Chapter 198: 198
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The young man said, "Why do you think I'm here? The moment I thought about giving some of my hard earned payday to you, I felt a little better... Speaking of feeling better, were you having a good dream or do I have to punch you for looking at me with weird feelings. I mean, I got a cousin and he's cool but I had to rough him up a couple of times for him to get the idea that-"
Al got dressed quickly and said, "It's high blood pressure from waking up with an adrenaline rush. I think I might want to get my cholesterol checked too. Just because I'm eating healthy now doesn't mean I didn't log the damage time."
Devon smirked. "Whatever, old man... See, I thought about the all the sh*t you you said and you see that? Call me f***ing Robin Hood. You know, cause I was robbing, in the hood."
The young man laughed at his own dumb joke before Al said, "So, you didn't immediately go out and get nice threads? I'm completely convinced you wouldn't do something as simple as going right out to get a nice ride to advertise that you have money you shouldn't have... Why, I bet you're so smart that you even remembered to pay your taxes and figure out a cover for how you got all your money so when the IRS flags you for audit, it won't look as suspicious and get the feds checking into your activities."
Devon gawked at Al for a moment and said, "Alright, old man. It seems we gotta have another talk..."
Al took some time to lay out the things he'd been thinking about since Devon left after the first visit.
"Debt consolidation? Is it really that easy to get into?" the young man said.
Al nodded and said, "But don't forget about something like a tree service or house repair. Something like that. You have to have an intro business to justify starting capital first. The best thing about my plan is, you can really help some people out in the process.
"There's plenty of old, dead and dying out there whose financial affairs are gray areas. You can reduce their financial burdens and launder your money at the same time. Keep up your floor level businesses but don't get too far away from what you can handle. I can do a little part time accounting and record keeping to help you stay on track.
"Oh, and for goodness sake, no more drug dealer thefts. Are you trying to get us both and everyone we might care about, killed? Even if you got away with it a couple of times, you won't keep getting lucky. Frankly, I'd be doing more experimenting and less low earning grabs with the key if I were you. Have you tried using it to 'unlock' a password for instance?"
Devon said, "We can just cut out all the other sh*t and pull it right through some old white dude's account. If they're rich and powerful enough, no one's going to say sh*t."
Al said, "Don't! You think drug dealers are a little scary? Powerful 'old white dudes' can do things I don't even want to think about. Please keep things reasonable! You don't need all that anyway. Stay low key, safe and slow build. Eventually, you won't even need the key anymore and you can go legit. Be wealthy and legal!
"You can't keep using that key or something's going to get you. You're going to get caught or killed. You might drag others down with you, people you care about. Ultimately, the key itself is going to squeeze you dry like a damn halved orange on a juicer!"
Devon gave Al a weird look and said, "If I didn't know any better, I might think you actually gave a damn what happened to me."
The older man looked solemnly at the younger and said, "Mostly guilt but... I think you're a good kid that got a raw deal, not someone that wants to do bad things or hurt people. If-"
"I'm not a f***ing kid and... Alright, I'm listening. Teach me how the old white dudes get away with it when we can't," Devon said and sat down to listen while Al laid out some of the finer details.
While they talked, the computer smoked a little before dying. It seemed that the supernatural and technology didn't mesh well in his world.
Al started laughing and said, "It's a good thing you brought me some money. I've been meaning to get a new one anyway."
Devon replied, "There's close to about ten grand in there. That'll get you a real nice custom built."
The older man shook his head. "Store bought and remaining unregistered until I have it for awhile. Then I can say I bought it used. Less electronic paper trail, more deniability and devaluation. Buy a nice car privately instead of from the lot. Get them to put a small money amount on the title during transfer. So on and so forth."
"Hey, old man, are the other 'good ol boys' going to lynch you for selling all their secrets out?" Devon said in a snarky tone.
Al snorted. "There's only the millionaires club and the billionaires club these days. Green's the only color that matters anymore... That saying was a little more true when I was younger. Money's so... colorful these days and just about everything's done with plastic... By the way, call me Oris-... Call me Al. If I can't call you kid, it's only fair."
Al looked away, suddenly feeling confused and a little scared.
Chuckling, Devon said, "You in witness protection or something?"
Unable to wipe the anxiety out of his mind, he simply said, "Something."
Begging off that he wasn't feeling so well and needed to lie down, Devon left with an extra little pep in his step. Al highly doubted it was visions of sugar plums the young and ambitious black man saw dancing in his head. He just desperately hoped that Devon's appetite wasn't bigger than their combined ability to handle. After setting himself up as a crooked mentor, he knew exactly where the kid would come running if something went wrong.
