#it’s my own fault.. i always wrote in a sort of.. scribbly cursive from when i was a kid | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kbox-in-the-box · 6 years

Text

Austin Kingsley: Star Prodigy — Episode 1, “Saving Alexandria,” Part 5

Sept. 8, 1987.

The first day of school.

“Your dad seems like a really great guy,” Mitzi Klingfeld smiled sadly, as she dabbed discreetly at her mascara-lined eyes with a tissue from the office desk Austin Kingsley had unearthed and proceeded to partly stock up for her at the Bookhouse.

“Both my parents were good people,” Austin agreed briskly, as he loaded the desk with both heavy bound volumes, complete with clasp locks, and string-tied loose-leaf binders, so overstuffed and barely organized their pages threatened to spill out.

“It's okay to cry, you know,” Mitzi sniffled and chuckled all at once, with a mix of gentle chiding and encouragement. “I didn't even know the guy, and I've been bawling my eyes out over here.”

“You actually sound like my father right now,” Austin sighed, offering her a tired smile of his own. “He used to tell me the same thing. And I absolutely agree; there is no shame whatsoever in shedding tears, if it helps heal your hurts. The problem is, it doesn't do anything for me.”

Mitzi blinked with disbelief. “So, you're telling me you've never cried?”

“I didn't say that,” Austin rushed to correct her. “What I am trying to say … is that I haven't cried since my mother died, when I was 13 years old.”

Mitzi gaped at this admission. “But … I mean … what happened?” was all she could think to ask.

“She was conducting covert scientific research of some kind,” Austin threw himself into unfastening the supple leather covers, and spreading open the wrinkled handwritten pages, “right here in the Bookhouse. It was dangerous enough that she didn't even tell my father, probably because she knew he'd plead with her to stop, for safety's sake alone. And … there was an explosion. A pretty big one. You can still see some stray scorch marks, on exposed sections of the concrete.”

Mitzi squeezed his shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

Austin squinted quizzically at her. “Why? It wasn't your fault.” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Anyway, I must have cried for something like three days after she died, but once I finally got to the point where my body literally could not sustain the physical effort of crying any longer, I realized that my mother was still just as dead, and I still felt just as badly about that fact.”

“So, you really haven't cried, in all the years since?” Mitzi fixed him with a pitying gaze.

Austin's brow furrowed in confusion at her reaction. “If it doesn't bring back who or what I've lost, and it doesn't even make me feel better, then please tell me, what exactly is the point of the exercise?”

Mitzi's jaw dropped, but she nonetheless managed to hold herself back from passionately hashing out the issue on the spot. “To be continued,” she instead declared firmly, shutting her eyes tight as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Moving on to more productive topics, you and your dad called it the Star Point Portal. Does that mean that he got, like … whoosh, transported into outer space?”

“To another planet, you mean?” Austin checked, before shrugging and settling on a grudging nod, as he pored over the sea of text laid out before him. “That's my leading theory, albeit mostly by default. He made a handful of scattered notations about what he termed an 'Otherworld,' in quotation marks, possibly named Thel … or Quadris, or Aurica, or Eldebran … maybe even Aetheria,” he pointed to different pages for each one, “but even those are ambiguous about whether it's simply another world, or possibly even in a different dimension —”

“How are you not able to narrow down your search any further than that?” Mitzi's exasperation at last overwhelmed her patience. “With all these books in front of you —”

“In case you hadn't noticed, we left the realm of legitimate archaeology behind a while ago,” Austin countered, with a measure of peevishness to match her own. “We're now squarely within the realm of myths and legends. Any remotely credible accounts concerning the Star Point Portal simply state, straight out, that it cannot, does not and should not exist.” His shoulders slumped. “Besides, my father's notes don't tell me anything he didn't already tell me himself. There's speculation that the Star Point Portal enables not only interstellar travel, but could also allow entry into alternate timelines, perhaps even parallel universes.”

“The ancient Egyptians couldn't have built something that sophisticated, could they?” Mitzi guessed.

“The ancient Egyptians were perfectly capable of building the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza all on their own, without any extraterrestrial intervention,” Austin assessed, “and indeed, I'd suggest that's precisely why they were contacted, but no, something as advanced as the Star Point Portal was well beyond their grasp.”

