No Romance Chapter 24

I just went over this chapter for the first time since I finished writing it, and I'm seeing myself where it needs expansions and revisions. (Mostly in the first half of the Vanasmas climax, methinks.) Just so you guys know, I wrote Act III very, very fast (for me) (41,000 words in about three weeks?) and didn't really have time to give any of it a second look. So keep that in mind as you make your suggestions to me and don't judge my full authorial capacity on this, please, I beg you. Thanks.

-The Establishment

Chapter 24, "Rebellion"

Djetta got his tribe’s attention---which had hitherto been engaged in glorying in love and life---by shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
            It didn’t turn into a panic as one might have thought, and instead a hush fell over the crowd. Djetta, chains jangling, clambered onto a nearby rock for height.
            “Forgive me, there isn’t really a fire,” he began. “But something worse. For much time we have lived in stasis with our former brethren. We respected their space, and they ours. But now they have sent us a message, through The One Chosen By The Gods, the Splotched One, the one who has freed us---a message of war!”
            He pinched the purple seed in his upraised hand, and as the crowd saw it, they let out a collective gasp.

Jack woudn’t have thought a guy like Djetta, so spineless and slimy, could ignite this kind of fire in anyone. But as Jack looked around the crowd and saw the anger in the Cardaccians’ eyes, the anger turning to hatred, the hatred turning to all-consuming rage, he knew this emotion was common to all of them. They all shared the same core underneath their various personalities---a unified malice toward the Johnsons, a desire to regain the shiny they had lost, and a sense of devotion for this mysterious sacred vine that the purple seed had come from. Almost like they were programmed machines, every single one of them, reverting to their most basic instructions. This was who they really were.

“This is the message from the Johnsons! They have discovered the treasure and challenge us to war over it! What say you, my brethren? Shall we fight?”

A resounding roar of approval sounded from the Cardaccians.

“Then let us go!” Djetta cried, and he jumped down from the rock. He then addressed Jack, in a somewhat quieter voice. “O Painted One, my friend Ignadjus informed me you know where our treasure is. Will you tell us?”

            Jack thought it was only fair that the Cardaccians know, as by now Ay, Bee, and Three of the Johnsons had certainly made it through the temple and gone back to report its location to their own people.
            “It’s on a little black island in the middle of a bright green lagoon by Mt. Diabolo. It’s not really an island, but it kind of feels like one. Oh, but you should know, there’s a volcano---”
            But Djetta had once again stopped listening.
            “TO MOUNT DIABOLO!” he screamed as he jumped back onto the rock.
            His people, men and some women, let out several warcries and started moving as one to the west. Jack heard thunder and felt a few raindrops as the group picked up momentum, turning into a stampede. He looked helplessly at Ann who looked helplessly back.
            “What do we do?” she said as darker clouds crept closer to the overhead skies.
            Jack thought for just a second, then appeared to have come to a conclusion, as he started to move with the tail end of the crowd.
            “Come on!” he said. “We have to keep up with the Cardaccians!”
            But Ann didn’t move. “Jack, that would be a complete waste of time.”
            “Why?” he said, turning back.
            “Because they’re headed for a fiery self-destruction!”
            “Oh. You’re quite right. Sad. What a trainwreck this is turning out to be! Although let’s hope there’s no actual trainwreck in this story. What an abrupt ending that would make...”
            “If we want to find a way to stop the volcano we have to get there before they do.”
            “OH. Damb it, that took way too long for me to remember. Where’s that old mine Djetta’s wife showed us?”
            “What?”
            “Just trust me on this. We have to find that mine.”
            Ann racked her brains, found it somewhere in there, told Jack to follow, and ran through the abandoned tents in the direction of the abandoned mine. Lots of abandoned places on this island. Isle. Maybe because, Jack thought, all who previously occupied these places were currently converging on one point.
            They found it a mere five minutes later, a dark and ominous entryway between some massive rocky formations. Jack led the way inside, and found the structure and lighting to be exactly the same as the other end: a couple of flaming braziers lighting a stone passageway. Also like that one, the ground ended a short ways inside, giving way to nothingness all the way down. But...there were no minecarts on this side.
            Jack was about to say “Damb it” when he saw, a little to his right, barely within the illumination of the flickering light of the torches, a stone island about twenty or thirty feet across the gap. Squinting, he could make out a single track and a single cart laid in it. But how to get there?
            Fortunately, a clean and simple solution always accompanies these puzzling problems. In this case, there were two objects also atop that stone island: a barrel and a tall, lone, square stone pillar, about thirty or thirty-five feet high.
            “One can sense the influence of the platformer gods,” Jack mused.
            Without even telling Ann what he was going to do, Jack took Wrench in hand and aimed directly at the barrel. He fired and it exploded, causing Ann, who was looking in another direction and thus unaware of anything that was going on, to shriek, and also the stone pillar to be knocked over. Its top end landed directly on the edge of the ground this side of the pit with a resounding CRASH, which caused Ann to shriek again.
            “Shut up and get across the bridge,” Jack said as he mounted the fallen pillar and began walking very carefully over to the island. Ann hesitated only a moment before following without a single word or frightened look from Annie.
            “Apparently there’s a never-ending pit beneath Rainswept Isle,” Jack remarked, looking over the edge of the stone island. “Somehow.”
            “So now what?” Ann said. “We ride in the cart?”
            “Precisely,” Jack said, smiling. Except Ann couldn’t see it, as they were mostly in darkness.
            He climbed in first.
            “We may have to work together to keep this thing balanced,” he warned. “So I think I need Paula for this job.”
            Ann shot a look at him. He smiled again as she got in behind him.