As he laid down again, he thought he'd have a hard time getting to sleep but he was wrong. Al slipped off into nightmarish dreamland like he was being pulled under tar by an elephant, slow but unable to resist. The one to pass this time wasn't a fuzzy one, it was the one who had been steadily growing older every dream. It was a peaceful kind of passing.
Surrounded by loving and friendly faces, an elderly Orison passed away on Amoril as Droya stopped anyone from interfering with their many different abilities capable of saving him.
The last thing that Al remembered before his dreamworld was washed over in gentle white light was the sad cat woman saying, "He was only part of the whole. If we had stopped him from going as was intended, it would be a bad thing for our little boy. Wa-watching him fade away like that was one of the hardest things I think I've ever had to do... Gan, he's still alive out there. It might be a very long time before-"
Al woke up six hours later feeling wide eyed and well rested. For a brief moment a burning sensation radiated from the back of his neck as a weight settled down on his left middle finger. His mind was assaulted by a jumble of vague concepts and memories he was kind of glad weren't too clear. They were important but there were just some things he wasn't ready to deal with, didn't know if he ever would. He didn't think he had much choice.
One things was for sure, he was only a part of some greater whole. He didn't know why he was the one chosen to collect all the other pieces but his fear was clearly realized. Once it was done, he wouldn't be Al anymore. Once put back together, Al would only be a small slice of a greater being known as Orison.
For a moment, the depression won and he sat staring at the wall. Then, he felt a small trickle of soothing energy wash over him. It was what he inherited from 'white light' Orison.
In a broken, flickering vision he saw a key encased in a blue gem. Around it were three lights but there was the presence of a fourth, colorless and unglowing but vaguely noticeable. Al understood that they represented something important. He also knew that he had been carrying the fourth colorless energy the whole time. He was the glue, the magnate and collector. At the heart of that colorless essence was a wish for things to be more like they are in games.
With a hint of hysteria at it corners, Al laughed. "I'm the freaking game plus. All the other progresses will add to me. We're going from easy mode to normal or maybe straight to hard mode and I'm the freaking game plus!"
A weak intuition was trying to inform him that he wasn't right but his out of whack emotions wasn't ready to hear it. What he was ready, desperate, to know was what the white light was. At it's heart was a ball of hope, purer concepts of love and altruism whose heart was a wish made to set a slave girl free.
Through a process of elimination he could figure out who the 'red and green light Orison's were and even what wishes were at the heart of their strange and unknown essence. 'Red Orison' was the one who went after Wendy, filled with passion and ambition, with the wish for magical and physical training at it's heart. That's why that particular version was such a bad*ss. The only problem was that the thing after them was so much more powerful.
'Green Light' couldn't be considered a proper Orison at all. It was life and soul with no real direction or impetus of its own other than to seek being a person. At it's heart laid a complex wish of space, longevity and the desire to... be a person. The entity that had become a woman only to be hurt and used, found strength and courage once she became a mother. The center of her world changed from a source of pain to love and hope when she held that child in her arms for the first time.
Al was the center and the hub of all those other lives. Once the 'white' had joined him, he could feel them, could feel their connections with himself. All the lost, hopeless shadows, he called them to him. Their suffering was over. The ones that struggled, that had lives filled with hopes and ambitions, he left them be.
In time, he felt like they were inevitably going to come to him but there was no need to be forceful or cut short those lives with meaning in them. Al also wanted to relish the feeling of being himself. Too many shadows and he would be overwhelmed.
There were other things too. He needed to fully integrate what had become a part of him. If it happened all at once, he felt there was a possibility he wouldn't be able to withstand it. To ease the straining burden on himself, he used the connection he had with the others to share some of what he could barely contain.
Concepts preserved within the swirl of strange colorless and white essence that Al's meager human brain couldn't easily contain and would be in threat of being forgotten, he shared with the 'Green'. Skills, practical knowledge and the quasi-real things that floated like a nimbus within the colorless that he didn't have the ability to access himself, he sent to the 'Red'. Through this, they became aware of each other.
They couldn't communicate and only Al, who possessed the colorless and the white, could actively feel the connections. The Red wasn't happy and mirrored many of Al's own worries but wasn't surprised. From dreams, Al knew Red was aware of the others in an academic way. He felt a vague sense of confrontational 'may the best man win' kind of vibe mixed with some grudging respect and gratitude from the Red.
The Green was much different. She was concerned about her son. The kid had quite a ways to go before adulthood and she could vaguely sense a feeling of distant impending doom, possessing a fairly strong intuition. She might not have been capable of actively feeling the connection but she opened herself to it in a way.
A small trickle of essence filtered into Al through their connection, along with a mother's desperate plea. He may not be able to see her thoughts but he understood the message. If something happened to her, she wanted him to look after her son. He had no idea how something like that was possible considering that they were realities away from each other but had no problems with the concept itself.