Mitzi wheeled the nearest whiteboard next to the desk, flipped it over to its blank side, and started scribbling notes of her own on it with a dry-erase marker. “So, this Star Point Portal … beams your dad up to 'Otherworld,' maybe?” she collected her thoughts, more for her benefit than his, as the words she wrote mirrored those she muttered aloud. “Another planet, or different dimension … question mark?”

“What is this, that you're doing here?” Austin wondered, echoing her earlier question to him.

Mitzi rolled her eyes, without slowing her cursive loops. “You're so much like my daughter, it kills me. You're both geniuses, but neither one of you has got common sense enough to keep all those details straight in your heads by diagramming them out. At least she has the excuse of still being a kid.”

As Mitzi's felt-tip pen squeaked out the words, “Star Point Portal built by … WHO?”, Austin took up an eraser pad and a magic marker of his own, to replace the word “WHO?” with “Ancient Astronauts.”

“Aliens?” Mitzi asked aloud, as she wrote the word at the end of the whiteboard sentence, complete with question mark.

Austin recapped his pen, and raised his hands in helpless resignation. “Again, that'd be my best-guess hypothesis, but … my father always referred to them as Ancient Astronauts, and regardless of whomever or whatever they were, I tend to agree with my father, that they were drawn to Earth by the intelligence that the ancient Egyptians demonstrated, through the peerless precision of their architecture.”

“Okay, so, the Ancient Astronauts built the Star Point Portal, which they left behind with the ancient Egyptians,” Mitzi summed up, drawing an arrow from “Ancient Astronauts” to “Ancient Egyptians” on the whiteboard, “and when you and your dad dug it back up last month, the Star Point Portal zapped your dad into … parts unknown,” she circled a trio of question marks, reading “???” on the board.

“That's … about the size of it, yes,” Austin ran his hands through his hair, until his fingers interlaced at the back of his neck.

After Mitzi had replaced her own marker on the whiteboard tray, she stopped short, struck by a sudden thought. “Oh my God,” she gasped, her hands rushing up to her mouth, “you had to come back home without your dad, and then try to explain to everyone what had happened. You couldn't tell anyone the truth, because nobody would have believed a sci-fi story like that —”

“And even the least discerning ones among them could easily tell that the explanations I was supplying were far from the truth,” Austin flashed a rueful smirk. “I'm not an especially gifted liar, so my obvious dissembling, about my suspiciously missing father, gave the Van Dorens all the justification they needed, to argue that the Athenæum would be in better hands with their family steering its course.”

Austin wandered back to the desk, planted his hands on the desktop, and stared down wearily at the piles of pages that covered its surface. “Five pyramid-shaped segments, which come together to form the five-pointed star at the heart of the Star Point Portal,” he repeated his father's words, before pushing himself away from the desk. “I've tried opening the Ouroboros on my own, hooking myself up to it, like I was jump-starting a car battery, but without that key … even with me and my father working together, it took us forever to find the hidden entrance to the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx. The window of the Harmonic Convergence had nearly closed by the time I finally located the Ouroboros.”

Mitzi snorted mirthlessly. “And here I thought the Harmonic Convergence was just another Woodstock, for New Age gurus to wave their cleansing crystals over each other.”

“My parents tried to explain Woodstock to me,” Austin rubbed his bleary eyes, “but I suspect it's the sort of historic event that only makes sense if you've lived through it.”

“Oh, honey, you're so young,” Mitzi couldn't resist giggling. “Speaking as someone who was actually old enough to have lived through it, it never made any sense to me, then or now.”

Austin cocked his head curiously to one side. “How old are you?”

Mitzi slapped his shoulder, hard. “RUDE! You don't ask a lady her age! How would you like it if I asked you YOUR age?”

“I'm 24,” Austin responded by reflex.

“Yeah, well, I'm thirty-niii — I mean, what I meant to say was, I'm … almost 30, so I'm, like … 29?” Mitzi ventured tentatively, after her initial series of stumbles.

Austin narrowed his eyes skeptically. “Hm. That'd make you the same age as Nora, then. Funny; you seem younger than her.”

