Second Chances

It’s the dead of night. A man is trudging his way through thick piles of empty beer cans in his room. Barefoot, he kicks a few of them out of the way before plopping down in his desk chair, in front of a dimly lit blue computer screen. He grabs a 1.75L bottle of whiskey from the desk, surrounded by empty cans, and takes a swig. He’s wasted drunk, swaying from side to side, a smile on his face.

On his screen is a show about tanks. The driver whirls their turret over and takes aim at the enemy. Blam! They nailed them.

“YES! LET’S GO!”, the young man cheers, pumping his fist. He’s fully invested. The dim glow of the screen illuminates his features. Thin, gaunt, tired, with scraggly facial hair. Messy, greasy hair. He looks terrible. He fills out a stained sweatshirt, and matching black sweatpants. He’s a very, very rough 26 years old.

The girls in his show appear to have won some kind of contest, they’re cheering and congratulating eachother. He takes another celebratory swig.

This is business as usual. The days and nights have blended together. The young man swings back around in his chair, knocking over some more cans. The pizza! CRAP! It’s burning!

He jumps up and quickly jogs his way back to the kitchen in the dark, stumbling all the way. It’s filled with the acrid, nose-turning smell of burnt cheese. He gingerly removes the smoldering black disc from the oven, looks at it pitifully, and dumps it in the trash. The smoke detector chirps, in disapproval.

On the counter is a coroner’s report. It’s his father. It has his age, height, and weight, and a detailed blurb about the grisly auto accident that took his life. Beside it is a letter of apology from the police department he worked for. Strewn along the rest of the counter is various insurance paperwork, checks, and bills. He stares at it, mournfully.

There’s a glass of whiskey on the counter. He’d forgotten it half an hour ago, mostly full. With a quick, painful chug, he finishes it and carries it back to his room, leaning on the walls as he goes. As he reaches his computer, the whiskey glass drops out of his hand, bouncing on the carpet. He falls backwards.

His head strikes the beefy, jutting corner of his bedside dresser. Hard. He hits the floor with a thud. Blood pours out of his ears and nose, and he gasps for breath, knocked out.

Just like his father, he slips away. Another pitch black, falling, empty space, but this time, backwards. He grasps up into the air, as if to catch himself. He can see after-images of his arms and legs fading into the air as he falls. There’s a dim glow from behind him, but he can’t turn around. The fear of death grips him as he realizes what’s happening.

In his head, he screams, “NO! NO! NOT LIKE THIS!”, but he can’t make a sound. Abruptly, the falling stops. He tries to flail his limbs, but they’re frozen in place. A thin, yellow beam of light shoots down from above, piercing him through the chest. It grows in size until it blinds him. He’s being pulled physically upwards now.

The black fog disappears with a flash. It’s replaced with bright blue, cloudy skies. He’s falling again. He can move again. Absolutely terrified, he flails and turns himself over. He’s at least a couple thousand feet in the air over luscious, rolling hills and farmland, dotted by forests, and falling. Falling fast.

This must be a bad dream. He screams at the top of his lungs. He fruitlessly reaches behind his back, on the slim chance there’s a parachute. There isn’t one. The ground is coming up, closer and closer. In those few seconds, he resigns himself again to his fate and closes his eyes.

A purple, roiling portal opens up between him and the ground. Above it, three golden rings. As he hits these rings, they arrest his fall in stages. 150 miles per hour, 60 miles per hour, 20 miles per hour. Each shock knocks the wind out of him, and he limply falls into the purple gateway below him.

The portal dumps him out over water. He plunges, belly-flopping, face first into the icy cold sea. It’s at this moment, he realizes two things. One, he’s still alive, but most importantly, he can’t swim. He continues sinking down, thrashing, his lungs filling with water. That same, gut-wrenching upwards lifting feeling from earlier tears at him, dragging him upwards by the spine towards the water’s surface. He bursts through the surface and is gracelessly flopped onto a hexagonal concrete platform, a team of elven mages standing around him.

