewhere like Tibet or Bhutan. It's a large, Dzong-style fortress with high, windowless walls, a Chinese-style rooftop, and two massive doors made out of what looks like wood and iron. The Dalai Lama probably had a place like this once upon a time.

Connected to it is an apartment tower; a good-sized one, maybe twenty stories tall give or take. Lights are on in some windows, and a couple of swirling searchlights reach into the heavens above, painting the sky over and over with small circles of light. It is made out of concrete and stands out significantly from the rest of the land around. Balconies jut out from the sides; the top floor has one wrap-around balcony that isn't separated like the others. "I think that's it," you say, taking out the small brochure that was stuffed into your pocket. Mission Friendship—A Place of Warmth and Protection states the front page of the brochure, next to a painting of the Dzong and apartment tower structure.

You notice another, thinner, tower is connected to the building by three concrete walkways, and looks as if it is set up as observation point—glass windows jut around the topmost part of the slimmer tower. Farther away is a large and walled village; it looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings or another fantasy novel. Wood-timbered homes stick their heads out over the walls. You also see a large wooden bridge spanning across the rushing river that separates you from Mission Friendship. A lumber mill building also spans the entire river and is right next to the bridge.

The train begins to slow. "And here we go," Jaime says in a guttural voice before coughing a few times to clear his throat.

"The Joker said that before he blew up a building in The Dark Knight," you retort, seeing double. "Nerd."

"That's the joke..." Jaime says.

"I think this is the best capital D drugs I've had since I was thirteen at that Prodigy concert at Glastonbury." John Boston coughs again. "You ever seen that old movie, The Jerk? Remember that cat juggling shit?"

Jaime looks confused and you have no idea what John Boston is talking about. "Was that about cats being juggled, or a cat juggling shit?" you ask with a slur.

John Boston shrugs and then after a moment calls out, "These cans are defective!" Silence. "Steve Martin—it's a funny film."

No one laughs. "Was Steve M-Martin the guy in The Blues Brothers?" you ask.

No one says anything for a long moment. Keira laughs, stoned. "I should really slap you hard."

You laugh, and so do Boston and Jaime.

Keira slaps you hard enough, stunning you.

Boston laughs, and even Jaime laughs a little, nervously. You are startled. Then you hit back once, twice, and three times, making Keira almost tear up. Her face is really red and starting to look swollen. Boston stands up and stretches out the ori-baton he had hidden on him. He snaps it out with such force, and then points it at you, lifting you up and out of your seat without using a single muscle, but rather through telekinesis. Invisible strings seem to pull you out of your seat.

"Hey-hey, now girl. All quiet on the Western Front..." Boston says, a scowl on his face. He looks like he is about to do something else just as a Ni-Perchta monorail attendant in a shimmering rainbow-colored tunic walks into the car, having seen what has happened. Boston drops you, right back onto your rump.

You have arrived at your new home, after almost getting into a full on fistfight with strangers who were once friendly. "Last stop," the overhead speakers say. "Funeral Breaks village. Mission Friendship. Star in the Mountain."

Near tears, you get off the train and step onto the very empty stone platform.

Boston and Love walk over, looking sheepish. Love also looks a little angry. Boston speaks up. "Look, my friends, I think that, back on the train, things became a bit heated. A bit strange. Drug use makes these situations happen." Boston snickers, and Love and Boston laugh together.

You and Jaime look at each other. Boston and Love put out their hands to shake with you and Jaime, and you gingerly do so. "We'll be working on-site in Sargasso-3, out in near the old boat quays. Our radio frequency is Quay-256."

Boston hands you his powder-white business card embossed with the words Boston-Love Dayhawk Co-Op. "We check up on the world around 4-6:00pm each evening. Give us a call if you are in the area. Stop on by."

Jaime nods and says, "We may just do that. The old boat quays in Sargasso-3, that's about a mile or two from the Nemo Gate that leads to the old reactor, right?"

Boston nods slowly. "Yes, if you can get near the place—the wreckage and the machines down there... You don't, don't own that site, do you?" Boston says out of curiosity.

Jaime smiles a little. "Oh I wish. But no, no, just read up about it. Sounds neat."

Boston blows out a raspberry. "That's a bad deal friend—that's a death zone, ask anyone. I mean that whole defense system is up and running. It's very strange. It's more than a reactor should be. That place is locked down, shut down, do not enter... Unless you've got a defense key."

Jaime shakes his head. "Uh, no, no, just curious about it."

Boston shrugs his shoulders. Love speaks up, in a sort of stilted speech, changing the subject quickly. "I'm sorry about the- what happened back there. Have a better one. Radio us."

You and Jaime thank them, though a cold feeling is running up and down your spine. A place that is considered a death zone does not seem like a place Jaime should be working in. You laugh and laugh, making everyone uncomfortable, and then start to tear up again.

Boston says something about maybe being wrong, but you take it as him trying to downplay what he just said.

You wait and listen to Jaime talking with Boston and Love for a while; he is giving them your new home address at Mission Friendship and telling the couple to come by whenever they have the chance. Boston and Love are picked up by what looks like an old Pontiac muscle car being driven by a Ni-Perchta male in dark war paint. They drive off and down a dirt and cobblestone road that leads into the mountains at the far end.

You see Mission Friendship and hear the rushing water of the river very close by. You can hear the songs the Ni-Perchta are singing somewhere in the distance; they are echoing in the valley. It's very cool out and a breeze is blowing down from the mountains all around you. Everything smells fresh and of pine. It's about a fifteen-twenty minute walk to Mission Friendship from the station's platform.

You look to your left, up a snow-capped mountain on the other side of the river, and see something you've just heard about on the monorail train. Star in the Mountain.

Jaime is nervously blathering on. He'd probably mentioned it before, but you hadn't really bothered to ask him what it meant, figuring it was self-explanatory—which of course, it is.

Over two hundred stories tall, Star in the Mountain is a glass and steel "star", a single giant building in the shape of an actual multi-pointed star. Its mid-section is like a glass bowl and its points, which are dissimilar in size and length, stretch upwards and outwards. The star is set into the side of a mountain, like God's own Christmas ornament.

One point of the star has broken off, having fallen over and taken a piece of the mountain with it. The rest seem to be in good condition. You notice an odd reddish "light" around it, somewhat faded. You wonder if it's the moonlight being reflected, but you are not sure.

"That star can hold up to 100,000 people, if not more. Star in the Mountain is the one of the few left that's still intact," Jaime says in a whisper. "So are we supposed to-?" Jaime nods over to Mission Friendship. "Do we walk it? What's the instructions?"

You only stare up at the stars in the sky as you wait, not thinking and not listening for the moment. The constellations are so different, so jumbled up compared to what you can see on Earth. Seven moons drift overhead, amazing you. Somewhere Earth is there, you suppose, up in the middle of all that.

# Chapter Six: The Ritual

Far away you see what looks like an old-school police cruiser painted yellow, blue, and white, its headlights flickering on and off. It seems to be signaling to you and Jaime who are still on the badly-lit station platform with the idling train. The cruiser has a rough double tap rumble to it, like something is wrong with the muffler. The vehicle is at least thirty years old and definitely not American made. More European-ish in style. The words Mission Security written in English and Perchta decorate the sides of the vehicle.

The cruiser pulls up. Two young guys, both in black leather uniforms like motorcycle cops, pop out. Each one has an ori-baton, a pistol, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun attached to his belt. They call out to the Ni-Perchta train workers in their language, speaking Perchta fluently, before coming up to you two. The Ni-Perchta are busy off-loading some cases from one of the monorail's cars.

"Who are they?" I say. "Cops?"

Jaime blows out a raspberry. "The Ephors are the only cops to be really scared of, Sarah. No, these are just Counters, uh, Mission Security who work as, well, security for the Network Missions. They actually operate under the Bill of Rights."

The two men who came from the cruiser shake hands with the Ni-Perchta in the Ni-Perchta way: one hand closed up in a fist touching the chest, the other out and shaking in one smooth pumping motion.

"They look like college students. Just like us," you say, watching them.

Jaime suddenly becomes nervous. "Be careful what you say to them. You don't know how they'll turn it. We love each other very much and are happily married."

He kisses you on the cheek, which is now the second time you have kissed since you have been officially married.

The Counter with glasses and long hair begins to speak to you and Jaime. "I am Tadeo Marcelino, and this is Robert Fuller." He puts out his hand to you and then to Jaime. You each shake it and then Robert's hand.

Jaime says, "We're married, me and her, and this is great. This is fun, this is what couples do." The inspectors shoot you and Jaime a weird look.

A single eerie horn blasts out over the dark, empty land, like a call from a dead Viking's tomb. Other horns begin to blow, from all directions. You hear what you assume to be other Ni-Perchta out in the darkness, far off, calling out to each other.

"This is the night of the comet's return. It signals something to them—a chance for change, incredible change. You see the moons up there—the seven—those are the Seven Sisters of Night. And with the comet here, it's the return of the Eighth Sister—the one that'll fight with the other sisters before passing on. The Eighth Sister is important—she determines the future of all. The Ni-Perchta know the exact hour when this comet will return every century. Incredible isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. I knew that," you say.

The Counters gesture to their cruiser. "Let's take you over. There's a local nomadic tribe... They like to know those who work and live at Mission Friendship. They are not like the city Ni-Perchta who hate our guts but smile to our faces."

"They're called covens, Sarah," Jaime pipes in.

Robert Fuller, the shorter one, nods. "Yes, that's correct Jaime."

Jaime looks very happy to hear that.

Tadeo continues, "A lot of your future neighbors are there, too. The Coven of Upper Sargasso has welcomed you all. All are welcome."

