Season 1, Episode 5 - "The Secret Origin of Isaac Spallacio, Part 1"

The town of Patuxet, four years ago.

Patuxet wasn’t exactly the largest town - far from it - but Isaac felt proud of it all the same. The only ways in or out were the spur line to the Saguenay-Acushnet Railroad or the southbound paved street that quickly turned into dirt road and then into paved highway as it neared the port city of Acushnet. The whole town mainly consisted of a few intersecting streets, with a handful of smaller roads scattered about here and there, modernity slowly - but surely - arriving there.

In fact, Isaac could run around the whole town in less than an hour. That’s why his brother had him run around the town multiple times. Every morning, they started off at the same spot - the road outside their home, surrounded by patches of grassland, forests in the distance. Then they headed off, the daily jog towards town and then around it. Isaac could keep pace with his brother for the first stretch, but soon his brother's broad shoulders would appear ahead of him, and then his brother would be off on his own pace, Isaac struggling with his own.

His brother had once told him an old world adage - never save anything for the swim back. They weren’t swimming, but the concept still applied - Isaac gave the morning jog his all. Well, some days were lighter days, other days were more along the shorter, sprinting side, but you get the idea. He ran around town, passing under lampposts and passing by sandlots and storefronts, over and over. Each lap made his legs and lungs burn, but he did and kept running until he could do it no more.

When no more arrived, Isaac sputtered to a stop wherever he was to take a breather. He saved nothing for his return trip back home, after all, so usually he took a seat and collected his breath until his brother finished his run and brought Isaac home together with him.

Today’s weekend morning run was a particularly tough one, under the heat of a late August sun. Isaac could go no further right as he arrived near a sandlot, no construction workers in sight. A tall dirt mound, faded green weeds growing out of it, provided a nice place to lay down on and rest; a stack of shipping containers casting a long shadow over Isaac as he relaxed himself.

At that moment, as he closed his eyes, Isaac was on the borderline of unconsciousness and consciousness. Not just in terms of sleep, but in terms of his adolescence itself. At age twelve, Isaac stood on the cusp of simply living in the moment and recognizing his own existence in that moment.

Perhaps that’s what defines adolescence and growing up. Once you’ve recognized yourself, you can’t go back - the acknowledgement of your own existence changes life forever. You grow to understand your wants and needs, your strengths and weaknesses, your social status, your economic situation, your global situation, the fact that you somehow fit into all of that. The world is both smaller and wider than you ever thought of before. The “I” of existence takes shape, as does your identity.

Isaac stood on the cusp of all that. He was growing aware that his small world of Patuxet was part of something far greater. And that far greater world wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows and peaches and squeaky-clean as he always assumed it to be.

“Taking a nap?” Gregory asked, his new shadow joining the shadows of the containers in covering Isaac.

Isaac slowly blinked himself awake.

“Resting my eyes,” he answered, a proud grin on his face as he saw his brother extending a hand out to him.

Gregory hoisted Isaac off the dirt pound and handed him a canteen. The two brothers drank from it, then headed back home, Gregory patting his brother on the back as they departed.

As they arrived on the dirt road that would take them to their house on the outskirts of town, Gregory went into older-brother-lecture-mode. Isaac liked some of the lectures - the ones that involved theories on kung-fu fighting and modern war tactics - but today’s lectures appeared to be one of the more sorrowful ones.

“The world’s an uncaring place, Isaac,” Gregory explained, his eyes on the horizon ahead of them. “That’s just how it is. And because it doesn’t care, humanity is free to destroy itself over and over. There are peaceful times and cruel times, Isaac. Unfortunately, right now, we live in one of the cruelest times of all.”

Isaac rubbed his head, trying to understand. His brother seemed to know everything - it’s why he would be leaving later today to attend Wampanoag University with a full scholarship for research. Despite countless hours in the library and dozens of notebooks back home, Gregory didn’t look all that bookish. At age eighteen, he stood nearly six feet with a strong body, his hair neater and a shade darker than Isaac’s.

“You know why it’s cruel?” he asked rhetorically. “Because we know how people used to live. Our current life and society is just a shadow of the past. Our father died because we were born in a cruel time instead of a peaceful time. And we’ll die in a cruel time, never knowing peace.”

Gregory could get in those darker moods at times. Isaac didn’t understand how he could - it was sunny out, it was still summer so no school yet, and the family’s new radio would be airing its Sunday morning crime capers starring the Minute Man!

Isaac was slowly starting to understand that the world had some negative aspects to it, but he didn’t understand yet that the world could also be cruel.

Their house soon came into view. It was a small thing built by Isaac’s grandfather, an Acushnet soldier during the Presidential Restoration. Isaac always felt fascinated by his war stories - his favorite was the final assault on Quinsigamond, which involved both new black gunpowder and old TOW missiles - but then his grandfather died in his sleep one winter. That occurred early in Isaac’s childhood, so everything about his grandfather and death itself remained hazy in his memory.

