The Cerfcum child, Adam and the human child, Paul, grew up together and were very close. Over the next ten years, their family grew with two brothers and a baby sister. With the war over, Reed resumed his previous occupation as a mercenary, and every summer he took his family to some fabulous destination around the federation. But when Adam and Paul reached the age of twelve, Reed’s happy home life hit a ripple. Adam’s Cerfcum heritage asserted itself; his resonance became active. Reed could no longer put off telling Adam about his beginnings. For Adam and Paul, certain things in their history books were suddenly very close to home.
It was a heart wrenching process, but Reed explained everything he could and answered all of their questions to the best of his abilities; he even took them to see the man he believed to be Adam’s real father. The man had been living in an institution ever since being brought back from the war.
As soon as Adam saw the man, a tenuous and totally unexpected connection was established between them; it was this connection that allowed the man to throw off the dead queen’s last shroud of control and begin to recover.
When the boys were old enough to enter high school, Reed enrolled them in the mercenary high school and extra curricular activities were contingent on good grades. Both Adam and Paul got part time jobs in order to pay for some of them. Adam used his money to pay for simulator time; he had learned to fly and he couldn’t get enough of it. Paul hoped to buy a car with his earnings.
By the time Adam was fourteen, he had earned the name ‘Stress Test’. Where once, the simulator technicians had been required to set aside time to run stress tests on the simulators, now, they used Adam’s flights to run those tests, as a reward, they let him fly for free whenever they ran their tests, and he'd fly anything they asked him to.
One evening, Adam’s flight was witnessed by a lieutenant from the base and he was truly amazed at the skill Adam showed at such a young age. After watching a highly uneven dog fight, the lieutenant offered to pay for Adam’s time if he would fly a chopper for him. Other pilots flying the mission were delighted to have Adam’s participation and because of it, they decided to increase the danger level. About half way through the simulation, the mission went very wrong; someone was shooting at Adam and they wanted him dead. Death wasn’t an option in any of the simulators, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be knocked out.
When Adam woke, it was to find himself still in a simulator but it was a ground simulator and he had no idea where it was. His tormentor looked like his father, but he figured it wasn’t true; there wouldn’t be any need for the simulator if it were. In an effort to turn Adam against the man who had raised him, Adam’s tormentor began to torture him, punishing him with painful simulator death every time Adam refused to use his magic against the image of Reed.
As the torture tested his endurance to the limit, Adam reached for the only help he could think of. He reached for the man who he had had such a sketchy connection to once before. He called to him, called for help every time his head was clear enough to do it, and it worked. The man was able to find Reed and lead him to where Adam was held, but it wasn’t before Adam’s resistance broke down.
Reed had taught his son well though; using logic, Adam planned his attack. He was accustomed to using his status magic, but that was as far as he could go. With no Cerfcum to draw on, his elemental magic was only so many words. The simulator could copy it after a fashion, but when Adam turned his magic on his attacker, he found the experience overpowering and he wanted so much more. He managed to suck the magic right out of the man. Wesley’s efforts to turn Adam against his old enemy had backfired. With a full array of magic, Reed now needed to teach Adam how and when to use it.
Over the next two years, word got around about what happened to Wesley, and now that there was no more bug threat, some guardians wanted to be relieved of their burden and Adam's magic began to take on a whole new dimension. Word also got around about Adam’s prowess in the simulator and he was hired to test them.
He was working on a new simulator on the base one day when the base commander was talked into allowing him to fly a real jet; it was a trainer, but it was a real plane and he would be flying in a real sky. With the gentle encouragement of a flight instructor, Adam flew his heart out all the way up until this blue tarp-like thing draped itself across their canopy and then was ripped away by their speed.
Curious, Adam circled, and then he decided to go after it. He was afraid he knew exactly what it was, and he was right; it was a Cerfcum male and he couldn’t just let it die, not like that.
Over the next several weeks, Adam and the Cerfcum male tried to understand each other, but there was very little common ground to help. When it came time for him to leave, Adam saw to it that he made it away; it was a logical decision. Keeping him hostage, or prisoner, could only entice another to come after him and the next Cerfcum might not be so amiable.
After graduating from high school, Adam joined the Air Force Academy and Paul went into the Marines. At the academy, Adam learned how to be an officer and a leader. He learned how to be the leader his father was trying to make him, but simulator troops already knew how follow a guardian, these young men didn’t. After witnessing how much damage Adam could do with his magic, the Commandant of the academy ordered him to keep it a secret, but that didn't mean he couldn't still carve his men into an engine of destruction.
