Committed

COMMITTED by A.R. Kirby Episode 22 Oh, the things we can do! T al shot an irritated glance at Toby while Liv helped him up from the heap of gravel. “I thought we had a talk about this already today,” Tal said as he brushed dust from his calves. “I said it was a start, didn’t I?” Toby stood on his hind legs and crossed his paws over his chest as he addressed Tal. “I feel my description of the situation was accurate. No offense was intended. However, if any was taken, I offer my sincerest apologies.” “Right.” Tal walked beside Toby so that he loomed over the cat. “So what’s next, mister alien? I want to fly!” “I bet you do,” Toby said under his breath, then looked up at Tal. “No, we’ll work with your elemental powers first, because they are what differentiate you. I still don’t know why you chose these commands over air, water, fire and earth, but you could have done much worse. Talking to fish, for example. But elements? Were you going for some hippy-dippy granola thing? No matter, no matter. By sheer dumb luck, you chose powers that are fairly wellrounded, and knowing how to use them is what might give you a chance to save this world. Flight, strength and speed are important, but they are almost universal. Anyone can be strong, anyone can be fast; there might even be some other than the two of you who can Committed by A.R. Kirby fly. Flight, strength and speed aren’t limited to organic creatures, either. With the right technology, machines can be created that are faster and stronger than you.” Then, again under his breath, “And probably smarter, too.” “What was that?” Tal glowered down at the alien as Liv walked to his side. “Nothing, nothing; just a little piece of hairball caught in my throat, I’m sure. Anyway, your elemental powers will give you an advantage. Master them, and you’ll be able to overcome those who are stronger and faster than you.” Tal grinned. Images danced in his head of towering, Godzilla-like monsters tearing through downtown Birmingham, with he and Liv coming to the rescue in the nick of time and a grateful public showering the two of them with praise and adoration. It was heady stuff. it.” “All right,” Tal said, excitement in his voice. “Let’s get to Toby directed Tal to stand next to the pile of gravel where he most recently ended his first flight as a superhuman. As Tal moved into place, Toby led Liv to a position about twenty feet away, close enough to shout instructions and encouragement, yet far enough away to avoid most potential mishaps. “What now?” Tal looked confused as he stood by the pile of small stones. “You get to move rocks,” Toby said. “Knowing you, we better start with something small.” Tal grimaced at the cat, then looked at the neat pile of gravel he stood beside. The heap consisted of thousands upon thousands of small, sharp-edged stones, each a silvery gray in color 2 Episode 22 and no more than three inches in diameter. The pile of rocks was about ten or twelve feet high and measured maybe twenty-five feet around its periphery. There was no way of knowing how long it had been here, waiting for someone to find it useful, but it had obviously been years since a single stone had been disturbed. A few adventurous blades of grass pushed their way up through the stones near the bottom of the pile, but otherwise the rocks were in essentially the same condition as they were when they had been deposited here by the L&N railroad decades before. Tal closed his eyes and grimaced, thinking hard in an attempt to make the pile move, somehow, some way. Thirty seconds went by. Tal ground his teeth together, and little beads of sweat appeared on his brow. Nothing happened. If any of the stones intended to move, they were keeping mum about their plans. Toby watched impatiently from the sidelines with Liv standing next to him, a hopeful but worried look on her face. “We can start whenever you’re ready,” Toby squawked. “Really. Come on. We’re burning daylight here.” “Think about what happened yesterday, Tal,” Liv chimed in an attempt to be helpful. Tal closed his eyes even more tightly. “Think about how you felt and what you did.” Tal thought back to the previous afternoon. He had been looking out the window when the dean had passed by below on the university Quad; an instant later, a divot came up from the lawn as Griffin walked on it, causing a fantastic tumble. Tal knew for certain he had caused the earth to move; he wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew. But what was it he had felt? How did he make it happen? Tal searched his memory. There was disdain for the dean, to be certain, elation at the result of his actions, but there was something else as well... what was it? 3 Committed by A.R. Kirby “Tal, you’re supposed to save the planet, not give yourself a brain aneurysm,” Toby mocked. “I can see the veins standing out on your