෴Midnight෴

෴Hex෴

෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

I Need Help Part 2

෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

When Midnight stirred after nearly eighteen hours of sleep, he looked around in confusion for a moment before realizing where he was.

Sitting across the room with a book, Hex looked up at him, “I was beginning to think you’d decided to go into a coma rather than answer my questions.”

“Oh no. What did I—” his hands went to his face, probing and feeling his features. He shot to his feet and rushed to the bathroom.

“You’ve looked like an older Raz for most of a day, that little secret has flown,” she called out after him.

He emerged a few minutes later with a mortified expression, “You shouldn’t have seen that,” he dropped back onto the couch.

“Too bad for you. I’ve seen you, and now I want an explanation. Who are you really?” She pressed, her tone devoid of sympathy.

He leaned forward, letting his head rest in one hand. “You know who I am.”

She looked skeptical, “Do I? Are you a clone? Is he? Are you related? Some kind of time traveler? I don’t know the questions to ask, so just tell me!”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and then looked up at her, “Well, you brought up time travel, so maybe this won't be as hard to explain as usual, I’ll answer you, but only on the condition that you let me tell him. It’s a lot to take in, and I don’t want him to freak out or make any snap decisions.”

She thought about that for a moment, “No. No way. First off, I don’t keep secrets from Raz, my Raz, the real Raz,” she didn’t miss the way he flinched at her words, “More than that, that kind of ‘I’ll tell him when it’s time’ is how we got in this whole mess, and it never works out!”

He sighed and leaned back on the couch, “You know what, sure, let's do it your way. It’s obvious that you know him better than I do. Everything about this time around has been screwed right from the start, but I have to admit he’s surprised me, in a good way. So fine, I’ll tell you, and you tell him, but I’d still prefer to be there.”

She half nodded, “If possible, that’s fine. But I’m not getting dragged into some bullshit sitcom where I somehow agree not to tell him, then he finds out at the worst possible moment, then learns that I was keeping it from him after promising I wouldn't do that, and that leads to him turning to the dark side or something,” she blurted out in a rush, “So no, ‘if possible’ is the best I can do. I plan to tell him as soon as I can.”

He looked at her intently for a long moment, before shrugging, “The more of this side of you I see, the more I realize why you two are such a good match.”

She hid a smile behind a cough, “Quit stalling. What’s your deal?”

“Got any food?” He countered.

“Actually, I’ve got Chinese delivery on the way already,” she answered, her eyes remaining locked on him, “What is your deal?”

“That sounds great. Where should I start? You want to know about the anomalies? You want to know about the Megiror? You want to know who I am?

She held up a notebook, “I have a whole list of questions I’ve come up with over the years,” she tossed the notebook back on the couch, “And I’d love to get you into a nice Q&A interview sometime, but right now I’m not going to play the ‘ask me questions’ game with you. You know what you’re hiding, and by your own words, it doesn't matter anymore, so just tell me!”

“I’m so tempted to send you a life experience packet, just to watch you struggle with it. It would explain everything, but your nature wouldn't handle it well, and I try not to be petty.”

Midnight looked over at the front door, then back at her, “I should tell my whole story sometime, but for now I guess the first thing I should tell you is that yes, I’m Raz, but I’m not your Raz. Adele is my mother, but she’s more his mother than mine, and she doesn’t let me forget it. That’s something that seems constant across time.”

Hex leaned forward, “Yes, time. You’ve said a lot of things about time that make me wonder if you’re able to see the future. What’s the deal there?”

His eyes went wide, “Time! How long was I asleep?”

She glanced at the wall clock, “A bit over eighteen hours. I figured you had to be running on empty if you slept that long.”

He sat forward, tension filling his movements, “Time. I have a time problem. I need to get some livestock to Mercator right away!” His stomach grumbled loudly, “I’ll answer you till I’m done eating, but after that, we’ll have to reconvene later.”

She looked at him with a wary suspicion, “If you’re Raz, how similar are you?”

He shrugged, “What are you really asking? I’ve got a much different life, and a lot more of it, than he has. At the core, we’re pretty close, probably why we get along like fire and gasoline, another constant over time.”

She nodded, “I had noticed you both have a gift for annoying each other. If you’re like him, your promises mean something. You’ve always been pretty careful about making promises, so I’m going to assume the best, that you take your word seriously.”

He nodded, “I do. I don’t make promises lightly. But, if I’m being honest, I’ve probably failed a lot more people than he has.”

She brushed that aside, “You have a time problem. I have a problem in that I don’t know where my Raz is. I won’t pretend to understand why you’re so willing to just throw up your hands and give up, though I have my suspicions.”

Midnight rolled his neck around till it popped, “And?”

She chewed her lip, then continued, “And, if you’re willing to give me your word that you’ll stop keeping secrets from me, and Raz, I’ll table this discussion for now, and help you find Adele, if you help me find Raz.”

He shook his head, “I don’t need to find her. I know where she is. I need some help, some heavy hitters to get her out of there. This isn’t the kind of fight you’d be much help with, sorry to say.”

