PRL Serials

The PRL Event: Darker Resurrection 5

The country of China has a very long history that has been preserved for posterity. The movement of peoples under various leaders has been thoroughly documented, and a person of Chinese descent interested in tracing their heritage may have an easier time comparable to say, a person of African descent in America. 

Aile Lang, current patient of Dr. Thomas Eakran in the basement level of the Institute for Brain Function, has Chinese heritage, but she is also half French, and her mother gave her the name Aile because the girl was born with a swath of dark hair that swept over her head like a wing. She is very well traveled and she has seen the neighborhoods where her father’s family lived in China before distant relatives eventually relocated to the US, and she has seen the historic villages that made her mother’s family in France. Her tennis career had allowed her to travel to many countries though she was uninterested in immersing herself in those cultures. She was laser focused on being the best tennis player she could be.

Her one track mind helped her stand out from peers, but it also contributed to her ultimate downfall and addiction to painkillers. Her detox after she got treatment was traumatizing and it scarred Aile forever. She rarely talked to anyone, and if not for her chance meeting of Alia at a facility in Columbia, South Carolina, it is doubtful that anyone would know her name today. 

Aile Lang had hoped to disappear after her detox, to be forgotten by everyone so that she could avoid the stimulation of hearing their thoughts. It was a strange thing to experience for the first time and she was convinced that it was a side effect of her drug use and she hoped that it would stop with time. 

It didn’t, and it wasn’t until she was visited by her sister, Stephanie, that she was finally able to understand what was happening to her. Stephanie had died when she was fifteen while the family was on vacation to China. 

Aile was happy to see her sister, even if she was just a ghost or an illusion. They talked when Aile had time alone in her room and she explained to Aile that she was special, and not for the reasons that she believed. She told Aile that she could see other ghosts if she tried, and that it was worth it to meet her ancestors who could help her navigate her mind that seemed to be damaged by her drug use. But Aile resisted, and she eventually stopped talking to her sister who she was convinced was not actually there. 

Then she met Alia and Elia and she had friends who would sit with her and they would help her drown out the sounds of everyone around her.

Alia has been gone for a long time now, and Aile has not been herself in the basement of the Institute. She still enjoys time with Elia, but her sister has returned with other dead relatives who stand around and watch her, waiting for her to engage them. She has yet to say anything to them to date.

In this ninth installment of the adventures of the brave Chimutengwende, Wendy gets an assist from an extraordinary woman who is like her, but very different.

Wendy Meets an Aliarum

Great uncle is a fast learner. He is from a time when things were much simpler and the technology of modern day is bright and loud to his senses, but he is a true servant of the Chimutengwende vadzimu, and he follows the mission of the head medium who leads them, the current brave, Wendy. As such, he occupies the basement level of the Institute for Brain Function in rural Georgia at her request, and he focuses intently on the actions in the office where a man sits with an older woman. He doesn’t know what this is all about, but he knows that Wendy has been frantically looking for this woman and it seems that the man she is with now was responsible for her disappearance.

Not only does he watch, but he gives Wendy a view as well, and even though she is reviewing mundane lab reports for Dr. Hansberry in their second floor laboratory, she is listening intently to the conversation between the man and the old woman in the basement. 

“There is no way that you can be who you say you are,” the man says. He is a very attractive man and the view of him gives Wendy the creeps. 

“And yet, I was able to access the elevator to get here,” Helen responds in a voice that Wendy had never heard before in all the time she worked with her. The woman could not speak before her disappearance.

“I didn’t say this whole thing isn’t very curious,” the man responds. “I know that there is no way you, Ms. Helen Baumgarten, would have knowledge of Dr. Frederick Cousins who is locked in a patient room. The fact that you claimed to hope to free him defies all explanation. So I will ask you again to tell me the truth before I resort to my regular, very tortuous methods of answering questions.”

“You have always been a butcher, haven’t you?” Helen says boldly. “If you try to harm me, you will only be harming this poor woman who is very much capable of feeling pain. I told you who I am, I told you that I don’t know why I’m still here after you brutally murdered me. But I know Helen here has been an empty vessel for a long time, unable to access her communication function, until it was recently restored and I took advantage because I could. All of this is my fault. I should have never kept your secrets, and Rick is locked up like a prisoner because of me. I will make it right.”

