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At that very moment, Alayna was beginning to come around. Blake also recovered his composure, saying, “Area 51? My cup runneth over!” He saw Alayna’s stirring, and he quickly sat down beside her, cooing, “Hello, sweet pea, are you okay?” He took a lock of her hair in his fingers and tucked it neatly behind her ear. She opened her eyes. The heat was gone from them.
Abe rushed to her side, picking up her hand in his. She said, groggily, “All right, already! Leave me alone!” Looking around, she added, “Am I in a morgue? Have I been collected?”
“You’re in Lutheran Purgatory, sweet pea,” Blake said. Sano giggled prettily.
“What was that building in Kyoto, then?” Abe asked. “If it wasn’t a school and if it wasn’t an insurance company, what was it?”
“Norwegian infiltrators,” Blake said. “So that Japan, or Kyoto at least, will never have a viable hockey team.”
Ed said, “It was a school. That’s all: it was a school.”
Abe said to Alayna, “Ed said that this stone slab bed should be comfortable, like a firm mattress.”
She roused herself further, propping herself up on her elbows. “Well, it’s not exactly comfortable, but it’s not uncomfortable either. Warm, though. How long was I out? Where are we?”
“We,” Blake said, elongating the syllable, “are in the mountain.”
“A new biome,” Sano said.
“Should we fetch the others?” Abe said. “I mean, the bower is amazing and all, but this is the inside of a mountain.”
“Ah!” said Ed, formulating a thought.
Abe continued, “Perhaps combining Command Plant Life with your Stone Shape, we can really have a veritable palace in here. Paneling, and beams, and torches, and stonework. Wow! We really could make this into the Season 7 The Morose Alpaca home base, at least for the first two arcs.”
“Is that the odd season?” Ed asked.
“Oh, no…” Blake said.
“Yeah, they had two arcs in the first seven episodes, and then they went eight more episodes—and I’ll admit it wasn’t the most stellar arc: lots of talking. They probably could have done all that exposition about Nami in only four episodes, but I feel like they were stringing it along to make filler episodes. I mean, gotta cash in, right?”
“Just like Re: Zero,” Ed said. “I hated the second season for that.”
“What are you two talking about?” Blake demanded.
“Odd anime seasons,” Abe said.
“Bad storytelling decisions,” Ed said.
“Wait a second,” said Blake.
Abe said, “But who does a fifteen episode season? Twelve, thirteen? Fine. Sixteen, twenty-four? Also fine. But fifteen? It felt like it was limping. I was so glad when Season 8 came out strong.”
“But you’ve been here since 1997!” Blake said.
“Have I?” Ed said, furrowing his brow. He was confused.
“You’ve been here since before this young man was born!”
“Have I been here since 1997? What year is it now?”
The five of them stared at each other.
Stoic, it might just be 1997, and the years you have…the years you possess in…after all…what is a year? Does a year require seasons and changes of season? Fogs and mists here and about…
“Not…1997…” Alayna finally said.
“Well, at least we have an anchor point, a terminus a quo,” Sano said.
“A what?” Blake asked.
Sano giggled prettily. “No one else took Latin?”
“I just can’t understand how you’ve been here since 1997—”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Who said I got here in 1997?” Ed demanded.
“YOU DID!”
“No, I said I was in an airplane with John Denver. I don’t remember the frickin’ year.”
“None of us can remember the frickin’ year,” Abe said, laughing.
“John Denver,” Blake said, breathing deeply and slowly, “died in 1997. You said you were responsible for that.”
“No, I was supposed to be responsible—did he die?”
“YES! In 1997. He crashed his plane in California.”
“No way I was responsible for that,” said Ed. “Someone else did him in, then. There is no way that little plane could get from here to California with the fuel it could carry.”
Blake stared, working out the problem in his mental calculator.
Sano spoke up. “Ed, the way you told it is that you basically killed John Denver, which happened in 1997, and you landed here and have never departed.”
