PRL Serials

The B.I.V.

Alia is dark green, her hair is dark green to match, but now it is a puffy afro that seems to ring her head like a Renaissance halo. And her armour has been replaced with the flowing robe that Ivan had been wearing before she destroyed the green planet. The fabric looks to have the texture of wool on the outside, but it doesn’t feel rough or uncomfortable when she touches it. It is thick, like it should feel heavy, but Alia doesn’t feel weighed down by it. The robe is like a bathrobe with big sleeves that swallow her arms up to her wrists. She wears a simple dark green bodysuit underneath the thick, but gentle and flowing robe and at closer inspection, it is a standard issue IP spacesuit. She holds her large sword tightly in her right hand. 

She sees Nebuchad holding desperately to a large grey rock amidst the debris and she flies toward him. He is wearing the completely gray, fancy suit he had been wearing on the orange planet that lost its color when Alia absorbed it. She floats before him as he panics to hold on and when he notices her, she is smiling. 

“Help me!” he yells.

“Just let go,” she says, trying not to sound annoyed.

“I don’t want to fall down into nothing.”

“Where do you think you are?” Alia asks. “This isn’t real life, don’t you remember that? You can let go, and you can fly like me.”

Nebuchad looks at her skeptically.

“Then why do I feel like I’m falling?” 

“Because you believe you are. When was the last time you ate something? This is all a dream.”

Nebuchad closes his eyes and after a couple minutes, his clothes change to match the green of Alia’s robe. He opens one eye and looks down at himself, like he is confirming that he had been able to alter the color of his clothes, and when he does, he begins to slowly levitate next to the gray rock.

“See,” Alia says. “Now, you need to figure out how to get back to your body, how to wake up. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Nebuchad says. “How long have I been like this? Asleep or whatever?”

Alia shrugs, “Since 2014 I think…”

He nods at her and cuts her off, “Yeah, it’s still 2014 right?”

“It’s 2020,” Alia says cautiously, hoping to soften the blow that Nebuchad had missed almost a decade of his life. 

He doesn’t say anything and Alia floats with him in silence.

After a while, he says, “I’ve seen a lot of stuff here. Weird stuff. It was all my dreams?”

“No,” Alia says confidently. “This is where we go to dream, and this place can become whatever we make it, but that’s true for everything that can dream. Everything in the universe. And there’s more than humans in the universe. We all dream here, daydreams too. What you experienced here was probably that drug that knocked you all the way out there and you made that prison for yourself because you thought you deserved it. All the stuff you saw there was a mix of you and everything that filtered through you. Your consciousness is so far away from your body.”

“How do I wake up?”

Alia thinks a moment.

“You can navigate this place,” she says eventually, “by trying to understand your own dream logic. And by understanding feelings and emotions and stuff in general. You can make this place whatever you want it to be. When you’re done with it, you make the choice to leave. But if you didn’t make the choice to come here, I guess you wouldn’t know about that. I want to help you, but you see that blue rock in the distance,” she points over Nebuchad’s shoulder and he turns to see it. “I have to do what I did here to the others. It’s important.”

“You can’t help me?” Nebuchad asks.

“Come with me and when my stuff is done, I can help you or find someone who can.”

Nebuchad agrees and Alia has him grab onto her robes as the sword takes her at a fast pace in the direction of the blue planet.  

As she flies, Nebuchad talks to her. It is an uncanny experience, she thinks that she shouldn’t be able to hear him, but she does very clearly and they talk as though they sit across from one another at the same table.

“The orange planet is a real thing? With the changing monsters?” he asks her.

“The orange planet, that green one we just left, the blue one ahead, is something that exists here. The things on it are from other places, other people’s dreams, or just one person’s. It’s hard to know unless…”

She stops talking when she feels something graze her back in a flash, and then she feels the weight of Nebuchad removed from her robe. Before she can stop her sword, she feels something connect solidly with her torso and she loses her grip on her sword. She isn’t in pain, but whatever hit her, seems to be clinging to her, grabbing her with hands and arms. She can’t really see anything because she is tumbling around and the view in front of her rapidly changes. She is dizzy and she wants to stop. She makes her body levitate up, focusing on the direction, and she spins into an upright position before coming to a stop. 

She looks down and sees what hit her, and she looks out before her at the waves of men hurtling through the dark space. She spots Nebuchad at a significant distance from her, tumbling like the rest of them and he doesn’t respond when she calls his name.