---

Paula didn’t last long. Many screams and moans and quick little breaths of terror later, Annie spilled out of the car onto solid stone ground much like Jack had done earlier that morning, staying low to ensure she didn’t fall off of it. She crawled to the wall just below the torch and sat against it as she caught her breath and righted her mind.

            Jack, meanwhile, had learned to have fun with it. When the motorized cart pulled in to the middle track at the end of its roller coaster-like journey, he laughed like a child, but then had to catch himself against the stone wall to prevent his dizziness from upending him into the bottomless pit.

When both had properly recovered, they made their way out and onto the boxed-in little cove in the corner of the turquoise lagoon.

“So this is where that leads,” she said.

“Shh,” Jack said softly.

The place was absolutely, unnaturally still. The only semblance of sound came from little raindrops dotting the lagoon, and the increasing wind blowing patterns across the surface. It all had a muted quality to it, however, such that Jack and Ann felt compelled to be just as quiet. The pebbles amid the wet sand crunched every so quietly as they crossed the beach.

Jack could soon hear a noise, a faint harmonica, lone and ghostly, as they took their first steps up the stairs. And as they continued their slow, hesitant ascent, the storm clouds above grew denser and darker, and the day seemed to be turning to night. They also began to perceive a very strong, very strange scent that intensified as the darkness descended around them.

With their last step on the black staircase, they saw a fire’s glow through the trees in the direction of the clearing. In a kind of hypnotized state, they looked at eachother, then looked back at the fire, and made their approach. They entered the clearing, and Jack swore he could hear the sudden strum of an electric guitar joining the haunted sound of the harmonica. Together they wove a song that tested the limits of Jack’s sanity.

And yet, all remained still, and quiet. Not even the three flaming bonfires, arranged in a triangular pattern before the steps of the black stone temple, were crackling. But...no. They were crackling. But every sound Jack heard felt alone, distinctive, as if it were the only sound present, the only sound that could penetrate their state of mind. It was like they were walking in thick new snowfall.

Neither Jack nor Ann said anything, just stood and looked deep into the fire. They had completely forgotten to examine the eruption sequence dashboard. Something else had taken their attention, had taken their minds. They sat down where they stood, Indian style. The music in Jack’s head died away.

