Manhunter Revelations
Page 16
She stopped at this point as she could see I had more questions.
"Where was your island transported to?"
"We now know there are many dimensions of reality, separated from each other by what we call a dimensional wall or barrier. These barriers are to our understanding unbreachable, with the exception of the barrier between earth and Muraii. Many thousand of years passed and my people found that our powers were slowly getting stronger. Yet it took many years before my people figured out the existence of the barriers, and that there may be many of them. The only one they were fully able to identify was the one separating them from earth. They theorized that the dimension they were in was connected to earth in some fashion, but nothing else was known about it. So when we refer to Muraii, we are not only referring to our islands, but our new dimensional world altogether. Now you must understand this battle with The Xantu has not been going on for all these thousand of years constantly. There have been centuries when there was no evidence of The Xantu, sometimes thousands of years because they were sleeping. We figured they did so for some type of regeneration or at the least hoping that when they awoke we would be gone. We just do not know. During those times some of our people thought that they were gone for good, but that was just not so. Their last appearance before now was just after the last ice age. They were around for a few hundred years and then was gone again. They recently reappeared a little over two thousand years ago, and have been off and on ever since. In fact this is the longest period they have been active. That is why we feel something eminent is going to happen soon. What we just do not know"
Now I am not a heavy drinking man, but I do drink my own brand of beer and I love it. Unfortunately there was none of it in the village, as everyone here drunk the village special brew Elixir Ale. Getting up I went to the frig and got some of the brew and two glasses. Getting back to the table I poured generous portions of the stuff into each glass and passed one over to Sessa. We sat there for a few moments enjoying the brew while we each mulled our thoughts, or while I mulled mine. Sessa just waited for me patiently. The ale by the way was excellent. Better than my old brand. I would have to see that some was shipped home after this case was done.
"You do know that I am finding all you have told me very hard to believe. Yet certain evidence lead credence to your story. The main one is the fact Major Hennings and his men are here. Did you know that him and his men are a special operations tactical battle group? Do you know what that even means?”
For the first time, there appeared a look of confusion on Sessa's face.
"No I didn't. What are they"
"Since the Antarctic Plague, the government realized there were forces in play that they were totally unprepared to deal with. The USOA decided that they needed a rapid response group of specially trained and equipped military and in a few cases civilian personnel who could mentally, emotionally and physically deal with any unexplained or unusual occurrence or circumstance. A circumstance such as this. I was recruited by the military to train a group of these men in exceptional tracking abilities, under any circumstance, terrain or conditions. When I worked on training them a few years ago, I learned that the government believed that there were certain unexplained forces either at work in the world, or would be soon. They were preparing for this eventuality. For the next nine months I worked with them in the field, specifically hunting down a band of Mut-Gorillas that had migrated northward into the country. Trust me that was a very nasty piece of work, but it showed me the pull Hennings and his men had when requesting supplies or equipment. Whatever he requested was sent to him immediately. In a way I guess you can say the USOA government was waiting for your people to approach them for help. Not specifically for this particular problem, but a problem nonetheless. I cannot be sure because even though I had been cleared for Top Secret information, they were very tight lipped on certain matters. I now suspect this situation or something similar was what they were preparing for. How they knew a situation such as this would develop is a major mystery, and they aren’t telling. The discovery of The Structure many years ago really scared the USA and the other governments of this world very badly. Here was evidence of a very advanced species, which was obviously not of human origins, nor considering what was released from the place, not a friendly species. The creation of forces to deal with such a threat was due to happen. Major Hennings and his men are not USOA Police. They are a top secret special operations force created to specifically deal with threats of an unusual nature. So if Hennings and his men are here, then the USOA truly believes this threat to be real, unusual and highly dangerous, hence I need to give your story a certain amount of credibility"
I could see she was in deep thought.
"Tell me about the guards outside. They appear Muraiin but look somewhat different"
"They are Muraiin, but not as you or anyone else for that matter knows. They are Sakquain who have fallen in battle against The Xantu. The injuries to them was so severe that our healers could not save them. So they were offered an alternative to dying. It is a procedure recently discovered in the past four hundred years by some of our healers. In an untried attempt to save some fallen warriors, the healers tried a new procedure to try and save lives that normally would be considered lost. This new procedure produced some new and startling changes in the warriors. They were healed, but were no longer the hybrid Muraiins we knew or Muraiins on any level we had ever seen before. Their personally had been erased. They know who they were but their personality had been completely changed. In a way they were like living robots although they still felt a very deep kinship to us. They were also physically changed. They had grown larger, incredibly stronger, not as fast, but relentless. We found that as warriors they were unsurpassed, and virtually unbeatable in combat. Over the years the technique to produce them was perfected and used to create what we now call Sakquii. Yet the procedure is only performed on Sakquains who have fallen in battle and are too badly injured to be saved by the Healers. The choice to become a Sakquii is strictly theirs. They must agree to the change, and their families must be involved, although the final decision is the injured Sakquain alone. Any Sakquain unable to agree to the change, is allowed to die peacefully and is buried with honors. Very few Sakquains agree to this as I stated, because their personalities and memories of themselves will be drastically changed. They prefer to die peacefully. There are some among us who are against the creation of Sakquii, but it is accepted for the good of the people. No one except The Healers and The Seer knows how the procedure is done. Not even The Elders know. Also no Sakquii are created without a Seer being present during the procedure. She alone can stop the procedure if she sees or perceive that doing so is best. These Sakquii do not go out to battle The Xantu. They are the exclusive bodyguards of Muraii. If The Xantu or any other threat managed to gain access to Muraii, the first line of defense are the Sakquii. Early on they were battle trained by Master Sakquains, but assumed the role of training new Sakquii themselves as they were too powerful to train against us. They were sent into battle against The Xantu early on, and that is how we found out just how powerful they truly were. One instance is when two of them stumbled upon a Vampu nest. Inside were two Masters and over a dozen younger Vampu. The battle lasted only minutes but the results were unbelievable. The two Saquii killed all of them. One Sakquii took on the two Masters alone and killed them both in minutes. The other Sakquii killed all the younger Vampu by himself. They were both badly damaged in the battle, but survived and healed. The Elders at first wanted to use them as our front line warriors, but they were too few. Even today there are only a few hundred to guard all of Muraii. They were deemed too valuable and too few to be used they way. Hence they were assigned the job of Muraii's front line defense and has been so for the past three hundred plus years. That is why we were so shocked to see four of them accompany Tessia back here. It has never been done before. It also shows us just how serious the matter with this creature has become"
Now I ha
d a whole lot more information on the Muraiins then before, but I felt there was still something missing.
“How come all of you speak English so well?
“We speak all human languages well”
“All of them?”
“Yes, all of them. One of the lessons we learned from the Atlantus destruction was that we could no longer fully isolate ourselves and still protect life on this planet. Being able to communicate with humans became a matter of great importance. At birth all Muraiins, and when I refer to Muraiins I am speaking about all of us, originals and hybrids, are born with the ability to roughly understand our native language. After a couple of years we fully understand and can also speak our language. This ability was developed in our species thousand of years ago. What was discovered after the development of us hybrids was that we had a unique ability to learn human languages extremely fast. If we listen to a language being spoken for a few hours we begin to understand it. After a few days we can then speak the language fluently.
“Are there a lot of you back in Muraii?
“There are roughly seventy nine thousand of us. Of those only nineteen hundred of us are Sakquain. We have loss quite a few over the past years in our war both with The Xantu and through other means”