In 1847, Hungarian physician and scientist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis introduced a policy requiring his medical staff to wash their hands with chlorinated lime solution before attending to patients. This intervention aimed to combat the transmission of “childbed fever”, a bacterial infection responsible for a substantial number of maternal deaths. Semmelweis’s practices were validated when the maternal mortality rate dropped from nearly 20% to less than 2%, for which Semmelweis was lauded as the “Savior of Mothers.”
In 1939, sulfonamides were introduced into clinical practice as was the world’s first antibiotic, penicillin, which began being mass-produced throughout the early 1940s. Between 1930 and 1950 the maternal mortality rate fell by over 80% across developed nations. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate would drop from 37 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1960 to 9 per 100,000 in the late 1990s. Across the globe, maternal mortality rates would further drop by approximately 50% between 1990 and 2020, with the most significant reductions occurring in developing nations.
In 2039, Polish-born American medical and psytech expert, Dr. Alexander Kowalski, developed the Psychic Maternal Care Protocol and patented the PERT (Psy-Energy Resonance Therapy) machine, which utilized targeted psy-energy waves that could optimize cellular function in the womb and effectively resolve blood hemorrhaging with an over 90% success rate. Kowalski’s research would drop global maternal mortality to less than 7 per 100,000 by 2060. An improved model of such a machine was currently being used on Marissa Cornejo. How then, Marissa frantically wondered, was it possible in 2056 for her to be having this many complications giving birth?
“Hold on, Mrs. Cornejo! Just keep pushing,” her doctor reassured her.
Marissa’s labor wasn’t going as planned. The situation was so serious that her husband Carlos, who had gotten off duty early specifically to be at his wife’s bedside while she gave birth, had been forced to sit outside. The doctor employed a psychic sensory modulating device that kept Marissa from being in too much pain or emotional distress, but things were still critical, which bewildered her. There had been no hints that she would have delivery complications this serious throughout any of the months prior. Up until an hour ago, this pregnancy had actually been smoother than her previous one, but now she was having a harder time of it than we she gave birth to her twins.
…Is it because it was Halloween?
Marissa’s water had broken prematurely. She was supposed to go into labor in early November. She wasn’t the most suspicious person, but she was lacking any other definitive explanations. She felt like she was about to black out. It was not even the pain of the labor that was draining her the most. It was something else entirely. It felt like something was being channeled through her.
And then, it happened.
The delivery suddenly became remarkably easy for mother and doctor both, almost as if the child had pushed himself out at will. Despite all the initial concerns, a healthy child had been born without any complications.
“It’s a boy, Mrs. Cornejo,” a relieved doctor told her, after cutting the umbilical cord.
“Ah… Thank God,” Marissa said, before passing out.
She was too exhausted to even take a good look at her new son. A nurse moved in to quickly stabilize her condition and make sure she could live to take a proper glimpse of her turbulent delivery. A short while later Marissa’s family arrived outside of the nursery area, beating her to the punch.
“Which one, daddy? Which one?” a two-year-old excitedly asked from atop her father’s shoulders.
“Calm down, Gabby. He’s the second from the right,” her father Carlos said.
“Dat one?” Gabby’s twin brother Jonny asked, holding onto his father with one hand and pointing with the other.
His father nodded, and both Jonny and Gabby gleamed with excitement over the arrival of their newborn brother. Carlos was surprised at how healthy he looked. The doctor explained the bizarre complications Marissa had as best he could, but so much of what he said had sounded even more puzzling. The doctor himself genuinely didn’t know what exactly had happened in there, but he reassured Carlos that his wife and new son had both made it through perfectly fine.
Carlos gazed warmly at his new boy. “You haven’t even been here a day and you’ve already got adults sweating this much. You’re going to be a handful, aren’t you Matthias?”
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Johnny and Gabby had always been a bit mystified by their little brother’s unprecedented fearlessness. They had started taking notice while Matthias was still a toddler. He would dawdle around, often with a toy in hand, going wherever he could and doing whatever he liked. Nothing – not darkness, strange noises, or solitude – seemed to faze him. He would still cry as all toddlers did, but only over hunger, injury, or resistance against his own sleepiness. Fear never prompted their brother’s tears. This further became apparent at a birthday party Matthias was attending in a park. A rabid dog, notorious in the area for its poor behavior that had already led to an incident where one of its legs had to be amputated and replaced with a bionic limb, was running around in the park, barking and snapping at everyone. While nobody was bitten, the dog’s size and ferocity caused adults to stand up on park benches and the children to hide out on playground equipment. Everyone was paralyzed by the hound’s rampage save for its owner and a small boy still playing by himself as if no chaos was happening around him.
