The Time Stone, Third Edition (Extended Version)

Time: 2012, A.D., Chronix Bay

Around the city of Chronix Bay, there are sirens and lights from police cars wailing as federal agents suited up running about and hovering about the scene of a gruesome series of bloody murders.

“What do you got, Mac?” asks Adam, the FBI agent, a smooth-talking man in a dark grey suit with his hands on his hips and dashing smirk.

“Seventeenth woman this week, killed and totally the victim of exsanguinations... you know drained of blood,” says Mac, a chubby balding man in a cheap suit holding a white box and wearing white gloves.

“So we’re still hunting count Dracula.” says Adam.

“I don’t like this. I used to hear stories of olden times when there were similar occurrences, and they were never solved.”

“We might be fated to suffer the same fate.” Mac nods as the two men stand watching the coroner taking the latest victim away in a body bag.

“Strange claw marks,” says Adam looking at the face of the latest victim, a petite blonde woman, with three claw marks on her bloody face, gashed in like a wild animal tore at her flesh, loose pieces of brown hair surround the wound. Adam looks at the back of his hand and saw the brown hair on his body and extended fingernails.

The tall skyscrapers and structures of the modern era are a sight for sore eyes and Mercedes, Tina, and Drax look up at the Chronix Bay towers as a 747 plane soars overhead.

“Yes,” says Drax. The year is 2012. We’re back. We made it home.” He pumps his fists in midair.

“But we’re a man down,” says Tina sadly.

“Don’t worry” says Mercedes, consoling her with her arms around her. They hear loud booms coming from the air above, and loud echoes.

“Sounds like firecrackers,” says Tina.

“It’s not firecrackers,” says Drax, looking at the launching of small projectile missiles from the side of the building to a distant location. They look up and see a familiar sight, Satyr flying up towards the apex of the central complex.

“Oh no, what is he up to?” asks Mercedes.

“Let’s go check it out,” says Drax. “We will arouse less suspicion by taking the elevators. I still know the access codes.” The trio walks into the building and onto the elevator, and stands in formation like a triangle as they head up to the top floor.

“We can still change things and stop the Machination’s experiment or more of it from harming the past?” asks Tina.

“We need to try,” says Mercedes.

“We will try… and possibly save the future as we know it” says Drax, determined. They hear one loud boom after another in the skies above.

The elevator made it to the top floor and they walk off onto the roof out of a cylindrical entryway. Satyr stands over an altar set up with lit candles and roaring flames in gold bowls. The struggling form of a young woman with brunette hair lies on the table, wearing a white gown. She is shackled at the wrists and ankles with chains attached to the altar. Satyr chants in a different language as he holds a curved dagger over her body with both hands.

“What the hell is going on here?” asks Drax. He runs over to the altar as Satyr turns and stabs the dagger at him. Satyr lunges forward and Drax dodges and strikes Satyr in the jaw over and over with his clenched fists. Then Adam came running up the stairs gun drawn.

“Hold it, FBI” he yells. Tina and Mercedes run over to the altar and try to undo the restrains on the helpless prisoner, but are unable to free her. Loud noises and booms continue above them. Drax continues to pummel at Satyr who grabs Drax and tosses him to the floor. Adam yells again for them to get up and they do.

“You fool!” yells Satyr.

“Dad,” says Adam, I know it is you behind the killings of those women and the others in the past. Drax looks at him with a perplexed grin. He kicks at Satyr who grabs Drax by the leg and pushes him back. Drax falls back. Satyr opens his large mouth and reaches with his tongue extending long like a hose towards Adam and grabs him by the neck, wrapping his tongue around it and choking the life out of him. Adam drops his gun and feels for his neck. He falls to the ground as his face turns blue. He collapses as he looks with shock at the last thing he sees: Satyr’s enraged face.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, indeed” says Satyr. Drax runs over and he kicks Satyr’s hand while he is distracted. The dagger goes skimming over the floor near the large altar.

