Yuri Worlds

[102] Rainbow

Each of them made a pounding effort at the locks and windows but just came away aching and frustrated. Franklin surmised that it sure seemed like they actually wanted them here. A trap from the beginning.

Both Yukas attempted their anchored leverage push, which worked at breaching the confinement force field. This time, even with two of them, they couldn't make it budge or force a crack. That made sense, as it was poured concrete.

The different devices seemed like they should give them something, but the controls had been locked out, and no interface interactions made anything happen. None of them slumped to the floor in resignation, but they paused in place and barely dared to breathe.

"There's gotta be a way," Dwight resolved. He searched around the edges of the room. Guy looked high while Franklin scoured the floor and low places.

"Here!" Guy stretched on his toes and hopped, gesturing to the highest point in the ceiling. It looked like an inverted drain in a sink with a split cap unfurled beneath it. After scrutinizing what was written on the edge, Guy determined that it was the outflow valve for the Rainmaker. Even though they couldn't do much else with the devices, at least a pipe map clearly demonstrated that if they sealed it, then it would flow directly into the main feeder. All they had to do was close it.

But it was so high up there, looming like the interior of the massive water tanks they built in the hills to save aquifer water during the arid parts of the year. Both Yukas stretched into the air as far as their gooey blackness could reach. They capped out at about twelve feet with any sort of grasping ability remaining before losing cohesion and needing to pull their constituent parts back. Dwight swiftly looked around and did some math.

They didn't have any objects they could pull to stack other than perhaps the keyboards, monitors, and tablet. And they were unlikely to support them. If they wanted to reach the top, they were going to have to be literally on top of one another.

Dwight had no qualms about being the base of the stack, especially with his usual muscles back. Guy knew that he would have to be near the tip, but neither Yuka would allow him to be in danger at the top. That would be their job. To get a little bit more, they clung to and braced themselves with the device at the center of the room. Standing on top of it was too tenuous, but they inched their way up to get as much height as possible.

Even with the five of them bordering on performing a circus act with every muscle burning and every ounce of dark entity essence stretched from Franklin's puffy cloud push to double Yuka tendrils, they still fell just heartbreakingly short. Before the girls could call it quits and try to provide the best protection for the others when the deluge finally came, one Yuka stopped the other and reminded her, "Three. Ambitions of three. That's what they said. Three-headed Cerberus. What do you think?"

They wobbled, and Franklin gathered what was going on. One more. The two of them could bring on one more, and that would be enough height. Once again, a situation crafted to lead them in this direction. It didn't feel good. But what other option was there?

The room shook with the shifting weight of so much coming their way. It was worth a try, no matter what. The top Christmas tree ornament on an exhausted, human structure that felt like it was made of dried needles haphazardly stacked together, Yuka closed her eyes and tried to find the same place that had carried her to another world, the same emotion and connection. It began and ended with Misaki… with Franklin… with Carrie Francesca. They each had their own special names of the moment and aspirations of forever. Together but separate. That imagery brought the cacophony of their breaths into a focused cohesion, which then carefully split into one more breath.

Wavering with the new weight, Yuka carefully clung to her second doppelgänger. Franklin had seen a fluttering of the air above her before the third appeared, but nothing more distinct than that. It had been like Yuka just willed another her into existence.

This one didn't speak or bother with the surprise of being born. She had one job to do with unbreakable intention. They were so close, even with her regular fingers. She could hold the edge of the structure and almost push it together. But it just wasn't enough. Not enough strength, not enough stretch. The Yuka at the top screamed as a thunder greater and heavier than anything they had ever heard or felt swelled through the edges of this tank, this prison, this place of death.

Top Yuka stretched every black fiber of her being around the stopper, around the drain, willing it to be closed, straining for every last millimeter to join the damn thing together. Just when it seemed the splashing cascade was at the opening, an overwhelming sea breeze of disintegration looming to fall, she smashed her head into it and was greeted by a heavy mechanical thunk finally sliding into place. The weight of the deadly flood shuddered against the stopper but then was sucked up as though through a mystical straw, rising from the depths up to somewhere beyond.

Physically and mentally exhausted, it took an oily mattress for all three girls to bring the three boys down safely. Checking the display, they felt relief to see that the display showed "Rainmaker filling for use". This quiet moment was unfortunately brief as a multitude of new alarms erupted that had nothing to do with the Rainmaker device. The entire building, the entire structure, was now on a manic, angry alert, and they had a hunch it had everything to do with them.

