Future Past

Flashing back, he remembered something.

Everything around him was different this time, his surroundings were a hazy white, all the objects and people replaced by hazy lines that only showed its shape like he knew it existed but it wasn't focused on or acknowledged. He could hear a woman and a man's voice, two soft and loving voices that seemed to be in the distance. Their voices overlapped and intertwined, but none of that mattered.

The only thing that mattered was his one-two hands and feet and a large toy car. It came as a disassembled mess, meant to be priced together by the maker. Suddenly, everything sped up. The hazy lines wavered faster, the voices jabbering away, and his own two hands rapidly piecing every piece together.

Everything flooded back to his mind, how the toy car was assembled, the joy and wonder he experienced making it come to life and the satisfaction upon completing it. Time slowed back down and two voices came into focus, "wow! He made that in just half an hour! Our little boy is going to shake this world with his ingenuity," Said the man.

"Yes, our little boy. I can't believe he is even here, he is a miracle!" The woman said back.

Time moved on, his yearning to continue hearing their voices ignored and he was a little boy, just a few years older, at someone's home, a home he had been hypnotized into thinking it was his. His hands moved just like they had before, everything around him was toned out and was seen as a blank space, space he didn't even register in his mind. He pieced together with metal pieces that his father provided to create something he recognized, a work that he had been working on through several hypnotized lives. He held up his completed work after a while, admiring the beauty and the functions he had for this, finally working out all the issues and adding functions to something he had been working on for so long.

The next moment, he was at a school. He sat next to his classmates, who he immediately recognized. George, Ava, and Trey.

They all wore the same thing, a soft and comfortable white coat. Under his arm, he had a metallic contraption. When he felt the cold metal on his arm, he felt a sense of pride swell from within his chest, and he realized it was a secret contraption he made himself.

The three kids around him also had similar contraptions under their lab coats and they all looked at him, smiling and gave him a thumbs up. The table in front of them had a couple of flasks and Trey took a flask, pushed the tube into a small wedge in the contraption under his arm, gave his arm a tiny shake, and the flask began rapidly vibrating until the color inside changed from white to blue while all the other kids at other tables manually shook their tubes, the contents still white.

Zeeth then took a glass cylinder off a bunsen burner and placed it in a small socket in his own metallic contraption, turning a dial-up to the halfway point. The liquid inside instantly began bubbling and it slid out with a small plate when it was done.

He placed it back on the burner as Trey poured the blue liquid into the cylinder he just heated up as the insides of it swelled and became a foamy purple. They jotted down some notes onto a holographic image in the table and a green check sprung up.

He took a few materials from the cupboard and had each of them take a few. They shook, mixed, boiled, and froze things all by secretly using their own contraption. He noticed the name on it was Zeeth's Prototype 57 and an assortment of trial names under it like 'ArMachine' or 'MultiArm' and a date etched next to each name, the first was "1/2/3456", the second was 3/15/3456", it made the present Zeeth cringe just reading the names he came up with as a child. His science teacher, whose name he would often forget, walked by their table and clapped happily, saying, "table 4 wins again!"

His friends sat there proudly and nonchalantly as if they had always known they were going to receive the victory. He disliked their smug faces, their smiles that made them seem as if they were above all others. But he suddenly realized, disgusted, he was wearing the same expression. He didn't feel any pide, he simply felt as if this is what the world should be like.

The young Zeeth in his memories didn't realize, but the present one noticed another boy from a table to their side glaring at him angrily. His name was… he couldn't remember, his young self had no intention of learning his name so he couldn't remember at the time either.

Shortly after class ended, his friends gave him back his arms and Ava was cheerfully saying, "thanks for letting us try the prototypes!"

George and Trey followed up with, "Make sure to sell us one first when the completed one is out!"

"That was fun, let's do it again!"

They said that, but he felt a hint of malice and jealousy from the two boys. He had allowed them to test it out for him, but even his younger self sensed a bit uncomfortable at how they talked. Their hands were slow to let go and their eyes kept following his hands as he folded them up and put them in his bag.

He left the class, heading back to the orphanage he was located, thinking about his parents who he never met. His two hypnotized mother and father met up with him and led him into their flying disc, a much flatter, sleeker version of a car that flew using a combination of magnets and air pressure. He had a strange amount of knowledge of these discs and his younger self thought back to the time he took one apart to understand it.

He saw something he had never noticed before, in another flying disc, sat the woman who had saved him the first time. His younger self didn't notice her, but he did. Staring at them, he noticed that she and a small team watched his every move, through tinted windows and one-way glass.

He was snapped back to reality and saw Page, still holding onto the metal spikes and approaching a terrified Utha who was cuffed down to the floor.

"Zeeth, you should try to sort out all those dwarven techniques by making a few of those things in your head, that much information can still be mind damaging even if it was sorted out. I will be finding out everything I can from this one while we wait for help."

"The record? You saw everything in the record and you aren't an insane wreck yet?"

"Are you sure help will come?" Zeeth asked, ignoring Utha.

"Yes. After moving all the dwarves to safety, the elder dwarves might try to come back and see what's up and we will explain everything then."

"T-they won't believe you! I'm the elder, I'm the dwarf, they will trust me!"

Page looked at him curiously. With an amused expression, he said, "you don't truly believe that, do you? That was said with some hesitance, you don't think it's true."

"Wha- shut up! You have a lie telling skill?"

'Black, how come you didn't tell me he had bad intentions?' Zeeth asked metally.

'Likely for the same reason Page couldn't read his lies. The blue shield blocked our mana. But now that it's gone, I sense immense weariness, to the point of wanting to harm us for self-protection. I really need to heighten my mind skill, to think such a shield blocked my skill.'

