“Are you kidding me?!” Parker started yelling. Alexis and Caleb stared at him as he flailed around and kicked the ground.
“Parker, what happened?” Alexis said as she whipped a whirlwind around Parker. He blinked several times, stopping his tantrum. “What happened? Talk to me.”
Parker stared right into Alexis’s eyes but didn’t say anything. He didn’t’ understand why this was all happening. How was he teleporting without trying? He hadn’t even focused on something this time like he usually did. Homing in on someone’s core and then teleporting to it was usually the key, but for some reason, he didn’t need that this time.
“Hey, what happened while you were gone? You’ve been gone for like a day.” Caleb seemed concerned but more curious than anything else.
Parker took a moment and looked around. He realized that they were back in their old common room. The feeling of being back was nice. For some reason, the common room was where Parker felt the most relaxed. Probably because of all the wonderful memories they’d made there. Studying, well maybe not studying, but hanging out with friends, getting to know Alexis better, etc.
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Parker was standing in the street looking up at the skyscraper he’d jumped out of. He could tell that he’d been walking and was ready to go into the building and confront Lara but then he stopped.
“Wait a minute,” he said, realizing that he’d made another time jump. He went to go grab the door handle again but remembered that’s when he teleported back. Did he want to go back right now? He could use this opportunity to talk to Lara again like he’d planned in the first place. But how was he supposed to get to her if grabbing the door handle meant teleporting back to Lancastre?
After thinking for a moment, Parker spread his feet a shoulder width apart and raised his hands in front of him like he was trying to lift something heavy. A chunk of the sidewalk came out of the ground and thrust it forward through the glass doors.
Parker looked at his handywork and then stepped through the newly made opening. Proud of himself for coming up with a method the first year him could’ve come up with, he sauntered off toward the stairs. He was sure Alexis could’ve thought of a better way to get in, but he didn’t care.
Standing in front of the elevator, Parker clicked the button to go up, but nothing happened. It took a minute, but he realized that there was no electricity on in the building and now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any outside either. He’d thought it was just the smaller towns they’d kept to that didn’t have electricity but apparently it was everywhere. Why didn’t any of the Imperials pick up their old jobs? Shouldn’t the world still be able to run like normal? Or did everyone take this as an opportunity to just quit their old life and live the life they thought an Imperial should live? One that lives completely off the elements.
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Living off just the elements seemed dumb to Parker. Why go backwards technologically when the things they had were so nice and made most of life very easy and convenient? He thought about it even more as he stared at the entrance to the staircase that he would now have to go up to get back to the room he’d been in before.
Parker opened the door and walked to the center of the stairs. It reminded him of the staircase at Lancastre. It had seemed so cumbersome to have to walk up the stairs before he learned how to fly. He looked up to see what he was getting himself into and toward the top, he saw a small head poked over the side of one of the railings. It was hard to distinguish from so far away, but his gut told him it had to be Lara.
“Well, here we go,” Parker told himself as he whipped the wind around him in an attempt to make his tornado. It had been so long since he’d done it, he wasn’t sure he’d be successful but after a moment he began floating. Slowly, he rose floor by floor getting closer to the head that peered down at him.
“Have you come to your senses?” Parker heard Lara yell down at him.
“I’m here to talk. Either you hear me out or I vanish without a trace, got it?”
He heard a loud huff from above followed by “Fine, got it.”
They met in the conference room they’d been in the day before but the window he’d jumped through was already fixed. Parker took a seat at the opposite end of the table as Lara.
“So, what is it that I need to ‘hear out’ first?”
Parker took a moment to compose himself. He knew he had to keep his calm here because he needed to understand how to teleport properly again. She’s taught him once; she should be able to do it again.
“You teach me how to teleport properly, and then once I have it down, I will teach you how to sense cores again.” He knew this was a long shot, but he’d hoped he had said it with enough conviction that she would agree, no questions asked.
“Fine,” she responded quickly. Parker’s heart started to race with joy. “I’ll just teach you how to teleport so that you can just up and poof yourself away. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Crap, Parker thought to himself. “Those are my terms,” he said in his sternest voice he could muster. “Take it or leave it.” He started to stand up to try and drive his point home, but a strong burst of wind knocked him back down into his seat.
“Listen here you little cretin. You’re mine. You will show me how to sense a core again and then, if you haven’t pissed me off, I might show you how to teleport properly.”
Parker’s heart dropped into his stomach. He knew she was right, but he didn’t want to just submit to her will so easily. He’d threatened that he’d just vanish without a trace, but he hadn’t taken the moment to think it through. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized the “threat” he’d given her, was what he was here asking her to help him with.
They stared at each other in a hate-filled silence for several moments. In that time, Parker tried his hardest to go back through time again so he could retry this, but no such luck came. He’d have to figure out how to fix the situation he’d gotten himself into.
“ARE. WE. CLEAR?”
Parker nodded his head very slightly with a scowl on his face. She had him, dead to rights.