They could see his mother on the front stoop, her brown hair with a hint of gray in a ponytail, her usual gray woolen shirt on - and from the way her arms were crossed, they could tell she was angry.

“Gregory!” she called out, tapping her foot.

Isaac looked up as his brother in confusion, who rubbed the side of his face sheepishly.

“Hey, Mom,” he answered as they arrived in front of the house.

She gestured at the items next to her on the porch - two cases of luggage, a briefcase, and a backpack. Then she reached into a pocket and gestured at the ticket now flapping in her hand.

“Your train leaves in twenty minutes!” she exclaimed, a vein in her forehead about to burst. “What were you doing out there?”

“I thought you said you were leaving later today,” Isaac said.

Gregory chuckled. “Well, I guess technically, by later today, I meant mid-morning. But hey, I’m leaving town for the first time, right? I wanted to take my time and give it one last look.”

He rested an arm on Isaac’s shoulder. “And what’s wrong with spending some last minute time with my dear younger brother?”

Isaac fidgeted away, but he also didn’t want his brother to leave. Wampanoag would take him to the east, towards the coast, a long train-ride away. He wouldn’t be back until Thanksgiving break, a full three months away.

His mother sighed, but smiled. “Alright, Gregory. But the last thing I want is for a son of mine to get a reputation of being tardy.”

As Gregory walked up the steps to the home, she gave him a huge hug. Gregory looked hesitant for a moment, as all teenagers are when a parent shows emotion, but he soon brought his hands up to hug her back. They held each other for a moment, then separated.

Their mother gave them a proud smile, a few tears going down her face. “Give them hell out there, alright?”

Gregory nodded. “Always.”

He threw the backpack on, stuck the briefcase underneath an armpit, then grabbed each thing of luggage. Inside of them were textbooks and notebooks, journals and pencils, clothes and toiletries, anything he might need for life beyond home.

“You better run fast if you want to make it,” his mother warned.

“That was always the plan,” Gregory answered, an enthusiastic grin on his face. “I don’t need to save anything to make it back here.”

Him not needing to make it back there brought out the waterworks in their mother. As she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, Gregory turned to face his brother.

“When Dad died, I had to step up,” he said, his voice going into pure older-brother-saying-goodbye-for-a-while-mode as he knelt down in front of Isaac. “And now, I’m going away, so it’s your turn.”

Isaac saluted. “I won’t let you down!”

But then he thought about it. “But, uh…how do I do that?”

“You’ll know when it happens,” Gregory said. “When we run in the morning, why do you go all out?”

That was an easy question.

“Because you do!”

Gregory shook his head. “Training is all about finding your limits, Isaac. It’s for you yourself. By finding your limits, the outline to your body forms. You know who you are. You have a better sense of self. If you keep working hard at the things you love and the things that must be done, you’ll understand yourself better. That’s why you need to do both of those while I’m away, alright?”

Isaac saluted. “I won’t let you down!”

But then he thought about it. “But, uh…I don’t understand, really.”

His brother stood back up. “As I said - you’ll know when it happens. Now, don’t tell Mom, but she always keeps a bit of money tucked away in the coffee can in the closet-”

“Gregory!”

Gregory gave his mother a cheeky grin, then gave Isaac a firm one, then dashed off, laughing as his steps kicked up dust down the dirt road, until he disappeared into the horizon.

Isaac paced around the train station, an afternoon sun hanging low in the autumn sky, then gasped as the distant train appeared in the horizon. Its whistle blew as it rolled into the station, steam billowing from a smokestack at the engine car. A conductor moved down the cars, opening the doors, and those arriving in Patuxet for Thanksgiving stepped out of the cars, carrying bags of luggage.

Those departing the train looked around for any familiar signs. The whole town would be familiar to Gregory, but Isaac darted around the platform until he found his brother leaning against a wooden pole, a backpack around his shoulders.

“Gregory!” Isaac exclaimed, bounding up to him.

“Hey, Isaac,” Gregory greeted, glad to see his brother and to be back in his hometown. Isaac noticed he looked and sounded slightly different - he walked a little taller, held his chin up a little higher, and spoke in a tone that was simultaneously wiser and wearier.

“How was college?” Isaac asked, thinking about that postcard he received a month ago from his brother, depicting the Wampanoag campus - a scattering of tall and long buildings right next to a small town.

His brother grinned. Gregory led the way out of the station, Isaac following alongside him.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Gregory admitted. The two looked both ways to avoid any horse-drawn carriages or the rare automobile passing by the station, then started on the road home. “There are more people my age there than there are people in this town.”

