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xp_logsHarriet seeks her revenge against Rictor for his humiliation of her, and conjures a monster from the plant to incinerate him with his own fears.
Misunderstood?! Spending time together almost every day for weeks, going to movies and meals and concerts, and Julio Richter thought that Harriet Bromes misunderstood his intentions? How dare he.
Fine, then. If he was going to be that way and prey on her and humiliate her, she could do the same. She had learned a lot from Grandma Augusta and her friends (and Rictor, Harriet reluctantly admitted) about caring for the unusual swamp lily. But she still knew more of its secrets than anyone.
Namely, that plant housed a vengeful guardian spirit. Dormant now, but with the right nudge, a witch of her caliber could prompt it to awaken. Or just awake part of it.
The demon dwelling in the bulb she had cut for Rictor, for example. It might be angry when it wakes up and attacks the first person it sees, but that would of course just be a misunderstanding, too.
~*~
Amanda would surely be proud that Rictor’s sneakiness got him from the garage to his room without anyone seeing him. He had no way to explain why he was covered in caramel apple crepe filling without getting into the Harriet of it all, and that was far too humiliating to admit to anyone else. He prayed the resident psychics would not see through him. God help him if Hope mimicked a telepath and discovered the truth.
He was still jittery after he showered and donned clean clothes. A beer would have been great, but with a few months still until his 21st birthday, he had nothing. Maybe a greenhouse visit would help. Even if Harriet had exploded, he could at least keep the swamp lily going. It did not need to suffer simply because she was hysterical.
It was no surprise to see Clea there, but Amanda and Topaz, too? “Are we preparing a tonic or enchantment?” His apprehension over the events from an hour ago instantly evaporated, energized by the excitement of witchcraft.
No one noticed as slender verdant tendrils emerged from the soil in the flowerpot, snaking down the shelves and penetrating every pot they passed. Within seconds, every tapped plant had wilted, as the swamp lily and tendrils grew engorged from sucking the life out of them.
In the time it took Rictor to turn around and discern what was happening, the swamp lily was no longer a simple flower. Standing over an overturned IKEA shelf and several broken pots was a hulking green humanoid monster composed entirely out of plant matter. Bark-like skin, moss and peat growing in patches over its lumbering form. Shoulder pauldrons of mushrooms and weeds. Vines hung from what must have been its face in a grotesque facsimile of a Fu Manchu mustache.
But most striking were its eyes. They weren’t just gleaming ruby red like Mr. Summers’. One look at them and they pierced directly into your soul. Reality fell away as you were caught in its gaze.
Julio Richter was caught and there was no escape.
~*~
There was no more greenhouse. A billion glass shards from the broken windows littered the mud floor, and the metal frame was cleanly torn in two. The carefully curated and maintained plants—ranging from everyday orchids to rare climbing ivies—lay withered in shattered containers and broken trellises. All the labor and sweat and love and blood Rictor had put into this place was meaningless, his great passion annihilated by this plant/man thing looming over him.
Rictor stepped back a few paces, but the thing stayed in place. Only its gleaming eyes followed his movement.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Rictor demanded. Fists clenched so tightly he risked leaving little crescent cuts on his palms from his dirty fingernails, he tapped into the always-roiling power of his gift, readying a prayer to the Earth to swallow this monster at his mark.
But in the blink of an eye, the Man-Thing was gone, and his grandfather stood in its place as if he were always there. His white linen robes were clean and crisp despite the fetid scene. “Juli, it is finally time to put away this nonsense. You are no brujo.”
“Huh? Nool, why would you say that?”
"Because it's true. I already told you, back when we saved your arse. But you're too bloody stubborn to accept the truth." Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, the leather of her jacket creaking slightly. "I've been too bloody soft on you. So, here's the cold hard truth. You. Don't. Have. Magic."
Rictor spun on his heel to face Amanda's castigation, feeling his grip on his gift loosening. "That's not true," he protested, "You said it's possible I have not unlocked it yet. You said there are many other pathways to find my magic. What else could I have been doing for the last two years?"
"Lying to yourself," Clea said behind him, "You can't even perform a simple spell. Not even once. If you haven't unlocked it yet, then you will never unlock it." The redhead rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hip, "Maybe Miss Edith is right, and all you ever will be is a cabana boy."
