Lovers of Babel (15 page)

             
The worker wiped his brow. He opened the sack slowly and after a deep breath he dipped his arm into the sack. He let out a comical scream and immediately pulled his arm back out exposing teeth marks all over it. He grabbed it with his other hand and looked to be in severe pain.

             
“Somebody get this man a doctor!” The Herald demanded with a hint of annoyance in his voice.

             
Chad walked over to the injured worker and grabbed the bag. He dumped the contents of it on the lawn of the Tourney. This was the smarter move.

             
There it was, amidst the dozen or so piranhas flailing around on the grass; the Portal of Antiquity. It was shining so brightly it could’ve been a star. Chad bent down, picked it up and showed it to the audience who was cheering.

             
“Here is your proof, Herald! Now, is it over?” Chad called up to the Herald.

             
“Bring it to me so that I can examine it,” the Herald said.

             
Chad placed the portal inside the black basket and sent it up to the Herald. The eccentric announcer held it in his hand with as much caution as if defusing a bomb. The light from the portal was so bright that it made his face disappear from the view of the audience. He cupped the portal inside of both hands and the light disappeared.

             
“This is it. The Portal of Antiquity has been found at last! And we now have a new winner; Chad Pilgrim!” The Herald announced excitedly.

             
The game masters came down from the stands to greet Chad, something they didn’t do for the previous winners. They placed a glass crown on his head that was adorned with a jewel encrusted air symbol in the center. The audience applauded. Chad Pilgrim was the youngest teleporter to ever win the Tourney.

             
After a few minutes of applause, the Herald raised his hands in a gesture to silence the audience.

             
“Everyone please quit down. There’s still more to be said. As you recall before Quicktrek I mentioned that an extra prize would be given to the winner. Well, I have that prize in my possession right now.”

             
The Herald raised his closed right hand out to the audience and opened it. The light emitting from his palm shot through the glass ceiling of the arena.  The audience was stunned. The extra prize that would be given to Chad was the actual Portal of Antiquity.

             
Chad looked up at the Herald with his mouth agape.               

             
“But you will not receive it now,” the Herald said and closed his hand again shutting out the light. 

             
“This gift will be presented to you by the headmaster of all power schools, Amias Riley!” He announced.

             
The audience was inundated with “ooh’s” and “ah’s”. Chad looked slightly confused and unsure how to react to the news. What on earth would he do with such a powerful thing like the Portal of Antiquity? From my seat I could tell that this is what he was thinking.

             
Later we would find out that the Quicktrek competition was actually a test to find the best teleporter in power school. A couple years later my father, Amias, would ask Chad to embark on a journey to find the ancient book that had been stolen. He would tell him to use the portal to help him find it. If Chad knew then the consequences of his victory, he mightn’t have fought so hard to win, but this was the way things operated in power school. Each assignment was a test of our abilities. We were constantly being held under a microscope. I know now that it was all a part of my father’s plan to create perfect gang of young power players who would lead the Equinox into a militarized society.  But before he could do this, he needed that book.

             
After witnessing my first Tourney, Chad, Mia and I became friends. Our friendship would spark something in me that would never die; my hunger for the truth.

Chapter 2: Mammoth Forest

It was my sixteenth birthday and I was unenthused. For a girl with so much responsibility I could care less about the carousing that goes along with another birthday party. But there I was seated on the radiant birthday throne made up of ten red dwarf stars, 200 tiny neutron stars that twinkled twenty times per second and 50 blue-white stars; it looked like Christmas, from what I’ve read about it.  The light was so bright that I couldn’t see any of the faces eagerly wishing me a happy birthday or the fact that most of these faces were strained from all the fake smiling. My father made it imperative that I get the royal treatment on this day. He had the top creators in town make me a seven-foot tall edible cake made to look like a tall stack of 75 of my favorite books. This was the only thing that pleased me that day despite the gorgeous hovering constellations necklace that my father created for me. I heard he had been practicing that hex for two months just for me. It would have pleased me if I had not had such a sour feeling about hexes.

If it hadn’t been for
Chad and Mia my birthday would’ve been extremely boring. While all of my father’s friends and associates were carousing we decided to sneak off to our favorite place: Mammoth Forest. This forest was the very first creation ever made by the hands of a human. They call it Mammoth Forest because supposedly the guy who created it saw a Woolly mammoth coming toward him. Of course this would’ve scared him because at that time mammoths had been extinct for centuries. Now, we coexist with mammoths and other prehistoric-like animals. Some people think once the Equinox happened the time/space continuum changed and it brought back creatures from the past. I think because of the extremely cold climate and the ice age that happened after the apocalypse, the animals adapted to the climate and grew fur. Either way, compared to what I’ve read about the old world, this place seems magical.

Most people won’t dare go into the Mammoth forest. It’s too mysterious for their taste, but we like the mystery of it.
Chad, Mia and I have turned it into our secret hide-out.

The forest is about 10,000 miles away from my home
, so to get there we use Chad to teleport us. We snuck off to my room and huddled in a circle in the center of the ocean carpet that I created to mimic the real ocean. It’s like walking on water.

“Sage, I swear I’ll never get used to standing on this thing. What if I fall in?”
Chad asked.

“You’re
not going to fall in silly. It only looks like the ocean. It’s a simple hex really,” I said.

