The Ouroboros Cycle

Step 001/05

BEFORE

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They were crammed into the small, dingy motel room - Adam sitting in a corner idly perusing an anarchoblog on his laptop, Olivia sitting on the bed drying her hair, Calvin sitting in the window watching cars pass on the dark street below them and Anthony relaxing on the other bed, eating a sandwich. They had the television on, but none of them were watching. Every so often they would hear footsteps in the hallway and all stop what they were doing until the sound disappeared around the corner. It was after one of these pauses that Adam broke the silence.

“Anthony,” he asked, closing his laptop and kicking up his feet, “you said you were alive during the Schism, right?”

Anthony grunted.

“First of all, that’s still crazy. Second, why did the Schism happen in the first place?”

The older man stopped chewing and swallowed. “Ideological quibbles.”

Calvin rolled his eyes and Adam pouted. “No, seriously,” Adam said. “It didn’t seem like the Foundation had been around that long. What could’ve happened in such a short amount of time to cause a rift like that?”

Anthony set his sandwich down on the bedside table. “There was a profound disagreement from the beginning about what the Foundation had to offer. Back then we had this enemy, see - we called them Abbadon. We were led to believe the Abbadon was this group of desperate, hostile reality benders that were attacking our storehouses to loot our artifacts. The threat of Abbadon showing up on our doorstep everyday led us away from just researching and containing anomalies - suddenly we were concerned with protecting ourselves. Reaching outside our bounds.”

He took a drink from a can on the table. “We began a project to build this thing, this eigenweapon, that we could use to end Abbadon once and for all. Felix Carter, the Thirteenth Overseer, he was in charge of the occult research that went into developing the rituals we used to bind unparalleled power to a word, a word that could be used to annihilate anything in the universe in an instant with nothing more than a thought. We-”

He paused as another set of footsteps proceeded past the door with little incident.

“We did something,” he continued, “during the development of that weapon, that was truly heinous. I am convinced there is no greater sin than the one we committed to create that perfect gun, and I am half convinced the Overseers only signed that deal with Death to avoid the fires of Hell we’re all now destined for.”

He paused again and took another drink. “Anyway, we were fooled. Abbadon was an excuse, one perpetrated by the Administrator to, for the first time, create an anomaly. Give form to something that had not existed before we started. We succeeded, but at a terrible cost. The Schism was a result of the two lingering factions after that event - those who believed that creating that weapon was a net good, and those who believed it was a net evil. The ones who stayed thought that the ends justified what we had done, and that creating that weapon had created a safer world. Myself and several others rightly believed that we had done something unspeakable, and that the Foundation couldn’t continue to exist. That it was rotten to its core.”

Adam pondered this for a moment. “What happened to that weapon?”

“They buried it,” he said without hesitation. “It could only be activated with the word, and the only person who knew what that word was defected with us. Aaron Siegel, The Engineer, the man who is currently the First Overseer. When they realized they couldn’t use it anymore, they split up its component parts to keep them from being activated, and he could never use it again - word or otherwise.”