The gods bounced Costan around, world after world like some traveling cleaner of threats or something. They sent him to a million or so various worlds, ranging from the stone age to the intergalactic age, and from no magic to everything is magic, and everything betwixt and between those presets. They even made him put up with the whole meditation and magic pills of ki and Dao crap where everyone believed that flashier moves were more powerful.
They didn't realize the mindset that they were cultivating until after things stopped going right for them. It was a few worlds after making him be a dungeon that things started going really sideways. Costan had already been performing the absolute least work as possible to check all the boxes, but now he was doing the angry mercenary thing; where one does the primary objective as quickly as possible without regard to anything else like collateral damage or public relations.
The God of one world had no words for how Costan killed the Demon King... with a nuke. He killed everything on the continent, including himself, but the world threat was gone. Nobody knew that it was possible to get the toxic ore to do anything but be toxic. Now that specific god knows better than to just leave it on the world, lest someone do it again. Completely pure uranium ore in it's original state of high energy, all Costan did was smash two big chunks together really hard and kaboom.
It finally sank in that Costan needed psychiatric care after he was the world ending catastrophe for the third time, despite the gods instructions to abate the threat. Costan straight up destroyed multiple worlds to satisfy the order as quickly as possible. The gods were not happy about having to hit the undo button multiple times.
They decided to send him to a version of Super Earth because they had psychiatric care for heroes and villains and wouldn't pry too deep about another unstable weirdo with powers showing up. He died, from murder. The gods tried it several times with similar results before they trashed the idea and just reincarnated him as a human being in 1950.
The first round went down as usual with infanticide. They realized that it wasn't working out unless they did some intervention, but regular God of Earth was all like "nah, no intervention, EVER". They then found a gap and stuck him there, only for him to get discarded in a trash can. Then they tried different times and places, only for Costan to always die in some miserable way or another. He managed to learn languages, or parts of them though.
They were a persistent bunch, even with Earth's God pointing out that the psychiatric field of study wouldn't be of actually use until the late 1980's or 90's. They ignored regular God and combed through the timeline, only to find an extraordinarily miniscule chance in what would be described as a shitty life. He was about to be reborn as what should've been a stillborn.
Since humans don't have the whole weirdo genetic shifty stuff, they just matched up some of Costan's adult features and sent it. The time and place were something despotic, not out of place in a horror film or apocalypse. The mental facility was being actively raided by a joint operation of state police and Marine Corps.
Due to inhumane conditions and tax fraud, that particular mental hospital was being shut down by force, after refusing to acknowledge legal summons and cease and desist orders from a federal court. One unlucky former scientist was on the operating table. Her services to the United States didn't exclude her from someone pretending to be family and having her committed to get her money the day after her husband was reported killed in action in some conflict or another.
The people performing the raid were disgusted that they would do anything like that. It only got worse when they realized that the infant that she was carrying was still alive in the disembodied uterus of the now dead Dr. Colbert. The surgeon was forced to rescue the infant and file a birth certificate at gunpoint, with the helpful reminder about the state laws pertaining to the termination of pregnancy.
The letter of the law in that state in 1952 was unpermitting of any termination outside of to save the life of the mother, and even then you would face murder charges if the child died. The paperwork was filed as an emergency procedure, but everyone knew that the facility was up to no good. Hells, they tattooed all child patients, the newborn included, but they at least properly filled out the birth certificate.
Since they were marking the kid for life, the Marines and state police had things added. If the kid ever got in trouble, they would know exactly who. They just grabbed his mother's maiden last name and his father's last name and threw in a random rank for his middle name since both the parents were too dead to name him. Nobody was going to let facility staff slap him with John Doe, so Jamison S Colbert was born and sent to an orphanage.
There he managed to scare the staff with how fast he learned. They were thinking of ways to get rid of him by the time he was three, but he got adopted by a mechanic and his wife at the age of four. They had three girls and wanted a boy, and it so happened that there was a green eyed, blonde boy who was too smart for his own good in the orphanage.
Due to legal issues about inheritance and pending litigation, they couldn't just adopt Jamison out. They put him under a different name and did it anyway to get him off of their hands. George Mchattry and Elizabeth Mchattry were extremely happy to have a new son, with the added bonus of him already acting like he was a half grown young man.
Everything was easy going until they realized that while other kids were playing, James Mchattry would be doing odd jobs, studying, or filing a patent or something. This was when he was six and they got a check and a few people from the government asking some questions about James' intellectual properties. They sat him down and had a chat about how it was not normal and that he should be playing instead of making a "atomic spectrographic analyser and recombinant molten metal calculator."
James agreed, but also pointed out that if he didn't invent it, someone else would have had to eventually, and the money wasn't too bad. The people in suits were a bit off putting though, so James agreed not to patent any more things that the government would automatically call dibs on. He would just do something else like dig some holes or something.
Then, when he was eight years old, there was an incident. Due to a communication error, Mr. Mchattry got angry over something and punched James at a ball game. This sent James tumbling down the bleachers. Everyone was creeped the hell out when James just put his own joints and bones back into place and walked away. The Sheriff thought that he had to be on something and used an excessive amount of force to stop him.
After a lengthy stay in the hospital for the broken bone, gunshot wounds, and a very thorough drug screening, he was transferred to a relatively local mental hospital. They believed Mr. Mchattry about an "anger issue" and diagnosed that the moving through pain and bullets was a form of a blind rage state. They treated it with things that would have made anger issues way worse for a few months.
It came to an end when the lead doctor found out about it. Ice baths and drugs that made everything hurt like hell were one thing, but when the lead found out that someone intentionally put James in an unsupervised cell with a pedophile, it was over. The people responsible were immediately fired and James was "convinced" to not speak of it before being quietly released a month later.
The doctor told his parents to expect him to be distant for a few years because of the treatments and incidents that led to him being committed. He also instructed them to give him mostly vegetables with decreased meat and grains in his diet, encouraged exercise and sports or other physical activities, and not to react to him walking away or punching inanimate objects. He told them that the weird behavior should pass by highschool and to contact him first for future behavioral issues because misdiagnosis was more likely after the first time.
