https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nD--zdQYFDcYj_grWqvAlfbsx8270yxFBro4onYUUJM/edit?pli=1
thats a link to googledocs..but here it is below as well
Pantheon
By Nathan Croft
Chapter One: Gaia
‘Keep alive,’ the orphan came with instructions. At five
years old Richard was left on the porch as someone doorbell-ditched a Las Vegas
City fire station. Everyone who knew him since then, at some point, felt a hot
desire to disobey the explicit command.
~
Commotion all around the young
teenager couldn’t touch his meditative gaze out the high museum windows. He was
comfortably defiant, ignoring the mess he had caused. An arid, rainless
tempest flickered in through the window and bounced off the marble floors,
casting twisted split-second shadows on the other delinquents as they were
searched for contraband. From behind his black cheek-length hair Richard looked
past the prison-like bars into the vacant sky. He
was waiting for the stranger.
‘Keep alive.’ All his life he wondered what kind of people
would leave a note like that. ‘Weird old idiots!’ Despite his unknown parentage
the city declared Richard to be Caucasian. He never understood what that meant.
No one ever offered a straight answer when he asked where Caucasia was. Adults either
scolded his attitude or chuckled and ruffled his pitch hair. By now he had stopped
asking questions, but they were always there in the
back of his mind. Who was he? Where did he come from? Why was he just
abandoned? Most importantly why couldn’t he remember? At fourteen or fifteen he
knew he should still have memories of the fire station and before. The answers,
like his parents, simply escaped him.
There were only the scattered mental images of constant
migration between boy’s ranches and foster homes. Especially unhappy at his
current middle-of-nowhere slave labor camp, he considered running away, but it was way too far outside of the city to make it
anywhere safely. He hated the remoteness of the place and there were far too few people there. It was easier to
cope with being alone in a crowd than to feel like a sore thumb on a guy
with one hand. Thankful for the short field trip he was currently watching the
windows of some smelly moth-ball museum in the heart of Las Vegas. Right on campus at UNLV, he wondered if it was close-by,
the fire station at which he was abandoned.
Repressing disgust for the various exhibits and displays
around him, Richard had made himself comfortable in a corner with a
particularly nice stone wall on which to lean. Concealing perfectly, coupled
with his new hooded sweatshirt, his tan face and the surprisingly snug
headphones. He made sure his music was loud enough that he didn’t have to hear
the adults arguing.
“Have you questioned Rich-“
“A million and a half times. He said they mentioned the
strip but no one will rat him out.”
“Richard had to have had
something to do with it. When we get back, those kids are in huge trouble.”
“There’s no way we can make it back in this weather.”
“Yes we can, it’s not even raining and the news reports-”
“But if it starts, the road will be too muddy for this bus
and since when has the news ever been right?”
“What are you saying, that we spend the night here?”
“If it comes to it, with the boys and all I’d rather spend
the night here than stuck on some dirt road halfway to the ranch.”
The adults’ argument was masked by screeching guitars,
drums, and the latest electronic bleeps.
Richard, that was what they named him. Sometimes, the more
annoying tried their luck with Richie, but anyone who knew better called him
Black. The children often used made up names. It was his favorite color, his
dress code and coincidentally his hair was as dark as a moonless midnight. He
liked it so much that he went so far as to dye his already black hair just to
make it look deliberate.
Black was both Richard’s title and surname as he saw it. He
was the black sheep of the lost Vegas
boys. No foster family kept him. Valiant couples saw Black as a parenting
challenge or as their divine project. Embracing rejection, he never let them
tame him. Although he liked the foster homes best, he got sick of them quickly.
Sooner or later he always bounced back to the state, and he preferred it that
way, not that he liked the state itself, but Nevada nags a lot less than
would-be-mothers on a mission. The better they got to know him the more they
tried to “help” him. Above all he
didn’t like the feeling that he belonged anywhere. He needed to keep moving.
Standing in the corner ignoring the world around him he was
simply indifferent like nothing affected him. He thought of himself as a
shadow, only frightening if you fear it. Patient and tactful, he was only
cutthroat if provoked.