“Remember that
pet rabbit my mother gave you last year for your birthday? Remember how it mysteriously disappeared?” Chad said in his post-adolescent awkward voice.

“
Chad, it didn’t fall into the carpet. It probably got lost somewhere.”

“That thing is still stuck in your hex, Sage. You killed my mom’s rabbit!”

“Oh, be quite. You hated that thing anyway. It probably ran away to get away from your bad energy. Animals can sense bad energy, you know,” I said giving Chad a good punch to the shoulder.

“Ok
ay, you guys. Let’s hurry and get out of here before someone catches us,” Mia said. I could tell she was trying not to roll her eyes.

“Alright
, you know the drill guys. Close your eyes,” Chad commanded.

“C
lose our eyes, imagine the forest, pretend that we’re there. We got it, Chad,” I interjected.

Chad
looked at me in annoyance with his head cocked to the side.

“You seriously need to duke it
out or something. All of this pent up tension is making me uncomfortable,” Mia said.

“What tension!?
Psh whatever!” Chad said overdoing it.

“Fine, no tension.
Let’s just puleeease hurry!”

Suddenly,
we heard footsteps down the hall getting progressively louder.

We straightened up and
closed our eyes, but we were still standing in my room. It usually wouldn’t take that long to teleport, but I guess our concentration wasn’t as strong.

The footsteps were ge
tting closer. Suddenly the doorknob started moving.

We began
to panic. If anyone saw us leave, our secret place would be ruined. Plus, under the laws of jurisdiction, it was past our curfew and we weren’t allowed to use our powers past a certain time of day.

The door swung open. As we began to teleport
, I saw a glimpse of my mother’s wavy jet-black hair. Then, it was nothing but trees.

“That was close,” I said relieved.

“I wonder where they think we go when we disappear like this,” Mia said.

“It’s a wonder that we haven’t been caught yet. Then again, your father is the master of the universe,”
Chad said to me as he was searching for our food stash in the bushes.

“Trust me, that
has nothing to do with it. My father is much harder on me than you think. The reason why we haven’t been caught yet is because he wants me to take over one day.”

“Found it!”

Chad pulled out an aluminum crate with all sorts of junk food.

“Now this is a birthday feast,” I said with a mouth full of sugar cane candy.

“Are you guys at all nervous about The Tourney?” Mia asked. “It’s in less than a month.”

“I think it’ll be alright. I’ve been practicing a lot,” I said.

The Tourney was a competition that was held twice a year in Power School where powers compete for the title in their particular power grade. Chad once won the title over the Teleporters. Students were supposedly chosen at random.

“Let’s see your skills. I’ll be the Herald,”
Chad said and stood up with his chest puffed out.

He began to speak in a silly English accent.

“Ladies and gentleman up next is Sage Riley for the creators. She will create…” Chad was miming a drum roll. “The sun!”

Mia and I looked at
Chad like he had grown three heads. Someone of my experience couldn’t possibly create the sun. I had never seen the sun first of all. Second, usually the bigger the object, the harder it was to create.

“C’mon,
think a little smaller,” Mia said.

“No. Let me try.”

Chad gave me a small nod. We had been practicing our powers together for a while without Mia. It was just that Mia was a little more reluctant to push her powers to the limit. She was a transformer – and a good one at that – but she liked to play by the rules. Chad and I liked to push the limit and then some; after all, the rules were ridiculous. The rules for jurisdiction of powers for first and second generation Equinoxians were as follows:  powers could only be used between the hours of 7am to 12 noon. Then there was an hour of peace time where no one used their powers. After peace time, at 1pm to midnight powers could be used. Juveniles were only able to use their powers between 7am and 5pm; that was us. Also, powers could only be used at home, in training courses, and specific jurisdictions around the Equinox. There weren’t many of these places and the Mammoth Forest definitely wasn’t one of them.

Creators couldn’t create anything that was
lewd, dangerous, destructive, scary around children, profane, and we couldn’t create other humans. Only things that were helpful, good, fun, pretty, nice, and peaceful could be created.

Teleporters
couldn’t teleport outside their particular jurisdiction without allowance. They could never under any circumstances teleport to a private area. Transformers weren’t allowed to transform to look like another person for unethical purposes or to spy. They also couldn’t transform into a monster or beast to hurt others and were forbidden to transform into Amias the king; my father.

The rules seem to make sense on the surface. They were set in place for the purpose of keeping cit
izens safe, but the consequences for breaking the rules were dire. People who broke the rules were imprisoned. There was no warning, no citation, just imprisonment. No one really knew what happened to people who were imprisoned, but there were rumors that prisoners got turned into experiments to become perfect citizens and then released out into the world. This is why no one knew what happened. Anyone who was once a prisoner had no memory of what happened while they were there.

I guess one of the reasons why
Chad and I liked to play Russian Roulette with the law was because deep down inside we wanted to find out the truth. We wanted to know what they did to law-breakers. We were foolish to take such risks, but we were sixteen with superpowers. We felt indestructible.

I stood up in front of Mia and
Chad while the crescent moon shinned bright white behind me, creating a silhouette of my body. The trees were our guardians and stood too tall to see their peaks. These were the only trees in the Equinox that weren’t fluorescent at night and white during the day. They were like the trees in the old age and I loved the smell of ancient forest permeating through the night air.