“You better get in here, it’s starting!” Mavis Turner yelled from the living room.
Zacchaeus was looking for his Michaelangelo toy that he was sure was in his closet where he would close the door with a flashlight and pretend that he was underground in the secret hideout of the Ninja Turtles. But he had tossed everything out of the closet in his mad dash to find it and there was no sign of it. He wanted it to hold while he watched the cartoon with his grandmother.
After a few minutes rechecking empty corners of the closet, he heard Mavis Turner yell behind him.
“Boy, it look like a hurricane blew through here! What is you doing?”
“I can’t find Michaelangelo,” he said desperately.
“Its in there on the couch. You left it in the bathtub last night and I threw it on the chair.”
Zacchaeus turned with excitement to look at his grandmother. He had big, expressive eyes as a six year old and even though she was angry with him, Mavis Turner couldn’t help but smile at him, he was so cute.
He ran towards the door, happy to watch the latest episode of his favorite cartoon, but Mavis Turner blocked the door.
“You so cute when you happy, but I’m about to ruin all that. You ain’t watching no cartoons until you put all this stuff back in that closet. Hurry up and be neat, you can still watch most of your show.”
Mavis Turner left him and closed the door behind her. Zacchaeus pouted, but he put everything back as quickly as he could while meeting the standard of neat that his grandmother had instilled in him at such a young age.
Zacchaeus floats next to Maxx in the void of space. Zacchaeus and the Needy still have the black swarm contained within the hazy, gray containment field that is made up of the being of the Needy. Zacchaeus can feel the swarm pushing against the bounds of the barrier. He is surprised that the swarm is not composed of insects, from a distance it seems like a cloud of flies or some other winged bug, but it is only smooth black balls, millions, maybe billions of them, that move together. There are no discernable features on the balls, they are smooth all the way around, but they are connected into lines of up to eight balls, like segmented worms.
“I don’t understand how it knows where it’s going, or how it talked to Wazad,” Zacchaeus says to Maxx. The two use communicators to talk to one another.
“Has it spoken to you?” Maxx asks. His body is covered in the yellow glow of the Superconsciousness. “What does it want? You’re sure it’s not Minyak and the Daemon?”
“Issac is trying to figure out what it is, what it wants. Him and the Queen Rowen don’t think it has anything to do with Minyak or demons. The demons swarm like this?”
“They can,” Maxx explains. “Minyak can move into most anything, anyone and turn them into an extension of himself. Nothing is safe from him.”
“That’s the big difference between the Needy and Minyak, I guess. The Needy doesn’t infect, it can only surround and consume.”
“The most curious thing about all this,” Maxx says, “is that since you all arrived the Daemon have not appeared on Bludon.”
“You ever met Omega before?” Zacchaeus asks.
Maxx shakes his head. He stares at the pulsating barrier that moves along the surface with the movement of the undulating swarm.
“I’ve never even heard of Omega, but Wazad seemed agitated to hear the name. And your leader, the Master of Arcana seems very concerned as well.”
“Issac been the Master since our universe picked him to fight Omega, but he says he’s spent most of his time as Master protecting our Earth. He never met Omega face to face because it sends other things to fight for it. This must seem like something the Omega do to have Issac so worried.”
“What is Omega?” Maxx asks.
“The end of everything,” Zacchaeus says, but he allows the Needy to speak through him to convey the true horror of the thing. “There are beings of every universe that have existed since the beginning of their existence, beings who shaped the development of their universe, empowered by things beyond our comprehension of arcana. It’s crazy for dudes like us to even think about,” Zacchaeus’s personality interjects. “We deal with stuff on the surface of the planet, help who we can, try to change what we understand to be fucked up situations so the regular man can go about his day. But Omega is above all that, like how your Wazad isn’t based on any planet but tries to look out for everything in the forgotten corners of your universe. Omega is the antithesis of that. He is tasked to stop all life, he is the god of nothing and he influences others to carry out his grim vision. I was, the Needy was an apostle of Omega. The Needy was slowly depopulating Earth, one depressed person at a time, until I went to the Fonlands. That place changed him.”