Ed scowled, then stared into space, putting his hand on his chin to rub brain activity into being, as if his head was a genie’s lamp. “Let’s see…” he said, musing. “I mean, that was quite a moment in time, wasn’t it? Crammed into that little cockpit with the little bastard—heh, two little bastards, struggling over a hypodermic needle. Who knows? Maybe he jammed it into me! No, no, no, that’s not likely, seeing as how I’m alive…what about all this?”
“Ed, you’ve seen anime episodes that were produced…since…1997,” Blake said. “Apparently, you’ve watched and rewatched them, like some sort of horrible dweeb.”
“Weeb,” Sano corrected.
“I don’t know that I can explain,” said Ed.
“Hm…” said Blake, pondering.
“Hm…” said Sano.
“Hm…” said Abe. “I like it that you know all my favorite anime, though.”
“Replacement Lars,” said Alayna. She caught herself. “Oh, sorry, Abe.”
But it was Blake who took the shot. “Ouch,” he whispered.
“Ouch,” said Sano.
“Ouch,” said Abe.
“So sorry, Blake,” Alayna said. “It just slipped out.”
“It’s okay,” said Blake. “Stings a little, that’s all.” Sano rubbed Blake’s shoulder with her hand, looking intently at his face with her sky-blue eyes. A silence fell upon the party.
Ed broke the silence, saying, “Well? Do you wanna see it?”
“See what?” said Blake.
“The alien, of course!” Ed said.
Blake’s mouth dropped open. “No way,” he said.
“Yes, way,” said Ed. This here location is the cause for all the rumpus in terms of mid-century conspiracy kookery.”
“I resemble that remark, smart-guy,” Blake said, glowering down at the old man.
“Conspiracy kookery,” Ed said with a smirk. “A presumed meteor crashed into this mountain, and only a handful of people noticed, but one of them worked for the federal government, and he knew that the government would want to know about the thing, thinking that it was an important metal to be developed into a super-weapon. The government, not being completely stupid right after WWII, claimed that the Army Air Force had recovered a disk-shaped craft outside of Roswell, and being the geniuses they were, back before the hippies ruined government—”
“Preach it, brother!” Blake said.
“—they rescinded the statement, which, naturally, focused all attention on Roswell, New Mexico, where there was thinly plausible deniability, just enough to string along conspiracy kooks indefinitely.”
“I knew it!”
“When all along,” Ed continued, “an alien ship crashed here. Well, not quite a ship. It’s hard to explain. Come with me.”
“But we should be returning to the bower to collect the rest of the Unexpected Companions,” Abe insisted. “Besides which, Alayna, are you recovered enough?”
Well done, Stoic. That’s the way to show you care deeply about the opposite sex.
“I told you already,” Ed said in an exasperated tone, “she was experiencing a cooldown period. What actually happened?”
“A drone transmitted some commands to a dormant nanobot circuit via a low frequency carrier wave,” Blake said. “She was gearing up to kill us all before Abe jammed the signal.”
Ed stopped hobbling, turned, and stared at Abe. “Really…” he said, musing. “What have they developed in you?”
“Space alien!” Blake said, but Ed was having none of it.
“Our friends!” Abe said, but Ed was having none of that, either.
He said, “What did they tell you they were doing to you?”
“Who?” Abe said, “Me?”
“Yes, you, young man. What did they tell you they were doing to you?”
“Nothing. We just crashed into this mountain, breathed in some fumes, and now we have…uh…Command Plant Life, Stop Projectiles—”
“Small or large?” Ed demanded.
“Small, I think,” said Abe. “And we have Healing Touch, Hypnosis, and Cloudburst.”
“Cloudburst?” Ed asked. “What’s that?”
Sano turned away from the group, squatted, and, after the unmistakable sound of intestinal gas being released, but as though from a cow, she emitted from her backside the telltale cloud.
Ed’s eyes grew large, and he said, “Willikers! You mean Ink Cloud!”
