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2011 NANO Part 9

    Jared looks slightly embarrassed, “The way I’ve become is kind of an acident.  I’ve worked with Jerimia some to try and figure out what has happened to be but with no luck.  Maybe this little trip will help give me some clues into putting me back together,.  I mean we are supposed to be moving on and learning to be more than who we were, but how can I when I am tied down with what I am. 
    Alexander and Stephen exchange a look.  They couldn’t see how it could hurt having him along it wasn’t that but rather what he is saying.  Alexander asks, “Do you think you’ll still be able to do all the stuff you do if we put your soul back together?”
    Jared shrugs, “I am not sure.  I am also not sure when I am going to die, how my body works, where my soul is, what the hell I unleashed when I splintered my soul, how the ghosts relate to me, and what it is like on Saturn.  However, I do know that since I am going to be apparently leaving the world the way I found it instead of changing it to what I still think would be the better, I would like to be put back together myself.  I had pleanty of ability before it happened and I am not afraid”.  It is this sort of attitude that makes Alexander uncomfortable.  It has always made him uncomfortable and it more than likely always will.  One thing that always amazed him is that no matter how long he spends on the earth people have a way of being suprising to him.  Jared for example is, for all intents and purposes the spirit of the new millenium.  Through his meddlings in whatever the hell it was he was doing when he sundered his soul loosing it to the interent he has given birth to his own pantheon of new gods each an apspect to the matchine that is willing to obey his every desire.  Jared is gifted with powers  that Alexander would never ever understand no matter how hard he’s tried.  He’s only seen something like Jared once and it wasn’t pretty, he ended up hunting her and her new gods down.  Salem isn’t a time he is very proud of.  Jared has all of this and he is willing to do his best to give it all up so that he can grown fat, old, and eventually die just like everyone else.  Alexander finds the whole notion confusing.  What is worse is that even if they find all the parts of his soul which just sounds plain old impossible.  How were they going to put it back together?  Alexander has an idea of how to do it but he is by no means an expert.  The process sounds tedious and time consuming.  What’s more it might render him normal.  Sure being an ancient wizard who is supposed to be ruling the world has its draw backs, especially since all of Alexander’s major sources of power were destroyed in the 2001 event. However, John is helping him cope with being diminished in power and that is okay.  However, to go back to being normal?  All the way normal?  Just and an average square john?  The though kind of made Alexander ill.  Not even Stephen whoes art is pretty actively harmful wants to give his stuff up.  While he doesn’t do it as brazenly as Jerimia there are sometimes where he question’s John’s judgment. 
    While Alexander is off brooding about the nature of Jared and his desire to become normal Stephen has already accepted his help and they make plans together to go to Rebecca’s house, scout things out, and then while they are in the nieghborhood to swing by the not a virgin’s house see if she is okay and to maybe give her parents a stern talking to about abstinence.  Then if everything is hunky dory they’ll go to a different Dairy Queen for more ice-cream.  Otherwise they will start gathering materials and praying for victory.
    Jared smiles happily, Stephen and Alexander are still very intimidating to him, but Stephen is the only other person close to his age and every once in awhile Jared regrets that he spent his teenage years trying to end the world as we know it instead of enjoying himself a little bit more, “Alright so how are we going to get there?”
    Alexander firmly crosses his arms, “I don’t drive.”
    Jared looks confused, “Wait how do you get places if you don’t cast spells every-”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    Stephen and Jared shrug, as the do Jerimia does some odd combination of bounding and limping up crying excitedly, “I can drive I have a car wanna drive in my car we can use my my car cause I can drive in my car with you guys in the car”
    The three of them unanimously and simultaneously say, “no”
    Jerimia looks crestfallen for a moment then suddenly brightens up and leaves to go pester Devon about something.  Alexander shakes his head, “That man worries me sometimes”
    “Well I can drive” Jared throws the words out there the way a puppy will drop a ball at its master’s feet and nudge it hoping that it will get a nice happy play session instead of just being ignored because the tv is on and Lost reruns are exciting. 
