Out of Time the Grand Quest

by Christopher Douglass

  “That was twenty-two years ago. And you never woke me up again.”

  “You chose to go to sleep remember.”

  “Of course! Who wouldn’t! We were in a sickly nice place with no strife to bee seen! No bodies for me to rip asunder. No roaches for me to torture until they broke. I didn’t think it would last though! I mean, we both know peace never lasts. Peace is the word you use to keep the other person from killing you while you plot how you will kill them.”

  Jeremy sighed, watching as Kimberly tried to fit back into her school. The cloaking device kept anyone from seeing him sitting in the tree looking in the window. The Ice Prince was right, even he had been surprised the peace he had found when he came to Atlantis was more than skin deep. He had grown much stronger since he had created this persona, but he had been unable to let it go completely.

  “Of course you couldn’t let me go. We’ve been through too much together. I filled the need you had. I kept you sane while we were locked in that dark hole in the ground. I made you strong so we could survive the gladiator pits. I talked with you when no one else would. I was the only one you could trust and who trusted you in that savage future we came from. Without me, our owner would never have thought us broken in. He would never have allowed you out of that pit to have any semblance of a normal life.”

  “I know. I was weak back then. Too weak to survive on my own. That world didn’t care for my age.”

  “Yes, you were weak. You still are. Always handing over the body when you couldn’t handle it. I had to suffer through the killing. I had to suffer through the beatings, and I had to suffer through that nasty old man when he took me to his bed. I will never forget the day I slit his throat though. How he thought us well and truly tamed to his whip. Nor how we took over his whole drug operation. All those older men and women bowing and scraping to a ten year old. Doing to them what they did to us, it was a heady feeling indeed.”

  Jeremy looked down at the palm of his left hand, the scar tissue from where the broken shard of glass he had used to gut Karvis had sliced it open a constant reminder of his past. Prince was right, that moment had felt good. Prince had always been there for him, Jeremy just couldn’t cast him away. He was even the sole reason Jeremy was sitting where he was right now. Without his other personality, he would have never developed his Paradoxial ability. In many ways Prince was the only one he could truly count on.

  “So what is it you really want Prince? You don’t just talk with me to talk. That’s just not your way of thinking. I made you a cold heartless killer for a reason. Chatting wasn’t one of them. Perhaps in the beginning that wasn’t true, but after all the crap we’ve been through it is.”

  “You’ve grown up Juicy Jay.”

  “Don’t call me that. I hated when Karvis called me that.”

  “I know, that’s why I said it. But seriously, can we talk? Playa tah playa, pimp tah pimp.”

  “Now that is a phrase I haven’t heard in a very long time. Fine I have nothing else to do right now except agonize over current events.”

  “And that’s what I want to talk about. Can you stop this quest to merge Atlantis and Aerth together?”

  “That’s rare, you are sounding sincere. Normally you shout, and rant, and make off colored comments.”

  “Yeah, well after twenty-two years asleep, I really don’t have much control of the body anymore now do I? I’ll say this, you’ve grown much stronger mentally. You were never able to take the body back by force before. All I really have is my words to try and sway you, even if that’s my worst area.”

  “You should know I’m not going to stop, so why did you even ask?”

  “Because I don’t want to die. If you succeed, there is only a thirty percent chance our Paradoxial power will save us from disappearing. Without the veil between Atlantis and Aerth, we lose the protection that makes it all work.”

  “You? You of all people. The Ice Prince who has no need for any emotion, even fear. Who would willingly sacrifice his own body for the kill. Who would, and has, drunk his own urine to survive. You are saying you are afraid of dying.”

  “Of course I am! Dying in battle is one thing. But just-- disappearing-- is totally different. No fight, no choice-- no chance. We still share the same mind, the same body, the same thoughts and emotions. I just process and prioritize them differently as you made me to do.”

  “And you are saying your life is more important than billions of others? You would allow the world to be sent back into the kind of place we came from just for your own selfish desires.”

