Kharmic Rebound

by Yeager, Aaron

  Kharmic Rebound

  By Aaron Lee Yeager

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  Acknowledgments

  My wonderful wife Ruth, my eternal companion, without her I never would have gotten up the courage to write anything. The awesome beta readers Julia Abby Diana, Jessie, and Leslie. Cari, for putting together a list of embarrassing mistakes I keep making, like preform vs. perform. My daughter Shannon, who not only helped me create the characters, but also contributed quite a few jokes that made it into the final version. (See if you can spot them) And, of course, my buddy Shane who helped me with the backgrounds and assembling the artwork. I promise you, I’ll pay you back some day.

  You may not know who Shinichiro Watanabe is, but if you have even dipped a toe into the world of anime you’ve heard of his work. Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Macross Plus. This guy is my hero, and his works are probably the main reason anime fandom exploded here in the west. If I ever met him in person, I would totally squee. You can take my man card away from me, I don’t care. That man bottles lightning in the art he makes and I would openly squee in front of everybody. I’ve always told myself that if I ever got big as a writer, like stupidly big, like they make a theme park based on one of my works big (if you know somebody at Disney, have them give me a call, and let’s get on that, by the way); that if I ever got that big, I would have Shinichiro Watanabe make an anime version of one of my books. Wouldn’t that be freaking awesome?!

  The answer is yes, yes it would.

  The big news for this book is that I had to downgrade my computer. Yep, my big stupid man-toy gaming tower that I spent an embarrassing amount of money on got worse and worse until I was losing whole sections of writing from the constant crashes. So, we went out and bought the cheapest laptop we could find, and and I use it as a glorified typewriter.

  Dedicated to Stephen

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Through the Aether, all is connected, all is one. To do harm to another is to harm the whole, is to harm oneself. For every harmful action there is an equal and immutable consequence. If adequate punishment is not achieved in one life, the balance shall carry over to the next.

  -Morning Prayer from the Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Third Binding, Fifth Stanza

  The young plant had broken through the ground during the night. The caked soil had been pushed and cracked apart by the delicate stalks.

  Gerald’s brown eyes were focused as he kneeled over them. He chewed on his lip, trying to remember exactly what combination of fertilizer and moisture had worked this time.

  “Muffin,” came a matronly voice.

  With a dented spraycan Gerald carefully misted the tender buds, moistening them against the coming heat of the midday sun.

  “Muffin,” the voice came again, this time with an edge of warning.

  Gerald half turned his head towards the dusty house behind him, but his eyes refused to break from the plant. He smiled from ear to ear, too ecstatic to even voice it.

  The cracked window on the second floor slid up and a portly woman poked her head out. Caked and gnarled hair spilled out from beneath the helmet she wore.

  “Muffin!” she called again, her voice cracking, “the front door just rang, and I’m in the middle of a raid, can you give them the tour?” she asked, tilting up her visor just enough to peek out from underneath it.

  “Sure thing Mary,” Gerald called back, biting on his thumbnail happily.

  “Don’t call me Mary, call me Mom,” she threw back, covering her face up again.

  “Now you know how I feel about Muffin,” he retorted with a grin as he stood up and spun around. A sink hole appeared beneath his foot, and he came crashing to the ground, whanging his chin against a rock. Undaunted, he picked himself up and shook the dust from his plain brown robes as he ran through the rows of corn, rounding the corner of his eroding house and finally arriving at the front, where an alien family stood waiting impatiently.

  “Welcome to the valley of the Great Salt Lake,” Gerald announced happily, holding up his arms in the friendliest manner he could.

  The daughter blinked at him with her large compound eyes and turned away, folding all six of her arms. The father began making a series of metallic clicking noises that sounded vaguely like a car bumper being scraped against a chalkboard. Realizing his mistake, Gerald reached up behind his ear and turned on his dusty translator.

  “...so we came to see it for ourselves,” the father finished.

  “Well then, let me give you the tour,” Gerald offered as he walked down the dirt path towards the barn, the hem of his robe snagging against a nail and tearing a section away. “This is my father’s legacy, you know? Four hours a day for twenty-nine years he worked on it. It measures twenty-four feet in diameter, and weighs over 34,800 pounds. If you were to unravel it, it would be nearly twenty thousand miles long. That’s halfway to the moon and back.”

  “No, it’s not,” the daughter spat.

  “Be polite, dear,” the mother corrected.

  Gerald threw open the barn door, the handle breaking off the rotting wood in his grip. The screeching door broke a hinge and stopped half open, revealing the sagging mass within. “Here it is, everyone, the galaxy’s biggest ball of twine!”

  The family looked it over and blinked with their insect-like eyes. Gerald tried to hide his embarrassment as best he could. Broken strands of twine hung down limply to the ground. In several places, rot had pitted the ball with a mossy coating. Faded hand-made banners and posters clung to the cracked walls behind it.