"All are welcome, all welcome. Go into the light. There is peace and serenity in the light..." you say in a high and creepy falsetto voice, making Jaime and the inspectors look at you. "Never saw Poltergeist? Huh. I'm sorry I'm still a little high-"

"Highly exhausted," Jaime says. He takes our luggage and puts it into the back of the cruiser.

~~~~

YOU come up to an open grass area with a single tree in the middle. Two Ni-Perchta males are spraying something on this tree using an old garden hose connected to a small tank. A few other Ni-Perchta set this tree on fire; its entire form is now blazing and crackling under the dark sky. The smoke and the smell of the burning wood reminds you of Halloweens past when you used to have bonfires at Bolsa Chica beach.

The Ni-Perchta sit around on what look like giant carpets, watching the tree engorged in flame. You and Jaime and the Counters jump out of the cruiser. The Counters and, oddly, even Jaime call out to the Ni-Perchta in Perchta.

It certainly looks like the Ni-Perchta are happy to see you, and they offer you a place on their rough carpets stretched out over the soil. Meat and a sort of red milk are offered but you and the two Counters gently refuse. Jaime refuses as well after a moment. One Ni-Perchta brings out a small wooden baton, and with that strange little power of telekinesis that only orichalcum can give, pulls a group of branches off the burning tree and sets them into a circle of rocks to make their own separated bonfire for cooking skewers of meat that hang limply from rusty bayonets.

From over the horizon you see lit torches and hear the stamping of feet and the creaking of wagon wheels over the grasslands. More Ni-Perchta are gathering towards the burning tree, coming from all angles.

Jaime rubs his hands together, excited. "Must be somethin' special!"

You and Jaime watch the Ni-Perchta approach in pairs and in groups, some with fully decorated wagons adorned in garish colors like the old Gypsies back on Earth. Others arrive in small, rotted out pickup trucks and in cars twenty or thirty years old being towed by hairy cows that have six devil-black horns coming from the sides of their heads. These are the Afer animals. A few dump trucks, covered in beads and wind chimes, pull up as well, loud and jangling.

One Ni-Perchta, regal-looking, drives up in a rusted Ford Mustang with no doors and chains on its tires, being pulled by nothing but Detroit horsepower coming out of a bad engine. This older Ni-Perchta puts on his head a sort of black headdress; it looks like three straight, black Afer horns are coming out of both sides.

The Ni-Perchta call out to each other in their language, laughing or singing their funeral dirge songs.

The Ni-Perchta women are beautiful, their platinum hair waist-length around angular faces, their eyes glowing red in the dark. They wear almost see-through blouses and tunics that are every color of the rainbow.

Some of the Ni-Perchta males and their children begin setting up large drums. With large, smooth sticks the Ni-Perchta start to pound the drums in unison, creating a steady, thundering beat.

Whistles and flutes begin playing; there's a distinctly oriental sound to them, like something out of Japan or elsewhere in the Far East. Poles are raised that have wind chimes placed on top of them. The drums continue to beat in rhythm, slow, steady. The two humans with you, the Network boys, stand to the side, observing. You start to see some humans come out of the dark as well. Everyone's the same age or a little bit older than yourself. They have come by wagon or by crappy '70s-era cars.

The Ni-Perchta stand around in groups, holding hands now, singing their funeral dirge songs.

The drums start beating a little more quickly, then a little more quickly. The Ni-Perchta begin to dance in a large circle, all of them spinning around in their own individual circles, slowly. They are chanting now, something you would hear at the entrance to Hell, you suppose. They stop.

"Oh Lord," Jaime says, pointing to the sky. A comet, white and glowing, streaks across the sky, as large as one of the moons. It blots out some of the stars as it passes, frightfully large.

"The Ni-Perchta know the exact hour when the comet will return every century. Incredible isn't it?" Robert the Counter says.

The chief of the Ni-Perchta speaks a few sentences and you suddenly notice that all eyes are on you and Jaime. You assume that he is the chief by his headdress and the way the other Ni-Perchta pay attention to him.

The drums start to beat again, slowly this time. The chief sends over a little Ni-Perchta girl, a cute one, perhaps in her very early teens, who has something wrapped in a cloth.

She gives you a collapsed expandable baton, one like all the others that humans carry around. It's brand new, shiny. It has empty slots to put in orichalcum stones; only one slot has a blue-white orichalcum stone fitted into it. In tiny letters you can read Telekinesis above it.

"A goddamn weapon. Sweet," you say. "I refuse."

Jaime looks at you funny. "Refuse? You are a Force-Fire. Like me. It's sort of interesting. They want to make sure you are okay. They are so happy you'll be working at Mission Friendship."

You nod and then look around like you've just woken up from a deep sleep. And then realize you should ask, "What's a Force-Fire?"

"A resurrection of a local hero. Sort of like the concept the Tibetan Buddhists have about tulkus. You are a great soul, they say, but you just don't know it yet. Apparently, me too. We escaped from those dungeons—they, they all know this." Jaime looks confused, but excited at the same time.

"Wow. Great," you respond, disinterested.

"Of course you can refuse it... But that's, that's..."

"Do I have to thank them? Thank you guys, thanks..." you say quietly, as the large crowd of aliens stare at you, some with eyes reflecting red since it is night-time. One Ni-Perchta looks like he is sharpening a sword in the background. You think you see Guy Farson somewhere in the background too, but you are not really sure. A shadow of that good-looking man disappears into the darkness. You feel a little scared now as you are surrounded on all sides by the Ni-Perchta.

"Can't believe we did that..." you say, reflecting on what happened not even a full day before. The Counters look at you curiously, exchanging glances between each other.

"Thank you," you say to the Ni-Perchta girl who is still standing next to you. The Network Counters and Jaime nearly trip over each other trying to get the translation out.

"Why did they just give it to me?" you ask.

Robert, the other Counter, speaks to you in a whisper. "The chief says that it will help protect you as your past life comes into your present life."

"You should give a speech," Tadeo the Counter says.

"A speech for what? I don't know why. This is some silly stuff guys. I just got through some shitty twenty-four hours and you're springing this- this craziness on me..." You cough and then nod to the entire crowd of Ni-Perchta. You decide quickly that perhaps you should say something.

A long moment passes. You speak loudly and clearly. "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule anyone or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone—if possible—Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness—not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And The Oberon is- is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life here can be free and beautiful."

The crowd looks confused, and the Ni-Perchta say nothing as one of the Counters translates for you, a confused look on their face.

"It's from The Great Dictator. I had to memorize it for drama class. You're welcome," you say in a whisper to Jaime. Jaime looks confused.

"Humphrey Bogart was in it?"

"Never mind," you say.

The crowd cheers for an unknown reason after the Counter finishes, and you realize you are definitely still high from the Valis wheel. The speech still sticks in your mind. You haven't thought about that movie in a long time, nor have you thought about that Charlie Chaplin speech. The speech means a lot to you actually, though you don't share that information with anyone.

The other humans come out of the crowd of Ni-Perchta, walking over to you. The first you meet is this nice couple, the Cartwrights, a young couple from England who apparently run a lumber mill or something. The man, Wellington, "Call me Wellington," he says, after you call him "Devo" for no reason, is Mission Friendship's head doctor. His wife, Temperance Cartwright, cuts up and sells the trees around the Funeral Breaks to local Ni-Perchta tribes. You ask if the Ni-Perchta are too stupid to figure out how to use a saw blade and she laughs nervously and tells you no and that what you just said is a bit racist.

You also meet the Page sisters: two girls, one skinny with horn-rimmed glasses (Treena) and the other chubby with bouncy blonde hair (Winniefreddie), who run the bar inside Mission Friendship, the Benbow Inn. You say, "Fantastic!" and ask one of them to bounce on back to the Benbow and get you a drink. Jaime apologies and forces you to leave.

In the back of the cruiser on the way to Mission Friendship, as Jaime is still beaming at his surroundings, you take a look at the baton that the Ni-Perchta gave you. Though their concept of who you are is quite ridiculous, you find them giving you the baton to be a very nice gesture.

# Chapter Seven: Mission Friendship

The Ni-Perchta go back to their caravan homes and their trucks and cars to relax and perhaps sleep the night away. Though the smaller bonfire has petered out, the tree still burns, fully engulfed yet strangely not falling apart.

You see it behind you as you drive towards Mission Friendship, passing over the wooden bridge across the river. Someone has left strange white graffiti on parts of the bridge's wall. The graffiti is just the number 2 divided by 10.

A wanted sign is pasted onto one of the pillars of the bridge. It says _: WANTED—CHARLES MATHIAS, LEADER OF MATHIAS-PETTY GANG._ A hand-drawn and faded picture of a man with curly red hair has been copied onto the poster. _Convicted Murderer. 25 Million Dii-Yaa Reward, Alive or Dead, from Ephors of Kadath and Bureau of Off-World Affairs_. A dragon-like symbol is stamped at the bottom of the poster.

You mean to ask Jaime about it but Mission Friendship is ahead of you. As you get closer, the Mission looks like it is half out of the movie Kundun or Seven Years in Tibet and half like it belongs in Vegas or Dubai. The glitzy ugliness of the apartment tower arbitrarily grafted onto the old stone dzong is jarring to you.

You are mildly excited about what you are about to get into, curious more than anything else. A monument sign, states that, yes, this is indeed Mission Friendship. This cruiser is parked outside the massive wooden doors of the old part of the Mission; you notice the doors are ajar. Behind them is a set of glass doors, leading to the interior.

~~~~

YOU walk through the lobby; a pair of desks face you head on. The Counters had to unlock the glass doors of the building and then turn on the lights.

You see a couple of glass-walled offices off to one side. Reaching the two desks, you see each has stacks of brochures and a computer on top, along with a printer. Each computer and each printer has a funny-looking, metallic cage over it. One of the Counters grabs a clipboard and a yellow packet full of keys from one of the desks and leads you to the elevators.

This lobby area is as big as a soccer field and has within its stone walls three all-American shops: a McDonald's, a Subway (which makes your skin crawl a little), and a Starbucks. Though the lobby looks like it had once been the inner courtyard or hall for the great palace, it is now a glorified food court. A smaller shop with closed doors, off to the far right corner, away from fast food row, has a wooden sign stenciled with the words: Benbow Inn. The smell of French fries is both comforting and overwhelming. A large marketplace area, closed off and behind steel bars, seems to be your local grocery store. It takes up most of the space of the lobby.

Hanging on one wall of this lobby area you see an incredible painting—it's of a wizard, you think, perhaps a representation of the Witch-Lord himself. The figure is covered in shadow, holding a gnarled staff. A white light seems to be shining on this figure but it only illuminates his outline and never his (or even her) features.

