Deirdre Chen: Saviour of the Multiverse

Chapter 10

Deirdre

Drip. Drip. Drip. The condensation, caused by the icy touch of the space caressing the ship, fell in droplets onto the steel deck of the hangar. Spores of dust were shown to be floating in the stale air, by the whirring of the red lights that sat on the shoulders of loader Mechs. These were machines, engineered to carry the shipping containers. It was one such container that a distressed Manea was propping herself up against. She pounded her fist against it three times and started pacing back and forth.
  “Just breathe,” Ehutu pleaded, arms held out in front of her. Manea ran right passed Ehutu to hug Deirdre.
  “I’m sorry Manea,” Deirdre said, “i let you down. I couldn’t remember the word.”
  “Oh Di, don’t blame yourself. I’m the poopnicom here. I should have taught you something simpler.” Manea kissed Deirdre on her forehead and whispered in her ear,   
  “That’s for mummy.” Deirdre shot a confused look at Manea, who just smiled back. “Let’s lighten up the situation. Nyci show Deirdre your worst burp like I promised her.” When Nyci was right in front of Deirdre, Cassie and Ehutu, it opened its mouth in a silent scream. What Deirdre found odd was that she couldn’t stop looking at it, or look away from it…or move.
  Deirdre had become a statue of flesh and looking out of the corner of her eye, she saw the same had happened to the other two. Manea, however, was a sea of tranquillity.
  “Nyci can inhale and store the atmosphere of any planet it visits. What has just been burped into your faces is a mixture of oxygen and a paralyzing nerve agent. This atmosphere is native to the planet of-” she pressed the blue light on her wrist, turning green - “Lormia.” The banging of metal rang out from inside the metal container.
  “Can I come out now? I’m getting rather claustrophobic.”
  “Oh do stop whining.” Manea walked over to the container and lifted the metal lever that stretched over both doors. Out swaggered the hulking mass of Mengo the Conqueror. Manea’s eyes were filled with happiness and light, only this time in the same way a lion’s eyes are when they sink their teeth into a gazelle.
  “I win, little brother.”
  “Indeed you have, but need I remind you that you couldn’t have pulled it off without a little help from yours truly.” Mengo pointed his cucumber finger at her wrist. Mengo turned to Ehutu and strode right up to her.
  “That’s right, I had someone on the inside. Oppression is always best kept in the family.”
  “Oh I wouldn’t gloat my sweetest Mengy,” Manea said, bursting his bubble. “Ehutu has had someone under your nose this whole time too.”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Nyci.” Manea pointed upwards, and upwards is where Nyci flew.
  As Nyci descended, its talons were clutching a rope of what looked like knotted lightning, that was tying the arms of Bengo to his waist.
  “Bengo!” Purple tears formed in the corners of Mengo’s eyes.
  “How could you not have known Mengo? No one is stupid enough to ‘accidentally’ flush something that important down the toilet. He is why we knew to be in the supermarket and why Ehutu knew to go to Dayruntha.”
  Mengo roared.
  “The truth is hard Mengo,” Manea said, walking right up to Deirdre.
  “Like the fact that I made those words up so that you’d stand your ground and get caught by the bounty hunters, it was total gobbledigook.” She started ripping into Deirdre. “I could’ve told you the word was Gobbledigook and you’d have been like-” she held out her hand as if she was wearing The Gauntlet and put on the face of a dimwit, “-Gobblediboob. Gobbletiwook. Gibbledibob.” She shook her head, rested her hands on her knees and under the breath of her mocking laughter said, “Such a loser.” She drew a vicious looking laser pistol that had a mini bayonet on the barrel, which spun around when she took the safety off. “Oh and by the way, the window you smashed. It was all this.” she looked down at Bengo, and knelt down to rip his gag off. Her next line came across like a dare. “Any last words?”
  “Brother, Sister, I still love y-”
BLAM!
  Manea silenced her sibling with a quick squeeze of the trigger.
  Mengo fell to his knees, and clutched his deceased brother in his arms. It made Deirdre feel strange, seeing something so formidable break down in tears and wail in grief. This was only for a moment, because Mengo got back on his feet and with a sharp inhale, composed himself.
  “Ehutu, you have taken something that I loved, something I cherished and destroyed it. Now I am going to do the same.” Mengo shoved Manea aside and lifted Deirdre’s Gauntlet hand up. He even took the time to laugh before crushing it.
  It made the same sound as popping bubble wrap, but nowhere near as fun.
  “That’s for Mummy.”
  Deirdre could’ve done with Basroid’s bone booster, a special milk that turns your bones to topaz. Basroid invented it whilst at school to defeat a playground bully in a game of knuckles, AKA, slaps for psychos. Basroid was expelled after the bully was rushed to hospital. That’s the last plug.
  The Gauntlet jutted out of the wreckage of her hand. Mengo went to pick it like a berry, but The Gauntlet had other plans. It melted and solidified around both of their fingers. The energy rings went crazy, coloured rings layered on top of each other: orange, purple and green.

