Priya Echo's Adventure - Part 7

CHAPTER 26 - ECHO’S VACATION

Dreamess (who is Echo after defeating Visioness and securing the Dust-Throne) and Sam drop down to the interstellar space below the plane of the SOTA to be alone together. Dreamess, turns to her husband Sam, who is known as Dazin and is realm-king of the echo realm beside her. “There are aspects of our phenomenon which have become detached from their logic. Whether their logic has been lost or absorbed or stolen, I do not know. It is a mystery if the ascension itself is responsible'' she says. Sam reaches out to his wife to hold her hand and asks, “What do you mean? What aspect do you speak of?”. Dreamess sighs and replies, “I speak of the fabric of which the realm is woven. There is the chain of ascension, which links all of those from bards to mortals. That quilt appears to be whole for now. I mean to speak of the avatar chain, those two threads that form the foundation of the quilt and whose ends dangle from the body of the quilt. We should all simply be personalities of Dreamer and Dream, such that would collapse as the personalities of the echo seal bloodline generation did, but we have grown to be separate individuals. The avatar chain is now only a Link which connects us all. In this way, the logic of the avatar chain has become lost, stolen, or perhaps absorbed by the ascension itself. That is the mysterious truth that we should be all mere creations of the scilysts”. Sam thinks on the matter and returns with his conclusion, “Perhaps this is the legacy of the unraveling of black rainbow, who you re-absorbed. Do you sense the presence of such a leftover contagion?”. “I do not” she admits, “However, let us depart from this talk of work during our time alone together”. The two embrace and Sam, who is the map unravels and the folds of the cosmic map wrap around Dreamess. After some time drifting through the void Sam notices a far-off aberration. “What is that entity? '' he wonders and the couple travel closer to investigate. “It appears as a derelict Earth vessel, let us reduce our size and walk through its corridors, and see what answers it holds” Dreamess says. The two patrons reduce and conceal themselves and pass through the steel barrier as if it were tissue paper. “Let us step lightly” Sam says, “this tomb is fragile”. As they walk through the corridors the skeletons of fallen sailors drift by. The face of one of the skulls points toward the wall, where there is emblazoned “Men-At-Arms” , the name of the vessel. The hatch of the command chamber opens and ushers them within, where there is a large monitor. “Allow me” Sam says and waves his hand over the controls. A relic footage plays upon the screen. The hazy figure of an old man in a white robe appears, covered in cracks that cover his shoulders and face that crackle with green light and give off emissions of green mist. “This is Commissioner Thonis of Alpha-E calling out to Men-At-Arms. Captain Frankus … son … Can you hear me? Four months and five days. We have been waiting for your arrival and the salvation of the cure. In the wake of the epidemic the colony has almost completely collapsed. Now, only a few remain. Even the aid of Earth may be a little too late. Son, if you are hearing this, if you can see this, the disease has taken me as well. Your mother and I have always loved you. When she passed, I thought the world had ended. Now those few that remain call out to the stars, please, do not abandon them”. A wave of horror and realization pass over Dreamess and Sam as they take in the message. “What a fate for the first colony of mother Earth” Dreamess replied, “Let us go there and see if it remains intact”. Sam absorbed the coordinates from the computer and the image of Alpha-E appeared on his body directly below the SOTA and its plane. Before the patrons stepped back into the darkness Dreamess hesitated and said, “Wait”. Her power washed through the ship until she felt something. “Come this way” she said and the two entered an area that had previously been a laboratory. She reached into the structure of the lab table and pulled out a plastic case. “What is that?” Sam asked. “This disk drive is encoded” she replied in echoes, “We will be unable to decipher it until we arrive at the colony”. Sam nods and the two trans-manifest through the hull back into the void. It is a fleeting moment before the swift patrons arrive upon the lively grassy plains of Alpha-E, and alight in the midst of the ruin of a great city. “We are too late my love” Sam laments. In the crowded center of the city there rests a tall building surrounded by a citadel. “Let us walk” she urges, and they do, walking through the grave that once was a city. “Each blade of grass here rotates and twists around slowly as if it were a screw. The effect is wonderful and mesmerizing” Sam observes. The patroness points to the crumbled shells all around them, overrun as they were with lush green vegetation like the cracks that covered Thonis, “I perceive the heritage