Aelius was happy to have a visitor, but this was not the one he wanted.
He told himself not to be picky.
It was the second time Rio had visited, the most frequent visitor after everything had ceased repetition, but he so far has come only in a bad mood. On this particular visit, Aelius found Rio sitting underneath a towering pear tree, moping, sitting around various toys, a dresser, and a broken radio.
He looked down at him, poked him in on his head, and Rio let out a grunt.
"Welcome back."
"I'm running away," Rio mumbled.
"I don't think that's a good idea. Won't people be looking for you," Aelius asked.
He crouched down, trying to look at him, but Rio turned away and pouted. Aelius then continued to poke him all over. In his chest, his shoulder, and his blonde hair, until Rio started to grumble, and groan, and soon it turned to laughter. The child and the other child inside an adult's body got along quite well.
Rio let out a soft oh, and remembered something important. He went through both of the pockets in his khaki shorts and brought out a plastic watch, red and black all over. He held it out to Aelius and offered it to him.
"I found the watch you were looking for," Rio said.
"Oh... this is..."
Aelius did not want to hurt his feelings and pretended it was the watch he was looking for.
"This is absolutely what I was looking for," he lied. "Thank you."
"It's nothing! My dad got it at the store for me!"
Aelius was not angry with Rio, but with himself, for asking him to find a magical watch that could control space and time hidden somewhere, possibly in his house. There was no way a small child would know where it was, and even if he did, he wouldn't know what to do with it.
"Maybe you should go back home. I think your parents are worried," Aelius said.
"I don't need to listen to a man that talks funny. Maybe you can make me."
Aelius was insulted because he did not speak funny, Rio spoke funny. He spoke dreadfully slow, abhorrently, as if someone had was bogging down his lips. Even his entire body moved slowly as well, and this brought Aelius to wonder if this might be a side-effect of his ability.
Aelius considered asking but didn't want to anger Rio into never returning. He wasn't Ace, yet he was, taking his place in another world, and the discovery of him and his other visitors fascinated him. The recent uptick of various visitors was what solidified Aelius' theory that he was at some sort of crossway point for many different realities. He wanted more information but didn't think Rio could give anything to him, but maybe he could be of some use, so he decided to not ask him to leave.
That is what Aelius told himself when he was truly lonely and just really needed the company.
"Well, how about for now we start with fixing this thing," Aelius said, gesturing to the broken radio.
Rio shouted in excitement as Aelius used the powers of the strange No-Man's Land to fix the radio with a snap of his fingers. The broken pieces of the radio all rolled along the grass, back to their respective places, and once they were together again, a soft jingle played, the only sound other than their voices in the imaginary world.
"Thank you," Rio shouted.
"Well, I aim to please. I even made it extra special, so you can listen to anything, anywhere!"
"That's so cool! I will bring you as many watches as you want," Rio exclaimed.
"About the watch... Why does it have so many numbers?"
"What do you mean?"
Aelius held out the red and black plastic watch and pointed out that it was irregular. The watch he was accustomed to seeing had twelve points, for AM and PM, but this one was simply marked by the numbers 0, 12, 36, 48, and 60. The number 72 was under 0, in a much smaller, tinier print. The watch was on, but it seemed to move very slowly, just like Rio, pushed back by some invisible force.
"There are 72 hours in a day. I know this because I was told this in school," Rio said. "Did you go to school?"
"I am educated," Aelius said shrilly.
"It's okay! My neighbor is homeschooled, it's the same thing as a regular school but at home."
Rio eyed Aelius suspiciously.
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"Can you count," Rio asked. "That's how you use a clock!"
"Well of course I can read a clock! I don't understand—"
He paused.
The clock was very much correct.
Rio was not speaking slowly.
"Oh goodness. No wonder you are still a child," Aelius said in awe. "Everything just moves slower for you where you come from, while here it's faster."
Rio pouted and opened his mouth to make another argumentative reply, but before a sound could come out, another visitor appeared in the garden.
He fell sideways onto the grass next to them. It was another Aelius, with his hair chopped short, holding a sword, wearing only purple pants, his face filthy and hands streaked in blood. Another paradox for the original to kill and stay on top. The original Aelius looked down at him through his nose, thinking of a new way to kill this one.
His eyes turned ghostly white and he made a promise.
"I'm going to kill you."
The paradox took the warning to heart and ran, right into the garden's maze, the original following right after him. Rio clutched his radio, standing under the pear tree, in absolute silence until he heard a scream that traveled throughout the garden.
Rio screamed alongside it, and within the blink of an eye, he disappeared, traveling on a message, one of fear, right back home.
