There is no way you actually convinced them to help you with something like this. No way.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City – Iathea
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 32, physically about 21
Current residence: Arcadis Settlement, Iathea
Final Word Count: 821 words
 

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It’s been a year and I’m still trying to come to terms with everything.

From the get-go, I was fairly certain that she’d try something. She spent way too much time looking at Jase with sickening googly eyes and when it was just me on our balcony, hanging things to dry, it was like I was the worst thing ever and all I got out of her were death glares. To the few people who know me, they know how very much so keep-to-myself I am. They know that I much prefer to just do my own thing and spend my time with the people I do know. I’m not outgoing and having to deal with people giving me the stink-eye for no reason isn’t easy for me to deal with.

About a year ago, though, she somehow managed to convince some other guy to help her get the ‘guy of her dreams’, who so happens to be my years-long partner and the man I will be spending the rest of my life with. This is a little tidbit that she seemed, up until that point, unable to wrap her mind around. It isn’t as though Jase and I are constantly smooching in public, so I suppose it could be excused but we shared the same house. We kissed on the balcony before he headed off to help others out there, we kissed when he came back. The little list goes on, we were, and still are, affectionate towards one another when we are around the house and as she was our neighbour, it was very in-her-face for how much time she spent staring our way.

When the guy first came up to me, I was confused. I’d seen him around, our community isn’t small, but it isn’t huge, and I was faintly aware of who he might have been, but when he tried to tell me that there was something he wanted to talk to me about, I had a hard time trusting him. No one comes up to me to talk to me like that, especially not if they try to get me to walk some long-distance off to do so. I’m not going to walk out there into the nowhere with a relative stranger.

Thankfully, I guess you could say, it didn’t take much prodding to get out of him that she promised him a little something personal and extra if he got me out of the way for a few hours. I couldn’t believe that she’d go so far as to try and convince someone she possibly didn’t even really know, to help her in something like this. It just made no sense and my look of disbelief at the guy in question when I got that out of him must have been enough for him to doubt himself real good because he looked ashamed.

Not that she’d told him what she was going to do during the time he had me distracted but it was clear that the whole thing really wasn’t working out the way he had expected it. It wasn’t his fault, in a way, but I still wasn’t a big fan of how the whole thing ended up working out. I mean, she sweet-talked someone into keeping me away from home on one of the days Jase wasn’t expected to help out with anything so that she could hop on over and try to seduce him. All that, with a promise to the guy doing the distracting that he’d probably get some humping action once all was said and done.

Let’s just say that, in the long run, it ended up being something of a disaster. I know Jase. I know he would never do that to me. I know that her hopes and dreams were moot, but I also made it home just as she was tying her boat to our dock. The surprised look on her face possibly came more from the fact that the guy she’d talked into helping her was in the boat with me. He’s the one that rowed us back out. I could have done it myself, but it would have been a much slower process.

It took another six months before she actually moved back out. I can’t even put into words how much of a relief this is, as far as I’m concerned. It just feels so good. I can go out on our balcony again to hang things to dry and don’t have to worry about her giving me an ugly look from a distance. The guy she’d sweet-talked into helping her sort of disappeared; I mean, not literally. I’ve seen him here and there, but he keeps his distance and, you know, that’s for the best. He went sort of pale when he saw Jase and that still amuses me.

Anyway. Life’s gone back to what it should be and I’m grateful.

I’ve never met someone who’s hated me simply for the sake of hating me, but as you say, there’s a first for everything!

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City – Iathea
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 30, physically about 21
Final Word Count: 709 words
 

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I’m not a very outgoing person. Jason would likely confirm wholeheartedly but I suppose that, in a way, it comes from my childhood. It comes from the poverty, from my parents’ behaviour, it comes from being different. It comes from having been so very young when the snow first started, and almost not making it. It also comes from the fact that I never could keep up with the other kids while growing up in the jungle and I learned early on, to not even really try.