  Gerald forced himself to smile wider and threw open a cabinet, revealing a collection of coffee mugs, foam fingers, and bobble-heads.

  “And don’t forget to pick up some souvenirs to take back home with you.”

  The family said nothing, only blinked. The silence was maddening.

  Gerald’s smile faded.

  Then the family erupted with excitement.

  “By the gods, have you ever seen anything like it?!” the husband gushed, taking a picture.

  “It’s amazing,” the mother praised, jumping up and down and fluttering her wings.

  “I was wrong,
this is the best vacation ever,” the daughter exclaimed, hugging her parents. “When the girls back home hear about this, they are just going to faint!”

  The next few minutes were a flurry of activity; Gerald posed with them for at least an hundred pictures, the daughter insisting that he pose like he was in “one of those old earth boy bands.” Then, just as soon as it had started, it was over. The family skipped away, back to their luxurious starcruiser, loaded down with commemorative hats, pendants, t-shirts, and twine-scented air fresheners. The father slapped a bumper sticker onto the back of the ship and waved his insect-like arms before scampering up the boarding ramp. Gerald waved back absentmindedly as he counted the money.

  There was a whirr of engines, a whiff of ozone, and the ship ascended skyward, vanishing into a speck of silver in the gray skies above.

  Gerald sighed as he shimmied the busted door closed again and walked back over to his house. The rising morning sun silhouetted the sagging structure.

  “Now, before you go buying more costumes for your character, keep in mind that those were the only tourists we’ve had all week,” Gerald mentioned as he approached the front of the house. As if she had been lying in wait, the door cracked open and Mary snatched the credit chips out of his hand with her dirty fingernails.

  “Mom!” he protested, but the door slammed shut again.

  “Sorry, Muffin, but Halloween is coming up, and I need to redecorate the guild hall for the gathering of champions,” she explained.

  Gerald shook his head and took a moment to study the large rusted nail sticking out of the front door. He took a moment to reach out and touch it tenderly.

  “Miss ya, Dad.”

  Taking a cleansing breath, he got back to task and walked around the house into the garden. Carefully he went through the green rows of tomato plants, here and there giving one a little squeeze to check its ripeness. Once he had a basket full, he dug up a couple of potatoes with a spade and tossed them in as well.

  Making his way inside to the kitchen, he looked atop the stained meal synthesizer, underneath the grimy digital beverage replicator, and behind the rusty fusion-powered pastry printer and found what he was looking for, a cutting board, a stock pot and a book of matches.

  Going back outside, he closed the side door, the screen lining falling out and bonking him on the head. Looking around sheepishly to make sure no one was looking, he balanced the screen back into place so that it appeared functional, and set to work.

  Stacking some wood from a nearby pile, he kindled a fire and within a few minutes had a very aromatic tomato soup cooking. As he picked through the spice garden, taking a few leaves of basil and thyme, he glanced back over at the young flower growing and smiled again.

  “Father O’theen, you’re in for a surprise today.”

  As the soup neared completion, he pulled out his bike, tightened all the bolts, checked the brakes, and oiled the chain. “Okay, you’re gonna be good for me today, arencha little lady?” he cooed as he worked. “Yeah, we’ll make you nice and happy first.”

  Once it had cooled a little, he covered the stock pot and gently lowered it into the bike’s basket. Placing his foot on one pedal, he kicked off. “Maybe I should name you,” he said as he vibrated down the road. “They say it’s good luck to give your bike a name. How about Nikki?”

  The front wheel instantly snapped off, sending Gerald and the pot crashing down into the mud.

  “Should have named you sooner,” Gerald coughed as he stood up, his robes covered in mud and soup.

  Just then a hovercar sped by, kicking up dust as it went.

  “Nice job, Dyson,” the green-skinned driver screamed out, tossing his beverage out the window and striking Gerald in the chest.

  Gerald wiped his face and looked down at what was now a third kind of stain on his robes. “Well tossed, Caarl, I see your aim is improving,” he yelled back pleasantly.

  Now carrying the pot by hand, Gerald made his way down the road. The sun was fully risen, allowing him to see the remains of the overgrown city at the center of the wooded valley, clinging to the relatively narrow strip of land between the roots of the mountains and the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

  Melted green towers stuck up from the forest canopy like thistles. Slouching honeycombed husks that had once been business towers and stores; apartment buildings and offices, now the color of dried blood. Plant life grew out from the seams in the limestone and granite, their roots de-laminating the stone until the steel structure was exposed to corrosion.