He knew well that James didn't have actually anger issues before, but would probably become a murderer after everything that happened. James didn't care about much anymore. He was rail thin and had more scars than most veterans. The first thing he did when he got back to the Mchattry house was shower and change, ignoring everyone. Then he went back to the hole that he had started digging years ago.
James was digging himself a bunker, right there in nowhere USA. He didn't care what anyone thought about it. He went to school, he dug the hole, and they called the shrink a year later. It's understandable considering that he had a cavern dug out and filled with sciencie whatsits. The doctor decided that a house call was in order, rather than risk dead orderlies trying to take him.
The doctor was taken aback. All the place lacked in being a fully livable bomb shelter was a door, as far as he knew. He called in a friend that had dealt with bunkers in WWII just to help make heads or tails out of it. He waited for the guy while he spoke with the Mchattry family about James in hopes of figuring out what they thought the issue was.
James was nowhere to be found, and the bunker was huge with passages going off in multiple directions. The family voiced concerns about how James ignored them, had good grades, but also was digging a massive underground hole. They thought that James hated them, but they weren't wrong on that.
The old army guy showed up and went down what looked like the beginning of a hand dug well with the doctor and Mr. Mchattry. After the first twenty feet, the wood reinforced dirt turned into steel reinforced concrete and stone. Then he was struck dumb by the magnitude of the bunker. Lights, air system, water system, climate control, it was kitted out better than some military bunkers, aside from the future looking science stuff scattered about.
Then James appeared from one of the passages and a staring competition started. The three weren't carrying anything aside from clipboards and pencils, and James was pulling a mine cart and wielding a pickaxe.
"How have you been doing this year James?" The doctor was hoping that the statement would be neutral enough to start a conversation without getting a pickaxe lobotomy.
"Good enough. What is the issue here? Why are you in my hole?"
"Your family is concerned about your behavior as of late."
"Adopted family. My real family's been dead, and after everything... I don't recon anything more than the word adopted is fitting."
The situation deteriorated quickly after that. It came to a complete stop with the ten year old James ordering everyone to get out and stay out. Flipping a mine cart full of stone drove the point home.
The doctor told them that it was within expected behavior, and it actually went better than expected. Mr. Mchattry wanted to know what was expected and why. The doctor pointed out that James didn't actually have anger issues before he was committed, and given the treatments his underlings put him through were torture.
"I am surprised he didn't try to harm anyone, but since he isn't harming himself or others, no reason to send him back to us. You may send him back to the orphanage though, because he'll likely never accept you as parents. Or you can try treating him like he's actually your child and hope for the best. Goodbye, call if there's an actual issue."
"Wait, what about this is normal?"
"That's just it. He is doing something productive with his spare time that isn't harming anyone. He isn't planning anything nefarious, which is wonderful given his past. As I said last year, he should normal out by highschool when grades and girls begin to dominate his thoughts. Call me first for anything, but this isn't an actual issue."
"So him shunning us and building a bunker is normal?"
"For him, yes, any other child of that age, it would be strange; but you said it yourself that he is smart enough to have patents and a deal with the government. Him building a bunker for researching and development of new things is within the mindset of a scientist that has lost trust in others."
"Half the town calls him Gofer Boy. It ain't normal!"
"He isn't building bombs or anything, so it will be fine. He will grow out of it, and if he doesn't, then the government will always know exactly where he is. Just try talking to him, it'll be fine."
James came out of the hole for the usual dinner at that time. The doctor pointed at him and said, "James, you may not trust anyone right now, but you need to talk to your adopted family. If you don't start properly communicating with others you will end up back in the hospital."
"Fine." With the reluctance of a dejected child he stated what he had been up to.
Mrs. Mchattry took the chance to ask him to sleep in his bed in the house because they were getting worried about his health and well being. James relented and agreed to the request, after being tempted with the promise of a cheeseburger. Things improved after that, over the next two years.
Then Jenny got involved and things got awkward, in the way that preteens in love tends to be. James had struck a deal with the neighbors to keep the wells in order and some wine every month in trade for expanding under their farmland. Something about the grapes he grew made it especially wonderful, he called them DEV grapes, for Deep Earth Volcanic.
Jenny showed up one day and asked about James, just being nosey about Gopher Boy. It led to awkward moments in the bunker as James showed her around, but it also had the lovely scene of them leaning on each other overlooking the hydroponic grape field. He managed to fund a startup pharmaceutical company, and a few others, under his real name without his parents knowing.
In short, it was the start of something beautiful, awkward and wholesome for the time being, but wonderful in it's own way. James, despite running to school every weekday and being far more muscular than anyone of his age, was a late bloomer. His parents were getting worried until they found him just laying on his bed, trying his hardest to ignore himself at fourteen.
His relationship had vastly improved with his parents. They were concerned that he might start whacking the weasel and started talking to the shrink again. James was happy with his relationship with Jenny, even though thinking about it gave him an erection. Her ambushing him in the school shower after his morning run a few times didn't help with the stiffness, but he did buy condoms in case her antics went that far.
The Mayor of the town was getting worried, rumors about a blast furnace and secret power plant drove him to contact the Governor. They got in touch with the army guy from a few years ago and the federal government and started hashing out a plan to inspect Gopher Boy's bunker complex. The rumors that the Mchattry family were talking to a shrink about him were enough for them to give the family a little push towards treatment.
James had heard his parents complaints about the hole being an eye sore, so he built a barn over it. It looked like a barn, at least. It was a concrete and steel structure made to look like a wood barn with a shingle roof. He did that when he was thirteen.
The Mayor had his wife spread a lie about James cranking it, and the Mchattrys bought it. The doctor wanted to just make a house call, but they had James sent away. The orderlies were pretty sure that the thousand yard stare was their que to stay within reasonable measures. Muscles like that usually means lethal punches when thrown properly.
The doctor wasn't happy with having James back for something that just needed a talking to. The whole town believed it, so James was back, and he was quietly seething in an observation room. The laws had been changed, so they had to keep him at least seven days and show where they did something. The doctor didn't waste time and did a preliminary interview.
The results were what the doctor expected, not actually masterbating, just rumors and full distrust of everyone. The doctor checked his watch and came up with a plan.
"Listen, I know that this is bullshit, and I know that you know it. The laws are that we have to do something and keep you a week. That being what it is, we are only giving you water for two days before surgery, circumcising you on the seventh day, and you'll be home for Christmas dinner. Sound okay?"