Working with the troops at his permanent party wasn’t so easy. Adam was a young academy graduate and he looked younger than he was. Enlisted soldiers were reluctant to take a kid, and a cadet, seriously - they quickly learned the error of their way.
Two years later, Adam detected a vibration in the simulator he used and he recommended the bearings be replaced. Two days after that the vibration was worse, but the tech told him that the simulator had just been overhauled. Five days later, as Adam was taking off for a training exercise, the bearings froze up and the cockpit was launched through the simulator wall. It was nearly an hour before Adam’s broken body could be extricated from the smashed cockpit. After hours of surgery, and healing spells from the hospital guardian, Adam was still going to die; the damage was just too much. There was, however, one more thing to try and it was his brother, Paul, who was able to coerce him to try it. With every dimension of magic Adam had absorbed from guardians willing to be free of it, Adam’s magic had grown in strength, and by now his magic was very strong even though his body was so weak. His own healing spell just might be able to accomplish what the hospital guardian’s spell hadn’t.
Four months later, Adam was still in the hospital. His magic was healing him, but it would be a long time before he would be well again. It was during this time that another Cerfcum male came to find Adam. His queen mother wanted to rectify what she saw as an insult to Adam, her brother. She wanted to offer him a queen, but Adam was unwilling to accept such a thing. Her second offer, therefore, was wings; the Cerfcum male was made to fly his queen to her new nest and Adam had no wings. But Adam was broken; he didn’t believe that he would ever fly again. Then the queen had yet another idea; if Adam was broken, she would heal him and once he was whole again, perhaps Adam would be willing to accept her gift. The healing was incredibly powerful and accomplished in moments what was going to take years otherwise.
Adam returned to duty as soon as the doctors cleared him and he was even able to get back in a simulator - he had to - his need to fly was a very real thing.
A few months later, Adam was transferred to space duty. He didn’t like his new ship; it was sluggish and handled heavily, but it was top of the line. For the first year, the new men flew short patrols that would return them to the ground nearly every day. It was during that first year that Adam was able to test the new ship to its limit, and he found it wanting as it lack of maneuverability caused him to take too much damage. He was forced to try to fly the thing like a glider all the way to the ground. If it weren’t for his magic, he would have burned up on reentry. As it was, his landing was hard enough and he woke up in a hospital again - he hated hospitals.
When he was healed enough, he went back to his apartment, but it would be some time before he was well enough to go back to work. To fill his time, he found a program that would allow him to toy with the design of his ship. One day, he saw a truck pulling into one of the hangers and on its trailers was the remains of his ship. If he thought seeing the simulator after having survived that crash was hard, seeing the smashed and torn ship he had just flown was even worse. He was shaken so badly that he found himself on his knees.
A young woman named Cheyenne picked him up and saw him to his home. Adam had recovered from his shock by the next morning and he took the opportunity over breakfast to get to know his rescuer a little better. Over the next couple weeks, Cheyenne helped Adam heal and they became friends as well as lovers.
Back in space, Adam discovered that someone had taken the programs he had played with to heart and they had made the modification to his ship - it no longer handled like a whale.
It was now time for Adam’s squad to rotate to long-range patrols, escorting freighters and transports to their destinations. During the long idle hours, Adams magic became known, and as a reward for making it through their first year of long-range patrols without loosing a single man, Adam’s friends painted his ship to represent some of his magic.
It was a mistake to mark his ship so distinctly. Pirates, no longer wanting to take the damage Adam dealt out, singled out his squad for a mass attack. After the battle, Adam’s disabled ship was knocked off to float away into space alone.
When Paul heard about this, he did the only thing he could; he went after his brother. With Cheyenne refusing to be left behind, he rounded up the one person who had been able to find him one other time.
The connection was still good, but it was sporadic at best. By the third contact, they were at least headed in the right direction, and then they picked up a guide. Their guide, a Cerfcum male with wide bat-like wings, led them to a planet and then he led them into the heart of the nest. There, they found Adam. He was in bad shape; nothing had been done to heal the damage he had received in his fight.
Cheyenne and Paul prompted Adam to use his healing spells and he began to recover. It took a few days, but as soon as they could, they started to leave. The queen wasn’t willing to let them walk out. She was still determined to give Adam some sort of gift, to atone for the slight their mother had dealt him by creating him without planning a mating for him. It would be some time before they fully understood what it was the queen had given him.
