The Portal

by Charles Sterling

  “I can’t believe you’re real,” I said with a sad and relieved look on my face.

  “Sorry,” said Nero. “Wilmort’s instructions. He lied a lot to us, and he made us lie to you. The whole damn thing was a lie.”

  “I just watched Wilmort’s movie,” I said.

  “How was it?” Violet looked at me. Nero took my remote and went to channel minus one to reveal the timer. I was taken aback that it was still there, I had completely forgotten to even check.

  “It was…”

  Nero looked at me, he wanted to know too.

  “It was called Two Names. Basically the whole story revolves around Wilmort, or rather, Reed, breaking the fourth wall and creating a second self to go take vengeance upon humans. I’m not sure how the story plays out later, we were in it… it was all messed up.”

  “I’m in countless movies, accidently,” said Nero. “Got too close to the main plot. Once you mess something up, there’s no going back, and no figuring out what happened before that or how the story was supposed to play out without you.”

  “Damn. There’s still unanswered questions, though.”

  “Like?” Violet asked.

  I locked the door. “Like, how can we be sure there is only one Wilmort out there? The story loops, right?”

  “Woah, not so fast,” said Nero. “We haven’t seen the movie, we have no clue what you’re talking about without context. We have no time though, we’re going in.”

  “But, the code won’t work,” I said.

  “I had Regal change the code so that even if Wilmort decided to destroy all the machines in the base, he couldn’t destroy your link to the engine without knowing the code to turn it off in the first place.”

  “Oh! So the code just changed! And wait, won’t only I be able to go through?”

  “Who said that?” said Nero, typing in the code, and opening the portal.

  “Last time Bob was here… The portal wouldn’t open.”

  “Your friend didn’t have the pixel in him, it’s a little defense mechanism set up by Regal. We’re go to go,” said Nero.

  I stepped closer to the portal – it was truly active, I could see the shimmering lights in the distance slowly making their way out. I could not have been more relieved – I thought I’d never see it again.

  Nero typed in an image search on his phone and showed it to me.

  “This is a fictional boutique in the US, it only exists in this movie. That’s where we’re going.”

  “We’re not going back to base?”

  “Chances are, Regal escaped,” said Nero. “We just have to rendezvous with him ASAP.”

  “Got it,” I looked at the boutique again. It was very distinct, if it was the only one of its kind it would be a piece of cake.

  “Just like through a normal portal,” said Violet.

  “A few hours ago I never thought I’d miss the nauseating feeling of travelling so much,” I laughed half-heartedly.

  Nero went in first, as eager as always. Just as he did, there was a knock on my door.

  “You can go ahead,” I told Violet.

  “Is it important?” she asked.

  “I have no clue who it is,” I went over to the door. I unlocked and opened it. It was Emily.

  “Raymond…?” she looked over my shoulder, seeing Violet standing there. She was probably so surprised at seeing Violet her eyes didn’t quite see the void inside the TV screen, which was narrowly turned sideways towards the door.

  “If it can wait, I have to be somewhere,” I told her straight up.

  “So you’re with her now?” she asked.

  Violet raised her eyebrow.

  “No,” I smiled. “I’ll talk with you later,” I closed the door.

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” said Violet.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, watching Violet go in. Her body disintegrated into light particles before getting sucked in – that was a difference between teleporting here and there.

  I looked at my window. Emily was staring at me through a crack in my curtains. I put my finger over my lips as a gesture for her to keep quiet about this, and went in as well.

  Chapter 19

  Imagining the boutique took me mere seconds, I was becoming a natural at this. As I came to, the cacophony of the streets filled the air. It was the second half of the day when it was already getting darker, and to add on top of it the clouds were grey. Distant thunder could be heard, but no rain.

  Nero and Violet shook me awake, and we went off, blending normally into the city streets.

  “Now what?” I asked them.

  “Look for a signal,” said Nero. “If Regal is still tracking us, he’ll come to us himself. If not…” he didn’t finish the sentence, I didn’t press him to it.

