Chapter 16

The dream faded, but the creature flying high over the cliffs against which the lodge rested continued to circle...

“Hey, Frank!” Tia called out happily at the sight of him. “Surprised that you aren’t hiding out at your lodge. What brings you to town?”

Frank had been skipping stones across the pond in the castle garden, trying to enjoy the weak sunlight that, even though it was artificial, still filled the sky with light and heat and caused the wind to blow, somewhat. He looked up to see Tia and Tara, along with a perky young brunette with a very deep tan who was still gazing up at the inverted sky of New Eden in awe.

“See you have a newcomer,” Frank noticed, greeting the ‘T’ twins with a generous hug.

“Am I that obvious?” the new girl asked, nearly falling over now that she couldn’t lean on Tia’s shoulder.

“Well, let’s see,” Frank pondered, cupping the palm of his hand to his chin in mock thoughtfulness. “You can’t take your eyes off the sky – landscape, rather – and you haven’t learned to stand upright because the gravity is crooked here.”

“Yep, she’s new,” Tara confessed. “We found her at a club in Miami.”

“Back on Old Earth,” Tia added.

“Yeah,” Tara said. “This is Tally.”

“And he’s Frank,” Tia added.

“Pleased to meet...” Tally began.

“She was doing a knife act,” Tara said, interrupted her new friend.

“Except that her ‘buddies’ decided it was her turn to be the target this time...”

“And put six blades into her solar plexus.”

“Ouch,” Frank winced, giving the new girl a sympathetic look. “That had to hurt.”

“Oh, it did,” Tally murmured, feeling her lower stomach where she’d evidently been struck.

“Then her crew invited participants up from the audience to fuck her ‘new’ vaginas,” Tia added cheerfully.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Frank murmured, remembering a time when he carved into Tanya with a metal pole and fucked the new hole he’d made before fucking both her lacerated breasts.

“Yeah,” Tara sighed. “They killed her.”

“But she came so hard when she died that we decided to bring her back,” Tia added.

“After all, a girl who can cum like that when she’s dying...”

“would most likely make a really good Phoenix – ya think?”

“Never can have too many around,” Frank agreed, shifting his legs to hide the fact that he was getting aroused at the twins description of this young girl’s demise.

“Ha, ha, you can’t fool us,” Tia smirked.

“What? He’s getting horny?” Tally asked, surprised that she’d missed it. “Oh, my! I guess men are all the same everywhere.”

“Not really,” Tia said, defending her horny friend. “You should see his mate.”

“And what he does to her,” this from Tara.

“What those guys did to you was pretty tame...”

“In comparison,” again from Tara.

“I don’t think I need to know...” Tally began, looking around to see if there was some way she could get away from these talkative magpies.

“Don’t worry,” Tia told her, radiating ‘calm’ through her hands as she grasped the girl’s shoulder. “We didn’t bring you here to torture you.”

“I know,” Tally whimpered. “You saved my life. Though I can’t come up with a reason why you would...”

“Except to use you in our own schemes, huh?” Tara added, seeing the thought clearly in Tally’s mind.

“Well, it occurred to me...”

“Don’t worry,” Frank told her, even though he was aware that the girl wasn’t likely, at this point, to believe anything a male might tell her – especially a young, sexy hottie like this one. He’d probably like to carve a hole in her belly button – and she would just possibly let him do it... ‘Jesus! Is she really thinking that about me? And she’s not even immortal, yet. Unless... ‘

“You two haven’t ... uh...” he began.

“Oh, no!” Tia exclaimed. “She’s just excited about being resurrected.”

“I think she’s starting to look at life with, uh...” Tara tried to explain.

“New possibilities?” Tally asked, her round, brown, doe eyes fixed firmly on Frank.

Then she looked at her two guides/guards and asked, “If anything happens, you’ll ... save me, right? Bring me back again? I mean, why would you do it once, then not do it again? Do I only get one re-do?”

“Re-do,” Frank chortled. “That’s good.”

“No, honey,” Tia comforted her. “If something happens to you before you learn how to do the things we can do, we’ll protect you.”

“That’s why we brought you here,” Tara confirmed. “We think you have the potential to become...”

“Immortal,” Tia added, letting the cat out of the bag, bigtime.

“Immortal? You mean like live forever?” Tally practically shrieked. “Like I could be young, like this, and eat and sleep and make love and...”

“Anything,” Tia promised. “Even those things you’re thinking about right now.”

