(No art this episode because my art skills are way too subpar for what I had in mind. If you would like to contribute art for Chaos Corp in the future, contact me either here or on my personal blog @luce-the-sinner )
Zade burst through the door of the mansion and leapt out floating into the empty space. The crack in reality was now massive, very obviously visible from Farjack’s realm. She turned and saw Danae staring at her, his back to a waterfall, his human form with white paint covering his face in the shape of a skull.
Around her were a mixture of sounds, sounds of battle, deafening silence, and the chirping of birds from the northern plains of Forever Valley. A twig snapped and Danae walked towards her, his once stoic face melting into a sickening glare.
“It’s your fault!” Danae yelled, his voice boomed, bouncing off non-existent walls as they drifted through outer space. Zade backed away, this was not the Danae she knew. Something was very wrong here.
She fell. She wiped the dirt off her face and took in the beauty of Sera’s garden. A large clearing in the middle of a luscious jungle. The radiant flowers that lined the path to the large tree seemed to wilt away as she looked at them. Dropping their dead, dry petals to the ground as the wind carried them behind her. She turned to see the darkened form of Sera, all wind, all sound, all light converging on her location as if she was the center of creation.
“It’s your fault... isn’t it?” Sera asked.
A strong pain shot through Zade’s body upon hearing Sera’s voice, even in a more withered, husky form. It seemed to drain all the hope it had once gave. The pain tightened to her stomach, almost piercing now. And what in her name was Danae doing opening a portal to a world?
The crack in reality had changed from it’s pure black form to a sea of blue and green shapes. Danae stood in front of it, apparently trying to stabilize it and causing this anomaly. The pain grew sharper and deeper.
Oh right, she thought. She had forgotten the monster that she had to deal with. She looked down and realised she had been stabbed through the stomach by three long spikes.
“Well that is just not fair,” she said. Staring at the creature whose featureless face stared back. She felt a drop of cold liquid hit her skin, then another, and another. She blinked and the creature changed into a familiar shadowy dark form that bore a white mask. The kind of smiling glare that only a madman could make. The three spikes in her stomach had melded into a singular black mass, like an impossibly still solid shadow unaffected by the light around it.
A flash of light and a crack of thunder and she was flying through the air, landing in a puddle of mud. Her head rang in pain. The large purple hammer landed next to her with a thud, it’s wielder, a muscly brute of a man, picked back up and brought it down to her head.
She flinched but no pain came, the rain stopped and the mud on her dried, cracking away against the heat. She saw the shadowy mass again, but this time it sported her own face. A face that filled her with rage.
“It is your fault!” she screamed, charging the creature when she suddenly landed with a thump.
Her head swam and her battle instincts kicked in, leaping to her feet and punching the closest thing she could see. A smash was followed by broken glass falling to the floor. The framed portrait that Danae had hung in her room once depicted his likeness, now the crumpled canvas fell over her arm.
Zade glanced around. Yep this was definitely her room, no odd things about it. Still a cool blue filled with various books, knick-knacks, and another black flat glass object on top of a desk.
What the hell was Danae thinking telling her to try this ‘sleep’ that was horrible. She made a mental note to never do that again.
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The lobby was full of people, a few of them turned to look at her as she entered, she was about to brace for another getaway but they just went about their business as if this was everyday routine.
“This is Chaos Corp,” said Danae from behind her.
A handsome tanned woman in casual clothes greeted her with a smile, handing her a leaflet marked with the same emblem and name from on the side of the building. In an odd, sharp cursive it read:
Protecting the people of today, to train the people of tomorrow.
The rest of the front was taken up by two pictures, one of Danae’s human form, and one of the headquarters building itself. Danae escorted her through the crowd of people. The room had long, worn leather benches in rows for people to sit on. Surprisingly alive potted plants were placed intermittently along the walls and between them a bit higher up hung psychedelic paintings that were only slightly pleasing to the eye.
