Most people won’t dare go into the Mammoth forest. It’s too mysterious for their taste, but we like the mystery of it. Chad, Mia and I have turned it into our secret hide-out.
The forest is about 10,000 miles away from my home, so to get there we use Chad to teleport us. We snuck off to my room and huddled in a circle in the center of the ocean carpet that I created to mimic the real ocean. It’s like walking on water.
“Sage, I swear I’ll never get used to standing on this thing. What if I fall in?” Chad asked.
“You’re not going to fall in silly. It only looks like the ocean. It’s a simple hex really,” I said.
“Remember that pet rabbit my mother gave you last year for your birthday? Remember how it mysteriously disappeared?” Chad said in his post-adolescent awkward voice.
“Chad, it didn’t fall into the carpet. It probably got lost somewhere.”
“That thing is still stuck in your hex, Sage. You killed my mom’s rabbit!”
“Oh, be quite. You hated that thing anyway. It probably ran away to get away from your bad energy. Animals can sense bad energy, you know,” I said giving Chad a good punch to the shoulder.
“Okay, you guys. Let’s hurry and get out of here before someone catches us,” Mia said. I could tell she was trying not to roll her eyes.
“Alright, you know the drill guys. Close your eyes,” Chad commanded.
“Close our eyes, imagine the forest, pretend that we’re there. We got it, Chad,” I interjected.
Chad looked at me in annoyance with his head cocked to the side.
“You seriously need to duke it out or something. All of this pent up tension is making me uncomfortable,” Mia said.
“What tension!? Psh whatever!” Chad said overdoing it.
“Fine, no tension. Let’s just puleeease hurry!”
Suddenly, we heard footsteps down the hall getting progressively louder.
We straightened up and closed our eyes, but we were still standing in my room. It usually wouldn’t take that long to teleport, but I guess our concentration wasn’t as strong.
The footsteps were getting closer. Suddenly the doorknob started moving.
We began to panic. If anyone saw us leave, our secret place would be ruined. Plus, under the laws of jurisdiction, it was past our curfew and we weren’t allowed to use our powers past a certain time of day.
The door swung open. As we began to teleport, I saw a glimpse of my mother’s wavy jet-black hair. Then, it was nothing but trees.
“That was close,” I said relieved.
“I wonder where they think we go when we disappear like this,” Mia said.
“It’s a wonder that we haven’t been caught yet. Then again, your father is the master of the universe,” Chad said to me as he was searching for our food stash in the bushes.
“Trust me, that has nothing to do with it. My father is much harder on me than you think. The reason why we haven’t been caught yet is because he wants me to take over one day.”
“Found it!”
Chad pulled out an aluminum crate with all sorts of junk food.
“Now this is a birthday feast,” I said with a mouth full of sugar cane candy.
“Are you guys at all nervous about The Tourney?” Mia asked. “It’s in less than a month.”
“I think it’ll be alright. I’ve been practicing a lot,” I said.
The Tourney was a competition that was held twice a year in Power School where powers compete for the title in their particular power grade. Chad once won the title over the Teleporters. Students were supposedly chosen at random.
“Let’s see your skills. I’ll be the Herald,” Chad said and stood up with his chest puffed out.
He began to speak in a silly English accent.
“Ladies and gentleman up next is Sage Riley for the creators. She will create…” Chad was miming a drum roll. “The sun!”
Mia and I looked at Chad like he had grown three heads. Someone of my experience couldn’t possibly create the sun. I had never seen the sun first of all. Second, usually the bigger the object, the harder it was to create.
“C’mon, think a little smaller,” Mia said.
“No. Let me try.”
Chad gave me a small nod. We had been practicing our powers together for a while without Mia. It was just that Mia was a little more reluctant to push her powers to the limit. She was a transformer – and a good one at that – but she liked to play by the rules. Chad and I liked to push the limit and then some; after all, the rules were ridiculous. The rules for jurisdiction of powers for first and second generation Equinoxians were as follows: powers could only be used between the hours of 7am to 12 noon. Then there was an hour of peace time where no one used their powers. After peace time, at 1pm to midnight powers could be used. Juveniles were only able to use their powers between 7am and 5pm; that was us. Also, powers could only be used at home, in training courses, and specific jurisdictions around the Equinox. There weren’t many of these places and the Mammoth Forest definitely wasn’t one of them.
Creators couldn’t create anything that was lewd, dangerous, destructive, scary around children, profane, and we couldn’t create other humans. Only things that were helpful, good, fun, pretty, nice, and peaceful could be created.
Teleporters couldn’t teleport outside their particular jurisdiction without allowance. They could never under any circumstances teleport to a private area. Transformers weren’t allowed to transform to look like another person for unethical purposes or to spy. They also couldn’t transform into a monster or beast to hurt others and were forbidden to transform into Amias the king; my father.