Third Yuka barely had time to be introduced, let alone offer her thoughts on existence. She was indeed mute and couldn't do much more than gesture and panic. Fortunately, the six of them combined for just enough strength with black taffy and Dwight muscles to finally rip the main door open.

There were workers in gray at this level, but none seemed to care about them. Those who so much as looked at them the wrong way got to see the longest black blades each could produce.

Even with the feeling like the entire world was going to fall away, climbing back up the stairwell required breaks before they finally made it to the parking garage level. The lights pulsed around them, and some even burst with crackles and sparks. The space was sparsely filled with vehicles, and it was easy to find Dwight's car. However, the keys went with their bags when they parked last week.

Not that that was going to stop Dwight. He squared up his elbow to crack the window. Fortunately, Franklin stopped him in time with a different idea. It was no trouble for the original Yuka to extend a narrow protrusion under the window and into the door to press the power unlock button without having to leave a scratch on anything.

From there, she started to focus on willing her flesh to become a key for the ignition. But that wasn't necessary, as Dwight had a spare tucked into a deep recess in his seat, affixed with a lot of tape. The flash of a sudden, modest fireball warmed the garage a little too much and provided plenty of light. They'd seen enough.

Dwight cringed for the sake of his car but had no qualms about leaping several curbs to take a straight shot at the gate blocking the exit. It broke away easily, but not without leaving several shrieking, painful scratches in the hood and along the side window.

For all the chaos they had witnessed so far, once they cleared the underground parking garage ramp, the world around them was hauntingly quiet, serene, and normal for this hour of night. They took a side street so they wouldn't have to deal with the signal lights.

All three Yuka sat scattered around the back with modest separation but closeness to Franklin. This wasn't a time for words, but Franklin was able to read the quiet notes on their faces, even at the dim revelation of the world that their imaginations strained to calculate. Every flicker, shift of light, and shadow offered miraculous new sights. Franklin had to admit that the subtle qualities of this world preserved something special, even in this dehydrated state. They made it onto the old highway when a real rumble found them.

If they didn't pay attention to the particulars of the low noise, it might be easy to dismiss it as a simple, distant thunderstorm over the eastern desert. The attention of the Yukas was mostly focused on a bright, hat-shaped Pizza Hut building. But it was hard to ignore what flowered like a bomb in the night. A blast of pure, shadow-melting light seemed like a sustained shot of morning mixed with flares of color. For Franklin, it made him think of what he always expected the northern lights to be, but cycled faster, like one of those old searchlight advertisements put through a color wheel.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Finally, the wail of police, fire, and other emergency vehicles cut through the relative silence. Moments later, a beam of concentrated color with more laser-cutting intensity than the security turret shot into the sky and curled against it like hitting an invisible parabolic dish. The swarming radiance literally seemed to fall like a slow, seeding rain in waves that fluttered out from the center. Franklin was reminded of distant, hot summers made of phony memories of aiming a hose high into the air and waiting for it to splash him in the face.

Where the geyser of rainbows and light landed, it was like a new world spread forth. The land received a dawning breathed full of noonday brightness. An awakening. Before it swelled out too much, Dwight made a quick turn to the left to take them south from the street they were on. Part of Franklin had to wonder why they were bothering to rush away. It was finally going to rain in the desert, and it would be a good thing to be under the storm. At least, he hoped so.

The trio marveled at the great falling fountain of color. Occasionally, one of them would try aspects of their boyish efforts but never the full figure or the complete picture, absorbing the new knowledge surrounding them and the trio of inspirations nearby.

Dwight pushed the car as fast as it would go parallel to the eruption before they started gaining distance from it again. Everyone made sure they were buckled in. The four of them were in the back, with Dwight driving and Guy presenting like he was the copilot. The car was at capacity.

This route presented the advantage of very few slow traffic lights that enjoyed the sadism of holding streets empty of travelers to patiently wait on its schedule for the sake of authority. Not that it seemed like Dwight was going to give a shit about those so long as the route was clear to treat like a four-way stop. They buzzed past the government land, dotted by massive hangers where experimental aircraft were built. They never saw any UFOs, UAPs, or anything else made of unknown initialisms. He had to wonder what secrets this land would hold upon restoration.

Slowing briefly to check behind them, they glimpsed a wave washing across the land, a wave that reminded Franklin of swaths of destruction from a radiating solar flare or an unstoppable tidal wave. It wasn't destruction. At least, he desperately hoped that it wasn't. But it was swiftly coming their way.