  Nero got on the wide road, motioned his hand and created a car, a beautiful, silver sports car. We all got in, the engine roared, and we drove off with me in the back seat.

  Randomly creating a car on the streets definitely got a bunch of eyes on us, but we didn’t care. We drove off until the roads became less busy, and parked in a neighborhood somewhere. It was quiet and private.

  “Tell us about Reed, then,” said Nero.

  I leaned back. “About Reed huh.”

  “You can skip his story, just tell us what’s important,” said Violet.

  “After his family died gruesomely, he went to a witch and asked her for ‘the truth’. The truth ended up being the universal truth, that he was part of a bigger universe. This was in exchange for his soul. She would also give him back his memories after every loop.”

  “Damn,” said Nero. “That’s insane. He’d pile up knowledge about Light for every loop then, huh?”

  “Yes, I figured that much,” I said. “She gave him back his memories, and he suddenly changed and became more like the Wilmort we know. Then she told him that I’d be coming, and to bring the pendant to her.”

  “Lucky he didn’t go straight to her,” said Nero. “Would have turned out differently. Can’t say what happened to us was the best case scenario either, though.”

  “So Doug is dead, right?”

  Violet gasped quietly.

  “Yes,” said Nero. “Any clues on how his double came to be?”

  “No,” I replied. “He asked her how his double was doing, he wanted to know if there was any progression towards freedom. She said ‘you will see your reflection soon’.”

  “Reflection?” said Nero, he looked at me through the rear view mirror.

  “Yeah.”

  “So can you assume that the witch created Wilmort? Just by copying Reed or something?”

  “I don’t think Reed could create Wilmort himself, could he? Regal even said so, you can’t create other humans, it’s too complicated. Anyways, it must have happened a while ago, and the details of that are lost within context. Thanks to the memories being brought back to him, every time, the movie slightly changes. Only the real Reed knows.”

  “I say we go talk to Reed then,” said Violet.

  “After we get Regal back,” said Nero.

  There was a moment of silence. The situation was tense, and we were almost completely in the dark, just hoping for the best. If Regal was still out there, we felt like we had a fighting chance. He knew a lot more than we did.

  “So what did you do with the stopwatch?” I asked.

  “I told Regal, just before going to see Reed, that he should prepare as if Wilmort will shut everything down and kill everyone. I then took the stopwatch and made our friend eat it.”

  I understood what she meant.

  “So long as Wilmort doesn’t have the fifth item,” said Nero, “he can’t do whatever it was that he wanted to do. We still don’t even know what that is. But there’s no telling if he can get another item by himself soon, so we have to act fast. Just need Regal, real badly.”

  “So how come you hid that you guys are humans?” I asked quietly.

  Nero took a pause, but then answered honestly. “He
said that, in order to motivate you and make you feel more special, we should keep the reviving part exclusive to you.”

  “Well it worked,” I shrugged sarcastically.

  “Douglas was a professional, he could complete lots of assignments from a distance, so we brought him along a lot of the times. But usually it was just us three. If it came down to it, Violet and I were ready to die as well, of course.” Nero paused again. The silence between us was painful and aggravating. “The timer was fake too.”

  “I thought about that, until I stayed past the thirty minute mark and almost died,” I replied.

  “The portal sends out a static that makes you feel unpleasant, there’s nothing more to it. If you were further away you wouldn’t have even felt it,” said Nero.

  “Genius,” I whispered, looking out the window. At this point, nothing surprised me. There was more silence between us. Small droplets of rain hit the roof of the car.

  “Sorry,” said Violet, quietly.

  “It’s fine,” I said normally.

  “This shouldn’t have happened…” she whispered.

  “Violet, it’s fine,” I reassured her. “We’ll get through this.”

  Violet rubbed her cheek with a finger.

  There was a knock the window of the car. We couldn’t see who it was, only up to his chest. Someone… peculiarly well dressed.