Mind turning directions, he thought about all the shadows' lives and realized, out of all those possible lives, only two had children. Green's boy possessed a touch of otherness and supernatural knowing beyond his age. The garden loving girl that had been born to White and Lyra had become a priestess of a temple for a time before Gan and Halda's eldest son dispelled some of the fire in his blood and had wooed her away to settle down. They had a brood of their own and were embracing the tide of life, much as White had.
There had been some question as to who the father was of Halda's second son. White knew the boy was Gan's but he never told and just as Orison had promised, treated the boy as if the difference didn't matter. Unlike the older brother, he was sensitive, scholarly and had a spark of magic strong enough to blow into a blaze of arcane prowess. In some ways, that child received more care and nurturing than the other two but only because his thirst for knowledge and understanding nearly demanded it.
White didn't know when it happened but secretly, his daughter had gifted her portion of whatever fey grace she possessed to that boy because she seemed to know the direction of her life and saw no need of it. Seeing no point in slightly delaying the inevitable himself, White similarly did so. With the combined 'grace' and nurtured personal gift for magic, the boy had taken on some of the agelessness that Gan himself had.
Tait was a name Al planned on remembering. The boy was nearly as attached to White as Gan was but for easier to bear reasons, thankfully. He was inclined and likely better equipped to find other parts of Orison as well. There was little doubt that the boy had the talent and disposition to be a climber.
"I'd lay money, if there's going to be another little squirt to worry about, it's going to be Wendy and Red's. There's no way in hell I'm going to go looking for a baby mama during all this crazy crap," Al muttered as he watched the morning news.
Global warming, climate change and few more local stories filled up thirty minutes before Al was getting ready to take a shower and start his day. As he was getting ready to turn it off, a story about a local woman who had seen a shooting was played. The fuzzy bit of phone shot footage didn't reveal much. They were protecting the victim's information but Orison recognized the lime green shoe soles as the person in dark clothes and a hoodie ran away from a person with a gun.
Al's heart leapt into his throat as he saw the person go down after getting hit. He turned the TV off and quickly cleaned up before heading into work early. Logging into his account at work, he cut over to current in-patients until he saw the one matching the victim he saw on TV. It was a stressful day as he plugged his way through until it was over.
As soon as he clocked out, Al was heading over to the hospital. Approaching the room with an unknown name, he checked in to see that it wasn't Devon. There was something familiar about the youth, though.
A man's cough behind him caught his attention. It was a black man roughly around his own age. Al apologized for the snooping and explained that he was a hospital employee who had seen the news that morning and thought it might have been someone he knew, checking out of concern.
"And you don't know the name of this, so called, friend?" the man said, justifiably skeptical and likely a little edgy.
Al said, "We hadn't met under the best of circumstances and if I were him I wouldn't have given my real name either. Like I said, it was just out of concern and this kid's way too young to be the person I know."
Looking angry and interrogative, the man said, "And what's the name of this friend? What made you think my son was him?"
A more familiar voice came from down the hallway, "Al? What are you doing here?"
Both of the men turned towards Devon but the angry man spoke first. "You know this white dude?"
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The young man said, "Why do you think I'm here? The moment I thought about giving some of my hard earned payday to you, I felt a little better... Speaking of feeling better, were you having a good dream or do I have to punch you for looking at me with weird feelings. I mean, I got a cousin and he's cool but I had to rough him up a couple of times for him to get the idea that-"
Al got dressed quickly and said, "It's high blood pressure from waking up with an adrenaline rush. I think I might want to get my cholesterol checked too. Just because I'm eating healthy now doesn't mean I didn't log the damage time."
Devon smirked. "Whatever, old man... See, I thought about the all the sh*t you you said and you see that? Call me f***ing Robin Hood. You know, cause I was robbing, in the hood."
The young man laughed at his own dumb joke before Al said, "So, you didn't immediately go out and get nice threads? I'm completely convinced you wouldn't do something as simple as going right out to get a nice ride to advertise that you have money you shouldn't have... Why, I bet you're so smart that you even remembered to pay your taxes and figure out a cover for how you got all your money so when the IRS flags you for audit, it won't look as suspicious and get the feds checking into your activities."
Devon gawked at Al for a moment and said, "Alright, old man. It seems we gotta have another talk..."
Al took some time to lay out the things he'd been thinking about since Devon left after the first visit.
"Debt consolidation? Is it really that easy to get into?" the young man said.
Al nodded and said, "But don't forget about something like a tree service or house repair. Something like that. You have to have an intro business to justify starting capital first. The best thing about my plan is, you can really help some people out in the process.
