by Eddie Patin
"What’s the omniverse?" Jason asked. He was no stranger to the multiverse concept from his years of playing DnD, but he’d never heard the term omniverse before...
"Holy shet, Jason," Riley replied with a smirk. "You’re gonna make your head explode, dude! So, the quick explanation is that there’s your universe..." Riley paused to make an all-encompassing gesture around the room, "which has infinite parallel universes, which—altogether—makes a one multiverse. Then, there are infinite multiverses—all different—which, all together, make up the omniverse—the big fratata. The omniverse is also the tenth dimension."
"It’s called the big fratata?"
"No," Riley said, shaking his head and laughing. "That’s just a figure of speech."
A large shadow suddenly caught Jason's eye, and he watched Gliath appear from the hall leading to the kitchen holding a can of cat food in one huge, black and furry hand. The lycanthrope pulled out chunks of wet liver and chicken dinner with a fork, messily delivering the sloppy bits of food to his feline mouth.
"How many dimensions are there?" Jason asked.
"There are ten," Riley replied. "Well, there are more, according to the scientists of my home universe, but I kind of go by the way that Jason 47 and 113 describe it. Everything makes more sense that way. I can explain it to some extent to you, and I will ... after you get some rest. But remember: I’m just a soldier—not a physicist like Jason 113 was."
Jason stared across the room at the picture on the wall that he so frequently looked at: the last photo he had of him and Mom and Dad before the plane crash. He thought about back when he dropped out of college. He was going into physics himself at the time, and what Riley said made him wonder whether or not all Jason Leapers naturally took that path...
"I was going to be a physicist, too," Jason muttered, not sure if he was telling Riley or just reminding himself.
"You were? Aren’t you now?"
"No," Jason replied. "I dropped out."
There was a quiet moment and Jason listened to the clinking of Gliath fork digging into the cat food can. He could smell the disgusting odor of Zelda’s food—his senses were still wildly alive from being so hungry. He was surprised when the nasty smell made his stomach gurgle.
"Well," Riley said with a sigh, "You can sure handle yourself—I’ve seen that. Even if you’re not a physicist, you’re still a Jason Leaper, and there must be a reason why Jason 113 sent us here ... to you." The soldier stood. "Now Jason, I will happily tell you everything you want to know, but an hour or so ago you were just in mortal combat with a huge fruking wyvern, trying to stab it with a spear made from your pocket knife! I’m sure you’re exhausted, so rehydrate and get yourself cleaned up. Rest a bit."
"You’re right," Jason replied, standing. His left thigh pulled and stung as he did. He realized that his entire body was buzzing after sitting in his chair for a while, and he felt like he wanted to sleep for days.
Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Jason turned off Airplane Mode and watched as his network connectivity reestablished. As he walked past Riley and Gliath toward the kitchen, Jason stared at his phone in shock, realizing that he'd recovered this device from some underbrush near a dead raptor the other morning. His phone started chiming with new emails and Facebook notifications. Two voicemails came in.
Jason opened his fridge, closing his eyes as the blast of cold air hit his face.
He pulled out a chilly bottle of water and sighed...
Chapter 40
"Hey man," Ben’s voice said in his ear. "Just wanted to see how you’re holding up dude; if you wanted to get a beer or something. Haven’t heard from you. Call me."
Jason clicked on the next message in his visual voicemail. He wanted to listen to Amanda's voice again.
"Hey, Jason!" she said, sunny but clearly tired. "It's Sunday night. I wanted to let you know that we made it okay. It’s about ten here, which means eleven in Colorado—I figured you’d be gaming or something. Guess you’re in your headphones. The drive went okay. We’re safe and sound. Give me a call, okay?"
Jason put his phone down on the bathroom counter. He’d already heard the messages from both of them a few times, but he felt compelled to listen again and again. For some reason, it seemed amazing that Ben and Amanda had called him while he was trying to survive in the Wilderlands, reaching out to him while his phone was off. Maybe he was running for his life from the mini-rexes at the time, back when he shot one of them in the face. Maybe he was stuck up in a tree trying to stop from bleeding to death, too terrified to cry. While Jason was struggling to stay alive, life here went on normally...
