#indigo orb

[indigoorb-blog]

Chapter One Hundred and Seven

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?

[indigoorb-blog]

Chapter Ninety-Seven

That evening, I was talking to Michael on a hard wooden bench. It was overcast. “Prayer, and resolve, and realizing that I am a man,” he was saying, “that is what made me normal again. I hope that you can become normal too Jasper... not just because of your homosexuality, but because of your other thing. Are you still doing that?” “Am I still an Astral?” I asked. “No, I left that lifestyle.” We parted ways, and then my Purity Rod began to vibrate. “Such interesting things are being found in those files,” said Vignir. “They contain an extremely detailed account of everything that went down that night. Magic users have been commissioned to analyze the spell and try to find some kind of counter-spell... we may be well on our way to stopping this thing. However, just in case no counter-spell can be found, perhaps the Indigo Orb can be used to prevent it, so I suggest you continue your operations below ground.” I explained what the Indigo Orb could do. “That is amazing, Jasper,” he said, ecstatic, “just amazing! With time travel, we could send an army into this place on August 13th, 1990 and prevent the Cue Ball from ever being summoned to begin with! I wish you the best of luck below, the fate of the world depends on you. Vignir, out.”

[indigoorb-blog]

Chapter Eighty-Six

The Keeper had been placed at the very bottom of the Indigo Orb Quest Facility to deem the worthiness of Enthangwor heroes, and, if worthy, bestow upon them the Indigo Orb. It had been created in a joint effort between the Ori and the Enthangwor. First, the Ori provided the Enthangwor with some materials needed to summon The Keeper in its raw form. These involved rare gemstones, animals, and minerals from across the Universe. Once the Enthangwor had completed the ritual to summon The Keeper, the Ori had added some improvements of their own. They added advanced cybernetic enhancements, and built The Keeper a new, stronger, heart - powered by the Indigo Orb itself. The Keeper, while armed with high-tech weaponry and enormous size and strength, could also use the power of the Indigo Orb itself  as a weapon. “What is the power of the Indigo Orb?” Michelle asked. “I wish I knew, beautiful monkey,” Unit 41 replied. “But my creators never programmed me to hold that knowledge. That was awfully mean of them, don’t you think?” The Keeper also held the power to communicate telepathically, and could see everything that was happening in Ori Base B. Indeed I can, The Keeper interjected, and by the way, your friend who was once a horse draws nearer. If you do not wish him to seize the Indigo Orb for himself, you should hurry. “How are we going to face him as mere animals?!” asked Yufu as the shock of hearing a voice in our head wore off. “That, lady horse,” said Unit 41, “is going to be a bit of a problem. If your hooves get sore on the way though, there is a restoration chamber just before the elevator to The Keeper’s lair that will heal you right up!” “Will it also heal magical ailments?” asked Mikoti hopefully. “Indeed it will, happy dove,” Unit 41 replied. Finally, there had been some good news. Unit 41 sped up our ability to solve puzzles considerably. We weren’t getting them done as quickly as we would have if Duncan had still been with us, but Unit 41’s hints proved invaluable.

[trevorvanas]

Apparently the background and header images had disappeared for a few days. This problem is now fixed.

[trevorvanas]

I have added a new project to my website, Indigo Orbs. You can read more about it here. 

A quick summary is that Indigo Orbs is a blog based novel that a friend and I worked on. The link above is a discussion on how I brought it to life.

