Flare 2.01: The World outside the Window

Gazing through the window and to the yard lingering just a touch from his grasp, Lucca could only marvel at the sight his world had become.

As the cold moonlit night rained down over his hometown of Rosway he could find himself barely recognizing a thing. Sure, the buildings surrounding his own were still there, still separated by small gaps that gave the smallest comfort of 'separation to the residents, but there was this… atmosphere. In the past, he recalled it as being this calm, beloved part of town where neighbours knew each other and their dogs.

But now… now there was something off. Fence's higher than a picket wall cloaked some of the buildings—his own included—while the buildings untouched were empty. Not quite decrepit but they just had no life to them, like abandoned hermit crab shells picked up and polished as if refusing to acknowledge they'd been abandoned.

Glancing to the left, down the street to where he remembered an elderly lady once lived who'd bake the most amazing brioche's, Lucca could only see a construction site cordoned off with the framework of some three-story building in its place. 'She was old,' he thought. 'Maybe she died while I was comatose?' it didn't sadden him so much as it left this cold churning in his heart. A disappointment that he hadn't been there to watch the world churn by without him.

"You're doing really well," Lena spoke, her tone soft as she stood off to his side, her arms cautiously outreached ready to catch him if he so much as tipped an inch.

Lucca turned to her, she was looking down at his stoic legs hidden just behind his straight-legged pyjama pants as if searching for the wobble of fabric denoting the supposed muscle atrophy he was to have suffered through.

"Am I?" He questioned and looked down to his feet, waggling his toes before shrugging. "It is just walking."

She scoffed at that, "yeah, for a guy who hasn't walked for ten years. Normally you'd be going through a rigorous diet and physical therapy to build up muscle mass before even being able to stand upright!" he wasn't sure if she sounded amused or upset that he was kicking convention to the curb by existing.

"That does make sense." He shrugged, "for someone with atrophy." Scratching his hip, he felt the tightness of his skin, his fat, it was nothing like a skeletons. Physically at least, mentally even he knew there was bound to be some kinks to work out.

"Which you're supposed to have." Lena dropped her arms and brought her hand to her pushed out left hip as she rested her weight on her right. "But no, you don't. If we'd known getting your soul abducted to another world would cure stuff like this, we'd have figured out dimensional travel years ago."

Pivoting on point, Lena marched to his bed and picked up the old, discarded pyjama's Lucca had changed into—of course under her watchful gaze, which was another thing Lucca expected himself to be hesitant about but simply wasn't. Perhaps it also had to do with Lena's nonchalant whistling as she chortled a 'well isn't someone packing now?'

Something told him that was not an appropriate thing for a mother—even a step—to say to her son—even a step.

As she lifted the clothes she tossed her gaze back to Lucca, to his form cloaked in the dim lighting of his room. It had been difficult to work with him when shadows seemed more prevalent than light, but Lucca was more comfortable when the lights were low, and the moon was out.

"Why do only a few of the buildings have walls?" he asked.

Lena rose a brow and quickly tossed the discarded garments into Lucca's washing basket and quickly arrived by his side, peering over his shoulder to see what he meant. "Ah, we're close to a rift." Pulling away she began to pat dust one of the shelves but continued to talk, "after they started popping up everywhere, whenever one would pop up in a residential area like this people would just evacuate to somewhere safer. People were scared they didn't have the means to protect themselves from the monsters, so they ended up running away. If you know anything about anything, you can guess that a mass exodus is not good for a city's economy. So, a few years ago the government began hiring builders to put up some sturdier walls for anyone who didn't move away. Just to sort of keep them there."

Moving back towards his bed, she furrowed her brow at how wrinkly the bed was and began to pull and tug the duvet till it was straight, when it was, she immediately turned and dropped herself onto it. Leaning back halfway as she rested on her hands.

"Those other houses were set aside for the R.D's, er, Rift Divers. The people who dive into the rifts to explore them."

"Like Catia."

She bobbed her head to the side, "eh, sort of. Catia's still got a few more months till she gets her license but yeah. Like her."

Lucca hummed in acknowledgement, "don't they also get better walls? Or is it because of their powers, that they can defend themselves better?"

Snapping her fingers, she pointed a finger gun his way, "exactamundo. Most all those other buildings are rented out to diving agencies and indie divers for cheap as a way of populating and making sure the rifts don't overflow and destroy the rest of the city."

"Cannon fodder basically," Lucca commented and looked back to Lena.

