Outsiders Pt. 02

"I didn't," Simon said. "I am six thousand years old and untouched by death. I am also newly reborn, at the same time."

"Oh great," Sean thought as he rolled his eyes, "We've been killed by a complete loony."

Gianni squeaked out a pained, "It's not too late, Simon. It never is. Repent and let God's love purify you from this demon!"

"Aye, lad," Sean said, panting, "tell us the name of the demon and we'll rid you of it!"

"Demon," Simon asked. "Dude, your head is so far up your ass that it's sticking out of your throat." Simon winked. "But you're still talking out of your ass." He smiled at the three men before him. Seeing them squirm in the dirt was a glad sight, especially since one of them had bashed his skull in.

Gianni began to chant but was quickly reduced to groaning in pain and misery. Sean exerted all of his willpower to drag a nerveless hand to his chest and clutch his rosary. "The power of Christ compels you," he chanted.

Simon barked out a mocking laugh. "Compels me to do what," he asked. "Laugh at your stupidity?"

"The power of Christ compels you," Sean chanted, "to reveal your name, demon! The power of Christ compels you to reveal your name, demon!"

"We don't have names, insect," Simon said. "Names are the marks of lesser species. We are The Outsiders. We are pure beings of essence, identified by our intent and deeds. We do not have the need to distinguish ourselves with sounds and painted marks."

"Are you Legion," Sean asked.

Simon rolled his eyes and said, "Dude, you're too fucking stupid for words." He heaved a great sigh and started to look around. Gloating over the dying men was fun and all, but he needed to get indoors and find some clothes and get to work on his mission.

Sean saw that Simon was about to leave. "Keep him here," he told himself. "Whatever it takes, keep him here till the coppers come!" Piotr began to exhale pink froth out of his mouth and nose and Sean winced. It meant that he was bleeding out into his own lungs and would probably be dead within minutes. "Are you using the royal we, there, lad," he asked Simon.

"May as well," Simon said. "I was first in line to become Prime. Still am, I suppose."

Gianni was trying to chant an exorcism, but all he was doing was vocalizing his agony. Sean lifted a hand to gesture around them. His arm soon flopped back down to the dirt. "Not exactly royal digs," he said. "Where were you hiding?"

"Hiding," Simon distractedly asked.

"Yes," Sean said. "How did you escape from the blast and where were you hiding all this time?"

Simon looked down at Sean and said, "I didn't escape the blast, you idiot! I was pulled back to my dimension where my flesh was fused with me and I was sent back here to..." He trailed off as he realized he was remembering two entirely different versions of the past day, each true. Explaining his situation to the dying man was of no importance so he shrugged it off and looked around at the other houses on the street. He needed to pick one, gain entry to it and find some clothes to wear. Walking around naked just wouldn't do and the three men's suits were bloody, dirty and would probably be a poor fit.

Gianni gathered his voice and began to recite a ritual in Latin that was meant to rebuke the demon back to Hell. Sean joined in, whispering as drawing breath became more and more difficult.

Simon cocked his head at them and bunched his brow, listening. "First of all, your pronunciations are atrocious," he said. "Honestly. Just awful. Even accounting for the chest wounds." He looked up at the night sky. "And secondly, my goal here actually is to get home."

"Well, if that's the case, laddie," Sean said, suddenly shaking with chills, "then hand me my gun and I'll send you back to Hell in a jiffy."

"I'm not from Hell, Narnia, Middle Earth, or any other made up place, you idiot," Simon said. "My home is galaxies away."

"Galaxies away," Sean said through teeth grit tight to stop them from audibly chattering. Hearing a witch claim to be an alien was something else. If he wasn't in the throes of mortal agony, he'd be laughing. "How did you get here? By spaceship?"

"No," Simon said. "My people build portals that allow us to instantaneously travel across the universe."

"Well then," Sean said, "be a good lad and take the portal back home!"

"I can't," Simon said. "It's not finished on this end. I need to finish the last four elements of its construction. Then I can activate it and start to work on going back home to get my reward."

Sean grimaced and bit back a painful yelp as his chest started to burn. Nothing this lunatic was saying made any sense, but he needed to keep him talking. "How'd you get here if it's unfinished," he groaned out.