"No, but my opinion never matters anyway."
"It'll be fine, I'll make sure they take as little as possible to say that they did, and it won't effect your abilities in bed. The Hebrews have been circumcising their children for centuries and it doesn't stop them from having a good time."
One week later, James was standing in front of the empty house in the cold with a couple of orderlies. They were giving the "what now" glance at each other. The barn had a padlock marked as government property on it. Since James didn't have a key to the house, and nobody left one, he tore the lock off the barn with his bare hand. His dick hurt and he wasn't in the mood for any more bullshit.
The team of inspectors that went in were dumbstruck and unable to believe that the bunker was built by just one person. They did their jobs and investigated. They took two whole days just to get the jist of everything, but they found something. Paperwork linking the some of the labs to Jameson Pharmaceutical and Colbert Energy.
While they continued the search on paper, there was nothing unpermitted in the bunker. Everything was filed for through one company or another. They really wanted to bust up the still, but it was licensed, so the alphabet crew just slapped a lock on the barn and took all the paperwork and samples that they could.
James was angry beyond comprehension at the blatant theft, so he filed lawsuits under the various companies that the paperwork was under. He also put the bunker in lockdown and opened the secret vault. He activated everything. Murphy sneezed and accidentally did a thing.
Elsewhere, the ships were still in stealth within their pocket dimension. They received a message, and sent a care package to the when and where it was to be in response. Alternate dimensions are fun, if you know how to make them correctly.
The courts tried to block the lawsuits, but the cases were iron clad with film of them doing it. The argument was raised that it's the government, but espionage and sabotage were the counter argument. It got bad enough that senators got involved and everything was returned in a year or two. The Governor and Mayor were implicated and lost reelection.
Back to Christmas though, James had to reassemble part of the reactor and start it back up to get the power back on. The bastards took that route because they couldn't find the power room, even with it marked on the wall map. Tired of the pain in his penis, he pursued the first aid kit, then a pop-up menu surprised him. That wasn't supposed to be possible on Earth.
He quickly decided that doing magical stuff or scifi level things wasn't in the cards, so he took the truck he built to go and visit Jenny. He grabbed a shower and some clothes first. The truck would be more accurately described as a combat technical, but it was the only "reasonable" ground vehicle left at his disposal.
Surprisingly, Jenny wasn't home. Her father accepted the gift for her, but refused to say where she was. James automatically made an assumption, and it came out like verbal diarrhea.
"She believed the rumors and left me for someone else."
"That's the short of it, but she didn't know if you were coming back. You are back kinda quick though. You didn't escape, did ya?"
"No, I got a copy of my discharge papers. If you want to give them a read." James handed over the paperwork and went inside to warm up. They chatted about how bad rumors are in that town while Jenny's mother read over the paperwork.
She didn't believe that a doctor would be able to call something bullshit in so fancy of terms, so she called the facility to double check. She waited until James was showing her husband the "prototype light fighting vehicle" before dialing. No use in agitating a possibly escaped mental patient with questioning their paperwork.
The receptionist didn't want to share details, but confirmed that James Mchattry was released earlier that day. She confirmed that they had investigated the rumors while James was under observation and found them to be "not founded in reality." The receptionist went on to inform that occasional masterbation in private is expected of teenage males and is only an issue if it is public or "excessive".
Mrs. McKinsey, Jenny's mother, was red as a tomato by the end of the phone call. Very embarrassed about being told about how it's normal for a teen to play with it up to seven times a month, she decided to call Mrs. Mchattry, who was at her husband's parents house for Christmas. She informed them of his release from the "hospital" and wanted to know if she should send him up to them, given the "very serious truck" would definitely make it through the snow storm.
They said to keep him there, but he was done talking and Mr. McKinsey let it slip that they were visiting old Mr. and Mrs. Mchattry. James pulled out before she could say anything. She could only call them up and tell them.
James stopped at Clive's Gas and Git for some fuel, snacks, and something to drink. He hadn't eaten in four days and while jerky and stale crackers weren't appealing, it was something. He was kicking himself for not keeping food in the vault. He dialed up his adopted grandparents while the gas pump worked at the eighty gallon tank.
Nobody answered the first time, but somebody picked up the second try. It was the groggy voice of his adoptive grandfather telling him to call back in the morning. It was only ten o'clock. James hung up and decided to buy some canned "food" and beer to go with everything and hit up the old mountain pass.
Clarence, the night time cashier, didn't ask any questions. Looking at someone buying a hundred dollars in stuff while dressed like they are coming from a future battlefield may have had something to do with it. Maybe it was the future looking gun on top of the truck that swivelled to aim at whatever James looked at, but he made his purchases and left with his crackers, beer, jerky, fuel, beens, coka cola, and oil sausages.
Half of the county knew someone was tearing up the back roads all night, but nobody had a vehicle capable of going to see what was up. James had a good time testing out the truck he put so much work into. Even Old John was on the HAM radio about it. He got bored after the third jump and took it back to the bunker at about sunrise.
Everyone was still gone. They came back six days later, after the storm passed and the roads were plowed. James was not there, he was at the actual hospital in the city. He found out that his difficulty urinating wasn't going away and part of the outside portion was shoved into him.
Mrs. Mchattry answered the phone not long after getting home. It was the hospital informing them that James was there and they needed to talk. Mr. Mchattry refused to go, so the hospital couldn't do anything because they needed parental approval. They suggested he get a catheter and released him.
James did what they suggested, but was still pissed. He went by the big market and stocked up on food before heading home. He didn't stop or go around the station wagon when he got home. He drove right over it and locked the barn behind him. Mr. Mchattry wanted to call the sheriff, but Ms. Mchattry was already on the phone with the hospital from a few hours ago.
Extra information really put light on the situation. She then called up the shrink who was without words for the situation. The shrink said that he was on his way with helpers and that the surgeon was going to get a beating and fired for screwing up something so simple.
She explained to her husband, but Mr. Mchattry still called the sheriff. To his credit, after the call about the futuristic gun truck, he showed up and exercised extreme caution and restraint. The barn having signage about live ordinance, lethal defense systems, and many other things gave him reason to contact the District Attorney for advice. The DA told him to call the state police, they would know what to do.