"Precisely." She chuckled. Feeling a buzz from her pocket she pulled out her phone and saw she'd gotten a new message from Henry. "Your father's nearly home." Pushing off the bed she stretched her spine and moaned pleasurably, "Get yourself down and I'll get dinner prepped for you."

Lucca huffed, "applesauce pumped into my stomach by a tube isn't much of a dinner. Can't I just have something normal to eat, like, something I could chew?"

"No." She blankly put. "As much as I was happy to let you walk around—which let me remind you, I wasn't. No way in hell is I overexerting your throat. Who knows what hell Catia'll bring down on me if she learns you ended up ripping your throat open because you ate something crunchy and didn't chew it properly."

"I know how to chew, Lena." Lucca pulled back his neatly flattened bed sheet and slid into bed, quickly covering himself before reaching to the remote and raised the back halfway to make a makeshift couch for himself.

"I'm sure you do. Still not risking it." She wasn't budging an inch, Lucca could see that clearly from her puffing cat of a pose.

Seeing he wasn't intent on refuting her she gave a swift nod of her head and said, "Good. Now I'll be back in a few minutes. So don't go anywhere."

Without much else, Lena soon disappeared into the hall leaving Lucca to glance around his room once more as if solidifying the changes and familiarities even this small portion of the world had undergone since his otherworldly excursion.

A chuckle escaped him, one that lifted his lips at the ends slightly as he thought back to earlier the day before. Catia and Lena's disbelieving faces still firmly at the forefront of his mind, latching themselves as the fondest moments since his return.

***

The explanation had been little more than blunt putting of facts, a simple here's-what-happened of the events. Them hearing with a fact that gods existed and one of them was even building beasts to invade earth. He felt to them it had given them a new world view, perhaps it was doubt to, even affirmation to previous conceptions of the origins of the Sparks and the rifts they had told him about.

By far his father had shown the most grievous of reactions. Where the girls had thrown questions and exclamations of shock his way, his father had taken the other end. He stood tall, his body just a shade off hunched and lips pulled back in a grimace as he said with cold determination. "You can never tell anyone this Lucca. You hear me?"

Catia had been the one to show the most shocked by his words, "What? Dad, we can't just keep this secret. We should tell people." She'd argued as Lena shook her head.

"No, I'm… I'm on your father's side on this one. The rifts are one thing but gods… ones making monsters… I can't even imagine the panic it would instil."

"You don't know that." Catia urged calmly, "It would give us a chance to prepare. More than we already are."

Their father's expression had scrunched up like he'd just sucked on a sour hard candy. "How far would that take us? Half the countries are filled with monsters Catia. Millions dead. Humanity as it is, is still picking up the glass. We haven't even gotten to the point of cleaning up the spill. Lumping this on top of it. It would be like wiping up the mess with just your bare hand."

"We would persevere," she hadn't raised her voice, didn't deny his words based on her own beliefs. Their father really had raised her well. Though he was still bound to tease her aplenty with such. "Just like we always do. Sure, it'd be a lot to deal with but come on. Keeping this quiet is just selfish. Especially when those others start waking up. Lucca said they were there to train to fight those monsters. They'd be on our side."

Lucca had scrunched his brow then. Those people were dragged along out of their world to battle beasts for decades. How many would be sick of the fighting? Sick of dealing with peoples anticipations and hopes. Many he presumed. Not all, but many. He didn't voice his opinion though, he could see this had been a conversation between father and daughter.

"We don't know that Catia." Henry came to lean against his desk, arms crossed tight over his chest. "Just as well they could see us and weak and think we should follow them. Use whatever powers this God gave them for their own selfishness. But I do see your point," sighing heavily he strained his fingers through his stringy brown hair greying in a few areas and muttered under his breath, "we just can't be sure."

Seeing their conversation rapidly descending to silence, Lena glanced back to Lucca then back to Catia and her husband and shook her head. "Do you all think maybe we're getting a little too philosophical right now?"

They looked to her, confused but realized what she meant when she had bobbed her head Lucca's way. At which their expressions grew to shades of embarrassment and awkwardness as they remembered the one person that was most important at that moment.

"You're right, you're right." His father threw up his arms and pushed off the desk and made his way to Lucca's side. He was older, understandable really considering the time that had passed but still, to Lucca he could see that almost illusory, young father before him fade away only to reveal the man before him.

A man who'd seen the years, wrinkles and dark bags with his hair hanging for dear life as it receded into nonexistence. Most surprisingly though, he'd lost his pot belly, that fat he'd grown since their mothers passing had seemingly faded to nothing, but a lean man dressed regally in a neat black suit and stark red tie.