    Alexander looks skeptical, “Can you actually drive or do you Jerimia drive”
    “Well since I don’t know what Jerimia drive means, and since I can actually drive we will go with that one.”
    Stephen realizing that this has the potential to become one of those things decides to move everyone along, “Well great we better get going then.  The sooner we get to Rebecca’s the better so we can properly acess the damange and see what we are going to need in to fix it”.  Then he abruptly starts heading twords the door.  As he goes he hopes and prays that Jared starts following him because he doesn’t know where Jared’s car is parked, what it looks like, or even if Jared has a car.  As Jared scurries quickly to catch up to Stephen he breaths a sigh of relief knowing full well that Alexander will be right behind them grubling the whole way like some old person who’s head is still stuck way back when during the good old days when everything was better, virgins were plentiful, and when flowers smell brighter.  Stephen starts to take the lead and appologises for his car being back at the church.  It isn’t much more than a five minute walk but other than Alexander cursing under his breath the whole thing happens in silence. 
    He unlocks it and as he gets in he explains, “Okay so I don’t actually know how to get there.  When I came last time it was because Jerimia teleported me without my asking or knowledge.  The time after that I did the freaky phone thing which is even less fun than it looks”.
    Alexander claims to know the way and soon then are underway.  Alexander doesn’t like cars.  He doesn’t trust them.  They are small, they smell, they can break, and he doesn’t understand how people can drive them without constantly crashing into each other.  Now granted people do frequenly get into acidents but they are so rare.  Every time they come to close to a car, or a wall, or the yellow lines in the road, left hand turns, or heaven forbid other cars he’d tense up, freezing in place, sometimes stopping in mid sentence.  This ends up causing no in to the complications they face.  Jared is forced to turn around, go the wrong way down one way streets, go five miles under the speed limit, and for him to do his very best to not turn around and murder Alexander where he sits perched in the back seat like some great big black bird so what should have been a 15 minute car ride took over two hours.  By the time they get there Jared’s nerves are shot and he has rededicated himself to his original apocalyptic intensions. 
    It is dark by the time they get to Rebecca’s house but she still isn’t there yet.  No one knew what she did or how she lives her life so she could be anywhere from doing grocery shopping to being off the wagon somewhere raising a cult to do her bidding.  Either way the three of them go about their business in the yard.  The weakness in the fabric of things is in the same place that the dome enclosed.  The places where things are the weakest are actually the edges around where the dome was.  Alexander begins to speculate that the size of the weakness, or bruise as they’ve all decided to start calling it would have been much larger and far more severe had the dome not been in place.  The formation of the disturbance is what shattered the dome in the first place, the domes final act was to contain the area of the bruise.  Hours of poking, prodding, consulting magical texts, summoning spirits, that sort of thing.  The spirit summoning went particularly bad.  Summoning them withing the disturbance not only failed but make the whole area even more unstable.  Once they left the area and tried to summon spritis not only would they not help but they wanted nothing to do with it.  This persisted even after Alexander got out his tool box and tried to be a little bit more persuasive. 
    Stephen pours over tombs of his own and tries to feel out what is on the other side of the disturbance.  Finding out what is on the other side is almost more important that fixing the stupid thing.  He ascertains pretty quickly that is isn’t where any of his things hail from which is a releif many times over.  He would feel so bad if while lying in her bad all asleep and happy Star creatures start to burst forth from the weakned point in realizity and start devouring the neighborhood.  That would be a disater on so many different levels that it is hard to choose just one.  Jared who spends most of the time mediating tries to see if he can figure out anything with any of his resources.  He realizes quickly he is totally out of his depth and gives up.  The only thing the three of them are able to put together is that if something like this has ever happened before then either the person who caused it didn’t live to tell the tale or that he decided that he wasn’t going to write about it.  Either way the three of them realize that they are on their own. 