The doctor showed up before the state police and got a feel for the situation, it was not good, but nobody was shooting yet. Then the state police showed up and read the signs. They called the governor and the feds, who eventually showed up and tried to establish contact. They failed to make contact and started coming up with a plan with an Explosives and Ordinance Disposal team.
The Department of Defense stepped in and made everyone stand down. This was a week into it. The Governor called James a trouble making upstart and was arrested for slander, being informed that he was already under investigation for espionage, embezzlement and maybe even treason. If anything taken from the bunker ended up outside of the United States, he would be convicted and executed.
The agents sent by the DOD put things in thorough but simple terms for everyone.
"Mr. James, the fourteen year old who is currently self isolating, has multiple contracts with the United States Department of Defense. The raid of his bunker back in December was the result of miscommunication and all entities and persons involved are being actively investigated. There will be no forcible entry of that barn or the bunker beneath it. We will keep agents posted to speak with him whenever he comes out."
The army was sent back to base. The federal guys could stay, but would be watched at all times by the DOD. Everyone else was sent home. James didn't know about it because he had looked through the many accursed menus that were plaguing him and found that he could revisit some of the worlds he had been to. One came to mind, he just had to survive long enough to get the funds and the surgery he needed.
The DOD agents had to almost make homestead for the six months that the place was buttoned up. James wasn't even there, he had crafted a power armor and went to Earth Number 2076 with the medium cargo craft he built. There he did many things. The agents gathered all the intelligence they could on the situation and had someone running down possible skin donors.
James had one goal, to get his dick back to some resemblance of normal. He didn't care if he had to re-nuclear apocalypse the planet. He struck out finding an operational automated doctor unit at the big casino covered in toxic gas, but found a few versions of them.
He did kill the old crazy guy who wiped out all of the programing though, and made a few friends. They took the casino for everything that they could carry. "Only open up for a sequence of events", is for the plebes without power tools, aircraft, repelling gear, and plasma torches.
It is nice to be able to get whatever food and drinks you want, after hooking the creepy vending machines to a micro reactor and giving one a little hacking to retrieve all of the product codes. James did swipe a few nonfunctional auto docs, but the one that did function was only good if you wanted to sound like a female singer. Christine wasn't happy about it, but James finally found out what her name was afterwards.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The other two were happy. Dean was gitty at having the bomb off his neck and finally having heisting the place. Jim was chilling in the back of the plane like object after the accidental psychotherapy snapped his two personalities together. He was recombobulating his thoughts and his him. Christine was weirded out about flying with an unknown pilot, a prewar ghoul, and a possibly still insane super mutant, but it passed with time.
The hardest part was figuring out where to go next. It was pure luck that the universe crapped him out at the big casino, but James had no clue where anything else was. Christine suggested a few places and Dean wanted to go to Vegas. James, going by his old name Jameson Sergeant Colbert, decided to retrace Christine's path. What he found was a mess of the remains of a research center.
He gave it a deep dive and collected what could equate to scientific curiosities, they were interesting but mostly useless outside of niche circumstances. Nobody had any real uses for any of it aside from the chips, implants, and stealth suit. Even then, it was all niche, the suit was bulky and heavy and overly talkative, with the pieces of a Chinese version making a far better alternative. Even the implants were overly niche.
They found Christine's brain in a jar, that was cool, but bad news. Lady had been hunting a man for weeks without it. They managed to figure out a way to put it back, but her memory of the crew was gone and caused some uneasiness. James ignoring her paranoia and deghoulifying Dean with a genomics decrypter got her off edge and intrigued instead.
Then Jim wanted to "be a boy again". It worked, even with the two hour cleaning thing that the auto doc went through between each procedure and the hours it took on each. Sure enough, Jim was a kid, before he was a mutant, but now he was a kid again.
Everything came to a screeching halt when the AI module refused to fix James little problem. It wanted parental consent. Despite James producing evidence of his birth date, the damned thing refused. James took it hostage aboard his ship and told it to teach the other one, which didn't work because an AI auto doc had no ability to reprogram a none AI one.
Then the computer in the building got uppity, so James scrapped a bunch of stuff around the complex and "expanded" his aircraft. They took the whole room, receiving passive aggressive and mildly threatening messages from some Doctor Klein.
He spent six months flying around the world, searching for a doctor that wouldn't ask for a parents signature. He ended up just helping a bunch of people who turned a cold shoulder to his problem. He even got in a fight with aliens over it and threatened to re nuke the world, but went back home without what he was after.
He did have advanced technology that only required a parents signature though. He only had to convince one of the two. Mrs. Mchattry would be the easiest to convince. The issue was the feds outside his barn, with patio furniture, playing cards. Can't forget the news guy sleeping in his car nearby.
It was a fiasco, for sure, but James just gave the area a scan and flew out of there. Nobody was home. He had missed school. He visited a lawyer, who freaked out because James was still in the armor. He got nowhere with it, and left.
He did some digging and found out that other countries also had doctors who could do skin grafts. He got more no's. Then he went back to the states, carrying enough fire power to level a city, wanting to give the doctors the Mexican trick. Silver or lead? Where they get the choice of working for money or a bullet to the head.
He aborted that plan because he didn't want to become America's most wanted. So he settled for scaring the shit out of the DOD guys by uncloaking the aircraft in hover mode right next to them. They had already gotten his parents to sign the consent papers, so James just snatched them and forced the doctor unit to finally unbotch his circumcision.
He realized that something was a miss when he stepped out of the auto doc to an off hand remark in an old Japanese language about penis size from a random samurai. It was followed up with a wolf whistle from Christine. James hurriedly put his clothes back on and hopped in his armor out of embarrassment. He swore that he left them all on or near Earth Number 2076.
Then the teleporter flared and Mister "I don't think I'll like being human again" popped out wearing the stupid vaquero outfit. James immediately reprimanded him because this Earth didn't have ghouls or evolution diseases or any of that crap. The gunslinger must have taken it to heart, because he stripped down and got in the machine. James face palmed.
It was a long explanation, but the agents didn't bother trying to call any of it false. They knew that James Mchattry was Jameson Sergeant Colbert and that he made things beyond the normal scope of reality. They did coax, weedle, and cajole his new aliases out of him and receive the finished light armor multi role fighting vehicle and paperwork though.
