Aaliyah's Garden

Basecamp Watanabe, my home for the next ten weeks, is a high-tech encampment, shielded by a crystalline dome large enough to fit my hometown of Obama-isha. This remote location, where, just cresting above the dome, buried in a haze of dark-gray cumulonimbus clouds, is Mount Hakone, has to be the most interesting place I’ve ever been in.

“Welcome, Grubs!” A chiseled jaw, dark-skinned man greets the six of us recruits as soon as the tram doors spring open. The name tag on his blue camouflage jumpsuit reads: “Solomon”, a name I’m sure I’m going to come to hate. “Give me twenty-five pushups. NOW!” He screams, a slight hint of vitriol coloring his voice.

Groaning, I drop my duffle bag of belongings and kneel to the ground. “Can this day get any worse?”

“What was that?” Solomon stoops down, head craning in an uncomfortable manner as he stares at me through his reflective sunglasses, his eyes barely visible.

“N-Nothing,” I pant, my chin meeting the dusty ground as I count to three in my head.

“That’s what I thought.” He stomps to his feet pacing back and forth, watching most of us strain to complete this simple task.

On my left, Nobuyuki thuds to the ground, his stocky form writhing as he huffs to catch his breath. A boot meets Nobuyuki square in the ribs, and the teen boy flips over, yodeling his pain. My eyes widen as I push up, completing number fifteen, and I bound to my feet.

“What the hell was that for?” I snap at Solomon, tightening my fingers into a fist.

Solomon tips his sunglasses down the bridge of his wide nose, hazel eyes shooting me an uneasy feeling. “Loosen those hands, Grub! Or we’ll have a bigger problem. And you do not want this—” he gesticulates from Nobuyuki to the other recruits “—to escalate any farther than this moment.”

Melokuhle, the brown-skinned teen to my right, pleads, “Get back down, Hadassah. Please. I’ve heard stories about Solomon—”

“And what horror stories have you been told about me?” Solomon strides to Melokuhle, places a firm boot on his mid-back. “Hold your position whilst you tell this Grubby-girl what hell I can reign down on her.”

Melokuhle’s muscular arms tremble as he holds a static pushup. “S-Solomon Owusu, a legendary drill sergeant, once made several insubordinate Grubs eat flowers from Aaliyah’s Garden. Then forced said defiant Grubs to compete in hand-to-hand combat whilst under the influence of the flowers’ magical properties. Those Grubs were sick for the duration of training, and barely able to lift a finger; therefore, they were subject to repeat the required training. However most dropped out…”

Solomon snickers, proud of his cruel and unusual punishment. “Nearly got my Kiester demoted to janitorial duties for that one. Thankfully, all of those Grubs survived. Besides they only took less than a gram, so no actual harm came to them.” Sighing with a devious delight, the Drill Sergeant queries, “Want to know the kicker? Captain Junpei saw an opportunity to start a trial test of sorts with willing and able participants all because of me! Soon, those Mecha’s won’t be the only things able to use the magic contained in those flowers.”

My stomach lurches at the idea of eating that ancient Witch’s flowers. I’ve read stories, seen news reports and read horror stories about desperate people who desired to become superheroes… or villains. Most perished on their journeys, bursting into balls of flame, or freezing into statues of ice. Others suffered irreversible damage to their bodies: limbs paralyzed by unyielding jolts of electricity, intestines boiling to soup, synapses misfiring in deadly ways…

Aaliyah’s Garden founded two thousand years, alongside a desert oasis in what was the sand-packed landscape of Nyumbani, South Africa, possessed mysterious flowers of an arcane nature. Those flowers are things of legend—good and bad. Magic, thought to be something a magician could “conjure” up by way of trickery, was found to be real and contained within the florae that inhabited Aaliyah’s Garden. A discovery of magic led many nations worldwide to wage war against their fellow man to claim the Garden as their own. Many hands from far and wide, plucked the Garden bare, leaving many botanists to attempt to recreate what Aaliyah had left behind. Most botanists were successful; others failed.

Now, under a secretive order established by the Ministry of Defense, these flowers, which have found new life in a top-secret location somewhere in Japan, are used only to power Mechas with amazing magical abilities.

Falling back into a pushup position because I rather not have my insides turned to soup because of Solomon the crazed Sergeant, I count sixteen pushups only to have the sergeant tell me to give him “Fifty additional pushups.”

An hour later, drenched in sweat and needing water to quench my dry throat, Solomon points at a half-mile long string of modular tents where the five other Cadets in-training are running laps around, and tells me without telling me to: “get a move on.”

Human bodies weren’t built for this sort of punishment, where one is wheezing for breath and staggering to stand as they complete a third lap around fifty-six—yes, I counted—fifty-six tents.

This is inhumane on all levels!

I’m about ready to quit, to tell my parents that I can’t do this, that I’m sorry for the crap I put them through when Solomon’s whistle goes off.

“That’s enough for today, Grub,” He shouts from his cozy seat thirty meters away from me, a twisted smile on his maw. “Hit the showers, grab some grub, and it’s lights out.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” I salute the sergeant, refraining from rolling my eyes at him.

Without preamble, sirens peal through the entire dome, jarring to my senses, scrambling my brain. Beneath me, like a deep lion’s roar, the compound ground convulses, rocking everything and everyone around me. I palm my hands over my ears, my eyes scanning the once empty skies now charged with ovate-shaped, golden ships writhing with hundreds of worming tentacles.

Someone clasps an arm around me and steers me forward. Seargeant Solomon pulls me alongside him, his reflective glasses no longer on his face--a face that is strewn with a terror I didn’t think possible from a man of his demeanor.

“To your quarters, Grub,” the Seargeant shouts above the din. “We’ll be going into lockdown until the Star Cadets arrive.”

Something thuds against the glass dome. Then, another something before the sound of shattering glass fills my ears.

“Attention!” a mechanized voice blurts from unseen speakers. “Camp Watanabe will be under lockdown until further notice—”

The robotic voice abruptly fades to a tinny, grating noise as the entire dome is veiled in an inky, nightmarish blackness.