Kal heard synchronized dings from multiple system screens. "No one's around?" He asks.
"Want more people involved in your little illegal pep project?" Aurelia XXX
"Wanted only you since the start." Kal closed his eyes, confident in Aurelia. He knew she could handle the entire office on her own. "Why do you even have those idiots around is beyond me."
"I am getting too old for this…" Aurelia yawns. "Girl has to retire someday." Her screen pinpoints a Scout's location. "Also… you are tiring." She whispers.
"What?"
"Don't forget your tracker this time," Aurelia yells into the receiver.
"Ah! Don't yell into my ear."
"Then stop being such a dumbass." She whispers again.
"What…? Wait, I heard that."
"Can't believe you've let them put a tracker on you," Aurelia speaks quickly before Kal can snap back at her.
"Don't play naïve. That's general protocol, you know that."
Aurelia ignores Kal and continues with her taunt. "Being tracked like a dog. Daag h tu Void-folk ke naam pe." <{Hindi taunt for:-You are a disgrace in the name of Void-Folk.}<.
"Watashi o fui o tsuitakereba, genchi no gengo o tsukatte kudasai," Kal replies. >{Japanese for:- Go to local languages if you want to catch me off-guard.}<
"Also, there's no point in riling me up... I am going to tame him once I get out."
"Tame?"
"I meant slay."
"That's even worse!"
One banter after another, Aurelia and Kal kept switching languages and accents as they schooled each other and retrieved Kal's tracker from the bank of Swizz. With the [Oblivion walk] skill on full display, the public kept staring at and away from Kal, without knowing why or what they should be staring at. This went on until Kal meant yet another interesting human.
This human not only had the audacity to smudge Kal's favorite jacket but also swallowed the tracker whole. To be honest, Kal didn't care in the least about the tracker. For the jacket, he would remember and hunt this human down after his restrictions were lifted.
Kal stares deeply, hoping to never forget his face, while the human stares right back at him.
"What are you looking at, punk?" Aurelia gets rattled up. "Wait… He is still staring." She realizes.
"We both are looking at the same scene, Aurelia," Kal says.
"No… He is staring right at us. I mean you." She corrects herself.
"Tell me something I don't see. I am going to remember his face and…"
"He is still staring at you."
"So what?"
"He shouldn't be! Our skill. I mean your skill. The Oblivion Walk is still active. Is it active?"
Kal finally realizes Aurelia's dilemma. For the first time, Kal meets the human's eyes.
"Stop spiking your presence," Aurelia warns Kal. "He might sense you and run away."
"The kid!"
"No! The scout. Leave him for now. The scout is around the corner."
Kal's gut screamed not to let this human go. In a split decision, Kal chooses to meet the scout first, vanishing from within the crowd. For a second, the people around Kal were astonished, but when the crowd behind them bumped into them, they forgot why they were staring at a black space and were led back to their lives…
————
One of the most hated places in the cosmos for Kal is this famous coffee place on Earth. For Void-folk, their name is the most prideful thing they cherish and as it so happens, this coffee place is also known for its unique coffee names.
Kal glares at Starbuck's entrance. "You planned this, didn't you?" Kal blames Aurelia.
"Wouldn't have if I could've," Aurelia replies promptly with a muffled chuckle.
————
For an engineer, the hardest thing in the world is engineering. The same goes for a doctor, artist, and every other profession out there. Until and unless one has done it for years, they wouldn't recognize the hardships that come to pull said talent to make a living.
Such nonsense doesn't apply to a lazy person. These are the elite amongst the elite who find the shortest way to solve the most complex of problems. Scout Scot is one such candidate. He selects the most impossible tasks and slacks off until his boss reassigns him with an apology. Neither his reputation nor his work has ever been reported because of this simple, yet genius, technique.
It so happens Scot loves himself a Starbucks coffee. After completing a tedious job of opening his screen and checking Kal's and his boss's location, he fled to the farthest shop possible, to enjoy people mispronouncing his name. They had to be lazier than him to mispronounce such an easy name as Scot. He knew it was a marketing strategy, and he loved them for such simple brilliance.
Now, he stood flabbergasted, with Kal sitting opposite to him, and the entire coffee place splattered with his coffee. People at the back wondered how he could even spit so far.
"Kal! I mean sir… you, sir, why, Kal?" Scot spitted out half of everything in his mind. 'You shouldn't be here!' He wondered in his mind.
"Seriously! This guy." Kal sighs.
Aurelia sighs with Kal. "Yeah! Only he has the skill according to our database."
"Why?" Kal asks.
"Sir?" Scot was confused. He was sure Kal would never contact his boss. They were sworn nemesis, according to his boss.
"Weird and a skill designed for the laziest people? This one was tailor-made for him."
Kal waves his hand, magnifying his [oblivion walk] skill. The angry mob forgets and settles down. "Now for you." Kal glares at Scot. He hits a military stance with precision and salutes. "Stop dragging attention to us."
Scot flicks his eyes around the coffee shop, maintaining his stance. Everyone's attention got dragged back at them. "Yes, sir!" Scot throws an invisible veil around them, complementing Kal's skill. Now the humans couldn't see, hear, or remember the two eccentric figures at the center. "Done, sir." He maintains his stance all along.
"Relax. I have some work with you and you better complete it as soon as possible this time around."