They walked up to a wide, vacant reception desk of grey objects. As Danae approached the gate separating it from the rest of the room it immediately opened for him. A robotic voice came from the gate.
“Welcome back, my lord.”
Danae stopped just short of two large metal doors on the other side and looked to her.
“You’re already programmed into the system, just walk up to it.”
Zade looked to the gate, and back at him. He was expecting her arrival? Well, the wanted posters had already told her that. But this was equally confusing and impressive. She walked up to the get, which opened to let her through.
“Welcome, Dick van Killjoy-McStuckUp.”
Zade stopped. The gate attempted to close, stopped an inch from touching her, opened again, and then repeated.
“Did I just get insulted by a robot gate?” she tilted her head at the machine, which was still attempting to close.
“Yes, now get the hell out of my way,” the gate replied.
Zade stood speechless.
“That’s Action,” said Danae. “You should probably do as they say.”
“It’s a gate?”
As soon as these words left Zade’s mouth the gate administered a strong shock to her thighs. She fell forward onto her face and the gate finally full shut above her. She thought she heard it sigh.
Danae pressed a silver button on the wall next to the metal doors. The ring around it lit up blue for a second, and this time Action’s voice came from inside.
“Doors opening.”
Sure enough, they opened, revealing a small room with reflective metal walls. Danae stepped inside. Was it some sort of empty closet? She slowly got up as the feeling returned to her legs.
She cautiously hurried through the doors lest the same thing happen again.
“Doors closing.”
“Don’t mind them,” said Danae as the doors closed behind her. “They’re just cranky cause they don’t have a physical form.”
Zade was honestly used to curious and unique entities by now, after all meeting Mother Nature was a life-changing experience, but this still had her speechless.
Inside the room was three rows of more buttons. Danae pressed the one labeled 362. The ring around it glowed blue and the room started shaking.
“What in the...” she said, backing against the wall and preparing to fight her way out.
“Oh right,” Danae said, surprised. “This is an elevator. It goes up, and down. A quick way to different floors of a building.” He dragged out each word in a patronizing manner.
“Oh...” she sighed, somewhat in relief that the room wasn’t about to digest them. She still didn’t like it.
“I notice you are tense Miss Killjoy-McStuckUp, I will play some calming music now,” said Action from some holes in the wall above the buttons.
Soothing jazz with an overlay of bongos began to play. It wasn’t very calming. Wait...
“Why does it keep calling me that?” she asked, offended that Danae hadn’t told them her real name.
“’They’ Zade, why do ‘they’ keep calling you that. Please, Action is a person to. A cranky person with no physical form, but a person none-the-less.”
Zade waited for him to continue and answer her. He didn’t.
He said it was a quick way to go up or down, but it sure took them a while before the red letters above the door read 362. The room slowly stopped shaking with a ding noise.
“Doors opening.”
They exited into a long hallway that stretched to either side. In front of her were two wooden doors standing a few feet apart, a mirror image of each other.
“Welcome to your new home. The Chaos Penthouse,” said Danae, moving in front of the door on the right.
She raised her brow in confusion. “New home?”
He opened the door and waited for her to enter.
The sight was like heaven to her eyes. The ‘elevator’ was truly some kind of slow portal. The room was wide and spacious, full of natural light from the setting sun that flowed into the two walls to the front and right of her that were full windows. The walls to the left and behind her were sky blue and the furniture was themed black and white. It was as if someone had decorated this room to match her mind.
At the far end was an L-shaped couch next to the window with its back against some stairs that led up to another door. In front of the couch was a low white table and in front of that was a desk with a large black glass object on it.
The side closer to her was a more practical looking area, a large, smooth stomach height table with drawers placed all along the sides. There were also six cupboards along the wall next to her. It was surprisingly homely.
She walked forward towards the window and froze.
Zade turned to her, “How about you?”
“How about me what?” Sera asked back.
“How about you, do you want a realm of your own?” She clarified.
“I can do that?”
She arched her brow. “Of course you can! You have the power to!”
Sera’s face lit up in excitement.