“This is not over,” yells Satyr as he runs over to the edge of the roof and jumps upward into the air as he lifts himself up, flapping his extending wings. Drax picks up and pockets the knife at the same time he reaches for the gun and then rolls on the ground and fires several shots up into the air facing Satyr. The shots strike Satyr in the back causing him to fall down to the earth below. Drax runs over to Mercedes and Tina with the prisoner on the altar.

“I thought human sacrifice went the way of slavery,” says Tina.

“It’s the ancient right of Maldificio, the ritual sacrifice of a traitor,” Drax says.

“What could she possibly have done?” asks Tina.

“I don’t know.” says Drax.

“She is very faint,” says Mercedes, checking the woman’s pulse.

“I think she is trying to say something,” says Drax. He saw her moving her lips with a sense of apprehension. Tina lowered her ear to the woman’s mouth and raises her eyebrows as her eyes widen with sudden shock.

“Are you sure?” asks Tina as she is listening again. “Oh my God, OK we’ll take care of it.” The woman then stops moving and her head drops to the side.

“I am not getting a pulse, we’re losing her. She needs medical attention now!” screams Mercedes, “I can’t do anything here.” she sat down, worried. She’s gone.”

“It’s not your fault.” says Drax as he saw her weep in mourning for the stranger on the altar. “What did she say Tina?” asks Drax.

“There is going to be an attack. She is named Sylvia Armstrong.” says Mercedes.

“I know her,” says Tina, “the news lady.”

“Yeah, she says she is a reporter for Chronix Bay-13 news and is doing a special report on Temporo, Inc. and found out they were planning to sabotage some group across town, a competitor, I don’t know, but her discovery must have caused them to accelerate their schedule and they have something in orbit that is going to strike any moment now and cause major destruction,” says Mercedes.

“That’s why they were trying to sacrifice her. She had been discovered, and they decided she was a traitor,” says Drax.

“We have to do something,” says Mercedes. “This could be what James saw in his vision, what we learned causes the great conflict, a major catastrophic event.”

“Oh no,” says Drax. “In theory such a catastrophe could be a temporal divergence that leads to the future the way we saw it. That could be the coming they kept referring to.”

“They?” asks Mercedes.

“Never mind, we have to go now,” says Drax as he fiddles with his wrist remote and says “I am summoning the scorpion car to us.”

“I guess this is the better time,” Tina smirks looking upward into the roaring winds as the car approaches them in mid-air. “It looks a lot cleaner than before … because it is brand new here.”

Within minutes, they are racing across the air in the car. “Here, Tina” says Drax passing her the handheld scanner and told her to find the weapon.

“How do I do that?” She screams.

“Follow the yellow lines.” says Drax as he pointed to a red button on the front and a slider switch. The lines will lead you to a strong energy surge and if it seems there is something big enough to be emanating a radiogenic particle field, hit the red button, OK?”

“Yes sir.” she replies, holding the device carefully.

“Mercedes, when I say take the wheel; I need you to take the wheel, OK?”

“OK.” she says nervously, sitting in the seat beside him.

“We got to find this weapon and use the scorpion car’s primary weapon against it before it can be deployed against its target and virtually end the world,” says Drax.

They both nod in response to his commands. They race across the sky at lightning fast speeds.

“I am getting something,” says Tina. “It’s very big, radiogenic identified.…”

“Hit the red button,” says Drax.

Tina presses the red button as hard as she could. The handheld scanner starts beeping loudly and the scorpion car is changing direction towards the heavens above higher and higher. Drax presses a button and converts the car back to its scorpion attack mode, isolating the three of them in a small self-sustained bubble. The car breaks through the atmosphere and into orbit, zooming high above into outer space, to their utter amazement.

“I have never seen anything so beautiful,” says Mercedes. The aura surrounding the craft illuminates the space before them. The space is immense and yet small as a vaguely lit dim vacuum. They saw a large object in orbit, a metallic orb the size of a continent stretching on for thousands of miles across and high.

