The young man had survived the wrath of Mrs. Burton and now he could go home to complete this crucial point in his story, a close-up of Acerus the Highest Elder. Matthew felt compelled to pay as much attention as possible to the eyes of the Elders during this time. Before they would be just black holes in their faces, a very simplistic way of showing what years below Denab IV’s surface would do to their eyes. But as his artistic skills developed more and more, he kept the pupils black, while the whites of their eyes would be replaced by a dull gray.
As Matthew walked past the faculty parking lot, he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Hey Matt.”
Matthew turned around. “Hey, Thomas. What’s up?” With his thick tortoise-shell glasses, cropped curly hair and fat stomach hanging above his scrawny bird legs, Thomas was a walking “Kick Me” sign and his jeans showed the dirt stains from the jocks’ shoes.
“Is that the next issue?” Thomas asked as he pointed to Matthew’s sketch pad.
“The next one’s already set to go online tonight. This is… something else I’m working on.”
Thomas reached for the sketchbook. “Lemme see.”
Matthew kept the book away as they continued walking past the student parking lot. “Not yet. It’s not ready.”
“Come on. I helped you set up the web page in the first place. Lemme see what you’re working on.”
“You weren't much of a help getting me to link up to the main search pages. I had to do that myself.”
“Lemme see!” Thomas gritted his teeth as he begged to get a look. His voice grew louder, attracting the attention of five members of the wrestling team hanging out by their cars.
Matthew glanced at the jocks who started pointing in their direction and lowered his voice in the hope that Thomas would take the hint. “No, dude. I told you before. Nobody sees anything in the book. Not until it goes online.”
Matthew pressed the sketch pad tighter to his chest. A cold sweat ran down the back of his neck as he recognized two wrestlers, Nick and Kelly getting closer. The oblivious Thomas yelled once again, “Come on!”
“What’s going on, girls?” Nick called out, stopping Matthew and Thomas in their tracks. “Can’t decide between who’s on top and who’s on bottom?”
Kelly released a hearty laugh as he gave a hard slap to Thomas’ stomach. Thomas yelped out in pain and would have dropped to one knee if Nick hadn’t grabbed him under his arm and kept him on his feet. “Suck it up,” the wrestling captain instructed as he kept Thomas upright. “You know, our papers are due tomorrow and I’m still waiting for that e-mail from you.”
The husky Kelly became a human barricade, blocking Matthew from Nick and Thomas. The wrestler stared him down with a look that reminded him why Kelly was nicknamed “The Kraken.” He pointed at the bus and instructed, “Go home and do your cartoons, freak.”
Matthew wanted to scream out, “It’s not a cartoon, asshole! It’s a webcomic!” But he turned and walked away, leaving Thomas to his fate.
* * *
As Semminex held onto the sword's handle, he watched the jewel in the centerpiece begin to glow and hum even louder than before. Nervous, he tried to pull his hand away, but he couldn't release his grip. His hand fused to the handle as energy pulsated from the sword into his hand and up his arm. His eyes widened with fear, and he looked beseechingly at the Elders.
“It's all right, Semminex,” Ducera encouraged. “Just allow it to happen.”
The energy continued to move slowly through Semminex's body and, in spite of his fear, he couldn't feel any pain. In fact, there was a cooling sensation as it traveled up to his head and concentrated on his brain.
Semminex saw sudden flashes before his eyes, flashes of another lifetime, of another person wielding the sword of Excelsior and lashing out at his enemy. He couldn't see the enemy since his face hid in the shadows, but as these moments passed, Semminex started to feel both more and less like himself. A stronger man. A warrior. A leader.
As the energy bathed his body, his muscles began to tighten and enlarge. His cuts, bruises and scars disappeared along with the dirt and ash from his cell.
In the space of a few seconds, the wiry young Denarian became a powerful warrior of glowing health. The locks on the metallic sheath opened freeing the sword. Semminex looked down at his hand pulled the sword from the sheath.
Semminex looked down at the sword and saw himself in the metal’s reflection. His eyes were the same pale blue that they were before; only now they emitted a glow that matched the sword’s jewel.
Acerus walked up to Semminex and placed a hand on his muscular shoulder. “Excelsior. It is good to have you back, old friend,” he said with a smile.
Denab IV's guardian smiled back and responded. “It is good to be back.”
CHAPTER 2
“You did it!”
Katherine stifled a yelp of surprise as Dr. Ritgen threw open her office door and ran inside. Now completely shocked out of her slumber, she sat up in her swivel chair and squeezed her eyes shut as the outside light shone like a spotlight because of Ritgen's dramatic entrance.
Minutes before he burst in, she was staring at a photo of a team of excavators holding up a sword that shone in spite of a thick layer of dust. As she continued to stare, a wave of exhaustion came over her and her eyelids became as heavy as anvils.
Ritgen didn’t help Katherine regain her composure as he turned on the light switch, causing her to cover her face for a moment. Even with her specially made sunglasses blocking the glare, she still found it disorienting whenever the lights came on so abruptly.
