Sin & Savior

CHAPTER 2, PART 2

"Too rich for my blood..." Gianmarco spake in a muttered breath, his words barely a whisper. As the sun set over the historic Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, he and Ronel sat in Alinea, a dining establishment of modernist cuisine, pristine beauty, bourgeoisie, and affluent excess. His client might have been used to daily $5,000 meals, complete with theatrically presented farm-to-table six-course gastropub dining experiences and the best craft cocktails and wine money could buy, but he—an incredibly wealthy man in his own right—held a far more powerful connection to his impoverished, disenfranchised roots than the average upper-crust attorney could purport.

The light cast torrential shadows through the dimly lit, sterile, atmospheric landscape around them. Surrounded by shrouds of finery, impressionist artwork, and Glencairn whiskey glasses, the dull ambient hums of an even duller, transient audience made Marco feel far away from home. Farther than he'd generally felt. He was missing the simplicity of Pordenonè, and Italy felt as though it were a thousand miles from him at the moment. Then, of course, beyond the veil of transience lay his true home: the Noncello River, its elegant bedding hidden away by yew-strewn banks, protectant and defensive of its heaving, weathered intimacy even amid the deforested areas nearby that fell under the siege of habitation—one such area having become the debarkation point of Gianmarco's birth: Sacilè.

A damp, apt resurgence of ancient nomenclatures, names originally elocuted in Latin: the Meduna, the Livenza, those old, rowdy import trading routes where merchants sold spices, spritzers, miscellaneous goods, and entire territories from Vinezia to Valcellina before European tongues ever cast them "Venice" or "Valley." Their picturesque landscapes, communed in Friuli-Venezia Giulia—the place Gianmarco called "Home"—were missed further still. He'd been stopping in and out of this universe for months now, hoping for answers to the crippling questions that had plagued his mind for the entirety of the previous year, without an inkling of respite in sight.

The subjects and secrets behind the Chaonidian war, the true nature of the female traveler in all her forms, and the journey toward finding himself amid the enwombing constriction of this new world were the story of all his told and untold dreams and nightmares. His insomnia was fueled by unsatiated curiosity alone and propelled by his burning need to know more about the nature of human consciousness and that of love itself. This, and only this, was the reason he'd subjected himself to such opulent fuckery as it was presented to him on that evening.

In this universe, he was a god of destruction and creation, but—in his own life—the life above the power-fantasy the Triumvirate's access presented him—he was a hopelessly downtrodden man. The core of his life had been forcibly taken from him by a lost love, a buckled business, and a psycho-emotional atmosphere in utter and absolute disarray, with seemingly no end to the downward spiral in sight. He suffered from a complex neuro-cognitive cocktail of Major Depressive Disorder and Dysmythia, with baseline suicidality as its symptom, Social Anxiety, Borderline Personality Disorder, ADHD, and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

A military veteran, a divorcee, a brilliant and more brilliantly broken shattering of a man, he found himself blessed enough to be a Primordial: born on Earth at the exact perfect time to witness the dawning of a new world. In his own life, he regarded himself as less than nothing. But in this world, he was stoic, salvific, superpowered, loved, worshipped, and adored by a woman he somehow held no control over. The cradle of credibility and responsibility his powers garnered him were vast. Command-based Probability Manipulation, Immortality, Reality-Warping, Fate-weaving, Consciousness Manipulation, and command over Space-Time were the two trademark abilities of The Travelers, and the ones that would not require his initial uncovering themselves.

Within this universe, Gianmarco lived life as God itself, with the entirety of existence being a sandbox environment to him in foundational essence and nature. And along with godhood came the existential burdens it carried. Having universal authority within one's reality, as well as limited agency among existence in an altogether separate alternative reality, leads one to ignore the consequences of meddling with the affairs of the fundamental laws of nature within one's world due to the issues being caused affecting only the inhabitants within. Or... so he thought. Until the most complex issue of both his real and connected realities found themselves as one: The Mother Particle.