Simon smiled. He had always enjoyed lording his intellectual assets over everyone else and, now that he was a superior being talking to insects, he couldn't resist informing them of just how superior he was. A part of him was displeased at the delay to their mission, but it had chosen to let him be in charge and deferred to his human judgment.

"Once the portal is finished, it will allow for easy, cheap and instantaneous passage of mass and power between the two locations, but even in its almost finished state, it can be used as a destination. It just takes a ridiculous amount of energy to travel here. My people sent me here, but they had to reap millions of sentient beings to power my passage. "

"You're lying," Sean said. "No one killed millions of people. I'd know about it. We would have heard about it."

"Not humans," Simon said. "The time of your reaping is yet to come. Our technology can harness the energy released by the physical destruction of a sentient mind and use it to manipulate the probabilities of behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. You pathetic humans would call it magic. We use it, amongst many other things, to build portals to new worlds that we conquer. Once we conquer a world, we reap its sentients to power our technology and faciliate our next conquest." Simon smiled down at the dying man. "Don't worry, we don't exterminate entire species. We gather up the younglings and let them grow to breeding age. After they reproduce, we reap them to power the daily operations of the portals and wait for their offspring to grow."

"That's mighty decent of you," Sean said, sarcastically.

"Not really," Simon said. "It's a matter of efficiency. Once a sentient mind reaches its maturity, reaping it provides the most possible power. Reaping unadult minds is all but wasting the power that would be gained if they were allowed to age a little more."

"Our faith protects us," Sean said. "You cannot reap us!"

Simon barked out a laugh. "As much as I'd love to harness the power of even your feeble minds dying," he said, "the fact that you began dying before I could initiate the ritual disqualifies you. We can only reap your energy if reaping it is the sole reason for destroying your sentience. If you have a preexisting, deadly disease, or a gaping chest wound, you're just wasted." Simon grinned and jutted his chin at Sean. "Being a waste is nothing new to you, now is it?

"As for the whole 'our faith protects us' thing, you are more wrong that you could ever imagine." He walked over to stand above Sean's head and look directly down at his face. Sean averted his eyes to not look up at the man's genitals. "My people have a giant, hollow chamber, the size of a small moon, orbiting our sun. In it, we can detect the energy released by the death of a mind that expects a psychopomp to come and collect it. We use it to detect worlds with sentients in them. We used it to detect Earth thousands of years ago, when your ancestors first began to band together and invent religions and deities to worship. One could almost say that it was your faith that called me here."

"You can lie all you want," Sean said and coughed, "but you cannot get us to give up our faith. Our souls are the property of God!"

"Only The Outsiders have souls," Simon said. "That is why we are the Outsiders. We are free to exist outside the confines of the laws of the cosmos. You are a member of a lesser species. Cattle, really. You possess a sentient mind and free will, both of which are wasted on you in your ignorance. Honestly, we are doing you a favor by taking them both and using them to power our technology. We are honoring you by giving your existence a purpose."

Sean wished he had any strength left in his limbs. He would love to sweep this asshole's legs out from under him and pound his face in the dirt. When Simon looked up and pointed his foot to walk away, Sean quickly said, "If you're here to finish the portal, who started it?"

Simon stopped and looked back down at him. "You did," he said. "Your ancestors. When they first started praying and we overheard them, we started reaping our stock of sentients to send messages here." Simon waved his fingers next to his ears. "Tiny, little voices, whispering seductively in their ears. Whispering about power and safety. They listened to the voices in their fear of all that they couldn't understand and out of their desire to master all that they saw. They slew their fellow humans in rituals we whispered to them. They reaped sentient minds and started constructing the other end of the portal for us."

"No one would ever do that," Sean said. "Not willingly."

"Of course they would," Simon said. "They already did. All we had to do was reap sentients on our end and pour that energy towards Earth to give them magical powers. Tiny, little, localized tweaks to thermodynamic probabilities that were utterly wondrous and seductive to your ancestors. They slew their fellow man and painted our equations with the blood they spilled."