"There's plenty of old, dead and dying out there whose financial affairs are gray areas. You can reduce their financial burdens and launder your money at the same time. Keep up your floor level businesses but don't get too far away from what you can handle. I can do a little part time accounting and record keeping to help you stay on track.
"Oh, and for goodness sake, no more drug dealer thefts. Are you trying to get us both and everyone we might care about, killed? Even if you got away with it a couple of times, you won't keep getting lucky. Frankly, I'd be doing more experimenting and less low earning grabs with the key if I were you. Have you tried using it to 'unlock' a password for instance?"
Devon said, "We can just cut out all the other sh*t and pull it right through some old white dude's account. If they're rich and powerful enough, no one's going to say sh*t."
Al said, "Don't! You think drug dealers are a little scary? Powerful 'old white dudes' can do things I don't even want to think about. Please keep things reasonable! You don't need all that anyway. Stay low key, safe and slow build. Eventually, you won't even need the key anymore and you can go legit. Be wealthy and legal!
"You can't keep using that key or something's going to get you. You're going to get caught or killed. You might drag others down with you, people you care about. Ultimately, the key itself is going to squeeze you dry like a damn halved orange on a juicer!"
Devon gave Al a weird look and said, "If I didn't know any better, I might think you actually gave a damn what happened to me."
The older man looked solemnly at the younger and said, "Mostly guilt but... I think you're a good kid that got a raw deal, not someone that wants to do bad things or hurt people. If-"
"I'm not a f***ing kid and... Alright, I'm listening. Teach me how the old white dudes get away with it when we can't," Devon said and sat down to listen while Al laid out some of the finer details.
While they talked, the computer smoked a little before dying. It seemed that the supernatural and technology didn't mesh well in his world.
Al started laughing and said, "It's a good thing you brought me some money. I've been meaning to get a new one anyway."
Devon replied, "There's close to about ten grand in there. That'll get you a real nice custom built."
The older man shook his head. "Store bought and remaining unregistered until I have it for awhile. Then I can say I bought it used. Less electronic paper trail, more deniability and devaluation. Buy a nice car privately instead of from the lot. Get them to put a small money amount on the title during transfer. So on and so forth."
"Hey, old man, are the other 'good ol boys' going to lynch you for selling all their secrets out?" Devon said in a snarky tone.
Al snorted. "There's only the millionaires club and the billionaires club these days. Green's the only color that matters anymore... That saying was a little more true when I was younger. Money's so... colorful these days and just about everything's done with plastic... By the way, call me Oris-... Call me Al. If I can't call you kid, it's only fair."
Al looked away, suddenly feeling confused and a little scared.
Chuckling, Devon said, "You in witness protection or something?"
Unable to wipe the anxiety out of his mind, he simply said, "Something."
Begging off that he wasn't feeling so well and needed to lie down, Devon left with an extra little pep in his step. Al highly doubted it was visions of sugar plums the young and ambitious black man saw dancing in his head. He just desperately hoped that Devon's appetite wasn't bigger than their combined ability to handle. After setting himself up as a crooked mentor, he knew exactly where the kid would come running if something went wrong.
As he laid down again, he thought he'd have a hard time getting to sleep but he was wrong. Al slipped off into nightmarish dreamland like he was being pulled under tar by an elephant, slow but unable to resist. The one to pass this time wasn't a fuzzy one, it was the one who had been steadily growing older every dream. It was a peaceful kind of passing.
Surrounded by loving and friendly faces, an elderly Orison passed away on Amoril as Droya stopped anyone from interfering with their many different abilities capable of saving him.
The last thing that Al remembered before his dreamworld was washed over in gentle white light was the sad cat woman saying, "He was only part of the whole. If we had stopped him from going as was intended, it would be a bad thing for our little boy. Wa-watching him fade away like that was one of the hardest things I think I've ever had to do... Gan, he's still alive out there. It might be a very long time before-"
Al woke up six hours later feeling wide eyed and well rested. For a brief moment a burning sensation radiated from the back of his neck as a weight settled down on his left middle finger. His mind was assaulted by a jumble of vague concepts and memories he was kind of glad weren't too clear. They were important but there were just some things he wasn't ready to deal with, didn't know if he ever would. He didn't think he had much choice.
One things was for sure, he was only a part of some greater whole. He didn't know why he was the one chosen to collect all the other pieces but his fear was clearly realized. Once it was done, he wouldn't be Al anymore. Once put back together, Al would only be a small slice of a greater being known as Orison.
For a moment, the depression won and he sat staring at the wall. Then, he felt a small trickle of soothing energy wash over him. It was what he inherited from 'white light' Orison.