Isaac hadn’t left Patuxet before, so he struggled to imagine that campus filled with that many people.

“Are the teachers nice?” Isaac continued.

“The teachers are the best,” Gregory said. “They know so much. I took a class with one professor in particular. He knows everything. I’ll even be working as his assistant next semester.”

“Wow!”

“And get this - he knows all about the Rddhi.”

The Rddhi. The physic magic system thing that made their world go from ordinary to extraordinary. Of course, Rddhi users were far and few between nowadays - government radio programs always spoke of their sacrifice in the First American War, which killed a great majority of them. Nowadays, users could primarily be found in the capital or other large cities like Acushnet, but considering Isaac had been to neither, he hadn’t given the Rddhi a whole great deal of thought.

But still - to be able to use superpowers just like that.

“Did you meet any of those Rddhi guys?” Isaac asked.

Gregory shook his head. “If you can use the Rddhi, you have to attend one of the colleges in Narragansett. But that doesn’t mean other schools can’t teach about it. This professor, for instance. He’s helped me think about the Rddhi in relation to my own self.”

Isaac didn’t understand, so he decided to think about fantastical images of college life.

“You remember my whole spiel about training to find your outline, correct?” Gregory asked.

Isaac let out a nervous chuckle. Being without his brother for the first time meant Isaac was responsible for his own training for the first time, with nobody to keep tabs on him. Thus, many of the daily morning runs instead turned into kung-fu movie marathons at the new cinema that opened in town recently.

“The Rddhi changes that whole equation,” his brother continued. Isaac sighed in relief, thinking his brother hadn’t noticed his facial expression indicated he became a slacker, but of course his brother knew and understood why. But he had far grander things on his mind.

“The Rddhi is a way to go beyond your limits,” Gregory explained, his eyes alight with visions of the possibilities. “Similar to the laws of nature, the natural limits of the body become hazy once the Rddhi gets involved. And do you know what happens when your person becomes unlimited?”

“Uh…”

“It means you can start changing things around here,” his brother concluded, ambition evident in his grin. “This whole time, you and I, we’ve been training to find our own limits. But now I know that finding your own limits isn’t enough. The modern world’s cruel. But when a person doesn’t know their limits, they simply become subsumed by the world. In contrast, you and I, now that we’re finding our outlines and have a greater understanding of their sense of self, we can clearly separate our identity from the wider world. People like us - they don’t let the world change them, they can stand on their own two feet.”

They passed by storefronts, laundry hanging between several buildings. People went about their daily business - store owners minding the shops, children playing in the street, townspeople sitting on stoops, gossiping. Others passed by them, brown paper bags in their hands and a slight stumble in their gait.

“The majority of people are cogs in a vast machine beyond their understanding,” his brother summed up. “And most people just remain cogs, spinning because they don’t know anything else. But once you understand you’re a cog, the ability to recognize you exist, you can spin at your own pace. And then, as you get stronger, you can spin in the other direction every so often, resisting the movement of the machine.”

His brother took a moment to stop as they reached a fork in the road. One road would take them to large farms and forested tracts, sparsely populated; the other road would take them to a long row of homes, separated by fields and forests, their own house among them. A lamppost for an unlit gaslamp stood above them.

“But it’s not enough for me, just to spin in the other direction,” Gregory said, his voice firm. “I want to start spinning more cogs in the other direction as well. But how do I do that? We weren’t born into money, we weren’t born with innate power or smarts or resources. All we have is the library, our laps around town, and our willpower.”

His brother looked at the sky. “That’s where the Rddhi comes in. Our knowledge of the Rddhi. That’s what’s going to help us change this cruel world for the better.”

Isaac tried to see what his brother saw in the sky at the moment, but came up empty.

“...we?” he asked.

Gregory nodded. “Of course. I’m already in college. Statistically, it’s too late for me to unlock the Rddhi.”

He patted Isaac on the shoulder. “But you, on the other hand, have all this potential laid out before you. All you need to do is seize it.”

A breeze blew past them. “You unlock the Rddhi and learn the practical side,” Gregory explained. “I’ll learn the theoretical side and make our long-term plan. There’s still so much to do.”

Isac felt unsure. “I don’t know a whole lot about the Rddhi, though.”

Gregory smiled. “That’s alright. We’ll take it one day at a time. We have time.”

Isaac nodded in agreement, but deep down, he still didn’t really know. He was at the age where he was only just realizing about the machine’s existence. The thought of making that machine run how they wanted it to run - especially when school and the radio and the newsreels and the posters around town made it perfectly clear that the government could run the machine just fine - made his head feel dizzy.

His brother resumed his walk toward home. “I hope Mom has a pie ready. In my last letter, I asked to make a nice apple one like she always does…”

Isaac followed alongside him.