  He leaned his head down, smiled, and waved.

  “Wilmort!!” Yelled Nero. He stepped on the gas. The wheels burned out and the car sped forward, through the neighborhood.

  We looked behind us. He was no longer there.

  “Frick, frick, frick, frick,” said Nero. “This is bad, this is very bad.”

  Nero drove frantically. He got into plenty mini accidents, and got out onto the main street, breaking every traffic rule he could. Violet and I were looking out of all the windows, trying to make sure he wasn’t close.

  A single thick metal rod sprout out from the road, our car crashed into it and flipped forward. We were totaled, and stunned. The side of Violet’s forehead was bleeding.

  Our car got lifted up by Wilmort’s bare hands as he flew up into the air with it.

  “Head down!!” Nero yelled at the top of his lungs. From the front of the car, giant jet ammunition spawned and began shooting straight towards Wilmort. He dropped us before he got hit by anything. The sound of the guns was deafeningly loud this up close. Nero made the car burst into Light, and we were free falling above a road.

  We regained stability in the sky, and flew the opposite direction of Wilmort. He flew right after us.

  “No use running now,” said Wilmort in a loud voice. “It will all be over quickly, I only want the location of the stopwatch I worked so hard to get!”

  We weaved and meandered through buildings and along roads, flying in zigzags and patterns to try to sway Wilmort away. Our speed was so high that if something appeared in front of us it would be too hard to react fast enough.

  Wilmort ended up pursuing Violet. The buildings were tall, and there was lots of glass everywhere. Violet was like a skillful gymnast with a body made of metal that knew no pain, and knew no gravity. She burst through windows, made inertia-defying turns and flew out through other windows. Wilmort’s body was covered in black smoke that consumed any matter that it touched. His chains were going through buildings, whipping chunks of anything in his way straight off.

  Nero and I did not let Violet fend him off alone. We shot whatever we had at Wilmort, disregarding anything in our path.

  At any given moment, Wilmort turned on any of us. He was terrifying. If he got close enough, there was not enough creativity in the world to escape his burning black grasp. His eyes were red and malicious intent on hurting you in ways the devil would praise.

  Our flights left behind explosions, collapsing buildings and bridges, and most likely a lot of casualties. Glass rained from high towers onto the concrete, emitting sparks in the cold and cloudy streets.

  One thing was for sure, this was not getting us anywhere, and there was no way in hell we could ever beat a pissed off Wilmort.

  Nero ascended up onto a tall rooftop, and landed on his feet safely, unscathed for the moment. He shot a red flare gun into the sky, catching all of our attention. Violet and I immediately flew towards him, and Wilmort decided to play along for the arbitration. The three of us were on one side, and Wilmort on the other.

  “So then, I assume I have your surrender?” Wilmort smiled jovially.

  “Go to hell,” said Violet. Wilmort wagged his finger at her.

  “After everything we’ve been through, is that how you’re talking to me now?”

  “We should have thought of a backup place to meet,” I whispered to them.

  “Make a single move, Raymond,” said Wilmort, “and all three of you will go pop right in front of me!”

  “Where’s Regal?” said Violet.

  “Dead,” said Wilmort.

  “Dead?!” Nero burst out.

  “Murderer!!” Violet burst out harder.

  “Oh no, no. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t kill him, he did it himself. To preserve information, I assume. A smart man he was. But not smart enough to see through me, it would seem.”

  “Okay,” I slightly stepped forward. “What do you want the five items for, then?”

  “To feed into the machine,” said Wilmort.

  “And then what?”

  “Then the machine goes boom!” he gestured with his hands. “And all your precious worlds go boom! Including my own, of course.”

  “Is that really the best way to go about it?” I asked.

  “It is the only way to go about it,” he said in a deep voice. “To take away from you what you value so much – all your childhoods, and dreams of being superheroes. All your creations and stories, all turned to naught. To you, it will be a life without stories and fiction – a life that won’t even change that much. You wouldn’t even know it was there. And to me – it would be a life without life. Both parties win, don’t they? You won’t even remember Doug and Regal existed.”

