PRL Serials

The R.O.

The pull of the sword is strong, but Alia feels her grip around it very securely. She knows that she is moving fast, flying like Superman through this construct of space, but she doesn’t feel any resistance against her and she imagines that if she were to move this fast in the physical world, there would be intense friction and a fire engulfing her. She sees the red planet like fire before her, growing bigger as she approaches it, and she sees that it is spinning slowly. As she gets closer, she feels the pull of the sword dissipate and she pulls it close to the breast of her silver armor as she rearranges her body with her feet down as she descends to the surface of the planet.  

It is a planet from the surface, not like the small, white rock she had drained to get here. This red planet is small relative to Earth, though, and she can fly around it’s surface in no time, and she does, staring down at the rocky terrain that seems completely barren. 

Alia lands and she decides to see if she can drain the red energy. She kneels and thrusts her fist to the ground, then she yells in pain, white light shoots from her mouth and eyes, and her fist is crumbled inside of her armor like a balled piece of paper. The red ground is unharmed. 

Alia hops around for a little while, cursing and yelling, the occasional bolt of light flying and crashing the rocks of the terrain to pebbles. She finally stops and looks at her mangled hand. 

“Dammit,” she says, then takes deep breaths. “Calm down, calm down.” As she calms herself, her fist reconstitutes. 

“Mou!” she hears a deep voice yell and she turns to see a man with a blood red form. He is a giant from her perspective, about twice her height and she recognizes his voice. 

“Ssi, I thought you were dead or something.”

He stares at her curiously. 

“Why would I be dead?”

“Because I stopped you.”

Ssi stops in his confusion. He doesn’t have eyes or a mouth, but there are features on his face and they display real dismay.

“You are a wonder,” Ssi says carefully. “You left and so many said you died, you must have, a woman couldn’t survive alone where we were born. But you did, and you came back, completely different. Powerful in your suit of light. I only want to be worthy of you.”

Alia shakes her head. This is Ssi, the Red Father who had possessed her friend Ivan years ago when the spell that trapped him was broken and he attacked Alia and her friends. But he seems very different in front of her on the red planet. Different, but still dangerous, she can feel his rage even as he stands calmly in front her full of contemplation. 

“I am nothing to you now, am I?” Ssi says sadly. “You don’t even need my son, some giant has given you that. I am nothing. Is that how you see me?” He is yelling when he finishes. 

“You are bad,” Alia says calmly, “this energy you have is corrupting your mind. You have to let it go.”

“And be nothing compared to you!” Ssi laughs loudly. “I will end you, woman.”

Ssi charges her and each of his steps shake the ground and send up dust mixed with the red light energy that issues from the planet, and he hits her in the chest with a fist that sends her flying back until she hits a jagged rock formation. 

She recovers and she looks to the sword in her hand. 

“What’s up? I thought you had my back?”

She touches the dent in her armor that she can feel against her chest inside. She wills it back to its original state and then she levitates.

“You are nothing!” Ssi yells up at her. “They will reject you and you will be cast out alone for what you are, a woman playing at a man’s duties. Know your place…”

Alia hears him, but she is well above him and she does not listen. She tries to feel the planet, what it is made of that she wasn’t able to drain it like she had the white rock.

It is a ball of energy like the white rock was, but it has a layer around it that she hasn’t ever encountered. She extends her arms down at the planet and at Ssi and focuses all of her light energy through her hands. 

“You are not enough to…” Ssi says before the light envelopes him and he disintegrates.

The light hits the rock like a jackhammer, pummeling it hard and chipping away bits of it at a time. After a few minutes, Alia is spent and she descends back to the surface of the red planet. She doubles over, gasping for breath. Then she feels the sword tugging her. 

“Stop it! I need a minute.”

The sword pulls her toward the crater that her light had created and she is impressed with the damage. Then the sword lifts her off the ground and she hovers over it, dangling like she holds onto the edge of a cliff. 

“I got it, let me catch my breath.”

Alia regains her composure and then let’s go of the sword to levitate next to it. She inverts it, both hands on the hilt in front of her face, and then she screams as she plunges the sword down into the rock. When she connects, there is a burst of rock and red light, and when the chaos settles, there is stale, gray debris, and Alia with red hair and her silver armour tinted blood red. 

“I see the orange,” she says and points the sword in the direction of an orange rock in the distance, and then she is off, flying toward it.

Flying through the mental realm is more like swimming than flying, like moving through the dark, intangible possibilities of the realm that waits to be formed by a nearby consciousness, rather than expelling energy to escape the influence of gravity to essentially free fall through physical space and maneuver the gravity of physical bodies therein until the desired physical body is reached. Alia doesn’t have to swim or maneuver through gravity, though. The sword navigates the mostly empty space that is occupied by orbs of others’ mental constructs that she would tumble through without the sword as she shapes the view of her consciousness into the spacescape necessary to realize the mission that she currently undertakes.  

But as she nears the orange ball that rages in a fearsome flame of energy and then blinks off to sit still, but glowing brightly enough to be a beacon, she is approaching an orb of someone else’s mental constructs that completely surrounds the planet. The construct is large and when Alia enters it, she is in the dark, and there is a ray of light through a small square of a window. She knows where she is, she recognizes the feeling inside, the entirety of the darkness outside the single ray of light that projects a white square against a wall. She must be at Morris Village, where they sent her shortly after her eighteenth birthday even though the only drugs she took were the ones forced on her by doctors and they justified her addiction treatment by categorizing her sun gazing as an addiction. 

Alia looks out through the square window to her right and sees a long hallway with many doors just like her own, and the windows are jet black. When she looks to her left, she sees the same hallway, but a dark figure in the distance is moving toward her.