“You’ve been to the Fonlands?” Maxx asked with wonder. “You’ve seen the Smiting Chamber? What I would give to see it for myself.”
“Once we settle all this, you should go.”
Maxx shakes his head. “Even once this mess is handled, there is still one on Bludon and I am at the center of it.”
“Mavis Turner taught me to clean the mess in front of me before I did anything else,” Zacchaeus says. “Sound like you should be down there tending to that instead of up here when you got people to handle all this and they probably got more experience with it.”
“You and your friends have proven yourselves to be very selfless heroes,” Maxx says, “and I have so much gratitude for your intervention here. But this is not your planet, this is not even your universe. If you all are here, who battles the Omega that threatens your reality?”
“There are many Arcane distinctions of our universe and the Master would not be here if our universe needed him. He is always where he should be to best protect our reality from harm. That is why we are here. Anyway, if we go home now only a couple minutes would have passed even though we’ve been here for a little while longer than that now. Issac says we ain’t going back until he understands why his role as Master of Universal Arcana brought him here. And what else we supposed to do in the meantime? Go chill in the Fonlands while this swarm eat planets or whatever the hell it was doing before it came here? You can’t really do much up here, Superguardian. Them powerful yellow beams you got can’t blast this swarm away, we tried that. If you got trouble at home, don’t let it just sit there ‘cause you got a good excuse not to deal with it. Go clean it up, man.”
“You’re right, I guess,” Maxx admits and he sounds sad. “I am the Superguardian. I should be able to handle any threat to my planet. I am the best of Bludon. If I am not enough, then we are doomed.”
“But you are enough,” Zacchaeus says. “We could still be fighting, you could still be calling me Minyak, but you’re not ‘cause you realized it wasn’t the smartest thing. You made friends to make sure you could take care of what needed to be taken care of.”
“You are stronger than me, Zacchaeus,” Maxx says, still sounding very sad, very unlike the blu that Zacchaeus had met when he first arrived. “I respect you, but I cannot like you, I cannot hear your words as comfort. It pains me that I still regard you as my enemy and that I do not want to heed your sound advice. I’m hoping that time will change this, and I will return to Bludon despite my sincere reservations. I will go through the motions of contrition even if my heart is warring with my sound reason. I want to fight you across existence, Zacchaeus and the Needy, to dance with you forever in reciprocal movements of force dealt and received. But there is a mess I must attend to.”
Zacchaeus watches the Superguardian fly back toward the surface of Bludon in a streak of yellow.
I think that he is attracted to you, the Needy says inside of Zacchaeus’s mind.
“Is that what that was?” Zacchaeus asks aloud. “I thought he was telling me he hated me for being stronger than him. Are we?”
Undoubtedly. Maybe he would make a good companion for you. Aside from me, you do not have many close associations.
“You ain’t wrong about that,” Zacchaeus admits, “but I ain’t gay. I could maybe get down with a turtle woman…”
Who was the last woman you were with, Zacchaeus, that you admired like you do the Superguardian? Your heart flutters when you see him.
“I haven’t dated in a while, since before you. It’s just easier not to deal with all that intimacy stuff. Sex is enough.”
You are not honest with yourself, Zacchaeus. You are too old to be so self delusional.
“You calling me gay?” Zacchaeus asks with surprise.
I didn’t use that word. You humans limit yourselves so arbitrarily. I’m not calling you anything, I am trying to open your mind to the possibility that you have met someone who can understand your extraordinary experiences who you seem to like a lot and you should explore a deeper connection despite his apparent aversion to you. That does not have to include a physical connection, though I understand sex to be pleasurable for humans so why not explore that if your genitals are compatible for it.
“Ok, that’s enough of this for now,” Zacchaeus says. “Never thought I would hear the Needy talk about my genitals.”
You do realize that I am inside of you and I am very aware of your penis and how best to stimulate it. I am even aware of your affinity for prostate stimulation during ejaculation…
“Please stop,” Zacchaeus says, shaking his head. “I know you’re in there when I’m jacking it, but I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
We should discuss it at some point…
“Just please not right now.”
