• You know, I remember how this all started...
    After a long and boring journey on a flimsy looking boat, I arrived at Jocey, the city that housed what would be my new home, Jocey University, for the next several years. I was here on a fully paid science scholarship and I was ecstatic about going to the school with the best known math and science curriculum in all of, well, everywhere. Or maybe my excitement was from the adrenaline rush I got from only heaving my guts everywhere twice on the little boat. Oh well, I was just glad to be on land, particularly the land on which Jocey itself stood. I began to mosey my way downtown, admiring the setting that had grown around me.
    Jocey was the best looking city I had ever seen, not to mention it was the cleanest and the most well balanced one, too. Its streets almost shone in the mid-morning’s sun. Even the sunlight itself looked hand-delivered by Apollo. The skyscrapers seemed to caress the sky and they ranged from the smallest buildings on the outside to the tallest of them all dead center in the middle of circle of buildings around it.
    I heartily noted the diversity of the people that walked or jogged past, some with determination, and others lost or moseying like myself. Some were dressed in suits, looking ready to jump into a court house or run for office, while others were dressed in tattoos, multiple piercings and pants, or in some cases, a skin-tight shirt, bandana, and/or tube-top for the girls. Then there were people in between, like me, wearing their favorite pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a combination of sandals and socks.
    I finally ended up near a small park, the green of the trees reflected in the windows of the first-floor stores that seemed to be popular downtown. The little park was amazingly pretty and peaceful, almost like a mini retreat for the Greek god of nature, Pan. Birds’ musical voices pierced through the general noises of the crowds and nearly swept me off my feet because of their randomness in the city. I sighed happily as I walked the small paths winding between the trunks and underbrush. Then I spotted a newspaper stand and, having previously found a good selection of best-selling books at a stand in the past, decided I would see which ones this stand would have.
    When I arrived at the stand and began to examine their selection, an odd sound distracted me. It sounded almost like an old car back-firing, but from the sky, like on top of a building. Knowing a car shouldn’t be on top of a building, I looked up and searched for the source of the noise.
    Up high, a plane soared quietly. For a second, I thought that had been the source of the noise until I noticed a figure dressed all in white fall, or jump, out of the side. The plane was just flying past a building’s rooftop, a building that looked to be almost fifty-thousand feet, or so. I gasped when the person fell past the rooftop and began an almost slow-motion decent to the earth with nothing in his or her way. Or, at least, I thought that until I noticed the second person.
    The two people, the second one dressed in what looked like all black, grabbed at each other, spun around a few times in mid-air, and then, I guessed, clung to each other desperately as they continued to free fall.
    Coincidentally, I hoped, a loud, disturbing sound hit my ears. It was the sound of screeching, rubber tires, immediately followed by innocent, human flesh meeting speeding metal. I quickly turned around to see what I knew would be a grotesque scene behind me, but I couldn’t not look for fear of my own life.
    I first noticed the car. It was sitting in the smoke the burned tires had made; blood was dripping ominously from the shiny, metal grille. The car looked like it was brand new, and, for all of the blood now staining it, it seemed perfectly unharmed.
    Sadly, the same couldn’t be said about the person laying pitifully on the ground a couple of yards away. Shuddering I couldn’t help but note the small, crimson pool forming slowly around the horribly maimed and twitching body, reminding me of a modern day Adonis who did not heed the warnings of the police, substituting for Venus, illegally tried to cross the street, and was overrun by a giant, metal boar that smashed his side with its heavy, blunt snout instead of tusks.
    Disgusted, I turned my head away and all but forgot the two free-falling people until I heard the impact of their bodies on the ground and felt a slight tremor, as if the two people’s bodies were made of stone and metal, instead of flesh and bone.
    I looked at the small crater that had formed just in time to see two bystanders fall, helplessly, into the hole. Surprised and further disgusted at the thought of other people falling on top of the bloody mess of the first two, I went to try to help the poor people out, and I followed an oddly familiar-looking girl to the spot.
    I looked down into the crater, along with several other people, but only saw the bystanders. There was no blood, no broken bodies, there didn’t even seem to be a trace of the two free-fallers in that crater, except for the crater itself. And it seemed as if the two in the hole were just as dead as the fallers should have been. A cigarette was still clutched in one of their hands.
    Shocked, I looked up to see the familiar girl looking at me with the same shocked expression as I was wearing. Now that I was able to see her face, I recognized her as my old friend, Jessa, from seventh grade.