“And...” Tally breathed, mesmerized with the incredible dream she was being offered. “I can die ... over and over and over again. And live to remember it.”

“Well,” Frank informed her, “Everybody does that anyway – the first part, not necessarily the second. They usually don’t remember. Dying can be pretty painful, after all, and usually causes serious amnesia.”

“And if someone does remember their past,” Tia added, “their parents usually accuse them of lying or making up stories.”

“They get punished,” Tara continued, “and then it’s no longer safe for them to remember, or talk about it, so they forget.”

“At least,” Tia finished the sentence, “that’s what happened to us.”

“You see, after we came here, and started studying in the Goddess’ University...”

“The what?” Tally asked, her interest perking up.

“We learned that everyone lives forever...”

“and you can’t really die,” Tara added.

“You just forget,” Tia finished again, “and move on.”

“So there’s a university?” Tally asked, getting more excited, “and a Goddess? I always KNEW God was a girl!”

“Well, uh...” Frank began, but was interrupted by an excited Earth girl who had just been moved a hundred years from her own time and onto a new and different world and just been offered immortality.

“So this university is where you go to learn about immortality and living forever...” the maniacally grinning girl exclaimed.

“Well, no,” Tia tried to explain. “Lisa taught us how to become immortal...”

“So where is this Lisa?” Tally asked. “Does she teach there? Can I meet her?”

“No.”

“She’s been exiled.”

“What?” Tally exclaimed, becoming angry. “You guys always kill off your saviors! What a stupid bunch of homo saps! We deserve what we’re getting!”

“What do you mean?” Frank asked, forgetting that he’d lived through that period of time where Tally had just come from. “What are we getting?”

“The men are all turning into animals,” Tally explained, nearly snarling her words. “Impotency has been rising for the last fifty years so the only sexual kick they can get is by killing their women, there’s no oxygen left in the air, everybody’s dying of cancer – which is why I joined the ‘Six-Shooters’, by the way, and the women can’t have babies and if they do they’re not ... human. And we all just want to die.” Tally broke down into tears and Frank automatically reached forward to hold her against his chest.

“It’s alright,” he cooed into her hair. “It’s all in the past. That was over a century ago, and this world is where we live now.”

He could feel that Tally had stopped crying, but she stayed where she was, hoping he would sooth her, tell her some more about everything being all right. So he did.

He told her about being alive a hundred and fifty years ago, about falling in love with a girl from another planet, but he hadn’t known that at the time. Instead, he’d thought she was a vampire. Nevertheless, he managed to follow her every time she fled – whenever her eternal youth began to be noticed. Three times she left, and three times he found her before she made him immortal, like she was.

“That’s just like an old Tri-D love story,” Tally sniffed, entranced by his tale, “so what happened next?”

“My following her got her killed,” Frank stated flatly. “She made the mistake of making friends after she met me. She decided she wanted to have a normal life, with friends who loved her, so she stayed longer than she should have – that last time – and a hunter discovered her. He killed her.”

Tally sat up. She gazed at him as he continued his tale, not knowing what to say to ease the tears in his eyes.

“I got married,” Frank continued. “She’d changed me, and she’d changed the woman I’d fallen in love with. Made us both immortal, you see. So I got married, had kids, had a somewhat quasi-normal life – except that we didn’t get old. My children grew up normally, but they didn’t age after growing to be about eighteen. Every decade or so, we had to move, to change our identities – to keep our secret.

“But the man she had come to love,” Frank continued, “the man who ultimately betrayed her by leading her killer ... He couldn’t take it. He left. Wandered for over half a century, looking for someone who could save him from his memories. And the guilt he felt.”

“But she came back?” Tally asked, hoping for a happy ending. “Eventually? She was reborn. Right?”

Tia and Tara had lived the latter half of this story, and they already knew what had occurred before, but they stayed anyway, enjoying Tally’s reactions as she avidly listened.

“The answer, of course, is ‘yes’ – she came back,” Frank continued. “But only because the alien beings who had left her behind had come back to get her, and what they found was her burnt remains. The alien scientist who had created her in the first place spent forty Martian years putting her back together – regenerating the cells of her body that he had been able to recover, and using stem cells from her regeneration to create what couldn’t be recovered.”

“Recovered?” Tally asked. “How did she die? Was she cut into pieces or something?”

Frank looked at the girl, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t Caucasian. Her hair was long and silky, but her skin had a darker pigmentation than most white people had. She was obviously an exotic – a mixture of white and a darker race. Exotics were known to be the most beautiful people ever born. He smiled at her, noticing the obvious truth of that popular belief.