Zacchaeus calls Issac using the communicator that the Queen Rowen’s security had distributed to the group.
“You doin’ alright up there?” Issac asks.
“I think the Needy been helping me pleasure myself for years now, so no, I’m feeling kind of nauseous.”
“What?” Issac asks.
“Nothing, don’t worry about it. Do we know what we doing with his swarm yet?”
“Take it to the sun,” Issac says. He sounds weary and Zacchaeus knows that he has been carefully deliberating their next step for dealing with the black swarm. “We just have to be ready for the Omega when it appears. I don’t think it knows we are here yet and other than the Wazad of this universe in the last few months since it first encountered the swarm, no one has worked in opposition to it. It’s almost as if the Omega wasn’t even active in the universe before this swarm.”
“You sure this is Omega? None of us have seen it before, can we be sure?” Zacchaeus asked.
“I am certain that this swarm is Omega, not all of it, but I don’t know how to describe it actually, like sensors. Like a bug antenna or a snake’s tongue, this is Omega feeling around the universe. I’m assuming this is happening to gauge his opposition, but wouldn’t you expect Omega to be aware of that already? If it is a primordial being like we understand the one from our universe to be. So maybe it is young? Maybe this universe’s Omega is only just awakening to its purpose of ending sentient life in the universe?”
“I have to keep reminding myself that we ain’t just on another planet. Everything is different. This might work to our advantage, Master Issac.”
“Why you gotta be funny all the time?” Issac says. Zacchaeus has made jokes about his title since they first met.
“You should talk to the universe and get a better title if you don’t like it. I strongly suggest you do. But if this Omega is young, it ain’t got as many tricks as a primordial being. This should be easy.”
“Easier than it could have been. The Wazads and the Guardians are in place. Take it into the sun and meet me down here on the surface of Bludon. The Queen Rowen will patch you in telepathically as we make final preparations. You should be seeing her soon. Hurry back, Z.”
Zacchaeus turns in space and he sees the Queen Rowen approach in a spacesuit and she is riding what looks like an Earther motorcycle, but it pilots space with jet boosters instead of wheels.
“I hope that this goes smoothly,” the Queen says. It is hard to see her features because of the suit she wears but the helmet she wears is large to accommodate her bulbous head.
“We’ll go quick and careful,” Zacchaeus says.
The Queen Rowen pilots her jetcycle toward the black swarm, Zacchaeus and the Needy close behind her, and she uses her telekinesis to push the barrier away from Bludon. The jetcycle moves quickly through space and Zacchaeus is able to keep up because the Needy grabbed onto the jetcycle. When they are a safe distance from the sun of Bludon, the Queen makes a gesture with her hands to hurl the large sphere into the sun. Zacchaeus and the Needy feel the panic of the swarm pushing against the barrier as it all burns to nothing.
As they fly back to Bludon, Zacchaeus and the Queen talk for the first time since they left Bludon.
“That looked easy for you,” Zacchaeus says.
“I guess I make it look easy because it is not,” the Queen says. “In order to move something with telekinesis, the mind has to be strong enough to move it, just like any other muscle. My mind is very strong, but that was a marathon. That is why I brought this jetcycle, I am too exhausted to move myself through space after all that.”
As she explains, Zacchaeus feels the Needy worrying inside of him.
“Can we stop for a second?” he asks the Queen and they hover in space, still a ways from Bludon. Zacchaeus looks behind them and the Queen turns as well. All they see is dark space, as though all the lights of the universe in the opposite direction they had been traveling were turned off.
I feel Omega. It is chasing us.
“Did it kill everything back there?” Zacchaeus asks the Needy aloud.
“What?” the Queen Rowen asks.
“Read my mind,” Zacchaeus says to her.
It is darkness moving through space, big enough to blot out the light behind it. It has not destroyed anything yet. It is intent on destroying us for disturbing it.
“We shouldn’t go back to Bludon,” the Queen Rowen says aloud. “We can’t lead this…death to Bludon. It is so hostile.”
“And getting closer,” Zacchaeus says. “What do we do?”
He and the Queen are still for a moment, neither sure how to proceed in the face of Omega.
PRL Serials 