Jason spent a long time staring at his phone, watching the digital minutes tick by, amazed that it was only Monday.
He stared at himself in the foggy mirror. Jason had just stepped out from the most wonderful hot shower he’d ever had in his life. He ran it until he was totally out of hot water—and his parents’ house had a pretty big water heater.
Someone else stared back at Jason from the mirror—a harder, trimmer man with a tightened face tinged with bruises of many colors ranging from dark purple to shades of ochre yellow. Jason vaguely remembered crashing into the rocky wall of the spider cave’s tunnel with his face. He almost didn’t recognize his blue eyes, which seemed stained with horror and vicious trials of life and death. Staring into the deep pits of his pupils, he could almost see the thick, primordial forest of the Wilderlands staring back at him. He could imagine the trills and chirps of the raptors hunting in the darkness at night...
He’d cut his hair with clippers. His unkempt, dark blonde hair had become a matted mess from all of the mud, blood, tree sap, bugs, and God knows what else over the last several days; over the last 24 hours or 240 hours depending on how you look at it. Fortunately, he was able to cut it all off with the largest blade-guard, keeping his hair around an inch and a half long instead of buzzing it to his scalp. It took a little brushing out of what was left to remove some sap, but the process worked, and he still had hair.
Jason had also shaved his face and neck in the shower, and his skin felt so much cleaner.
Before anything else, he cleared all of the nasty hair clippings out of the sink and into the small bathroom trashcan, then Jason spent some time looking at his many wounds. He had a hell of a bruise on one shoulder and remembered that a cannibal had thrown a stone club or something at him, which had hit him and almost knocked him over. He had a peppering of claw-marks on his shoulders and arms and legs—almost everywhere, really—from multiple encounters with the smaller raptors. The nasty laceration slashing across and along his left thigh from the big raptor that terrible night seemed to be healing really well. It felt great to finally take that jacket-sleeve and paracord bandage off and run hot water over the wound, clearing all of the organic junk away. When Jason's leg was as clean as it was going to get, he was astounded to see that the cut had sealed up and perhaps was never as bad as he thought it was. He thought for sure that he had suffered a deep, open wound that was bleeding profusely that night—there was no way that it could have been that bad and also be so healed up now! The first wound Jason had sustained on that world—the raptor bite on his ... right leg was it?—was just plain gone.
After applying some antibiotic ointment in several places and putting on some Band-Aids from his first aid kit, Jason brushed his teeth, put on some deodorant, and dressed himself in some comfortable, clean clothes.
The man found himself staring at his familiar bathroom—the hanging towels, vitamins, pills, various toiletries, books on the back of his toilet, his rechargeable toothbrush—it all seemed absurd and weird to him. This world—his world—was ridiculously normal. The world was also crazy and deadly ... if he were to step through the portal in his backyard. The world was everything. It was infinite. Infinite worlds...
Jason shook his head. That didn't make sense. He only had a little of the information. He needed to talk with Riley about more.
Once he was nice and cle
an and as back to mundane as he could be, Jason put his phone in his pocket and stepped out of the bathroom, walking out into his living room. The lights were on and everything was so beautiful and clear.
His world was so colorful.
The man stared at photos on the wall of himself and his mom and dad. He looked up on the wall above the couch at the kudzu skull with the big rack of horns—the beast that his dad had killed and mounted from Africa. Jason remembered the sleek and terrifying head of the wyvern with frills of spikes and quick, serpentine eyes that glared darkly with murder. He imagined its skull hanging there...
Riley and Gliath were in the kitchen chatting about something involving infinity crystals. Jason wasn’t really listening. His mind was racing with the absurdity of it all, thinking about parallel universes and being in this house—or another version of it, anyway—a few days ago, seeing Mom and Dad again.
The doorbell rang.
Jason looked over in shock.
Without thinking about it, he found himself moving toward the door, unlatching the lock, then opening it.