She sniffed, “Judging by the foot-long scar on your chest, doesn’t seem like a great fight for you either,” she retorted.

He shrugged and rubbed at the scar through the t-shirt, “You’re not wrong, but I’ve taken him before. Having Ade—my mom there, made me too careful, too slow.”

“What kind of help are you looking for? You say I can’t help, which I hate, but maybe I know someone,” she leaned back and looked at the ceiling in thought.

He peeked under the shirt at the scar before scratching at it again, “Anyone who can fight. Thing is, he’s a damn master of a spatial chain, as far as I can tell. Anyone who maxes out a chain is a force to be reckoned with, and I suspect he has more tricks than that. So ideally, someone who can kill him fast, survive his hits, and not get hit by his portal-based attacks.”

She frowned, “Sounds like you’re looking for a real super-human generalist. If Chris was—Ah crap. I need you to help out Chris, the metal guy. Wilson’s too mad at you to help his own people.”

The doorbell rang.

Midnight smiled, “Hope that’s the food.”

“Damn speedy delivery,” she muttered on the way to the door.

Moments later Midnight was too busy tearing into fried meat and vegetables to answer questions.

Once he’d eaten his fill, several entire meals, he leaned back and let out a long sigh of satisfaction, “Regarding your friend, I’ll try to help. From what little I heard, he needs a healer as well.”

“Raz can heal,” she blurted out without thinking.

He snorted, “Very funny. But seriously, he’ll need someone to do some flesh sculpting if those hands are as bad as I heard.”

Hex looked at him in confusion, “I’m serious. He’s got a healing ability. Seemed like a good one.”

Midnight arched a brow at her, “Assuming you’re serious, and not just trying to bump him up my priority list, that is shocking to me. I’d admit it would have been handy from time to time, but I cannot imagine spending my limited total capacity on a healing chain. I hate being the healer.”

She rolled her eyes, “I’ve heard him say the same thing. It was stupid when he said it, and if you’re older and supposedly wiser, it's even more stupid to hear it from you. Don’t you get it? There is no, ‘the healer’. I looked it up, do you know how many people are known to have a decent, not even good, just decent, healing ability on the whole planet?”

He didn't answer.

“Well, do you? No one’s certain, but it's somewhere around five to ten people in the world, total.”

He closed his eyes and clenched his fists under the table, “Whatever the real number is, it's ten people fewer now than it was this time last week,” he shook off the memory with visible effort, “So you’re saying Raz went heavy on healing. That is a surprise, obviously healing of any kind is a strong support ability. I just… well, let's just say I’m surprised to see him invest in a support ability.”

“Damn right it is! It’s a force multiplier at a bare minimum. You’re obviously looking down on him. You shouldn't. When he’s in his zone, the feeling of power rolling off him would be scary if it were anyone else.”

“It’s enough you can feel it?”

She nodded, “Yeah, no joke, it’s a lot. More than I’ve ever felt from you. Almost like a physical weight when he’s… doing whatever he does to make that happen. Don’t get me started on what it feels like when he turns on his new attack power.”

Midnight’s jaw dropped, “He has a third ability chain already? He’s moving so fast.”

Hex nodded, “You ever stand outside when there’s a storm coming, and you feel the wind rushing over your hands, and it carries a sort of energy in it, like a warning, but because you’ve got a safe place to go when the storm actually gets there, you can just stand there and feel it in the air?”

Midnight’s expression turned wistful, “When I was a kid, we’d visit my grandparents. They live out west in the rockies. I felt it there any time a summer storm was coming.”

She pointed at him, “Exactly, that’s the kind of dry air, higher altitude I’ve felt it the most clearly. When he turns on this new trick he’s got, it’s like feeling that energy, dialed up to a million, and about to strike you down,” she shivered at the memory, “I’ve only felt it once, and I’m pretty sure it was unintentional. But I’d hate to be on the wrong side of that power.”

“That is, interesting. Sounds like he went with a directed energy type ability. Hope he picked a good one. Plenty of those sound good but turn you into a one-trick pony. I’m worried if you can feel it like that, he might have picked one that’s wasteful, or not have much control over it.”

“I don't know all that. How soon can you get back there? We need to find him,” she insisted.

Midnight absently scratched at his fresh scar, “I need to buy time with Mercator, then I’ll head back there and look around again. We don’t have a whole lot of time before things get crazy, and so many things I’d like to do before then.”

She held up a hand, “Not yet. Before anything else, I want to know why,” her tone went hard.

He looked at her and cocked his head to the side, every small mannerism of his expression and body language suddenly making her ask how she’d ever not known he was Raz.

“Why what?” He finally said.

“Why the trickery? Why all the cloak and dagger? You acted like I was your trusted confidante, and the more I learn, the more I realize I was just another asset to be used.”

She smacked her own forehead, “But mainly, why would you set me to watch over yourself, and not tell me it was you?” She let it all out in a rush of words, then sat back against the chair and looked at him expectantly.