Parts of Lucca, they didn't want to acknowledge the changes but the other side. The rational one, it knew that no matter his sorrow or distraught at their changes, it would change nothing.

"Sorry, we shouldn't be talking like that and ignoring you." Lowering a hand to Lucca's own, his father gave it a slight squeeze as if testing Lucca was really there. As he released, his smile grew wider, and his eyes grew mistier.

"It's good to have you back Lucca."

***

Chuckling and smirking to himself, Lucca shook his head and turned his eyes to the wall opposite his bed. It was bare, mostly, there was a calendar hanging up, one uncomfortably decked with a half-naked Adonis of a man laying with a sword dug into the ground between his legs hiding his manhood, but just barely.

'Catia's I'm guessing.' With a shake of his head, he soon found his vision focusing on the computer monitor lingering ominously close to the ledge of the table. It's large screen like a portal entering into the void he was so familiar with. Tendrils crept behind it, squirmed down the back of the desk and connected with the dully humming beast that was his computer… Catia's computer—it was far from his ten years later.

Turning even more, he saw the wireless keyboard Catia had swiftly ordered late the previous night and had arrived just earlier that morning. Even faster than prime ten, well, twelve years ago.

She'd set it up for him, plugged in the little blue tooth USB into one of the computers free ports and handed him the reigns just before she had to run off back to the academy to apologize to her sergeant for suddenly disappearing.

Lifting the keyboard, he found it ominously light and extraordinarily thin. Not much thinner than wireless keyboards in the past but it was noticeably so. On one end was a touchpad, like that on a laptop and on the top right a small power button. To turn off the computer no doubt.

Swishing his index over the touchpad, the monitor rapidly blared to life, opening up on a quaint landscape scene with various icons and shortcuts lined up neatly into their respective uses on either side.

He paused, eyed with a slight squint for any familiar and found only one that he could barely say was the icon for a certain red fox wrapping around the earth. Though now it was just an orange line wrapping pathetically around a solid blue orb with the barest features on one end to give it a slight vulpine visage.

"Firefox has given up on its logo, hasn't it?" he muttered to himself and clicked the icon twice. Not seconds later did the browser open onto a—relatively—blank screen with but a few lined up squares with icons of sites across them. The first was unsurprisingly that of a red play button, just after that an icon like a letter opening wide—her email he guessed, given the chance he was bound to use the opportunity to snoop. He wouldn't be Catia's brother if he didn't.

But after those two the rest were lost to him, a swirling purple portal, a sword crossed over a shield, and several others. That's when he found another list, up in the top right, just below the X he found a star, the bookmark icon, and clicked it. What came to him was an unending list of bookmarks and files they were sorted into. To anyone else, it was chaos, a hellscape of shifting words and files that just blended together one after the other with seemingly no coherent process to them.

That was of course, had they not been Lucca who had at one point had his own variant of organized chaos and from the way things looked… Catia had inherited his formula from him.

"I wonder…" whether it was curiosity or simple mischievousness that drew him to doing it, he frankly didn't care. Filtering through one file, then another, he soon came to the one labelled shortly 'Hen' right below another called 'Xvi' and another 'Tsum', had he been from any other generation, those shortenings would have been lost to him.

Bringing the cursor over the 'Tsum' file, he opened it and found yet another list. At the top, a folder called 'Seen' stood proudly just above the 'faV' and the 'Tags' file. The list, it was extensive, horrifyingly so, a collection of so many things it was shocking even for him. Glancing to his door he could hear Lena chattering away on her phone.

When he turned back to the computer screen it had opened one of the links. He didn't care what, didn't know even. But quickly, as he saw the girl sat there, legs spread wide, slathered in white bodily fluids with ropes binding her tightly into a lascivious mess of an anime girl, he could only whistle at the scene and comment to himself.

"And, my sisters a pervert…" he mulled with narrowed eyes and clicking on the cover began to filter through the twenty-two pages of bondage at frankly horribly arousing imagery before coming to an end. When he did, he was nodding slowly, with a breath puffing through his nose like a bull he could just feel the pain Catia was going to experience when she discovered that he'd discovered her porn stash.

And it made that cruel brotherly part of him all the more excited to torment her with it.

Sinking into his bed he shut the tab and moved to the red play button as he could hear the creak of Lena drawing closer, he could only mutter proudly, "least she's got good taste."