"¿Qué verga?" He turned again, and pointed a trembling finger at Clea. "Where am I? This cannot be real. You would never be so rude."
"I told them not to coddle you." That was Topaz's disgusted voice behind him. She rolled his eyes. "There's a reason Amanda doesn't let me near you -- I never wanted to play these games. Oh he'll figure it out on his own eventually, Topaz. We just need to be nice to him, Topaz." She scoffed. "Imagine being so pathetic that you need three powerful women to baby you so your feelings aren't hurt. Wake up you bloody idiot. At best, the only thing you're good for is power fodder."
Mean, foolish words, but they fell on deaf ears. Three powerful women, sure, but he had power, too. It was undeniable, they had all seen it. "Don't test me," he warned Topaz, reaching for that strength again. "I'm not afraid of you, and I don't need you or any woman to protect me from anything."
"This is lies."
Sharon had appeared immediately beside him, imperious and unreadable in her hybrid form. She regarded him like a wounded mouse too pathetic to finish off. "You must do better," she said. "This you told me after you were saved by others, but you have done nothing. You say women's help is not for you while coveting those powers you do not have, arranging flowers and fussing in the dirt." The great cat fixed him with her baleful yellow eyes. "Still you are a coward."
"I want the inheritance my family left for me," he conceded, "But not because I'm jealous! It's my legacy. I am owed it. I just want what's mine. Does that make me a coward?"
"Owed?" Liam asked, perched up high, tail swishing through the air angrily, "You're owed nothing by no one and certainly not by people long dead. Make your own path... if you're brave enough. But you're not that brave."
Rictor was getting dizzy from turning heel to confront every accusation slung at him from people he thought were his friends, who cared for him. But worse, his heart agonized over the indictments themselves because . . . they were true? "You can't condemn me because I honor my ancestors, none of you have that right." But even that pushback was weak and tepid. Rictor based his identity on the single path he believed had been laid out before him. But all his friends here had either charted their own ways or were actively trying to. He had been left behind.
Hope leaned forward on a table, chin in her hand - bored. "Honoring your ancestors? You're just riding their coattails. Well, you're trying to? Like, you've got an amazing power, and all you do is whine about the one you don't have. You keep trying to say you're being a man, but you're just a whiny little girl who didn't get the doll you wanted. Don't real men just do what they need to with whatever they have?"
"What do you want from me?" he pleaded, his voice hoarse as he struggled to find air to breathe under the crushing weight of this inquisition.
There was a slight snort. Shatterstar stood close enough behind him to touch, to reach for Rictor's hand just as he has with the Slendermen. "I want to not have to save you anymore, Rictor." Shatterstar almost always called him Julio, except when he was annoyed. "All you do is need other people to save you and spare no time for anyone else. Do you even know what any of do? If I couldn't use you for your powers I don't know why I would keep you around. I don't want either of us to be each other's weapons anymore. I don't deserve something so worthless or to be handled by such a whining, selfish coward."
Shatterstar's words were like a bullet to Rictor's heart. Not him, too. Of all people, he could never survive Star calling him out and tearing him down, condemning their friendship as a one-way street that Star hauled him down.
Which, ironically, is what snapped Rictor out of this reverie of self-hatred.
"Big mistake, cabrón. Huge."
He stomped his foot on the ground, channeling the seismic energy of his mutant gift from his gut down his legs and out through his toes. The earth trembled at his command, and the remnants of the greenhouse shattered and disintegrated under the might of the power he drew up from the earth and siphoned back into it.
Now he was alone in the ruins of his personal botanical empire.
“Listen to me, whoever you are! You can’t fool me. You’re putting words in everyone’s mouth. My words. You know how I know? Because it’s all I think about all the time! That I don’t deserve friends and teachers like them, and they all hate me. You’re animating my own doubts and bad thoughts about myself and making weapons against me out of them!
“So here’s the cold hard truth. Maybe I’m not a brujo like Nool and Chiichii, but they would never dishonor their ancestors by denying me their wisdom. Neither would my teachers. Amanda, Topaz, and Clea aren’t coddling me, they entrusted me with their rituals and knowledge only because they think I’m worth it. They would have kicked me out a long time ago if that wasn’t the case, but they didn’t. I belong with them, one way or another.