She heads toward the blue planet that is still a ways away, and she can see the indigo and violet planets in the distance, waves of what she assumes are the same men who are like blue corpses that are clinging to life. She had felt the body she ran into grabbing at her, maybe he wanted help, maybe he wanted to hurt her. But there were so many of them, like a swarm or river that washes under her toward nothing in particular and their numbers were soon bolstered by indigo and violet bodies. 

“Alia!” she hears and she turns around until she sees a man flying toward her. It’s Darker and he is wearing a spacesuit that seems to be blue, indigo and violet depending on the backdrop.

“How did you find me here?”

“Kazi Fandral showed me,” Darker says with a smile. He looks at himself. “This isn’t what I was wearing when I started here. What is happening? Have you found the Rainbow Road?”

“I think I almost got it,” Alia says. “I just have to figure this out.” She looks down at the stream of men and she thinks she recognizes one of them. She flies after him and Darker is close behind her. When she is at the surface of the swarm, she sees a man that looks like Yuri as part of the changing blue, indigo and violet mass. She grabs him and flies up while Darker floats at a distance, recognizing his murderer, the man who had killed him years ago and set him on this journey. 

Alia holds Yuri, her arms securely in his armpits, and she rests her chin against his neck. He is completely naked and his skin is indigo, cool against her body.

“What is this, Yuri? Why are you here?”

She hears him speak in a strained voice. 

“This is where I go to cry. The only place I let myself.”

She feels him pull away from her and he keeps one arm around her neck as he looks out at Darker. 

“It’s ok,” he says, and Alia understands why he is wearing blue/indigo/violet. “What’s done is done. Feeling bad won’t undo it. Don’t waste time crying over me. You freed me up, boy, in ways you won’t understand for a long time.”

Alia watched Yuri accept the absolution from Darker but it doesn’t change his condition. Darker is not the only thing that makes him recess within himself to weep.

Alia says, “The only thing that matters is what you accept. You are sad at regrets, you’re all bloated with despair and misery that you hide deep within yourself. If you want to be different, if you want to be happy, choose it now, and then go into your life a better man. Only action can help you.”

Alia turns her attentions from Yuri and focuses on the swarms still moving away from the planets. She brings forth a construct, a large funnel that gathers the men into a large machine gun to serve as bullets. Alia flies toward the large handle to wield the weapon as the sword catches up to her and she grabs it as she grows large enough to wield the weapon. Then she takes aim at the planets as her gun swallows up the hordes that slough off of them. As she holds the gun, a green energy ignites and when she fires the bullet men, they are balls of green flame. She fires long enough to collect and convert all of the men into green fire bullets and when she is done, she lines up the sword underneath the damaged blue planet and shoots through it with the sword outstretched and flashing a partial rainbow of the colors she has collected. She smashes through the blue with little effort and the energies join the collected as she barrels through the indigo, and then the violet. 

When she has them all, the robe she is wearing is striped with all of the collected colors and her hair is straight and black. Darker and Nebuchad approach her, but stop as the sword in her hand changes and morphs into a large man with horns. Alia almost recognizes him as Solse Prab, something about the shape of his horns and structure of his face, but he has no fur and his skin is brown like Eakran’s. 

“Hello,” the man says with two voices as one, and Alia does recognize one as Solse Prab.

“Solse? Is it you? I’m looking for you.”

“You have found him here. We know you Alia of Earth, but how do you know him?”

“We’ve met before, a very long time ago,” she says and tries to explain. 

The look on the horned man’s face is one of complete and utter shock.

“You have accessed the sixth dimension, Alia of Earth. We do well enough with the fifth, and we have the Aeternus Machina.”

“That’s it,” Alia says with a relieved smile. “This is it. Par-Cell said I would make the Aeternus Machina aware of aeonic memory and that would cause the reset. I have to find you.”

“But you are taking the rainbow way to the edge of everything? You’ve summoned it.”

The horned man gestures and Alia looks to see a doorway of white that houses a blackness inside more absolute than the darkness around them all. 

“That’s it!” Darker exclaims with excitement. “It’s the way to everything and nothing. Let me go with you.”

Nebuchad is quiet and looks very confused.

“I have to interact with the Aeternus,” Alia says. “If I give it what I know, then nothing, not even a reset of existence without the Ascendant, can erase it. So even if I fail and I don’t remember, maybe someone else can figure it out and prevent the dark future. But I have to get to the Ife-Osu for my memory to survive.”

Alia knows that she can split her spirit. And she leaves half of herself with Darker, Nebuchad, and the horned man, and the other half wakes in the Kazi Master Dōjō.