  Gerald took the long way around so as not to pass too closely. The buildings groaned. Eerie corpse-like sounds issued from their shifting weight. The wind passed through their shattered frames, making sounds that were sometimes like whispers, sometimes like moans. Falling pieces of glass and masonry would strike the ground sharply, punctuating the silence with startling violence. Packs of animals, wild dogs and feral cats, moved about the rotting shells like carrion, their howls and shrieks echoing off every surface until they seemed to come from all directions.

  The distant sound of shattering of glass made the hair on his neck stand up, so he raised his voice to hide his fear.

  “You know, Nikki, people back in the day developed some pretty funny ideas about trees,” he mused to the broken bike slung across his back. “They became a kind of spiritual symbol of peace and harmony. But look at what they’ve done in just a few short years.” He motioned to the withering city without looking at it. “The reality is that plants are aggressive and invasive. They break through barriers to claim new territory; they spread their leaves high to hog all the sunlight and kill off any competitors. They crowd out everything else in favor of their own.”

  Gerald stopped in front of a dilapidated house. “Now, that isn’t to say that they are evil or anything; they are just following their biological programming, after all.”

  Without knocking, Gerald tapped open the front door and walked in.

  “Good afternoon Mister Conners,” Gerald greeted warmly as he set down the stock pot.

  “My name is Etrigan Aphotic,” the man insisted from beneath his helmet, “and I thought I told you never to come here while I’m grinding gold.”

  “If I only came in when you were offline I’d never come in at all,” Gerald chuckled as he knelt down alongside the man’s decaying easy chair.

  “Well then, take a hint,” he retorted. His skin was dry and cracked, his pallor gray and sickly. Carefully Gerald rubbed ointment into the joints of the man’s dry fingers while he barked out orders into the helmet he was wearing. Sitting this close, Gerald could hear the sounds of simulated combat coming from within.

  “You know, your twenty-ninth birthday is coming up next week Mister Conners,” Gerald mentioned as he ladled some soup into a bowl. “I was thinking I could treat you to a picnic lunch up by the point of the mountain. There’s this group of college students from Andoria that like to come in sometimes and glide on the updrafts with their wings. It’s quite the sight, actually.”

  Conners coughed dryly. “Don’t give me that, I know you are on the payroll of the forces of Chaos. They’ve driven us back from the highlands, buncha hacking dirtbags. If I abandon my duties now we could lose the moorlands as well.”

  “Well, we can’t have that, now can we?” Gerald chuckled as he carefully clipped the man’s yellow fingernails.

  “This is the only server where Order has the advantage. All the new players sign up as Chaos nowadays, and the moderators aren’t doing a thing about it!”

  Gerald placed a straw in the bowl and worked it up underneath the helmet. Mister Conners resisted at first, but then finally relented and opened up his gray lips, revealing a single rotted tooth. Slowly he sucked down the nutrition, and his body seemed to tremble a little less than before.

  “You shouldn’t waste my time like this, Gerald,” Mister Conners complained when he was done. “I can get along fine with just a protein drip.”

  Gerald looked down sadly at
the man’s emaciated frame. Barely more than a skeleton and skin. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Gerald promised sadly.

  “Not too early, they’re releasing a content patch and I need my instance cooldown to match up with those of my teammates.”

  As Gerald slung his bike over his back, there was a crash of shattering porcelain.

  “What the heck was that?” Conners asked, peaking from underneath his helmet.

  “Oops, sorry Mister Conners,” Gerald apologized. “My bike got caught on your tablecloth.”

  Gerald bent down to pick up the broken vase, only to hear another crash from behind him.

  “Gosh dangit!” Conners barked.

  Gerald spun around and found a broken picture frame lying on the floor. “Oh, I’m so sorry, see I named her Nikki thinking it would bring good luck and...”

  Gerald moved forward to pick up the picture but his feet got tripped up in the spilled tablecloth and he came crashing down on top of the coffee table.

  “Get out of here, NOW!”

  * * *

  Years ago, the Salt Lake valley had been a desert. Oh, it didn’t look like a desert, with its snow-capped mountains and cool forested valley, but it received so little rainfall that it technically counted as a desert. Since Gerald and his mother had moved there, it had rained every single day, except during the winter, when it hailed every day. By the time he had brought lunch to Miss Davenport and Mister Sophia, Gerald was soaked to the bone. He carefully crossed the remnants of the interstate. Years of dandelions and other weeds growing up through the cracks and layers of lichen had begun to form a thin little crust of topsoil into I-15. Already it was barely recognizable, looking more like a wide forest pathway than a freeway. Only the collapsed sections arched over the old railroad hub gave it away for what it was. A startled deer lifted its head when he approached and watched him warily.

  “Hey look, it’s Bambi.”

  The deer snorted and charged. Gerald barely avoiding being impaled as he scampered over the side, twisting his ankle when he landed. The deer gave off an angry hiss before bounding away.