“And my friends? We’ve fought and suffered and won together. We’d do anything for each other. Hope was ready to give up her life for me. She might be a soldier from another world, but do you think she’s going to sacrifice herself for a coward and a loser? And Sharon and Liam are unafraid to tell you what they’re actually thinking about you, and you know what the actual cruelest thing they’ve ever said to me was? Sharon said my pozole tasted better coming back up than it did the way down, and for Liam it was something about my mother when I kicked his ass at Mortal Kombat. That’s it.
“And then Star . . .”
They had nearly come to blows the first time they met. Shatterstar was ashamed of losing control of his gift and wrecking a tree. To him, it was a visible reminder of his immaturity and vulnerability. To Rictor, it was a work of art, a thing of beauty. That was the moment Rictor made his first friend, and maybe the moment he had his first inkling of . . .
“He loves me,” Rictor said so softly that had there been any noise in this space, he'd have been imperceptible. Those were not words men said to each other. Most men were probably not even capable of feeling that in the first place. But Rictor felt deeply and the courage to announce it swelled within him. “He'll always be there to save me if I need it. And I would do the same for him, too. We're each other's swords as much as we are each other's shields. He loves me and I love him and even Chiichii and Nool would throw me away before he would! Now, whoever the fuck you are, show yourself, you pussy!”
The ground rumbled, but not from Rictor's gift. The dead plants, fallen leaves, and torn petals were being pulled into each other by an invisible force, merging into the monstrous man-thing that attacked him in the greenhouse. Its eyes still blazed with ruby red light. But Rictor did not fall into its trance this time. He held up his hands and called on his gift, drawing up from the ground's power again to shake the air. The creature halted mid-step in its stride towards Rictor.
“I was afraid all last year,” he told the creature, “Trauma after trauma for me and my friends. The Slendermen threw it in my face and you think I'm scared of you now? You're a repeat covered in mushrooms. This is lies. So stop lying . . .” Shock waves tunneled through the space between Rictor and the monster again, lifting it off its feet . . . “and show me the truth of what you are.”
A groan like trees bending in a gale escaped the man-thing, but Rictor continued his seismic assault. No matter how it struggled, it failed to reclaim its footing, and bits of bark and moss fell from it as its wooden body cracked open. Mud poured out, pooling around the man-thing’s trembling limbs, and with one final push of Rictor’s power, it crumbled to pieces.
The only other times Rictor had drawn so much power from his gift, he’d been supported by his grandparents group of twelve or by Shatterstar’s own gift. Without that support, he was spent and fell to his hands and knees. Everything around him started to darken, and though he feared this meant his body was giving out from pushing past his limits, he smiled.
“At least if I die, I fought back against you, demon. I’ll see you in Xibalba.”
But the underworld wasn’t what awaited him. A small white light shone in the darkness. Rictor crawled towards it, and realized on his approach that it was a small white flower with long, slender, tapered petals. A swamp lily. Rictor agonizingly pulled himself to his feet, briefly stumbling as he stepped in muddy water.
The lily was the only thing growing on a small mound in the middle of the shallow pool, lined all around with towering cypress trees. A swamp? Nowhere Rictor could remember having been, but maybe where Harriet had found the flower, the Florida Everglades.
Before Rictor could reach the lily, a human hand burst up through the ground. Without thinking, Rictor hurried forward to grab it and pull whoever it was from this miry tomb. And it was a man. Just a plain unremarkable white dude. Could have been anyone off the street in Salem Center. When his wandering gaze fell on Rictor, he yelped and staggered back, tearing himself out of the young man’s grip.
He opened his mouth but no words came out, just grunts and sighs.
“Who are you?” Rictor asked. “Are you . . . you can’t be. Are you the thing that brought me here?” The man nodded after a pause. “You’re a man? A human being?” Another nod. “A mutant?” Another pause, then a shake of the head. “You don’t have to be scared of me. Please don’t. I’m sorry if I hurt you. But you did attack me first.”
The man pondered over those words then nodded again, eyes cast down in shame. There was something so innocent and pathetic that Rictor could not help but find some humor. After all that, it was just some guy. “Look, there’s clearly more going on here than either of us knows. But can you send me home? I’ll find out what happened. I know a lot of very smart people. We can figure it out together.” Rictor extended a hand and stepped forward onto the ruined clearing.
“I’m Julio. Mucho gusto.”
“Ted.” The stranger’s voice was raspy from disuse, like this was the first word he had said in years. He stepped forward and took Rictor’s hand in his, and the world burned red.
