The next few weeks seemed like an eternity. I was so disconnected from the outside world that I had really no idea where to begin to try and find the Doomaki. They had been off the radar from everyone for 18 years; they were good at staying hidden. A seasoned detective wouldn’t have been able to find them, much less an 18 year old that had barely been out of his personal secluded dimension. If it hadn’t been for Drake I would have been completely lost. Given the fact that Drake’s father, Troy, was the leader of The Peacekeepers, he had travelled to a lot of places throughout the galaxy and developed many useful relationships with different people and leaders. Drake wasn’t with his father near as much as he wanted, but he was still able to get plenty of exposure to the way the galaxy was run and was able to visit many planets. Once Drake turned 18 he was able to accompany Troy on a lot of his Peacekeeping ventures, so he had two solid years of exposure to many of the things The Peacekeepers saw and did.

Even with that, the galaxy was a large place, and there was a lot of places to look. Drake had a handful of people to start with, so that meant a lot of downtime in our spaceship as we traveled and investigated. It was good having Drake with me to pass the time. We were using my ship; since Tyfoonica was gone, no one was going to miss it. We didn’t bother saying goodbye to anyone because we knew The Council would have forbade us to go on this expedition. Even without us saying anything, though, they knew what we were doing. They had reached out to us several times and sent us several transmissions but we didn’t answer any of them. We reviewed their messages regularly to ensure they hadn’t found anything useful that would aid us in finding Tyfoonica, and also that they hadn’t already found him. They were extremely upset with us and felt we were potentially throwing out lives away. Plus there was the occasional reminder that we could be subject to legal consequences since we were directly disobeying orders from The Council which was against the law. But none of that mattered to me. The only thing that mattered was finding Tyfoonica.

We had already made half a dozen stops at various places, but so far, no one had heard anything useful about the Doomaki. The most we found were people terrified to learn that the rumors they had heard about the Doomaki’s return were true.

“We should be arriving at sector 1178 in the XFQ province in a few hours.” Drake said. I groggily rubbed my eyes and looked over to him; I had been nodding off on the couch near the navigation panel where Drake was. Drake looked over to me. “That’s where planet Threschar is. Once we reach the XFQ province it won’t take long to get there.” I nodded in acknowledgement.

“Awesome.” I said semi-enthusiastically through a yawn. “I can’t wait to get off this ship. I’ve gotten spoiled living where Fiora is, it’s pretty close to just about all the places Tyfoonica and I regularly go. Spending days at a time in a ship sucks.”

“Haha yeah, welcome to my world.” Drake said with a laugh.

“Who are we meeting with again?” I asked.

“A guy named Estrada. He isn’t a political leader or anything, but he is a gossip king. Knows a lot about the goings on in the galaxy. He’s also really strong, strong enough that the Doomaki may have tried to recruit him as some point.” At that last point, my nostrils flared and I felt my face get flushed.

“In that case, how do we know he isn’t in league with the Doomaki?” I said, trying to control my voice as rage swelled up in me.

“Not this guy, he absolutely LOATHES authority. He can’t stand having someone in charge of him, I’d be floored if he decided to put himself under the thumb of the Doomaki. Besides, he’s a good guy. He may hate authority, but he has a good moral compass. He just doesn’t like to be told what to do.” Drake laughed it off. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. I was on edge, and anytime I thought about the Doomaki it made my blood boil. “Better watch that temper.” Drake said, waving his finger back and forth. “You don’t want to let your emotions get the best of you if we actually run into some Doomaki.” I bit my lip.

“I know…” I replied. “The last time I fought them, they got away. But the next time will be different, I’m sure of it.” My ship had a training simulation room, it was heavily fortified and was able to simulate a variety of battle scenarios. It was limited as to how much ki blasts it could sustain, but it was great for training speed and reaction time. Speed and lightning fast reflexes is one of the biggest advantages you can have in a fight. Raw strength and power is all but useless if you can’t catch your enemy. I had also been doing a lot of meditation on the ship. That was one of the best ways to increase the strength of your ki. Ki is virtually limitless, but you need the mental fortitude and concentration to harness it and convert it to a useable form. When I meditated, I would clear my mind of all things and focus intensely on the air, the moisture around me, even my own body. It’s as if you have a radio with 1,000 stations and you have to dial in to each one, one at a time, until you find the one that the ki resides in. And even then, you have to go deeper, fine tuning it to get rid of all the static, until you are left with a pure, free flowing form of energy.