“Danae...” Zade said sternly, fists suddenly clenched. She could tell the change threw him off. “Why are there only two rooms?” She turned her head. Danae had forgone his mortal guise, adopting the dark skeletal form she was used to. Much harder to read the expressions and thoughts of.
“I told you,” he replied coldly, turning away. “The tome brought everything within a small radius. Itself, me, and you.”
Zade’s form shimmered and she was suddenly standing in front of him, catching his eyeless gaze. She held a dagger of pure black energy against his chest. He made no attempt to retaliate.
“Where are they?!” she tried to remain calm, but her eyes quivered.
Danae remained silent.
“Where are Farjack and Sera?!” she was shouting now. It was so rare that she got angry but now she had twice in one day. Both at Danae.
He turned around and as he did his cloak evaporated like smoke that parted to reveal his human form. He walked towards the door.
“Don’t make a fool out of yourself. There’s nothing either of us can do now. Get some rest. Try this neat thing the humans call ‘sleep’.”
And then he was gone, the door shut behind him. She heard the faint voice of Action from the hall and knew he wasn’t going to his room. She didn’t know her way around this infernal building so there was no chance of confronting him again for today.
He was right though, and she knew that. There was nothing she could do to help them now. To her she was just with them, but Danae had spent a year without any of them. If he couldn’t find a way to fix it then no one could. She had to find out what happened to them though, with or without his help.
Curse this amnesia, she thought. Why were magical side effects always amnesia?
She glanced down at the Chaos Corp leaflet in her hand, and then back out of the window, looking down upon the massive city that surrounded a forest.
[Read from the... oh right this is the beginning... um... continue reading?]
(1153 words)
In the beginning there was nothing, nothing save two realms. Somewhere, and Nowhere. Nowhere was a pitch-black void of nothingness. No air, no land, no sea.
And somewhere in the middle of Nowhere sat floating, a person. Well, less of a person and more of a naked-bones humanoid wrapped snugly in a flowing black robe.
The robes hood hung over his head, a flawless, shining white skull with teeth bent into a permanent sarcastic smile. A flowing black cloak rippled behind him despite no breeze to unsettle it. To him and to all who hear of him, he is Danae, God of Death.
Through empty eye sockets Danae stared emotionless into the void. His thin, pointy-tipped fingers sat curled in his lap. On his back, seemingly attached by nothing, was a long staff with a curved blade at the top, a weapon made entirely of bone.
The god sat there for an indeterminable amount of time, considering that time hadn't been created yet. Never moving, just staring into the lonely abyss. But Danae was not particularly lonely, he hadn't experienced company to the point that he could miss it. If anything he was bored. It wasn't that he didn't like Nowhere, he thought it was a great place to spend eternity. But it could use a little more... more people, to laugh at his truly amazing jokes. After all he had had all of quasi-existence to think of them.
In a sudden fluid movement he reached into his right sleeve and removed from it a small yellow book. Written along an orange strip along the cover in yellow cursive read: “Meú et Evesair con 'Newbies'”.
This of course, if you could understand the pre-temporal language, translated to: “How to make a Universe for 'Newbies'”.
Danae opened the book and turned to the first page. Once again he remained motionless, reading but never turning a page. Any being who may have been watching him probably felt an aura of confusion emanating from him.
He looked up and spoke in a calm, soothing voice unfitting of his grim appearance.
“Grenade.”
Meanwhile, nowhere particular in Somewhere, were sitting the only other two obvious entities currently in existence.
Somewhere was a bright white plain where, unlike Nowhere, there was a floor. Though what exactly it was made of was impossible to fathom, it was just there. In this plain of white were two small, dark mahogany chairs facing each other, another curious anomaly that remained unexplained by even the best of religious historians. On these chairs, sat two deities.
On one was a magnificent being bearing a great muscular suit of silver plate armour with beautiful golden accents. The closed helm gave no tell of the nature of the entity beneath, a pair of luminescent green irises were barely visible through the metal grating. Off the back of the helm fell a wavy, blonde fake ponytail. His gauntlets were adorned with transparent orbs, containing a captivating golden essence.