The army got a new truck design and things simmered down. Life went back to a normal adjacent facsimile. The government never paid the three billion dollars in damages to the bunker though, stating "it didn't cost that much to build."
Puberty hit James like a freight train. By sixteen, he was supplying electricity to three states with other utilities and was partial owner of a railroad company. His parents, looking to keep him out of trouble, forced him to take many different classes and stuff.
They made him play chess, piano, guitar, box, ballet, karate, and hundreds of other things when he just wanted to work in peace. He was forced into multiple competitions, like the ballet thing in Paris, where his parents were anywhere but the competition. He got second in the men's solo because he wouldn't smile, even though the actual French people argued that a man dancing alone shouldn't smile anyway. While the girls wanted to keep him in France, he explained to them why he couldn't immigrate to France in perfect French.
It caused a scene. Nobody expected "such a handsome dancer to be so intelligent". James kinda wanted to stay, but not dance anymore. His parents still forced him through many things he wanted no part of.
Then there was the incident of the ninety-nine percent on a ten question test. The teacher was being a dick, saying that there is no such thing as perfect, while giving others a one hundred mark for all correct answers. James told the teacher "Your methods of grading instill a rage in me, the likes that conquer countries and burn nations." The reply of "then do that" started a whole thing.
James came back to school the following day with DOD agents keeping a very close eye on him. The same teacher asked what was with the feds and the armor. That particular teacher got an earful from them and the principal for starting The Six Hours War on a different planet, where James now ruled half a continent.
One agent that was assigned to keep watch on James had come aboard the unidentified aircraft and watched it all happened. James was officially a foreign ruler of an allied nation with dual citizenship. The President got involved and "the conquering of nations because you got angry is uncontionable" blah blah blah, they made him relinquish control of the territories to one of their diplomats.
He got a hefty kickback every month from being "retired." Both Earths benefited from collaboration, but everything was restricted by James' rules on things. He got back together with Jenny, but rumors started back up when he was seventeen.
Before he turned eighteen, the world's were catching up to what the one used to be. The rumors got bad enough that Mr. Mchattry forced James to see a shrink. It was a different one, because the rumors were of homosexuality, and mental care wasn't actually improving in the U.S., he didn't want to go.
James reassured that he already had a good physiatrist, but they wanted him to see the new one. They also didn't want him seeing Dr. Usanagi because her name sounded Japanese and she was a female. But they forced him to go anyway, despite Usanagi being fully licensed and highly recommended.
James was not having any of the quaks nonsense. The shrink pulled James full mental and medical files and contacted people who had been fired to find some things out. He overreacted to what he found out and wanted to have James committed. The still practicing psychiatrist that called bullshit multiple times pointed out the blatant multiple misdiagnosis and warned against anything without approval from both him and Usanagi.
The new shrink agreed to sit down and go through the entirety of the files with the old shrink and have a double session with James. James never showed up, the individuals recruited by the new shrink talked to Jenny and her parents as well as James parents. Jenny's father shot James an hour before the session, twice with buckshot.
James got patched up by his personal doctor, that he sto... Strategically transfered equipment to an alternate location for. Given that rumors spread fast, and that damnedable quak just ruined his relationship by sending people who raped him to Jenny's house, he had to plan fast. What was useful?
His birthday was in six days. Final exams were in ten days. His new 1969 Chevelle Super Sport Corporate Custom was supposed to arrive in two days, none of that helpful with people actively looking to kill you. Funny that it took almost a whole year to build it to his spec. Violence, while always an option, would just make him a criminal, unless he just made the whole town "disappear".
He called the old shrink and told him what "that fucking quak" did. The shrink told him what was going on and the currently accepted course of treatment for the perceived issue. James was fuming, half the town wanted him dead and the quaks wanted to chop his nuts off. He spoke with Usanagi, she didn't have much advice aside from avoiding it all and living on 2076.
He sat and thought for a while, but settled on a plan of subterfuge. Biological suspension fluid and gel were a thing, so something as permanent as getting castrated might not be so permanent or irreversible. He convinced his private physician to carry out the extended reversible androgen deprivation, but only after learning about what to expect out of being denutted.
He returned to regular Earth 2502 and sealed the bunker, just in case of more bull crap. The new flat door with a flush fit keypad would be good at limiting damage if someone tried to fill it molten steel or concrete. It had been almost almost a day since the surgery and James was feeling depressed, calm, a bit week, and wanted to just curl up and go to sleep despite not having eaten in three days.
Mr. Mchattry was waiting outside of the barn with a shotgun. The conversation was one sided and they were sending him away again. They didn't even set a place for him at the dinner table. Since it was a zero sum gain to say anything about it, he just told them not to drive his new car when it was delivered, or touch his stuff.
Mr. Mchattry asked about the car. James told him that it was a custom order and too much for daily driving unless you wanted to die from a light rain or a patch of gravel. Then the orderlies came and off he went in the back of a van.
The quacks didn't give him anything to eat for a few days, but somehow James was not hungry. He was too tired to be hungry. The older shrink wanted to just take James' word for it, but the new quak wouldn't even settle for a trained urologist giving him the check over. The quak had ordered an exploratory surgery to verify that "the treatment" was properly carried out.
James got six new scars from their search for testicles, and had to stay two extra weeks to heal up enough to be discharged. They had cut open his abdomen, back, and scrotum. When they did discharged him, he came back to a house with locked doors and nobody home.
The barn was locked, but he had a hidden key for it. They wrecked his car. All of his tools were missing from the barn, and someone poured concrete into his bunker. He wasn't faking the horrible sadness, but fought on to check the mail.
Revoked licenses, dropped contracts, kicked out of high school, bank accounts turned over to his parents, companies turned over to CEOs. It all had the same reason. "Due to decline in mental health..." He broke into the house and left the mail on the counter with the past due bills and newspapers.
He went up to his room only to find a note on the door. "We are having another child, we moved your room to the basement. -Love Mom". James checked the room, but there was only a crib. He checked the basement. None of his belongings were there. He went back, grabbed the note. He put a line through the word basement and couldn't come up with anything to replace it with, so he put a question mark and left it on the counter with the mail. He reconsidered, but couldn't find the energy to really care.
