A row of raindrops wound its way down into the folds of a prehistoric, untouched jungle. Accompanied by an incoming storm, a lightning bolt struck a tree rivalling the dimming atmosphere past the mountainous skyline.

  And behold, fire!

  Well, the homo erectus approaching did not know of such a word, but she knew she came across a magical light past the foliage. She believed the whitely jagged horrors in the sky shapeshifted into a dancing red glare rather than vanishing within a blink, but another horrific rustle fast approached her. A deformed hand made of branches and leaves gouged the ground, furcating fingers barely missing her hairy figure. After coming to terms with her fortune and the cut across her triceps, she realized the violent wooden hand was a tree. Becoming violent itself, the rain forced her to deliberately climb the fallen branches to follow the newfound smokey odor. She rested a flat hand to her forehead not unlike how her future descendants would perform a salute, delaying eyeward waterdrops to discover the red glare on a stump's branch.

  Fear and curiosity competed for the homo erectus's will. The victor could be found within her firm steps up the downed tree and towards the mysterious light waiting within the clearing. She hopped down the ripped portion of her fallen assailant and her bare feet landed on the clearing.

  She halted. Fear was winning ground within her mind.

  She took another step anyway.

  She paused again.

  The rain could very well be soaking her shaking soul at this point, however she mustered all the curiosity she had left within her heart. With no quarter she marched towards the next phase of evolution for her kind, now leaving footprints in the mud beneath her. Time became treacherously slow, but her progression continued. Before fear could catch up once more, she was within arm's length of the blazed branch.

  Instant and numinous hums drowned her ears, freezing her being to stand still. More sparks joined her, the fire, and the rain, eventually expanding into three glowing circles containing growing grids. The grids within revealed vistas of strange places, of past and future times, of bizarre night skies, of nightmares, of imagined stories, and of unimaginable horrors. Of futuristic and white hairless hands tapping at a bizarre tool with symbols reminiscent to those she found once in a cave.

  Clockwise and counterclockwise these places and memories spun until a bright sheen covered all the levitating circles, and they looked like floating slices of the prehistoric sun no longer visible behind the charcoal clouds above. Then, three children stepped out of their respective slices of light, the nearest child to the fire not hesitating to rip out the branch before the homo erectus could.

  "Ew!" Eve shrieked, her pigtails swaying as she brought the branch closer to the virtualtop-wearing teddy bear in her other hand. "This is mine! Invent showers first you stinky animal! Disgusting."

  All of this took place on an earthplexus hologram screen inside the police station Joaquim tried his best not to watch, but his boredom won out and he realized its victory after witnessing the title screen.

  A BIG SATAN UNDER YOUR PINKY TOE

  The show where Eve, Ace, and Isabella ride on S.A.T.A.N. in a perfect simulation of the universe to explore the deepest questions historians have about human history. Like, what if instead of Abraham Lincoln being assassinated, Eve instead gave the assassin John Wilkes Booth a painful wedgie? What if cocaine was always used in every soda? What if humanity had only one type of apocalypse during the 21st century instead of all of them at the same time?

  O humanity! These children could provide answers for the most pressing questions, but these children only cared about one pressing question:

  How could they doom the human race even further?

  "Shut up narrator," Eve said on the earthplexus hologram screen, a laugh track following her words before Joaquim could tune out the generated show. The hivelike police station built by Ember's police robots, both the city and the CEO fashionista who invented them, were swarming through the hexagonal hallways, the unremarkable white waiting room Joaquim was in, and the line up of jaunting disks to jaunt somewhere for duty.

  Gabe would have found this place interesting. It's like a bee brain was added to their training data, Joaquim thought. He then groaned thinking about him, forcing himself not to let his eyes get glassy again. *Why did you backslide again? Are you afraid of...

  Pitter patters interrupted Joaquim's mind, reminding him of the talking beagle that never introduced himself at No Man's Land. I also backslid once on talking animals didn't I? After Gabe read us stories from the Aulasy of what talking animals tried to do to humanity. Maybe... maybe I should stay... a girl to keep Gabe safe.