  “You know the answer to that. In a heartbeat. I only care about my own well being, my own comforts. Everything and everybody else are just vermin for me to eat, break, or toy with.”

  “Than what about me? We inhabit the same body, we use the same mind, and technically we are the same person. But we are vastly different personalities. Our views tend to be polar opposites, our actions vastly divergent. Does that mean I too am a vermin to you?”

  Prince was silent then, allowing Jeremy to go back to watching Kimberly. Sometimes he wished he could know what Prince was thinking like Prince did. But Jeremy was the original personality, the true holder of the body while Prince was the fragment. Since Jeremy could not understand how his mind worked, he had no way to connect to the thought process. So talking to Prince was like talking to an entirely different person who happened to be able to read his mind.

  While it had only taken hours to follow Kimberly, Jeremy had been unable to find a good time to approach her. First there had been the police, then there had been the doctors, and finally her mother had allowed her to leave the house unattended. Jeremy had to wonder what kind of story Kimberly had spun. The truth would never have been believed. She would be put in the loony bin for such a wild tale. Perhaps alien abduction, there were lots of crazy people who made such claims walking the street. Amnesia would work too. Any fanciful story she came up with would be chalked up to her “filling in the blanks as a way to cope” by psychiatrists.

  To Jeremy’s eyes, she looked uncomfortable. Not surprising really after everything she had been through. How could she be content to be “just” Kimberly Changa ever again? She knew she could alter her very personality, become a multitude of people with a wide array of skills. Donning them as easily as one would slip on a shirt. She had gone out on epic adventures and defied the gods of fate. She had forged bonds of friendship much deeper than anything she could obtain with the shallow humans of this era. Yet, like he had when he first came to Atlantis, she was trying to deny that part of herself. Was trying to forget it all like a bad dream.

  And like he had come to realize, it wasn’t working. Good or bad, big or small, change always happened. Once it did, there was no going back. She had been changed, altered from the normal life she might have lived the moment he had brought the seekers over to this era with him sixteen years ago. The course of her life until this point had been set the moment the needle went into her arm when she was hours old. Even if she was unaware of any of it, even if she still had the free will to grow as she would, Kimberly would have always found her way to Atlantis and Jeremy eventually. Now that fate had caught up to her and embroiled her in the grand plan he had designed, any semblance of normal was gone forever.

  He could see her trying her hardest though. The way she tried to fade into the corner at the back of the class reading a book while the rest talked to each other before the teacher came. The way she clenched fist and jaw at the taunts thrown her way by the other girls, or the odd spitball. But he also saw the changes in the other children because of her. Where before the boys showed disinterest, now they gave her sidelong glances. Realizing her beauty now that she had been chiseled by the Grand Quest. That aura of maturity and poise the other girls lacked. He saw the other girls recognized this on an intuitive level and felt threatened, hence the taunts. Jeremy had watched her from the sidelines the last sixteen years, so he could see the differences.

  “If she keeps t
hat pretense up for much longer she will break soon. Not the kind of breaking that I do of course, but she’s going to snap.”

  Jeremy agreed with Prince. He had seen it all too often both in his own era and in many others. He had even seen it a few times on Atlantis. There was an expression the crazy mutated humans who lived in the radiation zones used to have. Live hard, love hard, die hard. It was the idea that fear was a limiter to truly enjoying life. In everything you do, give your all to it. Never deny who you were, accept your strengths and weaknesses and flaunt it all to the world. Make the world accept you, don’t be content seeking acceptance by it.

  While everyone had hated the mutants, Jeremy had felt a strange connection to them. They hadn’t been bad people, just different. Without them, “normal” people would have never been able to enjoy the kind of semi-civilized life they had. Those adventurers had braved the radiated areas to bring out forgotten technologies from before the war. While they had to wear special suits when outside the radiation areas so as not to contaminate normals, they were the freest people he had ever met. Willing to offer you food, drink or the shirt off their backs without question and no expectations for repayment. They knew the radiation would kill them before everyone else, so they lived the life they had to its fullest. Not letting material possession or the corruption of civilization taint their souls.

