This is gonna' be a short one, in all likelihood. I don't have time tonight to draw up a longer segment, and this stuff needs to be filled in for later plot.
Chapter Two
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Phoenix leaned back in his chair and groaned softly as the joints in his back popped. He rolled his shoulders, which were stiff from sitting so long at the computer. It was the middle of the night, and he had been on RAF all day since The Big Poof, doing everything that he could to keep the RAFians from panicking.
Half a world away, in Jamaica, Richard was doing the same thing, as was Esplin in the United States. The RAF Administration shared a common bond, a common burden, despite their distance, so it was only natural that certain things would occur to all of them at once. Coincidence follows some pretty strict laws, after all.
Richard sneezed. Every window in his home flew open, and papers scattered everywhere, as though a small hurricane had struck indoors. Thunder rolled in the distance, and the winds outside picked up their speed.
While Richard was pulling his windows shut again, Phoenix was dealing with the small fire that had started on his desk, due to some paper laid too close to the overheated computer. When Phoenix moved to smother the flames, they vanished without so much as a puff of smoke.
At the same time, Esplin reached for the can of Bud Light that sat on the edge of his desk. Eyes tired from looking at the computer screen for so long, he misjudged the distance, knocking the can over. The can's contents sloshed out onto the desk, and Esplin rushed to move the computer out of harm's way. Suddenly, in a manner reminiscent of a VHS tape being rewound, the beer sucked back into the can, which righted itself again in its former position on the edge of the desk.
Any casual observer to this situation, knowing the respective personalities of these individuals, might have found it ironic that the calm, untemperamental, and forgiving Richard now had the ability to control the punishing blusters of local weather. Perhaps even more ironic was the fact that a fellow called Phoenix became a firestarter, and Esplin, who called himself after a character known for his destructive tendencies, gained the power of entropic reversal, the ability to set things to rights after they have fallen from a state of stability and inertia.
That's a load of bunk. Any casual observer to this situation would be screaming their head off, in all likelihood. The only reason these good fellows weren't freaking out is that they had seen enough crazy stuff that day to fill their freak-out quota for the next decade, and they all were quite familiar with the Laws of Fiction, which state that anything can happen. When fiction becomes reality, or vice versa, you become open-minded, or you become insane.
Speaking of insanity, somewhere in Florida, Jax and Jayne were having an interesting conversation regarding their respective subjective sanity, and in China, Morfowt was trying to figure out how exactly he came to be the only citizen of what was formerly Earth's most populace country. At the same time, Blue was having some major issues with the local plumbing, and Estelore, Goom, and Jen were quickly closing the distance between themselves and John.
More on all that later.
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