Later you walk up to the picture and see a small plaque with an inscription written in English, Japanese, and Perchta confirming your belief: The Hidden Witch-Lord of The Oberon.

Radio Oberon is playing through hidden speakers; it's an old doo-wop fifties song.

" _Well now, they often call me Speedo_

But my real name is Mr. Earl"

As you tow your suitcase behind you, the men from Mission Security take you to a row of elevators. You find yourself lowered, not brought up a floor; you are in some dingy basement-like area. The light here is pale and barely illuminates anything. The MS men take you to your front door, which opens to reveal a fairly large two-bedroom place. Bland furniture and appliances fill up the space, and there is no television, just a large, old style radio, an antique rescue from the forties. There are no windows, which depresses you further. The walls are blank inside your new and poorly furnished home. A welcome basket sits on one white counter next to the sink, and you find the refrigerator fully stocked with bland goodies.

The Counters check through the place quickly. Robert is making notes on how the place looks. This is your moving in inspection, you realize dimly. Jaime is doing all the talking.

Jaime calls you over finally to sign off on the last few bits of paperwork, and you do so. Jaime hugs you for a second. "New home for you-us. Kind of cool, huh?"

It's all a bit too much for you and your stomach heaves for a quick and painful moment. Jaime mentions that you have been feeling a little sick lately, which explains "the silliness you do" to the Counters.

Near the back of the apartment, you spot a single white door that is partially ajar, revealing a bleak looking toilet, and make your way to the back in order to use it. Perhaps it's every emotion you've had since arriving hitting you at once, or perhaps it's your foolishness in doing drugs catching up to you, but now you feel sick to your stomach.

You make it into the restroom and close the door behind you. You stare into the mirror for a long moment, seeing a slightly disheveled, tired looking young woman with brunette hair.

You turn the cold tap on, running your hands through it and then splashing it onto your face. You keep this up for a good minute, feeling the water run over your hands, your face. The basin is filled with cool water now and you start to become fixated on it, staring at it, skimming your hand over its surface.

Blackness. No sound. No feeling.

There are strange tones, something not of this world; sounds that only the dead can hear, you fear.

You stand up in a stupor, shaking your head. You stumble out of the bathroom, swinging the door wide open, feeling drugged.

And then you see in a flash Dwelka Storma, same armor, same mask covering the bottom half of his face, the half-crown. The Ephor warrior is standing there, sword drawn. But then you hear these strange tones and you feel as if you are falling... But you are not. The vision of Dwelka Storma seems to fade for a moment, and disappears, to be replaced by your sister—a woman you haven't seen for a very long time. You see Star in the Mountain for a brief second.

The vision disappears. The two Counters are helping to your feet, and Jaime gets a cup of water for you.

"We can go to sleep in a little bit. You okay, Sweetie McSweetums?"

You shake your head.

# Chapter Eight: The Flashstorm (When the Levee Breaks)

You wish the Counters an awkward goodbye as they leave your new home. You and Jaime watch from the front door as they walk down the hallway to the elevators.

Jaime nudges you. "Want to get something to eat? There's an observation area on the roof. And grills." Jaime checks the refrigerator. "They've left us Network Beer. Alcohol, Sarah. Take a look. Oh and they left personal liquor license forms to fill out- in the refrigerator-" Jaime shakes his head. "I don't know why they left them in the fridge..."

Your mood picks up a bit at that news, and you take a closer look at the refrigerator. "You're the man now, dog," you reply.

~~~~

JAIME hands you a white fluffy towel with the crest of Solomon's House University imprinted on it, and you take a shower in the second bedroom's bathroom. You stand in the shower for a long time, maybe thirty minutes, running that hot water all over, scrubbing away the memories of the train trip and the day in the dungeon, cleaning underneath your fingernails, and washing and rewashing your hair with little hotel-style shampoo bottles.

You look at yourself in the mirror. You don't know if this is possible but you look like you've lost more than a few pounds. You look like a skeleton with two red coals for eyes.

Wearing an oversized Solomon's House University sweater and sweatpants that smell of mothballs and were part of your move-in gifts, you walk out of the bedroom, looking for Jaime. You see a note on Network stationery—he is at the observation lounge at the top of Mission Friendship.

After a long elevator ride to the top, you emerge on the rooftop to encounter not a single resident.

There's an incredible view—the mountains, the stars, Star in the Mountain, the walled village, and the train station far off. You watch as clouds drift across the night sky with all those different stars looking back down on you and the seven ethereal moons orbiting above. There are little, round, neon-green birds sitting on the railing. Behind you is a fire pit that burns steadily in a giant brass centerpiece, the fire crackling and puffing as the logs split from the heat. The air is tinged with fragrant smoke. A strange robot, skeletal and ancient-looking, beeps away, watching the fire and stoking it constantly.

Jaime has found an old, portable transistor radio from somewhere.

Jaime stands there, grooving along. His eyes are closed the whole time.

You watch him awkwardly wiggle his knees back and forth before for a good few minutes before you touch him on the shoulder. He jumps a few feet straight up into the air.

After turning down the radio, Jaime leads you to where a couple of wicker chairs are set up with a tray table next to each. "Found all this stuff up here."

Each tray table is complete with a sourdough sandwich, empty glass, and small bag of Doritos. The music is playing and no one is saying anything. In fact, you are almost sure that no one else is here at the Mission.

"Quite the view here, hmmm?" You nod in response, looking at the dinner intently.

"Glass of milk, uh, Earth cattle, perhaps? Water? Pre-mixed virgin pina colada?" Jaime says, opening a large plastic red and white cooler that he's brought from downstairs. It has the Network symbol on it. The cooler is full of ice and beer bottles strangely covered with the hammer and sickle symbol and the words COMECON BEER, plus a few other beverages. The Network is not stingy when it comes to welcoming you to its Mission.

"M-milk," you say. "Still feeling a little loose from the whole train thing..."

Jaime pulls out a bottle and brings it over to the wicker chair that he's set up for you. Jaime gestures for you to come over and sit, which you do. He pours you a glass. You start to drink it, downing half of it in a moment. Jaime glances back at the cooler, then thinking better of it, leaves the bottle with you.

Jaime sits down in his own wicker chair after grabbing a dripping bottle of the Hammer and Sickle. He takes a bottle opener from his pocket and pops off the bottle cap, which he then throws over the railing of the observation deck. You are too high up to hear the clink of it falling against the road. "This is fun; this is what couples do," Jaime says, looking very content. "Boy, wait, I hope no one was down there..."

You start to eat with relief. Jaime takes out an old Casio digital wristwatch, a cheap silver thing that would have looked dandy on any frugal gentlemen from the 1980s, and tosses it to you. You look confused. "Not really my style..."

You toss back the watch, and Jaime immediately tosses it right back to you with a grin. "Keep it on, Sarah, and watch the clock. When the digital screen goes out, that's because of the EMP blast. When you see a blank face on the watch, that's when it happens."

"When what happens, Jaime?" you ask, looking over the watch.

"When it happens, you will know it..." Jaime says with an evil laugh. "You ever see those David Lynch rabbit things? No? Well, well you should."

You nod, still looking at the watch, feeling weird. There seems to be a charge in the air, a sort of static heaviness over everything.

The sandwich is great. It has meat inside that tastes like lobster, it's buttery, somewhat hot, with a spicy mayo sauce all over it. The sourdough, interestingly, is fresh. "What's in this sandwich? It's so freakin' good," you say.

Jaime shrugs. "Wish I knew... Something alien, I guess. Maybe like those trilobite meat things we saw back at Solomon's? I got it from this little deli shop on fifteen."

That stops you from eating further.

You are popping open the small Doritos bag and about to plop a chip into your mouth when you see Jaime stand up abruptly. Jaime walks away and comes back with that large, boxy transistor radio he had earlier.

Moving the tray table to the side with a scraping sound, Jaime puts the boxy radio on his lap with a groan, turns it on, and starts to fiddle with the dials. There is this funky popping noise, then a repeated buzzing noise. A warbling of static comes in and out of the transmission. You eat in silence for the next few minutes, listening to the noise, munching on chips as Jaime fiddles with the radio.

Coming from the radio is an old Led Zeppelin song with a steady, thumping beat. Plant carries the tune:

When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan...

"Got it," Jaime says. "Now we got music again."

"Old man rock 'n' roll? Still? Good god, it's like being on your dad's boat back that one day in summer... You remember that? Shit, he put Jimi Hendrix's greatest effing hits on loop for two hours, it was soooo annoying. I actually became happy after a while that Jimi choked on his own puke, and that's a mean thought. 'Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand'. 'Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand'. Oh man."

Jaime laughs hard. You eye him, realizing something but not letting the thought hit the conscious surface of your brain at first. "Yep, I thought that too. Not the Jimi choking to death part, that's really, really mean Sarah, but, you know..."

As you are laughing, you notice the watch face goes suddenly blank. "It just went dead, Jaime..." you say.

"Storm's a coming," Jaime says, rubbing his hands together.

The Led Zeppelin song is interrupted as the radio cuts out into an eerie emergency band drone.

The announcer, a woman with a crisp English-sounding accent, comes on. "We interrupt this radio broadcast to update you on the special flashstorm warning for the Super Sargasso Sea region. Any and all persons within five kilometers of the center of Sargasso-3 Antediluvian city must take immediate shelter. We repeat, this is a flashstorm warning for the Super Sargasso Sea region. Any persons within five kilometers of the center of Sargasso-3's reactor complex must take immediate shelter..."

And then the storm starts. The black sky, once cloudy and pockmarked with white stars and several moons, begins to be covered in a fast movement of clouds. The wind becomes stronger and there is a rich, droning sound. The roof of the building begins to shake so much that it rattles the glass of milk off your tray table and knocks it to the deck floor, shattering it. Neither you nor Jaime actually hear the glass break over the discordant warning sirens going off and the roar of the sky itself. The sky then begins to light up, red, then blue, then red again, and then it turns into an almost fiery orange.

You stand up and walk to the edge of the observation deck, watching the fantastic display. A ring of white circles seems to be spreading out from some distant location. The ring swirls in and out of the clouds, making at first a chain of circles and then shooting downwards and upwards from the sky to the ground.

You lose your footing for a moment due to the wind, stumbling to the side. Green lightning shoots out in all directions now and again. For moments at a time the entire world seems to light up in white flashes as bright as millions of flashbulbs popping at the same time.

The sky turns a deep bluish-green and becomes incredibly thick with clouds. A sound like a thousand groaning screams comes forth from the sky.

"You're not who you say you are, are you?" you cry out to Jaime. Jaime seems not to hear at first.

The wind becomes its strongest now, rattling the multi-paned windows in Mission Friendship with flashes of white that become more and more frequent. As you look up to the sky, it seems that the whole world is being bashed into whiteness.

Jaime gives you a funny look and says nothing for an entire moment, his mouth moving. "I am Jaime Van Zandt," he finally says.

The storm stops. There is now utter stillness. The clouds begin to disperse. Stars once hidden begin to shine again. A dog barks in the distance and a crow caws back.

You wonder about Jaime but let it go.

Jaime speaks up for a moment. "I'll get myself outfitted in the Funeral Breaks in the morning, and then I'll be off to go check out my little modded bike. You remember me talking about that, right? I'll be off doing what I want to do—sketch and salvage. God, can you believe we are standing on another planet?" Jaime shivers in excitement.

"In the morning, I'll be off to grab the bike and go. And the road leads ever on and on..." Jaime looks so happy. "You'll be okay here, right? I mean, it looks like the Network don't even know about our little, ah, excitement back in Solomon's Bay. The Counters never mentioned it once." Jaime crosses his arms. "Lord, we just started an adventure."

"Must you leave so soon, Jaime?" you say, looking over at Jaime, noticing once again how exactly he looks like Tyler.

"This is what I've wanted to do my whole life, Sarah." Jaime smiles. "Be myself, in a strange land. Thank you, Sarah. You helped make this happen." He kisses you on the cheek. "I'm living my dream."

You stand on the deck with Jaime, listening to the radio return to When the Levee Breaks...

Cryin' won't help you, praying will do you no good,

No, cryin' won't help you, praying will do you no good...

"Okay," you say. "Okay. You go out there, and do your dream—and I'll start mine here." You manage a smile.