of the culture of Earth, but with hope and the breath of new life. This is the loss of Earth’s only child”. Eventually the two make their way to the central tower. The entire building had been converted to a hive of labs, each of which ran into the next. The charred green coal-like remains of men and women rested on each lab table. The patroness approached a pile of research papers and blew until her breath had removed all but one, which she took into her hand. “Do you not see it husband, look closely at this dust”. As he does she reveals the image on the page, a blue woman with strange ornamental ribbons from her shoulders, a cuticle from her forehead and a title at the top of the page – ‘Rikiral Female – Specimen 8891’. The Map takes the paper and holds it in his hand, “The explorers arrived on Alpha-E to find the Rikiral. They married and interbred, but by that time it was too late. First contact had become the last as the contagion, an inter-species sexually transmitted disease wiped them out and turned them into green ash”. They trans-manifest and appear before a theater sized monitor in the heart of the control room. After ordering the computer to repair itself with a brief look, Dreamess placed the disk inside and the computer there decoded the message, sending up static that metamorphosed into an image upon the screen. A security tape of the Men-At-Arms is shown and Frankus is in the command chamber surrounded by half of his lieutenants, the other half facing them. A group of crewmembers confront the captain and his lieutenants. They say Alpha-E is lost and want to return to Earth. To prove the worth of the mission, the captain is forced to make a speech. He fails, and the next scene is within the barricaded laboratory, where Frankus speaks to the camera. “Home Base, if you can hear me, then you will know the truth. They … have gotten the better of us. I have only just awoken from an attack. My lieutenants saved me, but they are too few now. The Men-At-Arms will not be the salvation of Alpha. My home and family are lost forever. There is only one choice now. If we cannot take her back in a final engagement, then it is over. Farewell”. “According to Earth time, that was one hundred years ago” the patroness states. She extended out her arms and called out to every scrap of data hidden in the citadel to return to the epicenter, the monitor before them. Veiled in static, the image of two figures appears. The father and mother of Frankus, Thonis and his Rikiral mother when they were still young, sitting on the twisting grass of Alpha-E during a picnic. In the sky, the clouds of Alpha-E, which are like fat balloons lazily bump into one another and are sent in opposite directions. A warm smile appears on the face of the mother as she turns toward Thonis. She is wearing orange jewelry that hangs from her extensions and that appear through the distortion of the monitor as the color of sunset. Thonis wears a white uniform of an officer and his beard is still black, with only a hint of gray. Their knees rested on a checkered blanket, and there sat a woven picnic basket between them. Static lingered around them, intertwining their images and then separating them once again. As the two laughed and spoke of some reminiscence the colors of the picture seemed to levitate and then settle again, and the two could neither discern the words between them. Thonis took the Rikiral woman’s hand into his and kissed it, and the two looked away from the patrons out toward the distance. “My love” Dreamess said, “Will you join me in a picnic?”. “Yes,” Sam nodded. Dreamess and Sam transform into light and enter the monitor, travel through time and possess the couple. They could sense that all was braided together, the past, the future, and the world of the video. Dreamess looked through the eyes of the Rikiral mother, and turned her head left to witness her husband Sam who had inhabited the handsome body of Thonis. The woman opened the picnic basket, and somewhere in the far reaches of space and time a drifting escape pod opened, and the frozen, long dead body of the son emerged, rising into the starry landscape. The skull of the son is cloaked by the light of stars and scatters into dust. “Now you are free,” the woman says. The couple dig into the picnic basket and take from it all manner of foods and treats, which they eat together. When they finished the meal, they joined their shoulders together, and relaxed as the wind blew across the grassy plain, which had melted into an endless viridescent horizontal plane. “This is a truly remarkable echelon, but now let us return,” she said. The static enshrouded them and spun into a vortex. The two within the echelon materialized at the location of the picnic in the present day. The static dissipates, leaving only small traces on the surrounding environment. The two mortals part and the static bodies of the father and mother dissipate to reveal the spirits beneath. Their picnic finished, Dreamess and Sam return to the SOTA.