    The three of them decide to take a break for a little bit in Rebecca’s side yard.  The moon is nice and bright and it illuminates the entire yard in the most splendid way.  You gotta hand it to Rebrecca, she should make anywhere seem like the best place in the world given enough time and tools.  Stephen looks crestfallen, “So what are we going to do?”
    Alexander doesn’t seem to bothered by the whole thing.  He has long ago become comfortable with the fact that there are mysteries of the world and they are just that, like the disturbance or why people so fervently believed that Elvis was still alive for so long.  There are strange things out there.  Even after being alive for thousands of years.  He never really understood vampire novels with the bored immortal god creatures.  Perhaps it is because they can only go out at night.  Vampires are stupid and making them extinct was definitely not the worst thing he’s ever done.  Letting their mythology seep into the human consiousness instead of wiphing it out?  Now that might have been a subtle miscalulation but what can you do.  Jared and Stephen are still young.  So far they’ve been able to solve just about every problem they have come up against, so long as we aren’t talking about Stephen’s virginity.  Mysteries are new to them and so he lets them talk as they sit in the cool moon lit grass eating granny smith apples and herbed goat cheese.  They talk excitedly, plot, make reffrences to things the other doesn’t understand, and ultimately they end up going around and round never really getting anywhere.  Alexander smiles as he watches them.  He remembers back when the magic still flowed over the land and such conversations happened all the time in glades, meddows, deep woods, jungles, and perhaps even the moon.  In the time of wizards the world was so different, heck even the food had more flavor back then.  These strange things happened all the time and people with power would gather together.  It was a time where people like Stephen were hunted down and put to death, and where people like Jared would never excist, where the virgins were pleanty and there was always a new book on something interesting to read.  Those were good times.  Alexander doesn’t exactly regret secretly working with a cabal of sorcerers to lock all the magic of the world away except for a tiny few.  He most certainly doesn’t regret betraying the tiny few making him the cheese that stands alone.  He does regret failing though.  He was going to bring the magic back.  The world was going to become rich, full of life, mystery and wonder.  Sure half of the world’s population had to go to do it, and sure he would be the supreme leader and all would bow to him, but eventually the survivors would appreciate it, after a couple of nights like this one he didn’t see how they couldn’t.  Now instead the world just keeps on spinning, as a lifeless ball of mud.  It is sad really.  Feeling the need for action Alexander suggests, “Lets go find the not a virgin”
    “I thought that if she saw us it might cause her to freak back out” Stephen asks.  He knows by saying us he means him but sometime he can be self conscious especially when it comes to the wholesale slaughter of innocents.
    “We don’t have to worry about that to much.  We know pretty much where she lives.  So all we need to do is drive by, poke around, and see what we can see.  We’ve studied this one bruise enough so that we should be able to tell if there is another bruise in a surrounding area.  Since Jared is going to be doing the driving that will free us up to scan away.”  And off they go.  With less cars around and night time having fallen Jared is more relaxed as they drive around the neighborhood looking for tell tale signs of the bruise.  They drive through the nieghborhood a few times and around the school she must go to and they aren’t able to find anything.  They are about to head off when Jared says, “There’s something wrong here guys”
    Stephen raises his eyebrows, “What is it?”
    “I don’t know.  Something in the air.  Something has happened here.  All around here.  The very air seeths with this sort of force that is so very subtle that it feels almost like transmissions coming from space or something like that.  It all feels distorted.  You guys can’t feel it”
    Alexander leans forwards, “Pull over the car, careful carful OH MY GOD WATCH OUT FOR, okay good now careful watch out for the curb, okay then.  Magog I hate these car things.  Now then it doesn’t feel like the area around the dome right?”
    “No”
    “Alright you didn’t really feel anything there now you feel something where we feel nothing.  Looks like we might need to call in Jerimia.  Let’s give him a chance to regrow his leg first and we are going to have to find the not a virgin no matter what the risk is.”