    It was finally the middle of the school year, the time where all of the slackers began to set their serious slacking records. It was also the time of year when a new student arrived. She seemed timid and almost scared like most of the new students first appeared, and, just like other new students, she was, of course, the center of negative attention. Remembering what it felt like to be a new student only the year before, I decided that she shouldn’t have to go as long as I did without friends. I went up to her and introduced myself, and feeling intrigued by the mysteries in her blue eyes, I invited her to “dine” with me and my other friends at lunch. She smiled gratefully at me, which filled me to brimming with satisfaction. Our table discussions mainly consisted of, well, where she had lived and how she liked where she lived now. She agreed with the rest of us that Ohio was our least favorite state and we would not be cheering the Reds on.
    She stayed with us for the rest of the dreadful days of our seventh grade year, but that half year was the only time I would see her, because I had to move after I finished the grade. But I soon distracted my self from my lack of friends in my new school, again, by jumping head first into my studies and school work. I ended up skipping a whole bunch of grades and eventually graduated from high school at the young age of 15, which is the same age I expected to enter Jocey at.


    We looked from the crater and back at each other a few times. Then we were both able to slip in a small “Hi.”
    “D-did you see that person jump off the building?” she asked me, sort of yelling.
    I looked at her in confusion. “No, I saw someone jump out of a plane…Didn’t you?”
    She looked at me with a “gurl u cray-Z!” sort of look. And maybe I was, but I knew what I saw. But at the same time, my nerves were almost shot from the car accident and the free-fallers’ disappearance. It was like a scary movie, and boy do I hate scary movies. Then I realized something. “Whoa, was your person the one in the black?” I asked.
    But Jessa must have come to the same realization as me, because she said, “Hold it, was your person the one in white?” at the same time that I said it.
    We both nodded our answers, at the same time again, and Jessa said, “Um…that was a classified no one was supposed to see. Men in Black meets Terminator thing…let’s pretend it never happened, m’kay?”
    I watched her for a few seconds, feeling I’d rather attempt to figure the whole thing out than “trying” to forget anything. Finally I shrugged and responded, “Sure. Let’s, um, go get some ice-cream or something.”


    Some time later, after we had finished several scoops of ice cream and talking about everything except the recent, unrealistic events, we decided to finally seek out and visit JU, the college we were both conveniently going to stay at, together. But as we walked out of the ice cream place, after getting one last scoop of ice cream, we ran into some newly old, free-falling friends of ours. And we literally ran into them, mind you.
    When we recognized them, our eyes grew to saucers, and they muttered apologies almost as an afterthought as they continued on their way.
    We looked at each other and had a silent conversation. If my interpretation was correct, it went something like this:
    ‘Those were the people that fell.’
    ‘Well, duh! But where are they going?’
    ‘That isn’t our concern. Let’s go.’
    ‘Let’s go after them? Exactly what I was thinking.’
    ‘Absolutely not.’
    ‘Look, they’re getting away. We either chase them now or we’ll lose them probably forever.’
    ‘And that’s a problem because…?’
    ‘Don’t you want to know how they survived?’
    ‘Well, yeah, but-’
    ‘Then let’s go stalking!’
    It was either that or something about monkeys escaping from a zoo, but either way we started following the free-fallers. I watched them closely, afraid they would dissolve into the crowds, or just dissolve into the air itself. And only one thing distracted me from my intent staring. Jessa was humming the Pink Panther theme song.
    Finally, and expectedly, the one in black turned and confronted us. “Why are you following us?” the black clothed girl asked us.
    Simultaneously, both of us replied, “I’m not, she is,” which earned me a glare from Jessa.
    At the same time that Jessa glared at me, the person in white turned around to us. It was then clear that the two free-fallers were fraternal twins. They looked exactly alike, but they also seemed like total opposites. The white person was a boy and looked a degree away from delicate, while the girl in black looked a lot tougher. Both looked determined in getting an answer and an expected suspicion fluttered behind their eyes like a lightning bug trapped behind a glass wall that was flashing its light on and off.
    Then Jessa buckled under the pressure and blurted out the truth about us stalking them. She told them with a shaky voice, “Okay look, we saw you do your free falling stunt. We saw the big hole in the ground you left behind, and we’re both quite sure that by human anything, you should not be alive because of the impact of the ground, whether you had a parachute or not. And what if you were a bomb? We would all have blown away. So, spill. Why aren’t you dead?”
    “And don’t pull the ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about’ card because we know it was you two,” I added, mostly because they looked like they were about to say it.
    “How could you know that if you only saw us free-falling?” the girl countered.
    Jessa smirked. “East, your body structure is right. There are also two of you. Even if it wasn’t ‘twins’, I don’t believe that both pairs would still be together. Also, there were no bodies and they were wearing what you are wearing now. And lastly,” she glanced at me.
    I walked to them and pulled some gravel out of their hair and said, “It’s not easy to get this stuff in your hair unless you’ve made a hole in the ground…or if you’re playing with it and throwing it everywhere…”
    They exchanged glances with each other and blushed slightly in embarrassment and/or enthusiasm. “Man, you to remind me of Leader-sama and Ruler-chan,” the boy in white said with a smile.
    Jessa and I exchanged glances, and said, “Who and who?” almost at the same time, although I was only a quarter of a second behind her.
    The two free-fallers looked around suspiciously and said, “We, uh, we can’t tell you here, too many prying eyes and ears. But…we will tell you if you come with us.”
    I glanced at Jessa and knew another wordless conversation was about to commence.
    ‘Not even in your dreams, no’
    ‘Aw, come on, Jessa. They look as harmless as…little bumblebees…’
    ‘Looks can be deceiving, like they looked like they were gonna die.’
    ‘But that’s different.’
    ‘Mm? How so?’
    ‘Well, look at it this way. We both have our cell phones and we can put the police on speed dial. And we’re fast and smart enough to figure out if we’re in danger when we get wherever.’
    And when she said, “That’s if they don’t shoot us on the way,” quietly but out loud, I knew what I had interpreted was right, and not something about palm trees and candy bars.
    I knew what she really meant to say was, “Why yes, Are. Anything you say, Are.” But I let that slide and took what she really said as a yes so I nodded to the twins.
    The smiled a little and turned around, expecting us to follow.