Misunderstood?! Spending time together almost every day for weeks, going to movies and meals and concerts, and Julio Richter thought that Harriet Bromes misunderstood his intentions? How dare he.
Fine, then. If he was going to be that way and prey on her and humiliate her, she could do the same. She had learned a lot from Grandma Augusta and her friends (and Rictor, Harriet reluctantly admitted) about caring for the unusual swamp lily. But she still knew more of its secrets than anyone.
Namely, that plant housed a vengeful guardian spirit. Dormant now, but with the right nudge, a witch of her caliber could prompt it to awaken. Or just awake part of it.
The demon dwelling in the bulb she had cut for Rictor, for example. It might be angry when it wakes up and attacks the first person it sees, but that would of course just be a misunderstanding, too.
~*~
Amanda would surely be proud that Rictor’s sneakiness got him from the garage to his room without anyone seeing him. He had no way to explain why he was covered in caramel apple crepe filling without getting into the Harriet of it all, and that was far too humiliating to admit to anyone else. He prayed the resident psychics would not see through him. God help him if Hope mimicked a telepath and discovered the truth.
He was still jittery after he showered and donned clean clothes. A beer would have been great, but with a few months still until his 21st birthday, he had nothing. Maybe a greenhouse visit would help. Even if Harriet had exploded, he could at least keep the swamp lily going. It did not need to suffer simply because she was hysterical.
It was no surprise to see Clea there, but Amanda and Topaz, too? “Are we preparing a tonic or enchantment?” His apprehension over the events from an hour ago instantly evaporated, energized by the excitement of witchcraft.
No one noticed as slender verdant tendrils emerged from the soil in the flowerpot, snaking down the shelves and penetrating every pot they passed. Within seconds, every tapped plant had wilted, as the swamp lily and tendrils grew engorged from sucking the life out of them.
In the time it took Rictor to turn around and discern what was happening, the swamp lily was no longer a simple flower. Standing over an overturned IKEA shelf and several broken pots was a hulking green humanoid monster composed entirely out of plant matter. Bark-like skin, moss and peat growing in patches over its lumbering form. Shoulder pauldrons of mushrooms and weeds. Vines hung from what must have been its face in a grotesque facsimile of a Fu Manchu mustache.
But most striking were its eyes. They weren’t just gleaming ruby red like Mr. Summers’. One look at them and they pierced directly into your soul. Reality fell away as you were caught in its gaze.
Julio Richter was caught and there was no escape.
~*~
There was no more greenhouse. A billion glass shards from the broken windows littered the mud floor, and the metal frame was cleanly torn in two. The carefully curated and maintained plants—ranging from everyday orchids to rare climbing ivies—lay withered in shattered containers and broken trellises. All the labor and sweat and love and blood Rictor had put into this place was meaningless, his great passion annihilated by this plant/man thing looming over him.
Rictor stepped back a few paces, but the thing stayed in place. Only its gleaming eyes followed his movement.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Rictor demanded. Fists clenched so tightly he risked leaving little crescent cuts on his palms from his dirty fingernails, he tapped into the always-roiling power of his gift, readying a prayer to the Earth to swallow this monster at his mark.
But in the blink of an eye, the Man-Thing was gone, and his grandfather stood in its place as if he were always there. His white linen robes were clean and crisp despite the fetid scene. “Juli, it is finally time to put away this nonsense. You are no brujo.”
“Huh? Nool, why would you say that?”
"Because it's true. I already told you, back when we saved your arse. But you're too bloody stubborn to accept the truth." Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, the leather of her jacket creaking slightly. "I've been too bloody soft on you. So, here's the cold hard truth. You. Don't. Have. Magic."
Rictor spun on his heel to face Amanda's castigation, feeling his grip on his gift loosening. "That's not true," he protested, "You said it's possible I have not unlocked it yet. You said there are many other pathways to find my magic. What else could I have been doing for the last two years?"
"Lying to yourself," Clea said behind him, "You can't even perform a simple spell. Not even once. If you haven't unlocked it yet, then you will never unlock it." The redhead rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hip, "Maybe Miss Edith is right, and all you ever will be is a cabana boy."
"¿Qué verga?" He turned again, and pointed a trembling finger at Clea. "Where am I? This cannot be real. You would never be so rude."