forehead from here. Just make the rocks move!” Connection. That was it. Tal had felt a connection with the earth when he made it move yesterday afternoon. How could he feel that connection again? He reached out with his mind, looking for some way to feel what the earth felt. It wasn’t easy, but somewhere deep in his brain, a tiny spark reached out and found all the earth around him. Connection. At precisely that moment, the top stone from the gravel pile took off like a shot and whizzed over the top of Toby’s head, parting his fur. It clanged off an old hopper car stranded on the broken rails about a hundred feet away and clattered to the ground. “I think I’ve got it now,” Tal called, even though the feeling of being connected to the earth was fading rapidly. He was pretty sure he could call upon it again. At least he hoped he could. “Really.” Toby looked up at the crease in the fur on his skull. “If that’s the case, show us what else you can do. Making one rock buzz my head is hardly mastery of your skills.” “I’ll send more if you like,” Tal said, his voice tense. “No, no, that’s not necessary. Moving earth is one thing; how you control that movement is another. Let’s see if you can use those stones for a defensive purpose. You never know when a wall or a turret might come in handy.” “You want me to build a wall?” “I think that would be a good start.” Toby looked at Tal impatiently. “I’m really not sure how to do this. Should I relax?” 4 Episode 22 “If you think it will help,” Toby replied curtly. “Do you think it will help?” “It certainly can’t hurt.” Tal closed his eyes again and breathed deeply, searching inwardly for his apparently elusive connection to the earth. Standing there, he imagined being able to see gravity sucking him to the surface of the planet; he tried to feel how the ground held him in place. Slowly, he turned his thoughts to the pile of gravel in front of him; how each of the stones was connected to the earth, how they came from the same ground where he now stood. Then he began thinking of how he too was connected to the stones; even better, he began thinking about how he would like to befriend each and every stone in the pile of gravel. The stones were thrilled at the prospect of friendship; the only attention they had ever received previously was as a simple pile of gravel to be pushed and dumped and filled as needed. Friendship was something wholly unexpected and delightful, especially coming from a mushy mass of flesh. In fact, the stones liked the idea so much that they agreed almost instantly to be at Tal’s beck and call. About ten seconds later, Tal opened his eyes. It was dark, but light came from somewhere above him. He looked upward to find himself standing in the center of a hollow cylinder, about six feet in diameter and about thirty feet high, made entirely of the stones from the former pile of gravel. He pushed against the side of the wall; it wouldn’t budge. The stones had done as their master wished, and they weren’t about to budge now. “How’s this?” Toby and Liv strained to hear Tal’s voice floating down from the top of the hollow structure. “Not bad,” Toby yelled, hoping that Tal could hear him at 5 Committed by A.R. Kirby the bottom of the tower. “”A solid first effort. You need more work, of course, but I think you’re starting to get the hang of it. Now get yourself out.” “How do I do that?” Toby sighed. Working with these humans was more than he ever bargained for. They were so dim-witted sometimes. He couldn’t wait for the day when he could return to Empyrea and never deal with another human being again. “Do what you did before, just in the opposite direction,” the cat yelled. “Start by practicing how to take the tower down without bringing it all down on your head, and you’d better be sure of exactly what it is you’re doing. You’ll need to be able to control your powers in the blink of an eyelash. Making a tower like that should take you no more than three seconds, if that. So, mister, you’re going to practice while Liv and I will work on her powers. I’m sure it won’t take long. Not as long as you’re going to take, anyway.” Then, turning to Liv, he reached up a paw for her hand. “Now it’s your turn. Let’s go to the lake.” Liv cautiously took Toby’s paw and the two of them turned toward the old quarry. Behind them, stones began falling slowly, one by one, from the top of the makeshift turret to the ground below. “Why are you so mean?” Liv asked as she and the alien walked away from the tower. “Mean? How so?” “What I mean,” she said, “is that you are rude and insulting to us all the time. We’ve been good to you over the years; why can’t you show a little gratitude and patience?” 