Black turned back towards the window. Tonight was the night
he was leaving. He wondered why he hadn’t done it sooner. Free food and
scarcity of cash were just excuses. But now he had met someone, someone
different from the regular runaway or criminal. This one was smarter. Richard felt somehow he wouldn’t get killed or
caught with him. He continued to watch the window.
Outside, the flash and bangs worsened. It was still dry in the city but the chaperones had no
choice but to stay at the museum for the night. The intensified
lightning helped Black keep alert, now sitting against a wall in the designated
corner of the museum’s entrance hall. Black stayed in that corner all night, after all they boys had returned and been scolded, even
after everyone was asleep.
The museum was quiet, closed under care of security guards.
Richard didn’t know how the stranger would come, but if he could it would serve
as the proof that the stranger was telling the truth. With reservation, Black
envisioned the epic jailbreak it would require, but the man seemed to know
exactly how he would do it. It was all the same to him, he wasn’t going to
challenge. Questions got people like him into trouble, not authority trouble
but trouble with trouble itself.
Black waited for what only seemed like a few minutes, but
could have been hours. He was too indifferent for time to get to him.
The moment finally came, quietly, unnoticed. The wall behind
him began to grow warmer, steadily under the cover of the storm’s humidity.
Black shot up to his feet, back sweating. Half expecting to see that he had
been sitting against a broken radiator he stepped away annoyed. Looking back, unflinching he stifled disbelief as a
section of wall appeared to melt before his eyes. No one seemed to notice as a
stranger stood alone in the opening, hair blowing on the edges of a hood. A
black coat ran to the strangers’ knees.
“I think there’s been a
misunderstanding. I was expecting a professional thief, not some cirque du
sideshow.”
The sunken-faced man peeled
himself back from the opening, offended.
“The con-artists of your world-”
He cut himself off. “I don’t have to prove anything to you. Stay here if you
want. I hear you enjoy digging latrines over at that delinquent labor camp.”
Black didn’t trust this guy of
course, but he had never trusted anyone in his entire life. Why start now? And whatever
might happen sure seemed to beat the alternative.
“Alright, let’s do this!”
The stranger beckoned with a follow-me motion and turned
towards the night. The air was filled with a cool storm breeze. Though
lightning flashed the sky, still no rain fell in the city, there was only wind
and shadow. As they strolled away from the outer walls of the museum, Black saw
the wall close up as if nothing had happened. To the rest of the world, that
was the night Black disappeared.
Richard left all of his things in his backpack, even a few
things he had stolen that looked valuable, he wanted to leave the impression
that he simply vanished. He wanted them to wonder why he didn’t take anything
with him. He thought about a suicide note but it seemed to him a mystery, the
unknown, was more fitting. He just showed up one day and now he was simply
gone.
Before returning to that museum that evening, just in case
he was searched, he had stashed some of his other newly acquired goods in a
hollow tree close by. Wanting to get them he asked the stranger.
“Shut your mouth. You can’t take it where we’re going
anyway, and as much as I like practicing my English I’d rather you just shut
up.” That seemed to be the end of the conversation.
It was all the same to Black. He was now envisioning walls
melting all over the world. Glass display cases, vault doors and even prison
bars in his mind disappeared effortlessly with each new imagined caper.
Descending into the deep shoulder of a freeway underpass,
the rushing of sixteen wheelers on a four lane highway fazed him back into
reality. They stepped down into the ditch stopping at a metal grating guarding
a drainage hole. The stranger touched it and it too melted. Black’s arm was
grabbed and he was pulled to the hole.
“Get in!”
“Yeah right.”
“Do it or I’ll stuff you down myself.”
Black nearly pulled out his knife but his better judgment
took over and he cautiously climbed in. He was no match for a wall melter and
whatever else the stranger was, nor did Black think it wise to find out
presently. His feet hit a splashy ground that he didn’t know was coming. He
landed too soon but still only fell to one knee.
“Not bad kid. A natural faller. You might add up to
something.”
“Thanks uh,” Black paused, “What’s your name anyway?”