Stop laughing, Stoic! That’s not very stoic at all!
“Yeah,” said Abe. “We’re awesome.”
“So, you crashed into this mountain?”
“In a regular old commercial airliner,” Blake said, “which has now disappeared.”
“Huh.”
“The kids have all developed superpowers since then, starting with Abe here—but also Sano, who is not a kid,” Blake said, with some force. “I don’t understand the commonality, and why Lars and I didn’t develop like powers.”
“They’re Japanese,” said Ed.
“That seems racist,” Alayna said.
“So is sickle-cell anemia,” Ed offered, as a rejoinder. “Not age dependent. You’re fooled that way. It’s racial.”
The four of them drew their breath in sharply.
Alayna exhaled slowly, saying, after a moment, “Is…is that even allowed?”
“It is, after all, a joint Chinese and Canadian venture. Do you think they care about the morality of nanotech?”
“Godless communists,” Blake murmured, shaking his head.
“But Sano is my age!” Abe protested. “It is so, age-dependent.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Alayna said. “She’s our age.”
Sano giggled quite prettily, even to the point of blushing. Blake rolled his eyes.
Ed shrugged. “Fine,” he said, “have it your way. If you want to live in a fantasy genre, that’s okay by me. Just don’t foul up my real, here.”
“Josei,” Abe said.
“This is definitely not Josei, young man,” Ed said.
“All right: it’s fusion,” Abe insisted.
“Can we see the alien, now?” said Blake.
“No,” said Abe. “We need to get the rest of the party!”
“They’ll be fine,” Ed said. “They’re probably tucked away safely in another instance while you’re here. They’ll never even perceive you’ve been missing. But you guys crashed into the mountain, and you didn’t die?”
“Well, one of us murdered a bunch of people in First Class, but, yeah, everyone died but us,” Abe said.
“I wasn’t on the plane,” Alayna said.
“Okay, okay,” Ed said. “I get that it’s complicated. As for, uh, some of you, you crashed into the mountain in a commercial airliner, and you didn’t die. The point I’m trying to understand is that a heavy jet airliner, which was carrying the nanotech of interest, crashed into this mountain, right?”
“That’s right,” said Blake.
“Huh,” said Ed. “I think that explains why I’ve been phasing in and out of instances at short intervals, such as you see me now.”
“How does that explain anything?”
“Oh,” said Ed. “Come and see.”
He turned himself around and led the way, slowly, leaning heavily on his walking stick, fighting the lameness with grunts and panting. Back they went, toward the rear of his stone bower, weaving around stone furniture in a living area, past a privy, and into darkness.
“Trust me,” said Ed, as the darkness swallowed them. “You can’t get lost. Just keep moving.”
“This is worse than an escort quest,” Abe complained. “We keep tripping over you.”
“Better that way than into an abyss, right?” Ed said.
“Count the beats,” Blake commanded. “It’s step-one-thousand, two-one-thousand; step-one-thousand, two-one-thousand…”
And so they proceeded in pitch darkness, a darkness of mines, so dark that they could almost perceive the unspoken counting ticking away in each other’s minds. After a length of time (no one could perceive how long), a soft luminescence grew around them, and, after another length of time, they found themselves in a chamber.
“The Sarcophagus,” Ed intoned.
“It’s dead?” Blake asked.
“Impossible to tell,” Ed said. “Have a look.”
Blake craned his neck to see, as if doing so would make the room lighter. Ed held his walking stick slightly aloft. It began to glow, increasing the visible light so that their eyes were comfortable peering at the object of Blake’s desire.
They heard Blake issue a sigh of utter contentment. “I knew it,” he whispered. They looked, and they saw, as Blake saw, a shriveled mass, desiccated, about the size and shape of an American football, perhaps twice again that size, glowing luminescent green, faintly, with the slightest hint of a mist whispering up from beneath it.
“It’s a cocoon,” Blake said.
image [https://embodimentandexclusion.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/2.16.jpg]
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