A small part of him hoped desperately to see his father on the other side...
"Trick or treat!" a handful of kids in costumes on the porch cried out in loose unison.
"...What?"
The children stood there just outside: one dressed as a pirate, one as Darth Vader, and another as a blue monster. There was a very small child dressed in a bright green dinosaur costume who bumbled around, hardly able to see through the limp, cloth dino mouth around his face. Jason looked the costumed kids and saw a gaggle of parents lingering out on the sidewalk. He saw more kids and parents walking down his street in both directions. There were flashlights and glow-sticks of various colors bobbing around in the twilight. A cold wind hit Jason on his freshly shaved face.
"Trick or treat!" the pirate repeated, then the other kids reiterated in random order.
Monday. Monday night, Jason thought. It was Halloween night.
"Oh yeah!" Jason said, trying to smile. "Um ... I don’t ... uh ... hang on, kids."
Jason turned and dashed toward his kitchen, almost bumping into Riley and Gliath, who had closed in behind him. He heard the kids gasp. One of them breathed, "Cool costume!"
Opening his fridge, Jason pulled out enough prepackaged mozzarella sticks for each child to have one then returned to the door around Riley and Gliath. The kids were all gaping up at the huge panther-creature standing in the living room, bristling with armor and weapons. He threw a cheese stick into each of their bags and buckets.
"Thanks!" they said. "Happy Halloween!"
Jason smiled. "Happy Halloween," he replied, feeling that the universe—the omniverse?—was a huge and small place at the same time. As the kids all turned to go, he closed his door and made sure that his porch light was off.
After that, he walked over to his TV, turned it and his Xbox on, then plopped down to play more of his game from where he had left off. Riley and Gliath watched him play for a while then wandered back to the kitchen.
Jason worked at the controller with fingers and thumbs that hurt from scraping at rocky cliffs and pulling on rough tree-branches and fighting with spears. But as his guy ran through the level, dodging enemy shots and killing low-level bad guys, leaping around and grabbing power-ups, the screen seemed so small and the sound was grating to his ears.
He turned the game off and stood, going to join the Reality Rifters in the kitchen.
"You look a lot better," Riley said, scratching his beard.
Gliath stood, impossibly small in the human-sized room, leaning up against a counter and clinking a fork around inside a can of Zelda’s cat food. Jason could suddenly smell the pungent odor and he looked down, only to see his little white cat eating by Gliath’s feet from a pile of the same stuff on a dish. The werepanther stood stoically, watching Jason but said nothing.
"I feel a lot better, thanks."
"Cut your hair, eh?"
"Yeah, it was all messed up from tree sap and stuff. It’s hard to believe that I was gone for something like two weeks and it’s only Monday here. It’s really weird."
"Yeah," Riley replied, cocking his head. He was still wearing his duster jacket even though he’d been inside for a few hours. "Interdimensional travel—planeswalking—can be pretty fruking bizarre."
"I bet you’ve seen some bizarre things," Jason said, glancing up at Gliath again. "And what are you, anyway, Gliath? Some kind of werepanther? Wereleopard? Werejaguar?"
"I am Krulax," Gliath replied with a deep voice then licked his chops.
"He’s kinda like a were-leopard," Riley said, looking up at his friend. "But it’s the other way around. He’s a leopardwere. You see, a wereleopard is a man who can turn into a leopard. Gliath is—"
Jason knew. He remembered from the 2nd Edition DnD monster manual, back when there were werewolves and wolfweres; jackalweres.
"He’s like a leopard that can turn into a man," Jason said, finishing for him.
"Zappo," Riley replied, just as a person would say bingo.
"Gliath here is from universe 679, a planet called Luva, where all animal life is sentient, intelligent, and big. Most of them can shapeshift."
"Cool," Jason replied. "And that was him with you at the movie theater? The guy that looked like an American Indian?"
"I don’t know what an American Indian is," Riley replied, "but he was with me in human form, yeah. Long, black hair, right?"