He picked up the shield and inspected it closely for the first time. By the light of several Lumos Gems, he could see all the little bits and parts he never noticed before. Dozens of magic circles were carved into the shield, all to simply allow it to absorb magic. By studying all these new symbols, he knew exactly what would be weak or strong against it, the absorption of black magic was one of its weakest parts but would likely destroy it in the process.

'Items Acquired: Magic Absorbing Shield.'

'What?'

'I thought about your thing for a game, about status screens telling you a character's status. Are items not a part of a person?'

'Yeah, it is. Items are a part of a character. This is nice, it reminds me of that memory.'

He heard from in front of him, "No! I didn't want to hurt anyone! I just… I just didn't want to be left behind. Do you know how old I am? 290! I'm 290, I'm going to drop dead any second, I'm the oldest elder, do you hear how old that sounds? I just didn't want to die and have the youngsters go ahead without me! The demon promised me eternal life in exchange for all dwarf knowledge. It wasn't anything too bad, I wasn't taking the knowledge, I just made a copy! He promised not to share the knowledge with anyone else."

"And you really believed the words of a demon?"

"I… didn't think of that," Utha said, looking down.

"Then where is your circle?"

"Didn't make one. I made that female dwarf make the contract."

"What? And she let you? What happened to her now?"

"She was frustrated, easy to manipulate. I could tell at a single glance that she was always the blunt end of the joke, mad at everyone. I just had to figure out what was making her mad. A few lies and convincing rewards and she was doing everything I wanted her to do. But the demon should've taken her away by now, her body will likely be consumed the moment she wakes up."

Zeeth went over to their anvils and picked up another old metal to work on, taking a hammer and fanning the flames to heat it up. He began hammering away at the metals, everything was normal at first as he watched the sparks fly off and the impurities flake away. They reminded him of how Black removed his own impurities, they flaked away like how they did here. He stared at the red and orange metal, heated from the flames that were slowly being shaped by his hammer and the surroundings also began to fade.

The talking and dancing flames faded away before he even realized it himself. His focus was completely on the metal he was shaping, nothing else mattered and nothing else even existed at the moment. The hammer began to feel like a part of himself, it flew down with ease and followed his exact path. He handled it like it was another arm, gliding it through the air and pulling it back with no wasted movements like he had been doing this for years.

Finally, after what felt like a minute went by, he came back up. An old, rusty, bent piece of metal that sat in a junk metal pile was turned into a shiny, long, and thin blade. He looked at it proudly and dunked it under some water. The hissing signifying the end of production.

"Hey. you've been going at that for an hour, how's it feel?" Page said. He was sitting on the floor, an unconscious Utha on the floor.

"An hour? That long?"

"Long? that wasn't long at all. Getting a blade to that level in an hour is phenomenal."

"Really? That felt like fifteen minutes though."

"Yeah, blacksmithing is something that makes you lose track of time since it's so fun and you can see the results come to life."

'Upgraded: old, rusty metal became a phenomenal blade.'

Zeeth smiled and told him, 'thanks, Black.'

"How long would this normally take?"

"To make trash into something we can sell to hunters? I think it's best for you to ask him," Page looked at Utha, "but seeing as how he is unconscious, I would say about ten hours on average. And I would say a few years of experience for someone's first time."

"Huh. that long? Then are you sure this is such good quality?"

"Zeeth, in case you haven't noticed yet, you're sort of like a boy genius. Everything comes easy to you, you can adapt to situations that no one else could adapt to, that is why God chose you, was it not? Think back to all the moments you can remember, wasn't everything really easy for you? Maybe a little too easy? To the point where everything was boring after just a month, right?"

"I don't remember much, but I think. I remember playing a game that became boring."

"Reverie, right? Yeah, that's a good example. If you're really unsure about the blade, we can ask Utha when he wakes up."

"Was I just born that way? Was there a reason? I remember I was a science experiment for some people who apparently kidnapped me."

"No, the kidnap happened after you played the game. But yeah, you were just born that way. There is a reason, but I'm pretty sure it's under God's rule that I can't tell you about your past and I don't want either of us to become mindless vegetables just yet. Just know, there is a reason for it. Anyway, you should get back to blacksmithing."

"Don't we need to hunt demons sometime soon? Why don't we just break out, kill them and explain the situation."

"Don't worry, demons who are as weak as hell babies can't get too far from the air of hell. The air above ground is highly toxic to hell babies because it's so different so they need to stay close to a constant supply of hell air. The gap was also made underground so the hell babies are trapped for at least a week, trying to dig out and no one should find them for a month. That's what happened in my past life anyway.

Besides, we can't just blast out of here, apparently, when the red crystal is exploded all the defenses are set up by everyone else, even Utha doesn't know everything that's up there. Each elder made their own defenses and kept it a secret for cases like these when one of the elders is kidnapped. Although, this time it's different."

"We could still break out, can't we?"

"With our strength, probably. I heard Utha's defenses and we can get through fairly easily, but it's still dangerous." Page knocked on the walls with his knuckles, testing the strength, "This is the land of the dwarves, there could be stronger defenses than even the thunder cannon as long as they had the resources and time to make them. we could destroy the dwarf's land and their creations with it. If we are found blasting out of here, they might misconstrue a few things and think we are the enemy. I say we just wait a few days. We can make things until they find us."

The table Zeeth had folded up in his suit moved around and pulled itself out, staying near the flames to take in the warmth. Its strings wrapping around spare metal pieces and clung onto them.