Energy Level: 40!

Just as Deirdre was taking all of this in, she was standing on the bridge of the ship, looking through the window and seeing the destruction of the resistance with her own eyes.
  “Oh, this was my doing, of course.”
  “Ah, ah, ah, you wouldn’t have known where to point those cannons if it wasn’t for me,” Manea rebutted.
  “Well, I’m going to do this without your input, beautiful sister of mine.” The blue energy of the rift washed over the window. It cleared and Deirdre saw something that would have made her tremble, if she wasn’t totally immobile.
  Earth.
  It was morning time in the Western hemisphere, and the moon still hung in the sky. Along with broken satellites.
  “My, my, what a dirty orbit you have. Going to have to clean that up right away.” And with that, every single satellite in Earth’s orbit vanished.
  “You always did like to show off, Mengy.”
  “QUIET MANEA!”
  “Just hurry up and destroy the planet. I can still feel it’s stench on my clothes. Earth, a planet as worthless as the thing it’s named after,” Manea purred.
  “On the contrary, Manea: ‘Earth’, even the name radiates life. Hark at that splendid green and blue. I can imagine myself as a young Ehutu, bound in chains knowing that as the years passed, her family would grow old and die. I’m guessing that what kept her going was the thought of returning here.”  Mengo fixed his eyes on the moon. “You call it ‘Luna’, don’t you?” The moon was gone, and then it was there again. Only this time, it was closer to Earth.
  Mere inches, but mere inches was all it took. Deirdre saw tiny little Britain and Hong Kong swallowed by the waves, both sides of her family lay under water. She watched as gigantic Russia snapped in half like a breadstick and Africa moved from its place on the globe to embrace South America, as it had done millennia ago. She fought her brain, screaming at it not to imagine the innocents drowning in the seas, crushed under the weight of their collapsing houses. She only imagined how she could have stopped this from happening in the first place.
  “There goes your school and that factory we ‘practiced’ in. Still, you humans would have probably done this to yourselves anyway. Mengo just sped up the process.”
  “I’ll give you the Sahara Ocean, if you’d like,” Mengo said with a warm and affectionate smile.
  “This alien invasion has turned into an alien inYAYsion.” Manea punctuated this with a little fist bump, that made Deirdre realise that unlike her complexion, the quirkiness was not part of the disguise.
  “Look here, Deirdre.” Mengo looked back at her, with sad eyes that freaked Deirdre out.
  “I didn’t want to do this girl, but The Gauntlet forces you down a path, not that you’ll have to worry about that for much longer.”
  Deirdre’s body crumpled like a piece of paper and was suddenly pulled up from the surface like she was in a bungee cage. Deirdre thought this was Mengo using some power of The Gauntlet, but he looked as shocked as she did.
  They were jumping off of the deck, but when the surface began to flicker past them like a film reel, Deirdre knew what had happened.
  The Gauntlet could teleport things through dimensions, and it was teleporting the two of them through the dimension of time.