CHAPTER 27 - ICE CUBES

It was just one of those days when you really needed a few cubes of ice in your glass of water. Echo strode over to her refrigerator in the kitchen and took out the ice-tray, bringing it over to the circular table in the living room where a whisky-glass full of boring old water awaited on a coaster. Fidgeting with the plastic and bending it in just the right way, one of the cubes plopped out and onto the wood. After picking it up she was on the verge of dropping it into the glass when it grew just a little bit bigger. “Hmm, it’s segmenting into smaller ice-cubes” Echo thought, observing the geometric replication. Then a broad smile swept across her face as she realized the simple, unassuming thing had become a puzzle cube. “Woah … this thing looks interesting” the player thought, twisting the faces to match the particular shades of opaqueness inscribed within the squares. Biting her tongue, she eventually cracked the code, and the mechanisms within unlocked, and the individual ice-cubes glided into the whisky glass. Then the other ice cubes skipped out from the tray, changed different colors and slid across the table, over the top and underside and over the chairs. Managing to catch the red one as it bolted across the smooth oak, she felt a tap on her shoulder. “Hey, what was that!” she exclaimed, looking over and seeing no one. Turning back around the same thing occurred again, until she realized upon examining the ice-tray that one of the cubes remained, and that whenever she turned her head the cube had grown into a rectangular solid of a few feet in height, then branched off in ninety degrees, tapping her on the shoulder, and retreating quickly to evade discovery. “Give me a break, buster, do you think I’m that easy?” Echo grinned, removing the last cube. Taking its place, the refrigerator came from the kitchen and turned into a block of ice and slid into the depression. Then a white cube turned into white vapor when she touched it, billowing out until congealing into another on the seat of a nearby chair. She ignored it, instead turning to the pink cube that had inside of its interior another plastic ice-cube tray which she retrieved, flipping it over onto the table, letting the different varieties of cubes slip out, but it was really difficult to concentrate with the blue cube running up and down and tickling her left arm. “Oh, wise guy eh” she censured, flicking it off. As all of this was happening … halfway across the city ... Sam sat by himself in a rather put-together dining hall of the Dalmatian Dynasty Café. Having been bored for the last hour he leaned with a palm flat against his cheek, the other hand gripping a thick water-glass. Sauntering over to him from across the room a rather lovely waitress dipped over, her shadow the only respite in the dreary opulence. “Sir, would you like some ice cubes in your water?” she asked. Nodding he assented, and with a blissful smile she poured the pitcher into the glass, letting the dumb geometries clunk into that empty vessel. It was the third date she had missed that week.