In replays of the Disney Afternoon, Franklin recalled an epic storyline at the culmination of the DuckTales series, though in syndication nothing ever really ended. A golden goose was unleashed from some ancient temple along with a world-consuming power of pure gold. The brilliant shine of what was advancing toward them had a pervasive bluish-gold luster beyond the flowering of all other colors. And it was moving as swiftly as that cartoon memory, which surely meant it was keeping pace with the car.

They weren't more than a few miles from home, which seemed like a reasonable destination. They could push towards the big city or out east with Vegas ambitions, but why delay this rebirth? Any violent debris launched from Travel Anywhere's headquarters in the chaos was far away. Dwight seemed to sense this as well and pulled back from a frantic, pregnant woman rushed to the hospital pace to a much more reasonable one.

Pulling into their driveway felt like such a surreal conclusion. Three iterations of the girl Franklin loved marveled at the mundane aspects of the tree in front, engorged with a cornucopia of questions they had thus far withheld. They got out and ambled towards the sidewalk, where they were afforded a decent view of the faintest cusp of the wave advancing towards them.

More emergency vehicles and cars gunning it along the cross street obscured whatever other sounds and the idle tweets of ambitious evening birds in the blooming trees above. Guy turned in nervous circles, swooping from the road back over to the safety of the driveway.

Without their phones, it felt surreal not to receive emergency messages or frantic comments from everyone they knew. Gal Hotner was sure to be the current recipient of a swarm of concerned and confused social media posts. Dwight turned in his own orbit before pulling several folding chairs out of the closet for the six of them. Time to kick back and watch the quiet apocalypse. The chairs were surprisingly comfortable as soon as they slid in place with their legs locked.

Franklin was exhausted in a way that went beyond the jetlagged confusion of losing over a dozen hours in so little time. Rubbing his eyes in every way imaginable did nothing to dispel the grit and tiredness that had taken root as bitter rocks. Guy swiftly slumped into a micro-nap before bouncing up with alarm and uncertainty. The girls had their own little moments of exhaustion.

One Yuka delighted at all the possibilities spread out before them, along with wild hopes that the spillover of this infused energy would enrich and brighten the shores of her world. Another imagined living in this place, along with the transfiguration to come. It all felt so swift, so shockingly swift, that none of them had yet taken a moment to catch their breath after being shoved through the door, surviving a booby trap, surviving another trap, sprinting, driving, rushing, and anticipating.

All she really wanted at this time, with all her heart, was for Franklin to touch her hair. Unfortunately, he only had two hands. Teasing without concern, Franklin wondered aloud if she was playing into the whole hell doggy sentiment. The Yukas put on a harmony of plaintive whimpers and bowed their heads. A little scritch and scratch with gentle strokes brought on blissful sighs. But also nagging realizations.

Being close to Franklin didn't stir the magnetic pull, nor did the relative closeness of Yuka's sister selves. Examining the reaction, they noticed a faint flutter of light flanking their limbs like a guardian force of tiny fireflies. Separation and cohesion persisted between them. Thanking back, the girls realized that it had been like this since closing the valve in the high ceiling.

Theories soon abounded. None of this felt incidental. Despite the freedom of their escape, the ivory prison walls still felt near. Perhaps the company wanted them here, wanted them like this, split and solidly separated from one another. They resolved that they needed to flow back together and restore themselves. But it felt more like pushing against a physical person than a fluid fragment. The three pressed and pushed as tightly as possible, but nothing would yield.

With the transformation wave soon upon them, all sorts of scenarios rushed through their thoughts and voices. Franklin reached over and wrapped the entire group in an all-loving embrace. The girls settled together with truly relaxed breathing. They chuckled lightly and wobbled on unsteady feet. The consideration of trying to use their ropey tendrils or hungry blades to consume one another fluttered in the air before being rejected.

A distant, silent scream almost surged out as the distinctions between the three of them flowed together, like a blurry image coming back into focus. In an instant, there were just the two of them, Franklin and Yuka, seeing only one another and holding each other with perfect, balanced support.

As the others braced for the noonday rainbow rising towards their door, Franklin and Yuka wrapped around each other with comfort, fearless hope, gleeful peace, and wafting serenity as they pulled together in a roaring kiss to be a greater tower of light and love blasting across the landscape than what was slowly seeping upon them. They held each other close, the world together, still apart but bound like a single heartbeat, singing a simple but beautiful melody. A kiss for the ages.

Moments later, the wave to wash away the former world arrived. And there was nothing but light.