In a broken, flickering vision he saw a key encased in a blue gem. Around it were three lights but there was the presence of a fourth, colorless and unglowing but vaguely noticeable. Al understood that they represented something important. He also knew that he had been carrying the fourth colorless energy the whole time. He was the glue, the magnate and collector. At the heart of that colorless essence was a wish for things to be more like they are in games.
With a hint of hysteria at it corners, Al laughed. "I'm the freaking game plus. All the other progresses will add to me. We're going from easy mode to normal or maybe straight to hard mode and I'm the freaking game plus!"
A weak intuition was trying to inform him that he wasn't right but his out of whack emotions wasn't ready to hear it. What he was ready, desperate, to know was what the white light was. At it's heart was a ball of hope, purer concepts of love and altruism whose heart was a wish made to set a slave girl free.
Through a process of elimination he could figure out who the 'red and green light Orison's were and even what wishes were at the heart of their strange and unknown essence. 'Red Orison' was the one who went after Wendy, filled with passion and ambition, with the wish for magical and physical training at it's heart. That's why that particular version was such a bad*ss. The only problem was that the thing after them was so much more powerful.
'Green Light' couldn't be considered a proper Orison at all. It was life and soul with no real direction or impetus of its own other than to seek being a person. At it's heart laid a complex wish of space, longevity and the desire to... be a person. The entity that had become a woman only to be hurt and used, found strength and courage once she became a mother. The center of her world changed from a source of pain to love and hope when she held that child in her arms for the first time.
Al was the center and the hub of all those other lives. Once the 'white' had joined him, he could feel them, could feel their connections with himself. All the lost, hopeless shadows, he called them to him. Their suffering was over. The ones that struggled, that had lives filled with hopes and ambitions, he left them be.
In time, he felt like they were inevitably going to come to him but there was no need to be forceful or cut short those lives with meaning in them. Al also wanted to relish the feeling of being himself. Too many shadows and he would be overwhelmed.
There were other things too. He needed to fully integrate what had become a part of him. If it happened all at once, he felt there was a possibility he wouldn't be able to withstand it. To ease the straining burden on himself, he used the connection he had with the others to share some of what he could barely contain.
Concepts preserved within the swirl of strange colorless and white essence that Al's meager human brain couldn't easily contain and would be in threat of being forgotten, he shared with the 'Green'. Skills, practical knowledge and the quasi-real things that floated like a nimbus within the colorless that he didn't have the ability to access himself, he sent to the 'Red'. Through this, they became aware of each other.
They couldn't communicate and only Al, who possessed the colorless and the white, could actively feel the connections. The Red wasn't happy and mirrored many of Al's own worries but wasn't surprised. From dreams, Al knew Red was aware of the others in an academic way. He felt a vague sense of confrontational 'may the best man win' kind of vibe mixed with some grudging respect and gratitude from the Red.
The Green was much different. She was concerned about her son. The kid had quite a ways to go before adulthood and she could vaguely sense a feeling of distant impending doom, possessing a fairly strong intuition. She might not have been capable of actively feeling the connection but she opened herself to it in a way.
A small trickle of essence filtered into Al through their connection, along with a mother's desperate plea. He may not be able to see her thoughts but he understood the message. If something happened to her, she wanted him to look after her son. He had no idea how something like that was possible considering that they were realities away from each other but had no problems with the concept itself.
Mind turning directions, he thought about all the shadows' lives and realized, out of all those possible lives, only two had children. Green's boy possessed a touch of otherness and supernatural knowing beyond his age. The garden loving girl that had been born to White and Lyra had become a priestess of a temple for a time before Gan and Halda's eldest son dispelled some of the fire in his blood and had wooed her away to settle down. They had a brood of their own and were embracing the tide of life, much as White had.
There had been some question as to who the father was of Halda's second son. White knew the boy was Gan's but he never told and just as Orison had promised, treated the boy as if the difference didn't matter. Unlike the older brother, he was sensitive, scholarly and had a spark of magic strong enough to blow into a blaze of arcane prowess. In some ways, that child received more care and nurturing than the other two but only because his thirst for knowledge and understanding nearly demanded it.
White didn't know when it happened but secretly, his daughter had gifted her portion of whatever fey grace she possessed to that boy because she seemed to know the direction of her life and saw no need of it. Seeing no point in slightly delaying the inevitable himself, White similarly did so. With the combined 'grace' and nurtured personal gift for magic, the boy had taken on some of the agelessness that Gan himself had.
Tait was a name Al planned on remembering. The boy was nearly as attached to White as Gan was but for easier to bear reasons, thankfully. He was inclined and likely better equipped to find other parts of Orison as well. There was little doubt that the boy had the talent and disposition to be a climber.