  Whoever's paws were walking on the white marble floor revealed herself to be a husky. The recognizable gaze of sentience were in her periwinkle eyes reminiscent of the bygone icy arctic under twilight, and her pupils were like black planets filled with dusky mountains. She also had the uncanny neck many talking animals had, and in this city she had no reason to hide it for the most part. Especially in the Harlynx platform which Joaquim guessed would be near the center of the flying city how the Imogen Generators were built there. That must have been who Iker sent after him because the talking husky was staring right at Joaquim. When Colonel Felix checked on Joaquim through an earthplexus call, he asked him to call him Iker how he became his impromptu dad and he was out of uniform.

  "Naomi? Sorry... did I dead name you?" the husky asked upon her arrival near Joaquim's seat, coming to a sudden realization examining him. "That's the only name we could found attached to your face."

  "Wait... there's a record of my identity?" Joaquim asked.

  The husky nodded. "Why? Is there something we should know?"

  Joaquim looked away briefly before meeting her gaze again. "I am just shocked. I'm from No Man's Land."

  "Sorry, I should introduce myself," she said. "My name is Lucia."

  "... Joaquim."

  "You're not from Denver?" Lucia asked.

  Joaquim gave her a weary smile. "Is that the name of the city? M–uh... sorry... I haven't slept at all... the Don of Byza tried to rename the city I think. So it was called Denver huh."

  "Heh," Lucia said, showing her fangs with a grin. "He's Earth's don pretty much. Byza might be more powerful than the gang that runs Mars or the one that runs the prison in Proxima."

  Joaquim stayed quiet thinking about the leader of Byza.

  "Sorry... we went off on a tangent. Well... to be honest... I also wanted to see if you were comfortable around me," Lucia confided. "Are you ready to leave? I'm sure you're dying to be out of here... especially with the slop on TV."

  "You guys still use the word slop up here?" Joaquim asked with a laugh. "Yea I definitely do... do you know where Gabe is?"

  Lucia shook her head, turning back towards the hallway she came from. With the intention to follow behind her Joaquim tried to get up on both of his feet, but a wave of mystical lethargy washed over him. Even when he stayed awake for days in No Man's Land or the part of it that used to be Denver... he never ever felt this fatigued.

  What the...

  He barely was able to slam a foot near Lucia, stopping himself from faceplanting.

  "Joaquim!"

  Despite Joaquim breaking his own fall, Lucia's voice became a distant echo within the crumbling void with no care for his eyes remaining open. The echo ignored the police station having no way to stretch her operator-like voice for that deceptive eternity.

  A dense heat awoke Joaquim. His body felt as if it doubled in weight as he tried to push himself up, and somehow this was more comfortable than his previous weight. A light breeze brushed his eye lashes, and he spun himself to sit on his rear. Whitely skies filled with four-dimensional hands and eyes were above him and the familiar smell of mortar and pollution filled his lungs. Joaquim almost coughed from the stark difference it had from the air inside the police station. He looked to the distant right to see a massive statue of Prophet Ameen, raising his arms as if he were holding up the sky. Crawling on his behind, he moved away from the statue while burying his hands deeper into the rough sand beneath him. His hands went in deeper than he thought they would.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Around him, crosses were erected, sometimes glitching into looking like power lines. Some would glitch so fast that it looked as if some of the crosses were made of power line components. Sometimes they would appear in uniform lines, and at other times they blinked at random locations.

  An instant sandstorm manifested over Joaquim. When he could glimpse past his sandy arm he used to cover his eyes, he could see a row of human heads being dragged across face first into the sand. When he focused long enough he could hear faint but agonizing screams.

  "Godbane," a voice said. Joaquim stood on his feet and turned around to see an ethereal man with a patch of hair dyed blonde.

  "How do you know my name?" Joaquim asked. Wait... how did I know that nickname?

  "Go to the water," the man suggested.

  Past a row of roofless homes that spawned, a dying oasis was a few meters away from Joaquim. He ran past the palm tree that was holding on to its last leaf, got on his knees, and looked at his reflection in the water. In his reflection, he saw a wider jaw, buzzed hair, and broader shoulders. He was taller too.

  "You look even more... heroic in person," the man said, levitating above Joaquim.

  "Godbane?" Joaquim asked.

  "It is the name the enemy will give you," the man said. "Or you could say have given you. The fourth dimensions is a funny... uhm... place?"

  Joaquim's overwhelming emotions were catching up, but he was not sure if it was from the punishment the humans nearby were experiencing, from his new appearance, or from the mysterious entity speaking to him.