He sat down for a while to collect his thoughts. The knock at the door brought him around, out of his partial catatonia. He didn't know exactly how long he had spaced out for. It probably wasn't that long, but they had dropped him off in the morning. It was dark outside. James never heard the door open, he was too far away, off in a catatonic state.
The sheriff had gotten a key from the neighbors. They called him to check in on the house because the Mchattry family was away, tending to their daughter in the hospital after the wreck. James had been sent away, so nobody should be there, but the kitchen light was on. It wasn't on the night before, same with the basement, barn, and James room.
The sheriff wasn't in a big hurry, checking out the barn first. The totalled out Chevelle that had almost killed Chelsea, and did kill her fiance, was still totally destroyed. He found it weird that the place had wall pegs for tools and tool boxes, but no tools. The mismatched concrete in the middle of the barn gave him more of a creepy ledger stone feel than a industrial repair vibe, completely disconnected and foreign to the rest of the barn.
The sheriff switched off the lights after a good look over, locking the door and closing it on his way out. He carefully looked around outside, peering through the windows of the basement and checking for damage and suspects. Most of the curtains were drawn, except for the basement. It was empty.
The sheriff didn't see any signs of forced entry, and the neighbors had said that the barn had been locked as well as the house. Whomever it was had a key, so he decided to knock before entering. Nobody answered. He drew his pistol and started checking rooms. It wasn't long before he found James staring off into nothing at the kitchen table.
The sheriff asked James if he was alright, but there was no response. It creeped him out, stirred up memories of his father coming back from Normandy. He had bouts where he would just stare off like that. He edged over to the phone and tapped the receiver to get an operator.
"Operator, this is Sheriff Charleson. Patch me to the Perry County Sheriff's Department." He waited for it to go through, not taking his eyes off James. "This is the Sheriff, I need a deputy here at the Mchattry residence to keep an eye on James while I check the rest of the house." He hung up afterwards.
It didn't take but ten minutes for them to get out there, but it felt like forever to the sheriff. Nothing had changed, but one of the deputies tripped on the rug coming in. The sound finally clicked something in James head, and he got up to make something to eat.
James settled on a can of condensed soup from the cupboard. He didn't respond to any of the officers because he didn't care to. He couldn't find the can opener, so he just tore the top off of it and ate it with a fork. All the spoons were dirty. The deputies watched with confusion at the choices.
One deputy ask the sheriff "why's he like that?"
"Can't find a can opener. All the spoons are filthy, and I can't bother to give a damn", there was a long pause before he continued with "and no, your presence does not inspire me to give a damn. But I'll save you some readin." James ate another fork full of condensed chicken noodle soup.
"Got released from the asylum, they dumped me here bout eight Monday mornin. Told em not to drive my car or touch muh stuff for they sent me off. Come back to a wrecked seven thousand dollar car, bunker fulla concrete, missing tools, everything I had here is gone. State revoked muh license, feds dropped the contracts, declared insane they wrote. No chance at voting, bank gave my shit to George Mic Hatry, government turned my businesses over to CEOs that don't answer ta me."
James ate another fork of soup. "Elizabeth Mic Hatry wrote a note bout my stuff bein in the basement, it ain there. Whole town hates me, kicked outa school, Jenny's a no go. I caint have kids. Feds limited me to Arkansas only, N y'all actin like I'mma magic up a gun ta choot'cha. That simply put enough? Or do I gotta spell it out?"
The sheriff sent a deputy to check the other rooms while he made a couple phone calls. James finished his soup and thought about maybe washing all the dirty dishes, then realized that they didn't bother, so why should he. The sheriff had contacted Mr. Mchattry over at the hospital in Little Rock. James ended up washing the dishes, but grumbled and cursed the whole time.
They would try and send someone to stay with James, but he'd have to stay in the county jail until then. The sheriff couldn't just leave a presumably crazy person unattended in a house. The sheriff also called the old shrink and told him everything. The shrink showed up a few hours into James' staycation in an otherwise empty jail cell.
James answered the shrinks questions and didn't receive a diagnosis. He just said that he needed to corroborate with Dr. Usanagi. Then he left and James sat there for three days, occasionally eating at the bologna sandwiches they gave him once a day.
Daisy came as soon as the college finals were over, but bumped into Dr. Flanko coming into the county jails reception area. "Doctor Flanko?"
"Yes, I finished consulting another physician and believe to have an answer."
Daisy was confused. "Answer for what? Wait, James just got back from the nuthatch. You're not taking back, are you?"
"Excuse me, but who are you? And no, not taking him back unless this doesn't work on his issue... issues."
"Um, what issues?"
"No idea what to call it, but it has to do with odd genetics, strange hormone functions, stress, brain chemistry, past phycological trauma, his abnormally high IQ, previous treatment, current predicaments, and depression."
"You sound like a quack right now."
"Yes, I do, but Doctor Usanagi explained everything. I just couldn't commit it all to memory, but I have things that definitely will help." The shrink patted his doctor's bag. "Prescriptions from Usanagi and carefully formulated to get his body to make the stuff that makes his brain work right."
"Okay, any clue as to what it is?"
"Yes, actually. Your brother has no junk DNA, which means all of it does, did, or will do something. It was explained to me that every creature and plant has it in every cell in their bodies, except for the red blood cells. It determines most of your physical attributes from gender hair color, even your likely hood for cancer."
"So it will change his DNA?"
"No, your brother has lots of extra stuff going on in his body. One of the things I have is just an antidepressant, but the other one, it is to be given every twenty-four days into a muscle. It's a combination drug that will fill most of the role of the testosterone that his body no longer makes."
"So he was castrated and a side effect was him shutting down for extended periods of time because his testosterone did more than a normal males?"
They were already in front of the cell. James had gone catatonic again.
"Yes, and the custom prescription will fill most of the role. It won't effect the libido because of the primary chemical compound. It was originally created to keep soldiers from becoming sexually involved with anyone while deployed and eliminate the chances of sexually transmitted disease from foreign nations. It worked, but was trashed due to it causing atrophy and accidental permanent atrophic castration of the recipients."
The sheriff had been hanging around, making sure that nothing too weird happened. Like random explosive landmines on spider legs or robots, or unidentified aircraft, ground vehicles, or something. James was Gopher Boy after all, but the conversation was still a bit too out there. He added to it.