They headed directly home, but Paul’s return wasn’t to be uneventful. He’d gone AWOL to find his brother, and now it was time to pay the piper.
After his brother’s arrest, Adam had to go back to his own unit to prove that he still lived, and to get leave to attend his brothers hearing. That accomplished, he went home.
The next morning, Reed called with the disturbing news, that Paul had apparently handed himself over to the wrong MPs; he was missing. It was Adam’s turn to find his brother, but Reed wasn’t about to let him go haring off like Paul had done - with no plan and no backup.
The wait while Reed gathered information, was grueling for Adam, but they were off soon enough, following the most likely target, though they couldn’t find any sure proof of Paul’s presence on board. Forced to pause at every likely landing point along their route, they could only go so fast. They were close to the end of their choices when Adam got the first indication of trouble ahead. He heard the hiss of a Cerfcum queen in his head.
They found the ship they were looking for at the end of the line, but it was empty, so wasn’t the town adjoining the landing strip. It wasn’t until they explored closer to the center of the town that they found something none of them had expected - a Cerfcum hole, weathered and seemingly abandoned. Abandoned until they spotted lookouts - children - the queen was using the town’s inhabitants as if they were her own hatchlings.
Entry into the nest wasn’t really all that difficult when compared to a healthy Cerfcum nest, but it wasn’t easy either, what with the desire to preserves the lives of the human puppets they encountered, one of which was Paul - they had found him.
The progeny of the Cerfcum queen were all twisted and deformed. The colony mined uranium and the radiation had proved deadly to the unprotected Cerfcum. The humans hadn’t been exposed to the radiation, and aside from being abused and half starved, they were still as healthy as could be expected.
Getting Paul away from the Cerfcum queen wasn’t easy, but they did it, putting her and her deformed horde out of their misery.
When they left the planet, Adam named it ‘Twisted Sister’. Everyone thought he named it that because it was one of two planets in that solar system and it was radioactive, but he had actually named it after the Cerfcum queen - his twisted sister - after all, this entire generation of queens were his sisters.
Their journey back to Earth went quickly, and Adam and Paul’s mother welcomed her family back with many, many hugs and no few tears. Paul’s court martial was merely a formality as all the charges were dropped. He could have continued his career with the Marines, but opted for a discharge instead. Adam too left the Air Force and together they became mercenaries like their father.
It was a heart wrenching process, but Reed explained everything he could and answered all of their questions to the best of his abilities; he even took them to see the man he believed to be Adam’s real father. The man had been living in an institution ever since being brought back from the war.
As soon as Adam saw the man, a tenuous and totally unexpected connection was established between them; it was this connection that allowed the man to throw off the dead queen’s last shroud of control and begin to recover.
When the boys were old enough to enter high school, Reed enrolled them in the mercenary high school and extra curricular activities were contingent on good grades. Both Adam and Paul got part time jobs in order to pay for some of them. Adam used his money to pay for simulator time; he had learned to fly and he couldn’t get enough of it. Paul hoped to buy a car with his earnings.
By the time Adam was fourteen, he had earned the name ‘Stress Test’. Where once, the simulator technicians had been required to set aside time to run stress tests on the simulators, now, they used Adam’s flights to run those tests, as a reward, they let him fly for free whenever they ran their tests, and he'd fly anything they asked him to.
One evening, Adam’s flight was witnessed by a lieutenant from the base and he was truly amazed at the skill Adam showed at such a young age. After watching a highly uneven dog fight, the lieutenant offered to pay for Adam’s time if he would fly a chopper for him. Other pilots flying the mission were delighted to have Adam’s participation and because of it, they decided to increase the danger level. About half way through the simulation, the mission went very wrong; someone was shooting at Adam and they wanted him dead. Death wasn’t an option in any of the simulators, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be knocked out.
When Adam woke, it was to find himself still in a simulator but it was a ground simulator and he had no idea where it was. His tormentor looked like his father, but he figured it wasn’t true; there wouldn’t be any need for the simulator if it were. In an effort to turn Adam against the man who had raised him, Adam’s tormentor began to torture him, punishing him with painful simulator death every time Adam refused to use his magic against the image of Reed.