  "Joaquim, you must understand that this is no mere dream," the man said. "This is Ameen's influx ability. Whoever has been given an angel seed by Ameen can be forced to sleep, and they will be able to meet and communicate in this pocket dimension."

  Joaquim rubbed his chin in thought, his armored gloves being fingerless. "So if we were to betray him, we would need to remove the seeds first, or he could put us under a permanent sleep."

  Joaquim was always deductive teenager, but even now, his deductive reasoning was kicking in faster for some reason.

  "Yes exactly," the man said. While in midair he turned to glance at the human heads being tortured. "The first nations he went after were Israel and what remained of Palestine. He appeared where many of their leaders and diplomats were gathered and gave them an order. The order was to give up their worldly obsession with their nations, and let him rule over them as part of the New Earth foretold in the book of Revelations. He killed everyone he could that let the Palestinian holocaust happen and that refused to convert to the Alkrezian religion. Anyone that died during that time and place... ended up here."

  Joaquin frowned as he watched the unimaginable suffering in front of him.

  The sandstorm, the oasis, and the tortured humans vanished, and instead Joaquim was all alone with the ethereal man in a field of mechanical crosses.

  "Joaquim, you must be steadfast when he arrives," the man said. "Nothing good will come from you continuing to repress yourself. You must do it for you. For me. For Gabriel. For all the beings Ameen is torturing. This is all you need to remember. He is coming closer, and his power is too strong for me to continue intervening like this."

  The ethereal man transformed into ominous black smoke and it consumed the horizon. Joaquim had to cover his eyes at the supernatural smoke bursting up, he was forced up on his feet and he was almost swept away into the white skies until he dug his combat boots into the sand. As the black smoke glitched, Joaquim could see a mushroom cloud, a burning apartment building, and multiple flying cities in a crash course towards the ground. Then, there was no mistaking the glint of light in the middle of the towering black smoke. The same glint of light Joaquim saw at the funeral.

  Prophet Ameen was descending down towards Joaquim like a levitating saucer.

  "Naomi, is that you?" a voice asked.

  "Who's that?" Joaquim asked.

  "It's me, Camilo, the shapeshifter," Camilo said. "In this dimension, you'll appear as your true self. You can't see me?"

  Joaquim did not want to say it out loud, but Camilo appeared as nothing. His voice was right beside Joaquim, but there was no body that hosted it.

  "You need to change back, dumbass."

  Even though his voice was deeper, Joaquim knew he was Farouq. Joaquim turned around to see that he got his eyes back and he got older.

  "So this is who you truly are? Just an older you?" Joaquim asked.

  "You can willingly change your appearance here dumbfuck," Farouq said.

  "When have I believed anything you say?" Joaquim said.

  "You're getting out of hand Naomi. Change back now."

  Joaquim turned around to see that Gabe had already spawned. He looked exactly the same way he did the last time Joaquim saw him, his wrists still recovering the handcuffs. "When he lands you need to repent."

  "What did you tell him?" Joaquim yelled.

  Gabe did not bother responding to him. He stared forward coldly. He could not even look at Joaquim.

  Prophet Ameen's bare feet landed on the sand close by. He stood in front of the aberration made of black smoke, his white robes flowing with the desert wind. The smoke used the different mirages of mushroom clouds and flames to form a spider-like face. Then a lion's face. Then wheels of eyes and hands. Then tenebrous tentacles. Then back to a spider.

  Fear swept Joaquim as the realization of its sentience dawned on him. More Alkrezian boys and men were still appearing around Joaquim to be greeted with the image of the two powerful beings in front of them.

  Joaquim's mouth dropped ever so slowly to speak. "It's a... it's a..."

  "Yedaliuth," Joaquim and Prophet Ameen said at the same time.

  Humanity had yet to figure out if it was a black hole, some other space phenomena, or a lifeform. A group of scientists, supersoldiers, and PhD students pooled their knowledge, technology, and talents together to research what happened to GN-z11, and all the humans came back to their families with scribbles and the vernacular of a newborn. Ever since then academia had decided to leave it as a mystery.

  Yet a Yedaliuth was here as Prophet Ameen's pet. His pocket dimension plaything.

  "How are we still keeping our sanity looking at it?" Joaquim asked.

  "Because anything is possible through God. Can I get an amen?" Prophet Ameen requested.

  The large group of boys and men murmured amen.

