Recovery

He remembered life as an Eternal Champion. His multiverse (it somehow still seemed hard to believe that there was more than one) had been guarded by beings called the Offices. The Good, Order, and Chaos offices had recruited people as Champions to fight "sensitive" missions, mostly against the Evil Office. Champions were incapable of being killed and could recover from any injury short of disintigration, although they still felt pain.

Life as a Champion had been no piece of cake, however. The method of inducting the descendants of past Eternal Champions had been in place for centuries before Gareth had been born. Then, there had been the war with a mysterious being made of Crystallic, a war that killed more than half of the Champions. After that, it had been necessary to revive the induction of new people who arrived at Terra (intially repealed by the Rules and Agents because things were getting too complicated) so that there would be enough Champions to handle the problems that would come up. Not everyone had approved of this. The Eternal Champions had become an aristocracy of sorts, and believed that the inductees could not possibly handle the task of being Eternal Champions. Gareth had not been a member of his generation's main cohort, the Justice Batallion, or the inductees' separate cohort, New Eternity, but an offshoot Cohort, Rogue Squadron. It had included both inductees and descendants, the first such cohort in centuries. Many in both the other cohorts had opposed its existance, but in the two years that they had existed they had shown their heroism and won many great battles, and thus were beginning to gain acceptance.

Rogue Squadron is--no, had been--a fairly small cohort, with only twelve members. Gareth had been a distinguished member, and made friends with many others in the cohort, but he had never felt quite at home. The controversies and conflicts of the modern Eternal Champions alienated him. He had always gotten along best with members of the very first cohorts, Eternity Inc. and his parents', which had had no name and was referred to only as the First Cohort. He had known Fred Two well before he had been sent on this mission.

This mission had seemed fairly straightforward, at first. There had been several time anomalies in Eternal Champion history, and several groups of Champions had been sent to investigate them. The groups had contained members of several different cohorts, as was often the case for missions of importance.

Once he and the others in his group (Belinda Three, a fellow member of Rogue Squadron, and Fred 91X and Astra 91Q, from a more conservative Cohort that had opposed the revival of induction) had arrived, however, nothing had gone as expected.

For one terrible moment, he had assumed that it was because of too many counterparts of the same people in one analog universe. If this were the case, the excess analogs would have to be uninducted, and all of the new Champions would have been ejected. It had turned out to be even worse. They had pulled out of their own multiverse and found themselves in a red pyramid. There, they found other Freds and Astras. Eventually, they were contacted by a being who called himself Farlane Silverhand, who explained about the war between the beings who supported him, and their enemies, who were trying to destroy all the universes and remake them under their control. (Apparently, both were factions of the race of beings that controlled the multiversal Slipgates.) He had also told them their entire multiverse had been destroyed.

Now, Gareth wasn't sure what to do. The fact that billions and billions of people had died seemed almost too staggering to be real. What had hit the hardest was that everyone he had ever cared about, except for Belinda 3, was dead. His parents were no more. Once, he'd resented them a little, because of the long shadow of their heroic deeds over his life, he'd wanted to make his own reputation independant of them. He'd also resented their authority a little, as all children do their parents. But he'd appreciated their guidance and compassion, and now they were dead. He'd gotten his wish, they were now no longer alive to overshadow him, and all those who'd remembered their exploits had died with them.

But this was not what was most shattering about all of this. He had criticized the conservative Champions for trying to hold on to their old ways and deny that change and death were possible. But most humans walk through life assuming that they will never die, and Champions doubly so, because in most cases they don't. For the first time in his life, he was facing the fear of Death. The other Champions who had been Chosen, had faced it before, and perhaps could do so again. But he never had.

He felt ashamed and angry, and wished that all this would end and things would go back to normal. He didn't want to be like this, he was the rational one, he had always been one to look at the big picture and not get caught up in the crazy emotions of the moment. Of course he should be feeling grief, after all those people had died, but he should be able to move on and live normally, and face the new evil that had appeared. But right now he didn't want to fight it, he just wanted to be alone.

As he thought this, he realized why it was that so many people had reacted so extremely to the changes brought about by the Crystallic Crisis. It had seemed irrational to him. He had never appreciated it himself, for the Crystallic Crisis was merely an event in the past, a ghost of the previous generation. But now he knew why so many resented the changes, and why Fred Two had been broken by Astra Two's death. Surely he could have survived the "mere" death of a loved one, but to see for the first time in centuries that not all battles could be won, that people died and things changed, would have been devastating. He wondered how Fred Two was handling this current crisis. Surely he would be able to live through it as best he could, otherwise the Book wouldn't have chosen him. But Gareth was still worried for him.

He sat down and rummaged through the pockets of his coat. It had been a gift from his father, able to hold an indefinite amount of things placed in it. What would his father have done in a situation like this, he wondered. He had lived through much death and destruction, but he had always managed to move on. Gareth was tempted to ignore all this and pretend it was all a dream, but he knew that denial would get him nowhere.< p>He pulled a blue crystal out of his pocket. It was from Metebilis Three, the former planet of the Eight Legs, and was his father's gift to him on his fifteenth birthday. As he saw it, he once more felt a stab of pain. He tried to clear his mind and gazed into the beautiful crystal. He always found that doing so helped clear his mind. The crystal was a powerful focuser of psychic energy, it could also be used against his weilder by anyone trying to invade his mind. But Gareth knew his mental defences were strong enough to prevent such a thing.

1. As he touched the crystal, however, he began to feel uneasy.

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