“That’s it,” says Drax, “the weapon!” It began to glow bright purple and emit small beads of light energy.

“Fire the weapon… let’s blow it,” says Tina.

“Mercedes take the wheel and began maneuvering it in circles,” says Drax. Mercedes gets behind the wheel and Drax climbs up to a second tier of the small bubble they occupy where he sits up and holds himself like a gunner in a battleship. He presses a series of commands on a panel, and within moments the scorpion weapon begins to heat up bright orange and almost instantly thereafter fire a projectile of pure energy into the orb. The blast spread outward for miles, but afterward they saw it did nothing.

“It didn’t even put a dent in the orb,” says Tina. The Scorpion car’s main weapon blast fizzled in the middle of empty space before the orb object.

“Damn it,” yells Drax, “it’s a shield.”

“Try again,” says Mercedes, piloting the car around in circles.

“No use, we need to think of something else.” Drax says.

“How come we don’t try using the time stone?” Tina asks.

“That could work,” Drax says.

“Uh oh,” Tina says. “Look.” as she sees on the device a large buildup of radiogenic energy. “It’s building up to something.”

“It’s going to fire,” Drax says.

“Mercedes get us back to the planet now. Pull the wheel down.” He climbs into the cockpit with them again just as Mercedes pulls the wheel down causing the car to spiral down back into the atmosphere’s majestic flaming roar, surrounding the car. The orb begins to turn and the beads of light concentrate at a single point. “We’re not going to make it,” says Drax, seeing they were in the atmosphere, but far from landfall. “We going to have to eject or we’re dead.” He punches in a command on the console in front of Mercedes, and a small hatch opens up with a yellow and black marked lever. He pulls it and the small bubble they occupy lifts up and out in the momentum of the falling car, just as the orb emits the beads of light in a single concentrated-energy beam towards the car, obliterating it. The bubble with the trio rockets towards the landscape below barely missing being hit by the intense beam of light.

“Wow, that was close!” says Tina.

“Can we control where we land?” asks Mercedes.

“Yeah, good idea,” says Tina, “I am picking up a tall structure 3000 feet away.” She says looking into the handheld device.

“Plot a course,” says Drax, as Mercedes navigates the bubble in the direction Tina points. The bubble zooms down, approaching a tall building with a large antennae and then crashes down onto the roof of the tall skyscraper, bouncing along the roof until coming to a screeching halt at the very near a small inner structure.

“Whoa,” says Mercedes. “My scorpion driving days are over I guess.”

“Let’s go, we don’t have a lot of time,” says Drax, popping the hood of the bubble open as they all get out. The darkness of the night sky is awe-inspiring, but pales in comparison to the great impact on the side of the building they were on as the windows are broken and there are obvious remnants of an explosion which is charred into the side of the building.

“Looks like the missile attacks stopped, but this is obviously where they were targeted by Temporo,” says Mercedes.

“We need to try something else to destroy that orb,” says Tina.

“This is the key!” she holds out the time stone glowing brightly. Mercedes and Drax reach for it.

“Whatever we do we have to do it quick?” asks Drax the winds blowing fiercely about them. Then they each try to pull away and the time stone pulls apart into separate pieces, the five sides became disjointed and the five orbs became separated, with one in each part.

“Oh great we broke it,” says Tina.

“Huh? It’s never done that before,” says Mercedes. Tina smirks.

“Did you know about this?” asks Mercedes looking at Drax.

“I swear I didn’t,” he shakes his head. “But this must mean something. We unlocked some other possible potential for the time stone.” They each hold a piece.

“We got to figure this out and fast, before that weapon strikes again!” exclaims Tina.

Then Satyr lands on the roof flapping his wings.

“Uh oh, company,” says Mercedes as they turn to face him.

“What do you want?” asks Drax.

“I was cooped up too long.” Satyr replies. “I am not here to fight. I was thinking long and hard about what you said to me long ago, some seventy odd years.”

Tina looks at her comrades and remembers it like it was yesterday. “Yeah?” asks Tina.