~~~~

YOU and Jaime lie awake in your basement apartment with the lights off, trying to sleep but unable to. There is a note on your welcome basket about meeting for work tomorrow at 9:00am.

Jaime can't stand it any longer. You watch quietly as he gets dressed in the middle of the night. You watch as he throws on a leather jacket and a backpack. Jaime walks to the kitchen and comes back with a water bottle from the refrigerator. You get out of bed, studying what he is doing. "You are leaving now? It's, it's three in the morning, Jaime. You are taking off now?"

Jaime shrugs. "Night-time is the right time. Can't sleep, gotta walk."

"But it's, it could be dangerous out there," you squeak out. "Really, come on. Go to bed and go at daylight."

Jaime shrugs again. "Why? There are all-night inns in the Funeral Breaks. It's a twenty-minute walk to that walled village. I'm up, I'm ready, and I'm going to go. I want to see that Triumph waiting for me in the Free Zone."

"Besides," Jaime takes a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip out of his backpack. He stuffs it into his belt. "Counters had an extra shotgun just lying in the trunk, loaded." Jaime breaks the gun open, takes out two red shotgun shells, and reloads it. "Loaded, right. If they come and ask, play dumb. But they won't. My personal intellectual assessment of people like that, based on what I have read, is that they will be too embarrassed about having lost the gun to either report it or try to track it down. I'll be fine. It's time for the adventure to begin."

Jaime opens the apartment door slowly, peeking out. He whispers, "Look, Sarah, I think you came off-world with not the clearest and most rational reasons. I really do. So can I give you some advice?"

"Give me advice? Call me irrational? Says the guy who makes a really big assumption and steals a shotgun?"

Jaime smirks. "Look, what I am saying is this. We are here on another planet. Don't end up doing the same thing you did back on Earth. This is, this is such a cool situation."

"Jaime?"

Jaime looks you over and shrugs his shoulders. "You should come with me. Just leave. What are they going to do? This isn't Earth. All the old rules of life just went out the window."

Jaime steps out the door, leaving you to spend the next five hours awake and alone in your new basement apartment home.

Your phone, which you didn't even know you had next to your bed, rings and wakes you up just as you start to doze a little. It's one of those old style rotary telephones, older than you, and the noise scares you to full consciousness. A woman on the other end yawns into the phone as you pick it up. "Dee Ricco, Mission Manager, how can I help you?"

You state she called you, not the other way around. "I'm, I'm Sarah Orange, I'm the new Settler Service Rep."

"Oh, oh my god. I am so tired from last night! My apologies. Oh jeez, I just wanted to call you to check in. Did you and your husband have a good night's rest?"

You mention that yes, yes you did. "And you got our goodie basket and our note about today? Did you get all of that?"

You reply into the phone politely that yes, yes you did. "Oh joy! Great! We will see you at nine sharp!"

You get slowly out of bed, bleary-eyed, and start to shower and dress. Your stomach rumbles from a lack of breakfast, and your legs and arms ache from all the tension of the last few days.

Bored and over-tired, you start to sing that Led Zeppelin song to yourself. "Cryin' won't help, prayin' will do you no good..."

# Chapter Nine: First Day

You arrive at the downstairs lobby, smelling the hot coffee that's brewing automatically in one of those glass-walled offices off to the side. A strong-looking woman, mid-thirties, blonde, is brewing a cup of coffee and it smells wonderful, the fragrance filling the large lobby. She wears the Network flight suit tightly, her breasts about to pop out, with a white scarf around her neck to show some individuality. You notice that the front glass doors are still locked—it isn't officially start time. Ni-Perchta and human workers are starting up at McDonald's, switching on fryers and grilling whatever needs to be grilled.

The woman welcomes you into her office with a wave. She introduces herself as Dee Ricco, Mission Manager. She is still attractive in some ways, although the wrinkles and the over-tanning have caught up to her. She isn't as thin as she perhaps once was; she mentions to you twice that she needs to get back into "fighting shape". You are wearing your own blue wannabe NASA flight suit with the American flag on your right shoulder. She gives you a once over, seemingly sizing up the competition.

"It's really good to meet you. I understand, just loosely, you had some issues with immigration?" She sips her cup of coffee, her half-lidded eyes watching you closely.

You sip on your own mug of coffee that she had made for you, nodding. "A little misunderstanding. Just a small delay. Thank you for understanding."

"Of course!" Dee says, tossing her long blonde hair to the side casually. "Of course, this isn't America or even Europe. We have to operate on their time, not our own." Dee subconsciously glances out the window of her office.

"Well, I'll have you shadow me today, helping you with touring Mission Friendship, how to sell one of our places, how to do work orders for our maintenance team. Our maintenance is good—we have Ernesto, who has been here since the Morgan discovery, believe it or not, and Te-La-Calles, the Ni-Perchta foreman. All of our- Buenos Dias, Ernesto!"

You turn and see a slightly paunchy Mexican man in his mid-forties pass by. He walks over, eyes on the ground, and opens the glass door of the office. "Buenos Dias, Dee! Hello, hello." He puts out one of his big hands and shakes with you. "The new SSR, eh? You had a good train trip all the way?"

You nod. "Fantastic. It's beautiful out here. Very nice. I even got to see the comet ritual." Ernesto's eyes meet Dee's, as if they're sharing a little joke.

"Oh, yes, yes, you know that's a rare one," Dee says.

Ernesto leaves, pulling out a pad of paper and writing down something he's just remembered. He waves to someone you don't see, and in a moment you meet him for the first time—Jake Alexandros. Shorter than you, slicked back hair, he comes into the office with a gleaming, white-toothed smile. He has a briefcase in hand and over his black flight suit he's got a holster, just like a police detective back home. A pistol sits there comfortably.

"Our new SSR. Great to have you on-board. Jake Alexandros. I'm the Bureau of Off-World Affairs agent here at Mission Friendship. I'm, sort of, your friendly representative and advisor from the US Government. I help work with the Network people and, uh, locals." He chuckles and so does Dee, again at some inside joke.

"Good to meet you. I heard you and your husband were delayed a little, but got in just safe and sound. Good, good. Well, I know that our good Dee here is set to help you out through the day but I'll be here too. Oh, jeez, what time is it?" Jake swings his gaze. "9:05. Oh well, let's get these doors open and start touring today, shall we? We want our tower up and running for the day!"

You see a tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man, an Aryan superman, walk over and open the glass doors of the lobby area. He wears the motorcycle cop-like uniform like the rest of the Counters.

Armed with a submachine gun and carrying an ori-baton heavily studded with different types of orichalcum on his utility belt, he introduces himself in a heavy Afrikaner accent. "Oscar Botha, Chief of Mission Security here, Madame. I am the ori-man around here, just in case the Winkies get out of line."

Jake Alexandros nods and pats Botha on the arm. "Botha keeps us safe at night. There's been so many—misunderstandings—between us and the indigenous population..."

Botha gives you a once over and nods. "Quite right, sir. Quite right. The Winkies need to know we are not afraid to live here in the colony." Botha winks at you. "How's your husband doing?" he says intently.

"Oscar, Oscar, remember about the word 'colony'. We don't use that word here. 'Settlement' is more appropriate," Jake reminds Botha.

You and Botha ignore Alexandros's speech.

"Left me for another woman. Rat bastard," you say perfectly, true acting behind every word.

Botha takes out some gum from his pocket, offers you a piece. You politely refuse. Botha stuffs his mouth and starts smacking away at it. "Your husband is an interesting fella, yeah? Just takes off on you the first day you are here."

You frown. "He's, he's, unfortunately, he used to beat me."

Dee looks shocked and sad and puts out a hand, rubbing the top of your own hand. "Well, sweetie, no more of that. If he's gone, Botha won't let him in."

Botha laughs. "Nope. I'll put a bullet in him first, and then I'll let him in. Wife-beating scum."

