Epilogue: Closing

Previously on We’re Not in Edison City Anymore, Candystriper and the Malevolent Med-Student have happily reunited! With Candystriper no longer in mortal peril, the Green Moth and her team attempt to stop Mr. Superlative and ex-wizard Vencentus the Mighty from changing time! Meanwhile, on the other side of the dimensional rift, Samuel Superlative the Third had arrived on scene where his father, Sam Superlative Jr., was fighting with John Cute! We continue this story in just a moment, but first the usual commercial word:

Thirty Years Ago, Verin Prime

The rift was gone. Samuel had known upon arriving and not seeing his father that something had gone badly wrong in the fight between him and this John Cute who’d arrived out of nowhere. How he had arrived no one quite knew yet, but most likely it was through the rift. Whenever anyone unusual turned up on Verin Prime, “the rift” was so commonplace an explanation that it was practically a joke. Samuel would’ve loved to study it in more detail, but he didn’t have time now.

Also, the rift just wasn’t there anymore. The air where it had been hummed feebly, an echo of its presence. Melinda Lu Flirnalirxzaney, the new Prime Minister, gaped in horror. “What could’ve done this?”

Samuel looked around. “Where is my father?”

“Probably breaking orbit by now,” a cold voice said. “I honestly don’t know the science after that, whether you freeze or explode or whatever.” John Cute smiled. “Want to go see?”

He might have gone on to explain further, how the shock of the blow he’d struck Sam had overloaded and closed the rift (that was his theory, anyway) or the details of all the things he planned to do now that he was on Verin Prime with no one to stop him, but he didn’t get very far with any of that because Samuel hit him.

Samuel hadn’t hit anyone in anger other than a rampaging Trar, not one of theirs, that had fallen victim to a sickness and tried to attack the farm back home. Even then, he’d hesitated, withheld his full power, unsure what he might do by accident. He’d wanted to stop the mad Trar as humanely as he could, not crack the planet in two.

He struck John Cute a wild hard roundhouse blow right to the face, so hard that it actually knocked him off his feet and threw him scudding to the brown Verin Prime dirt. John even staggered a bit as he rose. “Okay,” he said, “Okay, let’s do this, I’ll tear you and all your freakin’ alien friends apart like a damn-”

Of course he didn’t know who Samuel’s friends were, nor the pertinent fact that one of them was the Prime Minister of the planet he was now on, and the others were her security. This explained the look of blank surprise on his face when one of Melinda Lu’s bodyguards took alarm at this threat and opened fire with his Zork-Tron Industries Blast-Rifle, Mark 11, which promptly disintegrated John Cute in a single BLAM.

Samuel Superlative the Third started at the empty air where John Cute had been, trying to collect his scattered thoughts, trying to make sense of it all. “Can you … he said finally, “Can you send up someone, a robot, something, to see if they can find…”

He couldn’t go on. The Prime Minister, being a telepath, understood. “We’ll bring him back,” she said gently.

“Thank you,” Samuel said. “I should go home. If the rift ever returns, let me know. I understand we have family there. They should be told.”

So Samuel Superlative the Third returned to planet Emi with the remains of his father, which were buried there beside the home he and his wife Frie had made together. He would not leave the planet again until some thirty years later, when the Verin Prime government contacted him with the exciting news that they had managed, at last, to create an opening in the rift. “We’re not sure about its stability, however, so if you’re going to make an attempt through, you’d better do it soon!”

Samuel said the appropriate goodbyes to his family, assuring them that he’d return shortly. “How can you know that?” his mother, Frie, said. “Suppose it closes again? Suppose-?”

“It won’t,” Samuel said reassuringly, “And if it does I’m certain they’ll have it back open in a moment, you’ll see!”

Frie was not encouraged. She felt like she was watching a replay as Samuel flew away towards the waiting starship. She begged the heavens that it would end differently.

He went through a short time later, in full uniform, carrying his xenocon filter as he didn’t have the command of Earth languages his father had. The Verin Prime scientists were indeed skilled, and they had opened the rift. They couldn’t keep it open, though, and they had no idea, and no way of knowing, the difference in time between their world and Earth. Samuel Superlative the Third stepped through and into the rift, and then it closed, and so he never returned to Verin Prime.

Earth, Present Day

The Green Moth and her team arrived at the mauve cloud over the tiny European city-state where Mr. Superlative had gone to meet up with the ex-wizard Vencentus the Mighty, only to find that the cloud had now spread to cover the city-state entirely. There it stopped, sealing the whole place in, and no one, not even the Green Moth, could get through.

“Well,” said the Wombat, staring at the glowing mauve wall before him, “Now what?”

The Green Moth made a vague sort of shrug. The Wombat didn’t think this helped to clarify things much, but he decided not to push it. Things were bad enough as they were.

“We’re going to have to tell him,” Gaseous Girl said in a low voice. “Sam the Third, I mean.”

“Yeah,” the Wombat said. “That’s gonna be fun.”

“Tell me what?” Samuel Superlative the Third said, having just landed with a soft thud. They all looked at him. “I had waited at the station for my grandfather, you would know him as Mr. Superlative I think, to return. As he did not, I made some attempts to track his flight. Then I saw a news report. Suffice to say I didn’t require much longer to figure out that he’d come over here for reasons unknown, and that you’d been sighted over here as well. So.”

They looked at him. “Ah,” the Wombat said.

Samuel could see the looks on their faces; he recognized them almost at once. He’d seen that same expression on his face in the shining glass of the ECPD windows as he’d come to tell Mr. Superlative about Verin Prime. It was the expression of someone who has to explain a very hard truth and who very much doesn’t want to.

He’d already lost his family. Now he’d lost what little he’d just had left. Samuel could feel the pain tearing out of him like an animal crying to be let free. He took a run at the mauve cloud and hit it, hard as he’d hit John Cute before.

This time, the cloud didn’t break. It didn’t move at all. This time, there was nothing he could do.

Samuel Superlative the Third, maybe the last, fell back on the ground and stared up at the distant stars. He found himself repeating the Wombat’s question. “Now what?” he whispered. “What do I do now?”

Read the Edison City Index.

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