"I'd lay money, if there's going to be another little squirt to worry about, it's going to be Wendy and Red's. There's no way in hell I'm going to go looking for a baby mama during all this crazy crap," Al muttered as he watched the morning news.
Global warming, climate change and few more local stories filled up thirty minutes before Al was getting ready to take a shower and start his day. As he was getting ready to turn it off, a story about a local woman who had seen a shooting was played. The fuzzy bit of phone shot footage didn't reveal much. They were protecting the victim's information but Orison recognized the lime green shoe soles as the person in dark clothes and a hoodie ran away from a person with a gun.
Al's heart leapt into his throat as he saw the person go down after getting hit. He turned the TV off and quickly cleaned up before heading into work early. Logging into his account at work, he cut over to current in-patients until he saw the one matching the victim he saw on TV. It was a stressful day as he plugged his way through until it was over.
As soon as he clocked out, Al was heading over to the hospital. Approaching the room with an unknown name, he checked in to see that it wasn't Devon. There was something familiar about the youth, though.
A man's cough behind him caught his attention. It was a black man roughly around his own age. Al apologized for the snooping and explained that he was a hospital employee who had seen the news that morning and thought it might have been someone he knew, checking out of concern.
"And you don't know the name of this, so called, friend?" the man said, justifiably skeptical and likely a little edgy.
Al said, "We hadn't met under the best of circumstances and if I were him I wouldn't have given my real name either. Like I said, it was just out of concern and this kid's way too young to be the person I know."
Looking angry and interrogative, the man said, "And what's the name of this friend? What made you think my son was him?"
A more familiar voice came from down the hallway, "Al? What are you doing here?"
Both of the men turned towards Devon but the angry man spoke first. "You know this white dude?"
The young man said, "Why do you think I'm here? The moment I thought about giving some of my hard earned payday to you, I felt a little better... Speaking of feeling better, were you having a good dream or do I have to punch you for looking at me with weird feelings. I mean, I got a cousin and he's cool but I had to rough him up a couple of times for him to get the idea that-" Al got dressed quickly and said, "It's high blood pressure from waking up with an adrenaline rush. I think I might want to get my cholesterol checked too. Just because I'm eating healthy now doesn't mean I didn't log the damage time." Devon smirked. "Whatever, old man... See, I thought about the all the sh*t you you said and you see that? Call me f***ing Robin Hood. You know, cause I was robbing, in the hood." The young man laughed at his own dumb joke before Al said, "So, you didn't immediately go out and get nice threads? I'm completely convinced you wouldn't do something as simple as going right out to get a nice ride to advertise that you have money you shouldn't have... Why, I bet you're so smart that you even remembered to pay your taxes and figure out a cover for how you got all your money so when the IRS flags you for audit, it won't look as suspicious and get the feds checking into your activities." Devon gawked at Al for a moment and said, "Alright, old man. It seems we gotta have another talk..." Al took some time to lay out the things he'd been thinking about since Devon left after the first visit. "Debt consolidation? Is it really that easy to get into?" the young man said. Al nodded and said, "But don't forget about something like a tree service or house repair. Something like that. You have to have an intro business to justify starting capital first. The best thing about my plan is, you can really help some people out in the process. "There's plenty of old, dead and dying out there whose financial affairs are gray areas. You can reduce their financial burdens and launder your money at the same time. Keep up your floor level businesses but don't get too far away from what you can handle. I can do a little part time accounting and record keeping to help you stay on track. "Oh, and for goodness sake, no more drug dealer thefts. Are you trying to get us both and everyone we might care about, killed? Even if you got away with it a couple of times, you won't keep getting lucky. Frankly, I'd be doing more experimenting and less low earning grabs with the key if I were you. Have you tried using it to 'unlock' a password for instance?" Devon said, "We can just cut out all the other sh*t and pull it right through some old white dude's account. If they're rich and powerful enough, no one's going to say sh*t." Al said, "Don't! You think drug dealers are a little scary? Powerful 'old white dudes' can do things I don't even want to think about. Please keep things reasonable! You don't need all that anyway. Stay low key, safe and slow build. Eventually, you won't even need the key anymore and you can go legit. Be wealthy and legal! "You can't keep using that key or something's going to get you. You're going to get caught or killed. You might drag others down with you, people you care about. Ultimately, the key itself is going to squeeze you dry like a damn halved orange on a juicer!" Devon gave Al a weird look and said, "If I didn't know any better, I might think you actually gave a damn what happened to me." The older man looked solemnly at the younger and said, "Mostly guilt but... I think you're a good kid that got a raw deal, not someone that wants to do bad things or hurt people. If-" "I'm not a f***ing kid and... Alright, I'm listening. Teach me how the old white dudes get away with it when we can't," Devon said and sat down to listen while Al laid out some of the finer