A Chance Encounter

"You don't belong here," the man said to a passerby. "Your home planetary system has been destroyed, and you should have been taken with it."

The passerby, John, stops himself and looks back to the strange man thinking that he is talking to someone else, but he stares John down.

"I don't know what you're talking about, man. Earth is the only planet that I have ever known."

"No. You're from a planet 1.3 million light years away. You were born there and brought here as a baby. I know because I was there. You weren't supposed to come here, but here you are. You should have been destroyed with the planet. That was the plan. That was the goal. But here you are. You should be dead, but here you are."

"Dude, I can appreciate that you're high as fuck, but you're out of your mother fucking mind."

"Your mom was Jarvalaina and your father was Tramalond. They were the leaders of the Scoraloranda Tribe, and they were the trying to destroy the planet with their greed. You should have been put to death alongside them. I was fighting them in the Floreundor infantry. I saw their faces staring me down and I could have taken their lives, but an explosion behind me left me disoriented. It was a dromaline bomb that detonated, and you know how disorienting those things can be."

"No. I really don't know how disorienting they can be."

"Well, trust me. They are designed to be non-lethal, disorienting explosions. They are unlike anything on this planet, thankfully, but I think that it is because the Uegentia tree cannot grow here, which produced a necessary ingredient to the bomb. It is what creates the hallucinatory effect."

"Do you happen to be on that right now?"

"No. This is your history. Someone needs to teach it to you."

John finds himself intrigued and with little enough to do that he sits down on the bench next to the man wearing tattered and torn clothing, loaded down with more layers than he thought would be possible, but also looks like a necessity in this cold weather.

"Anyway, I expected your memory to be in tact. We Organianans have impeccable memories, even at birth. It is what makes us so unnaturally good at things."

"Alright, I will bite. If you know my parents," the man John speaks to is old and weathered, but the lack of home means that his depiction of age could be heavily skewed. He could be thirty-five or he could be seventy-five, "then what do they look like?"

"Jarvalaina had deep green eyes with brown hair, which she always clung up in a tight bun on the back of her head. She smoked Availananana branded cigarettes there, which stunk like hell, but you'd never catch her without one. She was tall, definitely above average by several inches and would wear combat boots well enough to appear like a fashion statement even while stomping the heads of her enemies into the ground. Still smoking those horrendous cigarettes. Tramalond was quite reserved. He had brown hair as well, but with a blue green set of eyes that would drop your guard if you weren't careful. Some would even say it was a super power of his when it came to disarming his victims, as many people would not believe him to be capable of such atrocities. But, my boy, he was capable. He would extinguish the flame of life within his victims with such smooth, efficient quickness that one dare not even know it was happening to them. Then they would be dead. Honestly, it would be the way to die." The man's voice softens as though he begins reliving the view peering back at him.

Through the strange story this man is telling John, the depictions are eerily close to accurate. His mom, indeed, wore her hair and smoked away like a freight train. His dad looked just as depicted as well. Did this man truly know his parents? Could any of this actually be true? "So, what happened to my parents?"

"Your slimy parents got you into a Flundeeractious Pod and transported you all the way here when they realized they were going to lose the war. They were heavily outnumbered - 1,000 to 1, if they included you, which why would they? Impeccable memory or not, you were still unable to speak or do anything on your own."

"How did you get here then?"

"I was loaded full of weaponry and sent in hot pursuit hours after your parents left the planet. They didn't account for the planetary rotational shift when launching me, so it took me years upon years to find them. Once I did, they had grown older. Their violence subsided. Their hatred for others dissipated. And my mission, well, as a great Lorrecoloranean warrior, was over. I had lost the drive. I had lost the passion. I had lost the strength to carry on. My sense of honor took the greatest hit when I realized that I could not fulfill my task set upon me so many million lightyears away, and for many years now I have lost all will to carry on. I gave up a job. I stuck a needle deep inside my arm without a desire of seeing the end result, but here I am. I never had any notion that I would run into you, young boy, to share your past with."

"So... you've given up on life because you couldn't kill a couple people? That sounds like a pretty stupid fucking reason to give up on life, mate."

The strange man on the bench finds a spark in his eyes as they glint in John's direction. With a swift movement unlike anything John had ever seen, and unlike anything the man himself had seen in decades, he finds a blade stuck into the side of John's body.

"I gave up on killing them, my boy. But you, you will not live long enough to destroy any other lives."

A burst of pain shoots through John's body unlike anything he had ever experienced as something infiltrates his entire body, rendering him unable to move or make a sound. A mere moment passes before the life fades entirely from John's body.

"I got him boss. He is gone. No more of the Scoraloranda tribe exists," the strange man says speaking into a rubber band stretched around his wrist. He hears no response, but grows a big smile across his face.

-Dustin S. Stover