“Matthias, get over here!” Marissa exclaimed while hurrying over to him.
The dog while still being pursued by its distraught owner, bolted toward the boy quicker than his mother. To everyone’s surprise, especially the canine, Matthias turned to face the dog and shot the hound a look a boy so small shouldn’t have been able to conjure. Immediately, as though a whip had been cracked before it, the dog stopped in its tracks. The owner caught up to it, put it back on its leash, and apologized profusely to Marissa and then to Matthias. The little boy had already returned to entertaining himself and paid no concern.
The most telling, and somewhat worrying, example of Matthias’s fearlessness was only three years ago. It was Gabriella and Jonathan’s eleventh birthday. By this time, the twins had grown tired of big birthday celebrations together. Such occasions meant they had to share each other’s space, invite one another’s friend groups, share the same birthday cake, etc. Hence, they saw their birthday as an occasion for the family to eat out together at a restaurant of their choosing. Unable to decide between themselves and bickering non-stop about the issue into the late afternoon, they elected for their then eight-year-old little brother to decide.
“Isn’t Waffle House right around the corner?”
While not the initial or even alternative choice either of the twins would have made, they accepted it nonetheless. It was at that Waffle House when it truly sunk in for Jonathan and Gabriella that their younger brother was not only unlike any boy his age he was unlike possibly any child in the world. While the family was in the middle of enjoying their meal, there was suddenly a spat between a pair seated in a booth in the corner.
“Dammit! I already told you I’d handle it!” a hooded man said.
The hat and glasses wearing woman he snapped at shushed him. “Calm down, Kevin. You’re making another episode…”
Kevin regained his composure; at least, as much of it as he had. There was a not-so-subtle twitch in his hand that gave indication to Carlos that something was awry – if not nerves, perhaps something involving substance abuse.
Carlos, a Denver police detective, sipped coffee while taking a moment to properly examine the pair. He popped up a projection screen roughly the size of a medium tablet and found that the ‘Kevin’ sitting in the corner was likely one ‘Kevin Doyle’ who had a warrant out for some serious drug-related crimes he committed in Salt Lake City, Utah. The suspect with a Cognition Level rating of only D1 had disguised himself, even going through some degree of facial surgery; but his female accomplice – Vanessa Herrera – gave him away. Her dyed hair, hat, and sunglasses weren’t big enough changes to obfuscate her identity; not when she was being cross-examined by someone like Carlos.
Carlos further used his screen to request backup from his fellow officers, nonchalantly closed it, and then resumed eating his meal with his family. It was not long until two police cruisers arrived. By the time the wanted criminal and his accomplice noticed them entering the parking lot, Carlos had already grabbed his nonlethal weapon and rose from his seat.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told his anxious wife and excited twins.
Matthias was the calmest of the bunch, eating quietly while his father trod off to confront the pair of criminals who were trying to scurry off from their booth without paying the bill.
“Kevin Doyle and Vanessa Herrera, you’re both under arrest. Keep your hands up where I can see them,” Carlos calmly commanded while approaching them with his weapon visible but still holstered.
His weapon was a standard-issue Thunderbird 9, a non-lethal volt pistol. Carlos’ standard-issue firearm was in his coat jacket still resting in his seat. Modern cops were encouraged to resort to the use of lethal firearms only when killing a suspect was deemed unavoidable. Such a scenario was not to be the case, as both Doyle and Herrera used to give themselves up already. The two on-duty cops arriving to back up Carlos seemed to be the nail in the coffin to the idea of any resistance the pair might have had.
But then, Carlos caught a faint glint in Doyle’s eye and heard utensils begin to rattle on the table behind him and his accomplice. Realizing what the wanted man was attempting, Carlos drew, aimed, and began charging his volt pistol.
“Cut that out, right now!” he ordered, while pointing his weapon.