CHAPTER 28 - HAIRCUT COUPON

“Looks like someone forgot to clean the table off last night” Echo grumbled, adjusting a wet lock away from her face. Sifting through the melodramatic adverts, she came upon a conspicuous coupon buried in the mess. “Free haircut? That sounds pretty good” the early bird jibed, quickly clearing the breakfast table with a sweep of an arm. Between her feet the wooden floor devoured the refuse, transferring the useful ingredients to the portion’s industrial system. Already bickering with an overcoat, Dazin came from the bedroom and marched straight to the other side of the room where the window-door hung. “Going before breakfast? I thought you liked to dine and dash” Echo observed dispassionately. Dazin turned around to see himself chastised with a head tilt. Must everything be studied with mockery? “I’m sorry, there’s a protest in Idea’s portion over logic rations and I’ve got to be there to settle the crowd” he explained, seeking reassurance. Echo’s primary scoffing reflex was the farthest thing from concord. It was one of her day’s off for goodness sake … a rare occurrence. Shifting mood she waved a hand, condoning the breach of breakfast, “Beats me why they ration logic like that in the first place, it doesn’t make any sense”. Unfortunately, the explanation for that was also rationed. “Wish me luck” Dazin encouraged, then left tout de suite. The early bird walked to the refrigerator to procure melba toast and raspberry jam. “Hmmm … I wonder if I used this coupon, what the result would be. I mean it sounds awfully good … but what would be the moral implications?” she speculated, crunching down on the first course. Peacefully the ventilation turned on in the background, automatically brushing theories of air through its filter. Insignificant motes of dust, trailing like strays. Sticks of chalk rolled across the blackboard on the eastern wall, then leaped off, creating paths of residue through space. Snatching one of them she dragged herself over to the blackboard, preparing its sable face with a wet sponge. With a line drawn across the middle, on the left, she wrote, “Normal Haircut” and on the right, “Free Haircut”. It continued like that for some time as the day spread thin. With a labor across a prodigious length of the inner circumference, the Atmo became obscured until the mimicry of true night lulled those below to sleep in their miniature cities. Dazin came home from the long social escapade, shutting the door loud enough for an ordinary person to hear and be provoked. Making his way across the room, he found a full blackboard sprawling with arrows and cursive script. Such was hardly enough to outline the ethical boundaries of each proposal. Echo clawed a head of frizzy hair, shivering with the weight of the incompatibility. “Did you even go outside today, darling?” he sought, bequeathing a handkerchief for her to clean her dusty hands. The researcher shook her head to denote the opposite. “Naturally, the key to deduce the greater moral outcome is close, I just need a few more weeks to work out the precise details” the manic scribbler envisioned. “Let me take a look at that,” he intruded, stealing the paper cut-out from the chalk-ledge, “darling, this one expired over a year ago, down here at the fine print”. Gripping both sides of her frizzy fluffball of a head, the researcher stood dumbfounded, mouth agape, “Huh? Wa? But I …”. Seizing the moment, he drew close, pressing his chest against hers. “You know what this means right? I’ll just have to pay for a haircut” Echo whispered, voice overwrought with the grievous truth of the words. Her iris flickered with the gleam of esoteric wrath, then dwindled. Mute calmness disentangled the stress riveting every nerve and fiber of her being. The soft warmth of the Star-Map turned those aggressors to putty. “Really, I shouldn’t have gone so far this time” Dazin thought privately to himself as he ushered her back to the bedroom. Things certainly had gotten out of hand.