  “Shut up!!” Violet yelled at him.

  “Seems I have hit a nerve,” Wilmort smiled. “Do you miss Norman that much?” he smiled mockingly. Violet’s eyes had vengeance in them. “Where is the stopwatch?” he coldly asked.

  “At the bottom of the pacific ocean,” I said.

  “Didn’t your parents teach you not to lie?” said Wilmort.

  “At the bottom of the Ice Volcano,” I said.

  “Try a third time,” said Wilmort.

  “Up your ass!” said Nero. Him and I both fired at Wilmort, a mix of lightning and plasma ray destructive enough to blow half of the rooftop to bits.

  Violet opened a portal in the single moment of time that we had. I jumped in first. “To Cyl!!” I yelled. They jumped after me. I betted on them simply knowing where it was. They were tracking me from the beginning, weren’t they? I had hoped this would have worked out. The last place we had to go to was the base.

  I had imagined the exact same beach area that I first came to where I met Cyl. I was washed up on the sea when she helped me and introduced me to her android community.

  The pleasant sounds of the water moving up and down the sand filled the breezy air. The sun hit my face and it felt like a happy ending moment – except I was waiting for Nero and Violet with painstaking nervousness.

  I walked around the sand, flew up, and searched. They weren’t around. I flew over to where Cyl and Proto stayed – it was a few seconds of flying to get there. The whole place was burned up and destroyed. Cyl and Proto, or anyone for that matter, were not there.

  I saw a flare gun fire from where I was a moment ago. I flew back immediately, seeing both of them safe and sound.

  “You made it!” I said, landing next to them.

  “Are your friends there?” said Nero.

  “No…” I said. “They’re not. After that alien attack, I think they moved locations permanently.

 
; “Well that’s too bad,” said Wilmort. Our heads jolted to the left along the beach. He came out of his own portal, right where we were.

  “Freaking hell,” said Nero.

  “Couldn’t think of a safer place to go, Raymond?”

  “Well I wouldn’t go to the dark forest again,” I replied.

  “You should have,” he said. “Better odds.” He raised his hand at us. “I’m done playing catch with you three. I know one of you knows where the stopwatch is, and I’m going to torture the nightmares out of you to find out.”

  Suddenly, Wilmort’s hand lowered, and he flew back and out of the way milliseconds before loud and destructive lasers hit the place where he was standing.

  Cyl landed right in front of us, aiming her hand towards Wilmort.

  “Cyl!!” I grinned widely. We all looked to the skies. Squadrons of androids were flying in, and before you knew it, we were encircled and protected by all of them. “Proto!” I spotted him.

  “Hello!” said Proto. “Leave this anti-human to us.”

  “So yeah,” I called out to Wilmort. “I think I feel pretty safe!”

  “Enjoy your mockery while you can,” said Wilmort. A portal appeared behind him as he walked backwards into it. He was gone.

  “He’s gone,” said Nero. All the androids gently lowered their arms.

  “What a day,” said Violet.

  “Come,” said Proto. “We have a new base, it is thirty seconds of ultra-speed flying, but we can go slower.”

  “No,” I said, looking at my two friends. “No, we’re cool with ultra-speed.”

  I flew up into the air. All the androids stared at me with open mouths.

  “Come on guys, that’s the fakest surprised face I ever seen.”

  Proto laughed. Cyl flew up towards me, and hugged me right as we were hovering above everyone.

  “Very touching,” said Violet.

  “Take us to your base,” Nero walked over to Proto. “We have much discussion to do, and not a lot of time.”

  “Ultra-speed it is,” Proto ascended into the air. “Follow us.”

  In less than a minute, we were at their new base. It was honestly almost the same as before, just a different location. Similar beaches and tropical jungles mixed into each other with lively huts and beach volleyball and things like that.