You start to nod rapidly and sniff the air, as if about to cry. "Yes, yes. Terrible." You muster an amazing emotional act. Afterwards, you do not understand your outburst against Jaime and why you made up such lies and why you decided to slur his name. Something unconsciously bubbled to the surface and your anger and your sadness at Jaime's departure has made you say something less than sane.

~~~~

YOU get the grand tour of the place and start to see people trickle out of Mission Friendship. Half of the group there are the middle class of Network life—Ni-Perchta overseers—in their neat flight suits, but the rest are independent owners and operators in their mining gear or their Kevlar armor. Some greet you with kindness and courtesy, others ignore you. An old school bus painted blue and white pulls up in front of Mission Friendship, taking groups of people to their respective places of work in the area—the Darling Mine, Mine 357, the Scales Mine, and Orichalcum Refinery.

There is a gym on the fifteenth floor of the apartment tower, a full one with weights and exercise bikes, and there's a heated pool on the sixteenth floor. An old man is swimming naked, and Dee smoothly asks Mr. Bern to put on his swim trunks. "Why? Is this not proper? I mean, I mean, Dee, this is not the United States. What law are you enforcing?" He is saying this with his wrinkled and very naked carcass barely covered by a towel.

Dee smiles thinly. "But, but Mr. Bern, let us remember that we have by-laws here on Network property and the US Constitution."

Bern jumps back into the pool, showing off his wrinkled and concave ass. As he pops back up to the surface of the water, he states, "Well call, call the Counters, see if I care. Roll the dice and let's see what happens, champ. You're not the Supreme Court of anything except Hell! For the next 10,000 years you will shovel your own shit and eat it!"

Dee turns and smiles at you, gives you a fake laugh, and leads you back to the elevators. "Quoting a Sublime album," she says. "The old man loves to play around. If people don't get the joke..."

You look confused. "You are from Long Beach, right?" Dee says.

Another elevator pulls up, revealing the three Counters, Botha, Robert, and Tadeo.

You catch Botha yelling, "This is the deal. Get some goddamn clothes on, you old bastard!" at the top of his lungs just as the elevator doors close.

You are shown empty apartments ready for rent, priced at 28,000 Dii-Yaa a month, or $2,000 a month in real money. You wonder why they are so expensive, considering that most of the apartments have the same amount of living space as a Volkswagen Beetle. As you are looking over the new appliances, specially made without electronic components in order to avoid the EMP bursts from the storms, you ask why the rent is the way it is.

Dee replies smoothly, "People want to live with people, not with the Ni-Perchta. Except for the crazies. So they are more than happy to pay to live inside a real settlement, whatever the cost to their paycheck. Besides, they pay nothing in US taxes, so they still come out ahead. And the Network is a corporation, albeit one with a unique mission. We need to generate income in everything we do." Dee smiles at you, a wide and white smile, predatory and unkind.

You don't say anything as Dee rambles on. "Our mission is to make The Oberon a modernized world through progressive renovation and development. The Ni-Perchta here live as we did back in the fourteenth century. Illiteracy is found in almost seventy percent of the native population, child marriage is common, and slavery is legal. The Witch-Lord knows this, and he works with us to make this a proper and decent place to live."

You nod, thinking to yourself. "Of course."

Dee leads you back to the elevator and takes you to the top floor suite. "Wanna see something neat?"

You nod, already terminally bored by the entire experience. The elevator reaches the highest level of the apartment tower and opens to a small hallway that leads to two black doors. Dee walks ahead and pops open the doors with a key on her key ring, revealing something else entirely.

The penthouse suite is tastefully furnished, larger than most houses back on Earth, and takes up the entire floor. It's a modern art masterpiece made into a home and over 6,000 square feet, according to Dee. She walks you through it, showing off the wall to wall closets, the Jacuzzi bath, the incredible almost-360 degree view of the world around you. All the furnishings are here. It's an empty but fully-stocked palace waiting for a person to move right in.

"Nice place," you state, meaning it. It's done up in a sort of Arab motif, with striped pillars and gold furnishings adorning the place. The floors are tiled and covered in some spots by Persian rugs.

"Only for the best," Dee says. "17,000 USD a month. Quite the place and only for the best."

For someone who has lived only in cramped, crappy apartments or slept over at someone else's house, the size and the luxury of the place hit you in the gut and right in the back of the shoulder blades all at the same time.

"Anyone renting it?" you ask.

Dee shakes her head. "If you can get someone to rent it, I've got a great bonus for you."

You raise an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Sixty-five dollar Network voucher," Dee says, indicating at first that this indeed is something to work for. "You get the most expensive place rented you can get a nice little meal downstairs for a couple of days," she says with a wink. "I know."

You nod, looking over the place in open envy. Dee seems to be reading your thoughts. "Not like you or me could grab a place like this," she says with finality. "But maybe in the next life."

~~~~

YOU end up back at your desk with the computer, waiting for Dee. There is a young Asian girl at the other desk, looking very, very tired and hung over with heavy bags under her eyes and her long black hair slightly askew. Jake comes over and says, "Ohayou Saki, when did you clock in today?"

Saki yawns and speaks with a light Japanese accent. "Probably, like, five minutes ago. Hello." Saki stands up, smoothes her blue uniform out, and shakes hands with you.

"And what time is it, Saki?" Jake says. Saki nervously chuckles. "Um, five after ten. I'm sorry, Jake, it's just, well I was feeling like I was getting the flu again."

Jake nods. "Dee and I have to go to 301—they're moving back to Earth before the portal closes. Show Miss Sarah here how to take down work orders."

"No problem!" Saki says and you and she watch Jake leave the room. Saki mutters something in Japanese and goes back to the computer. Within a moment, she's back to playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on the computer.

"Oh-oh hey, sorry, you want to-" she starts.

You sit down at your desk and start to look over the notes you have been taking about your new job. "Oh, I figure we got about six more hours in the day. I want to type up my notes beforehand." You smile. "How is your day going?"

"Shitty," Saki says. "Woke up from being so drunk last night in the Funeral Breaks at this, uh, speakeasy run by an American. On Moondog." Saki looks slowly over at you, realizing she's said something terribly wrong. "Kidding, kidding! I never leave the Mission past curfew without permission."

You nod, and Saki turns slowly back to her computer, in mute horror about what she has said. "You want to see a work order now? I have to put one in for the guys; there's a broken faucet in 412."

"Sure," you say. A thought jolts you a little bit. You are doing exactly the same thing that everyone else is doing on Earth. The same exact type of corporate job that everyone else is doing. You look down at the tiled floor for a moment, thinking.

Saki says, "Hey, don't forget, day after tomorrow is Christmas. You got the invite to be at the observation lounge?"

You nod. "Oh yes, yes. Thank you. In that goodie bag, thanks. I got the message."

The day ends as it started—with you barely interacting with anyone. The miners start drifting in about the time you are going to wrap up for the day. 6:00pm, Oberon Standard. You are surprised as Dee pays you immediately for your work in Dii-Yaa money. 1,435 Dii-Yaa to be exact.

"Witch-Lord law," Dee says. "Have to be paid daily. Oh, you know, there was one thing."

Dee leads you over to her office. "Sorry, sorry, I know you are probably clocked out, but here's a rundown on people looking to get a 'dayhawk' license for Sargasso-3."

Dee pulls out a small folder with long thirty-page forms. "These are the salvage license forms—Form 27B–6. Now they have to be approved by myself, then cleared by Jake as the Bureau agent."

Dee grins. "How much do you think a license costs?"

You shrug, not terribly interested. Dee smiles. "20,000 cash, up front." You fake surprise. "Straight to the Network. You sell a license; you get a hundred dollars out of that. Sound good, Sarah?"

You nod. "Sure. But isn't that expensive? I mean that's-"

Dee keeps smiling. "Sarah, Sarah, we have a contract from the Witch-Lord and the Bureau that states we have the right to charge whatever is appropriate. This is market appropriate."

"Yes, but wouldn't that put people- I mean, would make people do things illegally instead?"

Dee shrugs. "Not really our problem, Miss Sarah. Besides, it's for their own good. If you have a good amount of money you can avoid most of the danger out there because you have the means to have your expeditions properly funded."

"Any way around that?" you ask, innocently.

Dee grins. "I wouldn't know anything about bribes, if that's what you mean..." Dee shakes her head. "Nope."

"You want to see our little salvage and ori showroom in the back? I mean, if you need to run off back home..." Dee says.

You shake your head, not quite interested but not quite ready to say no to your new boss.

She nods to the door, jabbering away as she leads you back beyond the elevators and the lobby. Past the mural depicting the Witch-Lord is a metallic sign bolted over a couple of large steel doors reading: _Official Ori and Salvage Buy Center for Sargasso-3_ and _JUST SAY NO TO ILLEGAL ORI AND SALVAGE SALES. SMUGGLING IS A CRIME_.

The wholesale prices for the orichalcum is in the thousands of Dii-Yaa, but a quick conversion in your head finds them to be pretty reasonable compared to what was being sold back on Earth, especially the telekinesis ori. A large bulletin board to the side explains in English, Spanish, and Japanese that they have:

Non-Human Non-Ni-Perchta Control Ori! 20K D-Y- Taurus.

Telekinesis Ori! 15K D-Y- Leo.

Fire Control Ori! (High Danger!) Mkt. Price. Sagittarius.

Electrical Ori! Mkt. Price. Libra.

You walk through the steel doors and discover a Nemo Gate—a small one, only big enough for one person at a time. You enter and in a moment you are in some underground place you know not where.

Dee materializes and leads you into the shop run by a few Ni-Perchta under a human overseer.

Stepping inside, you feel as if this is the most insane antique shop you have ever seen in your life. There are items on shelves that stretch up the entirety of the stone walls. Radio Oberon is playing over hidden speakers. The room is lit by gaslight, making it dark and dungeon-like. Why no electricity is being used is never explained to you.

There are no customers inside when you step in, just the glass counters full of random stuff and old style, '50s cash registers. There are old statues of the man-beast things from the Antediluvian cities and lots of old guns, including something called an "ori-projector". It looks like a haphazard mix between an M-16 and a flashlight, and it is hooked up to a backpack. There is also random junk, historical pieces, traditional Ni-Perchta armor, and clothing that looks medieval.