  The mutants had taught Jeremy very valuable lessons back then. Lessons that had set him on the course he was on now. They had engraved the desire to serve all people with everything he had. Even at the cost of his own life. They had taught him to live hard, and love hard. It was a lesson Jeremy could see Kimberly had learned already, at least in part. Yet she was trying to deny that lesson, which was creating conflict within her.

  “Family.”

  “Jeremy cocked his head to the left. “What?”

  “You asked what you were to me. You’re family. I’m just a figment. A fragment of who you are. I was never born with a physical body. I have no need to eat, or sleep, and I don’t get tired. I have no real name, either first or last. No friends, no lovers. I can’t touch or taste or see without your assistance. I exist only because you wish me to exist. My personality was created by you. I have no true will of my own. If push came to shove I will always bend to your desires if you desire them strongly enough. My thoughts are still your thoughts. This body is ultimately your body. You are my only link to the world. If, by some miracle, I could overcome my programming to talk to anyone else but you, it would be with your mouth. Any friends or lovers I might make would not truly be mine, but yours. They would be looking into your eyes when they talked to me, touching your lips when they kissed me. You are my creator, my parent if you will. So-- you are my family.”

  “Do you hate me for creating you? For what I have made you endure in my place?”

  “I can’t. I don’t even have the free will to hate you. You never programmed my personality with the ability to think those kinds of thoughts. If I hate you it is because you hate yourself. Yet you do not hate yourself, not really. You are disgusted with some of the things you do, and you regret, but you do not hate.”

  “This really isn’t like you. It is actually freaking me out just a little.”

  “You are usually not this fearful for your own life either. You tell yourself you are prepared for the eventuality, but I know your true mind remember. There is nothing in your mind or body that can lie to me. And I’ve evolved as you grew. You have become stronger, tainted by the evils of the world. You have become more like me. I don’t need to be your voice of sanity, filled with all the bad you didn’t or couldn’t deal with. You will never be me, and you still need me for my ability to distance you from your humanity. But you no longer see me as the sum of all evil needed to fight evil now either.”

  Again Jeremy lapsed into silence. He couldn’t really refute Prince’s words. Him and Prince had always had a strange relationship, even before Prince had gone to sleep. Jeremy could almost forget the Prince personality was a cold heartless killer. A bell pealed in the afternoon silence, it’s tones lingering. Instantly the class of children stood and made for the door, that alarm their signal of freedom. Claiming for all who heard that school was over.

  And like she had done the last week and a half, Kimberly lingered at her desk. While she had always been a studious girl, she had also been much like all the others in her desire to leave quickly. Jeremy knew why she lingered, she didn’t want to return home. Valerie had turned near crazy in her over-protectiveness. Demanding Kimberly return home as soon as school was out, even going so far as to time her. At least she was not walking Kimi to and from school anymore. Valerie even denied her the ability to go to the library.

  The woman had really gone downhill in the month Kimi had been gone. Getting fired from her job and wasting away inside the bottom of a bottle. Now, for the last two weeks she had been struggling back from her new addiction, winning the battle one fewer shot at a time. Kimberly, trying to be the good daughter, wasn’t openly balking at her newfound imprisonment. But her shuffling step and her lingering motions said it all.

  Still, that was of no real concern of Jeremy’s. His concern was getting her to do what he wanted. If that meant he had to eliminate Valerie to free Kimi from any attachments she might have to this place, than he would do so. First though, he had to make contact. Jeremy created a rift below, bunching his muscle to drop down into it when Prince stopped him. It was then he remembered how disastrous that could be. Kimberly had not only ripped his tear generation ability out of his control to open the way home, but had left it unstable. If he went through one of them, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t be turned inside out. Closing the tear once more, he dropped to the ground.

