Innocence- Prologue

Innocence- Prologue
“He’s The Doctor!” the girl in his arms gasped, “I swear! I was in the medieval ages! I nearly got burned at the stake for being a witch!”
She was already blowing him off. Of course. Girls were just like that in this time period. Had his sister ever been that way? He certainly hoped not.
Her friends, who had gathered around them at his sudden appearance in their school cafeteria, were dumbstruck, like most mortals when encountered with those who had found the secrets of this world.
He set her down, and she ran to them, spewing words out so fast he was surprised anyone could understand them.
“I swear! That hook on his hand is the TARDIS! He just cuts straight through reality, and then this space just appears and he steps through and he can go anywhere,like, really, anywhere!”
As she continued, her friends began to advance toward him. They started grabbing him, feeling his hook, making jokes about Captain Hook, and gradually driving him into the corner. He didn’t like that in the slightest.
Whoosh! He flared up his aura in the form of heat, and fire circled around him, driving the girls backward, awestruck again. By this time authorities would have been notified. Like they’d listen to the story these people would tell.
“I’m not from any TV show. My name is Marethyu, and I am human. Immortal and powerful, but human. Goodbye.”
And with that, he disappeared to fix something else.
Space-time always seemed normal to the average person, until you stopped moving through the space and took trips through time.
He stood in the place that wasn’t really a place, what the few people that had been there called “The Fabric of the Universe,” though usually not in English.
It didn’t take up space or time, and no one was sure what happened to your body while you were there. Nothing in it was perceivable by the senses used in the normal world, but everything could be “seen.” All of eternity was stretched out before him, but Marethyu knew that trying to delve into it would drive him mad. So he did as he normally did, and paced through it, skimming for flaws.
Mycelium grew on the walls here. That was the biggest mystery of The Fabric of the Universe, why something so normal to the real world could exist here. Trying to view it the way you could time simply brought what was expected: A fungus of made of living cells took in nutrients from its surroundings to make food and survive. Queer.
Marethyu continued his searching until he found a flaw, something fluctuating the ever-constant that this was. He peered into it.
Two separate realities, (there were a lot of those) but one of them was incomplete. The other was willing to give itself… No, herself, was willing to give herself up to stabilize the other.
The piece of the reality was a girl. She had set herself up as a sacrifice, and if she was willing, why shouldn’t he help her? He reached in and pulled her. She attempted to cling on for a few seconds, but soon released her hold on her world.
Things clicked into place when he moved her. No, he couldn’t explain it, even to himself, but now The Fabric seemed more… Right.
He continued until he found another flaw. This one was deeper though, attached and tangled to the other events surrounding it. He couldn’t just pluck it out like he did the girl. Well, she had been knowing and willing, too.
Marethyu put himself into the world, and surveyed the scene. It must have been a primitive one, because he was inside a wooden cabin, if the residents called it cabin.
The flaw was a white-haired boy sleeping on an uncomfortable-looking bed. Well, he supposed, that was probably what the people here were used to.
“Who are you?” a tense voice sounded from behind him.
A woman stood there, her hair white as snow and her face stern. He could tell she was the mother of the boy.
“I am Death, come to take your son away.”
Marethyu was a name given to him many long centuries ago. It did indeed mean “death” in the language of the people who started calling him by it.
The woman broke down then. She obviously was expecting this.
“Please, don’t,” she cried, “He’s done nothing wrong! How can you be so cruel as to curse him with these diseases?!”
“Please, don’t misunderstand; I’m not the person that makes those decisions. I am called Death because I am a killer.”
She drew in a shaky breath at that.
“Can you heal him, then?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Interesting. He was a stranger intruding on her house, and she trusted him already. She’d probably trust anyone, under the circumstances. But… He did have the power to save the boy. Doing things that messed with The Fabric, though… they never ended well.
“No. He has to die, whether by my hand or fate’s.”
”No!” she screamed, “No one is taking him away from me!”
The emotion in her voice made him almost want to cry with her. He couldn’t just kill him, or leave him to be killed if someone loved him that much. But he couldn’t live!
“…I can’t save him, but I can take him to a place where he could get a second chance. It’s a very strange world, and I wouldn’t be able to bring either of you back from it.”
“I have nothing here but my son. If we can be together somewhere, I’ll go.”
Marethyu began to ready a three-person portal, explaining to the woman as he worked magic with his hook, “Where I’m taking you… The people have a whole different way of life. Different language, different customs, different history, you get the point. It’s far too much to teach you, so when we cross over, I’ll pull a trigger, that is, a person knowledgeable on this world, and I’ll get their thoughts, not memories, just solid thoughts, about general things and beam them to you two. It’ll only take about ten minutes.”
“How long is that?”
Marethyu sighed. Relative time questions were always hard for him.
“Not very long. You won’t get bored, I can assure you,” he said.
“Alright, but, how will you choose this ‘trigger?’”
“That’s easy: whoever has the strongest telepathic power in the range. Don’t worry about them, they probably won’t even notice me.”
“Why can’t you be our trigger?”
“I have too much knowledge of too many worlds. It’s too much for anyone to absorb at once,” he answered.
The portal was finished. He turned to the woman, who was clutching her son in her arms. It was very clear now that he was sick, considering his frailness, the skin that was beginning to yellow around his eyes, and that he hadn’t woken up when lifted from his bed. Without meaning to, Marethyu let out a gasp of sympathy.
“…I don’t get those much. Most people think he deserved it for some reason.”
“My surprisingly accurate intuition tells me otherwise,” he grunted, and led them all through the swirling metallic lights that were the portal.
First, the trigger. He had landed them here at night, so hopefully they’d be dreaming.
And the trigger certainly was, as they found her riding a chariot loaded with anime characters. She saw them, and simply accepted them as part of the dream, telling them stories while past knowledge was copied and pasted from her to the mother and child new to this world.
Ten minutes passed, and soon they knew everything needed, so Marethyu pulled them away from her to the real world. He brought them to the top of a tall building, and it didn’t scare either of them a bit.
“This is where you let him go,” he said.
“This is where he dies,” she echoed, “Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. I know where I am now.”
And with that, she threw her unconscious son off the building into the traffic below.
“I’m sorry, honey!” she called, though he was certainly already dead.
“…You don’t sound sad,” he remarked.
“Knowing what this place is… I don’t have a reason to,” she said.
“By the way, I don’t believe you’ve introduced yourself yet.”
“Oh, I’m sorry! My name’s Siliki Kiryu, and my son’s name is Yoshiya.”