What Lies Beyond Sight – Part 1

So this week has started off with a lot of hubbub about why I write, why I write a blog, and really why I do anything at all.  Such introspection is neat, and I like it.  It’s vital just for me to get my thoughts out on paper, where I can examine them a little closer. 

However, you as a reader of this here blog, have rights to this space as well.  I’m not going to lie, I’ve been remiss in my duties as a writer as far as generating readable content.  Twitter is good and all, but if I’m going to do this correctly, I have to do it the way it’s intended: I have to make stories.

It’s not a bad thing either!  Using this space to create new content, new worlds, and new characters is phenomenal practice.  It also allows me to generate new material for the next serialized short story I want to work on.  I like that idea, using this space as both playground and prospecting pan all in one.  Plus, if I’m really lucky, I might actually engender reader discussion!  I know, far fetched dream, but hey!  Dreaming is kind of my thing.

So, with today’s story, I want to stay within the Sci-Fantasy realm.  I love, L-O-V-E, blending the genre’s.  There’s a reason Phantasy Star IV might be my favorite anything, ever.  Magic and futuristic science is a marriage I cannot get enough of.  I’ve had some interesting ideas on the subject, and as such I want to explore a few of the options.  I have one idea, not sure if it’s unique or not, but it involves magic not as some mystical force outside of all knowledge, but as energy wielded by a select few.

So, without further jawing on,

What Lies Beyond Sight

I was eleven when I hit puberty.  It was rather later than I had been hoping, and rather messier than I would’ve liked.  My mother was so happy for me that she baked me a cake.  Red velvet, because she was never one to miss out on a groan-inducing jest.  Now that she’s gone, I miss that about her.  It’s something so easy to hate when it’s there, but her wise-cracks leave a gaping maw now that I won’t hear them again.  I remark on my puberty not because of the red cake with red icing, I tell you of it so that you know when all of this started.  I was eleven when I hit puberty, and I was eleven and a day when I became a Conduit.  Back then, no one really knew what it meant to be a Conduit, or really what a Conduit was at all.  At the time, I just had extreme problems with electronics.  Nothing seemed to work right for me, and no matter how hard I tried, it was just no use working with anything that had a touchscreen.  Now?  Now I long for such innocence, such ignorance.  I would give anything for the world to have never probed gifts like mine.  Curses like mine. 

Whenever humanity discovers something new and unexpected, the first thing we do with it is turn it into a weapon.  Humanity discovers fire?  Burn people to death with it.  The Wheel?  Welcome to the age of the chariot and war wagon.  Splitting the atom?  Hiroshima and Nagasaki would like to have a word, but they can’t.  With Conduits, it was no different.  If anything, it brought out the worst in us.  When I was thirteen, Dr. Kenneth Lacey discovered etheric energy.  No one really thought anything of his papers, and his work was the laughing stock of the scientific community.  Dr. Lacey would not be deterred however, and since the American scientific community wouldn’t treat his claims legitimately, he took his research elsewhere.  For six years, he scoured the globe, trying to find a suitable party to fund his research.  At last, he found his match: North Korea. 

I was twenty-one when North Korea started World War III.  At the time, North Korea was a tiny blip on the map, not even a full country in it’s own right.  Poor, backwater, provincial, and maniacal.  Everyone dismissed their ravings of a new world order.  Now, The United Empire of North Korea stretches over the entirety of Asia, Europe, and Africa.  Australia continues to fight, but it’s only a matter of time.  The Republics of America, what used to be North America, South America, and Canada, is the only thing standing in the way of complete domination by the UENK forces. 

Dr. Lacey had discovered a new energy, and with the freedom to pursue his research and the wild promises he could make about the potential for such energy, Dr. Lacey was given all the latitude he needed.  Eventually, he created an etheric resonance chamber, a device not unlike a battery.  Only this battery could channel an unlimited stream of power, so long as a Conduit was actively maintaining a connection to the etheric river.  They had to be touching it, and trapping the energy for distribution to non-Conduits is still being researched, but it was enough.  Emperor Kim Jong-Un ordered a search of all of North Korea for those with the potential to be a Conduit.  Because of how tightly he ruled his kingdom, it was accomplished in swift order.  Due to the extreme nature of the loyalty that Emperor Kim Jong-Un force fed his subjects, not one of the Conduits refused service to the country.  It cost a great many of them their lives, but in the end, their fanatical devotion to North Korea and their hatred of everyone else gave them the strength to create the Triad which would grant them half the globe in a few short years, and destroy over six billion lives. 

To be continued…

Conduitfully,
Justin