Rather than comply, Doyle further channeled his psy-energy, causing the faint glint in his eyes to become a full illumination. Carlos then fired two shots straight into his chest. The shots should have been enough to put him out on the floor clutching his chest if not outright unconscious, but Doyle only lurched instead of going down completely. He then let loose his psy-energy, sending Carlos and the other two cops away with a push of telekinesis and cracking glass behind him. Carlos specifically was launched over the counter into the kitchen. A wave of gasps and a few shrieks rang throughout the establishment; one of the latter coming from Marissa at the sight of her husband getting rag dolled.
“Shit!” Carlos hissed while trying to catch his wind. “There’s no way him only being a Level D is accurate anymore. Son of a bitch must have took an Upper! That’s why his arm was shaking like that…”
‘Uppers’ were the universal names for a type of stimulant that boosted a person’s Cognition Level – a rough approximation of their psy-energy potence and control – exponentially. Even a weak psychic could develop strong psychokinesis granted they took a potent enough Upper. At least they would for a short while. Such drugs came with strong side effects and ugly ‘kickbacks’, but Doyle obviously wasn’t worried about anything besides making a way through the police. Herrera obviously was not so gung-ho about him going all out like he was.
“Kevin, you told me you wouldn’t do this again! You know you can’t handle—“
“Just shut up, Nessa! I’ll be fine after I get us outta here!” Doyle said, snatching Herrera’s hand and making a run for the exit with her.
The other two cops tried using their volt guns on him, but Doyle tanked their shots and then telekinetically flung dishes and utensils at them. Everyone in the restaurant hunkered down from the rampage Doyle was going on. Whatever Upper he had taken, it must have been extremely potent, because he was beyond what a single detective and two patrol officers were capable of dealing without greater preparation. The potency of the Upper became most apparent when, just as he and Herrera were passing the Cornejo family’s table, he suddenly stopped in his tracks. His grip on Herrera’s wrist became weak, and he began profusely bleeding from his nose. Twitching manically, his eyes went bloodshot as he collapsed to the floor and soon after began spitting up blood.
“Kevin! This is why I told you to not do all this!” Herrera exclaimed.
Carlos, still in the kitchen, aimed his volt gun. His fellow officers did the same.
“Herrera, just get on the floor and go quietly! We’ll get him to a hospital as soon as—“
Herrera had no great psychic feats in her as her lover did, but she was just as indignant toward the idea surrendering to the authorities. Rather than give herself up, she looked around desperately, found a tool she could use to escape, and immediately snatched him up from the nearest booth. Brandishing a short psytech blade, Herrera forced Marissa to back off at gleaming knife-point as she took her youngest son as a hostage. Carlos bit his lip. This was supposed to be a simple arrest of a simple crook, but now the suspect was in danger of OD’ing on the floor of a Waffle House and his girlfriend now had a knife at his son’s neck.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Get us a car! No, an AV!” Herrera demanded. “If you don’t get us one, I swear to God I’m gonna—“
The sound of a gunshot ringing out cut Herrera off. She felt as though molten fire had just been spat into her gut. The pain made her drop Matthias immediately. She realized first that the boy had a gun in his hand. She realized second that she was now bleeding worse than her boyfriend was. Doyle came back to his senses to see her keeled over beside him, clutching her bullet wound in agony.
“Nessa! You little shit!“ the Upper-junkie hissed while raising a glowing hand towards the boy. “I’m gonna—“
Matthias cut him off just as he had Herrera with another shot from his father’s pistol. It hit Doyle’s shoulder, and this was enough to stop any further psychic tricks from the suspect. Between the pain from being shot and the kickback from the Upper, Doyle had been effectively neutralized. Carlos quickly bolted over the counter and snatched his firearm from his son.
“That’s enough, Matt! That’s enough…” he said, giving him a strong hug.
In the parking lot, the Cornejo siblings waited in the car while their mother waited just outside it for their father to return from speaking with other officers.
“That was crazy. Can’t believe that all just happened at a Waffle House,” Johnny said, still astonished at what had all transpired.
“And on our birthday too. Imagine if that lady had hurt Matt…” Gabby said, grimacing at the thought.
“I don’t think she was ever gonna kill me,” Matthias said, rubbing the bandage placed over the shallow cut Herrera had gave him. “I wouldn’t have been that good of a hostage then. She just wanted to use me to get her and that guy out of the waffle house.”