I don’t remember much from the trip in space. It’s hard to believe we’ve been on this planet for six years already. It doesn’t feel like that long ago. Settling here, it was different. The air tasted different to me and I haven’t had a single asthma attack in those past six years. Not that I’d really had any in the years prior since I was careful but still.

This place is different and I think it also does something to us. Most of us look years younger than we really are. I know that part of this has to do with Doc Flynn but I still think that this place also has to do with that. I love falling asleep to the sound of the waves and most of us are living on the water, so it’s just perfect. There haven’t been many storms and while they’ve been bad, they didn’t really cause lasting damage to our homes.

Even now, on this planet, this brand new world, this different place, I’m not outgoing. I don’t really like to spend time with people I don’t know, and that shortens the list of people quite drastically. I don’t mind, though, I’m quite comfortable with the few people I can call friends and family. People don’t really move around a whole lot once they’re settled in. We’ve only changed neighbours twice in the last six years and I think that it’s because the first pair that was there broke up, and then a pair moved in. A few months ago, they moved to another, slightly bigger home that’s closer to the shore and we have had a new neighbour.

I didn’t know what to think of her when she first moved in and I still don’t know what to think of her. I’ve spoken all of a handful of words to her in the last few months and none of her ‘return’ words were any pleasant. She’ll usually spy Jase near me and her demeanour changes from A to Z, it’s dizzying. I get why she’s acting the way she is, but I’ve never met someone who’s hated me simply for the sake of hating me. It’s a first for me, it is.

The idiot has no chance at all of achieving her idiotic goal at this point and I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to get on her good side, she doesn’t have a good side. She has eyes for Jase and nobody else but the twit doesn’t want to understand that it’ll never be a two-way street, I should know. I’ve been at his side for years, after all. I’m his as much as he’s mine and no one is going to change that.

The problem is that she’s still the ‘next door’ neighbour. Her home is far enough from ours that she can’t really come in without going down, onto her own little boat, on the water and to us but she still lives right next door and I don’t get a single moment of peace when she’s outside and I have to be too. She gives me this look as though I’m no better than shit on a stick. It’s hard to focus on anything else when I can feel her eyes on the back of my head when I’m just hanging our things to dry outside.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s been a short few frustrating months and I refuse to move to another place. We’ve been here since we landed on this planet and this is home, no one is going to make me change that because they’re too stupid to see what’s right in front of them.

My neighbour’s cat keeps climbing in through my window, but the real problem is, I never open it.

 
Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 29
Final Word Count: 597 words
 

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When I was little, I didn’t believe in a lot of things. My parents seemed to make sure that my window into the world was very narrow and it isn’t until I was fifteen that I brought up this old memory I recalled from when I was almost too young to remember it properly that I learned that maybe I should have believed in ghosts and what-not. I’m still not sure.

See, I think I was about five just before the big snow happened and we didn’t live in a very good neighbourhood, we couldn’t afford to. Not that I understood these things and money has no say in life anymore here so it’s still strange to wrap my mind around it but, I digress. I was about five and we lived on the second floor of a building that had seen better days.

I had a little window in my bedroom though it gave to a brick wall as a few feet to the side was the window of the neighbour on the other side of the street. I think that the room between both buildings was likely just barely enough for a person to walk through. I don’t know why the two buildings just weren’t connected. The half alley in between didn’t get much use, at least that my five-year-old mind could remember. I recall spending a lot of time looking out and down that window when I was hiding from my parents.

I can’t remember how often it used to happen but I recall, almost vividly, that quite often, there was a cat that kept on climbing through my bedroom window. I didn’t think much of it back then, all I saw was a big—friendly as far as I could see—cat just climbing right through my window. It always happened at night so I didn’t think much of it; I was a tired little boy.

