H.O.M.E. 10

by Fin

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The families of the Ruling Council had been in control of Outer Ring City since the time that they had been its only inhabitants.

Some of the first settlers to The Core, these unfortunate colonists found their new world to be nothing but a smoking, barren wasteland.

A land of fire.

A land of death.

A land that no one would choose, if there had been any choice in choosing it.

Unintentional outcasts from their home dimensions, these beings had been forced to survive in a hell of which there had been no escape. Whatever cataclysm had torn the universal barriers asunder, was the one and same that had obliterated the outer most layers of this planet, leaving nothing left but the fiery, cooling core.

All original life that had once existed here perished in that one massive explosion, an extinction event so absolute that no record now existed of whom these beings once were, or what they had done to cause their own doom.

The Idiots.

The name these beings were soon known to be by those whom had washed ashore on their graves. For The Idiots had not just caused their own total annihilation, they had also wrecked the very fabric of reality in and around their once homeworld.

These holes in space-time acted as funnels, siphons which served to bring any and all close enough across the dimensional divides to be cast down in a land they could not leave.

The first to fall, did not survive long in the fires.

However once The Core had cooled sufficiently to allow new life to exist on its surface, outcasts to this new dimension began to take root.

Many of these had never seen other intelligent life before, besides their own.

But here on The Core, there were no natives.

Here there was no norm.

So to end any wars before they began, these aliens, both to this world and to each other, assembled themselves into a new society. One in which they could begin to live again, after all that they had lost.

Outer Ring City was one of these first settlements, built into and onto one of the few remaining structures The Idiots had left behind. A massive cylinder of gravitized metal jutting into the very depths of The Core.

How it functioned?

No one quite knew.

What it had been built for?

No one could now say.

But the clear usefulness of the structure to these new inhabitants was however quite clear.

The metal stored energy with ease.

And could be molded and shaped from its original form on demand given the right conditions into almost anything one could want.

In a land more inhospitable than any could have ever imagined, a city could be built here. A civilization could once again thrive.

And while advanced technology once again returned to the descendents of these colonists, a return to their home dimensions remained forever just out of reach.

Even if they could find one of the universal tears that had brought them here, lost and drifting in the ether surrounding The Core, they still lacked the sufficient means to travel in the reverse direction of which these tunnels flowed.

For there was no primary star nearby to The Core. No gravity well in which to gain the relativistic speeds required to breach the dimensions once more. If there had ever once been a sun in the sky of this realm, it had vanished with The Idiots a long time ago, never to return.

Eventually the flow of transuniversal immigrants subsided, as the larger of the tears slowly consumed all that was initially beside. New inhabitants to The Core thus became more rare. The journey here harder and harder as the only remaining rifts with anything on the other side, required more and more energy to cross.

So no one was looking to the heavens for any more travelers when The Icarus I flashed into the sky above The Core. Similarly, no one was watching many years later when The Icarus II made the same journey as well.

Now in the heart of the city built by the first colonists to this new world, Franklin and James Blade stood in front of the tower that held its ruling body. These aliens were descended from the hardy few whom had decided to survive, rather than die in this land as The Idiots had done before them. And it was them whom held the answers the father and son were looking for on the whereabouts of their missing family member.

"You ready James?"

"It is time to find Sam, Dad."