Gabby blinked. The thing that surprised her almost as much as the fact that the whole ordeal had taken place was that her little brother, currently three years she and Johnny’s junior, was so calm about all of it. He had not only had a blade pressed against him; he had also shot two people.
“But man, it was a good thing you grabbed dad’s gun, Matt. That lady didn’t see it coming,” Johnny said. “And that second shot on that telekinetic dude was dead-on! Has dad been taking you out to the range, because your aim’s crazy good!”
“No it’s not,” Matthias dissented. “That was actually the first time I ever fired a gun.”
“What? But you hit that guy square in the shoulder.”
“Yeah, but I was aiming for his head.”
Matthias’s siblings immediately clammed up. Their eight-year-old little brother had said something quite outrageous very calmly. Both of them were still somewhat rattled by what had unfolded around them, and they had neither been taken hostage nor shot anyone. Their mother and father checked with Matthias to make sure he was okay. Their mother even talked about immediate therapy. He reassured his parents that he was fine and that therapy would just be a waste of time and money. While his parents might of thought he was just playing tough as most eight-year-old boys would in his situation; Gabriella and Jonathan felt their brother was being completely honest. He seemed totally unfazed. If one went solely off his mood, you would think the Cornejos had a normal easygoing visit to Waffle House.
Yes, it was that incident that taught Johnny and Gabby that their younger brother was ‘wired a little different’ than other kids.
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It was shortly after his ninth birthday when Matthias fully “actualized”.
Everything before then was just him functioning in “autopilot mode”. The boy named Matthias was just more or less of a vessel for his subconscious before that, with his actions and personality traits greatly influenced by his inner ego. Once his lower mind finished ‘melding’ with his vessel’s higher mind, a nine-year-old Matthias Cornejo who had just woken up and brushed his teeth found himself staring at his reflection in the mirror.
“...Oh, yeah. That’s right... I used to be the Overlord, didn’t I?” he told himself.
One might think his realization of such a literally otherworldly fact was too casual, but Matthias found no need to be excessively shocked about it. He had, in a sense, always known. He just wasn’t consciously aware of it until that very morning. But when he stared at his own visage in the mirror, he saw a face near-identical to that of Overlord Matthiaz’s. His current face just had a somewhat darker complexion. By the time the peculiarities of his situation settled in – that he had in fact reincarnated into another world – he had already settled into his second life. That same morning he had gotten dressed, gone to school, and ate dinner at home as he normally did. He just ruminated about things more than usual.
And in the two years since his ‘actualization’, these ruminations had only increased.
“Okay, so today we’re going to cover the Three Fundamentals,” Matthias’s teacher, Ms. Pierce began. “You’ll all be hearing about these pretty much every year until you graduate from school, so pay attention now.’”
She changed the slide on the board behind her with a gesture and an illustrated projection of the subject accompanied it.
“The Three Fundamentals are the foundations of any psy-energy utilization. When someone bends a spoon without touching it, when someone makes a room cold in the summer without any AC running, when someone who doesn’t work out is suddenly able to lift something twice their bodyweight, when someone can guess the number you’re thinking of despite it having six or seven digits – all of that begins with these Three Fundamentals. They are Tethering, Channeling, and ORB Manipulation; and they all are…”
Matthias sighed, thoroughly disinterested in the lecture. His fellow eleven-year-olds seemed to be divvied up into three groups – the group that was trying their hardest and actively taking notes, the group that took some notes but were having a hard time keeping up, and the minority that had no idea what their teacher was talking about and had already given up. This latter group confounded Matthias because they had already gone over this last year in the fourth-grade. There was no reason to be confused at this point. These were quite literally ‘the basics’ all psychics, even those who dropped out of school, knew to some extent. They were called the Three Fundamentals for a reason.
“Now, as for ORB Manipulation… Well, first, can someone tell me what exactly ORB stands for?”
Matthias reflexively lowered his head and tried to pretend he was taking notes, because he knew what was likely coming next.
“Matthias! I know you have to know this one,” she said while pointing at him.
Whenever she couldn’t find another hand being raised, Ms. Pierce always defaulted to Matthias as her go-to question answerer. Sighing, he rose from his desk and went into a curt explanation.
“ORB is an acronym for ‘Overlapping Reality Boundary. It’s a metaphysical manifestation of every psychic’s influence on the world and allows us to break reality’s laws through the use of psy-energy.”
“Amazing! You’re like a walking textbook, Matthias!”
