2-1
I pushed the shovel into the ground and it hit something solid but hollow with a thunk. I turned to Owl where she was fiddling with her forearm and she gave me a nod. I pulled the shovel back and used its point to find the edges of the thing I hit before I started digging it out. Using the shovel and scraping the top of it off I saw it was made of old darkened wood.
Reaching down I grabbed the sides and lifted it out of its little hole and from the ground. I turned and raised it above my head, some dirt falling onto my shoulders, I set it on the rim of the hole I was in. I knocked the dirt off my shoulders before grabbing the shovel and throwing it out of the hole then leaping out after it. I landed next to the mound of dirt and the tractor that had helped us dig it.
He was an older man with a grey trimmed beard. He wore a straw hat and overalls. His tractor had a backhoe attachment and when he figured out what we were doing he drove over to help us. It was either that or his wife told him to help, we had gotten her permission to dig the box up in the first place.
Owl had knelt down in front of the box and grabbed the lock. A quick jerk and she tore it off the front of the box. She dropped the lock to the side and pried open the lid. The old guy leaned forward from where he sat in his seat while I took a few steps closer to see inside the box. It was filled with old bills and papers, Owl ignored it all and pulled back the layers until she found what she wanted.
What she pulled out was a light brown stone. From the shape of it I could tell it was a smaller shape of a greater form. “Is that what you are looking for?” The farmer asked.
Owl stood up and handed it to the farmer. He rolled it around in his hand examining, “Looks like a regular stone to me. My wife's family has owned this land for a few hundred years, one of them probably buried it.”
He held it out and Owl took it back, pulling it under her cloak. She bent over, closing the box then scraped some of the dirt off it before picking it up and passing it to the farmer, "There's quite a few bills in there. We don't need them and this stone can be dangerous.”
The farmer took the box and cracked it open. His eyes widened and he shut it quickly, “Do you think any of these would have historical value?”
Owl gave him a slow nod, “Probably. Erid Industries has a pretty good fact check from what I have heard. If you send them a message they might send someone over to take a look.”
He gave a nod, “Ill bring this to the house then swing back around and fill this hole up.”
He started his tractor and pulled away from us. I watched him go then turned to Owl, "That's the last stone then?”
“The last one that needed to be collected. Yes.” Owl replied.
I looked from her to the hole, “You just brought me along because there was a hole to dig, didn't you?”
She shook her head and brought up her forearm while answering, “I brought you along because you helped me collect most of the dangerous ones. I figured you would want to see this to the end.”
Space twisted around us and we appeared on the teleportation pad instead of her lab. “Is your teleportation tech not fully repaired?”
“No, why do you ask?” Owl asked as she stepped forwards off the pad.
I hurried forward so I could walk beside her, “We normally just appear in your lab.”
The door ahead of us split open and showed her lab. There were black lab benches everywhere with science equipment covering them. “I just selected the last location used instead of the lab. Walking fifty feet is just as simple as pressing a few more buttons.”
We weaved through the lab tables and approached the pedestal that held the rest of the stone. It was as big as a massive book. The ground opened up ahead of us as we got close and a computer rose out of it. Owl stopped before it and hit a few keys. Graphs appeared on the monitor, “The signal it's been sending had grown stronger the more it becomes whole. I am not going to let it finish what it's doing though.”
Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Another pedestal rose out of the ground ahead of us. Owl stepped to the left of the computer and pulled out the stone from under her cloak before approaching the new one. I am sure what she was going to do was put it on the pedestal and scan both of them but the stone had something other to say.
She must have crossed some limit or got too close because the mostly completed stone twitched then shot towards Owl. It was fast, I didn't see Owl move so I leapt over the computer and held my hand in front of it to catch it. My arm was stretched out ahead of it, when it got close to my hand the outer layer of it shifted from a light brown into a lighter grey. Then it phased through my hand.
My feet hit the ground and I heard a click then Owl suck in a breath of air behind me. I turned around and she was holding the full greyish tablet in one hand. It started glowing and her head snapped to me. I could tell by the way she shifted that was not a good thing. It was very alarming, I did the only thing I could think of. Reaching out, I grabbed the other side of the thing.