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It had been the second day of lost privileges and Rio was having none of it.
The television was password locked and he couldn't guess it. Friends couldn't come to visit. Even Fenton. The candy was hidden somewhere discrete in the house, and worst of all, Rio forgot to bring General Teddy back home with him.
It was a hard two days.
The door to his bedroom wasn't replaced, and his parents agreed that it wouldn't be replaced until he stopped his bad behavior.
The only place that Rio could go to continue his misdeeds was the backyard, with the halfway-finished treehouse. He again brought his radio with him outside, to continue endangering the neighborhood honing his abilities. No one thought anything of him walking around outside, inspecting the treehouse because he'd been quite excited for it to be finished for a long time. He quickly glanced up and looked at the house. His mother was looking away, chasing after one of his siblings, and wasn't watching him through the sliding glass doors any longer.
Rio was quite crafty. There was a hammer left outside near the treehouse. It was a little heavy for him, so he had to use both hands to carry it. He was on alert as he ran behind the tree and struck the grounder hard.
Its green light flickered and then turned off. There was a small click, and then it slipped off his ankle.
Rio was no longer on house arrest.
"I am the GREATEST," he shouted.
Sitting in the grass, with no shoes on, and turning the knob left and right, Rio heard messages from the local news station.
"The Empire has passed into the Federation's territory...it's a dangerous precedent. Peacekeepers have been sent to control the situation...."
Rio didn't like the depressing news.
When grown-ups thought he wasn't listening they would talk about it.
At school, the teachers would whisper about it, while watching the kids during recess. Some of the adults said the war wasn't real and someone was making it up, but Rio thought that was just plain silly. His father always told him,
"We're lucky we left all the way to Earth when you were so young. Some people aren't lucky."
Upon further inspection, the radio had extra buttons on it. One said SEND and the other said RECEIVE, both in green capitalized letters. Aelius had promised to make his radio extra special. Rio decided to test it out.
He was tired of the messages and decided to send them somewhere else. He closed his eyes to think about where to put them, pressed SEND, and then opened his eyes.
"RIOOOOOO!"
Rio almost jolted out of his skin when his mother came stomping across the lawn, with a baby in her arms. She had caught him, in the act, once again.
"Explain yourself," Amara said.
And he did.
Rio had convinced himself that if he could send the horrible messages away the war would stop. He was so sure of it. So he cleared his mind, closed his eyes, and thought of a place, a special place, to send the horrible messages to.
He thought to send them to a place where the Empire was defeated if such a place existed. A place where the good guys won, and they became friends with the bad guys, like in his TV shows. A place where, maybe, possibly, people tried their hardest to not ever fight, ever again.
He came to the conclusion that if everyone just talked it out that it would be okay, but he was too young and too naive to understand that the world is much more complicated than that sometimes.
Amara took his hand, helped him up, and took him inside. She finally understood her son was dealing with things he didn't understand the best way he could.
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Rio had sent the terrifying sound bytes to a place where the Empire's reign of terror had stopped, albeit very recently, in a different reality, far, far away.
It was so recent in everyone's minds, that the moment Mayor Anderson got wind of it, he was sure it was an incoming warning sign. Yet it wasn't. He was in a panic about a war that was occurring, in a different reality, in the past, whipping himself into a fervor that couldn't be abated.
He had been receiving the messages from his radio, in his office at City Hall, and soon he started recording them, to ensure that he wasn't imagining the return of a catastrophic war. He was sure it was a hallucination, especially since the speech was so slow.
The worst part about the voice was that it sounded somewhat familiar yet different, a tone he could not place but the absolute calm tone in her voice as she described recent events was terrifying. As if she were describing the daily weather report. And he later learned why.
The last sound recording he played to the group was one that scared Mayor Anderson the most.
"It is not very long until the Empire reaches Earth. I know you are afraid, but it is okay to be afraid in the face of danger. Being brave is looking it in the eye."
Another separate, distinct voice came into the air. This time it was a man's.
"And that was Mayor Sally Anderson, giving us updates from the Federation once more. She is an amazing inspiration, fighting at the front lines as a volunteer".
The recording ends and almost everyone is more confused than when they arrived. It gave more questions than answers. After deliberating until the sun came up, they all came to a conclusion.
Liane and Chad would find the source of the messages and hunt down Discordia. They assumed, that they were in the same place, at the same time, but they were nowhere close to the truth.
Everyone else would stay at home and find different ways to find the sources of the messages, but with only random clips of radio news pieces that Rio had sent, there was very little to go on.