The man was suddenly very alarmed. “You have been here for days and now we finally come to it. Say it, tell me my secret and confirm who you are.”

“You are an alien. Your name is Eakran 15, you are from the planet Druont, on assignment on Earth from an interstellar organization that is evaluating humanity for inclusion into your organization.”

Wendy audibly startles and she disturbs Dr. Hansberry in her office.

“You ok?” she asks.

Wendy looks at her blankly and nods. “Just saw a bug. It’s dead now.”

After Hansberry returns to her office, Wendy mouths profanities. It’s the Dr. Thomas Eakran that the woman Maria had been looking for all those years ago. And apparently he is an alien.

Wendy panics, unsure how to deal with the revelation. Should she tell Hansberry immediately and try to out Dr. Eakran as Helen’s abductor, rush to the basement in dramatic fashion to free her?

The panic doesn’t last long, it is quickly replaced by confusion at the manifestation of a ghost that she had never seen before. The woman looks like a real person at a distance, she stands inside of the lab close to the door and across the floor space where Wendy sits in the back near Hansberry’s office, and Wendy has learned to tell a ghost from people with physical bodies because they are frayed at the ends, indicating no clear lines in the physical realm, but that the energies are mostly corralled into the shape that their bodies took before death, and Wendy focuses on the edges. The young woman who appears in her lab is obviously out of place, there are not teenage patients in this department, but the doctors moving past the lab in the hallway don’t seem to notice the girl standing in the doorway.

She approaches and Wendy stands, and Wendy can see the vague outline of violet at the girl’s edges, the fraying of her unhoused energies.  

“My name is Stephanie,” the young woman says. 

Wendy only nods. She is alone in the laboratory, but Hansberry would hear her having a conversation with someone if she spoke aloud in response.

“You are like my sister, my sister Aile can see me, too. And your uncle said you sent him to the basement, where Aile is right now. Can you help them? Can you save them all from the evil doctor?”

Wendy almost speaks, almost responds enthusiastically, Yes! I can save them from the evil doctor, just tell me how to get down there and past the security guard Giovanni. But she doesn’t say anything, but walks to the private bathroom at the end of the hall and locks herself inside with the overhead fan on to create sound. Stephanie is not far behind and she phases through the door as Wendy sits on the toilet.

“Tell me about your sister,” Wendy asks, and she has to sit patiently to hear the story of Aile Lang, who was born in New York, but lived most of her life in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in tennis training academies. Wendy was frustrated that possession with Stephanie seemed like a real labor, not as easy as it was for her relatives to inhabit her body and to give her information directly into her mind. But Wendy doesn’t have the time to figure it out, so she listens. She listens until Stephanie says the name Alia, that the woman had been a great help to Aile and had helped her a lot even after they came to the care of the evil doctor. 

“Alia used to be in the basement with Dr. Eakran? When?” Wendy asks, blown away that she had not met Alia until she traveled to North Carolina at the behest of her ancestor Tendayi, when the Alia had been at the very same facility where she has worked for much of her professional career.

“Aile would like to speak with you,” Stephanie says in response, and when she speaks again, her voice sounds the same but different. “Do you know Alia? Where is she?”

“She’s doing well, she’s in North Carolina. Are you ok? What is the doctor doing to you down there? What happens in the basement?”

“Everything that you cannot imagine,” Steph-aile says very seriously. “Everything that should not. But do not get illusions brave Wendy, you cannot do anything with the knowledge I am giving you. You have a power like me, and I am still just a prisoner. We can’t stop him, and if we call too much attention to this, he will kill her and you will never see her again. If you want the old woman back, you have to trust me. I can get her out, but I need a favor.”

“Anything,” Wendy says, “whatever I can do.”

“You need to bring Alia back here. She has to come soon. Things are about to get even more strange, Wendy. Do you feel it too? Are your ancestors panicked like mine? Do they feel the unnatural stirring in the afterlife too?”

Wendy shakes her head, she doesn’t know. She has been focused on the missing Helen, and Great uncle had been working closely with her since then. There has been no word from the other ancestors, which is strange when she thinks about it.

