The sun was setting in the seemingly calm evening, coloring the wide fields of wheat with an orange glow. A light breeze rippled the flowing tops of grain, as a slow creaking noise began to drift along a nearby road.
An older man, his face ripe with the aged harshness of toiling fields, pushed the rickety wooden cart with a slow, steady pace. The shaky left wheel creaked with constant precision; the harsh, grey pebbles of the unpaved road leaving an age-old film of dust and wear along the chipped cedar.
The farmer began to slow to a stop, as a series of vibrations started picking up under the worn soles of his boots. He slowly turned a bit, his stiff neck refusing to cooperate. Down the road, coming up fast, a series of lights met his eyes.
The ground began to vibrate a bit harder, as the farmer squinted his eyes, trying to see past the lights.
They were growing, faster and faster....getting closer and closer...
Suddenly, a low wave of bass rattled the back of his teeth, as two Royal Mandelovian personnel transports shot past with a roar of anti-grav pistons.
The farmer gripped the hat on his head tight, as a plume of dust enveloped him in the backlash of speed...
"...why doesn't that guy just fly?" Ozzy asked, peering out through the rear observation window.
The interior of the transport was spacious, comfortable, and brimming with the ever-present superior technological advance that had made Mandelovia so very famous.
"Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in Mandelovia is a metahuman." Phil replied, lounging back in one of the luxurious leather seaters.
"Well, why doesn't he have a...a 'flying car'...like this one...?" he asked, still staring at the farmer, growing smaller in the distance. "I thought Schanz said Maldanolvia had tech that kicked everything..."
"Sure. They do..." Smith nodded, his head propped in his palm. "...but, most of the patents are owned by either the government, or corporations."
Ozzy sat back in his lounger, finally facing forward again. Phil sat facing him, legs propped on the small bolted table seperating them.
"So, even in an advanced society, the rich stay rich..."
"...and the poor go without anti-gravitational transports..." Phil added with a wry smile.
Ozzy grunted, folding his arms with a yawn.
"...damn...I think I'm going to get some shut-eye..." he said, his eyes already closed. "...wake me when we get to the Palace..."
"What are you doing here?"
Ozzy's eyes opened.
"What...?" he asked, his voice hoarse with fatigue.
Phil stared at him. Not in an unkind manner. But, with one of skepticism. An aloofness, obvious, yet, subtle.
"What...are...you...doing...here?" he asked, slowly.
"The boss hasn't filled you guys in?" he replied, his eyes closing again.
"All we know is that you and Diff' over here...", he thumbed to his right, the alien Adem Different never looking up from his study of Jym. "...were brought in to compensate for an unexpected loss of manpower."
Baxter sighed.
"I'm a prisoner, man." he responded. "Due to some unforseen complications...and some pretty shitty luck...I'm doing a long, long tour in the 'Vanguard Army'."
"...okay..." Phil nodded, still not quite sure what he meant.
"Sorry." Ozzy said, his eyes still closed. "Was that not what you wanted to hear?"
"No, no...I had no expectations, either way." Smith shrugged. "We're all here for crazy reasons."
"And you just wanted to know what brand of 'crazy' I brought to the mix?"
"Something like that..." Phil smiled.
Ozzy grinned, even though his eyes remained closed.
{Searching....searching...}
"Oh, damn well speed it up, eh?" Adem said with abruptness.
{Yes, yes of course...pardon me for taking so very long. I am, only, scanning every database of the entire species...}
"Sarcasm, Jym? Was that sarcasm?" he asked, leaning in a bit closer to the palm screen.
{Of course not. That is against the rules.}
"The rules? What rules?"
{Page four-thousand, seven-hundred-fifty, paragraph three, sub-section Alpha-J-Nine of the Exquisite First Class Paradise Galactic Travel Agency Employee Guidelines: At no given time shall any employee engage in any harmful, offensive, provocative, intelligent, luring, embarrassing, insulting, or sarcastic characteristic, language, posture, dialect, or sodium-oxide content which may provoke, cajole, cause, enable, demand, force, or negotiate any given client's immediate perception of reality into a frame other than the one in which he/she/GOBULUS/they/it originally possessed at the time of contract signature.}
Adem opened his mouth to speak...