Annoyed, he sat back down. The answer sounded textbook because it was. Matthias had already read about these subjects as well as the Primary Disciplines, mostly just for want of anything better to do. Honestly, school was more an episode of boredom for him than anything else. What else was he going to do, after all? He might have been an Overlord in his previous life but here he was just an ordinary eleven-year-old in the fifth grade.
Granted, ‘ordinary’ was not a word anyone besides Matthias would have used to describe him. His peers most certainly wouldn’t have.
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“Get ‘em! Get Matthias!” a boy yelled desperately before Matthias shot him down and sent him plunging onto the anti-grav bed below which safely levitated him to the floor.
Matthias landed on the floating platform he had knocked the boy off of while his ball automatically returned to him. Despite him standing idle on the platform, the other kids who were his opponents frantically hopped from platform to platform, anxious of becoming his next target.
“Can’t believe my team got wiped again,” Matthias sighed while shaking his head. “Why even have a team if I’m always going to be the last one standing anyway?”
For at least two days out of the week, the average American public school’s physical education class became a psy-energy training class, or simply PET. Sports, games, and general exercises that taught students the basic of honing control over their psychic powers were the focus. The most popular such sport at Matthias’s school was blitzball. In it, the players of two opposing teams would hop from one moving and floating platform to another and try to knock off the other with psy-energy-sensitive balls roughly the size of dodgeballs. Nobody expected too much from fifth-graders in this game, as was shown by the platforms floating much lower and moving slower than they did for even middle-schoolers.
Matthias, however, was a different animal.
“I’ve got you!” a boy yelled, throwing his psy-energy-infused blitzball at the back of Matthias’s head.
His target, rather than dodge, simply channeled a bit more psy-energy into his own blitzball and used it to knock the ball away and square into the face of a girl who was just about to take aim herself. It was fortunate for her that blitzballers wore headgear. It was fortunate for all of Matthias’s remaining opposition in fact because Matthias always hit hard, even when not putting all his power behind his throws. That move he had just used itself was a defensive technique no elementary schooler should have been able to use so casually. It was because of things like that the coach insisted that Matthias not only had to be picked last, he had to always be assigned to the weaker team.
It rarely made a difference.
“Hey. You’re moving too wildly,” Matthias told his next unfortunate victim while bounding toward them. “Just being skittish doesn’t mean you’re hard to hit.”
He validated this by nailing them while they were still in midair and sent them careening down for the anti-grav bed below.
“And you,” Matthias said while easily catching a blitzball that was thrown at his flank. “All your throws are too obvious. You can’t be slow and easy to read.”
There was a rule in blitzball that made holding an opposing player’s ball for more than six seconds an automatic DQ for the ball-holder for that round. Matthias skirted this penalty by furiously returning his opponent’s ball at the fifth second just as they were attempting to jump away, knocking them down as well.
What remained of his opposition were the best players on the other team – Eli and Devin. They were the best not just because they played well, but because they also played smart; the greatest example being their development of a strategy called the “Cornejo Rules” they used to occasionally clutch victory against the otherwise unbeatable monster it was often left up to them to deal with. The secret sauce of the Cornejo Rules was simple coordination of movement and synchronizing of attacks – attacking Matthias from awkward angles even he had trouble evading, trying to force him onto platforms where he was at a disadvantage both offensively and defensively, constantly forcing him to choose between attacking one of them in exchange for becoming a prime target for another. These tactics gave Eli and Devin the best record against Matthias.
It was still a losing record, but it was the most successful one nonetheless.
“Get ‘em, guys!”
“Yeah! Take that monster down!”
Constant comments like this came from the audience of students in the class who watched the game play out. Everyone who wasn’t on Matthias’s team wanted to see him lose. Not that Matthias cared. He had worse curses – figurative and literal – wished upon him in his past life. They didn’t break his focus in the slightest. Still, he had to admit that Eli and Devin had gotten better. In fact, he realized; a bit late at that, just how good their game plan against him was.
“We’ve gotcha now, Matt!” Eli exclaimed.
Matthias realized right after he leapt from his previous platform that the pair had lined up a perfect pincer attack against him while he was still in midair and unable to effectively dodge, and where any hit would be the end of him. Devin, who had jumped from a higher platform, was about to synchronize his throw with Eli who threw from below. It was checkmate… Almost.