You look into the glass counters, seeing things you have never heard of before—a jar of Remembers, also known as school pills; five pills for 3,000 Dii-Yaa, or one Krugerrand (no US dollars accepted).

These pills are, according to the typed up cards in the glass cases, guaranteed to give you increased intelligence for a temporary period of time, and you will be able remember any event for the next hour with one hundred percent perfect clarity and recall.

There are strength pills as well: "guaranteed to increase physical strength by 200% for three hours."

Golden belts that emit a "body shield to deflect physical blows or gunfire" are also behind glass and so are large, hollow boxes: "an infinite storage device when hooked up to electricity".

And, of course, pure orichalcum pieces line one wall, ready for re-sale.

"Everything you ever find or mine out there has to come through us. The Network's economy is bigger than Belgium's," Dee says, looking around the shop. "You know where we are?"

You shake your head.

"Neither do I. Once the Gate is shut off for the evening and the doors weld themselves shut for the night, no one can get in or out. If anyone tries to rob the place, the doors close and the room gets gassed. Even the tiniest bit of shoplifting. A little Antediluvian machine does everything. Thank God, too. If someone had access to all this stuff that the legals sell to the Network in this sector to re-sell back on Earth..."

She makes a mock shivering motion.

~~~~

YOU are back at your apartment in the basement, alone. You turn the radio on, after grabbing a beer from the refrigerator. You sit on the couch, listening to the only radio station coming in—Radio Oberon out of Solomon's Bay. You drink and fall asleep on the couch after filling out the license form.

You wake up again and realize that Radio Oberon is now playing some old type of radio play. You wake up in a stupor, listening in surreal awe. Something from the 1940s or '50s. You like it—there's a weird freshness to such an old-style show, with its melodrama and the faint scratching of vinyl.

"Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all?" the first narrator says on a recording made before your own mother was born.

"We offer you... escape!" the second narrator shouts like a used car salesman on amphetamines.

You listen for a while as Vincent Price rambles on about a lighthouse that is apparently surrounded by jellyfish and sharks and smells like death. Then the narrator has an adventure or something against rats and blind tribesmen while smoking a pipe to hide the stink of death.

The show ends in half an hour and you are not tired, not tired at all; you want to explore a little. It's 10:25pm according to the wall clock. According to the rules of the Mission, you cannot leave Mission Friendship without a pass or escort from Mission Security at this hour. But the Benbow Inn, the bar inside Mission Friendship, is open until 3:00am.

~~~~

YOU stand outside the Benbow Inn, at the lobby floor of Mission Friendship. You wait around, trying to see if anyone is around or working at this place. The doors are closed.

You suddenly feel weird, dejected, alone, hopeless, all of those feelings put together into a hideous emotional cocktail. You finally see Treena and Winniefreddie Page, the Page sisters, open the place up.

You walk inside.

The Benbow Inn is apparently nothing but four walls and an incredibly small version of the Nemo Gate that girds the Pacific. Treena and Winniefreddie have disappeared, apparently having gone through the Gate itself back to, well, wherever they have just gone to. A neatly printed sign hangs from a cardboard cut-out of John Wayne. Step on in, Pilgrim! One second away from cold beer and fun!

You hold onto the side of the Gate, girding yourself but then giving up.

You let go of the side of the Gate and feel this sort of pull as you go through the middle. There is a thunder crack and you can see, for just a brief moment in time, everything at once—your past, the present predicament, scenes of the future, all in a flash, in a jumbled mash that you can barely remember after being pulled through the Gate. Then you see a thousand stars exploding and have the sense of watching a white ring of light form and grow...

You are on the other side of the Nemo Gate, which is next to a pair of heavy wooden doors inside the actual inn. Looking through the massive plate glass windows at the front of the inn, you watch as a light rain pours steadily down onto a turtle and duck pond, scattering the little animals around. Green grass-covered hills covered by the night are just a moment's walk from the porch area of the Benbow.

You also spot Mission Friendship's modernistic tower miles away. A large sign bolted to the front doors of the Benbow states: No Access Beyond This Point For Any Network Settlers Past 10:00pm.

The Inn is deserted, despite it being 10:30pm. The wooden booths are empty, the tables with red checkered picnic tablecloths are empty.

The front bar area of the Benbow is decorated at one end with the giant skull of what you find out is a Baleen dragon ("quite harmless if a bit large in real life," Treena explains later), and hundreds of framed photos from around the world fill every nook and cranny of the place. The ceiling is decorated as if were the night sky, with the seven moons. Dark but homey, the place has that rich smell of years of spilled beer. It also smells of eggs—there is a large clear glass jar of deviled eggs sitting in the middle of the bar, reminding you of a place in Long Beach your dad once took you to. A plaque that states: _ILLEGAL TO HAVE ALCOHOL WITHOUT A PERSONAL LIQUOR LICENSE—WITCH-LORD LAW_ hangs above the bar area.

An apron wearing Ni-Perchta male with one side of his face heavily scarred watches you from down a hall that leads to a true, old school Viking dining hall area. An open fire pit area covered in hot coals is in there, with large bits of meat being grilled under a partially-opened roof. You realize that the bar section must jut out a little bit from Mission Friendship itself.

You yell out to Treena and Winniefreddie, the Page sisters, who are stalking about the place.

"Hey! Hello!" you say.

Treena and Winniefreddie, who seem to want to ignore you, walk over slowly and meet you by the bar. "Hey there, yourself, girl. What's up?" Winniefreddie says, looking bubbly. "Good to see you, Sarah, right?"

You nod. "Need something to eat and drink. You guys are open, right?" you say, friendly. "How much for a beer and uh, you guys got something heavy? Burgers? Steak? Somethin'?"

"Oh of course. For a price," Treena, the skinny one with horn-rimmed glasses, says, walking around the counter. She creeps you out at first with her weird voice that sounds like Bullwinkle being castrated by hot oil. "500 Dii-Yaa." She bats her eyes four times in quick succession, fluttering them at you behind her glasses. Her voice returns to normal. "Please. Sorry, I get excited talking about money."

You look the star-painted ceiling. "That's, that's, um, well it's 14 Dii-Yaa to the dollar, so that's, um..." You look at Treena. "It's 35 bucks. You really get so much business here?"

Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. Winniefreddie speaks up, "Well, well yes, yes we do. Yes we do. Yes."

The Ni-Perchta who is in the other room comes walking over, waving his hands. "You pay? Is Exeurncalles! Is Exeurncalles!"

"Yeah, yeah I understand, but I have to pay."

"Is Exeurncalles!" the Ni-Perchta says, looking at Winniefreddie and Treena.

You start peeling off and giving away the red Monopoly money bills Dee paid you. You give the money to Treena, who looks all too happy to grab it. "Yeah, yeah, shut up, ya stupid alien," you say as you hand over the cash. The Ni-Perchta still yells in the background. Treena nods appreciatively and stuffs the Dii-Yaa away into her 1950s-era cash register.

You shake your head. "Freakin' alien, huh?"

Treena and Winniefreddie look annoyed at what you just said. You watch as the Ni-Perchta man leaves and goes back to his cooking.

"You girls into drinking? No one else here, and I don't want to be the lonely drunk," you say dejectedly, feeling sickened by the last couple of days.

Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other, shrug. Winniefreddie says "I always love shooting the shit with a new resident."

The Ni-Perchta male working in the other room yells out, "Is Exeurncalles! Okay!"

You give him the finger, and he ignores you. "What does 'exeurncalles' mean to you guys?"

Treena and Winniefreddie smile to each other. "Means you should, uh, show respect to the festival days. Ni-Perchta have rules against drinking. Forget Tek though, he's just a little pious, that's all. Forgive him." Winniefreddie says.

"Beers on us. You are our only customer," Treena says, walking behind the counter. "I'm supposed to inform you that you need to have a personal liquor license registered with the Mission Manager. Do you have a liquor license?"

"I- uh, yes, not on me," you say, meeting Treena and Winniefreddie's eyes.

