05: The Blessed

Mirai, Mirai #05. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

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Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously: Christa never learned, or has forgotten, that the mythological Makaria was the daughter of Hades…

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“Your father called me Persephone?” Christa repeated, unsure of other words.

“Yes. Well, or ‘My Queen’, ‘My Lady’, that kind of thing. I suppose I knew it wasn’t your name really, but we went together so well, it just made sense. Hades the King, and Queen Persephone, and Makaria—she’s a very minor chthonic goddess. Makaria means ‘blessedness’, like a happy death.”

“I see.” She could feel a faintness creeping in, and pushed it away so that she could keep walking. “Kari, tell me about Hades.”

Makaria’s thin eyebrows flew apart. “Don’t you know Lord Hades?…oh, I don’t know, what is there to say? He’s Father. He’s good, and fair, but even when I was younger he always seemed terribly sad. I was always too afraid to ask him why, though.” She hesitated. “It got much worse after you died, of course. I’m sorry if I startled you too badly, but I haven’t seen you since I was fifteen. I missed you so much.”

Christa summoned all her nerves in order to stay steady. She wanted to be a hero, didn’t she? Lady Radiance could do anything. It should be no problem to handle a little thing like this. “Of course you did,” she said graciously. “I never knew my mother at all, so I can imagine what a shock it was to see me.”

“Oh, yes. You see, Mother more or less stopped aging when she came to live with us. You still look just like her.” Kari suddenly had a worried frown. “Are you all right?”

“Just fine,” she said, pulling her camera smile back into place to convince herself that it wasn’t a lie. “But I’m afraid you’re not making a lot of sense.”

“I suppose I did start in the middle,” Kari said. “Sorry. The beginning…mm, that would be Gabriel, maybe? He’s the one who created me. Matrix said your Earth is pretty backwards on embryonic synthesis, but it’s normal where I come from. We have very good cloning tech. That’s what Gabriel works with, because he doesn’t have his own body anymore and it turns out that’s a surprisingly common problem—people get vaporized, or stuck between dimensions, or don’t make it all the way through molecular transport, but then they don’t die exactly. He’s been trying to modify the cloning process into something that can regrow a body without creating a new person. He made me from yours and Father’s DNA just as a side project. Father didn’t want you to have to come live with us and not have anybody except him and Gabriel.”

This just kept getting more complicated, somehow. “You keep saying come live with you like it was in another dimension, or something.”

Kari shrugged. “It’s just Ohio. He said it wasn’t really safe for you to leave the compound after he transformed you into Persephone, though. Gabriel has too many enemies.”

“Transformed…”

“Well, of course. You couldn’t be the Queen of the Dead unless you could talk to the lost souls too.”

She took a slow breath. “But did I want to be the Queen of the Dead, Kari?”

Makaria hesitated, then gave a slightly nervous laugh. Christa noticed she was twisting her fingers together in a familiar motion of feeling compelled to say something she didn’t really want to. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I was young. You were the best mother I could ever want, and you said you were happy, but—well—I always suspected that Father loved you much more than you loved him.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “He didn’t want you to go Above and fight Mheksos, but you—you told him he couldn’t control you anymore. And then of course you were killed, and it devastated him. I lost both of you, really.”

Christa didn’t know what to say; her head was spinning. Their pace had slowed to almost nothing. Up ahead, she could see Ignis and Titan Beetle hanging around in the doorway, still waiting for the sirens to cut off. Left uninterrupted, Kari kept talking.

“When The Matrix asked me for help, I told him we had to save a timeline where the two of you were really, truly happy together. Whatever else happens in Terra-32…I don’t care. That’s everyone else’s business. But you gave up so much for me, and i-it’s really all I could do,” she said, starting to choke. Christa took her by the shoulder and wrapped her in a tight embrace.

There was the sound of Beetle’s visor swiveling again. “You two okay?”

“Why don’t you just worry about your own problems?” Kari snapped.

“What problems? My parents are normal...well, relatively normal. I’ll be fine.” He turned back to Ignis. “I don’t know what to tell you, though, man.”

Ignis pointed to the scar-riven cowl. “Fortunately, I at least have some common sense.”

There was a static explosion as Titan Beetle laughed through the vocoder. “Seriously, tell me who your dad is. I need to see where you inherited that from.”

Heat blasted up from the asphalt, its surface softening underfoot. “You watch your mouth, Beetle. She may not be the same one, but she’s still—” Ignis’ jaw visibly locked in pain, and the heat faded as the flow of power stopped, his hand to the side of his neck.

Inside, everything finally fell silent. Still wincing, Ignis grumbled some curse upon everything electrical and ducked through the shattered glass door.

“About time,” Beetle said as his armor started to whirr, plates separating to reveal the man underneath.

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