THE VROL TRILOGY (99 page)

"Max, do this in order," commanded Jennie.
"Your mother is missing, but we not only need to find her, we need
to figure out what is happening on this world."

"This… world? What do you mean by
this
world
?" asked Mrs. Wong.
Common thought grouped the three moons with Azul, so the system was
always considered a
world
,
hence Mrs. Wong's unusual response.

"I can make this quick. Mrs. Wong - my
experiment was faster-than-light travel, and I got back to
Old-Earth in seven days."

Mrs. Wong gasped in amazement and had her
clasped hands at her heart before Max could finish his sentence,
but Jennie put her arm around the aged caretaker and calmed her so
Max could continue.

"The military and the federal government
didn't like me going back, so they sent a ship after me. That's
where I met Jennie. We were actually in Machu Picchu, Peru! Can you
believe it?"

Mrs. Wong smiled in delight. Even
though her genetic background was Chinese, her last ancestors
during the Exodus were living in Peru - one of the countries that
participated in the Exodus - and her family carried a rich, verbal
history of their lineage.
The Adventures
of Juan Carlos Wong in Machu Picchu
was a series of
tales told to every child in the Wong family ever since they had
arrived at Azul centuries earlier.

"Oh my, that does sound amazing, Master Max,
but what was it like? Was it beautiful, like in the stories I would
tell you as a child?"

"I believe I can answer that, milady,"
Liliana interrupted. "I have been to this Machu Picchu and it is
quite beautiful. There is lush vegetation everywhere, and rare
birds sing in the trees. I hope to return with my parents one day
soon so that we may fly in my father's space craft and explore the
galaxy." Liliana then got a slightly more concentrated and devious
look on her face as she pointed a finger in the air and continued,
"This will enable us to ferret out our enemies and destroy them
with our mighty swords. The streets will be stained with the blood
of the enemies of freedom!"

The three adults stared at the little girl,
amazed with her demeanor, while being more than slightly scared by
her follow-up statement.

"My, what a fine young lady you are. And your
name is Liliana?" Mrs. Wong asked nervously.

"Yes, ma'am. That is my name. Liliana
Gunnarsson. I am a lycan and a mage… at your service."

"Um, yaaaaah, that's great Lili! Woohoo! Oh
boy. Ok, so we need to find mom, right away," interrupted Max,
trying to quickly change the subject from lycan and mage.

"Oh, Master Max, she's so adorable. But… how
did you two… um, I mean," stammered the caretaker, trying to ask
the difficult question regarding Liliana's advanced age for a
couple that had been together for such a short time.

"I am adopted, milady. Mami and Papi saw fit
to include me in their family."

"No, sweetie. We were blessed with your
decision to choose us," Jennie said lovingly.

"Yup, that's true," said Max. "So tell me
now, Mrs. Wong - what has happened here? What has gone wrong?"

"Well, things are very odd. There have been
abductions - disappearances, and now that the Artusians are nearing
our system there's a lot of propaganda. I mean, I can understand
the excitement - our first contact with an alien species, but it
seems… unreal."

"What sort of propaganda is being pushed?"
asked Jennie.

"Billboards and holo-verts, showing
pictures of them. They look like angels, really. But many believe
something is wrong. Why would the military be standing down and
pulling back forces? Plus, the ruling class has changed. There is
no longer a president - there is a
chairman
," the old woman said with an ominous
tone.

"Let me guess - Len Johnson?" asked Max
rhetorically.

Mrs. Wong nodded her head knowingly,
affirming Max's greatest fear - Azul was now a system-wide
dictatorship, run by those with recessive vampire genes.

"Here, let me show you, dear," the caretaker
said kindly, as she activated the wall screen.

Jennie and Max watched in near-horror
as newscasters plastically regurgitated obviously contrived
propaganda. They were talking heads, spitting out the latest
approved notifications for the general populace to absorb. In fact,
their broadcasts were so unreal that it was obvious they were
trying to convey a sense of distress, as if charge weapons were
pointed at their faces while they spoke. Terms like
Enormously Popular Chairman Johnson
,
and
Overwhelmingly Elected and Beloved
Governmental Leaders
were frequently repeated during
the newscast, with the reporters stressing titles in comical
fashion. Only a narcissistic, sociopathic leadership would fail to
notice the obvious undertone of rebellion.

Max had no sympathy for the broadcast
media, as they had nearly always supported measures that would have
resulted in the stripping away of freedoms from the citizenry of
the planet and the three moons. He could never understand why they
would subscribe to such beliefs, but simply chalked it up to
success guilt
- there were those who
had succeeded in achieving their goals (either by hard work or by
luck), but felt guilty that they were doing so well, so they agreed
that making everyone
the same
would be most fair (except for their class, of course
-
they
needed to lead the
masses, or
los desdentados
[the toothless ones], as they were called). Unfortunately,
making everyone the same meant making everyone poor and destitute,
relatively speaking. There were no true poor on Azul, except by
choice, because, in public institutions, education was free all the
way up to a Ph.D. Work was plentiful and it simply depended on the
individual's will and desire to succeed, so Max Gunnarsson felt no
such guilt. He had studied and worked very hard for a number of
years, and so had his wife. It was merely that the newscasters were
now receiving their just desserts. He would have snickered, or even
laughed out loud, had his mother not been abducted, or his planet
not in jeopardy of invasion by a death machine race of bipedal
praying mantises. He was there to help save them, and fully
expected to be berated for it afterwards.

After watching the news for about ten
minutes, Max looked at Mrs. Wong and asked if his room had been
disturbed by the military when they took his mother. Of course it
had.

"The room is empty, Master Max. There was
nothing I could do, as they removed everything in it. Even your bed
is gone. I simply hold out hope that your mother will return
soon."