Who could it be? she wonders.

As the figure gets closer, Alia can hear keys jangling. When it is several doors down, she can see that it is a man in a fancy orange suit. He is looking into each room that he passes and Alia wonders if he is looking for her. She bangs on the door, and the man in the orange suit shrieks and jumps a foot off the ground in surprise. 

“Have you been watching me this whole time!?” the man asks when he recovers, and then he races down to the door where Alia stands inside. “How long have you been in there? I’ve been walking around here forever, I thought this was hell…”

“Nebuchad?” Alia asks. 

“Your voice sounds so familiar, but I don’t recognize you. Can you help me leave this place for good? There’s so many doors and even when I find the right key to a door, it’s only temporary and it’s never the right place. Maybe this is the right one? Did you come to help me?”

Nebuchad doesn’t wait for a response and he fumbles at the keys on the large chain that is like a mini hula-hoop that hangs around his waist.

“Back up,” Alia says, “let me see what I can do.”

Nebuchad steps aside just as a red light fills the room and then the hall around him, but he doesn’t notice until he hears the explosion that blows the door off its hinges and sends it smashing the wall just next to him. 

“That’s much quicker than these keys,” Nebuchad says and he rushes inside the room. He looks disappointed as he stands in front of Alia for a second.

“This one’s a dud,” he says, “it happens really fast if it’s going to happen. How did you get here? Did you take that drug too?”

“This is where you’ve been this whole time?” Alia asks sympathetically. 

“How do you know me?” Nebuchad asks.

“We were at the Institute together, actually, you’re still there. You’ve been a patient since you took that drug years ago.”

“What do you mean? I’m here, I’m not a patient anywhere.”

Alia explains to Nebuchad that he is separated from his body and he has apparently been stuck in an elaborate mental construction on the Dreamscape.

“I guess that’s why I don’t feel stuff like I used to,” Nebuchad says. “But why am I here, I don’t even know how I got here.”

“We can figure it out together because I have to get to the center of this whole thing. I need to find the orange planet.”

Nebuchad’s face changes to fear.

“No you don’t. I went through that door and I was on that planet. I only survived it because I got pulled back to this hallway.”

“Show me the door,” Alia says.

Nebuchad shakes his head. “Trust me, that’s not the way out, it just makes this place so much scarier that something like that exists here.”

“What’s on the planet?”

“They seemed like people at first. I fell to the surface after I walked through the door and these people helped me, but after a while, they changed into something else. They are all monsters, big monsters that tried to tear me apart. I won’t go back there.”

Alia looks at him sympathetically.

“I know you’re scared, nothing about any of this makes sense, and then I show up out of nowhere. But you know me Nebuchad. That’s why you recognize my voice, you’ve heard it before. You can trust me. I will keep you safe. Just please take me to the orange planet.”

“It’s hard to remember exactly, I don’t even know how long ago it was that I found it, but I think I remember the direction I was going. You can’t see it from here, but there are other hallways to turn onto. This place is huge.”

“Can you find it?” Alia asks the hilt of the sword in her hand, and then she feels it tugging her. “You should hop on my back, this thing moves too fast for you to run along behind me.”

Nebuchad is hesitant, but as soon as he climbs onto Alia’s back, they take off quickly down the hall. They fly for a while, turning many corners onto new hallways that look identical to the previous ones before she hears Nebuchad’s screams and she asks the sword to stop. 

“We passed it,” Nebuchad says when they land. “We can walk back though, it’s close.”

Alia follows him and they both stand before a door that looks like all the rest. She looks in through the window and is awed by the scene of space with distant stars and a large orange planet dominating the view. 

“Be careful,” Nebuchad says as Alia summons the red light energy at her fist and then punches the door to dust. 

The sword flies Alia to the surface of the orange planet, and as she descends, she throws the sword like it is a ninja star and then she changes her position in the air to gather her red energy in order to break the outer layer and access the orange energy at the center. But before she can launch her attack at the position where the sword entered the surface of the planet, Alia feels something tackle her out of the air and wrestles her to the surface of the planet. She punches her way out of the tussle and she realizes that she is surrounded by deformed people with bodies and limbs like distortions of normal human proportions. They remind her of her friend Gertrude in her Crude form, when she grows over a foot taller and her muscles bulge and half her face seems to slip. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them, surrounding her in an ever shrinking circle as they all inch closer, bearing unnatural fangs or claws.

Alia jumps and hopes to levitate up to find the position of the sword, but the monsters jump with her and knock her back down into the circle.

“I don’t want to hurt any of you!” she yells at them, seeing them all as her friend Gertrude who only transformed into Crude against her will and when she was angry. She is bruised and beaten before the hilt of her sword hits her in the back of the head. She yells at it and then picks it up.

“You’re late and you hit me,” Alia says to it. 

The sword seems eager to attack the monsters, but Alia struggles to corral it. But then she realizes that her reticence to hurt the orange monsters would keep her stuck there forever. Even if these were other innocent people lost on the Dreamscape, their aggressive form was a danger to themselves and she would hopefully help them if she could destroy this part of them. 

Alia yells as she gathers red energy to the sword and she jumps up from the surface, slicing down the monsters who jump with her, and then she throws the sword again, and her beam of red energy is not far behind it. Just as the sword cracks into the orange, rocky surface up to its hilt, the red energy punches after it, exploding the small hole made by the sword and sending the monsters flying away like debris. The entire planet ripples with destruction before it explodes and Alia plunges into the orange energy at the center of the chaos. When it dissipates, her armor is now orange, and she is floating in space with an unconscious Nebuchad nearby.