I spent hours of meditation, both growing the power of my ki and focusing to find new and useful ways in which I could use it. I was still intent on finding a way to reabsorb ki into my body once it was expelled. Being able to do this would be useful in many ways. Ki was able to be stored in specially designed containment units and usually these were used as either a sort of battery, or for grenades in combat for those unable to harness ki themselves. But if I was able to reabsorb the ki, I would be able to use it to replenish my ki in a battle when I grew weary, like a health potion. I also wanted to learn how to absorb ki universally as well. Each person that expels ki, such as a ki ball for example, puts their own sort of “fingerprint” on the ki. It makes that ki unique to that person. This would pose a new difficulty to reabsorbing ki. Even if I could learn to reabsorb my own, it would require adjustments for each and every other person if I wanted to absorb someone else’s ki. I focused on many other things during my meditation as well, it was a good way to pass the time.

The next few hours went by especially slow. I was very eager to get off the ship onto solid ground, so naturally it dragged by. Drake was busy doing something on the ship’s computer, probably trying to figure out where we would go after we left Threschar. I decided to freshen up before we arrived. With all the training I had been doing in the training room, I pretty much stayed in a constant state of sweat and stink. I got undressed and hopped into the shower. I closed my eyes as I put my head under the running water and my mind wander off into thought. I had done a lot of contemplating about the Doomaki’s motives over those past few weeks. I thought about the war between the Doomaki and The Peacekeepers from before I was born. It was the single greatest mystery of the century: why did the Doomaki fall off the map. They had won the war, what was left of the resistance against them wasn’t enough to slow the Doomaki down even a little. Some people thought they had a coup, that once they got so close to overthrowing The Peacekeepers and The Council, they had a power struggle and broke apart. I didn’t believe that though, it didn’t really make sense. From what I heard, they were always extremely coordinated and efficient, all working together to achieve their goals. That was evident in the most recent attack; it was well coordinated and precise. They knew what they were doing and they executed it perfectly. Not to mention the fact that Troy was certain that the ki he felt from the Doomaki who took Tyfoonica was the same as the Doomaki he fought 18 years ago. And I was sure Tyfoonica had felt the same thing. It wasn’t a coup that caused the Doomaki to disappear, it was something else.

And there was something else that was nagging at me…the Doomaki that had nearly knocked Troy out. He was obviously much stronger than the other Doomaki. Troy was by far the strongest fighter among The Peacekeepers, and arguably the strongest fighter in the entire galaxy, yet that Doomaki made him look like a novice. And after he took out Troy, he was the one that blinded everyone so they could escape. It seemed to me that he was the one in charge of that group, he was calling their shots. It was even possible that he could be the leader of Doomaki. No one had ever seen the leader of the Doomaki or found his identity during the war. If this was, in fact, the leader of the Doomaki, it raised all kinds of new questions. The biggest question was the same as the one about the Doomaki reappearing period: why now? Why now did the Doomaki reappear? Why now did their leader finally show up among them? I played back the memory of seeing him in my mind. His cold eyes, his menacing smile toward me. He had made direct eye contact with me, and smiled. He didn’t look toward anyone else, he looked directly at me, like he knew me or something. Of course, it could have been my mind playing tricks on me. Trying to get too far into the mind of a sociopath usually didn’t yield anything but crazy.

My attention shifted focus back to Tyfoonica. Of all the uncertainties I had, there was one thing I was certain of: Tyfoonica knew something the Doomaki wanted. The Doomaki wouldn’t have come out of hiding otherwise. My concern wasn’t as much about them breaking Tyfoonica and him telling the Doomaki. My concern was that they would kill him in the process. But what was it that Tyfoonica knew? He had been the trainer of my father, The Chosen One at that time. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that he might have known something my father shared with him, a secret perhaps. Since my father disappeared, Tyfoonica would be the only person they could try to extract the information from. I had to accept the fact that no matter how much I thought and mediated about it, I wouldn’t know what secret it could be until I rescued Tyfoonica and asked him.