The sheer awesomeness of the being was enough to leave anyone speechless, though unbeknownst to those observers the god had an astoundingly large ego combined with an impish attitude that made him seem just innocent enough to forgive these traits. He was, and is, the God of Warriors, known as Farjack. And Farjack sat, still as a statue with his left leg hung lazily off the chair as his right leg crossed over it, an elbow resting on his thigh to hold his chin in his palm.
Across from Farjack sat – in a much more polite and comfortable manner – the Goddess of Duality, Zade. Zade had a humanoid body, but her appearance was far from that of most humanoids. Her body was pitch black and blinding white, split perfectly down the middle in a vertical line. Her 'skin' was flat and featureless except for two yellow diamonds for eyes. Everything about her pose and body language spoke royalty, sat proud and prideful.
The two sat looking directly at each other, until finally Zade broke the silence in a soft voice that seemed to echo off of nothing.
“This staring contest has been going on for a few millennia now and I am bored, can we please stop this?” The bottom half of her face moved as if a mouth should be there, an unnecessary habit she had developed over the eons.
“Fine, we can finish...” replied Farjack with a deep, strong, but jolly voice that could almost shake the ground around them.
Zade's face began to move as if she was smiling.
“...but first, blink,” he finished.
Zade sighed. “I am incapable of blinking, you will have to give up eventu-”
She was interrupted by a deafening sound that rang through Somewhere from above, where a small black spot was just now visible on the white sky. Both gods looked up briefly before returning to their staring lock.
“Not on your life.”
The boom still echoed throughout Nowhere. Danae, not exactly having ears, just sat there vibrating until it stopped. In the distance he could now see a white spec on the abyss.
In the opposite direction a similar grey spec appeared, growing slightly larger with each moment. As it grew he began to realize it was a sphere, floating casually towards him at a slow pace relative to two-hundred miles per second.
The, now panicking, God of Death tried to float out of its path by flailing his limbs to no avail.
“What did I do to deserve this?” he asked himself, accepting the inevitability of the situation. “I mean sure, I AM death. But I haven't actually killed anyone...” he paused briefly. “Yet.”
If you have ever been hit by a speeding car and propelled faster than should be physically possible whilst the car continues to press harder against you, then it need not be explained what Danae felt in this moment. If you however have not experienced this, I recommend either spending your life trying to break several laws of physics, or alternatively just ask those who have.
This feeling just hit Danae flat in the chest cavity. But he did not move. Instead the small object spontaneously combusted with the strength of a thousand dying stars.
Something landed next to Farjack with a quiet thump. Careful not to avert his gaze, he picked it up. It appeared to be a yellow book of some kind. Farjack was not one to read but he opened it anyway, out of boredom. He was relieved to find that the book had only one thick page, with one word printed on it in comic sans.
“Grenade?”
“Oh gods...” said Zade.
Farjack followed her gaze upwards to what used to be a black dot, and was now rapidly approaching blue fire. The two were drenched in energy and heat.
When the light finally faded, Somewhere and Nowhere were no more.
A maelstrom of energy swirled amidst the former battlefield. What had once filled the air with relief, now caused only dread.
In the center of the storm stood the God of Death himself, raising high a large red tome that seemed to be absorbing all energy around it. The magic that Zade had summoned in order to banish the great evil they had just defeated.
“Danae!” she called out, but no sound could be heard. The air was filled with pure silence. “Stop this now!” she tried again.
She had no idea what he was doing now, something reckless... If only Sera was here to stop him. No. Zade shook her head. Now it was up to her to stop him. And stop him she would.
Zade pulled herself together, pushing against the unrelenting storm and lunged forward and then-
Darkness.
There was nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing to smell. All around her was darkness. What happened? Was she dead? Is this what happened when gods die, just emptiness?