{Forthwith, shall no member, being, prodigy, relation, or imaginary janitor of the aformentioned Exquisite First Class Paradise Galactic Travel Agency make any infered, implied, repeated, blatant--}
"Jym."
{--boisterous, arrogant, asinine, flagrant--}
"Jym!"
Phil glanced over at the alien, even as Ozzy cracked a single eye into a barely open slit.
{...Yes...?}
"Listen, I simply asked for the type of transportation that peculiar soil-walker--"
"It's called a 'cart'."
Adem paused, looking over towards Phil.
"Cart." he repeated with a nod.
"Right."
"What is the fusion-consumption rate of this...'cart'?"
Phil grinned.
"It...doesn't have those...things..." he answered. "It's a box...on two wheels..."
Adem's eyes peered at the man. Then, he looked back down at Jym.
"You didn't tell me Perdita--"
{Earth.}
"You didn't tell me Earth had made contact with the Bokkz Colony."
{I believe the mammal's usage of the word is in reference to 'a four-sided object of various practicality and function; a fundamental geometric shape of considerable simplicity'.}
"Ah." Adem nodded, looking back up at Phil. "This...'bokkz'...how does it travel?"
"Well...as I said, it's on two wheels..."
"Right....right..." Adem nodded.
He jerked his eyes back down towards Jym.
"What the gargleblaster is a 'wheel'...?"
Seated back-to-back with the grouping of chairs, another row of loungers accomadated two more passengers.
Tayden's eyes stared out at the passing countryside, the sunlight playing off his thick locks, the vaguest hint of a golden aura settling upon his head.
Brianna sat across from him, her gaze set on the fiery sunset, as well.
They had sat there for the past half-hour in silence. Not the awkward silence of strangers, mind you. Just, a pleasant, peaceful silence, borne of thoughful minds.
But, within that silence, a small tune had been forming in the air between the two. A melody, that had begun humming ever-so-lightly on Tayden's lips. The flowing notes, barely above a whisper, had worked its way into Bri's daydream, the song flowing in time under her breath.
After a time, she slowly looked up, realizing that she had been singing.
And that Tayden was singing the same song.
"...and the sun shall rise, when winter sets...the birth of gods brings nature's rest..." they both sang in a quiet harmony.
Brianna sighed with a heavy emotion.
"...that's...Ava' Taria..." she finally spoke, her voice hush.
Tayden's mouth crinkled into the barest of smiles, never breaking his tune, even as he turned his eyes towards her.
Brianna stared at him, his perfect pitch flowing softly across her ears.
"I...I used to...sing it...every night..." she spoke, staring almost wide-eyed at him. "...in the prison..."
"...sitting on your bed...huddled in the dark..." Tayden's voice soothed.
"...all those nights..." she continued. "...I couldn't..."
"...you couldn't sleep...you would sing Ava' Taria to soothe your mind..."
"It was...something I had heard when I was a child..." she said, her eyes wide with random memories of years gone by. "...it's about the death of structure...the death of oppression..."
"It comforted you...wrapped you in a blanket of warmth and familiarity..."
"How...how do you know these things about me?" she asked, staring at the smiling ex-angel.
"My dear girl..." he replied. "...I was always with you..."
"Harvard? Really?" Phil asked with a hint of bemusement.
"Yep." Ozzy replied, his eyes still closed. "I held the feather-weight belt for three years."
"So, that's where that scar comes from..."
Ozzy reached up, grazing his fingers across the small scar along the corner of his left eye.
"Yeah...Chester Barris..." the man said. "...what a prick that guy was, let me tell you...but, damn if he didn't have left-hook that cracked the sound barrier..."
"So, you haven't been...'indestructible'...all of your life, huh?"
"Nope. Got tough about thirteen years ago."
"Weird."
"What?"
"Well, I mean, metagenes usually fire during puberty. Wonder why yours waited so long?"
Ozzy shrugged.
"Who knows? Probably all that pot I smoked during my pseudo-Bohemian years....stunted my growth..."
"Is that why your hair is white?"
Ozzy's eyes opened, his head raising with an annoyed air.
"You sure ask alot of questions, man..." Baxter said, an irritated expression crossing his face.
"Sorry. Didn't mean to hit a nerve." Smith shrugged.
Meanwhile, in the second transport, Chance, Grimm, Priest, Velo, Nadia, and Drax discussed their quickly approaching encounter with D'Goon...
