All sentient life is connected. The appendages may be different, we may eat different things, and live in different universes, but at the end of the day, we’re all one big family.
It’s time to explore the branches of the multiversal family tree, and today, we present:
(Node 5 Prime 5 Earth Year 2024)
The Old House
– Issue 1 – Where Them Girls At Part 1
“They ain’t back yet?” Roy asked nervously as he entered his sister’s kitchen. His knee had been bouncing nervously as he sat on the living room sofa since his nieces left for Monroe.
“Roy, you would hear them before I would,” Bonita said as she watched the espresso machine on the countertop. She said it matter of factly, no real annoyance, but it made Roy take a deep breath and apologize.
“I’m sorry, I know I’m acting…”
“Weird as fuck,” Bonita finished for him. “Yeah. Whatever is going on, you can talk to me about it. I may not have wings like Ariel, but I’ve been to the Fonlands, I know the Supremes that come to Earth.”
“I know, it’s just…this thing is dangerous. I shouldn’t have read that book, I just couldn’t help myself. Even with all the crazy Fonlands stuff around now, I didn’t think this would be real. I didn’t want to involve Ariel in this, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Ariel walked gingerly over the rickety, wooden porch that was elevated five feet off the ground. The sun was high over the house and it was a hot day, made worse by the humidity that seemed to encourage the sweat that beaded on her forehead and rolled in thick lines down the back of her neck. Even though the house was a wreck, there was something picaresque about the lot where it say. There were a few trees visible from the front yard that was clipped by a two-way street; the front yard was only a few feet of scraggly grass between the street and the front porch that was a brick rectangle with brick stairs leading up to the door. There were two large, ancient trees on either side of the house and Ariel was convinced that they were among the oldest in Monroe. They were the creeping oaks that she remembered from time in the South Carolina low country, but one was massively tall, the other tall but not as tall, with a wide berth of branches growing jagged like bolts of summer lightning etching its way through the firmament.
The backyard of the house was bigger than the front and there was a time when the back porch had been the perfect place to sit in lawn chairs and stare out at the field of grass that stretched far into the distance. Ariel wished that she could have experienced it then, not like it was as her sister pried at the back door.
“Zana, be careful,” she said, feeling the wood underneath her sway. Her wings twitched underneath her shirt, ready to spring out and carry her to safety if the rotting wood did give way.
“I don’t know why mama even sent us here,” Zana said angrily. “Ain’t they supposed to be coming to tear this place down?”
“That’s why she sent us. Uncle Roy said he needed something out of here before they tear it down.”
“Why ain’t he here getting it then?” Zana said. She had given up on the door knob and turned with her arms crossed at her chest.
“You know he don’t come back to Monroe since all that shit happened,” Ariel responded with obvious annoyance.
“That’s my problem?” Zana asked. “I don’t get why he so scared but they sending us in there.”
As she said this, Ariel’s wings sprung up behind her. The span was as long as Ariel was tall with stark black feathers that cast a dark shadow over her sister.
“You know all of this is somehow related to the mmoatia thing,” Ariel said.
“Don’t ask me how,” Zana said, shaking her head slowly but never taking her eyes off of her sister’s wings, “but I always forget you got those things.”
“You could have them too,” Ariel said. “You got the ecstatic gland, which means you just as mmoatia as I am.”
Zana lowered her head and looked at her sister like she was glaring at her over a pair of glasses and shook her head quickly.
“I told you I don’t want to be part of that stuff.” Zana’s expression changed suddenly. “If you here, I definitely don’t need to be here. Ain’t nothing I can do that you can’t do yourself.”
“You my moral support,” Ariel said and moved gingerly over the wooden porch to the window next to the door. “This shit look like a haunted house.”
“What uncle Roy need out of there, anyway?” she asked and stood next to her sister.
“He been having dreams about something,” Ariel explained reluctantly. “He say the devil trying to get back to Earth and if we get this thing out of the house, it’ll close the door the devil trying to come through.”
Zana shook her head and backed away from the door. “Nuh-uh,” she said like a defiant child. “Hell nah. Why you bring me over? You really don’t need me here. Just fly in there with your light hands, grab it, and meet me in the car.
She took a step to move away from her sister, intending to take the steps down to the grass, but a spot in the wooden porch gave under her foot and she fell, crashing through the porch and disappearing into the darkness underneath the porch.
“Sissy!” Ariel screamed, retracted her wings, then she jumped in after her before she had a chance to think it through. She expected to land on the rotting wood of the collapsing porch and to grab her sister and fly her away from the house, but as she descended into the hole, she realized that she was descending into a depth that had already swallowed her sister and the broken wood that had accompanied her in the fall. As she went down deeper into pitch black, Ariel extended her wings again and confirmed that she was not under the porch of the old house.
“Lookahere now.” Ariel heard a voice from the darkness and she turned in the direction it came from. Her wings beat slowly at her back and she bobbed slowly up and down in the darkness like she floated in water. “I didn’t expect a Supreme Mmoatia down here. What you doing in Monroe?”
“Where is my sister?” Ariel asked as calmly as she could manage. The darkness was beginning to make her panic and the flatness of the voice made her uncomfortable.
“Oh, so you act like you don’t know me now that we not in the Fonlands?” the voice said flatly.
Of course this was some Fonlander playing games on Earth, but why were they under the porch of this old house that was set to be demolished?
“Your uncle sent you for the spoon, didn’t he?” the voice asked. “Not brave enough to come get it himself so he sends his Mmoatia kin? Sorry, Supreme, if he wants it, he will have to come get it himself. Run along and tell him that I have his baby mmoatia niece and will use her like we used his friends in the past if he does not come to me.”
“My sister ain’t mmoatia!” Ariel shouted. “Just let her go and I’ll do what you say.”
“Aww, you ain’t gotta lie, Supreme. Just ’cause she don’t let her wings out don’t mean I can’t tell what she is. Now, go fetch your uncle and bring him back here. Tell him I’ll have a nice meal waiting for when he come.”
If it was true that Zana was a mmoatia, that she had activated her ecstatic gland since falling into the porch, Ariel would be able to find her even in that darkness, even in whatever strange place they had been transported to. She closed her eyes and when she felt the being of her sister in the distance like she had never felt her sister before, she opened her eyes and smiled.
“Who are you,” Ariel asked the darkness.
“If you don’t know, Supreme, I’m afraid I can’t say,” the voice said. “But if you do what I ask, then maybe I can be more gregarious.”
“If you know I’m a supreme, then you know Agê will be pissed if something happens to me.”
“I’ve known Agê for a long time,” the voice said. “I helped her put together her first Smiting Deck and I was there on the Disc of Xêvioso to watch her play for the first time. Those were good times, the Vodun and I were like children then. But that was then, and now, Agê would happily see a Supreme parish if it meant she could avoid the likes of me. You are in over your head, Supreme.”
Ariel was becoming agitated in the dark. She didn’t know if the voice spoke the truth, but something about it all, falling through the porch of her family’s old house, made her think that she should not underestimate the power of the voice.
She flapped her wings to fly in the direction she thought she felt Zana’s energy and the voice seemed to fade behind her as it called, “You should’a just fetched your uncle. Now, you’re just gonna stir up trouble.”
“That’s what I’m good at,” Ariel said aloud.
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