  "This is a demon," Prophet Ameen declared. "There have been warnings that demons will come and be called aliens and extraterrestrials, but let it be known that they are agents of the Satans. The araks that have subjugated the human elites in the flying cities are servants of Samael. We must go to the cities and exterminate them all."

  The Alkrezian boys and men cheered.

  Joaquim frowned. Despite the bad experience with Wexil, he knew not to assume that every arak was like him.

  "Once the flying cities come down, I will declare a holy war on Brennisteinn, and I will wipe out their civilization before first contact," Prophet Ameen said.

  Whether humans and araks have made first contact in the official sense was debated amongst scholars, and even though Joaquim had a hard time deducing what was conspiracy and what was true, he knew at least that both cultures were still mostly unaware of each other now that Joaquim knew that Wexil indeed existed.

  "You know a lot about this creature, don't you, Naomi?" Prophet Ameen said, pointing to the Yedaliuth. "You've always been fascinated with space even though you want to serve the lord. God will not be happy with you entering the heavens, but it seems you are doing everything you can to stray from God."

  "I think if anything you copied over passages you do not understand," Joaquim said.

  The atmosphere got denser around Joaquim, the bloodlust of everyone around him pouring onto him. The ominous glares coming his way were like lasers piercing through his body.

  "I have been waiting for you to be forthright with me ever since we met in No Man's Land," Prophet Ameen said. "This can be a moment of healing. A moment for us to exorcize the demon that possessed you."

  "Please, let him help you," Gabe begged Joaquim, taking a few steps closer towards him. "You don't have to be this way."

  "I know who I am," Joaquim declared. "And you do too."

  Spurts of feathers flew out of Gabe's shirt. Feathers manifested themselves and grew over his face, then his head transformed into one of a chicken. A beak came out of his mouth, and his lips disappeared.

  The group of boys and men laughed at him.

  "Gabe..." Joaquim muttered.

  "Wait," Farouq said. "So deep down he wants to help her? "

  "Gabe," Joaquim said. "You always knew this, didn't you?"

  "No, I had no idea," Gabe lied. He turned away from his brother and lowered his wattle.

  "Face me," Joaquim said. "I would never abandon you like you did to me."

  "From what I'm hearing from letting you speak, Naomi, is that you have no intention to return to God," Prophet Ameen said. "Gabe's intervention has not convinced you."

  "Ameen," Joaquim said, letting Ameen's name without a title hang in the air. "Taming that yedaliuth came at the cost of your sanity, didn't it?"

  Ameen's seemingly impeccable composure cracked. The white in his eyes amplified and he clenched his teeth.

  "How dare someone possessed by a demon allude that I am not sane!" Ameen shouted.

  "I am the most sensible one here," Joaquim said. "And that includes my brother, who clearly doesn't know who actually loves him."

  Gabe turned around to meet Joaquim's eyes, some feathers falling off his face to reveal human skin.

  "So you are an apostate," Ameen said, pointing an open hand towards Joaquim.

  "Gabe, I love you," Joaquim said quickly.

  Ameen brought his hand down and made Joaquim's avatar vanish.

  Joaquim woke up in a blue bed with Lucia sleeping near his feet. He apparently had a change of clothes and a shower, and it made him clench his teeth.

  "Why did you change me in my sleep?" Joaquim yelled.

  Forced to wake, Lucia hopped off the bed and stretched her body. "You did. You don't remember? Are you alright?"

  Alarmed by Joaquim's yelling, Iker barged into the room that already had all the things Joaquim would want, including a virtualtop. It was almost as if they read his mind or...

  "Hey! Hey! You alright?" Iker yelled. "Sorry for yelling. Octavia Butler you scared me."

  "Why did you change me in my sleep?" Joaquim yelled again.

  "Joaquim... you got ready to go to sleep after you did the bootcamp," Iker said. "You don't remember?"

  No, they did not read Joaquim's mind.

  He ended up in the future.

  "When is this? When is this? When is this?" Joaquim kept yelling. His accelerating heartbeat was pushing up against his rib cage.

  Joaquim had no memory of asking for the things in the room or from the bootcamp he apparently went to.

  Only from the dream he woke up from.

  "How long ago were in the police station?" Joaquim asked Lucia directly.

  Lucia stared at him with the deepest worry a husky's face could show.

  "It... it was a week ago."