About two hours later we finally arrived in Threschar. It was a small, mostly green planet made up of mostly swamps and forests. A dense fog covered most areas making it difficult to navigate by sight. Luckily the ships autopilot didn’t have an issue navigating right to where we needed to go. After passing through a large patch of fog, we could finally see through to the ground where there was a small landing area for our ship. It looked to be only big enough for five or six medium sized ships. It was obvious the planet, or at least this area, didn’t see a lot of interplanetary visitors. Drake and I got off our ship and checked in at the ship port, a standard practice when visiting a planet. Anytime someone visited a planet besides their home planet they had to get registered for record keeping. This was a practice that was started by The Council so they could have a record of who was going where at any given time. But many places didn’t do a very good job of enforcing that rule.

We quickly finished checking in and started down the main street in the village. It went especially fast considering this wasn’t Drake’s first time visiting the planet. The air was humid and warm, causing me to break into a sweat almost immediately. There wasn’t much civilization, just a few bigger buildings, probably the local market, and a collection of modest homes where the local inhabitants lived.

“Threschar is a pretty poor planet in the eyes of most surrounding planets.” Drake said. “They gather most of what they need from the surrounding forests. There are a lot of hunters and gatherers, and for specialty items and needs they have a handful of stores in each village. Many people actually live in the forests in tree houses. That is pretty typical around the whole planet.” I looked around the forest surrounding the village. The trees were enormous; most were about 30 feet wide and a few hundred feet tall at least. “Estrada actually lives in a tree house about 30 miles east of the village. Hopefully he’s home; he spends a lot of time hunting. He has a pretty primitive way of living.”

“Primitive you say? I thought this guy was a gossip king?” I asked, surprised.

“Ha, don’t let the primitive lifestyle fool you. The rest of the planet may be simple and disconnected from the outside world, but that’s not the case with Estrada. Inside his little treehouse is a solar powered technological wonder. He has tons of receivers running with signals and news reports from across the galaxy. He doesn’t have a traditional job; most of his money comes from selling the meat he gets from hunting. That leaves him with plenty of time to keep up with all the goings on in the galaxy. “

I chuckled. “Sounds like a regular hermit.” I said with a laugh.

“He definitely is!” Drake answered back, smiling. “He is a bit eccentric, for sure. But he has about as good a chance as anyone at knowing something about the Doomaki.” My look turned a bit more serious at the mention of the Doomaki. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

With that last note, we took flight and began flying in the direction of Estrada’s treehouse. It all looked the same to me; just a vast collection of dense trees. But Drake seemed to know exactly where he was going. It was a short flight to our destination. Drake stopped abruptly and looked down.

“I think this is it.” Drake said. We could only see a vast collection of tree tops from where we were, like a giant green blanket covering the entire surface. We descended below the treetops and sure enough, just as we broke below the canopy we saw a large treehouse built in one of the bigger, older trees about 200 feet off the ground. It was an interesting sight; on the one hand it was a treehouse, so there was a primitive look to it. But on the other hand, it was obvious that Estrada was not as technologically underdeveloped as the rest of the planet appeared to be. Most of the tree houses we had passed on the way there were very simple and pretty small. For starters, Estrada’s house was really big, and actually spanned between two or three trees that had intertwining branches. The supports traced back to the main body of the tree. In addition to the metal supports under his house, he had half a dozen or so tractor beams set up on the ground below that looked like they were installed with the polarity reversed, because instead of pulling the house to the ground, they were helping support it off the ground. This was likely a backup support in case one of the metal supports failed or the tree itself gave way. There was a ship port built into the tree with a one person ship parked on it. Dozens of high beam lights and cameras were set up all around the house. There were several motion detecting lasers setup around the house and tree. I couldn’t see the lasers, but I was able to feel the energy radiating off them similar to the energy that would emanate from a ki blast.

“This guy is pretty serious about his security, isn’t he?” I said, looking around the outside of the house.

“Yeah, he’s a bit paranoid. Come’s with his distaste with authority I suppose. He doesn’t trust many people.” Drake said with a shrug.

“But he trusts you?”

“He trusts my dad, so by extension he trusts me. Estrada used to be a part of the military here and he worked with my dad on occasion. He even accompanied dad on a few missions off the planet.” I looked at Drake in surprise.

“That’s unusual. I didn’t know your dad ever worked with people outside The Peacekeepers.”