            A man came, but they saw not from where. The fires seemed to have summoned him from their depths, and cast three towering, glowering shadows behind him on the temple walls. With their slowed minds, Jack and Ann didn’t recognize him, or even have the capacity to recognize him, but you will. Simple vest over a bare chest, tattoos of a donkey, eagle, and snake, parachute pants, and long dark hair tied in a ponytail trailing down his back.
            “The spirits whispered to me that you’d come here,” Vanasmas said, tall and mighty behind the flames. “They’ve been whispering to me my entire life.”
            He sprinkled some kind of powder onto one of the fires from his hand. The chaotic winds snapped the flames back and forth (though the light rainfall had no effect on them). Vanasmas frowned as the powder was blown away by the wind before it could fall into the fire. He checked a pouch hanging from his waist and frowned some more. He grit his teeth and turned back to Jack and Ann
            “I’ve been waiting quite a while. You two took far too long. I’m almost out of Super Peyote.”
            He went to another of the fires, took a pinch of powder from his pouch, and planned its placement carefully. He felt for the wind, then, anticipating, let go so the wind would carry it into the flames. But at the last second, the wind changed directions, and more of the powder floated away. Vanasmas cursed under his breath.
            “Fine,” he said. “I’ll check the stupid book.”
            He sat down on the steps behind the fires and opened a huge, red-glowing tome on his lap. He started flipping through the pages. He stopped on a certain page, looked closely, then started flipping again. Again he stopped, putting his finger to a paragraph, then cursed again.

“May Monty swallow you and eat you and digest you for a thousand years!” he said to the glowing red book. Then he stopped at another page. “But wait, this looks familiar!”

But no, it didn’t.

“Curse you for changing languages!” he said. “May Swiftfast pluck you out of the water with his talons!”

            Jack and Ann, once sitting patiently, started fidgeting and looking around, first at each other, then at the jungle and the dark sky above them, and the light rain falling down. The water, though not concentrated enough to douse the fires, was exactly what they needed to rinse the peyote from their minds. But it was a gradual process.

Vanasmas rose and threw the book on the ground before descending the temple steps very slowly, very purposefully. “It does not matter,” he said. “Jack McDowell, you hero. I know you have what I am looking for. The spirits have told me.”

“Like you need the map anymore,” Jack said groggily, then he and Ann started giggling in a very weird, but pleasant, way.
            “Not the map, you fool. The---”

“You’re already here! Why would you need the map?” Ann said with a burst of laughter that Jack joined in on.

“Fire! Look in the fire!” Vanasmas said frantically. “Breathe in the fire! The smoke, I mean! I mean, the scent! Breathe in the air all around you! Breathe!”

            “You want me to throw the map in the fire? Righto, boss,” said Jack, and Ann giggled some more.
            Though the, ah, disordered mental state of Jack and Ann was wearing off, it still had some effect on them. Just thought you should know.
            Jack took the map-wrapped scepter off his back and unrolled it. He took the cloth map in hand and, grinning ridiculously at Ann, tossed it into the nearest flame, where it ignited and curled in on itself as it burned. They both burst out laughing again. But Vanasmas didn’t care anymore. His eyes were drawn to somewhere else---to the faint green glow emanating from the now-exposed scepter.
            “You---you do have it!” Vanasmas said, gaping. “You---may Burro Bill kick at you with his powerful hind legs!”
            “Oh, and I suppose you chose the book?” Jack said in a bit of a drunken voice while Ann tittered.
            “That ridiculous Alligator Ay picked it up before I could get the Elder Weapon,” snarled Vanasmas. “And now the cursed thing has changed languages.”
            “It’s ‘cause you’re a villain,” Jack said, starting to sober up and gain control of his faculties. “You’re not allowed to read the Great Big Book of Everything if you’re going to use it for villainous purposes. It won’t tell you whatever you need to know at any point of time. Not this late in the story.”
            “But the spirits are on my side!” he shouted, his joined eyebrows looking like a unibrow in his fury. The shadows against the temple wall rose exponentially higher as he rose himself up to his full height and stretched his arms toward the heavens. “And I will prove it to you! I summon the fiercest god of all! From the fire, from the flames! Come forth, Carl Sagan!”
            And Carl Sagan, the gargantuan, magnificent Super Tiger, came trotting out from the darkness of the jungle, casting his own monstrous triple shadow behind the bonfires.