As the torture tested his endurance to the limit, Adam reached for the only help he could think of. He reached for the man who he had had such a sketchy connection to once before. He called to him, called for help every time his head was clear enough to do it, and it worked. The man was able to find Reed and lead him to where Adam was held, but it wasn’t before Adam’s resistance broke down.
Reed had taught his son well though; using logic, Adam planned his attack. He was accustomed to using his status magic, but that was as far as he could go. With no Cerfcum to draw on, his elemental magic was only so many words. The simulator could copy it after a fashion, but when Adam turned his magic on his attacker, he found the experience overpowering and he wanted so much more. He managed to suck the magic right out of the man. Wesley’s efforts to turn Adam against his old enemy had backfired. With a full array of magic, Reed now needed to teach Adam how and when to use it.
Over the next two years, word got around about what happened to Wesley, and now that there was no more bug threat, some guardians wanted to be relieved of their burden and Adam's magic began to take on a whole new dimension. Word also got around about Adam’s prowess in the simulator and he was hired to test them.
He was working on a new simulator on the base one day when the base commander was talked into allowing him to fly a real jet; it was a trainer, but it was a real plane and he would be flying in a real sky. With the gentle encouragement of a flight instructor, Adam flew his heart out all the way up until this blue tarp-like thing draped itself across their canopy and then was ripped away by their speed.
Curious, Adam circled, and then he decided to go after it. He was afraid he knew exactly what it was, and he was right; it was a Cerfcum male and he couldn’t just let it die, not like that.
Over the next several weeks, Adam and the Cerfcum male tried to understand each other, but there was very little common ground to help. When it came time for him to leave, Adam saw to it that he made it away; it was a logical decision. Keeping him hostage, or prisoner, could only entice another to come after him and the next Cerfcum might not be so amiable.
After graduating from high school, Adam joined the Air Force Academy and Paul went into the Marines. At the academy, Adam learned how to be an officer and a leader. He learned how to be the leader his father was trying to make him, but simulator troops already knew how follow a guardian, these young men didn’t. After witnessing how much damage Adam could do with his magic, the Commandant of the academy ordered him to keep it a secret, but that didn't mean he couldn't still carve his men into an engine of destruction.
Working with the troops at his permanent party wasn’t so easy. Adam was a young academy graduate and he looked younger than he was. Enlisted soldiers were reluctant to take a kid, and a cadet, seriously - they quickly learned the error of their way.
Two years later, Adam detected a vibration in the simulator he used and he recommended the bearings be replaced. Two days after that the vibration was worse, but the tech told him that the simulator had just been overhauled. Five days later, as Adam was taking off for a training exercise, the bearings froze up and the cockpit was launched through the simulator wall. It was nearly an hour before Adam’s broken body could be extricated from the smashed cockpit. After hours of surgery, and healing spells from the hospital guardian, Adam was still going to die; the damage was just too much. There was, however, one more thing to try and it was his brother, Paul, who was able to coerce him to try it. With every dimension of magic Adam had absorbed from guardians willing to be free of it, Adam’s magic had grown in strength, and by now his magic was very strong even though his body was so weak. His own healing spell just might be able to accomplish what the hospital guardian’s spell hadn’t.
Four months later, Adam was still in the hospital. His magic was healing him, but it would be a long time before he would be well again. It was during this time that another Cerfcum male came to find Adam. His queen mother wanted to rectify what she saw as an insult to Adam, her brother. She wanted to offer him a queen, but Adam was unwilling to accept such a thing. Her second offer, therefore, was wings; the Cerfcum male was made to fly his queen to her new nest and Adam had no wings. But Adam was broken; he didn’t believe that he would ever fly again. Then the queen had yet another idea; if Adam was broken, she would heal him and once he was whole again, perhaps Adam would be willing to accept her gift. The healing was incredibly powerful and accomplished in moments what was going to take years otherwise.
Adam returned to duty as soon as the doctors cleared him and he was even able to get back in a simulator - he had to - his need to fly was a very real thing.
A few months later, Adam was transferred to space duty. He didn’t like his new ship; it was sluggish and handled heavily, but it was top of the line. For the first year, the new men flew short patrols that would return them to the ground nearly every day. It was during that first year that Adam was able to test the new ship to its limit, and he found it wanting as it lack of maneuverability caused him to take too much damage. He was forced to try to fly the thing like a glider all the way to the ground. If it weren’t for his magic, he would have burned up on reentry. As it was, his landing was hard enough and he woke up in a hospital again - he hated hospitals.