"The hell with the Ephors," Treena says. "Fourteenth century fools trying to boss us around. If it wasn't for the ori we'd probably never come here except for a curious vacation."

~~~~

"HE cheats on you with two different people, and then has the balls to blame you for not doing the 'hey-hey'?" Winniefreddie is saying, making a mock shivering motion. She is sitting on one of the bar stools, her chubby figure angling to get a comfortable perch. The storm has picked up and is still playing outside. "Is he a psycho?" Winniefreddie continues, as you stand behind the bar drinking out of a copper cup you just refilled with the tap.

Treena, the skinny one with horn-rimmed glasses, is on another cracked red leather stool next to Winniefreddie playing solitaire. Treena looks annoyed, since you've been belaboring the shit out of this story, and pipes in with her opinion. "Yeah, he sucks and needs to die in a car fire. Now, can we move the hell on?"

The giant dragon head that hangs over the restroom doors watches you and the others with glass eyes that reflect flickers of light from the fireplace you just lit up angrily after complaining to the Page sisters. You find that you like them a lot and enjoy talking to them.

A regular rainstorm is going on outside. It is at a steady, hard tempo. With only a few lights on and with the centered fireplace-stove giving off light from burning logs, the place is both grim and homey at once. A fully decorated Christmas tree is in one corner. You wonder how they got away with the tree. Perhaps since Christmas is such a secularized nothing holiday back home that even the non-religious love it, you figure that Christmas trees got a free pass.

You notice for the first time that dollar bills are stapled across the ceiling; people have signed them from wherever they came. A couple of the bills are noticeably red notes instead of green dollar bills—Dii-Yaa money. One says Guy Farson, you think. You realize you've been staring at it for a while. If it wasn't for the Nemo Gate next to the back door of the Benbow, you would think you were in some ancient pub back on Earth.

"T-that was my feeling, yes, Treena, but then what you were saying... And yeah, he's, wow," you say, turning on the beer tap and putting your mouth on the end. "God, I like to drink now."

You are joking but there is a bit of reality behind your statement. Alcohol, you notice, makes things feel just distant enough that you can think for a simple moment. Alcohol calms your nerves and your stomach enough to make life tolerable. Alcohol masks the shittiness you feel. With increasing doses, alcohol makes life fun again. You have noticed this since the Queen Mary. Guy offered you a drink then and you remember how your mind stops racing, slows down and you think you can think more clearly after a drink.

Winniefreddie wiggles some more and then takes out a cigarette. She mumbles something under her breath and then looks through her pockets for a lighter, doesn't find one, and puts the cigarette away.

You stop. "Did you just say he's a probably a vampire? I don't think this- Wait, are there vampires here, in The Oberon? You think? No, no that's stupid... Wait, there are vampires here..." You think of the dead city you went through.

Winniefreddie looks away and mumbles something about you about to be educated, so you move on.

Treena takes out a small .38 pistol and a blue expandable baton that's collapsed. It has a single blue orichalcum stone in the handle. She lays it out on the counter. "You should go back there and blow his brains out. This is my gun and my baton, totally untraceable to you. You understand me? Totally untraceable."

Winniefreddie quietly asks, "Can we have a beer to calm our nerves?"

You nod and bring out copper cup for each as well as two bottles of home-made beer with tags stating Tokyo Sexy Whale. You realize that you are just running the bar now, for no particular reason. Treena takes the beer bottle without looking and twists off the cap. You look at the bottle again. The name is awfully familiar. You stare at the label that shows a blue whale with a sailor's cap on. The whale is destroying what could be downtown Tokyo, while women in bikinis run away from the whale. Tokyo Sexy Whale is written in colorful, neon lettering.

Winniefreddie is trying to open her bottle with her teeth until she sees Treena make a twisting motion with her hands. "Look at me, Winniefreddie, look at me." Treena says.

"Where you guys, I mean, let me say that again. Where you guys from?" you slur.

"Seal Beach, originally," Winniefreddie says. "Graduated Los Alamitos High School in 2006."

You lick your lips. "You gotta be shitting me! You shit me not! God, that's me too, me freakin' too! I graduated in 2011! Jeez, that's awesome! We are all from Seal Beach!" You are very happy to hear that and high five the two girls, hard. "This is fate. I attracted this. I attracted this big time. You ever read The Secret?"

They shake their heads.

"What are you guys doing out here?" you ask.

"Selling alcohol pretty much. We make our own beer. Tokyo Sexy Whale. Want to get out there to the Sargasso-3 Free Zone. California Gold Rush time, you know? Sargasso-3 is supposed to be barely hit, and so a lot of flush dayhawks are paying ten bucks a beer. You can't import alcohol into The Oberon, but we can make it here," Treena says, her face down.

You look at the bottle again. "Tokyo Sexy Whale. That's—you know Guy Farson, don't you? Dayhawker, right?"

Treena and Winniefreddie become very still. "Nope, never, uh, heard of him. Why do you say that?" Treena says.

You look at the bottle again, thinking, but don't say anything.

"We really wanted to get into dayhawking ourselves, but we don't have anyone to teach us, you know? And the license cost- If you want to do it legally and in the daytime, it's a lot of money or special favors to the Bureau agent here," Winniefreddie says. Treena looks at her as if she has said too much and Winniefreddie quiets down.

"I want to do that. We are all California girls. We can handle ourselves out there in the big bad empty, can't we?" you say.

Winniefreddie is nodding along and saying, "Hell yeah. Hell yeah," repeatedly. You put out your sloshing cup full of cold beer. "Here's to underage drinking and bad decision making! We got to go into dayhawking, right? I mean you guys don't want to just own this place, right? I mean you guys got here just a little while ago too, right?"

Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. "Right, right, and we own this place, right."

The Ni-Perchta male walks behind you three, shaking his head and yelling, "Is Exeurncalles!"

You shoo him away. "Shoo! Shooooo!" Winniefreddie and Treena say goodnight to the Ni-Perchta male, who goes into a back room area that is marked Private. You see a little cot is set up for him to sleep on.

"Do you guys want to see something nuts? The book? That the Network Rep brought me back in Long Beach? From my sister. I looked it up online. It's a very rare thing to have, and it's supposed to be very helpful with dayhawking," you say.

Treena shrugs. Winniefreddie nods with excitement.

You put down the copper cup and run back to your apartment—which means going through the Nemo Gate again with a crack. You bring out the book, and slap it down on the counter in the Benbow. You open it up.

Winniefreddie looks like she's just won the lottery. "Oh snap, it's the Necronomicon! Have the walls started to bleed and are the stars right? Where's the section where we can raise the dead from their dreamless sleep?"

You ignore Winniefreddie's ramblings on H.P. Lovecraft, excited about telling your story. "Voice of the Four Winds or something, he said. Not the Necronomicon. I don't know what that is. You can read stories, look over maps- I've read a lot in here." Treena finally rouses herself up, pushes back her glasses, and looks over the book.

"Are you thinking about selling it? It has to be worth something..." Treena says.

"Y-yeah," you say, meaning it but feeling that it will never happen. Looking at the book again gives you a chill. It's quiet for a long moment with the logs crackling in the background and the storm playing outside the front doors.

"These books are pretty rare, Sarah, so I've heard," Treena says.

"These books, these are really strong religious artifacts too. Like our Bibles or Korans. Sort of a translator/GPS/gospel for the natives, the Ni-Perchta. How'd your sister get it?" Treena flips through the pages of the book. "And it is blank, Sarah."

"And it's worth a shitload of money, I think, wait, what?"

Treena nods without looking up from the pages. "Oh yeah. You smell that, every time you flip a page? Smells like electrical burn. Just, sort of, drifts up from the page. What is this?"

Winniefreddie spits out half of her beer, spraying the book and you, understanding what you have and what can be done with it. "Oh man, we can use this! I know what this is. This is a tetrachromatic version of their book—that's why we can't see it—but I guess you can, jeez. Man, we make money so we can hang out with you and you'll be like, 'Winniefreddie, you want to go places and do things and not work 'n' shit?' And we can drink Hankakins instead of Budweisers, and the men we hang with will all look like Abercrombie and Bitch models except without the douche factor? Right?" She high fives you hard and you are barely ready. You shake your hand because it hurts. "But wait, you said you can read certain things, how does that work?"

You wipe your front with a towel after spilling some beer on yourself. "Sounds a-awesome to me, too. The word is Heineken. Not Hankakins." You look at the book. You can see every hieroglyphic and a map showing the entire Oberon with the four regions—Burzee, Quadling, Super Sargasso Sea, and Nikh-Cunm/Former COMECON Territories.

"Do I look like I'm Russian like Hitler? I don't speak the language," Winniefreddie says, chugging her beer and placing it on the counter. "Chalk up another one to the Maniac. I can't read a thing though. You must be tetrachromatic."

Winniefreddie and Treena look at each for a long moment. "Yeah, you must be." Treena agrees. "You know what that is, right?"

"Seeing extra colors and shit," you slur.

"Seeing extra colors beyond the normal spectrum, right," Treena says.

"Cool." You start to gargle with beer and dribble some onto yourself. "My future is in beer dentistry... Hey, hey, got a question. Why are we so locked up tight in the Mission? They afraid of the Ni-Perchta that much? I mean, Jesus, what's the big deal? They are strange but they ain't, you know, Cthulhu flying up into your face and shit, you know?"

Winniefreddie and Treena smile at each other. "There's a lot of, creatures, around. I mean, more like in Sargasso-3, but still, you can see things out there, late at night." Treena says.

You nod as if you really understand this. "Where is everybody?"

The Page sisters shrug. "It's Christmas Eve. Everyone is with family, Sarah." Winniefreddie says.

Treena comes up with an idea. "We should go to the Breaks, girls! Hang out at the bars on Moondog Street!"

You high five her hard, making her cringe. Winniefreddie nods her head. "Oh yeah."

~~~~

YOU and the girls actually walk the green and hilly fields at night, taking a good fifteen to twenty minutes to get over to the walled village of the Funeral Breaks. Walking on a cobblestone path, you and the girls are doing a stumble-and-talk to the town's edge. The high wooden and stone walls greet you with ambivalence and the gate leading inside has a green reflector plate, like a highway sign back home, stating that the walled village of the Funeral Breaks is a designated census spot. A mix of cars and motorcycles and even a few short buses are all over, parked in front of the village, each modified with extra lights, metal plates, and other things to armor them.

A single yellow Karmann Ghia stands out amongst all of the other cars—clean looking, snub-nosed, a 1970s hipster-mobile. A Ni-Perchta kid, maybe thirteen, sits on the hood of a '55 Chevrolet that's dying of rust, smoking a Valis pipe. He waves to you and points to his pipe. You ignore him. A slight drizzle falls from an overcast sky, creating a mist.

Already just steps away from passing through, a Ni-Perchta in simple, medieval-style armor steps out and asks what your business is. Next to him is another Ni-Perchta in a blue military uniform, human style. Winniefreddie responds, "Going to Moondog Street, sir knight."

The Ni-Perchta frowns and lets you pass by. You look him up and down, still a little weirded out by seeing a true alien up close and personal.

The village itself is of a good size, with winding and narrow streets snaking off in all directions. You walk on mud and cobblestones, avoiding the stares of the few Ni-Perchta still on the street. Their homes and shops are shuttered closed and all street lamps are doused. You walk in almost pitch darkness with only a few Coleman lamps left in windows and on street benches to guide your way. Ads for bars and restaurants dot the street, pasted onto Ni-Perchta homes.

Coming around the corner after avoiding a couple of fat, drunk humans munching on carrots, you and the girls make a beeline down the street that the music, the shouting, and the yells are coming from—Moondog Street. Electricity is on in this section of town. Neon lights make their appearance. Women with green and red body paint covering their breasts also make an appearance. A couple of homeless human street musicians thump their musical shit through the air. Multiple bars, and what you assume to be strip clubs, dot the street. Ni-Perchta women alongside human women call out to you for lap dances and make obscene gestures. Cigarette smoke and the smell of food blow by with every gust of wind. You even hear firecrackers—or what you naively think to be firecrackers—popping off.

Christmas lights are piled on buildings that look like they were built in some medieval Lord of the Rings-like world.

"I'm so far away from home," you say, bumping into one girl with no top who's using body paint as a bra. In the distance there's the guitar riff of Money for Nothing. You spot signs stating Human Only and Both Races Allowed in many of the shops.