“I guess you’re going to hear it sooner or later,” the
slender man consented. “The name’s Yuki.” A meager offering. He pressed onward.
After a little walk in pure darkness being pushed from
behind by Yuki, Black saw a bright flash and instantly felt a sharp pain in his
head. He didn’t realize what had happened, nor were
there enough seconds between his rapidly falling body and the floor to find
out. He was totally unconscious before he even landed.
As if he were dreaming, the
evening’s events replayed in his subconscious. He was back in the museum. The
still distant storm echoed in the empty halls. They boys were given some free
time to wander the museum at their leisure after dinner. Black had conned the
other boys’ ranch inmates into running off to the strip during this reprise
form supervision to test their luck on slots and
cards. He had convinced them that all the
fun there was to be had on the Vegas strip would outweigh whatever punishment
the staff could come up with. Also he assured them vigorously that once all was
said and done, after they had paid the small price in the form of extra manual
labor, they would have a trove of smuggled-in contraband. Videogames.
The other delinquents may not
have trusted Black, but when he said he could get something in, he meant it. Frankly,
videogames appealed to everyone there. Whether or not your style was headshots
and claymores, shouting dragons from the sky, endless worlds made of pixilated blocks,
zombies, or motion sensor sports, Black was your man. They used to have several
handhelds and an outdated console. That was before the great confiscation following
Christmas last year. It was high time Black upped the ante.
They had to leave in waves so as
not to raise any alarms but Black never had any intention of meeting them at
the rendezvous point. Each boy boasted of their
future game and glory as they waited for Richard, as promised, at the
rendezvous point. Instead with a perfect diversion, he had made his way to the
nearby campus to lift electronics off careless coeds and lazy bachelors.
That was the pivotal point in
his plan. Get everyone else lost and eventually caught, he would appear to have
never left the museum, oblivious to everyone else’s absence. He would pretend
to have had some artistic epiphany over some sculpture, or painting or some
other crap. That would get their hopes up. Of course he would have to corrupt
whatever bogus insights he had with some morbid twist, just for credibility. ‘Maybe
there is hope for Richard after all, if we can just get past the psychosis.’
Black wasn’t really psychotic,
he was clever. Maybe there was a fine line between them. ‘Well, whatever works.’
All of his peers would take the heat while he became the hero, loaded with
hours of against-the-rules electronic entertainment.
The return of the other boys
cued Black’s volume finger. Drowning out the scene, his music blasted louder
than before. He kept the best piece of course for himself, headphones under his
shirt and in his hood, out of sight from the ever-searching eyes of the
institution. Black did regret that he had not
seen their frantic faces when they fruitlessly searched for the escapees on the
strip.
The mental movie played out in his
mind, the boys found the strip and no Black. They would look for hours before
getting caught by angry social workers and dragged back to the museum. Their
play time utterly wasted, they were now being tried and sentenced. He had sold them out and in the end they would praise him
for it. He would just shrug. He kept the volume
up. The mental movie was good enough, and providentially the PSP was absolutely loaded. Most of it was even pretty
good.
He smirked as the shaky hand of
part-time justice dealt with the other delinquents. After the public
reprimand the group was admonished to “go one last time.” It had grown late, and the storm near. There was no
chance they could get the massive busses back to the distant ranch in this
weather. It still wasn’t raining in the city, but via cell phone the staff was
warned that it came down in droves all along the dirt roads leading to the
camp. Black continued leaning like a lazy
sentinel as the rest of the crew filtered in and out of the bathroom, his legs
crossed and arms folded. Some other boys approached him, curious to know of his
exploits.
“Dude, they think I’ve been here
the whole time. Go away or they’ll figure it out.”
“But”
“Piss off!”
With a particular gesture of his
hand Black ushered the other barterer away. In truth, for the first time, he
wasn’t able to obtain the requested goods, not all of it anyway. Distracted
during his collection run, a skinny long haired and scruffy man at the
university had caught him rummaging through backpacks. Instead of capture, the
man had approached Black and offered change which he readily accepted. Life off the grid, and a chance to learn
professional thievery, packaged with the promise of never getting caught, ultimate
freedom was all the enticing he needed to agree. So he just gave up on lifting small time gadgets, he didn’t even
bother finding the freshman dorms. He just took what he had already nicked and
went back to the museum even earlier than he had to.