6 Episode 22 “There’s no time for patience,” Toby replied. “Your world is in imminent peril, and you are the best hope Earth has. That’s why I’m impatient with the two of you. You’ve got to be ready and the sooner the better. “As far as being insulting is concerned, I don’t think I mean to do it; it just happens. I come from a civilization far more advanced than yours, and you humans just seem to be pretty slow on the uptake, if you follow my meaning. Call it cultural elitism, if you will. It’s what I know, and I can’t help it, so you’ll just have to live with it. And if I sometimes seem a little bitter, it might be because I’ve spent the past several years stuck in the form of a cat. That tends to make one a little testy.” “I just think you’d have better luck with the two of us if you were a little bit nicer,” Liv continued as they reached the water’s edge. “I don’t need luck. I need for you two to learn how to use your powers. And you need to know it now.” The cat let go of Liv’s hand and looked her in the eye. “Now, you seem to have a bit more aptitude than Tal. I don’t know why, but it just seems to come more naturally to you. That minitornado in the living room this morning was nice work, but you’ve got to learn how to control your powers. See if you can do better than your husband. Let’s start with some wind work.” In much the same manner as Tal, Liv closed her eyes and concentrated. She could feel the slightest breezes around her, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The connection to the breezes came much more easily to her than it did to Tal, and in an instant, she had a small dust devil dancing along the side of the lake. “Good, good,” Toby said as he observed the small whirlwind. “Now do something with it.” 7 Committed by A.R. Kirby With just the slightest amount of effort, Liv found she could make the whirlwind move wherever and however she wanted. A moment later, she had it bounding across the lake and spinning across the rail yard, bobbing and weaving amongst the old building and abandoned boxcars. “Very nice,” Toby said. “There might be hope for you yet. Much better than that cretin you’re married to,” he laughed. The laugh he expected in return did not come. “He is not a cretin,” Liv said sharply, and the dust devil disappeared. “He’s my husband, I love him, and the two of us will save the earth.” Liv closed her eyes again and concentrated. About fifty feet away from where she and Toby stood on the shore, the surface of the lake began trembling slightly. Ever so slowly, a point of water began to arise from the center of the pond, growing into a cone shape like a liquid stalagmite. It continued to rise until it reached a point about seventy-five feet above the lake. Toby stared slack-jawed in amazement as the tip quivered, then arced downward for about thirty feet before looping over itself and heading for the shore. By this time, the base of the column was about thirty feet in diameter, and had displaced so much water that the surface of the lake had dropped by twenty feet or so, displaying the rocky sides of the former quarry. The tip of the cone then swooped downward toward the shoreline where the Liv and Toby stood, the tip changing rapidly from a point to a blunt end. When it stopped abruptly a hair’s breadth from Toby’s head, it looked suspiciously like the end of a shimmering liquid sledgehammer. “You’d better be really still,” Liv cooed at the alien, her eyes still closed in concentration. “One touch from even a whisker, and you’ll break the surface tension. The whole lake will come 8 Episode 22 down on your head, and you’ll have to spend the rest of the weekend trying to dry yourself off.” “Okay, sure, sure,” Toby replied, nervously eying the millions of gallons of water hanging unbelievably directly above his head. “I’m still.” “Now, mister Empyrean,” Liv said, still focused -- at least for the moment -- on keeping Toby dry, “I think we need to see if we can work on this together. I want you to be nicer to Tal and me. We need your help, and I’m starting to think that somehow you’ll need ours before it’s all said and done. If we can’t at least be civil to each other, none of this will work. We’ll do our best to learn how to control our powers. We just need for you to be a little more understanding and a little less alien. Got it?” Toby glanced at the aqua hammer. Grooming was one of the things he hated the most about being in a cat’s body. He shuddered at all the licking he would be doing if Liv dropped the water on him. Humans might not be the most advanced life forms in the galaxy, but this one, at least, knew how to press an advantage when she had one. “Done,” he said. “Good work. Your progress is surpassing my expectations. I think we can call it a day. And yes, I will see what I can do about being a bit more understanding of your situation.” At that, Liv began settling the water back into the lake, but she couldn’t resist having just a few drops splash on Toby’s head before she was finished. To be continued... 9