“Tally,” Frank said, saying the word slowly as though testing it on his tongue to see how it felt. “Hmm. That’s a nickname, correct?”

“Uh, yeah,” Tally confessed, not really wanting to change the conversation from a subject that fascinated her. “It’s short for Tallulah. My grandmother was a famous singer in the early twenty-first century.”

“Ah, I remember,” Frank grinned. “Tallulah Shantal. She was quite beautiful as I remember. Her mother was Japanese, I think.”

“And my grandfather was black,” Tally grinned, though she radiated annoyance. “And my father was white and he married her daughter, so I’m a real mixture of everybody, I suppose. Now can we get back to something more interesting than my perfect skin?”

Tally had spent much of her youth as an ‘outsider’, mostly because of how she good she looked, and it wasn’t until she’d reached adulthood that she’d come to terms with who she was. But by then it didn’t matter. The human race was obviously coming to a close, and breaking down into victims and predators. For a while, she’d been a predator, starting her own entertainment group, The Six-Shooters, who made millions by buying off people who were severely depressed or sick and didn’t have long to live, and gunning them down on stage. Half of the proceeds from each event went to the victim’s families, per standard contract, and since it was a contract, under the law, it wasn’t murder.

But the public began to demand more for their money. If a person was a gorgeous physical specimen, she might find herself kidnapped and strapped to a target, either in one of the suicide clubs or victimized by a group like The Six-Shooters. Tally fiercely disagreed about the ‘new’ direction her group was taking, and suddenly found herself as the next target, strapped down in front of her own group. Mostly because of her perfect cocoa flavored skin, her slender figure and that luxurious head of hair. Being outvoted by the other members of the group hadn’t helped, either.

Because of her popularity, her execution drew a massive crowd – the biggest and richest haul The Six-Shooters had ever drawn. Also, since Tally was the last surviving member of her own family, those bastards were allowed to keep all the money. She was still pissed about that. ‘But – at least, I’m alive ... and still looking good!’

“The story? Sure,” Frank agreed, then continued. “Where was I? Oh, yes, She died. How did she die? I was there, and it was truly terrible. Someone had planted a car bomb, and she was trapped inside. She was burned alive.”

“Oh my God! That’s horrible!” Tally exclaimed. “I think I’d rather be shot!”

“You were shot,” Tia ventured.

“Several times,” Tara added, grinning at her.

“I agree,” Frank told them. “It was the most horrible moment of my life. Her lover, Jake, blamed himself – well, we all blamed him, but we kept it civilized. Her death was tempered, however, by the appearance of a huge – and I mean ‘really, really big’ – flying saucer. It took up the entire sky – blanketed the moon and the stars. Then this tall, blue fellow – acted like he was God, himself – condemned us as a species for killing his last surviving daughter, and accused us of killing his only son – I thought he most likely meant Jesus, and later, after I arrived here in New Eden, I found that I had been right. His son actually was Jesus Christ.”

“Freakin’ weird,” Tally gasped, unable to keep her mouth from gaping open. “So Jesus was the son of an alien, and this girl was the alien’s daughter? Wow. That means she was Christ’s sister!”

“Could be,” Frank admitted, “though none of us who knew her ever considered that possibility. And when she came back seventy-five years later, she never mentioned it.”

“Seventy-five? I thought you said it was forty years – keeping it in the context of a religious event, you know, like – forty years in the desert, forty days and forty nights, stuff like that,” Tally explained.

“You sound like you don’t believe me,” Frank ventured.

“No, it isn’t that,” Tally said, her voice immediately contrite, as she wanted to hear the rest of this tale. “But you’ll have to admit, that when you said it took forty years to put this alien girl back together, I was ... I felt like maybe you were telling me a bit of a, um, legend – you know? Maybe just a mite of religious lore added in there? You know; a tiny bit of doubt that you weren’t maybe embellishing the story. I just never truly believed a story that had a ‘forty’ in it.”

Frank, as well as Tia and Tara, laughed. The tension of the last minute or so dissolved into a more relaxed atmosphere.

“Forty Martian years,” Frank explained, “is seventy-five Earth years. Mars orbits the sun more slowly than Earth so the years are longer, there.”

“Oh. So, go on, tell me more,” Tally insisted.

“The scientist, Sibilius, rebuilt her body and another alien life form, a machine-based entity called a Praetor restored the girl’s life essence to her body, and she woke up.”