“Carl Sagan! Take the Sonic Scepter away from that man!” Vanasmas seethed, pointing at Jack. “With this sacred treasure”---indicating the scepter---”and with this secret of science”---indicating Carl Sagan---”animal becomes like man, and man like the gods! This is my DESTINY!”

            With these final words Vanasmas stretched his arms up again, and the flames rose with them, becoming, for a second, great pillars of fire, multiplying the myriad dancing shadows and temporarily forcing Jack and Ann to draw away with just a degree of fear.

And as the fires fell back, Carl Sagan leapt across the great center flame, mouth open, teeth bared, and landed in the middle of the triangular arrangement of the fires. And for a moment, Jack’s courage faltered, and Ann despaired---

            But then Carl Sagan flopped down on the ground in front of them and started rolling around on his back. Ann’s face brightened and she crawled over to him to scratch his belly. Jack looked up at Vanasmas in fierce triumph.
            “Where are your spirits now?” he taunted.
            But then a voice sounded in Jack’s head.
            We are here, it said.
            It was a familiar voice. He had just heard it earlier today. In fact, he had been hearing it subconsciously his entire life.
            Take the scepter now.

Jack obeyed without hesitation. He took the Sonic Scepter in his hand.

            This time it was Vanasmas who feared, who despaired, who looked utterly defeated. His open mouth had turned downward in something of an exaggerated, horror-struck frown. The transition from righteous fury to stricken, cowering terror had been nearly instantaneous.
            Jack raised the scepter, pointing it to the sky. The night-like darkness lifted, revealing an intense array of storm clouds overhead. The rain suddenly poured down harder, as if a giant umbrella had just been closed and put away. The steaming bonfires were gradually extinguished.
            He turned the scepter on Vanasmas. Vanasmas, shocked and afraid, was suddenly enveloped in the same kind of green glow the scepter gave off. It raised him off the ground and locked him within its gaseous aura. Though he could still move his limbs, he couldn’t leave the cage.
            “Well, huh,” Jack said, looking more pointedly at the scepter. “Impressive.”
            Ann sat where she was, motionless, looking on the scene with cautious, uncertain eyes. Carl Sagan, curled up near her, was in a similar state.
            Jack approached the floating Vanasmas.
            “Can you share with me what you’re doing and what you’ve been doing?” Jack said. “I’m in the mood for a good story. Be as bold and passionate as you want. Whatever you say and however you say it is probably not going to change anything, but I want to see what’s really at the heart of this whole conflict.”

Inside the cage-like aura, Vanasmas seemed wrong-footed, even though he wasn’t standing on anything. “Uh...okay,” he said, with some wary consternation.

            “It’ll just add to the atmosphere,” Jack said brightly.

“Fine. Here it is,” Vanasmas said, turning cold. “I have devoted my life to finding the treasures of my people, the treasures of the old gods. When the spirits began whispering to me at a young age, I knew that my destiny was to join those gods. To become as they are. And I knew the secret to that was to find their treasures, take them up in my own hand and command the world, the elements, the people themselves. I would take their weapons and instruments under the guise of recovering their treasure for them and thus become their equals, their peers. They could do nothing to stop me. Nothing at all. I had the spirits on my side.”

He touched his hands to his tattoos.

            “Except...the gods sent you. You, the hero, you, the true weapon. In my panic I ordered you killed, and accidentally played my hand. But I knew if I could stop you, I could stop them. So I tried again. And again. When I determined you could not be killed, I devised a stratagem with you as the fulcrum. Using you and your Chosen status and your innate abilities, I tricked you into finding the treasure for me. You were the only one who could do it. Neither myself nor anyone else would ever able to find it, ever since it all crashed here decades earlier. The treasure of the gods could only be found by the Chosen of the gods...or by anyone who had the map. For some reason the gods looked on that map as a legal document. It was fair game. No sacred barriers. Anyone who had the map could get the treasure. And before you came to this island, that’s what I intended to do.”
            The fair-minded look he had developed throughout that paragraph turned to a bitter but sly, plotting one.