"Definitely sir." Scot straightens his back even further.
Most of the system knew Scot by his lazy reputation. Yet no action was taken because of his irreplaceable talent. In a pinch, he finds the laziest solution, which takes less time and solves the problem with high efficiency.
————
Kal dumps his spatial storage junk into Scot's storage and gives him instructions on what he has in mind. After a not-so-long one-sided debate about how Kal planned to freeze the Earth, and the consequences of freezing a planet. Kal scolded Scot, bragging about how he integrated two species who pumped out and created a trillion babies within a second. "Make the world stop for you." He says, then goes on to criticize Scot's knowledge, intelligence, looks, and family, and looks again until Scot agrees to help Kal of his own free will.
"Delegate work." Scot's personal skill gets to work: assembling, rearranging, and enchanting the various scrap tech from the junkyard. "Delegate Now & Delegate Next," Scot adds two more skills to accelerate his initial skill.
The ridiculous skill names grabbed Kal's attention. Scot shrugs and gets back to work.
"How long?" Kal clasps his head.
"Before I complete my…" Scot realizes he hadn't ordered Kal a coffee, while he himself had a huge jug, a complimentary for being a regular. "Complete your coffee…?" Scot uses a skill and places another order.
"My coffee?"
"No… no, no, I meant let me get you a coffee and before—"
Kal looks at the barista lady with disgust. "I don't want one."
"But I have ordered one."
"He did what?" Aurelia screams into Kal's ears.
Kal pushes his anger down, turning red nonetheless. "Cancel it. Now!"
Scot panics, not having the skill to cancel an order. He made one, so he didn't have to move or stand in line. There were times when he ordered one too many and still drank them all, just because. He sure as hell never thought he would need a skill that cancels an order. So, he did the next rational and lazy thing left to do. "I don't know how!" He replies.
Kal leans forward, peering through Scot's soul. "Complete the artifact before she says my name." Before Scot protests, Kal hushed him. "Tick-tock kid."
Like all the other times in his life, when it did come upon his life, Scot pulled himself together. He never noticed why he did that, but at some crossroads, he just decided not to die that day and did the work required to survive.
A couple of minutes later, the Barista lady yells out. "Ka dul trumph? What a funny fucking name."
Kal clenches his fist, ignoring her as he glares down at Scot. He did not see why Kal's ominous aura seeped out. For some reason, he thought the funny names would cheer him. These were the times Scot wished he weren't so lazy. If only he had worked before and created a skill to cancel orders, he could've been lazy today.
Scot's concentration trailed away as he was disappointed with himself for not being lazy the right way. Meanwhile, Kal's aura shatters the effects of both his and Scot's skills, making them the center of attraction.
Someone from the crowd boos at Kal, while the others support the Barista.
"Ka ah ha! Dude, pick your coffee up already." A Stranger yells from behind. "Picking a fight, you fuck."
"Yeah… Fuck off." The customers provoke Kal.
Aurelia codes with full knowledge of what's about to unfold. "Earth has a way to break the strongest wills… And he always had a quick fuse. It's a wonder it took so long." She completes her side of the preparations. "Earthlings are lucky he waited this long."
"Ten seconds," Kal warns Scot in his home tongue, while the public takes it as a threat. Before the public reacts, Kal took a simple step, now facing the barista. At this moment, they knew they screwed up big time.
Kal leans forward as his earthly disguise flickers away, revealing parts of his true body. "Hate can't reflect the weight of my ᚨːəᚨin i\n )0! ᚨəːːəᚨ." Kal blurs out the rest with his native tongue.
"Fuck!" The same stranger slips, speaking out loud. He immediately clasps his mouth shut. But it was too late. Kal had already turned his gaze towards him.
With a bone-shilling smile, Kal takes another step, reappearing in front of the stranger. The shop goes dead silent. Right now, only Scot didn't hear his own heartbeat. As he was relieved to have extra time, he slacked off and enjoy his coffee. A quick glance from Kal, which only he could spot, made him spray the coffee shop once again before he refocused his speed.
Already sweating buckets and Kal's presence holding the public in a trance, no one felt the spray of coffee.
"Perhaps the only worthwhile trinket from Earth is this word." Kal shifts his sights back to the stranger. "ᚨːəᚨ feels right, but fuck has a distinct ring to it altogether. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck you!" He towers over the stranger.
Everyone imagines Kal looking at them when he said his last fuck. None suspected his speed, of course. Not even Scot.
'I am out of time.' Scot thought to himself. He half-asses the final touches before shutting off his skill. "Done," Scot says, removing a huge artifact from his spatial storage.
Kal snatches the artifact mid-air and shrinks it before it reaches his hand. "Your fucking race deserves to suffer." And he dragged Earth into the system.
****
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**
*
Vast space of nothingness...
A pitch-black dimension where nothing escaped. The living, the dead, the almighty, the light, and everything else, the darkness of nothingness consumed without a hitch.
A body drifts within these confines — "No! Kal tries to jerk awake from this nightmare. "Back here!" Kal exclaims. He knew this place way too well, being born here and all… "Did I ever leave?" He doubted his reality and everything which has transpired thus far.
Only one being can be behind this absurdness. Kal glowers into the void as the void glares back.
"ᚨːəᚨîŋ Fuck!"
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