“I want to leave and I want to take Elia with me. Alia has to come end Dr. Eakran for good. For the good of everyone else trapped down here.”

Wendy nods. “How will you help Helen?”

“The spirit who has her body is a woman, a former doctor of mine named Donna Moss. Eakran murdered her, and apparently she had been looking for a vessel until she found Helen. She came here to save her friend, my other former doctor, a man named Frederick Cousins. I would have my sister wrestle control of Helen’s body from Donna, but then she wouldn’t know how to access the elevator to leave…”

“I do,” Wendy says enthusiastically, “or my uncle does. He has seen Giovanni do it so that he can get past the security room.”

“Excellent, then have your uncle do it. Why haven’t you?”

“Because that doctor has been talking to Helen with the Moss lady inside of her and I don’t know how he will act if she suddenly isn’t claiming to be Moss. But we do have to get her out of there before he locks her up or something.”

“I’ll create a distraction, and you be ready. Tell your uncle to do what he can to get her out of there as fast as possible. Stephanie will stay with you and let you know when your uncle can do his thing.”

Wendy nods. This has been a crazy day, but it could have a happy ending.

She returns to the laboratory and she sits at the paperwork she had left. Stephanie is close by and she mostly smiles at Wendy. 

“What’s going on?” Wendy asks in a whisper.

“Nothing yet,” Stephanie smiles. “Almost.”

In the basement, Great uncle has his orders from Wendy, and he flexes his eyes at the old woman, Helen, to see the younger spirit of Donna Moss inside of her. She and Eakran are still conversing and the room is tense, but Eakran seems to be coming around to the notion that his murdered former assistant has returned to the basement laboratory in a new body. 

There is a sudden commotion from the patient rooms further down the hallway where Eakran’s office is located and Eakran jumps. He doesn’t currently have an assistant, his replacement in the absence of Moss and Cousins, the woman Maria, has been on a trip at his request. He checks on the noise himself, and he is angered to find the patient known as Nebuchad causing a ruckus in his room. He always finds a way, Eakran thinks, and he would finally do what Maria had talked him out of, just sedating the man who is hardly a man all the time. When he is not struggling with delusions of being a bull, and slowly grazing on imagined grasses, he can become very frantic and even dangerous. 

“You will be the death of yourself, Nebuchad,” Eakran says as he lets himself into the room where he restrains the man who flails his limbs wildly. “Don’t make me kill you before I can understand how to reset the human mind from the chemicals you have encountered.”

Down the hall, Great uncle poises to strike, and then he leaps at the body of Helen, and tackles the spirit of Donna Moss from it. They tumble and roll over the floor; Helen sits blankly in her seat. The skirmish is not difficult for Great uncle; he has been a spirit for many centuries and he knows how to maneuver his energies to overpower other spirits. When she is subdued, Great uncle notices a group of spirits watching him, a few are as ancient as he is but they are Chinese.

“We will take her from here.”

Great uncle jumps into Helen’s body and focuses only on piloting it. It is a struggle to ignore the confusion that is the woman’s consciousness, but he focuses and pushes the woman’s fragile limbs to the elevator. Before he can get there though, before Helen makes it, Giovanni comes springing across the laboratory. Great uncle wants to go evasive maneuvers, but the vessel is not capable, and suddenly he is frozen with fear.

But Giovanni runs right past Helen, toward the back to assist Eakran with the unruly patient. And Helen makes it to the elevator, enters the complex code that he had seen Giovanni do earlier in the day, and takes it up the second floor where Wendy waits excitedly at the elevator with Dr. Hansberry. 

They are both shocked to see her and she cannot explain where she has been. Or if she can, she doesn’t. When she is back in her room receiving a check up from another doctor to make sure she has no injuries, Wendy pulls Hansberry aside.

“I need some time off,” Wendy says, not as a question. “I have something really important to do. Someone important to see.”

Hansberry recognized a concerned Wendy, and she has wanted her to take time off since Helen went missing because it had stressed her. She agrees and she kisses Wendy gently on the cheek.

“If you need me, you call me.”

“I’ll be back in a week or so,” Wendy says as she leaves the lab, and then the institute. Great uncle follows her at the left, and Stephanie at the right.