It was late and dark outside. The
chaperones scurried about in a worried frenzy over a few missing delinquents
and the impending storm. Richard couldn’t help but laugh. He, the alleged “Ring
Leader” of the nonconformists, had just been honored for his current presence.
Richard smirked again. The other boys hardly
pulled a penny slot and he had a brand new PSP
playing music in his pocket. As if he was
really going to go up against casino security, trying to gamble with stolen
wallets and purses. What use were some
vacationer’s credit cards anyway? A few chips were nothing to him in the middle
of a go-nowhere boys’ ranch compared to eighty gigabytes of memory sticks, loaded with free music, movies and
games, courtesy of some unattended backpacks at
the nearby computer lab.
Eventually everything had died down
and he sat in a corner, against a wall and waited. He must have fallen asleep,
because now he was waking up. It wasn’t completely dark but his eyes still hadn’t
adjusted. Stupid stranger wasn’t coming. Or wait, he had. ‘No,’ he thought, ‘that
was a dream.’
He became suddenly aware of a
sewer-like stench. ‘Who farted?’ But as he became more alert he noticed he was
wet. He had been lying in some rancid water next to a set of short wide steps. His
eyes adjusted to the dim light emanating from something above him, his
surroundings were unrecognizable. He started to look around trying not to seem
awake.
Soon the darkness past the steps became an archway and there
appeared a light. It was jagged and incomplete,
obstructed by whatever contained it. As the light drew nearer it grew a
pair of arms and then a body, someone was holding a bright object in the palm of their hand. ‘Yuki that backstabber!’
“Sorry kid, it was necessary, would have been mounds of
trouble. We’re there now so get up.”
As Black got to his feet he opened his mouth but was cut
off.
“Just shut up and listen. I need to know everything you have
on you, down to every little hairpin and piece of string. Put it on the table
or it’ll be your head.”
“What the-“
“Do it now and don’t make me ask again.”
Black started emptying his pockets and Yuki barked
“Everything.” He didn’t have much, a
small stiletto and a big hunting knife. There was a little utility piece that
consisted of a miniature compass and a lock pick and a few other little pocket
knife type tools. There was a little cash and a lighter. Black wasn’t about to
hand over the new mp3 player he had just recently adopted.
“If that’s not everything you’ll be dead or in prison in
less than an hour, and believe me you won’t like this sort of prison.”
Black subdued a few nerves that started to perk up, having
kept his mp3 player from Yuki’s grasp. A few seconds pause, but minutes calmer,
he pulled off his left shoe. He took out the insole and then withdrew a thin
piece of metal with a nasty spike on the end. There were a few holes in the
piece, a skinny pair of steel knuckles. A butterfly knife came from the hollow
sole his right shoe.
“Do you have any necklaces or jewelry?”
“No.”
“Really? No piercings?”
A ring and a bar went from his lip and tongue to the table.
“Happy?”
“Don’t get smart, ant.” Yuki smirked as he pulled something
out of a coat pocket. It was a small black and brown box with a square hole in
one end. He held it so that the hole faced outwards and took few steps over to
the table. Light in one hand, box in the other, he lowered them both to the
table. Yuki touched the hole-side of the box to the first knife, the stiletto.
It melted and disappeared, then the butterfly. Everything Black had melted and
disappeared until the large hunting knife was the only thing on the table.
“This is ugly, besides it won’t be much good to you anymore.”
Black stood there with a protest deep in his throat. Not
knowing what to say as Yuki seemed to materialize a white chalky disc from
nowhere. Yuki picked up the knife and tapped it to the disc. The blade turned
to dust and was sucked into the disc. Black stood in awe, that disk was solid
no mistake, yet it sucked the dust into it.
“No more questions squirt?”
Black dared, opening his mouth-
“Good, stay shut up, you’ll live longer.”