The glow must have been a charge because when I grabbed it the thing went off. Space twisted around us, not the smooth and elegant shifting of Owls teleportation. This felt like we were being stuffed through a thin straw. It was a long straw two, Owls teleportation was almost instant, this one took a few seconds.
Owls mask snapped shut and we appeared somewhere else. Wherever we were was hot, the ground was a reddish brown with a layer of crust. There was very little wing blowing and from where I was standing the ground was the same out to the horizon. I let go of the stone grey tablet thing and both of our arms dropped.
Owl lifted her arm and a hologram sprouted out of it with a long string of numbers. They were flashing and changing quickly. Owl stared at it with an intense focus. The numbers scrolled for what felt like a minute then they stopped and lined up. I heard her sigh in her suit then she dropped her forearm, “What happened? What is that thing? Where did that thing take us?”
“The good news is that we are still in our universe. The bad news is that we are quite a ways from our planet.” She looked at the tablet then waved it around, “this thing was a call for help.”
“A call for help?”
She gave me a nod, “From a long time ago. We are about three or four thousand years too late to help though.”
I crossed my arms and watched the tablet in her hand before meeting the eyes of her mask, “How can you tell we are too late?”
Owl pointed at the ground beneath our feet, “The biosphere died out once, this crust is the planet slowly reviving. In a few hundred thousand years there might be plants and things growing but something killed most of the things on this planet.”
“Shit. At least we are still in the same universe.” I replied.
She nodded over my shoulder and I turned around, following her line of sight. A massive city covered the horizon. Building that reached up and almost touched the sky. From the distance it looked like it was covered in the reddish brown dust below our feet. I could see flying vehicles shoot around through it in lines. Some things lifted off from the city and shot into the sky, disappearing as they got smaller and smaller.
“How far away is that place?”
“About fifty miles.” Owl answered.
She took a step forward and stood next to me. I watched the vehicles zipping around the city for some time, “Those are not hover cars”
Owl shook her head, “Those look more like the equivalent of semi trucks to me.”
“And the things shooting into space?”
“Freighters. Probably unloading on something in space. There's a few space ships too.”
It was like landing on the mountain all over again. I sighed and took a step forward. The crust and stuff crumbled under my feet. It was a few seconds later and Owl caught up to me. We walked at an idle pace, like we were not in a hurry. I don't know if it was because reaching the city would mean something or if we were just done for the day. Owl still carried the tablet with her. If I was her I would have dropped it.
“How are we going to get home?” I asked her.
She was silent for quite a long time. I think about a half an hour passes before she replied, “we find some where I can patch into the internet equivalent and download some language software. If this society is advanced enough for space travel they probably have some kind of translation matrix or something like it. Language drift can get pretty bad over stellar distances.”
Wind swirled past us as we marched, “that doesn't sound too bad. Then what?”
I pulled my pipe out, filling the bowl with herbs and lighting it with a spark of chi. The smoke tasted like strawberry. The planet was quiet, there were no bugs chirping or birds tweeting. It was unsettling. “We acquire a ship.”
I let out a chuckle. “Aquire? Do you know how to fly them?”
“It won't be hard to learn. The ships are probably simplified. The number of them lifting off and landing says they are probably as simple to drive as cars on our planet.” Owl answered.
“How long is it going to take us to get home from here then?”
Owl shook her head and shifted her weight back as we walked down a hill, “Anywhere from a few weeks to a month or two. It depends on if i have to tweak their FTL drives or things like that.”
“You know the science behind them?”
“I was fourteen when I had a plan to solve every problem humanity would ever run into. Of course I know how to tweak their drives.” She replied with a huff.
“Then why did you not solve every problem humanity would run into then?” I asked her.
I could hear the tone of her voice change into a grumble, “a version of me from twenty years in the future came back in time and told me how it was a bad idea. Humans need something to achieve. People got lazy and fat. It spiraled from there.”
We continued walking. I could tell it was going to take all day to get there at this pace. The sun wasn't a bright yellow in the sky but a yellowish red. I didn't know the time and felt it wasn't worth it to ask. It wouldn't be our planet's time so it didn't really matter to me.
I slapped te ash out of my kiseru and was hanging it on my belt when something occurred to me. “We are going to be going quite the distance right?”
“Yes.”
“Can we stop for souvenirs?”