“I knew Golbez knew where the gold was, but he never fully trusted me. Even so, I was able to learn about the map that had disappeared 30 years ago. The thief had been an employee of Golbez Industries, and went and got himself reformed. But he still was pleased when I contacted him and told him I wanted to use the map to destroy Golbez Industries, and Golbez himself. So he sent the map through one of his new friends. The friend’s name...was Eli Noyce. A legendary hunter of sacred relics and ancient artifacts and secret treasures. And he was coming here to give me the map and help me find it. I don’t think he never really knew what I was. I’m sure he thought I was just a friendly native who could show him the way. But...we never did meet, thanks to that plane crash.”

Vanasmas stared past Jack, not at him. He seemed to be pondering something. Then the stare moved back to Jack, and he pointed between them.

“We did, though. And I knew you had the map. Right when I heard of you. So I threatened you, bribed you, then tricked you. And I won that battle. Now I’ve found the gold and the temple. But neither of these matter to me. They were just means to an end. I don’t care about Golbez’s stupid gold. I don’t care about the treasure one whit. My tribe can go to hell, and so can the Cards. This is my journey. My destiny. The spirits have told me.” His eyes grew crazy. “And I will obtain that scepter of yours. The Sonic Scepter---The Magic Staff That Does Whatever The Story Requires! With this greatest weapon I can write my own stories, craft my own characters, weave my own worlds. When it is in my hand, I will be as the gods. The gods that seek to write, edit, and revise all our lives as they see fit. With the help of the great spirits, I will be as they are: A veritable god.”

Jack looked him in the eye. “So you’re the reason I’m here.”

“The spirits told me you’d be here, at this temple. While it might have been a trap, it was also the last opportunity I had to confront you alone.”

“No, I mean here on this island. I’m here on this stupid adventure...to stop you.”

Vanasmas said nothing.

“I suppose I knew that all along...but only in generalities. Now I know the specific reason. What has essentially become the literal purpose of my life. To keep this”---he indicated the scepter in his hand---”out of your hands.”

Jack was annoyed and underwhelmed at his discovery.

Vanasmas snorted. “The scepter is power incarnate. It can read minds, it can telepathically lift anything up, it can bind and imprison, it can shoot a laser, it can ruin and destroy, it can heal wounds, it can save lives. It can do anything you need it to, to tell the story you want to tell. We don’t have to be enemies, Hero. We are clearly after the same thing. Freedom. Godlike freedom.”

            The staff also has the power to disintegrate things into a million or more pieces, we said.
            Jack heard. And he relayed.
            “While this can save lives, Running Rat, it can also end them. That’s what the gods are telling me right now.”
            Vanasmas’s eyes widened, his pulse and breathing visibly quickened, but he said nothing.
            But clearly something other than the thought of death was going on inside Jack’s head. Something other than the words we were telling him. Something that, for some reason, we could not see.
            End him. Kill him. Destroy him with the staff, and your task will be complete.
            “So...you’re the reason I’m here,” Jack said again. “I keep coming back to that. All for this one little moment. I should think I’d want to kill you for that. For being the reason I had to go through all this ridiculousness. But...hmm. Maybe that’s the point...”
            “The spirits are here, Jack McDowell. They are whispering to me right now.”
            “Oh? And what are they saying?” Jack said distractedly, preoccupied with something else.
            “They are telling me to tell you that I can offer you freedom. I can offer you release. Just like I did when we first met in that prison. If you free me, I will free you.”
            We aren’t saying that last part. Most assuredly not. But in him you can find your salvation, your liberation from this island. It is in his death that you will truly be released.
            “They’re telling me something different, Vanasmas.”
            Vanasmas paused inside his green glowy-cagey thingy. “Impossible. The spirits whisper only to me. Burro Bill, Swiftfast, and Monty have chosen me.”
            Now is the time to tell him who we are. But first, you must know.
            And we told him. We told Jack. He listened. Then he started pacing back and forth in front of the floating Vanasmas.
            “See, the problem here, Vanasmas, is that the spirits whose authority you claim are the gods. You’re the one who’s been manipulated this whole time. The gods have been on my side for about as long as they’ve been whispering to you. And for the first time I know their names. They are William, Eagle Eyes, and Montgomery. Odd names for gods, but, well...”