“No,” Black complained, “I need some information. You choose
what you’re going to tell me, it won’t matter what I ask, but you tell me
something before you or I make another move.”
With a wide grin Yuki retorted almost sinisterly, “Ok kid,
you’ve earned it, but keep your shorts on. I work in a little different line of
smuggling than you think. This is a border unlike any you’ve ever seen, and I
always have plenty of tricks up my sleeve. This box is a smugglers hole. It can
store huge amounts of just about anything, even someone unconscious. How’s your
head by the way?”
“You put me…that’s-“
“That’s what, impossible? Or magic? Ha, kid, keep your eyes
open.” With that Yuki touched the side of the box, stroked the corner, closed
his eyes, and pulled a three foot long sword out of the box. “This, my friend,
once belonged to a man named Gilgamesh,” his proud announcement was met with a
blank stare. “Don’t know your history eh?” He traced the box, and closing his
eyes Yuki then pulled out “something you might have heard of, the staff of
Merlin. And this,” he boasted as he pulled a third time, “is the helm of Hades,
worn and lost by Perseus.”
Something about the last item rang a bell but the name to
which the staff belonged he knew. “So
what?”
“So what?” Yuki repeated in disbelief. “These artifacts are
hundreds of years old and worth a fortune, but the point is this box can hold
just about anything you want. I put you in there. On our way down here in the
tunnels I heard voices. There’s never any way to know who a voice in the dark
belongs to so I stuffed you in here. It’s easier to defend myself alone, and
smuggling extremely rare and expensive artifacts requires serious skill,
especially where we’re going, so I don’t need you screwing it up!”
“So where are we going?”
“Nowhere that you would believe. Now, it’s easy to hide
anything in the box. It’s the box itself that takes some effort in hiding.
There’s a few ways to do it, you can make it appear to be something it’s not.”
He illustrated, somehow turning the box into a scarf. “It doesn’t always last long and there are
rarely any options since you can’t take anything with you to this place.” The
scarf turned back to a box. “Clothing is a number one suspect for hiding things
by the way, so it won’t work here. Or you can try to dilute it into the air,”
he did not demonstrate, “an easy thing to do but very unreliable. The chances
of finding it are slim, the chances of being able to get it back are slim, and
the chances of it being detected are not so slim, but the feat is the easiest
to perform.
“A third option, my personal preference; reversing the magic
of the box on itself, much the same as melting it into air but a little more
specific. With a little magical skill and tolerance for pain you can melt it
into yourself.” He stared at the box for a minute or two then jammed two of his
fingers in the hole. While saying something under his breath the box began to
melt. Yuki pulled his fingers apart and turned the box inside out. Then he
clapped his hands together around the box. There was an absorbing silence that
followed and he opened his hands to show nothing but air like a magic card
trick when the card ended up in your sleeve.
“It’s painful, but they’ll never find it.” That moment Black
saw a deep red smear on the palm of Yuki’s hand. Curious, he looked at the
other and saw blood seeping out of a cut so deep he expected to see through to
the back of the hand. Yuki dressed the wound like it was an involuntary
response. Jaw gaping, Black agreed with Yuki’s previous assumption about his
disbelief. ‘Ok this guy gets some credit. That was way cool,’ he applauded
mentally, which only made him more curious about his destination.
“Great marring,” Yuki
continued, “will stand out under the aegis oculi. And just so you know kid, very few people
know this method even exists and fewer can achieve it,” he paused. “We’ve
wasted enough time already, we need to move. I’ll even tell you why. We are in
one of many antechambers. This room is where you may purchase a locker,” he
directed, pointing at some heavy metal doors on the sides of the walls. Black
had not noticed those before. “Almost anything of this sphere cannot be taken
to the other, vice versa. I take what I want where I want. With that Yuki went
over to a chest next to some lockers opened it and started rummaging.
“You didn’t tell me why.”
“Eh, so I didn’t. Here put these on.” In Yuki’s arms was a
bundle of interesting looking cloth.
“No way!”
“You’re going to wish you did.”
“Yeah I’m sure I will big guy.”
“Alright kid,” Yuki chuckled. “You know best. Come on, time
to go.”