Next to them, Piotr's body began to shudder. His head was thrown back in an impotent attempt to clear his airway of the frothy blood that was spurting out of his mouth and nose. Sean winced at hearing the wet wheezes. Piotr was definitely beyond help. Sean detested the fact that such a good and honorable man as Piotr had been felled by a crazy bastard like Simon. As he looked back up at the smug face of their killer, a grin overtook him. He spotted a fault in the lunatic's ramblings.

"You think you've won," he said. "But you haven't. You will lose, just like you've lost two thousand years ago!" Simon's brow twitched and he paid Sean's words his full attention. "Don't think I haven't figured it out! You say you had men slaughter in your name thousands of years ago, but you only come here to reap the benefits now? You were defeated and I know who defeated you!"

Simon's face took on an amazed expression. Just as the portal was about to be finished, the Earth had suddenly been covered by a barrier that stopped the flow of their power to it. They became unable to whisper in the ears of their confederates and tempt new ones with promises of power and all their plans had come to a crashing halt. No other realm had managed to escape their efforts before, or since, and Earth ranked highly in Outsider discourse. They had spent so much time, effort and power on conquering it and they were insulted both by seeing it all go to waste and by not having a single clue as to how it had happened. The Primes were particularly pissed off.

Simon waited with bated breath to hear Sean's explanation.

"Jesus walked the earth and stopped you," Sean said. "His sacrifice for us redeemed us. His death on The Cross defeated you."

Simon looked incredulously at the dying man at his feet for a few long, tense moments before bursting into raucous laughter. He bent over and slapped his knee as his laugh grew almost hysterical. He knew he should control himself and stop being so loud, but the hilariously insulted expression on Sean's face kept him laughing. When his eyes began to water and his stomach muscles started cramping up, he managed to stop. He bent over to catch his breath. "You honestly believe that, don't you," he asked.

Sean glared up at him and said, "It is the truth."

"Oh, dumbass," Simon said, still giggling, "You're off by a few thousand years." Simon converted his people's time measurements to those of Earth and called upon his knowledge of ancient Egypt and its dynasties. Just as he was about to tell Sean exactly when the barrier had first shown up, it all clicked in his head. He became the first Outsider to figure out the mystery of Earth's defiance. Both his human and Outsider sides were utterly blown away by the revelation.

"Holy shit on a crap-laden fuckstick," he whispered, astonished. "It's the pyramids! It's the fucking pyramids!" He looked down at Sean and extended his hands at him. "Don't you see? It was that doctor! What was his name? Imhotep! He did it! He was the one who built the first pyramid. He stopped us! That fucking cunt!"

Simon stood up straight and started walking a few feet to and fro as he talked to himself. "He must have figured it all out, somehow. That cunning cunt! He built the first pyramid in accordance with the exact same celestial principles that govern the construction of the portal itself. And he even oriented it properly! Oh, we never would have thought that a hairless ape cousin could ever pull off such a great work!

"And the bastard must have also sent his work across the globe, in writing, or something, cause everywhere people tried to sacrifice in our name, there are pyramidal temples standing tall, doing their work. Un-fucking-believeable!"

"How do pyramids stop you," Sean asked.

"By clearly proving that humans have power," Simon all but yelled at Sean. "Don't you get it? Before they were built, humans cowered under the whips of clerics and truly believed in all the deities they espoused. Just by seeing the majestic pyramids, everyone could plainly see that they have the power to take control of their world if they banded together under the guidance of reason and science. They suddenly knew for a fact that they could improve their lives and those of their progeny. Once these gargantuan monuments to the power of human civilization were erected with nothing more than human hands, mathematics and geometry, there was a clear alternative to prayer. Science!

"No longer were your ancestors content to consult the witch doctor and accept all of his mumbo-jumbo as fact. They dared to think and dream on their own! Sure, they still prayed and listened to the clerics and all that jazz, but they knew for a fact that they could accomplish. That they could be the source of power and its recipients. As the human spirit turned its faith to equations humans discovered, so did those spirits empower the barrier the pyramids constructed and made it come into being."

"Is that your mission," Sean asked. "To blow up the pyramids?" His belly began to seize up in burning pain. He felt like someone was pouring lava into it.