No. There was something else now, bristling against her skin like a cool breeze from below. She also felt the force of gravity pulling her down. She definitely wasn’t standing anymore.
Zade began to ponder what the repercussions of what Danae did exactly were. Absorbing a monumental amount of energy into a magical tome that’s contents were all of time itself.
A screeching sound suddenly filled her ears. The sound of wind as the pressure from below her grew. She could very well be free falling right now, but she had no way to tell. Y’know... besides the sensations and sounds.
She ran through all the possible scenarios she could now be in. The book could have sent her to a parallel universe, perhaps a different timeline. Maybe even the past?
Ah. She thought as she remembered the other ability the book had. The remarkable ability to accurately predict the future to a worthy reader. Such as a God of Death.
Sight returned to Zade’s eyes moments before she hit the ground.
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The screams grew louder as Danae and Zade traveled in their general direction, they had left Farjack behind in his odd frozen state.
In the distance was a small black crack in space, like a lightning bolt scarring the universe itself. As Zade stared into it she could feel it slowly reaching out to her before trying to yank her soul away like a vacuum. For a god it was easy to resist with the right amount of caution. But any mortal would have their consciousness ripped from them leaving behind an empty husk.
Danae had stopped a little closer, analyzing the situation. The screams were definitely coming from there, fueled by an unending pain.
“It appears that this is the center of creation,” Danae stated, with a metaphorical glint in his eye socket.
“You mean the place you blew up?” Zade snickered.
He returned an undecipherable glance.
“Something is very wrong here...” he said.
She nodded. Besides the soul sucking emptiness and the screaming, the crack was also mangling her senses, a mishmash of emotions and thoughts flooding her mind and attempting to distract her focus. Whatever it was it was very powerful.
“Maybe we should get Farjack, and try and find a way to stabilize it- and what are you doing?”
Danae had begun to poor his magic into the crack, feeding it, sating it. There was a very slight difference in it’s pull on her soul, not much... but something. You didn’t need godly senses to know this was a reckless plan.
Why not join him? She thought, Nothing to lose right...? She was questioning the amount of thought put into this but loosened her guard.
There was a strange combination of pain and euphoria as her very soul was being drained of energy. The crack began to grow slowly, accepting their offering, it was showing no signs of stopping even when it reached thrice her size. Zade was just about to back out of this plan when suddenly a silhouette somehow appeared on the darkness. The screams had stopped, as if the source now had enough hope to hold onto life.
She strained through the torrent of energy now surrounding them and forced herself carefully through the crack. For some reason trusting Danae to keep it contained. As soon as she made it through everything dulled, the energy sounded like it was far away and a sudden surge propelled her through the emptiness. There was a flash of white, and in her panic she crashed into a solid surface.
Zade found herself in a strange room. She struggled to her feet, leaning on a wooden table for support. The walls were made of a similar kind of wood, but uneven and rounded like the inside of a hollow tree. A layer of monochrome grey hid the colours from her view, even her own white side seemed a dirty grey. Almost like colour itself was being drained from the area.
Behind her was a thick black crack that must have been her way out. An ominous silhouette faded into view on the other side of the room as other objects started to lose their detail. Whatever this place was, it was being effected by the crack in reality and wouldn’t be here for long.
“Hello?” she whispered, but no sound came out. The room was filled with only deafening silence.
Zade put cautiously placed her hand on the persons shoulder and felt a mental connection form, a flair of relief sparked from both minds and the connection cut short. They were still alive, and Zade had to get them out of here.
Glancing back she noticed the crack shimmering, she didn’t have long until they were both doomed. She grabbed both their shoulders and tried to shake them but there was no response and barely any movement. They were stuck in place. If only she could pull them through the crack, but her magic couldn’t help her move bodies.
Zade moved to the other side and began to push, she couldn’t just do nothing. But they were almost immovable and she wasn’t an unstoppable force. They slowly moved across the fading floor inches at a time.
Almost there...