details. While they talked, the computer smoked a little before dying. It seemed that the supernatural and technology didn't mesh well in his world. Al started laughing and said, "It's a good thing you brought me some money. I've been meaning to get a new one anyway." Devon replied, "There's close to about ten grand in there. That'll get you a real nice custom built." The older man shook his head. "Store bought and remaining unregistered until I have it for awhile. Then I can say I bought it used. Less electronic paper trail, more deniability and devaluation. Buy a nice car privately instead of from the lot. Get them to put a small money amount on the title during transfer. So on and so forth." "Hey, old man, are the other 'good ol boys' going to lynch you for selling all their secrets out?" Devon said in a snarky tone. Al snorted. "There's only the millionaires club and the billionaires club these days. Green's the only color that matters anymore... That saying was a little more true when I was younger. Money's so... colorful these days and just about everything's done with plastic... By the way, call me Oris-... Call me Al. If I can't call you kid, it's only fair." Al looked away, suddenly feeling confused and a little scared. Chuckling, Devon said, "You in witness protection or something?" Unable to wipe the anxiety out of his mind, he simply said, "Something." Begging off that he wasn't feeling so well and needed to lie down, Devon left with an extra little pep in his step. Al highly doubted it was visions of sugar plums the young and ambitious black man saw dancing in his head. He just desperately hoped that Devon's appetite wasn't bigger than their combined ability to handle. After setting himself up as a crooked mentor, he knew exactly where the kid would come running if something went wrong. As he laid down again, he thought he'd have a hard time getting to sleep but he was wrong. Al slipped off into nightmarish dreamland like he was being pulled under tar by an elephant, slow but unable to resist. The one to pass this time wasn't a fuzzy one, it was the one who had been steadily growing older every dream. It was a peaceful kind of passing. Surrounded by loving and friendly faces, an elderly Orison passed away on Amoril as Droya stopped anyone from interfering with their many different abilities capable of saving him. The last thing that Al remembered before his dreamworld was washed over in gentle white light was the sad cat woman saying, "He was only part of the whole. If we had stopped him from going as was intended, it would be a bad thing for our little boy. Wa-watching him fade away like that was one of the hardest things I think I've ever had to do... Gan, he's still alive out there. It might be a very long time before-" Al woke up six hours later feeling wide eyed and well rested. For a brief moment a burning sensation radiated from the back of his neck as a weight settled down on his left middle finger. His mind was assaulted by a jumble of vague concepts and memories he was kind of glad weren't too clear. They were important but there were just some things he wasn't ready to deal with, didn't know if he ever would. He didn't think he had much choice. One things was for sure, he was only a part of some greater whole. He didn't know why he was the one chosen to collect all the other pieces but his fear was clearly realized. Once it was done, he wouldn't be Al anymore. Once put back together, Al would only be a small slice of a greater being known as Orison. For a moment, the depression won and he sat staring at the wall. Then, he felt a small trickle of soothing energy wash over him. It was what he inherited from 'white light' Orison. In a broken, flickering vision he saw a key encased in a blue gem. Around it were three lights but there was the presence of a fourth, colorless and unglowing but vaguely noticeable. Al understood that they represented something important. He also knew that he had been carrying the fourth colorless energy the whole time. He was the glue, the magnate and collector. At the heart of that colorless essence was a wish for things to be more like they are in games. With a hint of hysteria at it corners, Al laughed. "I'm the freaking game plus. All the other progresses will add to me. We're going from easy mode to normal or maybe straight to hard mode and I'm the freaking game plus!" A weak intuition was trying to inform him that he wasn't right but his out of whack emotions wasn't ready to hear it. What he was ready, desperate, to know was what the white light was. At it's heart was a ball of hope, purer concepts of love and altruism whose heart was a wish made to set a slave girl free. Through a process of elimination he could figure out who the 'red and green light Orison's were and even what wishes were at the heart of their strange and unknown essence. 'Red Orison' was the one who went after Wendy, filled with passion and ambition, with the wish for magical and physical training at it's heart. That's why that particular version was such a bad*ss. The only problem was that the thing after them was so much more powerful. 