"You really are fucking stupid, aren't you," Simon said. "Of course I'm NOT going to go blow up the pyramids! They are the physical representation of the celestial principles of portal construction! If I blew them up, I'd almost certainly destroy all the work already done on the portal. Fucking Imhotep! What a clever, cunting, little fuck he was!

"Besides, blowing them up wouldn't do me any good. Constructing the pyramids enabled the construction of the barrier, but it exists independently of it! Your faith in the power of your sciences and civilization is what is protecting your realm. And you don't need no fucking pyramids to be reminded of having set foot on the Moon, come up with germ theory, or of having invented the internet and thousands of other technologies that your ancestors would consider voodoo magic!"

Sean's vision grew dim. He was close to losing consciousness, but he fought on. "This barrier," he whispered, "makes no sense. Why didn't it stop you?"

"Because it's cracked," Simon said. He turned back around and smirked at Sean. "In recent years, you people have started to believe that the moon landings were a hoax, that vaccinations cause autism, that jet engines spray chemicals that make people sick and, my favorite, that the pyramids were built by an alien progenitor species. These beliefs, that people hold dear and true despite the overwhelming abundance of easily verifiable proof to the contrary, negate human accomplishment. They created the tiniest of cracks in the barrier and we used it to whisper to Simon."

Simon stood over Sean and angrily said, "Fuck me, I've got a big-ass task ahead of me! In order for me to open up your realm for the reaping, I'd have to make you doubt everything." He started counting on his fingers. "I'd have to make you doubt your ability to master and shape your future. I'd need you to doubt your faith in your own society, in the human next to you. I'd have to make you doubt your place on this planet and your ability to master your environment. I'd have to make you doubt in the natural order of the species and, most importantly, I'd need to make you all doubt in the very fundamental laws of nature that you have discovered!

"To weaken the barrier protecting your planet I need to make most of you feel exactly like your ancestors did in ancient times. I need to make you accept as fact, not fear, or belief, but factual, fucking fact that you are nothing but lost, little souls whose only purpose in this existence is to give power to something greater than yourselves. And that something must not be humanity at large.

"I mean, if I could make you revert to such a primal state, then the barrier would crack further and my people could shatter it from their end as soon as I completed the portal. The Earth would be opened up for the reaping and I would be hailed as a hero. I'd be proclaimed Prime!"

"God would never allow that," Sean spat out.

Simon heaved a sigh of disappointment. He had expected the maggots to be looking up at him in awe by now. "Honestly, talking to you is a fucking waste of breath," he said. "I gotta hand it to the Primes, though. They kept a vigil on the portal to Earth for all these millennia, even though most of us had given up on it. I mean, as soon as they spotted the crack, they began to whisper and tempt. I heard them and began to do my work to be able to receive their gifts of power. I sacrificed scores of people, believing it necessary to get power, but I had really been constructing a spell that would transmit me to my home planet and facilitate the return of my flesh, if The Primes desired it sent back. They put me in a double bind, you see. They sent me power to use to summon a Prime to Earth and, if I succeeded, then Earth would be open for reaping. If I failed, they'd get me and finally find out what was going on, which would probably lead to opening up Earth for reaping in the long run as they'd be able to send an infiltrator here.

"They played me for a fool and I've got to hand it to them, they played me well." Simon raised a finger. "But they also fucked up. I told them not to do it, but they sent open ended power to me. To Simon, I mean. They sent him the power to modify the laws of nature around himself according to his own will. A blank check, if you will." He shook his head and looked off into the distance. "That was stupid."

That power was now in the hands of a young man named Ben Kidder and it was free to be shaped and utilized in whatever manner Ben saw fit. Simon would love to have it at his own disposal, but for him to remove it from Kidder, he'd have to imobilise the man while he was awake and drain all of his bodily fluids as he reaped him.

Even if Kidder didn't know he had power, or didn't want to use it, the power was still with him and would instinctively rise up in his defense in a time of need. For all his knowledge and tentacles, Simon knew for a fact that his chances of defeating a reality warper afraid for his life were next to none. It would be best for him, he decided, if he gave Kidder a very wide berth. He barked out a laugh as he realized that the bullshit he had fed to Raven in the car the other night was all but true. Besides, he had a mission to get to and a human magician was a wildcard that he needed poking around like he needed more holes in his human head.