"What about my basement? Did they find it?"
he asked hopefully.

"No. They did not find it, even though they
searched the entire property."

Max then decided to share some of his new
life with Mrs. Wong, as it would be necessary to display a bit of
his new skillsets before her.

"Mrs. Wong, um, I really want to tell
you everything that happened, and I promise I will, but first, I
need you to
not
freak out if
you see anything… different, ok?"

"Different? What do you mean, Master
Max?"

"Oh sweetie, just show her already, I know
you're dying to," Jennie busted out, as she stood while pulling her
husband up by the hand.

Mrs. Wong watched as Max looked at her,
winked and then shot his arms out, with his obsidian-black,
feathered wings following full-spread.

The china gave Max the same look she had
always given him whenever he had shown her a new invention, or his
top-level grades from a project - it was a knowing look, devoid of
surprise, as he was always such an amazing young man. But this time
she also laughed out loud, her already-small eyes closing
completely with her jovial laughter.

"So, you met your father, I assume," she
said, not even bothering to make it sound like a question.

"Huh? You know… huh? What? How did you?"
stammered Max, as Jennie crossed her arms and grinned. Apparently
she understood female intuition much more than Max did. Liliana
merely smiled as she watched her father flap his wings lightly.

"Master Max, how do you think I got the job
as majordoma of this household? Did you believe I answered an ad on
the data net?"

"Well, I never really thought about it, to be
honest," Max stuttered comically.

"Mija-El contracted me to care for you," she
said as she gave them all a devious grin and wildly shook her head
from side to side. As she did so her face changed and became
younger looking, astonishing her houseguests. Then standing there
looking at them, she appeared to be a woman in her twenties,
suddenly smelling like a lycan.

"Your father enabled me to care for you by
activating my recessive genes, young Max. I could smell you the
moment you appeared on the doorstep. And you, Mrs. Gunnarsson - you
are also lycan, as well as your lovely young daughter. But it
appears that you have full control of your senses, which should not
be possible here, unless your father shifted you - is that what he
did?"

Max took a moment to gather himself. His
nanny, Mrs. Wong, was a lycan, and she had maintained her abilities
all her life in order to protect him.

"Oh, now I get it! That explains why you were
on vacation for a couple of days every three weeks! It was always
during a full moon!"

Azul had two moons and each one had a full
phase every three weeks, Luna within one day of Sienna.

"No dear," she said laughingly, "I do not
suffer the change - your father made sure of that."

"Then what were you doing?" he asked.

"I had a boyfriend and we partied a lot. You
were quite a handful, and I needed a break every now and then."

"I can go with that!" exclaimed Jennie,
reaching out and giving the now young-looking Mrs. Wong a
high-five.

"Everyone! Can we please get to the business
of finding grandmother? I would very much like to meet her,"
demanded Liliana, scolding the adults for getting off-track.

"Sorry, sweetie," said Max, as he retracted
his wings gracefully. One of the things about archangel wings was
that they would appear and disappear on demand. Contrary to popular
belief, angels did not walk around with wings 24/7. Nor did an
archangel need to have special clothing with slits in the back of
the shirt and/or jacket - the wings developed on-demand by a
combination of some very powerful innate cantuses, capitalizing on
salubots and mutatebots. They formed through and outside the
clothing and retracted/disappeared in much the same way.

"Mrs. Wong, would you like to accompany us to
the basement? I promise that once we have found mother I will show
you how you can retain your lycan skills on any world," said
Max.

"Of course, but you do realize that there is
surveillance outside, right Master Max?" asked the nanny.

"Oh yeah. Part of the thing about
the
new me
is that I'm also a
mage, so I made us invisible upon arrival."

"Very well, then. Let's go out to your
toolshed. However, I would appreciate it if you could include me in
your invisibility thing, whatever it might be," said Mrs. Wong.

"No problem, let's go."

As the small group walked outside to
the
basement
under Max's
camouflage, he contacted his grandfather via comm, wanting to
convey his current information and get a bit from Vera.

"
Draagh, can I
get a status update on conditions where you are
at
?"

"
Yes, my son.
We have bypassed all security and are now safely in the deepest
parts of the mine shafts here. We shall soon begin to carve out our
base of operations. How goes it for you
?"

"
Pretty good.
Hey Michael, Dad, whatever - um, you could have told me about Mrs.
Wong
," Max said with a bit of disdain.

"
Oh my, I
forgot about her, Max. I am really sorry. Yes, she is lycan and I
adjusted her frequency to that of your world so she could care for
you properly
," responded the archangel.

"
I located
her, by the way. I personally thought she would be an excellent
caretaker
," said Gabriel.

"
You did not!
You didn't even know he was born. I found her working in a Peruvian
restaurant and I
-"

"
Shut up both
of you! It's ok! Now, in case you are interested, things have gone
to hell over here. Johnson took over as some sort of chairman and
there's a ton of propaganda showing the Vrol as angelic
awesomesauce. It's not good. Plus, my mom's been abducted by the
military, so we are going to my basement
."

"
And what
would be there, my son
?" asked Draagh.

"
My stuff. All
my stuff
," said Max, with a certain amount of pride in
his mind.

The group of four walked into a small shed,
where Max put his palm up against a seemingly innocuous aluminum
wall. The area where his hand touched suddenly lit up, creating an
outline of a red glow around Max's hand, and a portal in the ground
started to slide open. A small stairway was exposed before them,
which Max used to descend to below the ground level.

Max snapped his fingers, silently
creating a light source that helped to display a massive room full
of displays and electronics. He walked over and flipped a switch on
the wall, providing light to the entire underground installation.
Liliana let out an
oooo
at
seeing all of the equipment light up, computers quickly starting
and fans running and circulating air.