"So you are going to give him something design on a different planet that causes all sorts of stuff in hopes that it will help?" The sheriff wasn't too sure about using such, but wasn't going to stop it. He just wanted James out of his jail.
"It may seem counter intuitive to administer a potent low side effect chemical castration drug to someone that has been surgically castrated, but the drug was widely used in punitive corrections to great effect. It will also get his brain to make the chemical it needs. Naturally, his body would have the testosterone, that was unique to him, to get his brain to do the thing. There were once plants that had a similar effect. We have a fungus like that, but prescribing hallucinogenic mushrooms is likely a bad idea."
There was a lot of medical stuff discussed while the shrink administered the drug cocktail. It was four shots, each in a different muscle, both deltoids and both glutes. It wasn't long until what was said sank in with the sheriff.
"So James brain has so much extra thinking power that his brain requires what is essentially a natural perviten, but a lot more powerful, so that it can work. Like how some cars need additives or supergas to run right?"
"Yes, like the methamphetamine in the Nazi drug Perviten, but it's not. It just does the same thing, far better and almost no side effects."
"Super meth without side effects? Sounds like something that would be weaponized rather quickly."
"That's why the doctors on two zero seven six refuse to say anything about the actual compound, they call it Blitz. They also keep it super secret. Oh, and it's completely lethal in any substantial dose, to anyone normal at least."
"Great my little brother is a natural druggie, flying on amphetamine since birth."
"Not quite that simple, Daisy. His DNA is coded for it, so God made him that way? Odd coming from me, but that's my best guess."
Things started improving in an hour, when James actually ate the whole bologna sandwich. It was slow and took him twenty minutes, but he ate it. It was like watching a bad C list movie, you know it's not entertaining or good to watch, but it's what's there.
After the sandwich, the shrink declared him good to go. He handed a hard case to Daisy and gave her a very brief run down of what was in it and why. Then, with a quick "call me if anything else goes wrong with James", then he left.
"So we'll see you in twenty four days, right?"
"No, any properly trained nurse can administer the solditrone intramuscular injections, goodbye."
"He's gone. Do I have to bail James out, or can I just drag him out to the van?"
The sheriff looked at Daisy, looked at James, then called for a deputy to help haul him out of the jailhouse. He started walking with them as support as they got closer to the exit. They set him in a chair in the lobby where they could finalize some paperwork about why he was there and how long. They always gave the state full paperwork, states love paperwork.
It took Daisy two hours worth of phone calls to get all of the information to complete the paperwork. James had pretty well come around and helped her finish it. Then the receptionist remarked "wow, most people just put the name, maybe a birthday, and some form of insults. The aliases is also usually blank, but it is supposed to have all former names, nicknames, and call signs."
James sighed deeply and gestured for her to hand the paperwork back. It only had his current name and the nicknames Gopher Boy and Vunder Kraut, an unappealing nickname that only Daisy called him. He added his full original name and some of the things he was called (but only in this life).
"No wonder they changed it. You had a last name, a rank for a middle name, and another last name." The receptionist seemed a little too proud of herself for pointing that out and Daisy got nosey. She picked on him for having Sergeant as his middle name.
The affiliation spot was also filled. There was no room to put anything else. The receptionist's picking around about including rivals and any arch nemesis that he may have as Sgt Vunder Kraut and Gopher Boy was ignored.
They finally left the jail, but James stopped in his tracks when he'd seen it. "No, not that damned dirty hippie van from the protests two years ago." The T1 Volkswagen van was sitting there, as dirty as it was during the protests against the new clean furnaces of Plant Saturnite, the cleanest blast furnaces to ever exist.
"So, you already know Enrique then?"
James just grunted in response to Daisy's question.
"Good, because there's no reason to take you back home and nowhere else that comes to mind..."
"That house was never a home to me, just a place to exist in."
"Wow. That's a statement. But also the van only has enough gas to get back to the apartment I'm staying at."
"Wait. Not all of my things are encased in concrete. If we had enough gas, we could make it to my house."
"You have a house?"
"Yes, I built it myself with plenty of growing room. I intend to... I had intended to marry Jenny and move there. No use planning a future anymore, everything is downhill from here. Won't even be my house when they finalize the paperwork."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"They declared me legally insane, all of the things I owned will belong to Mister and Misses Mic Hatry. Accounts, businesses, property, all of it to people who treated me like a mut they got from the pound."
"Oh, come on. Sure they will own it on paper, but they love you and I'm certain that they will talk with you about it all."
"No, it'll be just like the three times they sent me to the asylum. They don't care to listen or know or even attempt to understand my side of things. They'll sell it all and send me a different asylum because she's pregnant and the state won't let someone raise a child around an insane individual."
"It won't be like that, I promise."
"Just like when you promised to stop calling me a kraut."
"You know I only pick on you because I love you. Hell, since you were adopted, I kinda used to like you in a different way. But that's a story for a different time, let's go."
"Wait, let's check a map and take stock of what we have before we go."
Daisy realized that what "the crazy one" just said made sense. They checked for change or money, only found a nickel. Then they went back inside to check a map. Daisy came to the conclusion that they didn't actually have enough fuel to go anywhere but out to the farmhouse, where they lived, and a gas station, maybe an extra stop.
They wouldn't make it back to her apartment outside Little Rock. They also wouldn't make it to James' house in the mountains. They would have to settle for the Mchattry farmhouse and hope to find enough change to get them somewhere.
James didn't want to try the bank, because of the notification about his accounts. Even though the paperwork hadn't been finalized, they would likely refuse any services for him and Daisy had closed her account with them before going to college. Daisy insisted that they try, and it didn't work out. The bank, even though the accounts hadn't been signed over, refused due to James being legally insane.
They ended up back at the farmhouse, where there was a total of two days worth of canned food and no electricity. They didn't pay the electric bill before the accident and all the food in the fridge and freezer went bad. The power had been shut off the morning after the Sheriff took James to jail. They were thinking and Daisy wanted to call Earl, her boyfriend, and George. That plan was out, because the telephone bill was late too and the hospital didn't like taking collect calls.
The water was also shut off, but James just laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Daisy was not having his craziness and slapped him. "The hell are we supposed to do? Everything has gone sideways and you're going to laugh?" She grabbed his shoulders and gave him a shake. "Use that kraut brain of yours to figure something out."