When he was healed enough, he went back to his apartment, but it would be some time before he was well enough to go back to work. To fill his time, he found a program that would allow him to toy with the design of his ship. One day, he saw a truck pulling into one of the hangers and on its trailers was the remains of his ship. If he thought seeing the simulator after having survived that crash was hard, seeing the smashed and torn ship he had just flown was even worse. He was shaken so badly that he found himself on his knees.
A young woman named Cheyenne picked him up and saw him to his home. Adam had recovered from his shock by the next morning and he took the opportunity over breakfast to get to know his rescuer a little better. Over the next couple weeks, Cheyenne helped Adam heal and they became friends as well as lovers.
Back in space, Adam discovered that someone had taken the programs he had played with to heart and they had made the modification to his ship - it no longer handled like a whale.
It was now time for Adam’s squad to rotate to long-range patrols, escorting freighters and transports to their destinations. During the long idle hours, Adams magic became known, and as a reward for making it through their first year of long-range patrols without loosing a single man, Adam’s friends painted his ship to represent some of his magic.
It was a mistake to mark his ship so distinctly. Pirates, no longer wanting to take the damage Adam dealt out, singled out his squad for a mass attack. After the battle, Adam’s disabled ship was knocked off to float away into space alone.
When Paul heard about this, he did the only thing he could; he went after his brother. With Cheyenne refusing to be left behind, he rounded up the one person who had been able to find him one other time.
The connection was still good, but it was sporadic at best. By the third contact, they were at least headed in the right direction, and then they picked up a guide. Their guide, a Cerfcum male with wide bat-like wings, led them to a planet and then he led them into the heart of the nest. There, they found Adam. He was in bad shape; nothing had been done to heal the damage he had received in his fight.
Cheyenne and Paul prompted Adam to use his healing spells and he began to recover. It took a few days, but as soon as they could, they started to leave. The queen wasn’t willing to let them walk out. She was still determined to give Adam some sort of gift, to atone for the slight their mother had dealt him by creating him without planning a mating for him. It would be some time before they fully understood what it was the queen had given him.
They headed directly home, but Paul’s return wasn’t to be uneventful. He’d gone AWOL to find his brother, and now it was time to pay the piper.
After his brother’s arrest, Adam had to go back to his own unit to prove that he still lived, and to get leave to attend his brothers hearing. That accomplished, he went home.
The next morning, Reed called with the disturbing news, that Paul had apparently handed himself over to the wrong MPs; he was missing. It was Adam’s turn to find his brother, but Reed wasn’t about to let him go haring off like Paul had done - with no plan and no backup.
The wait while Reed gathered information, was grueling for Adam, but they were off soon enough, following the most likely target, though they couldn’t find any sure proof of Paul’s presence on board. Forced to pause at every likely landing point along their route, they could only go so fast. They were close to the end of their choices when Adam got the first indication of trouble ahead. He heard the hiss of a Cerfcum queen in his head.
They found the ship they were looking for at the end of the line, but it was empty, so wasn’t the town adjoining the landing strip. It wasn’t until they explored closer to the center of the town that they found something none of them had expected - a Cerfcum hole, weathered and seemingly abandoned. Abandoned until they spotted lookouts - children - the queen was using the town’s inhabitants as if they were her own hatchlings.
Entry into the nest wasn’t really all that difficult when compared to a healthy Cerfcum nest, but it wasn’t easy either, what with the desire to preserves the lives of the human puppets they encountered, one of which was Paul - they had found him.
The progeny of the Cerfcum queen were all twisted and deformed. The colony mined uranium and the radiation had proved deadly to the unprotected Cerfcum. The humans hadn’t been exposed to the radiation, and aside from being abused and half starved, they were still as healthy as could be expected.
Getting Paul away from the Cerfcum queen wasn’t easy, but they did it, putting her and her deformed horde out of their misery.
When they left the planet, Adam named it ‘Twisted Sister’. Everyone thought he named it that because it was one of two planets in that solar system and it was radioactive, but he had actually named it after the Cerfcum queen - his twisted sister - after all, this entire generation of queens were his sisters.
Their journey back to Earth went quickly, and Adam and Paul’s mother welcomed her family back with many, many hugs and no few tears. Paul’s court martial was merely a formality as all the charges were dropped. He could have continued his career with the Marines, but opted for a discharge instead. Adam too left the Air Force and together they became mercenaries like their father.
RSS Feed