CHAPTER 29 - ROOFTOP ROMANCE

Dazin (who is Sam after becoming patron) scrutinized the hapless creature whose eyes were glazed over in boredom, leaning on a desk with one hand moving independently. Slow progress ceased as the writer noticed a note pop from thin air at the edge of the table. “Are you really using stationary for hand-written letters? That’s so arbitrary, we can send telegrams telepathically all the time that print our thoughts on the paper” it read, prompting Echo to lift her focus to the newcomer. Around him, the commonplace pillars were sparse, and as such the environment prolonged itself in this vacant wing of the Residence Erudite, where normally students would linger, focusing on given coursework in their own safe harbors. Dotted in the wet grass were cans openers that worked on their counterparts until the metal lids segregated, floating into the air where the metal discus extended vertically forming metallic pillars. In time, the natural element would be subsumed. “Is there something wrong?” Dazin asked Echo, who looked forlorn enough to rattle about in grim realities as students do, then throw porridge against a wall for the purpose of self-mollification, as if the spillage was an apologist for such an injustice. “Not really, do you think people will like handwritten letters? They’re very down to earth, and a real chore” Echo submitted for his approval. Of course, a bland endeavor such as this was way out of character for her, as if she were vainly striving to be swathed in crestfallen blue. “Fine, if you want to be alone, keep it to yourself” Dazin rejoined conversationally, standing firm, looking stoically into her face to acknowledge that he would stay. If one can take a dream with a grain of salt, one can also take reality with a grain of salt. There is one grain. “No, Star-Map … wait. About last night, I just felt like we weren’t really connecting” she replied. Their talk broke a moment as the patron watched the novice ways in which the nature of the room flunked in its quest to fashion itself. From the dresser beside the stream a group of polyester socks leapt out, swimming upstream like salmon until reaching the top. Crossing over to land, the socks returned down the hill and dipped their ends into the river until bloated with water. From there they separated out, finding their own places in the grass where threads unwoven collected twigs and leaves, sewing them together into clumsy branches. Echo looked ironically at the scene from the desk. Happy and fat, the socks lifted up the branches to form a mockery of a tree, until eventually a tiny hole would form on the body, and the water gushed out in one motion, deflating them again. The whole sequence of events was quite dissatisfying. “It’s the same as what we normally do, '' Dazin admitted, blushing coyly. Echo was beginning to lose patience, even with her other half and his dashing loyalty. This was not a hard to grasp concept, after all. “I know … did you want to try something different?” she suggested. “What did you want to do? Anything but that …'' he gulped, reminiscing back to the era of the Trail War, when he had against the Couple’s wishes sought to be the compass guiding all lost souls, and their final confrontation where she had destroyed his aspirations with brazen tactics in one fell swoop. Fortunately, his lover shook her head. Nearby the desk a mailbox grew out of the juvenile grass, propped up by its wooden post. Rotating, it molded its body and blossomed into a black flower. Both of them turned to witness its development as it expelled a plume of white letter dust, obscuring the desk. Getting up, she walked over to him, waving away paper cloudiness with one hand. Dazin put a hand on her hip as the girl laid one arm over his shoulder. Once more, they were interrupted as the stones below the waterfall towards the northern wall rolled onto ground, each tugging a strip of water in alternate directions causing them to snap as they continued their revolutions. “This room is dumb at everything” Dazin observed, until his partner with a tap on the cheek moved it back to its rightful position. “Have you read of that time when someone fell asleep on the rooftop at night?” Echo enquired, smirking in a way that was more confounding than calming. He shook his head to indicate that … no ... he had not in fact heard of that. Letting go of his cheek, she raised her hand, tearing a hole in the ceiling with a strike of mirror lightning. Flying through the gap, they alighted on the roof of the Residence Erudite. With inscription lined circles she impregnated the clouds above with color, releasing it to fresh yawning pandemonium. Dazin tore away his human guise, resuming his original form, first with a layer of ordinary maps, then to another type. Echo zigzagged her eyes across the breadth of his body, stopping at every vertex, envisioning the true constellations of the Star-Map. “Don’t think about the color. Here … I will lay on the roof and you on top of me” she instructed. As he began kissing her neck, she ran her fingers through his hair. Dazin looked down, seeing with pleasure filled eyes how the flunking of nature continued unabated below. Pathetic … but beautiful. Going further, she felt the texture of the roof rough against her back. He could not help but look through the gap below, at the black flower that had just been a mailbox. They caught a breath after a hard kiss and with the clarity of dreamlike absoluteness, the empress pictured her game plan. “Do you know how swiftly a real night goes? I do. And I have a good trick up my sleeve. Let me approach your back” she whispered in his ear. Securing his consent, she passed a hand over his back along the skin and over the full length of the spine. Motioning with her hand his torso descended. Dazin groaned as the tool tightened. “This is the most important part, so don’t look at anything else but me” she trained. Dispersing, the sky let loose the first of the secondary colors. Echo felt his muscles tense atop her, constricting in pleasure. With each succeeding thrust his energy surged, growing quicker. Damp droplets fell in intervals around them, heightening their senses. Assumptions like time melted as heat fled from their bodies, mild insubstantial wisps. Their passions extinct, she flicked her wrist, untying her arms from his, and nails from his side. Vision slowly returned from addled obscurity, after four or so blinks, and watched the colors engulfed by darkness again. Luckily none of the students saw them on the roof that evening. “Almost ... as good as I thought it would be” Echo considered, biting her tongue.

Chapter end