"I told them not to coddle you." That was Topaz's disgusted voice behind him. She rolled his eyes. "There's a reason Amanda doesn't let me near you -- I never wanted to play these games. Oh he'll figure it out on his own eventually, Topaz. We just need to be nice to him, Topaz." She scoffed. "Imagine being so pathetic that you need three powerful women to baby you so your feelings aren't hurt. Wake up you bloody idiot. At best, the only thing you're good for is power fodder."
Mean, foolish words, but they fell on deaf ears. Three powerful women, sure, but he had power, too. It was undeniable, they had all seen it. "Don't test me," he warned Topaz, reaching for that strength again. "I'm not afraid of you, and I don't need you or any woman to protect me from anything."
"This is lies."
Sharon had appeared immediately beside him, imperious and unreadable in her hybrid form. She regarded him like a wounded mouse too pathetic to finish off. "You must do better," she said. "This you told me after you were saved by others, but you have done nothing. You say women's help is not for you while coveting those powers you do not have, arranging flowers and fussing in the dirt." The great cat fixed him with her baleful yellow eyes. "Still you are a coward."
"I want the inheritance my family left for me," he conceded, "But not because I'm jealous! It's my legacy. I am owed it. I just want what's mine. Does that make me a coward?"
"Owed?" Liam asked, perched up high, tail swishing through the air angrily, "You're owed nothing by no one and certainly not by people long dead. Make your own path... if you're brave enough. But you're not that brave."
Rictor was getting dizzy from turning heel to confront every accusation slung at him from people he thought were his friends, who cared for him. But worse, his heart agonized over the indictments themselves because . . . they were true? "You can't condemn me because I honor my ancestors, none of you have that right." But even that pushback was weak and tepid. Rictor based his identity on the single path he believed had been laid out before him. But all his friends here had either charted their own ways or were actively trying to. He had been left behind.
Hope leaned forward on a table, chin in her hand - bored. "Honoring your ancestors? You're just riding their coattails. Well, you're trying to? Like, you've got an amazing power, and all you do is whine about the one you don't have. You keep trying to say you're being a man, but you're just a whiny little girl who didn't get the doll you wanted. Don't real men just do what they need to with whatever they have?"
"What do you want from me?" he pleaded, his voice hoarse as he struggled to find air to breathe under the crushing weight of this inquisition.
There was a slight snort. Shatterstar stood close enough behind him to touch, to reach for Rictor's hand just as he has with the Slendermen. "I want to not have to save you anymore, Rictor." Shatterstar almost always called him Julio, except when he was annoyed. "All you do is need other people to save you and spare no time for anyone else. Do you even know what any of do? If I couldn't use you for your powers I don't know why I would keep you around. I don't want either of us to be each other's weapons anymore. I don't deserve something so worthless or to be handled by such a whining, selfish coward."
Shatterstar's words were like a bullet to Rictor's heart. Not him, too. Of all people, he could never survive Star calling him out and tearing him down, condemning their friendship as a one-way street that Star hauled him down.
Which, ironically, is what snapped Rictor out of this reverie of self-hatred.
"Big mistake, cabrón. Huge."
He stomped his foot on the ground, channeling the seismic energy of his mutant gift from his gut down his legs and out through his toes. The earth trembled at his command, and the remnants of the greenhouse shattered and disintegrated under the might of the power he drew up from the earth and siphoned back into it.
Now he was alone in the ruins of his personal botanical empire.
“Listen to me, whoever you are! You can’t fool me. You’re putting words in everyone’s mouth. My words. You know how I know? Because it’s all I think about all the time! That I don’t deserve friends and teachers like them, and they all hate me. You’re animating my own doubts and bad thoughts about myself and making weapons against me out of them!
“So here’s the cold hard truth. Maybe I’m not a brujo like Nool and Chiichii, but they would never dishonor their ancestors by denying me their wisdom. Neither would my teachers. Amanda, Topaz, and Clea aren’t coddling me, they entrusted me with their rituals and knowledge only because they think I’m worth it. They would have kicked me out a long time ago if that wasn’t the case, but they didn’t. I belong with them, one way or another.