The silhouette touched the exit and the next second went by in a flash, the body suddenly weighed next to nothing, flung into the crack with Zade thrown off by the inertia. Her head slammed into their body and with an echo of metal her senses faded.
“Hello?” a comforting but worried voice called out, grasping the attention of Zade’s unconscious mind. “Are you okay?”
The pain in her head slowly dimmed and her vision returned.
“She will be fine,” shook the numbing voice of death, a snap back to reality.
A beautiful woman floated in the space in front of Zade, watching her closely. She wore a set of chain mail armor reinforced with silver plates and trimmed in a dark blue-gray. She withdrew instantly as she noticed she had come to, seemingly embarrassed.
The woman’s physique was agile and she moved with elegance, but her stature gave her an aura of strength and leadership. She was radiating positive energy that raised Zade’s spirit as though she could do anything.
“Are you okay?” she said with genuine concern. “You took quite a hit.” She tapped the armor on her shoulder and offered her other hand to help Zade get her balance that after a moment of hesitation she took. Their eyes caught and her energy that had been so eagerly sucked away earlier all but returned, their fluorescent dark blue invigorating her.
Judging by her intact body and vibrant green skin she was definitely a lot more living than the others. Perhaps she was related to the humans that Zade retained a distant memory of.
“I am fine,” she said after realizing she was staring. “My name is Zade. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
Zade thought she heard Danae sigh.
“Sera,” she happily returned the greeting. “I’m Sera, and the pleasure is mine.”
Sera turned to Danae who was now stood away from them, pretending to assess the situation with the, now massive, crack in space.
“Is he your friend?” she asked with a smile. “He’s rather... unpleasant,” she giggled.
Zade noticed him blatantly glare their way. “Really? I did not notice,” she said with heavy sarcasm.
Danae laughed, confirming his eavesdropping.
“Do not mind him,” she continued, “I think he has never conversed with a stranger before, and besides he got blown up recently and that is enough to make anyone cranky.”
Sera raised an eyebrow quizzically and turned to Danae who had suddenly approached. The momentum of the movement carried through in her knee-length wavy hair that scattered onto Zade’s face via zero gravity. Though she didn’t seem to notice, Zade could tell Danae was holding back a chortle.
“We should probably introduce you to the other member of our eccentric group,” he said, “He’s far worse than the two of us combined.”
The crowd quickly cleared after the man clarified the issue. Dr. D.A.S. Familiares as the tag on his suit read.
“No seriously Danae,” Zade continued as she walked up to him, “What the fuck?”
Danae tilted his head, “What?”
“You put a wanted poster out for me?!” she yelled, fists clenched.
“Out of all the questions you could ask right now I am surprised you picked that one,” he replied flatly and began to walk towards the building in the center of the clearing.
Zade was very confused and angry, a combination of emotions that had become oh too familiar to her around Danae. “Where are you going?”
“Again, poor choice of question,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder.
Zade ran to catch up and followed by his side. The citizens of the city seemed to treat Danae with respect, and under a different name. The former being the most bewildering of those facts.
“What question do I ask then?” she asked, followed by an audible sigh of frustration.
“None,” he replied, “You follow and listen to my monologue.”
Dear gods this was definitely Danae...
“Turns out, absorbing a metric butt-ton of magical energy - oh that you created by the way, thanks for that - into a temporal omnipotent artifact is not the best idea.”
Exactly what she was thinking at the time he did it.
“It made the book itself and everything in a very specific two meter radius go into the future by an average of 363 years. Well, I say average because I arrived 362 years into the future, and you’ve just arrived now. Your hand must have just been inside the radius or something and the book refused to just take your hand. I assumed you would arrive at some time, but part of me thought it might’ve been better if you’d just fallen out of time.”
“Hey!”
Danae coughed. “I mean because of the shit this world has become!”
They walked past a bush of green thorn-lacking roses, and coming up on their right was a leafless tree that bore some kind of purple fruit. What an odd garden. Zade realized there was a catch to what Danae had said.