“Oh, really?” Mitzi resisted the impulse to preen, biting her lower lip to keep from beaming openly, even as her attempt at pursing her lips broke into a huge, goofy grin that spread all across her face.

“Are you okay?” Austin asked, out of what sounded like equal amounts of clinically scientific curiosity and earnest concern for her welfare. “You appear to be … blushing —”

“No, yeah, sorry,” Mitzi cleared her throat and inhaled sharply, straightening herself up and crossing her arms over her broad chest in mild embarrassment. “So, what I'm hearing is, you're gonna have to hunt down all five of these ancient artifact thingamajigs, and that's gonna take some time.” Here, she adopted the same professional tone to which she'd been subjected by so many workplace motivational speakers. “So, in the meantime, as long as you're gonna be spending all that time searching anyway, why not make that time work for you?”

Now Austin was finally, fully lost. “I … am not sure that I follow.”

Mitzi slid her smaller hand into his gentle grip, and led him out onto an open space on the concrete floor. “Austin, you can literally spin planets out of pennies,” she laughed, raising his arm so she could twirl in place while still holding his hand. She then grabbed both his hands, and tugged him closer to her. “Have you even bothered to try and figure out how many other powers you might have?”

Austin's expression grew more confident, as he was able to return to more comfortably familiar footing. “Actually, I've been using an updated version of my father's old Quest Tracker computer, to keep track of all the abilities I seem to have manifested so far,” he pointed to the large upright metal ring, taking the lead in their dance by tugging Mitzi with him, while he took a few steps toward the assembly, until he was near enough to scoop up the Ouroboros from the floor.

Mitzi tested the granular texture of the carved stone relic with her fingertips, jerking her hand away when its neon yellow light trails pulsed in response. “So, when this whatsit opened, during the Harmonic Convergence, it basically bathed you in, like, cosmic rays?”

“That's about as accurate an explanation as any I've been able to come up with,” Austin admitted, with a self-effacing grin. “You're not a half-bad scientist, Mitzi Klingfeld.”

“You really do mean that, don't you?” Mitzi brushed his floppy bangs back from his eyes, momentarily taken aback by the sincerity of his compliment. “It's not just a line, or a come-on.”

Austin winced apologetically. “I recognize those are probably idiomatic phrases, but … I can't parse their meanings from the context provided.”

Mitzi patted Austin's cheek. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. What does matter, Mister Kingsley,” she took hold of his wrist, and lifted his arm to bring the Ouroboros to eye-level between them, “is what you learned about your powers, through your mad science experiments. So spill.”

Austin took a deep breath. “In simplest terms, it appears my exposure to the extraterrestrial energies released by the Star Point Portal … has altered my relationships with matter and energy,” he struggled to summarize his findings, as Mitzi spotted the pattern behind his fidgety habit of tapping each of his fingertips, twice in a row, against the flat of his thumb, in a repeating sequence. “It's … difficult to get much more specific than that, except to point out how the potential applications of such powers are obviously profound, even if my current capacity to tap into those powers seems severely limited. Because unfortunately, this,” here, he briefly waved the Ouroboros, the wrist-twisting gesture reminding Mitzi of a tambourine player, “didn't come with an instruction manual.”

“But even if you didn't have bona fide superpowers, which you do, you've got some seriously super skills and gifts, that you could already be using to do good,” Mitzi began to list them, ticking them off on her fingers, one by one. “You're brilliant, you're rich … I mean, even after the hostile takeover of your family's company, I'm guessing you're still loaded, yeah?”

“I have an inheritance that's independent of the Athenæum,” Austin confirmed. “I have absolutely no idea what its financial value amounts to, but my parents assured me it would pay for the Bookhouse's rent, utilities and any future permutation of telecommunications fees into perpetuity.”

“In other words, you're so rich, you can actually afford to not even know how much money you do have,” Mitzi marveled, her tone wavering between scorn and admiration. “Plus, you're mourning the loss of your parents, and you've got an honest-to-God secret lair. You're basically Bruce Wayne, before he picked out a costume and a cool car.”

Austin hesitated to reveal even more of his ignorance to Mitzi, but his next question was unavoidable. “Who is Bruce Wayne?”