    Ten minutes later, we reached our destination, which was a warehouse. But not just any warehouse. It was a rubber ducky warehouse, and they owned it. I don’t mean they worked in it and it was their “territory” or something. I mean they literally had ownership of the entire warehouse.
    I glanced at Jessa as we made our way inside and I knew she was psyching herself out by thinking she was going to die and what her mom would say. She might even have been thinking the two free-fallers would replace us and make it look like we had never been killed.
    When we went inside, Jessa relaxed when she saw that there weren’t any people inside waiting for us with guns. In fact, there weren’t any people inside the building at all. The two free-fallers explained that they had given their workers a vacation, though the people didn’t know why.
    I found it very comical when I thought about working in a rubber ducky warehouse and I giggled hysterically for a minute. Then Jessa grabbed a rubber ducky and made it squeak, and I copied her because the sound they made was amazingly stereotypical but cute.
    Eventually the twins sat on a conveyor belt and gestured for us to the same. I had never sat on one before and I thought it was a lot of fun, especially when I got to squeak the rubber duckies on the conveyor belt. But Jessa just stood sort of next to me, looking suspiciously at the conveyor belt.
    “Okay, this is what’s happening. I’m Kari, she’s Elphaba and we’re from the future.” Elphaba was watching our faces for our reactions as her brother talked.
    I scrunched up my nose and tried to refrain from asking an idiotic question, like “Have carrots been outlawed?” or something, which I was notorious for when I was hyper.
    “In our time, the world had been taken over by…what you all would call dictators today. We call them Leader-sama and Ruler-chan.”
    Jessa interrupted him. “Hold up, you said we reminded you of them. How do we remind you of dictators? We’re all for world peace and stuff.”
    Elphaba rolled her eyes, “So are they; our Leader-sama and Ruler-chan are strong, fierce, independent women. In fact, they’re so many things I hesitate to call them women. They’re more on the verge of Goddesses.”
    Up till that point, I was polite enough to nod and pretend to believe everything that they were saying, but when Elphaba mentioned the Goddess part, I had to struggle to keep myself from laughing.
    “Then…what Goddesses would you call them?” Jessa asked.
    “Athena and Aphrodite,” they replied immediately.
    Then Jessa seemed to remember why we had come here. “Um, so, why didn’t you die, again?”
    They both blinked and then smiled. “One of the things Leader-sama thought up. To make sure no one died an unnatural death because of stupidity,” Kari said as he pulled at his skin. Elphaba copied him and their skin began to come off. Jessa covered her eyes quickly and I scooted closer to them to see what they were doing better. It looked to me like they were peeling off an extra layer of skin, like a snake would shed its skin. Jessa peeked through her eyes and grimaced.
    I poked the skin Elphaba held away from her other skin and they both laughed. “Ruler-chan hates it, just like your friend. She thinks it’s disgustingly like a snake, and she hates snakes. We think that’s the main reason Leader-sama made them like this,” Elphaba told us.
    Jessa shuddered and squeaked a ducky once. “Tell us about your leaders, like how they came to power,” she requested.
    Elphaba nodded and began describing what she knew to us, with Kari pitching in a time or two. As they spoke, I felt a visiony-premonition sort of thing crawl up my spine and embed into my mind.