[indigoorb-blog]

Chapter Forty-Eight

The Forest of Life was a place I had invented in primary school. Its most distinctive features were both the diverse array of plant and animal life, and how unsafe it was by day while being very safe by night. I had found it so fun to imagine that I had made it a part of many stories I made up when I was in late primary school, while in early primary school I had liked to pretend I was living there, fighting ogres with my magical sword and totally disconnected from reality.   I had forgotten all about this place until, ten years later, here it was. The Enthangwor magic in that memory-sucking booth must have sent instructions to the Enthangwor Layer in Ori Base B to construct an artificial reality based on my own imagination. It took a full minute for the realization of where we were to hit everybody. Everybody knew about the memory booth already, so when they put two and two together... Yufu was the first person, but not the last, who had to sit down from the shock. “These people,” she said, breathless, “were not people. They were gods.” Duncan’s mouth was hanging open. “This cannot be,” he said. “This is... this is impossible.” Mikoti had fainted. Michelle was just pensive, staring out into a river. As Lacy began fanning herself, she said, “if the Enthangwor could seriously wield this kind of power, and the power contained within the Indigo Orb terrified even them, then...” She didn’t even need to finish. “Just what kind of power must the Indigo Orb actually hold?” I asked.

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[indigoorb-blog]

Twenty-One

From my conversation with Gluttus and Unit 42, I managed to glean some useful information. I figured that what I was coming back with would not only clear me of my debt, but it was so substantial that Michelle would owe me. Maybe she would hook me up with a galah x phoenix crossbreed of my own.   I now knew why the Ori had come to Earth in the first place. It hadn’t been just so that they could hang out with the Enthangwor, though they had formed a very close alliance. No, the Ori had originally come to Earth on a mining expedition. The Enthangwor’s territory just so happened to be above where the Ori needed to dig. What the Ori were mining for was a cache of very rare items which existed nowhere else in the Universe; only existing at that specific part of the Earth’s crust. Indigo Orbs. There were several hundred thousand of them buried there. This was what the purpose of Ori Base B originally was: a mine. An unbelievably massive, complex, cavernous mine in which Ori miners both had to live and work. Eventually, they extracted all of the Indigo Orbs that were there. In return for their assistance, the Ori granted an Enthangwor request: to leave an Indigo Orb behind, with the tribe. The Enthangwor knew the incredible power contained within those orbs, however, and knew that it should only ever be used if it was absolutely needed - or else, if used recklessly, it could wreak untold destruction. Hence, the Ori agreed to build what Michelle knew as Ori Base A. As we knew already, Ori Base A was where worthy heroes were sent. As generations passed, Enthangwor heroes were told that they were being sent on a great quest to retrieve an enormous power with which they could protect the tribe from danger. They were allowed access to Ori Base A, and stepped into the memory-sucking booth. Then Gluttus would awaken and Unit 42 would activate, and together they would tell the hero about the Indigo Orb Quest. This is where Ori Base B comes in. While originally a giant Ori mine, together and over the course of many decades the Ori and the Enthangwor “refurbished” their old mine once all the Indigo Orbs were extracted to design... a proving ground. A labyrinth, to test the mettle of the chosen hero and five of their companions. The hero and their chosen five needed to step onto the elevator to Ori Base B on the night of the next full moon and, once there, they would have until the night of the next full moon to reach the bottom of the mine... or the entire mine would become a furnace, literally melting any human being in there within a matter of hours. “And at the bottom of the mine is the Indigo Orb, I take it?” I asked. “Well... more or less, yes,” said Gluttus. “So,” I said, “now for perhaps the most obvious question: what does the Indigo Orb actually do?” “Information not in database,” replied Unit 42. “We don’t actually know,” said Gluttus, “there’s only one left behind by the Enthangwor and the Ori who has that knowledge, and that is...” “The Keeper,” said Unit 42, “a hybrid of highly advanced Ori technology and a being summoned by the Enthangwor. It holds the Indigo Orb at the bottom of what your memories call Ori Base B. It is indestructible. It will give the Indigo Orb and safe passage from the mine to one whom it deems worthy. It will kill the unworthy.” So, that was the Indigo Orb Quest: catch an elevator down to Ori Base B with five companions on the night of a full moon, make it to the bottom, get the Indigo Orb from The Keeper, and get out before the next full moon. No matter what the power of the Indigo Orb may have been, it was in no way worth risking death to undertake this “quest”. I knew that even Michelle Gelatin was not insane enough to contemplate such a thing.

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