Now and again in the mornings, though, I’d go to look through my window and I’d realized that it was shut, screen, glass and all. No one, not even my mother, came into my room once my door was closed and I was meant to be sleeping. I hadn’t opened the window, not at that point, it was autumn and cold out but still, I could remember the cat coming right through the window as though it were open.

As I said, it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I brought up this memory, the images still bright and defined in my mind and it’s left me to wonder about what it might be. What it could have been and what may lie beyond.

I mean, it could all just be a figment of my imagination and it could be something else entirely but it still feels real to me, and considering where we live now, on an entirely different planet, I want to keep my mind open to the fact that the world might not have been what I thought it was all along. Maybe ghosts and spirits exist, maybe the supernatural exists, I just don’t know.

What I know is that my neighbour’s cat kept on coming through my window, despite the fact that my window was closed and couldn’t have let a breeze through if it had wanted. Well, that one is a partial lie, there were cracks in the windows and breezes could come through but that’s beside the point, really. The point is that either I imagined the cat or the cat wasn’t flesh and bones. I’ll never know.

I can count on all ten of my fingers on why I can’t stand you.

Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 27
Final Word Count: 530 words

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No longer having to be on my toes about needing to run away at a moment’s notice because some strange beast is out to eat me has been blessing for my health. While my asthma is still present, I haven’t had any attack for a long enough while. I honestly think I haven’t had an attack since we came to Iathea. Not that there aren’t any beasts out there who might be tempted to eat us but so far we’ve been lucky and what we’ve found has turned out to be relatively friendly. A good thing.

There are fishes in the ocean, I don’t know if we’re still able to call them fish when the average one is about half the size of our smallest canoes. Most of those fishes, at least so far that we’ve seen, also aren’t much of a danger to us unless they mistake us for food, they’re big enough for that but it hasn’t happened yet.

So now, my main source of problems is Joline. She doesn’t seem to be able to wrap her mind around the fact that: a) I am not interested in her because, b) I am gay and, c) well I’m not into—what’s the term they use? Cougars? Yeah, that. She’s almost twenty years my elder and it’s downright creepy that she seems to be so obsessed with me.

I mean, so far she hasn’t been obsessed to the point of being a problem but it’s really creeping me out, the way she always seems to be around, the way she’s found means of being on my working teams and just, it’s wrong and I’m just really glad that Jason managed to be on my teams as well. While some people believe that gathering isn’t as hard a job as hunting or working the fields that are a short distance off from our settlement, it isn’t easy. It may not require running all over the place or impossible strength but it still requires skills that not everyone has.

Skills that I know I have and I usually work flawlessly but her presence so close to me has had me distracted for a couple of weeks and I’m just considering myself lucky I haven’t hurt anyone by accident or even hurt myself because of it.

I’ve tried to talk to her, tell her she needs to stop. I’m not really the forceful kind so that didn’t get me much of anywhere; I think it honestly made her try harder. Going to have to sic Jason on her before too long but do so gently, so he doesn’t maim her or anything. Protective almost hubby is protective. That should be something else to deter her. That ring on my finger isn’t there just to look pretty though it is absolutely gorgeous in my eyes, it’s there to let her and everyone else know that I’m off limits.

That didn’t stop people before though so I expect that it wouldn’t really stop them now. I remember how some people seemed to just get even more excited at the prospect of what, bedding?, some married person because, to them, it was hot, or some nonsense.

Signs

Timeline/World: Lucky Souls
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 36
Final Word Count: 561 words

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He had been sick. Dying really. He had been this way before he had come down to the realms and it had only gotten worse over time as he’d struggled to survive on his own before the great Lord had finally taken notice of him and had shown him this new world that he was meant to live in.

The whole place was slowly crumbling over time with the disappearances of most others but the one room, though it was bigger than a city block as far as he could have seen, had been beautiful, breath-taking really and not in the way that he’d been struggling with recently.