“What’d I do?” Katherine asked as she pulled her hands away from her face and ran her fingers through her short red hair. Her words stopped Ritgen in his tracks, and she could see in his eyes that his mind had suddenly drifted.
Katherine chose not to smile at him, since she knew that would fluster him even more. Instead, she sat stone-faced while he tried to find the words that made up the good news. “All that time that our team's been putting into digging in the Greenland area, as you kept requesting...”
Katherine nodded as she began leaning forward at her desk in anticipation. “Our people found something, didn't they?”
“This is big, Dr. Sierra. Really big,” Ritgen answered. “Otzi big.” The word “Otzi” reverberated in Katherine's mind as soon as it entered her ears, and her smile only grew broader.
As Katherine heard Ritgen bringing up the mysterious Otzi iceman excavated from the early 1990s dig, she quickly put two and two together on her own and stood up. “SomeONE,” she corrected herself from before. “We found someone, didn't we?”
Ritgen nodded with extra enthusiasm. “Found, dug up, brought here!”
Katherine pointed to the floor. “Here? Here as in Tollund Laboratories?”
“They’re having the body brought in right now. Come on, you have to see it.”
Katherine quickly rose from her chair and followed Ritgen into the hallway. The two of them walked with the same brisk pace that made everyone else in the laboratory out of breath when they tried to keep up with them.
“I still can’t believe how all of this happened. Do you realize how close we were to our funding being cut off? You have GOT to see how this looks. The preservation is just unexplainable.”
“What do you mean?” Katherine asked.
“You’ll just have to see it when we get there. It’s fascinating. I’ve already started writing my speech to the press in my head.” Katherine’s pace quickened to the point where she was practically jogging.
Ritgen did his best to keep up, sucking in air as he tried to speak to Katherine as they continued walking down the hallway.
“You know... uh, Dr. Sierra...” Katherine showed no signs of acknowledging him, her pace not slowing down a bit as they made a left turn down the sterile white hallway. The sound of the fluorescent lights' buzzing filled in the spaces Ritgen left with his awkward stuttering. Considering how quickly this accomplished analyst shifted
from loud and confident to quiet and bashful, Katherine would have easily deduced that she was talking to two different people. However, her tunnel vision had her looking ahead and her body was obliged to keep moving.
Dr. Ritgen tried again. “Ummm... Kath... I mean Dr. Sierra, I just wanted to, uhhh...” His original sentence drifted off into nothingness, so he tried another. “You've been here for, what, about 10 years?”
“If you say so,” Katherine answered, her eyes still staring straight ahead.
Ritgen cleared his throat and then continued. “Well, yes, anyway I wanted to.... uh.... thank you once... umm... once again for everything you've done since you've arrived. If it weren't for your... uhh... constant pressuring of the backers, our funding would have been pulled only two years after we revealed the, uhhh...” He paused for a moment, then finished his sentence. “...the Ritgen sword.”
The name was music to Franklin Ritgen's ears, and he suddenly felt his confidence returning as his mind drifted away from the crush he always had on Katherine. He thought back to the moment that made his career, the moment of glory he was granted when he introduced the world to the sword his team had excavated. “That was around the time when you first came to work with us, is that right?”
Katherine turned toward him and looked into his eyes for the first time since she left her office, giving him a smile that threatened to derail the confidence that had just resurfaced. “It was an amazing discovery, Franklin.”
Ritgen's heart soared, just as it did each time she referred to him by his first name. He failed to hide his joy as he gave her an adolescent smile that could only be described as goofy, and when he responded, he kept his stuttering under control by just talking about the sword. “Yes, it definitely was. I mean, to uncover an object so unique and beautiful and so...” He hesitated to even say the word, just as everyone on his team secretly said it among themselves, yet were ordered by Ritgen to keep the press from hearing it. “...otherworldly. I mean, there's really no other way to say it, right? Flawless in its forging, made out of a metal that nobody can identify. I can't wait to get it back so we can get back to studying it.”
Katherine asked Franklin, “So this person that's in the lab now, do you think it's linked somehow to the sword?”
“Two different discoveries found less than a mile from each other? I don't think it's a coincidence, and based on what we heard from the excavation team, this could wind up being just as much of a find as the sword discovery.”
Katherine simply nodded and then turned back toward the door they were quickly approaching. From behind the door, Katherine and Dr. Ritgen could hear the mixed chatter of their team of analysts, and the excitement level had reached a point where Katherine could feel it like a bolt of electricity coursing through her veins. She reached the door and pushed it open, entering the large room with her team hard at work.
The room had much brighter light than the fluorescent ones in the hallway, with a powerful lamp positioned in the center, beaming down onto a narrow coroner's table. The analysts closest to the table were too engrossed in studying the body to notice them enter, but the men and women with an obstructed view looked up, saw who it was that walked in and then turned back toward the table.
The 30-year-old woman closest to the door smiled as Katherine passed by her. “Good morning, Dr. Sierra,” she said as she rocked back and forth on her heels. Katherine smiled at her as she passed by. Another analyst who was only a few years older than the one by the door sucked in his gut and stood up straight as Katherine looked at him.
