THE ALIEN LANDS

Cordelia was thin and tall, unusual traits for a woman, but not unusual for Colonial females. Cordelia habitually hunched her shoulders in a piss poor attempt to brace herself against whatever blow was coming that the heavens was preparing for her. As a tall, good looking female, she always felt that karma was going to attack her first. Her shoulder-length hair was blowing hard against the Chicago wind. She wanted to wash it badly, but knew that could wait until after the interview, but for some reason – maybe she was in a self-destructive mood today. It had stopped snowing for an hour, but the skies continued to get grayer which suggested more snow was on the way. It seemed to Cordelia like the world was trying to give her a fresh start, would she be woman enough to open the door, walk through the entrance, hold her arms out and accept whatever destiny was going to give her.

“By the Lords of Colonial, I am so full,” Ingles said, “Earth food is going to make me fat. Why do I eat too much?”

“Because you are a man who thinks that the more you eat, the higher your profile will be in our society?” Lisa said brightly. “Because we have been eating nothing but rations for five years and you miss having solid food in your system?”

Ingles put his hands-on top of his head, like he was waiting for a police officer to come pat him down. He then let out a large fart. Lisa and Cordelia nearly covered their mouths, “Damn, when someone before you let one of them life killing farts out.”

Cordelia hated the cold. Maybe it was a family trait, but every time it got cold, she would get sick. Winter has been never her favorite time of the year, neither of Colonial World nor here on Earth.

Ingles sang, to a tune somewhere between, “Where oh Where are you tonight?” the famous song that was performed on the Earth show, He-haw.”

He saved us from a fate worth than death

He traveled the world, calling himself Seth.

He drove a fast car and crash through the wall

And he had a sidekick, a man named Saul.

“By the lords of Colonial!” Lisa was getting annoyed. “Stop singing that bloody song!”

Ingle had written this song ten years ago on the Colonial home world for a middle-level school play that he had written. He had fancied himself a career in the arts as something like that of a playwright on Earth. Lisa shoved him, still single into a nearby wall, and when that did not make him stop with the single, she did the next best thing, she snatched the Chicago Bulls cap and started beating him with it.

“Jeepers girlfriend you just did not just mess up my perfect hair!”

Cordelia continued to rehearse the scene in her head.

“Guys, it’s time to start behaving like we’re in a professional workplace,” Cordelia said, “but we have two minutes.”

“Yeah, that’s not good,” Lisa twittered. “The queen’s going to have our ass if we mess this up.”

I should be happy, Cordelia thought. I’m young and alive and healthy. I am on a different planet than I was born on. I have two reasonably sound parents --- Dad, the King of our People, still trying to help us out with our issues, our problems, our society as we navigate in this strange new land and Mom, the Queen of our people, the ambassador to the people of this planet. While dad handles the day to day operations of our people, mom travels the world, fostering up good will as the Earth pours resources into building a new continent for our people to live on as we integrate into Earth Society. As they walked east bound on East Illinois Street, in her traditional Colonial red overcoat and her brown interview suit, Cordelia knew she wasn’t happy. Why not? She was certain she had everything she needed for true happiness, she rolled the dice, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like the winning lotto numbers to the power ball refused to come. She did not know what else to do.

She followed Ingle and Lisa past bodegas, Laundromat, a place called the Parker’s Grill, she saw computer stores lined with glass piping, past a bar where she thought it was unusual for people to be drinking at one forty-five in the afternoon, past a police sub-station where she saw a good looking white officer stuffing himself with a slice of pizza that smelled good. He waved at her, she waved back. He blew her a kiss, she blushed. She could date a police officer from Earth if she had the chance. If she could go and talk to the cosmic secretary and ask her to make a few alterations to her plan she would have the perfect life, back on the Colonial Home world.

Maybe his real life could turn up at this Earth School, this Arcadia Academy, which was a very popular school on Earth with those who had dreams of working in the arts on Earth.

“You got you’re a-game ready, Cordelia?” Ingle asked.

Cordelia blushed.

“I got my a-game ready.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t have, you’re a-game ready.” Ingle clapped her on the shoulder. “Breathe, you got this. We’ve worked on this for weeks. You’re going to knock them dead.”

“I’m going to knock them dead.” Cordelia said as she mustered up the courage to go inside.

The wind bit through the thick material of Cordelia’s interview suit, but she did not want to button her coat. She let the cold fly through it. It didn’t matter, she wasn’t there anyway, she transported herself to a magical land.

She was in the land of Mount Arm-Joy.

Celeron Belgrave’s The Chronicles of Mount Arm-Joy is a series of five interactive novel programs published on the Colonial home world one hundred years ago. They describe the adventures of five Colonial children who get transported to a strange alien world they discover while on vacation with their eccentric grandmother and grandfather. They are not really on vacation, of course- their father is up to hip’s knee deep in a criminal robbing spree, and their mother had been diagnosed with X-disease which is why they had been packed off to their grandmothers for safe keeping.

All that unhappiness takes place in the background. In the foreground, every summer for three years, the children leave their various schools scattered through the Colonial solar system and return to Mount Arm-Joy, and each time they find their way back to this magical land where they have adventures and explore the villages they find all over the mountain. They would defend the mountain from various criminals, alien creatures who want to harvest the people’s souls. The most powerful and dangerous of their adversaries is a woman known as the Black Queen, whose enchantments threaten time itself, trapping the people of Mount Arm-Joy in a different dimension for the rest of their lives.

Like most people, Cordelia participated in those novels as the main character. Unlike most people --- unlike Lisa and Ingle – she never got over them. They were where she goes when she couldn’t deal with the real world, which was a lot. (The Mount Arm-Joy books were both a conversation starter for Ingle not really loving her and a reason why he did not.) There was a strong whiff of fifth class prose style about them, and Cordelia felt secretly embarrassed when she got to the parts about, the violent storms, the adults yelling at the children and the ground based vehicles from another world.

There was something more seductive, more dangerous to the world of Mount Arm-Joy that Cordelia couldn’t let go of. It was almost like the Arm-Joy Holo-novels --- especially the first one, The Secret of Mount Arm-Joy --- were about reading it. When the program begins, the oldest child Melios, cracks the secret combination code to his grandfather’s cabinet of his kitchen, there is a note that is posted to the door that says Enter at your own risk and when she cracked the code and open it into Mount Arm-Joy (Cordelia always felt strange pushing aside the door) it always felt as though she was opening the cover to the first page of a grand adventure she was about to start.

The world Melios discovers while exploring her grandmother’s house is a world of magic, a world of modern technology, a landscape that is as foreign as it is dangerous. In Mount Arm-Joy, the moon rises for twenty minutes and when winter comes, it lasts for several hundred years. The oceans are clean, the food is fresh and healthy and the people enjoy their lives, dull as they can be at times. The one thing about Mount Arm-Joy that stood out to Cordelia was that when the author wanted you to have an emotional connection to an event, you felt it. It stayed with you for years and years.

They finally made it to their destination. A recently constructed house. The neighborhood was a busy one, with wide sidewalks and new business going up all around them. The smell of pizza from the nearby Angelo’s Pizza caught their attention. Cordelia was now craving pizza and everyone knew it. The house was a brownstone house. It was constructed to match all the buildings in this part of Chicago.