The rules seem to make sense on the surface. They were set in place for the purpose of keeping citizens safe, but the consequences for breaking the rules were dire. People who broke the rules were imprisoned. There was no warning, no citation, just imprisonment. No one really knew what happened to people who were imprisoned, but there were rumors that prisoners got turned into experiments to become perfect citizens and then released out into the world. This is why no one knew what happened. Anyone who was once a prisoner had no memory of what happened while they were there.
I guess one of the reasons why Chad and I liked to play Russian Roulette with the law was because deep down inside we wanted to find out the truth. We wanted to know what they did to law-breakers. We were foolish to take such risks, but we were sixteen with superpowers. We felt indestructible.
I stood up in front of Mia and Chad while the crescent moon shinned bright white behind me, creating a silhouette of my body. The trees were our guardians and stood too tall to see their peaks. These were the only trees in the Equinox that weren’t fluorescent at night and white during the day. They were like the trees in the old age and I loved the smell of ancient forest permeating through the night air.
I never saw the sun in person. I read about it in books and have seen pictures of it, but the sun drifted away from us after the apocalypse. Some even think it was destroyed and the only reason why we weren’t frozen was because of the proximity of the other planets and stars. I tend to think that the sun is still here, but that it moved away to some better place. Somewhere we aren’t allowed to go.
I used the hair-tie on my wrist to pull my hair up into a frizzy ponytail that looked like a gigantic ball of fuzz. My freckles and curly hair gave my fellow classmates a reason to make fun of me. I couldn’t have cared less.
“Sage, are you really going to try to create the sun? You know what the law says about that. Do you honestly think we won’t get caught? Do you realize how bright the sun is!?” Mia nagged.
“Yes, I know, Mia. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick,” I said.
Mia crossed her arms in disapproval.
I stood with my arms to my side and palms out to take in as much energy as possible. I closed my eyes and imagined the fiery sun ablaze. Suddenly, a small ball of fire appeared floating before me. My friends gasped at the sight.
“She’s rea
lly doing it,” Chad said under his breath.
I continued to concentrate on that ball of fire and it began to grow bigger and brighter. It got to be so bright that I had to squint my eyes just to see it. It grew to the size of a basketball then suddenly the light went out and it fell to the ground.
“Crap! I almost had it!”
“It was probably meant to happen that way anyway,” Mia said flipping her black hair.
“Wait,” Chad said. “I have something that might inspire you.”
He reached into the hip pocket of his denim jeans that I created for him as a birthday gift. Chad was always interested in old fashion trends. He despised the boring pastel colors and nanotech fabric used to create our clothes, which ended up leaving little room for individuality.
Chad pulled out a small wooden box from his pocket.
“That’s the Portal of Antiquity!” I said in shock.
“A couple of years after I won the Tourney, your father gave it to me. I’ve never used it though…until now,” Chad smiled at us.
“Let’s use this to see the sun. And I mean the real sun.”
“I thought you could only use the Portal of Antiquity when you absolutely needed it. Right now we’re fooling around. I doubt the portal will even open,” Mia said.
“Whenever you want to look into the past the portal will open. There’s got to be a reason to look into the past. Can either of you think of something you’ve been needing to see?” I asked.
There was a long pause.
“I have something,” Chad said while he put his hands in his pockets.
“What is it?”
Chad began to pace around in a circle. We could tell something was bothering him.
“There’s something that I’ve been meaning to tell you guys. It’s so strange and I don’t even know what to make of it.” He stopped pacing and looked at us.
“Remember that year I won the Tourney? I was, what, thirteen?”
“Yes, that was our first time watching the Tourney,” Mia answered.
“And remember when I finally found the Portal of Antiquity, after going through hell, they announce that I would be presented with the portal by your father?”
“You never told us how that went,” Mia said curiously.
“A few months ago I was in my quarters taking a nap after trekking with the guys and suddenly Nirva, my teleporting teacher, appeared in my room. She told me that Mr. Riley wanted to meet with me immediately and she would bring me to him.”
Mia and I sat down for the rest of the story.
“She brought me to the headmaster’s suite and it was a lot dustier than I imagined. Anyway, your father told me that the power society members are always scouting for potential ‘champions of the cause’. I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, but he told me that my performance in the Tourney was so impressive that he wanted to offer me an opportunity to help him.”
“To help him with what?” I asked impatiently.
“With finding a book,” Chad answered scantly.
“Do I need to ask what book?” I scoffed.
“Yes, you do.”
“WHAT BOOK?!”
Chad was very amused by my impatience.
I wanted to wring his neck.
“It’s an ancient text called, The Book of Wisdom. It was stolen from the Power Society Library years ago. Your father has been trying to find it ever since.”
I remembered as a child my father being obsessed about a book that had been stolen. It seemed like he spent the majority of my pre-adolescence looking for it. I couldn’t understand why, after all those years, he hadn’t found it yet.
I looked down at the fluorescent blades of grass in between my fingers in silent thought.
