Never As It Seems

Fuzzonia, But Different

There was silence. Flames stared at Rick, Rick stared at something in the distance, and Annmarie looked between both of them, confused. 

"Are you serious?" said Flames finally. 

"I wouldn't joke about that, man," said Rick. "It happened. He's not here. And he's not going to be here."

"I - I don't know what to say."

"It's a shock, I know..."

Flames gave a very forced sounding laugh. 

"I - I don't mean to interrupt," said Annmarie, "but who's Adam?"

"Guy we know," said Rick. 

"He's the one who took me away from AY5 that one time," said Flames. "Dude with a space suit, very vague, possibly menacing? I don't know."

"Oh, that guy," said Annmarie. "Um. Was he... nice?"

"Yeah."

"I'd say he was more serious than nice," said Rick. "I swear, sometimes you couldn't even make a joke around him. He would just stare at you and tell you to get back to work. Weirdo."

"How long has he been dead?" said Flames. 

Rick shrugged. "Oh, a couple of days."

"What?"

"I'm telling you, the crap going on on Fuzzonia is rough. Lots of rebellions, not all of them successful. That's how he died, he tried to get out of jail and - well - yeah."

"They killed him?!"

"They did. They took him to an interrogation room, questioned him for hours, finally beat him up -"

"Please stop," said Annmarie. 

He looked at her and nodded. 

"Well, you get the picture. They didn't like him there. At all. And this was the last straw, I guess."

"Why?" said Flames. 

He sighed. "He had tried to break out a couple of times before, and obviously they didn't work out. And he had kind of been, I guess you could say, in the rebellion league that some people had started. You can imagine what that was all about. The Fuzzy Guys knew all about it and they kept trying to stop it - it was getting pretty strong when I left, it'll be interesting to see how it all is."

"Sounds horrible," said Annmarie. 

"I never said it wasn't." He sat up and looked at the both of them.  "But! If this all goes to plan, which it better otherwise I really will never see you again, this will all have been reversed. Who knows? Maybe he'll come back."

"Is that even possible?" said Flames. "Wouldn't the universe implode or something like that? Something about messing up people's timelines, they say it all the time on those lame sci-fi shows."

"Don't know and don't care. Ah, here we are. Nice part of town, isn't it?"

As they had been talking he had been driving, and they had arrived at a very flat and deserted part of land. It wasn't the same as the spot where the field mission had begun; although it was deserted, it didn't seem like it - like people had been there before and would come there again. 

"It's empty," said Flames. 

"Great observation," Rick said sarcastically.

"Why are we here, exactly?" said Annmarie. "This is not the other planet out in space somewhere that I've been hearing so much about."