Mitzi clutched her temples, to fend off the stress headache she felt coming on. “Okay. Let's try this instead; if you had the power to do anything you wanted — and after you used that power to bring back your dad, because of course, that's a given, I totally get that — what would you do?”

“Well, for a start, I wouldn't waste that level of power on a task that I'll be able to accomplish without it,” Austin scoffed. “My father trusted me to track down and reassemble the pieces of the key to the Star Point Portal. It'll happen. As you said, I just have to put in the work in the meantime.” He paused, and a dawning realization crept across his face. “But if I could travel back in time … I could use those powers for saving Alexandria.”

Mitzi caressed his cheek. “Oh, honey … was Alexandria your mom?”

“What? No,” Austin unwittingly disregarded her empathy. “The Royal Library of Alexandria, founded probably not long after the start of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, circa 3rd Century B.C.”

The way Mitzi set her jaw would have been recognized by any of her exes as a warning sign. “So, what you're telling me is, if you could do anything you wanted, you would use that power … to bring back a library?”

“Not just A library,” Austin enthused, “THE library. The library against which all other libraries in history have been judged. For more than two centuries, about the same age that the United States of America is now, the Library of Alexandria served as a repository for all the knowledge in the world, that had been recorded at that time. To this day, we're still relearning discoveries that were already made millennia ago, and then lost when the library was destroyed by the fires of Roman armies. If those insights could have been preserved and carried forward, human civilization could have had a two-thousand-year head start on where we are now.”

“And what about where we are now?” Mitzi shot back. “What about the real world, outside this warehouse, the way it is right now? You and your dad spent so much time digging in the dirt, it's like all you know how to do without him is just … bury yourself in the past.”

“That's not what this is,” Austin denied, as he set the Ouroboros down delicately among the aged pages on the desk, causing them to crinkle like autumn leaves. “You're acting like I've lived my whole life in the Bookhouse, when I've been traveling around the world with my parents since before I could even walk.”

On a shelf next to the desk, Austin spied a child-sized globe that seemed familiar to him. Even before he fetched it, and ran his fingers over the multitude of red pins stuck into its soft cork surface, Mitzi had gathered that each pin marked a spot where he'd stopped on his travels. “I was 9 years old when I climbed up the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I've bedded down in the Sahara desert with roaming Bedouins, and foraged for food alongside otherwise isolated tribes in the Amazon rainforest. I've long since lost track of how many languages I've learned, and how many different cultures I've encountered firsthand.”

“And in all that time, you never saw something that you thought needed fixing?” Mitzi pleaded.

“It's too complex!” Austin threw his hands in the air. “The more I learn — about the world, about other people — the less I understand. I'm not qualified to diagnose what ails modern human civilization.”

Mitzi stroked his forehead soothingly, as she prized the globe from his grasp, to place it on the desk. “Austin, you don't have to solve all the world's problems at once, you know. It's not like I'd have the first clue how to tackle the big picture, so … let's start small. How about helping out the city?”

“Why this city in particular?” Austin inquired, more intrigued than dismissive of her suggestion.

“Why not?” Mitzi swept her arms out expansively. “It's where we both rest our heads at night, isn't it? Besides, there are people out there who are homeless, and hungry. And if you live in the big city, you're always at risk, of getting robbed, or shot, or worse. Imagine what could happen, if this city had its own superhero?”

“I have to tell you, I don't think I know a single thing about this city,” Austin freely confessed, feeling steadily less embarrassed by the gaps in his knowledge, and instead, increasingly eager to delve into new discoveries.

“Well, I may not be the highfalutin academic that you are, Mister Kingsley,” Mitzi's lips curled into a mischievous smirk, “but there was one subject in school I always excelled at, that I think you could learn some lessons from.”

“Which is?”

“Field trips.”

#Austin Kingsley: Star Prodigy #Austin Kingsley #Star Prodigy #Mitzi Klingfeld #Charlemagne Kingsley #Hypatia Germain Kingsley #Nora Van Doren #Beatrix Klingfeld #Bookhouse #Athenæum #Q-T #Quest Tracker #Ancient Astronauts #Star Point Portal #Ouroboros #Harmonic Convergence #Saving Alexandria

2 notes · View notes