Vanasmas’s eyes bugged and his jaw dropped with the weight of an anvil from Looney Tunes. It looked similarly cartoonish.

            Jack continued on. “They brought you and me here together, today, so I could destroy you, so I could keep you in their place for them, so I could shove you off the tower you were using to attempt to climb into the heavens. But if they brought me here for that...that means I’m being manipulated, too...Hmm. This is a dilemma, no doubt.”
            He kept this pensive manner far too long for us to be comfortable. Then his face cracked a grin. He had reached a conclusion. And we knew what he was about to do.
            We prepared the lightning.

“It is my theory that true gods grant choice. So I will make one, right now. The choice that they don’t want me to make. I think I have lived my whole life for this moment. I’ve been groomed, prepared. But not in the way they intended. In doing what they’ve done, they’ve bred an enemy, not a friend. Their tool, their instrument, their weapon, is now turning against them. Vanasmas, I will let you live. You are not to blame for me being on this isle, like they’ve been trying to tell me. They are.the ones responsible.”

Jack, as foolish mortals do, faced heavenward.

“So I rebel!” he shouted, shaking the Sonic Scepter at us.

Lightning struck at that moment---but it hit the scepter! The lightning was absorbed.

Jack laughed.  

“The power to repel a god! That is mighty,” Jack said fiercely, angrily, still gazing into the storm. “And if I keep this for my own? What can you do then?”

After a second so totally silent that Jack thought his eardrums had exploded passed, a resounding CRACK of thunder sounded at the same instant as Jack saw lightning strike the ground literally right next to Ann. She was thrown screaming twenty feet away, and all that remained where she had sat was Carl Sagan, electrified but very much alive---a pulsing glow throbbed around him: just as the scepter had done, he had absorbed the bolt of lightning.

And even though no one had been hurt, Jack got the message: Annie was vulnerable, and he couldn’t protect her forever. And he realized that in some way, somehow, he cared for her enough to let go of the scepter---let go of the power. It clattered to the ground.

But then with a rising roar, Jack picked it up and threw it---past Vanasmas and into the open temple door. “You aren’t true gods!” he cried. “If you’re threatened by a little tool like that!”

The temple door, sensing the motion of something entering, slid shut.

“Now no one can ever go into that temple again!” he said. “Now it’s closed off forever, and with it the scepter and the weapon, because that door won’t open unless someone solves that first puzzle. Are you happy now?!”

The power of the scepter that had lifted and imprisoned Vanasmas faded away, and he was lowered to the ground

“Dynamite can be a very helpful thing,” Vanasmas said simply.

“I doubt it will work on something like that,” Jack said, his head bowed and his rage subsiding. The pouring rain had soaked them all, and his wet hair hung down around his face.

            Then a booming voice resounded in the air, loud and majestic as the thunder.
            “Jack. You have displeased us. You betrayed your purpose in not striking down Vanasmas, whose villainous and prideful ambition we have tracked since he was a child. He has tried to bring beasts up to the glory of a god, and you nearly let him take the divine instrument we have worked so hard for many generations to keep safe. It is only meant to be in the hands of a chosen few. And though you were chosen for the duty of protecting that instrument, you are not among the few destined to wield it. You have gone contrary to our will, fully knowing that there would be consequences. Furthermore, you rebelled against us even when there was no purpose to that rebellion. Vanasmas’s tribe has been listening in the trees the whole time. They know of his own personal ambition, that he meant for the treasure to be for him alone, when they thought he was trying to bring glory to the entire tribe. His fate will be up to them, and though it should have remained in our hands, it will be the same as if you had killed him with the scepter. Your choice changed nothing but your own fate. You have failed us, Jack McDowell. And you will be punished accordingly as the gods confer.”
            Jack, growing more numb with each word from the gods, looked into the trees with deadened eyes. Now that night had drifted away, he could see the tribe of Johnsons, Treike and Three Seas in the forefront. All were armed, crossbows and compound bows drawn and ready for warfare.