  He turned the corner of the school just as Kimi pushed open the front doors to walk down the steps. Careful not to bump into anyone else, or let them bump into him, Jeremy followed at a distance. Ahead, Kimberly stopped to look up at the sky, then down at her hand which she opened and closed. No doubt thinking about Aerth and the time she had spent there. That was good, it meant this might be even easier than he had first anticipated.

  While she was lost in her thoughts, a gaggle of girls started whispering snide remarks behind her. Jeremy could spot the ringleader of the five from her stench alone. The alpha males of a pack were the same wherever you went. It didn’t matter if it was a post apocalyptic world, a peaceful city, or a magic filled place in between. The weak flocked to the strong for protection and sense of acceptance.

  Jeremy saw Kimi’s posture change just a fraction, though the girls were too oblivious to notice. He knew she had just slipped into another one of her personalities without thinking and was suppressing it. To her credit, she overcame her moment, returning to her dominant and natural persona quickly. Ignoring the girls, she clenched her fist and trudged towards home with her head down. The gaggle, not content to leave be, followed her while talking in a way they meant Kimi to overhear.

  “Here comes the break.”

  Jeremy agreed. The tension in the air was thick. The sense of danger all around. If this had been in his era, these girls would have been subdued and turned into concubines or drudge slaves already. They were soft and dull, unable to read the air.

  “Did you hear the latest, Becky? Apparently there is some unknown girl who claims to have amnesia, yet retains a surprising amount of memories. I hear she was kidnapped and warmed some old man’s bed. The thing is-- I hear she came to love it, and now runs the streets at night making money while trying to satisfy her desires.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! And get this, she’s partial to women too! Better watch out, I hear such things are contagious.”

  Kimberly turned a corner, a large wooden fence hiding her from the girls and their words. When the gaggle reached the corner, Kimberly appeared once more, her fist flying in an arc from her hiding spot to smash into the lead girls face. Her momentum carried the helpless girl around until the back of her head bounced off t
he wooden fence. Her other fist came up into the gut of a second girl, doubling her over. Kimberly’s foot lashed out from the side, hooking a third girl as Kimi pushed her in the chest. The girl fell on her butt as the other two froze in surprise. Further proving they were soft, unused to real confrontation. With a jab to a kidney and a blow to the side of a head with her elbow, Kimi finished administering her justice to the five girls.

  “Contagious that.”

  Spitting on the ground, Kimberly turned and left them to nurse their wounds. Jeremy smiled thinly, but made no move other than to follow his target. He was impressed, not in how she had moved swiftly and efficiently, though that was impressive. What had impressed him most was the fact she had done so as herself, not using another persona to handle the confrontation.

  He slipped into the apartment complex and marched up the stairs not two feet from her. He had contemplated initiating contact between the school and her home but thought better of it. A confrontation behind closed doors would be better.

  “Mom, I’m home.”

  Valerie ran out of the kitchen to embrace Kimi like she hadn’t seen her for years. Kimberly suffered through this treatment as she had anytime Kimi was out of her mother’s sight for longer than a few minutes. The moment she let her go, Jeremy struck, plunging the sponge tip onto the back of Valerie’s neck. He caught her as she fell backwards, setting her gently on the couch before turning towards Kimberly who was staring at his masked face in shock.

  “J! What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to talk to you alone, that’s what. It would be inconvenient if your mother were awake to listen, so I put her to sleep for a little while.”

  “Me? Why do you want to talk to me? And how did you get here anyway?”

  “I followed you, it wasn’t that hard. As to why you, to convince you to return.”

  “Why? I’m home.”

  Without replying immediately, Jeremy pulled a small black box from his pocket, placing it on the side of the television. The show that was playing instantly flickered to a live fed image from a satellite. The view it now showed was the center of the Bermuda triangle where a swirling whirlpool was moving counter-clockwise.