“I think there's a spot here where you can get a good view, Dr. Sierra,” the love-struck analyst blurted out, prompting several quiet giggles from the men and women nearby.
“Thank you, Richard,” she answered. And just like that, another man was captivated by the mysterious woman's lasting beauty.
While Katherine looked over the shoulders of the analysts standing in front of her, she managed to see several patches of the being and was alarmed at the flesh she saw. Based on the amount of time it had been lying dormant, it should have been reduced to dust by this point, and yet here it was. And not only was it in one piece, but the body still had skin wrapped around its bones as if the being had died only a few years ago.
Ritgen called attention to himself by asking his analysts in a booming voice, “Okay team, what did we miss?” He quickly forced his way through the crowd so he was standing directly in front of the table, across from where Katherine was still struggling to get a better view.
The analyst in front of Katherine raised a finger before speaking. “The preservation is simply unbelievable, Dr. Ritgen. No air or moisture causing deterioration. It's been excavated for weeks now, and it doesn't look like any damage was caused to the body since it was found.”
Ritgen responded to that observation. “We're going to have to schedule a partial autopsy to see what made this thing stay in one piece for so long.”
Katherine’s mind was racing at all of the possibilities when she overheard one of the analysts. “Are those scales?”
Katherine quickly peeked past the analyst’s shoulder. Sure enough, she saw patches of skin on the being that had scales running up its arms. Katherine gasped as she looked up at the being's face, which was just as preserved as the rest of the body.
Another analyst pointed at the eyes. “It looks like there are two sets of eyelids on its face. You can see the nictating membrane right there. Where do you suppose something like this came from?”
Katherine worked her way through the crowd and got a better look at the being on the examining table. She saw that while its eyes were covered by tightly shut eyelids, there was another set that was halfway open over them. Its mouth was clenched shut, a frozen grimace of pain on its face. As Katherine continued to scan over the discovered corpse, she noticed a series of deep large cuts in its torso.
Dr. Ritgen pulled out a laser pointer from his pocket and used it to highlight the torn chest and stomach. “Whatever this is, it looks like it was on the losing end of a battle with some kind of animal. Nothing too large, since it would have torn it to shreds.” Ritgen looked up at Katherine, who did her best to mask her concern. “Dr. Sierra, your thoughts?”
Katherine was too busy looking at its right hand, which was tightly balled up and pressed against its body. She looked closer and cocked her head to get a better look at what it was keeping close. She squinted her eyes and looked as close as possible without leaning over the table at the small opening between the being's fingers, and saw that there was an object it had hidden from view as it met its painful death.
Fortunately for Katherine, nobody could see her eyes widening from behind her glasses. “Oh no,” she whispered as she tried her best to keep from causing a scene in the crowded room.
Dr. Ritgen watched Katherine back away from the examining table. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I'm fine,” Katherine quickly answered. Now it was her turn to stammer. “I, uh... I have to... call my father.”
As she quickly walked out of the room, she failed to hear one last exchange between two of the analysts.
“Her father's still alive?”
“Well, she's gotta get her good genes from somewhere.”
* * *
Katherine walked inside her barebones office and grabbed her jacket, digging into her pocket for her keys and locking the door. Her eyes strained as she quickly walked outside the laboratory and jogged to her car. Despite her powerful sunglasses, her eyes still burned as she reached her car door. Fortunately, she made sure to install tinted windows and the burning sensation in her eyes began to subside once she sat in the driver's seat.
Katherine walked inside her barebones basement apartment, shut all the windows so no sunlight could get in, and then turned on two of her lamps with bulbs that only gave off 15 watts. She removed her sunglasses and placed them on her endtable beside the sofa, then looked around her home in Maspeth, Queens.
The apartment had a
ll the comforts of home: television set, sofa, coffee table, twin size bed, laptop computer and a small amount of clothes easy to throw in a suitcase at a moment's notice. A wooden case the size of a shoe box was the only item in the middle of the coffee table.
Katherine always counted her blessings that Mr. and Mrs. Norris were so accommodating to have her as a tenant. They have been the perfect landlords, and she always appreciated their weekly invitations to join them for Mrs. Norris' famous meatloaf.
Katherine pressed a button on the jeweled box in the middle of the coffee table, then sat down on the sofa. A ball of light slowly rose from the small box and morphed into the form of the head and shoulders of an old man with a white beard. His eyes looked sunken in, a combination of black and gray.
“Klierra. Are you all right? You look exhausted.”
Katherine nodded and allowed herself just a hint of a smile. It had been too long since anyone referred to her as Klierra. She ran her hand through her red hair, which had already started to turn gray after only ten years on Earth. “This planet is less forgiving than our own, Acerus.”
“What has happened since you last made contact?”
Katherine took a deep breath and then answered. “The humans here have discovered the remains of Danaak. His body should have dissolved during the amount of time it had been on this planet, but it had been preserved by the jewel, just as we feared. Now that he's been uncovered, it won't be long before the jewel will start to regenerate his body.”
Acerus sucked in a deep breath before responding. “I wish you had some better news to report. What about the main reason why you have been sent there?”
“The sword has been located, but as of now, there has not been any other sign of him.”
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