The Indigo Orb felt smooth in my hands. Cool. I turned it over, examining it.
I held it between my palms and lay down on the silky soft couch of the psychology room. The ceiling was cracked, with some of the faded yellow paint peeling.
“You’re going to have to fall asleep without my techniques this time, in order to activate your ability. Just close your eyes and relax. Get comfortable,” came Marieke’s soothing voice.
“Ow!” I said to a sharp pain in my arm.
“That was to speed it along,” she said.
When my eyes opened up again I seemed to be in the middle of a dark forest. I became immaterial and floated along the winding dirt trail, keeping an eye out for any of A Tenet’s Lion’s armed guards or yellow mages who might have been patrolling.
This wasn’t who I saw first, though. Walking along the path, hand in hand, were... Gautur and Theodora, Vignir’s parents. Tonight, Gautur would be tortured to death and Theodora would escape alive, but with no legs and slightly insane. Well, unless I could do something about it.
I came up behind them... and before I knew it, Gautur had turned around and pointed his weapon, which looked like a bulkier version of a handgun, at my chest.
“This weapon is a...” he began, then I completed:
“Quantum destabilizer, I know. Fires a pulse of energy which is able to destroy mystical creatures, including immaterial beings such as myself,” I said.
“Why are you here?” asked Theodora, taking off her sunglasses. “Explain why you were following us or my husband will shoot you.”
“I know you probably won’t believe this, but I was sent here from the future by your son Vignir,” I explained. “He grows up to be a paranormal investigator just like you two.”
“And why would we believe you?” asked Gautur, rubbing the trigger.
I explained, in light detail, about tonight’s ritual and its consequences, as well as the nature of the underground Ori bases. As well as what I was doing there.
“Hmm,” said Gautur, still aiming his quantum destabilizer, “so the ancient legends of the Enthangwor and the Ori were true? We were so convinced that was just a myth. I have just one more request: prove that you’re an Astral, not a spectre, by entering your physical form.”
I did so, and Gautur holstered his weapon. “I am convinced. Theodora, Jasper, let us go and stop this disaster.”
We hadn’t walked long before we were ambushed by three yellow mages. They leaped from behind a patch of trees and all three of them began throwing lightning.
“Duck!” I yelled, becoming immaterial. A bolt passed right through me, while Gautur was able to dodge the other. Theodora, however, took the full force of a bolt... and it did nothing to her. She had of course been born anti-magic, able to resist any spells thrown on her.
What was strange was that that knowledge had popped into my head as though I had always known it, when I didn’t recall ever having had learned it. The flood of information that was unknowingly in my head as a result of Marieke’s trances would take some getting used to.
Theodora drew her pistol and fired three shots at the yellow mages, who were very confused that their attacks were harming neither me nor Theodora. Two were taken down, with the last getting hit in the shoulder. Gautur ran to the man who was hit and pinned his arms to his sides.
“What are you guarding?” he demanded.
The mage was unresponsive until given a dose of sodium theopental. Like father like son.
To further establish who I was, Gautur asked both the captured yellow mage and I a series of questions about what was happening inside the Lion’s Temple that night. When our answers corresponded correctly, Gautur booted the yellow mage in the face. “Just had to make sure you weren’t some agent of theirs,” he explained.
“I thought that you had already been convinced?” I asked.
“I wanted to be doubly convinced. If you want to make yourself useful, fly up nice and high and give us an idea of what’s up ahead,” said Gautur.
When I came back down, I gave the pair an outline of the forest, what areas the yellow mages and armed guards were patrolling, and the exact location of the Lion’s Temple. I drew out a map in the dirt with my finger, which contained much more detail than I could remember taking in.
“Thank you for this information, Jasper,” said Gautur. “If we take this route through the forest here, we should only encounter patrols of yellow mages, and with my wife’s anti-magic ability they should be significantly less of a threat to us than the armed guards. Also, you said that when we were captured in the original timeline, it was by armed guards, correct?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Things are going to happen differently tonight, though.”
We made our way through the path that Gautur - who looked and acted much like his son - had mapped out for us through the forest, sneaking up on bands of yellow mages as we did so and dispatching them with Theodora’s tranquilizer gun. At one point, a yellow mage stood guard far away behind a tree. We could make out his yellow cloak swirling in the wind, but could not see his body.
“I can’t get a clean shot at him from here,” Theodora whispered, “and he would hear us approach with all those leaves all over the ground. Jasper, I’m going to need you to fly over and zap him with this.” She held out to me a steel rod with one yellow end. A riot prod.
I did so, pushing the rod into his neck and holding the button. He shook for several seconds, until I released the button and he collapsed. How amusing, that a yellow mage would be stopped by electricity.
When I flew back, I noticed that a guard was facing away from me, holding Theodora in a headlock, with a gun pressed to her head. Gautur had thrown down his own weapons in surrender. “You must be Gautur and Theodora,” said the guard. “You two are such menaces to us like you wouldn’t believe. Well, no matter. I’ll take you to one of our yellow mages, and it can look like you were sneaking around on our property until you were struck by ligh- ahhhh...”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence, as I had jabbed the riot prod into his neck.
As the guard, shaking from the volts of electricity still going through his body, fell to the ground I said: “they do that same lightning thing in the future, too, just not with magic. I’m afraid they were going to do much worse than just electrocuting you once they caught you, though... much worse.”
“Thank you for saving us,” said Gautur, adjusting his tie. “Now we should really continue...”
We did so, eventually reaching the Lion’s Temple. It was perched on a rise, the same place as where the administrative office would be in the future - so right above Ori Base A. The Temple itself was stone and elaborately carved, with a lion’s open mouth forming the entrance.
“A Tenet’s Lion has long denied the existence of this place,” said Gautur. “Amazing to actually see it now... simply amazing.”
“Well,” I explained, “it won’t exist just a few days from now. It is smashed down and the forest bulldozed to make way for a camp which is meant to ‘purify’ people before the apocalypse that they summoned. Well, unless we can stop it.”
There seemed to be dozens of guards and yellow mages patrolling around the temple, from what we could notice. “Let’s go,” said Gautur.
Before we could, however... a vertical hole appeared high in the sky far northeast of the Lion’s Temple. “I hope that is not a sign that their ritual has started already,” gulped Theodora.
“I think that it is something else entirely,” I said, snatching away Gautur’s binoculars.
The hole was exactly what I thought that it was. What fell down through the hole in the distance and into the forest below was... Mr Sillypants. Several of the guards noticed this strange figure falling as well and went off to investigate.
“What was that thing?” Gautur asked, putting down his binoculars. “It was like an ultra thick version of a bodybuilder, covered in grey fur and wearing these strange polka-dot pants...”
“Long story short,” I said, “it is somebody very strong, also from the future, who has come here to stop us.”
The question was - why? Why had The Keeper elected to send him back here?