“And my friends? We’ve fought and suffered and won together. We’d do anything for each other. Hope was ready to give up her life for me. She might be a soldier from another world, but do you think she’s going to sacrifice herself for a coward and a loser? And Sharon and Liam are unafraid to tell you what they’re actually thinking about you, and you know what the actual cruelest thing they’ve ever said to me was? Sharon said my pozole tasted better coming back up than it did the way down, and for Liam it was something about my mother when I kicked his ass at Mortal Kombat. That’s it.
“And then Star . . .”
They had nearly come to blows the first time they met. Shatterstar was ashamed of losing control of his gift and wrecking a tree. To him, it was a visible reminder of his immaturity and vulnerability. To Rictor, it was a work of art, a thing of beauty. That was the moment Rictor made his first friend, and maybe the moment he had his first inkling of . . .
“He loves me,” Rictor said so softly that had there been any noise in this space, he'd have been imperceptible. Those were not words men said to each other. Most men were probably not even capable of feeling that in the first place. But Rictor felt deeply and the courage to announce it swelled within him. “He'll always be there to save me if I need it. And I would do the same for him, too. We're each other's swords as much as we are each other's shields. He loves me and I love him and even Chiichii and Nool would throw me away before he would! Now, whoever the fuck you are, show yourself, you pussy!”
The ground rumbled, but not from Rictor's gift. The dead plants, fallen leaves, and torn petals were being pulled into each other by an invisible force, merging into the monstrous man-thing that attacked him in the greenhouse. Its eyes still blazed with ruby red light. But Rictor did not fall into its trance this time. He held up his hands and called on his gift, drawing up from the ground's power again to shake the air. The creature halted mid-step in its stride towards Rictor.
“I was afraid all last year,” he told the creature, “Trauma after trauma for me and my friends. The Slendermen threw it in my face and you think I'm scared of you now? You're a repeat covered in mushrooms. This is lies. So stop lying . . .” Shock waves tunneled through the space between Rictor and the monster again, lifting it off its feet . . . “and show me the truth of what you are.”
A groan like trees bending in a gale escaped the man-thing, but Rictor continued his seismic assault. No matter how it struggled, it failed to reclaim its footing, and bits of bark and moss fell from it as its wooden body cracked open. Mud poured out, pooling around the man-thing’s trembling limbs, and with one final push of Rictor’s power, it crumbled to pieces.
The only other times Rictor had drawn so much power from his gift, he’d been supported by his grandparents group of twelve or by Shatterstar’s own gift. Without that support, he was spent and fell to his hands and knees. Everything around him started to darken, and though he feared this meant his body was giving out from pushing past his limits, he smiled.
“At least if I die, I fought back against you, demon. I’ll see you in Xibalba.”
But the underworld wasn’t what awaited him. A small white light shone in the darkness. Rictor crawled towards it, and realized on his approach that it was a small white flower with long, slender, tapered petals. A swamp lily. Rictor agonizingly pulled himself to his feet, briefly stumbling as he stepped in muddy water.
The lily was the only thing growing on a small mound in the middle of the shallow pool, lined all around with towering cypress trees. A swamp? Nowhere Rictor could remember having been, but maybe where Harriet had found the flower, the Florida Everglades.
Before Rictor could reach the lily, a human hand burst up through the ground. Without thinking, Rictor hurried forward to grab it and pull whoever it was from this miry tomb. And it was a man. Just a plain unremarkable white dude. Could have been anyone off the street in Salem Center. When his wandering gaze fell on Rictor, he yelped and staggered back, tearing himself out of the young man’s grip.
He opened his mouth but no words came out, just grunts and sighs.
“Who are you?” Rictor asked. “Are you . . . you can’t be. Are you the thing that brought me here?” The man nodded after a pause. “You’re a man? A human being?” Another nod. “A mutant?” Another pause, then a shake of the head. “You don’t have to be scared of me. Please don’t. I’m sorry if I hurt you. But you did attack me first.”
The man pondered over those words then nodded again, eyes cast down in shame. There was something so innocent and pathetic that Rictor could not help but find some humor. After all that, it was just some guy. “Look, there’s clearly more going on here than either of us knows. But can you send me home? I’ll find out what happened. I know a lot of very smart people. We can figure it out together.” Rictor extended a hand and stepped forward onto the ruined clearing.
“I’m Julio. Mucho gusto.”
“Ted.” The stranger’s voice was raspy from disuse, like this was the first word he had said in years. He stepped forward and took Rictor’s hand in his, and the world burned red.