The water seeps from his clothes, drawing crooked lines along the perfect, smooth concrete. Immediately, one of the mages casts a green light on him, healing magic, and the young man begins coughing up globs of water. The elves look upon him with a deep level of concern.

It’s the standard Royal College of Magic retrieval retinue. The students, very tall, lanky male elves, a senior mage girl with bright blue hair and piercing blue eyes, and Kalth, the grandiose, luxuriously-clothed Great Elder Mage. The look of sheer disappointment and disgust at his “catch” is obvious.

“He’s not in good shape, sir.”, the blue-haired senior mage girl reports. “We should bring him back, immediately.”

Kalth sighs. “Very well.”

In a flash, the entire concrete platform rips through the air, surrounded by a bubble, moving at thousands of miles per hour over blurry forests and lakes. A great, wide canal comes into view, and the platform races over it at lightning speed. The spires, sprawling neighborhoods and slums of Laios grow closer. Kalth slows the platform down a bit, so as not to break any windows below, and hauls the platform in to one of the College’s spires. A team of mages in red and white uniforms are waiting.

They quickly swarm the platform, yank the young man up and carry him into an infirmary. Kalth heads off again the instant they clear the platform. The next few hours are a blur, the young man lapses in and out of consciousness. Blue lights. Green lights. Concerned whispers from the medical staff. The decision is made to put him into suspended animation until some experts on human anatomy arrive from outside the capitol.

A few days later, Leia arrives in the medical wing of the College, dressed in beautiful, grey, gold-trimmed robes. She goes from room to room, evaluating the patients. The vast majority of them are subjects of the Human Retrieval Program. If they arrive in poor shape, as they often do, they’re nursed back to health and simultaneously probed by experts in psionic magic – mind readers. This serves both as training for them and as vetting for these human candidates. Many are identified as undesirable through these tests.

Leia reaches the young man’s room. He is slack-jawed, with chapped lips and a terrible, gaunt appearance. She squints at him for a moment. He looks kind of familiar.

A psionics technician is actively working over the young man’s bedside. He greets Leia and invites her to sit down. He pops up a magical view-screen in front of her. He’s poring over his memories.

First, the house. A nice house, with a green lawn, and John’s old Ford cop car in the driveway. Both of these elves are puzzled by this fancy “carriage”. Next, the hallway. Then, the bedroom, with its terrible, sad mess. Empty beer cans. Giant, empty glass bottles of whiskey. Lots and lots of memories at the computer. The technician quickly swipes through the more… erotic memories. Leia raises an eyebrow.

“Here are the rough ones.”, the technician murmurs.

It’s the young man in his school days. He approaches a girl and asks her to be his girlfriend. She looks right at him, with pure disgust, and shouts “NO! You’re weird, David! EWWW!”

All her friends laugh. The memory screen gets blurred, and the young man runs away in embarrassment.

Both Leia and the technician grimace. There’s lots of this stuff. This kid did not have a good time.

Finally, they reach a scene inside the house. The young man is screaming, angrily, at the top of his lungs. He’s having an argument with his father. Furniture is being thrown, and curses loudly ring across the room. The view pans over, and a familiar, slightly overweight, balding figure dominates the screen.

Leia gasps. “That’s John!”

He’s shouting, red in the face, furious at his son. Threatening to kick him out of the house. The son is crying, but shouting back insults and barbs, one after the other. The insults are truly biting, painful, personal attacks at each other. Leia asks the tech to zoom in on John’s face. She studies it closely. It’s him. He’s got the badge on his hip.

The final set of memories shows a police detective standing at the door, breaking the news of his father’s death. He hands David the coroner’s paperwork, and he glances over at the now-empty driveway. David walks through the eerie, empty house, and places his dad’s badge on the nightstand beside his bed. He then grabs a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet, and sees his reflection in the glass. His face is sullen, empty.

“The rest of these are completely unreadable. I can’t get much more than this. It’s strange, because there should be months more.”, the technician sighs.

Leia is speechless. This is his son? What am I supposed to do with him?