“We are the same race and I know it now. My misgivings were compounded by ages of hatred and prejudice. I am ready to begin anew and work towards a brighter future.”

“That’s sweet, Satyr,” says Tina.

“Yeah, except no one is going to have a brighter future unless we destroy that orb!” yells Mercedes.

“We got one shot” says Drax, “but we don’t know how…”

“The solution to stopping the Alchemic Orb is to unleash the time stone’s ultimate potential, a direct shot upward harnessing the type 3 quantum-chronoians-posian particles drawn by the device from the space time continuum. It will annihilate the orb by accelerating the temporal divergence process and ultimately pushing it out of phase with this reality. It will not be able to survive nor impact this world.” Satyr said.

“Time as a weapon,” says Drax confidently.

“How do you know this?” asks Mercedes.

“I ate a scientist!” he grimaces to their dismay.

“Let’s make it happen,” says Drax. They each walk over to the center of the building. Satyr grabs a piece of the time stone too leaving Tina with one outer piece and one inner peace.

“If only we had one more person,” says Tina sadly, thinking of James, when suddenly a white light appeared overhead as a vortex opens releasing the white light they last saw in the desert, the calming and peaceful halo remnants of their comrade James Timewalker.

“Is it the weapon?” asks Mercedes.

“No,” says Tina, “its James.” She feels his presence, peaceful, carefree, joyous, loving, and warm. The light spreads over them in the night sky.

“Amazing,” says Mercedes.

“Also look where we are standing,” says Drax, “there are five corners to this building like the time stone. Maybe if we all stand in one corner and put our faith into this light entity being our friend James, it will be enough to tap into the time stone’s power to stop the attack wherever it is.”

“A good defense is a good offense,” says Mercedes. “Anyone know whose building this is?”

“Beats me, but we have to do this or we don’t stand a chance of beating the orb,” says Tina.

“Let’s do it” says Mercedes.

“OK, everyone to your places,” says Drax. Tina, Mercedes, and Satyr each head to a corner of the roof and Drax takes the extra piece middle section from Tina and places it in the central corner where the white light concentrated and set itself.

“I hope this is you James old buddy old pal. If so, we will find out,” says Drax, dropping the fifth piece of the time stone before the white light. Then he runs over to the other corner.

“Let’s do this!” Drax yells “Put our faith in the white light and in each other. We are one!”

Together they held up the time stone shards they each hold, and the light levitates the fifth piece off of the ground by its own psychic energy having its own life. The five pieces begin to glow.

“Concentrate everybody,” says Satyr. Then in orbit the orb spun around and began to generate the light beads at a focal point ten times as large as the last burst it let loose, and in an instant it is intensifying in its preparation to fire the weapon. A beam of yellow hazy light emerged from each time stone shard on the building roof, and the five pieces each shine a light that met in the center and combined to form a large circular loop of light energy that intensified and in instant fires upward just as the orb fires downward. The individuals below felt themselves combine as if they could hear what each is thinking and feeling, while the orb’s projectile is neutralized by the blast from the time stone, being galvanized by the white light being’s own aura as it continued upward to the orb, blasting it in a gigantic explosion as massive debris from the orb scattered itself with concussive force throughout the planet’s orbit and atmosphere, burning up the incoming fragments exploding in the air like fireworks over the night sky as the lights dissipate. The fragments explode and clearly fade almost instantly upon impact. Tina, Mercedes, and Drax stand with gladness. Tina jumps for joy. The group stands proudly as they witness the event and Satyr nods in recognition. Mercedes smiles gleefully crossing herself in prayer. The white light being fades up into the air as if bidding them a final farewell and fades into the vortex that opens for it and closes thereafter and the crew remains staring up into the sky forever focusing on the future.

“The good book observed ’[f]or as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of man.’ Matthew 24:27” says Mercedes smiling.

The group stands on the edge of the rooftop together as they watch the remnants of the device drift and phase out into the atmosphere in a flashing display of lights and colors.