    Leader was described as Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, art, industry, justice, and skill; and she generally didn’t let her people forget it, really. She had gone to JU on a science scholarship and met up with Ruler by some bizarre events. Together, the two worked on formulas to discover many things, among them the secret to invulnerability to aging. All they had needed was a larger lab that was better equipped than even the one’s at JU, so they sought out Leader’s brother, Daniel, or Ares as he was more popularly know as, who happened to work in such a lab. The scientists in the lab were always up for any research and the experiments that went with it.
    Finally, when they were twenty-two, they were able to take over the entire world. With Leader’s scientific exploits and Ruler’s mathematical genius, and both of their common sense, they had figured out the secret. All that was needed were threats of nuclear bombs hitting every capital in the world. And with their new power, they worked hard to make the world a better place to be in; social status was thrown out the window, and a new form of trade for necessities was invented. In the end, everyone was happy, and Leader and Ruler became more and more liked as the time went by. They didn’t age, so, although they were technically three hundred and twenty-two, they really only looked to be not a day of twenty-two.
    Honorable Leader-sama was never seen without a book, or, at least, when she wasn’t busy. She was the more sensible of the two, and made more governmental decisions. Almost anytime anyone saw her, they were unnerved by her piercing green eyes.
    Respectable Ruler-chan was often-times found roaming the streets in civilian clothing so that she could supervise her people. Her blue eyes were always icy when she was dealing with misconduct while they were devoid of all emotion during hearings and full of burning passion when she was helping others. They were both truly god-like.


    Then randomly out of the blue, the free-fallers’ rather ugly wristwatches began to beep at the same time. They simultaneously looked down and pressed a button.
    “Artemis, Apollo, portal opening…now. Aphrodite and Athena would like to see you as soon as you get home.”
    The twins looked startled. “Why?” Elphaba asked.
    “It’s something about the Time, Space Continuum. Don’t worry, they’re happy. Ten minutes left to get to the portal, and them, before the portal closes and their tempers burst. Ares out.”
    The twins exchanged glances then looked at us, contemplating something. Jessa’s brow was furrowed just the same as their’s and she was examining the building. When she turned her back to me I started to giggle hysterically again.
    “Hey Jessa,” I said through my hiccupping for my breath. “Are you still afraid of spiders?”
    “Yes…why?” She asked slowly. Before I could answer, the spider jumped off her head and crawled down her shoulder. She amused me further by screaming and running around in circles trying to get it off without actually touching it. “Damn you Athena!” she yelled.
    The twins looked alarmed and Kari said, “Did you just call her Athena?”
    “Uh…no, I was cursing the Greek goddess. You know, the story of Athena, Arachnid, and weaving…how it is Athena’s fault spiders are in this world…does that ring any bells?”
    They both smiled the same smile, the furrow of their thinking gone. “Okay then,” Elphaba said.
    Kari pressed the button on his watch and finally replied to Ares. “Hey, Ares? We’re bringing company. We know they’ll want to see them.”
    “Okay, whatever you do, hurry up. There’s four minutes remaining.”
    On our way out, Jessa randomly asked, “What’s with this Greek theology stuff? Who is calling you two Apollo and Artemis? I thought your names were Kari and Elphaba.”
    They looked at her, agitated, and sighed, glancing at their watches, “Okay, we call each other Greek god names as a code, there are people who want to catch us and, like, experiment or something, The one talking, Ares, is Leader‘s brother, Daniel. We told you that part before, keep up!” Elphaba said quickly.
    Kari, intent on his watch nodded, “Yeah, like the people we were escaping earlier. So come on.”
    Jessa crossed her arms stubbornly and gave him a look, “Uh, no.”
    He gave her an exasperated look, and looked over at his sister; she grinned, and then dramatically sighed. “Want some gum?” she asked out of nowhere.
    Jessa looked bewildered, and, for some god-forsaken reason, took the gum. As soon as she put it in her mouth it appeared to multiply itself and kept her mouth shut.
    “Ugh! That’s sick!” I exclaimed.
    “And that’s Gummy Gum. The gum Ruler made to annoy Leader.”


    And that would bring us back to the present, back to this speeding car, seemingly driven by a drunken cop who thinks she’s on duty, whose name also happens to be Elphaba. I mean, come on! Even Kari looks like he fears for his life as much as I do right now. Jessa is just sulking next to me in the back seat, not giving a care about anything but being forced, mainly by me, to go to a portal that most likely leads straight to the future. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she’s blaming me for this whole thing right now.