“We are in the future? And you arrived two years ago?!”
Now Danae faltered slightly, tilting his head. “You’re very slow aren’t you.”
Zade would have rolled her eyes if she had any. Oh right, that’s another detail she skipped out on.
“Why are you a human?” she asked.
Danae turned his back to the building they were walking towards, facing her. “Finally!” he said as if it was obvious. “An important question, however you will now have to wait to find an answer.”
They arrived in front of two large glass doors that lead inside the Chaos Corporation building. Wait... Chaos Corporation? The tome that Danae had received was called the Book of Chaos. This building could not belong to Danae...
The doors slid open for them and Danae stepped to the side extending his hand towards them. “Welcome to my company.”
A voice roused Zade from her thoughts. She could only see dark grey, probably due to lying face down on the ground.
The goddess rose to see a very boring looking man. He had boring slicked back brown hair and wore a boring black and white outfit. Though she admitted it was a great colour scheme.
The man’s mouth was now hanging open. Zade wondered if she had something on her face, or perhaps it was her appearance. She had probably seen better days.
“I don’t normally take to such formal titles but I will accept it just this once,” she said, brushing off her shoulder.
“You’re...!” he replied, failing to form a coherent sentence.
Zade tilted her head and looked around. She appeared to be stood in a small crater in the side of a road. Strange buildings reached to the sky as far as the eye could see.
A honk sounded from her left, it came from a metal box with a human sitting inside. Every time the human pressed their hand to the circular object in front of them, the honk sounded again.
“What a strange world...”
Zade then realized people were staring at her. An awful lot of people. All with the same expression of shock on their faces.
“Um... hi?”
People started to walk towards her. Not everyone,. but those that did were definitely making it fast. Zade backed up against a solid object behind her. She was weak but she definitely was not going to resort to violence.
She turned and found that it was some type of notice board that she had backed up to. On the top was a digital display that contained a series of numbers and letters: 06/02/MM/E182. There were also various bits of paper on the board, one in particular catching Zade’s eye. It had a crudely drawn picture of her on and read: “Wanted: Strange Humanoid Entity | Alive, Reward 10000 Eras.”
“Well that explains the first part,” she said, narrowly dodging someone as they tried to grab her from behind. Zade swiped her arm to the side bending the light around her to create an illusion in her place whilst she became unseen.
The illusion held for a second, just enough to confuse the mob as Zade sprinted down a nearby alley. It didn’t take long for the citizens to follow though, and the alley exited into another street but there was a narrow fork left. Zade took the risk and ran for the fork, immediately regretting that decision as it opened into a wide courtyard with no other apparent exits.
It was like a clearing in a forest of stone, occupied only by nature. At the center was another towering building, taller than all the others. On the side of the building facing Zade was a logo resembling a flame. Far below that, over an entrance, was a white sign that read: “The Chaos Corporation”.
Zade turned to the shocked eyes of the mob of humans but noticed that this time they weren’t looking at her, but behind her. A familiar energy pulsed in the air, one that smelt of iron and hung heavy like smog.
A couple of the villagers bowed, others turned around and went back to their business, and the rest just stared.
“Dr. Familiares,” one of the bowing citizens said. “The strange entity has appeared, what shall we do!?”
“Ah well...” said a calm soothing voice. “You see I should probably clarify.”
Zade turned. Behind her stood a slim young gentleman in similar clothing to that of the citizens, yet still appearing more dapper and of a higher class. He wore a black double-breasted three piece suit with red pinstripes, two spiked vents, and a red tie with a skull pattern. His black skin didn’t seem to reflect sunlight, nor was it pure black like half of Zade. The man’s sharp gaze turned to Zade, peering at her through a greasy curtain of short black hair and a pair of white square glasses with pure black eyes.
“It was more of a missing persons poster than a wanted poster,” he chortled and extended his hand to Zade. “I am Dante Aleistar Solomon Familiares PHD. Please allow me to be the first to welcome you to Eterna, Zade.”
