01:00

"When out the old light goes,
"New light seeks a host.
"When there is room not for heroes,
"Is when our world needs them most."
- Lady Clyde, "Divine Inquiry," Ch. 29, Ln. 1-4

The sound of steel-toe boots clunking against the polished marble floor had long grown as monotonous as its echoes against the museum's winding walls. Was it not for the single earbud playing a fantasy podcast, Squill lu Qils would fear imminent madness. He hadn't asked if he was allowed to use the device on the job, but he would rather apologize than spend the night listening to nothing but his own faint tinnitus and seeing nothing but the same artifacts illuminated in the dull circle of his flashlight's beam. Squill's attention repeatedly drifts from the podcast to his own thoughts and back again.

"...And this Thursday night, if you'd believe it, there's gonna be a perfect syzygy of our solar system. It'll reach its maximum alignment at around 2:37 AM, and you can bet that all the mysticism fans out there are gonna have their cameras ready to take a picture of either two or five planets in a once-in-a-lifetime row. That makes the perfect segue to the newest entry in S.R.S. Scarborough's..."

Squill glances at his watch--2:35 AM--and lets out a tiny sigh of a chuckle. Unless he's gotten lost in the week once again and it's currently Wednesday or Friday, he may be about to see some cosmic artifact come to life and wreak havoc on his sleepy town, he thinks.

That's the extent of that train of thought, though, as his mind once again drifts to this internship. Squill wonders if his seven-year-old self, the one who so desperately wanted to be "a superhero," would be satisfied with a bachelors in Criminal Justice and a night shift internship at some museum where the only crime that ever happens is the highway robbery in the giftshop.

Squill has always had the build of a superhero--a muscular physique, broad shoulders, and a large back, all of which once made him quite at home on the wrestling mat--and his borderline-naive kindness has never differentiated friend from enemy. By all accounts, he doesn't lack the wherewithal to partake in classic heroics--it's the "super" part that's always been the problem.

"Pro wrestlers are practically superheroes," Squill's father would say, half-jokingly, "Want me to sign you up for some wrestling classes?" Those words started Squill on a long road with a full college ride at the end, but that end was just that--an end.

"The closest you're gonna get to a superhero is an army ranger," Squill's older cousin would say, "But it's nothing like that 'Hyper Rangers' show you watched." Those words didn't start Squill down any path--he was and is far more likely to be a conscientious objector.

"I don't know about 'super,' but there are firefighters, EMTs, and police officers," Squill's mother would say. Those words started Squill on their own path, this one ending in the aforementioned degree.

"Oof!" Squill walks into a wall, as he often does when he gets so lost in his own head. He sighs and rubs his faintly aching forehead before continuing his patrol loop, knowing that a bowl of homemade eggs and rice awaits him back in the security office's microwave. He refocuses on the podcast, hoping that keeping his ears entertained will help keep his eyes open so he can thwart the countless burglars he's sure to encounter.

"...Now, we all know how I feel about the 'fish out of water' trope, so naturally I fell in love with this 'fish getting put in water' story. Speaking of water, don't you wish yours wasn't as boring? Well, that's where today's sponsor comes in!"

Squill groans as the ad intervenes at the least helpful time. Monotony abrasing four-and-a-half of his senses, his dreams' knees buckling under the weight of "the real world," an untimely break from his only source of meaningful stimulation, and on top of all that, that low-pitched whirring is starting to annoy Squill a great deal! ...Low-pitched whirring? That's new.

Squill removes his earbud and follows the alien sound, which is kind of like the purring of a cat if that cat was part-heron and had a cold. He pokes his head around a corner in the moonlit Greek Curios Exhibit and shines his flashlight on the source of the noise: a bulky, humanoid robot with a simple electric eye in place of a neck or head and a glowing blue mass in what would be its torso. Squill checks his watch with wide eyes--2:37 AM.

"There's no way," he mumbles to himself, "I was just joking. Please don't destroy the city."

"City-ty-ty?" A deep, electronic voice drones amidst the warbling.

Squill yelps and stumbles back at the sound, then falls on his tush and scrambles across the floor as the automaton's joints creak and its electric eye flashes a stuttering red. It flexes its fingers and its spindly arms, then steps off of its pedestal and over the red rope guarding it.

"Your city is beyon-on-ond my di-directive," the android continues, its electric eye now consistently glowing that menacing red, "I must ge-ge-ge-get back to my brothers-ers. Which way-ay is Ferropia?"

Squill gulps loudly and struggles to his feet on wobbly knees. "You're not going to... 'terminate me,' are you?"

The robot responds with silence, then turns and trudges down the hall.

"There's no way I don't lose my job over this," Squill whimpers as he stumbles onto a wall for support. He forces himself off of the wall and hobbles after the robot in the once soft but now eerie moonlight. "I've, uh, never heard of Ferropia," he calls out, "Which country is it in?"