James stopped laughing and gave Daisy a serious look. She didn't know what to expect, so she backed up a few steps. "James, what's that look about. You're scaring me." James grinned, "ha, you weak willed hippie. Go walk over to the Henderson's, see if they'll let you use the phone. I'm going to search for anything useful."
"Anything useful, so you're going to plunder through everything in hopes of finding what?"
"The hose adapter so that we can use the water from the barn in here or maybe some petty cash. Something that could be used to at least partially fix one of the many problems."
Daisy sharply inhaled when it hit her.
"The barns water and power is off the bunker! I knew that brain was still good."
James demanded an apology for the slap, but Daisy refused. She almost made the mistake of driving the shitty van to the neighbors, but caught herself before she turned the key. While the VW T1 was good on fuel, a quart of gasoline won't get you all too far before you end up walking. It was only a half mile over the hill, and she was a big girl. She could handle a little stroll, James used to run ten miles a day to school, so a mile with a good break was nothing.
She was out of shape. Her boyfriend appreciated her "extra curvyness", but she wasn't doing so well. She vowed to walk more and smoke less weed to herself. In hindsight, she didn't. Her moral and conviction were best described as "hippie like", despite her gothic manner of dress and greaser like mannerisms.
James almost laughed at her obviously panting silhouette atop the nearby hill, but he had things to do. He slipped into the barn and checked the fuel gauge in the wreck. Half a tank of premium gas, just sitting there, going to waste. That wouldn't do, not at all, he'd keep an eye out for anything to help salvage the fuel.
He got to work looking for things that could be of use, starting with the stupid shed that they insisted needed to be washed, repainted, and the roof scraped and resealed every damned summer. It had a padlock, emphasis on "had". James found the water hoses, a few adapters that he'd made years ago, a couple empty Jerry cans, an assortment of lawn and garden tools, and the crappy converted ride on mower along with the far faster push mower and weed whacker.
The weed whacker was capable of mowing the grass faster than the ride on, and the dirt bike was there and still in need of a new engine. James looked at the bike, then looked at the nuclear electric mower, then at the lack of mechanical tools and sighed. He had options for egress, at least. He used one water hose and an adapter to hook water up to the house from the barn, not high flow, but it was running water. Then thought again and used the second of the three for the same thing.
He had a plan for the new hose, and it didn't involve water. It was a plan, but he wanted to check his other options first. He had to get to Four Peaks where he could at least have some modicum of comfort. Sure it was listed as an Embassy, but it was just the giant mansion he had built for the delusion of having a happy life.
He went and checked the attic, maybe he could find a change of clothes that weren't pajamas patterned and textured like Auschwitz surplus. The abrasive effects were starting be more than irritating. He lucked out and found some uncle someone's old military stuff. Uncle David, George's brother that died by an unsecured piece of cargo on the way back from some conflict. Korea maybe, but definitely one of the Eastern hell holes.
Nothing goes as good together as camo cargo pants with a white T-shirt and facial scars. He stopped to grab some of the petroleum jelly and some gauze for his abrasion before searching every nook and cranny. He turned up pocket change, pawnable stuff like guns and jewelry, and other useless things. Then there was the locked door in the basement.
It was where George kept his tools, his own personal workshop. James gave the door a half hearted kick and it just so happened to fall off it's hinges. As expected, George didn't sell any of his stuff for the hospital bills, he just sold off all of James' NKH Steel and Company tools.
James stopped for a second to contemplate why he didn't just use his weird powers and teleport or retrieve a vehicle from one of his temporal pocket storage or a pocket dimension, or why he ever bothered to try and live that life in a remotely feasible fashion. He came back without any reasons remaining aside from not being stripped of said weird powers again. Then he remembered that the gods would lock all of it down as soon as they found out.
He grabbed some tools and went about dropping the fuel tank of the Chevelle and draining it into the van and the Jerry cans. He then remembered the stupid RV cable. He could have wired it between the barn and house, but dismissed the idea because it really felt like it was helping an enemy.
He turned water back off and went about disassembling the mower and dirt bike. He figured to taking them apart would help him decide on if to make the bike nuclear electric or put the gear box from the bike on the mower, if possible. To nobody's surprise, the dirt bike didn't have enough frame space and the parts weren't compatible.
James figured that would be the case. Then he remembered the old brush cutter and the welding machine and checked out the rear end of the Chevelle. One of the rims was bent, but most of the damage was in the front and roof, so the differential was good. He had a high tech redneck moment.
Daisy was taking her dear sweet time, so she came back after dark. Just in time to see James welding together an abomination of what could be loosely referred to as a ride on mower. It was a ride on brush cutter with some of the properties of a zero turn, some. It wasn't a zero turn, but it could turned by locking one brake or the other like some half assed tank design or by turning the front wheels. It did end up with a top speed of forty five miles per hour.
Daisy's response of "what the hell is that" was not amiss amongst the arts. The arts being the cobbling together of a nuclear electric skid brush cutter with bucket seats and a car's transmission and rear end. James explained it as "I got bored."
She wanted to know why it was built instead of focusing on restoring electricity and water. James shot back by explaining that all she had to do was hook up the hoses and use the old RV cable to connect the buildings, adding a quip about laziness and it's correlation with obesity. Daisy complained, but didn't press the issue and did the "small tasks".
Daisy knew that her father was going to be angry about his tools and the mower, but that would definitely take a back seat to everything else. James couldn't give two shits about George's tools. The asshole was told not to touch his stuff, so reciprocation was fair game.
Daisy was relieved to have fuel, but too tired to drive and settle for having dinner, a bath, and some sleep. James took a shower for the first time in over a week, after cleaning the van. After the shower, and Daisy went to bed, he took the telephone from the kitchen.
He took it out to the barn and plugged it in under the back workbench upstairs. He called Four Peaks Embassy and requested Bast. The call immediately switched from a fake secretary to the artificial intelligence of Bastet. The conversation was short and in Godspeak.
A car arrived in the morning to collect James. He made plans and strategized with Bastet until he received an honest to God draft notice from the United States Department of Defense. He ended up dying in the Vietnam War, after a heroin addict s.o. shot him in the face with an enemy's AK and left him there.