That he was still alive now, a decade later, spoke of… he wasn’t sure. Keiran couldn’t tell whether or not this was because of the air in the realms or just his presence at the Lord’s side. He still coughed now and then though it didn’t come from as deep and didn’t hurt as much, he still woke up out of breath every so often. All of the signs were there but there wasn’t much he could do about them.

He had accepted that death would be coming to him soon when he’d first stepped into that portal. The information he had been given about the kill he’d been supposed to perform had been vague at most and it had landed in him a world he knew nothing of, in the presence of dangerous beings who could have ended his life with a single thought.

Yet they didn’t.

Keiran imagined that perhaps it was a longing that kept him alive. Some, including himself in some way, preferred the company of others to the loneliness of empty hallways so that the demigod had finally taken notice of him had almost lifted a weight from his chest and shoulders. It hadn’t been enough at first to allay the fear that had settled into his stomach that he likely only had a few weeks left of breath in his lungs but it had been something. He’d still been coughing in a somewhat bad way but he had managed to keep to his feet while he had been given the tour of the more than beautiful place that was now his own.

It still was strange, even ten years later, but he had learned to appreciate every small nook and cranny his home within the realm offered him. He had no thoughts of really heading back to the surface, there had been no one waiting for him then and those who had known him probably thought he was long dead, which, in a way, perhaps he was.

Now and again, the thought that perhaps this was the afterlife was not lost on him. His mind tried to lead him into believing that he had died, perhaps that very portal had killed him and this was it. The more rational side of him, however, looked more closely at the details. If he was dead, somehow he didn’t think he would still wake up out of breath on certain mornings or aching as he did on that particular day. But then, his more emotional side piped up with the fact that for all the lives he had taken, perhaps he was closer to a halfway point to hell.

It didn’t matter, really. He just took his days one after the other.

Hungry

Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Keiran Baine
Race: Human
Age: 27
Final Word Count: 557 words

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I have often gone to bed hungry before in my life. While I was a child, up until they took me in, saved me from the evils of what was left of my family. After that, things changed.

Of course, I never really dared to eat more than what little I was used to, often feeling full with little more than a few bites of the food they brought for me and I felt terrible for wasting. I think I cried myself to sleep often during the time it took for me to adapt to everything that was different with them as it has been before they took me in.

It took a long time before I started filling in. I would eat a little more with each passing weeks but it still wasn’t much and I could see the worry in their eyes. It confused me, I had never seen that kind of look before and I just didn’t understand what it meant.

It is Jason who helped me understand the different looks they would shoot my way. The one that told me they were worrying because of how little I ate. The one where there were almost… I think the word I could use is frightened, for how easy it was for me to lose my breath. There were little things here and there, most of them were subtle but as the years passed, I grew to better understand everything.

There still was some looks I cannot understand but Jason is always more than willing to tell me when I can put it to words. It doesn’t happen often, seeing as I’m trying to explain how a certain look, well, looks to me but I don’t have the words since I’m trying to understand it, to start with. Does that even make sense?

Now that we’ve landed on this planet though, this beautiful bit of paradise, I think things are even easier. Here there is nothing left of the violence I grew up with. No memories in the things that surrounds me. I have no fears of reaching for a bit of food to eat it when I feel hungry because that is simply how humans function.

I need food to survive and it really has been since we’ve set off in our space ship that I have really managed to grasp that one thing and make peace with it. I can’t recall how long we spent in space, trying to find a new place for us to call our own, a place we would do our best not to destroy the way Earth was destroyed.

The landing was interesting because this time we weren’t really asleep, not like the take-off. We were sent down to the surface in groups since the ships who could do so without much of an issue weren’t really big enough for all of us at once. We were in a somewhat large room, secured in seats a bit like an airplane but even with the systems online, I could feel the gravity tugging at us in the ships.

It was an interesting sensation but oh, when we set foot down on the pale sandy beach, my breath was stolen away from me for a good reason, for once, and I just knew this would be it, our better world.