Jason nodded, patiently trying to get around Gliath and into the fridge. He wanted a cold beer. Oh God—how he wanted a cold beer. He plucked a Laughing Lab from the six-pack in the door, opened the top, and took a long, desperate swig.
"Oh my fucking God," he said, letting the cold, malty flavor fill his mouth and sooth his woes. After focusing on it for a while, he looked back at Riley. "So, you guys are monster hunters? That’s like the primary thing you do?"
Riley nodded and smirked, colliding with Gliath playfully with his shoulder. The huge cat-man didn’t react. "Yeah, that’s right. It’s something a lot of planeswalkers do. When you have infinite universes out there you can find just about any shet you want, and a lot of people want various parts of monsters. Like your wyvern of the Wilderlands. Those eggs are valuable. Parts of the creature are probably valuable, too, to the right people. I haven’t hunted a wyvern before—I don’t know. And some people put bounties on certain monsters or certain individuals of ... uh ... monstrous lineage that have wronged them or whatever. Sometimes we go after bounties for the recovery of special items that someone wants—there’s all sorts of stuff to do."
"Sounds dangerous."
"Extremely," Riley replied with a smirk. "But we’ve got lots of cool weapons and gear and shet to handle it. We’re professionals."
"Why do you do it?" Jason asked. "Why do you planeswalk if it’s so dangerous? I mean—both of your previous Jasons have died..."
"No," Riley replied. "Only the last one died. The other one is just ... retired for a while. And why else would we do something so crazy and adventurous? For profit, of course!" He grinned.
Jason ran a hand through his new, short hair. It felt so odd and clean. "You’ve said that the infinity crystals will make you rich. What are they?"
"Do you know what a piezoelectric crystal is?" Riley asked.
"Yes."
"Well, there are lots of different kinds of infinity crystals across the omniverse. The term infinity crystal is just a term that we use for piezoelectric crystals that can create more electrical output than is required to activate that output, know what I mean?"
Infinity, Jason thought. Of course.
"Really?" Jason asked. "That would be—" Jason stopped, staring at the kitchen wall. Something that created more energy than required to run it was ... free energy. Infinite energy. If the crystals produced more power than they needed to power a machine that could ... squeeze them to produce more power to make a surplus and keep the machine going ... why, that would be priceless! J
ason realized he was staring into space and met Riley's gaze again. The soldier was smiling and nodding. "But crystals like that could change the world!" Jason exclaimed. "They could power my house—I mean, I would need enough to replenish a battery circuit faster than I would be drawing power from it, but ... free energy! How cool!"
Riley smirked and elbowed Gliath, who grunted, looking up grumpily from his can of cat food.
"Look at him, Gliath," the soldier said with a chuckle. "That’s a Jason Leaper, alright..."
"Crystals like that are priceless," Jason reiterated.
"Uh ... they do have a price, actually," Riley replied, "although it changes depending on the market, but they’re used kind of like currency trading with interdimensional merchants, along with precious metals, and a few other things. But it’s true—having access to a lot of them will definitely set us up pretty good as a new group—a new Reality Rifters—assuming you’ll join us. Jason 113 was smart to put us in contact with you and the portal to the Wilderlands where there’s so much we can use. That universe has great resources. He told us to give you the stone so that you could open the rift. I’m ... uh..."
Riley stopped talking.
Jason knew what was going on. Now that it came up again, he realized that he was feeling a little bloom of heat rising in him. The idea that Riley and Gliath left the infinity crystal for him to find angered him. That crystal led to him falling into the wyvern’s cave and scraping by for survival for days, nearly being killed on many occasions. He’d been through so much. It didn’t have to happen like that...
Jason sighed.
"You left the stone for me to find, of course," Jason said. He realized that he must have been glowering, because Riley’s face had become a little anxious. He could tell that the young guy—a few years younger than Jason was, it looked like—was passionate and wore his feelings on his sleeve for the most part. Even Gliath had shifted his relaxed posture and Jason caught sight of the leopardwere’s black tail flicking just like Zelda's did when she was agitated.