"Atlan-lantis," answers the towering machine, "but it is called 'Dzresin' by-y its locals." The robot suddenly freezes mid-step and shudders violently, the blue glow in its midsection intensifying. Squill, too, stops in his tracks, his already wide eyes becoming like saucers. The robot takes several more stubborn steps as its splicing voice descends into a series of garbled nonsense. The whirring, too, intensifies as the blue light grows even brighter. Squill pays heed to the alarm bells going off in his head and ducks into the nearest diverging hallway, only peeking out enough to see what happens next.

Hiding would turn out to be a wise decision, as the light and noise crescendos to a blinding, deafening assault on the senses before an abrupt explosion shakes the building, sending chunks of metal and a luminous blue liquid all across the floor and sending Squill fully behind his ninety-degree shelter. The smell of scorched metal mixes with something indescribable as anything but extraterrestrial.

Squill ignores a new set of alarm bells in his head and steps out from behind the refuge of his corner. He takes step after tentative step towards the carnage--or, rather, metallage--on the floor. With the blue glow no longer intense enough to properly illuminate the space, the flashlight is required again, but it turns out to not be much good in such a tremulous hand. What can be made out, though, is that the splatter of faintly glowing, blue liquid on the floor is...congealing.

The alarm bells become too loud to ignore. Squill turns to speed-walk away, but then a new sound waxes in volume. It begins as a soft rumble, then loudens into a terrifying and constant boom, like a much deeper and more intense version of an industrial vent. Just after the sound reaches Squill's ears, he's lifted off his feet and yanked towards the remnants of the robot.

Squill screams in terror as the museum becomes a mere shrinking circle in front of him that shrinks into invisibility within moments. He feels nothing but the sensation of falling, sees nothing but swirling hues of nearly-white blues and greens, and hears nothing but the faint echoes of his own horrified hollering. After a few moments of abject confusion, Squill's fear and sensory overload get the better of his consciousness, and the bright colors fade to a uniform black.

The darkness of unconsciousness gives way to a bump on Squill's forehead, recalling its memory of his earlier introduction to the museum wall. Squill jolts into a sitting position and his eyes shoot open. He looks around him and sees the culprit--his flashlight--lying on the ground next to him. Surrounding him, aside from a vast subtropical forest and a clear daytime sky, are pieces of the museum floor and wall, with a few still tumbling out of...the sky? Squill's eyes wander up to see a bright hole a few dozen feet above him. A few more chunks of debris tumble out before the hole creeps closed. Squill stands up with a stiff neck and aching back and stares around the forest. Seeing nothing of note, he picks up his flashlight and picks an arbitrary direction in which to walk, his endless questions yielding control of his mind to a desire to not die by nature's careless hand.

The first discovery is a river. Following that upstream leads to a red bridge of wood connecting two parts of a dirt path. Squill's eyebrows furrow as he considers the architecture of the bridge--it uses thick posts at alternating angles of outward and inward rather than the trusses he's used to, and it's almost twice as wide as the pieces of dirt road it connects. For its meager length, the bridge seems wide and tall enough to fit an elephant. Squill looks up the trail, then down. There's no telling how far it'll be before he reaches civilization in either direction, but he'll definitely get nowhere standing still. Seeing nothing more of note here either, Squill arbitrarily goes left to match his dominant hand.

It takes almost ten minutes of silence for Squill to realize that he lost his earbud somewhere between here and the museum. A sinking feeling, one that tells him he won't be needing it for quite a while, keeps him from turning back. Squill does, however, feel his phone, keys, and wallet still in his pockets, although he has no concept of the nearest cell tower, the proximity of his car, or the buying power of USD wherever he is.

Squill sighs and steels himself for things to make less and less sense from this point onward. When nothing is sure, not even the likelihood of surviving the next few moments, what can a man do but search for a safety that may not even be within reach? The humid air smells salty and a touch fishy, so that handily narrows things down.

After another half-hour of walking, Squill passes by a tiny woman in a white gown and wearing a blue bandana, from behind which poke two long, pointed ears. She pulls with her a small cart of empty glass jars and clay pots, and smiles cheerfully at Squill during their passing.

"Veldel flai," she chirps, her prominent ears twitching.

Squill smiles awkwardly. "V-veldel flai," he echoes.

After another few minutes of walking, Squill begins to register the coos and calls of different animals. He wants to assume they're birds, but seeing as he's just met what must be an elf, he clears all remaining expectations (which were already very few in number) from his mind. Squill wipes the sweat from just below his short, black hair and begins to notice the terrain and overlaying path grow uneven and soon hilly. The soil and grass surrounding the path gradually shifts to sand, as does the previously dirt path. Before long, the only things delineating the trail from the surrounding dunes are two rows of sedimentary rocks of varying sizes.

As he trudges up a particularly large, steep hill, Squill half-expects to see an ocean on the other side. As his head pokes above the summit of the hill, his eyebrows rise and he lets out an impressed whistle; on the other side, he can see not only that expected expanse of glistening blue beyond the trees but also a large city hugging its coast. Squill's lips curve upward, pulled by the relief of his stay of execution by mother nature.