At the last moment, Matthias did something nobody, not even Eli and Devin who studied his moves extensively, had seen before: he put his blitzball under his shoes and then kicked off it with as much psy-energy as he could quickly muster. Essentially, he did a double-jump.
Eli and Devin were too stunned to realize their blitzballs were now honing in on each other. They both went down as Matthias stuck a solid landing and had his ball automatically return to him again.
“Winner: Blue Team!” the AI that had been keeping track of the match announced.
Everyone in the gymnasium looked disappointed at the predictable victory, save Team Blue and Coach Ridland. Like Ms. Pierce, the coach enjoyed the spectacle his prodigious student-athlete provided every session.
“I might have to start giving the other team one or two extra players to make it fairer next time, though,” the coach mumbled to himself.
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“How was school, Matt?” his mother asked that afternoon.
Matthias yawned. “Boring. Same as always.”
He rummaged through a cabinet just to fetch himself a bag of chips. His mother silently watched him while preparing food for dinner later.
Normally, a child who was bored and unmotivated with school was seen as problematic by their parents, but for Marissa and Carlos, they knew there was no danger of their son becoming a school dropout because of poor grades. On the contrary, he might drop out in the future because he found school so unengaging. His grades were always good, and Marissa knew better than to even humor the idea of Matthias being bullied by anyone; even older kids.
“You can take a day off from school tomorrow if you want,” she said. “Your father and I won’t mind.”
“Wait, what?” Johnny blurted out while rushing into the kitchen. “Mom, why won’t you let Gabby and me take days off from school like that?”
“Because Gabriella’s already taken too many absences because of her injuries, and you’ve been falling behind in your grades. Try focusing on soccer less and school more Johnny, and then we’ll talk.”
Jonathan gave a defeated sigh. He consolidated himself by sneaking a chip from his little brother as he was passing by him on the way to the stairs, earning him a fraternal glower. Once in his room, Matthias sat at his desk, set his chips aside, and began engaging in his usual pastime: drawing while reminiscing on his past life on Ein. He was joined by the family’s cat, Juana, who had followed him to his room and hopped onto his lap while he brought out his drawing tablet and stylus. Matthias had been engaged in this habit for two years now, daily replaying events vividly in his mind and occasionally even drawing them. It always led him back to the same question.
“Why aren’t I dead right now?”
The last and most vivid of his memories was that of his vanquisher, the Chosen One, gazing down at him. She had slain the Overlord only for him to wind up in her world. And he had specifically made sure it was her world. Also on his desk was a journal that contained nothing but recollections of the stories Josephine had told Matthias in his previous life. He had written down every detail he could account for and cross-examined them to make certain that this was not just Earth, but ‘the Reincarnated Chosen One’s Earth’. It had the same technology far surpassing anything the most advanced nation on Ein possessed. Its espers did indeed use psy-energy to manipulate reality but were, in fact, not identical to wizards. Matthias had grown up in this world and it felt just as much home to him as Ein did.
Maybe even more so.
Back on Ein, he grew up as the Black Sheep of the Royal Family of Zarland – the son of a court sorceress turned mistress. From a young age, he had to navigate the cutthroat world of aristocratic political intrigue. But here, he was just Matthias Cornejo – the youngest child of a middle-class family in Denver, Colorado. His two lives couldn’t be any more different. They were so different that he occasionally wondered if he was simply dreaming his previous life up. But he knew that this was just an out he wanted to use to discount the fact that Josephine had been completely right.
“Reincarnation is real. Damn, it’s actually insane the more I think about it,” he muttered to himself. “I guess those weird cultists talking about ‘conjuring souls from foreign realities’ weren’t that crazy after all either.”
Matthias was interrupted by his phone rumbling on his desk next to his tablet. The face of his sister was projected above.
“Answer,” Matthias said.
The projected face of his sister then said “Matt, Mom said dinner’s ready. Get downstairs and eat.”
The message ended, and Matthias ushered Juana from his lap. As he started for the door, he stared at his journal full of Josephine’s stories. Eventually, he shrugged.
“Well… it’s not like any of it matters anymore. I already died on Ein, and I’m probably not going back after I die on Earth, so…”
He took the journal, put it in the bottom shelf of his desk and headed with Juana downstairs for dinner, certain he would never open that journal back up again anytime soon.