Winniefreddie and Treena look at each other. "Green Man?" Treena says. They stare at each other for a good moment and then nod.

"The hell is this place? Did we just wake up in that part of Back of the Future Part Two where Biff controls everything?" you say over the yelling and the people shouting things to each other.

Treena shrugs. "Shit, basically. Thunderdome meets the village of Bree."

You see Livesey's Green Man. It's a very large, medieval-looking tavern-like place standing in a field of high grass that perhaps was a common area or park at one time. Old wooden picnic tables dot the bare ground in front of the tavern. An odd flag that is yellow, red, blue, and white flies from Livesey's Green Man—you've seen that flag once or twice since coming off-world and you try to make a mental note to discuss it sometime. A wooden statue of a person, well done and very intricate, stands outside the tavern, seven feet tall, painted a dark green. A string of Christmas lights, reds and greens, is strung around the statue. People are all over; the place is busy this hour.

Each man and woman, all pretty young, has one of those orichalcum batons, with maybe a couple or more stones set into it, and each has a crossbow on them as well. Everyone has a red or yellow plastic tag on his or her chest or on his or her arms. They all look tired and spent. Men and women are grouped together, talking in pairs and in groups. Some have metal chainmail armor on, others thick, leather, padded motorcycle jackets and even old riot gear helmets.

You walk up the front stairs and swing open the heavy wooden doors. The Green Man is one part roadhouse, one part casino, and one part place to get stabbed, you find out. Stepping inside as a twenty-year-old girl, you feel very alone and very overwhelmed in this dim, partially lit place.

Passing a cardboard sign that says Check in All Weapons! _NO EXCEPTIONS!_ , you come across an odd scene. There are roulette tables—those big wheels that spin so you can bet whether or not the tag will land on a 1, 5, 10, or 20. Men in bowler hats are dealers in probably rigged card games, and salvagers with stacks of money are laying down bets on craps tables left and right or duking it out over poker. A thick smell of cooking meat, cigar smoke, and sweat permeates the entire open space. A salsa and chip bar is off to one side, looking appetizing if presumably unhygienic.

"Oh snap," you say, seeing something that turns you on like nothing else. The two girls watch you as you drift over to the casino section of Livesey's Green Man.

"Blackjack!" one of the old women dealers cries out, clapping her hands as she's nailed a blackjack. The other players look pissed, folding up their cards and giving them back to her. They are playing with bundles of red money and casino chips. You take a look at the table between chip bites. One shoe. The dealer is only using one card shoe to deal, so the cards are barely getting mixed up.

You are pretty good at math. When you were small, you used to play a little casino night with your Dad and could always count the cards—you were doing that when you were eleven, twelve years old. You move over to the blackjack table. Treena and Winniefreddie shrug and walk over to the bar to pick up a libation or three. They ask if you want something to drink and you reply, "What do you think?"

You sit down just as another player is leaving. The old woman dealer in a bowler hat gives you the dirtiest look in the world, her wrinkled and over-made-up face seeming to crack with petty hate. "You of age, Missy?" she says.

You stare at her. You say nothing. The old woman shrugs. "It's another planet anyway. Who the beep cares, amiright?"

She starts to deal out the cards. From that one shoe, you think, amazed at how this place is being run. You know from television that casinos back home, in Vegas, usually use six shoes to prevent what you are going to do. With six shoes there would be so many card combinations that no one could ever figure it out. In this half-assed Oberon, they didn't think of it at all.

You get your first card: a queen. You start to play; beginning very carefully, scoping out the territory, seeing how they flop down. You are playing next to a guy who looks like an older, more beaten up version of Brad Pitt and a very attractive older woman with heavy mascara who is drinking beer from a copper cup. With two extra players, the dealer and you, you'll have no problem figuring the flow of play.

A human waiter comes by and asks if you want a beer. "Of course," you say. "I'm old enough." The dealer gives you a fake smile with nice golden teeth. You start to drink the beer, feeling pretty good now. Treena gives you an extra beer. She blows a raspberry after seeing you already have one. You are about to destroy this casino, you just know it. One shoe! Holy Christ, what an opening, you think. You cross yourself in front of everyone before the second deal, muttering a prayer to God, thanking Him and His son.

It is about the fourth deal when you start winning big, figuring what is in the shoe and at play. You get dealt a queen and a deuce—this combination is usually shit, but you know that there's a nine coming up, and there it is. From then on in, you blow up Livesey's Green Man.

You play and play and drink and drink, beer after beer, in copper cups and plastic cups, depending on what the Ni-Perchta waiters can throw to you. You see your mountain of chips in clear, double vision, and scoop up the mountain into a plastic bucket that somebody handed to you earlier. A crowd has gathered, quite amazed at your dexterity and also waiting to see if at any moment you will be hauled off for cheating.

You fall off your stool, still holding the bucket upright, still holding your beer upright. You are laughing hard, managing to somehow, in a very difficult (at least for you) motion, stand up with the cup of fresh beer and the bucket of casino winnings. Seeing that everyone is looking at you, you take a bow. The older woman with mascara is laughing very hard and gives you a thumbs up. Older Brad Pitt is there, laughing, and you decide to go up and kiss him on the mouth for no particular reason.

"Alright! 'Kay, thanks, bye!" you yell to the casino, the other salvagers cheering you on as you grope your way across the place to the bar counter where the Page sisters are talking with the bartender, who wears a blue leather jacket. A bouncer comes over, a thick, big-bellied bastard with a bald head. "I'm the bouncer here, and I am asking if you need assistance to your car or vehicle-" he says before you interrupt him.

"Why don't you bounce on over and get me a drink, then?" you say, winking at him and stumbling backwards. The bouncer just looks annoyed and leaves.

You manage to face the man in the blue leather jacket. "Ch-change 'em out." The man shakes both of his heads looking at the four Page sisters, and then takes your chips. He opens a door marked Private behind him.

You stand there rocking out to music that may or may not be there.

After five minutes the man in the blue leather jacket gives you your winnings. You count the stacks. 500,500 Dii-Yaa or, in real money, 35,750 dollars. Not too bad.

You give a few thousand bucks to the Page sisters, who shake your hand, then stuff the rest into every available pocket.

"We gotta be hanging out with her more, man. We gotta. We just gotta, we gotta, we gotta..." Winniefreddie says.

You and the Page sisters keep drinking until all the words coming out of your mouths become slurred and slow versions of themselves. You three laugh the night away and dance in some club connected to the Green Man with people who look like the Manson family. You listen to typical club songs being played by live human bands.

~~~~

YOU and the Page sisters stumble out of Livesey's Green Man laughing like the inebriated hyenas you are. Dawn has arrived in the Walled Village. There is still some music playing somewhere.

You and the Page sisters take turns peeing in a Porta Potti set up on a street corner.

Exiting Moondog Street, you are back in the true Ni-Perchta part of town, trying to roam back to the Benbow.

Flush with a bit of cash, drunk, and happy, you three come onto a disturbing little scene when you exit the walls of the village.

Next to a parking lot is a group of humans surrounding a group of Ni-Perchta who are on a makeshift wooden platform. Ni-Perchta guards in armor and in soldiers' uniforms stand by.

Even in the little you can see, there is a handmade sign stating: Dawn Auction of Assigned Persons. An excited Ni-Perchta rambling in Perchta is pointing at the Ni-Perchta in chains. The auctioneer is touching their arms, their legs, patting their behinds as he speaks as fast as any auctioneer back home. Some of the Ni-Perchta in chains are children. A small, weasel-like, bastard human is shouting out the translation at the same time.

"What is dis?" you slur, pointing at it. You still have a plastic cup filled with beer in hand.

"Assignment auction shit. The Ni-Perchta—if you get caught—caughted, I should say—doing a non-violent, non-religious crime, they sentence you to be bought as someone's slave, servant, for a period of time. Five to fifteen years, unless they release you early. For minor, little aggressions. Failure to respect the Witch-Lord, petty theft under 500 Dii-Yaa, stuff like that..." Treena says, and then burps. "I'm going to be puking."

Winniefreddie pats her on the back. Treena hiccups and gives her a thumbs up.

"What? Slavery? You kiddin' me?" you say. You see a little girl Ni-Perchta crying her eyes out as some pedophile-looking human starts to raise up his hand to purchase her "service." You get a sick feeling in your stomach watching the display.

"Whoa, whoa," you say, stepping forward, taking out all your cash. "How much? How much?" you yell; other people and Ni-Perchta look at your demented appearance as you rush through. The crowd parts in two to let you in.

~~~~

YOU walk back to the Benbow with the Ni-Perchta girl in hand. The girl holds hands with a couple of other Ni-Perchta kids; you've bought them as well.

Treena and Winniefreddie stare at you in wonder. "You just spent all that cash on these little Oliver Twist bastards," Winniefreddie says. "Jesus, you got some heart. Brains, no. Heart, oh yeah."

Treena shakes her head. "No, no, it's a good thing, Winnie."

The children look at you in awe as you say to them, "I got no idea where you can go, but you can go." They look at you in wonder, their eyes wide.

The Ni-Perchta girl starts to speak haltingly in broken English. "My- my dad- he up that way- up that way."

You turn and see that a Ni-Perchta male has been following you the whole way from the village. He's tall, regal looking, and afraid.

You let the children go, and they follow the first girl over the hills to her dad.

"Hey! Screw the Witch-Lord! I escaped from his dungeon, and you can all escape too! Fuck the police!"

Winniefreddie looks at you sideways. "You're that girl?"

You sober up a little, staring as the children run off. "Winniefreddie's right. That was stupid. Drinkin' makes you do silly things. There goes, how much money? I still technically own their contracts, right?" You look down at a piece of parchment that was given to you, and then throw it away. You notice it just sits on top of the soil. You kick up some dirt and halfway bury it.

You slap Winniefreddie on the arm and start to dance a bit. "All day, all night, all day, all night. What the fuck..."

You and the other girls start to dance and giggle in the morning air.

"Going to get more money, right girls? Right girls? I went to Spain and saw people partying..."

Winniefreddie and Treena look at you and say almost at the same time, "You're good people. We'll be in touch."