“Usually he didn’t.” Drake said. “There were a handful of exceptions, though. Estrada is very loyal to his friends. He used to be very loyal to his country and planet as well. When he was in the military, he was an elite officer, and one of, if not the, strongest in the military. He would frequently be selected to go on secret missions as well as interplanetary reconnaissance. He would usually go as a spy and collect data and government secrets from other planets that posed a threat to his own. At least that’s what he was told. He was under the impression that the information was being used as a security measure in case one of those governments decided to invade his country or planet. But it was a lie. The president and military generals were using the information to collapse the economies and governments of entire planets that were no threat at all. And then they would send aid, either in the form of financial consultants, or military help in the case of collapsed governments, and charge a hefty fee to regain government stability and fix the problems that they themselves caused. Once Estrada found out about it, he made the information public so everyone on this planet and other planets around the sector would know what was happening. That’s why most of the planet is so poor. Nearly all the resources were taken by planets that had been swindled. After all that, Estrada completely cut off ties with the military and his government in general. Because of his strength and his smarts, none one from his government could do anything to retaliate against him. The planetary government pretty much collapsed after that, and only small local governments remain.” We flew down to the ship port and made our way to what looked like the front of the house.

“I can see why he has trust issues. I’m glad he still trusts your dad.” I said as we approached the front door.

“Me too. During his many recon missions, he gained a lot of intel and intergalactic contacts that helps him stay in the know with everything going on around the galaxy.” Drake stopped at the front door and looked around cautiously.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I don’t think he’s home at the moment.” Drake replied, looking around with a somewhat concerned look on his face.

“How can you tell?” I asked. He hadn’t knocked on the door or done anything else to indicate to Estrada that we were present.

“Because he hasn’t come out to greet us yet. He’s a bit of a security freak, if he was home, he would have already come out. He’s got plenty of cameras and security equipment to let him know we’re here. I’m a little hesitant to knock on the door, I don’t want to get a poison dart to the neck or something.” Drake said with a nervous laugh. I could tell he wasn’t really joking.

“Gotcha’. I guess we can just wait.” I replied. I sat on the edge of the landing we were on and let my feet hang off the edge. We were at least 200 feet above the ground below. It was a little kid’s dream house, the best tree fort someone could imagine. Far below, on the ground, there was a pack of beasts glaring up at me, circling the tree we were in.”

“See those?” Drake said, pointing at the beasts below. They looked like a mix between a bear and a wolf. They were built like a bear, but had wolf-like head. Some walked around on all fours while others were walking on their hind legs. They were huge, easily 1200 pounds or more and probably standing close to ten feet tall. Even from 200 feet up they looked massive.

“Yeah, they don’t look very friendly.” I replied.

“Animals like those are the reason there are so many tree houses. Those animals are fierce predators and extremely territorial. But most of them aren’t adept at climbing trees. The general population is all but helpless against them.”

“What about Estrada?” As soon as the words left my mouth, a huge mass of fur and teeth landed right beside me, practically landing on my lap. I sprung up quickly and jumped back about ten feet, ready to defend myself. But the beast that was before me was limp and lifeless, a river of blood pouring from its neck.

“He eats them for breakfast.” Came a deep voice from above. I turned my eyes upward to see a tall man covered in animal skin standing on a thick branch about 20 feet over my head. He jumped off the branch and landed in between Drake and me. “Drake, it’s good to see you!” Estrada walked over to Drake and extended a hand to greet him.

“Good to see you too, my friend!” Drake answered back. Estrada turned to face me.

“And who do we have here?” Estrada asked.

“This is my good friend, Tyfoon.”

“Tyfoon! I have heard many good things about you! Troy speaks very highly of you.” Estrada walked over to me and greeted me with a very firm handshake. “I hope I didn’t startle you too much.” Estrada said, glancing at the lifeless beast a few feet away. I laughed.

“Not too much.” I said. “That’s quite a catch.”

“Just a juvenile, but he will feed many mouths. But I assume you didn’t come all the way here to enjoy the mundane flavors of the mascratti.” I assumed that was the name of the beast. Drake laughed and shook his head. Apparently the mascratti didn’t taste very good.

“Definitely not. We have some important business we are here for.” Drake replied. Estrada smiled and nodded.

“Of course, of course.” Estrada walked over to his front door and waved his hand over the door. A digital keypad appeared and Estrada entered a password and the door unlocked and slid open. Estrada looked over his shoulder at us. “Please come inside. I’ve been expecting you.”