“So he asks you, a scrawny junior, to go find it for him?” Mia asked.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at how true that was. Sure, Chad won the Tourney against George, the fifteen-year-old barbarian, but to us he was still Chad, the stringy-haired blonde nerd whose fashion sense was stuck in the 1900s.
“Hey! He said I was a warrior! I fought hard to find that portal.”
“Okay, okay you did. You won fair and square. Happy now?”
He folded his arms with a pout.
“So what does he want you to do specifically?” I asked.
“That book could be anywhere on earth so he wants me to use the portal to pinpoint the moment it was stolen and to find out where it was taken. Once I find this information, he wants me to bring one person with me on my journey to find the Book of Wisdom and bring it back to him.”
We all sat there meditating on his last words. My father was a very mysterious man. He became leader of the new world at an early age and spent years building up Equinox into the developed society it is today. In his years of reign he had managed to create a new system of government where he was the chief and under him the Authorities who were in charge of policing the citizens. He created an economic structure where everyone worked for the advancement of the system and all jobs were created for that purpose. He even developed a currency of credits that were stored inside a chip that was implanted into the eye of every citizen of the Equinox. That way, he could keep track of everyone’s whereabouts. In order to enter a public building everyone’s eye had to be scanned. This was the way my father wanted the new world to be. He then spent a lot of his time managing the Power Schools in order to insure that the next generation of superior humans would use their powers the way he mandated. This was the perfect society, according to my father. To me, it was a prison.
“So did you accept his offer?” I asked.
“I did. Of course I did. How would anybody say ‘no’ to Mr. Riley? I didn’t even hesitate.”
“So who are you going to bring with you?” Mia asked.
“Well I know you would never go. Heck, you won’t even take a dump without asking your mom first,” Chad said trying to hold back laughter.
Mia’s face turned bright red.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“Ha! No way. Your father would never let you go with me.”
“What makes you think he’ll care?” I ask.
“Because you’re his daughter and you must stay in perfect condition to rule once he steps down as leader.”
“I don’t want to take his place, ever. Besides, I’m one of the best creators in school. I could really help you.”
“How on earth are you going to be able to leave without anyone finding out? I know we’ve done a lot of sneaking around before, but this will be next to impossible.”
That’s when I look at Mia.
She sat there for a moment confused. Then her face turned serious.
“Oh no! No, no, no, no, no! Absolutely not! Are you crazy!? No!” Mia got up from her seat on the forest floor and began to walk away. I ran to catch her.
“C’mon, Mia, it’s not like you haven’t done it before.”
“That was for fun. We were fooling around. This would get me sent to prison! Do you want me to go to prison!?”
“Even if my father finds out, he won’t do anything to you because he’ll need you to tell him where I am. Please, just once in your life take a risk. Please Mia.”
She paused for a while and surveyed the night sky that was dotted with the constellations.
“If I do this for you guys, what’s in it for me?” Mia asked.
Chad walked over to her and put both of his hands on her shoulders.
“You’ll get to be the daughter of Amias Riley.”
My father’s proposition to Chad made me wonder why he was in such frenzy over a book. I knew my father was always interested in the ways of the old world, but I never knew that he owned a piece of it. What was so important about that book that would cause someone to steal it? Stealing in itself hardly ever happened in Power School. Everyone in school was already deemed more privileged than the rest of society. It was a privilege to be a part of that school and all students had access to the best supplies c
redits could buy. For someone to steal something belonging to the Power Society – and a measly book for that matter – was extremely suspicious. And what was more suspicious was the fact that my father had yet to find the culprit.
One night when my parents were out, I decided to do some snooping in my father’s office to find more information about the Book of Wisdom. My father was a minimalist when it came to decorating. His philosophy was the least decorations as possible, the better. His office was no different. There was only a large wooden desk with a matching chair and a bookshelf that circled the entire room. There wasn’t even a chair for someone else to sit just in case he had a visitor. The only redeeming quality of that dull room was the huge jutting window behind my father’s desk that took up the majority of the wall. The window jutted out from the house allowing a person to step inside giving them the allusion of walking on air. My father once told me that he liked looking out his window because it made him feel like a real king.
I started looking in his desk for anything relating to the mysterious book. Then I came across a leather bound journal tucked away in the back of his desk drawer. The journal was fairly thick and had a lock on the front. I began to inspect the office for a key. There was no sign of one in his desk; only documents and scraps of paper. I looked inside the bookshelves and found nothing. I started opening certain books that I thought he would hide a key; nothing. Then, I looked up toward the top of the bookshelves. I grabbed his desk chair, pulled it toward the shelves and climbed on top of it. I reached my hand over the top of the shelf and felt for a key to my father’s journal. I continued this process for each section of the bookshelf until I had circled almost all around the room. Finally, near the far left corner of his office, there it was. I picked up the small golden key and inspected it.
Lovers of Babel Page 11