'Green Light' couldn't be considered a proper Orison at all. It was life and soul with no real direction or impetus of its own other than to seek being a person. At it's heart laid a complex wish of space, longevity and the desire to... be a person. The entity that had become a woman only to be hurt and used, found strength and courage once she became a mother. The center of her world changed from a source of pain to love and hope when she held that child in her arms for the first time. Al was the center and the hub of all those other lives. Once the 'white' had joined him, he could feel them, could feel their connections with himself. All the lost, hopeless shadows, he called them to him. Their suffering was over. The ones that struggled, that had lives filled with hopes and ambitions, he left them be. In time, he felt like they were inevitably going to come to him but there was no need to be forceful or cut short those lives with meaning in them. Al also wanted to relish the feeling of being himself. Too many shadows and he would be overwhelmed. There were other things too. He needed to fully integrate what had become a part of him. If it happened all at once, he felt there was a possibility he wouldn't be able to withstand it. To ease the straining burden on himself, he used the connection he had with the others to share some of what he could barely contain. Concepts preserved within the swirl of strange colorless and white essence that Al's meager human brain couldn't easily contain and would be in threat of being forgotten, he shared with the 'Green'. Skills, practical knowledge and the quasi-real things that floated like a nimbus within the colorless that he didn't have the ability to access himself, he sent to the 'Red'. Through this, they became aware of each other. They couldn't communicate and only Al, who possessed the colorless and the white, could actively feel the connections. The Red wasn't happy and mirrored many of Al's own worries but wasn't surprised. From dreams, Al knew Red was aware of the others in an academic way. He felt a vague sense of confrontational 'may the best man win' kind of vibe mixed with some grudging respect and gratitude from the Red. The Green was much different. She was concerned about her son. The kid had quite a ways to go before adulthood and she could vaguely sense a feeling of distant impending doom, possessing a fairly strong intuition. She might not have been capable of actively feeling the connection but she opened herself to it in a way. A small trickle of essence filtered into Al through their connection, along with a mother's desperate plea. He may not be able to see her thoughts but he understood the message. If something happened to her, she wanted him to look after her son. He had no idea how something like that was possible considering that they were realities away from each other but had no problems with the concept itself. Mind turning directions, he thought about all the shadows' lives and realized, out of all those possible lives, only two had children. Green's boy possessed a touch of otherness and supernatural knowing beyond his age. The garden loving girl that had been born to White and Lyra had become a priestess of a temple for a time before Gan and Halda's eldest son dispelled some of the fire in his blood and had wooed her away to settle down. They had a brood of their own and were embracing the tide of life, much as White had. There had been some question as to who the father was of Halda's second son. White knew the boy was Gan's but he never told and just as Orison had promised, treated the boy as if the difference didn't matter. Unlike the older brother, he was sensitive, scholarly and had a spark of magic strong enough to blow into a blaze of arcane prowess. In some ways, that child received more care and nurturing than the other two but only because his thirst for knowledge and understanding nearly demanded it. White didn't know when it happened but secretly, his daughter had gifted her portion of whatever fey grace she possessed to that boy because she seemed to know the direction of her life and saw no need of it. Seeing no point in slightly delaying the inevitable himself, White similarly did so. With the combined 'grace' and nurtured personal gift for magic, the boy had taken on some of the agelessness that Gan himself had. Tait was a name Al planned on remembering. The boy was nearly as attached to White as Gan was but for easier to bear reasons, thankfully. He was inclined and likely better equipped to find other parts of Orison as well. There was little doubt that the boy had the talent and disposition to be a climber. "I'd lay money, if there's going to be another little squirt to worry about, it's going to be Wendy and Red's. There's no way in hell I'm going to go looking for a baby mama during all this crazy crap," Al muttered as he watched the morning news. Global warming, climate change and few more local stories filled up thirty minutes before Al was getting ready to take a shower and start his day. As he was getting ready to turn it off, a story about a local woman who had seen a shooting was played. The fuzzy bit of phone shot footage didn't reveal much. They were protecting the victim's information but Orison recognized the lime green shoe soles as the person in dark clothes and a hoodie ran away from a person with a gun. Al's heart leapt into his throat as he saw the person go down after getting hit. He turned the TV off and quickly cleaned up before heading into work early. Logging into his account at work, he cut over to current in-patients until he saw the one matching the victim he saw on TV. It was a stressful day as he plugged his way through until it was over. As soon as he clocked out, Al was heading over to the hospital. Approaching the room with an unknown name, he checked in to see that it wasn't Devon. There was something familiar about the youth, though. A man's cough behind him caught his attention. It was a black man roughly around his own age. Al apologized for the snooping and explained that he was a hospital employee who had seen the news that morning and thought it might have been someone he knew, checking out of concern. "And you don't know the name of this, so called, friend?" the man said, justifiably skeptical and likely a little edgy. Al said, "We hadn't met under the best of circumstances and if I were him I wouldn't have given my real name either. Like I said, it was just out of concern and this kid's way too young to be the person I know." Looking angry and interrogative, the man said, "And what's the name of this friend? What made you think my son was him?" A more familiar voice came from down the hallway, "Al? What are you doing here?" Both of the men turned towards Devon but the angry man spoke first. "You know this white dude?"