“That’s a much bigger question than you think. I wish I had an answer that will satisfy you,” he remarked around a spring roll.

“You’re doing it again! You’re acting like we’ve had this discussion already, and you already know how it’s going to go, so why do it, it’s pointless, blah blah blah!” She punctuated the sentence by slamming her hand down on the table.

“If you know the future. If you even just know me, you should know that won't be enough,” her tone and cadence flat with barely masked threat.

He popped the last spring roll into his mouth and looked at the kitchen clock as he chewed, “I’m not trying to evade the question. Really, I’m not. I just don’t know how to answer you in a way that won't turn into an hours-long discussion, and I just haven’t got that kind of time.”

“It sounds like things aren’t lining up with your expectations in a lot of areas. At this point, what have you got to lose by just leveling with me?” She lowered her voice, trying to project calm.

“I keep things close to my chest because every time, it seems that some random event changes major things by this point. That part isn’t a surprise, what with chaos theory, the butterfly effect and all, but I can’t seem to nail down all the triggers for different events. I’m seeing all kinds of new problems, and solutions, this time around I’ve never run into before,” he saw her start to say something and waved her back, “Yes, I know. I said this time was bad from the start. But at the very least, I need to learn everything I can,” he rested his elbow on the table and pinched the bridge of his nose, “That, and the real truth is, it’s hard for me to treat things like they don’t matter. Hard on my soul.”

“So how does your time machine work?” She tried to change the subject.

He let out a sharp, barking laugh, “Time machine. I wish. It’s nothing so precise and easy as some device,” he glanced at the clock again, “Incursions, better known as anomalies, those are holes ripped in the fabric of space and time, and somehow they’ve put two worlds with very little in common into chronological lockstep. I use these holes, these wounds, in reality, to go back in time. There is a lot more to it, and I’m happy to sit down and talk about it sometime, but not now.”

“How? They’ve tried all sorts of ways to go through those things, or even just get some data. You can see into them, but nothing has ever gone in.”

“Time and space. My dad was a physicist. When an anomaly popped up in the Mars extremophile artificial environment at the university he worked at, he studied it in detail. The sealed and controlled environment of the artificial environment let him learn some interesting things. For instance, if everything that comes out of an incursion dies right away, it starts to shrink. Eventually he had to keep some of them alive in the habitat to keep it from closing altogether.”

She frowned, “That’s interesting, but I don’t see ho—”

“I’m getting there!” He snapped, “he tried a lot of the same ways everyone else tried to get something through the opening, or get anything through at all. You can touch the event horizon, you know. It doesn’t really feel like anything. If you push on the opening lightly, it feels like you’re not even pushing at all, very confusing to your nervous system. If you punch it, or otherwise hit it, it feels like it hits you back just as hard. If you shoot a bullet at it, the bullet disappears. Many people tried that one. Nothing worked, until he tried a railgun.”

“Your dad had a railgun?”

He chuckled, seeming for a moment, to be a much younger man, “Well, yes, but not really. One of his students had built a barely portable railgun that used a capacitor bank and a lot of hand-wound electromagnets to accelerate a 2cm long thin steel rod to between mach 2 and 3. It wasn’t very reliable, in terms of speed, or accuracy, but it worked, and they could just press the opening right up to the event horizon, so missing wasn’t an issue.”

She leaned forward in her seat, “So what happened then?”

“Well, they got there Monday morning and discovered that the artificial Mars environment had developed a problem. A seal somewhere had failed. My dad verified that the leak had started late Friday night. The anomaly was still there, so they decided to proceed with the test. They set up, and fired the railgun. The engraved slug vanished at the event horizon, as they more or less expected.”

He paused long enough for Hex to wave her hand as if to say, “and then?”

“Later that day, he tracked down the leak from Friday night. It was a tiny hole in the outer wall, made by the railgun projectile. It was the same engraved projectile they’d shot at the surface of the anomaly that morning.”

“So you shot a hyperspeed bullet back in time? So you’re saying it takes a little more speed than 88 miles per hour? What about the rest of the bullets people were shooting at them?” She asked.

“Right, and it turned out it wasn’t just railgun projectiles. Regular bullets go back in time as well. The math was never completed, but the speed of the projectile, plus the mass, are both factors. Enough speed is needed to get through the surface, but once through, mass also matters. Thing is, the angle, and velocity are usually preserved.”

“Usually?” she prompted.

“Like I said, I still don’t know all the details, and doing pure academic research isn’t really feasible once bigger things start coming through.”

She leaned forward with another question on her lips. He forestalled her with a gesture, “This is what I mean. By trying to answer one minor question, I spark dozens more, which would take hours to answer, and those answers would spark a thousand more questions, and so on. There is just too much to tell, so it’s easier to keep everything to myself.”

Midnight covered his mouth and let out a soft belch, “That was damn good. I need to go deal with some things, but I’ll field one more question.”

Hex nodded, “I’ll hold you to that question, and save it for later,” another aspect walked in, geared up and heavily armed, “I’m coming with you.”