Deirdre Chen: Saviour of the Multiverse

Chapter 1

 
Mengo

Aside from the dreams in which he found himself being chased by the ghosts of his victims, Mengo the Conqueror didn’t dwell on the past. It was one such nightmare that lead to him flying through the rift, the causeway between dimensions. Imagine the surface of an ocean rolled into the shape of a tube with tiny wavelets rushing across its surface.
  Mengo was travelling through it in the imaginatively named ‘Rift Ship'. These spherical craft are sophisticated pieces of engineering with a hoop around
them that spins and spins until forming a drill that pierces the fabric of reality. You don’t barge your way into the rift, you have to surgically implant yourself, then cut your way out afterwards.
  Mengo’s ship was ‘The Lormian Glory’, a perfect ball of plated gold. It was a symbol of his family’s wealth and power. Mengo was of the clan Termut. When he was a boy, the clan was very close to being wiped out through a combination of poverty and war. Good fortune had turned the situation around, but now, those halcyon days were soon to be over thanks to his little brother, Bengo the Stupid.
  He let Bengo pilot, feeling that it was best to get his spirits back up by showing the oaf that Mengo still trusted him. The pilot chair he sat in was like a tongue curling down from the roof. A footrest jutted down diagonally from it.
  Two arms that started from the back of the headrest held out three screens in column formation, with a holder for Sulphade, a popular soft drink made of sulphuric acid that had recently caused controversy when parents became concerned about the sugar content.
  The screens let you know if anyone was sneaking up on you because the circular window at the front of the cockpit didn’t let you see everything. His twin brother, younger than him by five minutes, had some making up to do.
  Whilst Mengo loved him with all his six hearts, and the spare seventh located in their species’ left buttock cheek, Bengo was so thick that two short planks would be charging him money to do his homework for him. It wasn’t a case of Bengo being ‘Not all there’, but rather that was totally lost, asking where ‘there’ was. As for playing with a full deck, Bengo was playing Poker with a deck of Snap!
  You might think it fair that if Mengo got the brains, then Bengo might get the looks. However, Mengo had boulder-like biceps, shoulders like a mountain that had then injected steroids because it felt inferior to Everest, under his Jade skin and the desired shade for their race called ‘Lormians’, whereas Bengo looked the same colour you might turn when you’re about to vomit. Bengo’s physical state was at one point so awful that he required a suit that levitated him inches from the ground as slaves pushed him along.
  Mengo wasn’t too harsh on him, for he was partly to blame. The Finger Gauntlet is a device that he wore on his forefinger unique to his DNA, that could teleport the wearer or any object they desired through dimensions. It had landed in the dense forests of Lormia when Mengo was but a child, during one of his many hunting trips. Mengo was very close to wiping out The Jenesnax, a ferocious species of grass eating bovines, when it arrived in a bolt of lightning.
  You may have noticed that Mengo was not currently using it as a mode of transportation, that is because before bed, he had a bowl of molten steel soup and he had to take The Gauntlet off because he didn’t want it to get dirty as he dipped his graphite slices into the soup, made from robots that had gained self-awareness, a split second before being melted down. The sentience really gave the soup kick, especially with a bit of ground pepper! The mistake was going off to bed whilst leaving it on the table.
  You see, if the gauntlet is not worn for a long period of time, it turns to liquid, liquid which if left next to a bowl of molten soup might look as if the soup had been spilled. And if you were his brother Bengo, you might wipe it up with a cloth and flush it down the toilet, all whilst humming a pleasant tune and congratulating yourself on having the diligence to tidy up.
  Lormian toilets are a little different from ours on Earth. We have a sewage system, and that’s pretty good for a civilization too inept for space travel. What Lormians prefer to do is fit their toilets with a vortex. Therefore, instead of all this harmful waste building up, it just drops on civilizations too inept for space travel, and it just so happened to be our inept civilization!
  The reason this caused Mengo’s stomach to bubble with dread and purple sweat to seep out of his pickle-coloured pores, was because he had built an empire in minutes by teleporting comets at planets; simple yet effective. I can feel you judging him, and so you should. There were deaths - I shudder to think how many. Understand this though, those who surrendered now live in prosperity. Mengo had turned backwaters into beacons of civilization. Mengo told himself that it was worth the pain. That’s why the motto on his royal seal is, ‘Always look to the light ahead, not the darkness behind’. The issue was that without the Gauntlet, the darkness was going to come rushing towards Mengo like a freight train.
  Folding his arms, to cover up the fact that his hands were trembling, Mengo ordered Bengo to test the ship’s weaponry. The turrets on a rift ship are different from the ones on other craft. What with the big hoop spinning around its hull, standard weaponry would cause more damage to you than your enemy. The Glory’s was working fine; it was a cannon made out of pure energy that hovered in the ship’s orbit. Each rift ship has a unique weapon according to the tastes of their captain. Mengo liked to reminisce about one Lieutenant whose weapon was a broadsword; it was a jovial sight as he cleaved enemy frigates in half. This pleasant memory was brief, because needless to say Mengo was very, very nervous. What would Earth have in store for him?
  Upon first learning about us Humans he was more than a little frightened. I mean, we know how infinite the space around us is, and yet we kill each other over a segment of rock. Mengo’s coordinates were set for a small dwelling known as ‘Manchester’, a settlement he assumed was built for prunes seeking moisture, as it was located in the middle of a rainy valley.
  Strange and savage as we sapiens may be, we scare him far less than his mother, who thankfully didn’t know about him losing The Gauntlet.
  “COME BACK WITH THE GAUNTLET OR DON’T COME BACK AT ALL!!!!!” Lenga roared like the fearsome lioness that she was, as she appeared on the comm screen above the window. Now dear reader, Mengo is a big alien. He can squat an Alzuran Mastadon, bench an Ipraxan Whale and can even shot put a Neutrino Star. But let me assure you that none of that, I repeat, none of that matters when he hears his mother’s voice. She always had this ability to make him recoil. Not physically mind, he was sure to maintain an intimidating power stance when around her, because as a boy she used to whip him until he got his intimidating power stance right. Lenga made him recoil if you like, in his soul. She stood with the use of her zimmer frame, her back arched upward, giving her the appearance of an angry cat dressed in tan-coloured robes.
  “Now mummy, how did you find out?”
  “Call it a Mothers intuition, and also my ability to read”: she held up Mengo’s Diary. She opened it, showing a passage that read, “my idiot brother has lost The Gauntlet. Off to retrieve it, should be back for elevenses.” Lenga looked at Mengo, wanting to grind his bones into sherbet.
  “I’m warning you now, if you don’t get it back, then either I or your sister will do it for you.” The thought of his sister’s smug face, filled him with rage. “So, what is your plan, my dearest Mengo?”
  “Simple, go down to Earth, and kill a child.”
Yes, he was fixing to kill a child - perhaps you should get to know her first.