Martin Luther King day is coming up, so I’ll dedicate the next arc to MLK and anyone else that
got themselves shot risked their lives while defending freedom and equality. The human capacity for evil is infinite, but the human capacity for good is
uncountably infinite.
Lieutenant Ernest “Maximum” Spin raised his foot over the crystal of the Key of Taloc.
Strategist Roboson saw this from the floor, sprawled over Denis. “
NO!” he shouted.
Spin brings his foot down.
The stone shatters.
There was a deafening silence.
Then the crystal explodes and a wave of searing psychic force washes through the base, billows of red light thundering down the hallways.
Everything goes black.
When they wake up there’s medics all around them.
“What… what happened?” asks Roboson.
Around him, KJP and Denis are being loaded onto stretchers. Two people are helping Merrowitz up.
“An explosion of some kind knocked you all out,” one of the medics says. “Big ball of red light.”
Merrowitz realizes something suddenly. “The Key! Celling! He’s-”
“I’m all right,” says Celling, standing up slowly.
Merrowitz looked at him. “What?”
“I’m fine. Boonering was lying. Through his teeth,” Celling repeats. “I got a good look at the inner workings of the Key and his mind when he attacked me. Erasure does not need to be controlled by the Key, but it does need it for energy. When you smashed the power crystal, the spell fizzled.”
Roboson gets up as well. “Wait, what about Spin?” he asks, looking around.
“We took him away first. But it seems that his entire brain was erased in the blast. He isn’t physically harmed, but he’s mentally dead.”
“He was the closest,” KJP mentions. Denis gets up besides him. “If anyone died in that explosion, it would be him.”
The medics grabbed him. “Come on now,” one says. “You need to get away from the vortex as soon as possible.”
“Vortex?” asked KJP.
“What’s the vortex?” asks Celling.
The medic points at the door. They all looks.
The door had been blown off its hinges and a section of the wall had cracked open into a huge hole. The fragments of the Key of Taloc crystal lay underneath it. And in the hole, suspended in midair, was a blazing red bolt of energy, a splotch of psychic force and sheer
wrong the size of a refrigerator. Its edges were covered with jagged protrusions, like cracks in a camera lens, and the inside swirled furiously with different shades of red.
“What… is that?” Roboson asks.
“It formed when Spin smashed the stone,” explains the medic.
“Is it enlarging?” Celling asks worriedly.
“Slowly. By centimeters since we got here,” the medic answers. “Might be dangerous, though. We’d better get away before-”
“Wait,” says Roboson. “Something’s changing.”
Something indeed was changing. The chaotic mess of hues of red, once rushing in all directions, now organized into a swirl around a central point. And in that central point, a single speck of blue glistened.
“Do you see-” begins Celling.
“I see that,” says Merrowitz.
The speck grew larger and larger. A whirring sound is now audible from the rift, as well as the crackling it was giving off earlier.
“Back away!” one of the medics says. “It’s about to do something!”
The whirring grows deafening.
The speck of blue continues to expand, and the onlookers realize that it is not a speck, but a whole new world - a shattered fragment of a totally different scene, rushing towards them.
They hear an echo, a thought so bright and so caustic, distorted through its passage through the tunnel and through layers of contradiction, carried on by the will of its owner for it to be heard.
“I, Miko Miyazaki, now fulfil the divine destiny that the Twelve Gods have-”With a silent crash, the scene, draped in blue, smashes into the edges of the rift, suddenly turning the vortex into a window to an alien world.
“What gate?”