Incognito: The Time Warp

Incognito 

by Aryan Mukherjee

    "Ommmm". A solemn noise echoed through the air like the droning of a gong. Edward Cross, a professor in the field of moksha, was meditating towards his dream of two ultimate boons that would transmogrify him into his soul purpose, invisibility. Out of the blue, a 'poof' noise rang in the air and a blue cataract was exhaled upon Edward. "I am Lord Shiva" a voice deeper than the Pacific Ocean growled. You shall have your two boons. Edward grinned, and cried "For my first boon, I request invisibility". "What do you wish for your second boon", Shiva inquired. "I'll hold off for that one" Edward mumbled, and Shiva disappeared with his telltale 'poof'.

    That same day, at the bank, two bulky figurines broke glass, and not with their voices, but through the door of this heavily guarded Irvine-vetoed bank. They were, forsooth, the two most notorious thugs in all of Irvine; Bob and Otherbob. Unfurling two mini-pistols, Otherbob cried "Hands in the air everybody, and we'll do this the easy way". They both knew that the police would be arriving in a few minutes, and set to work. First, they took out a mix of heated fluoride and sulfur. Then, they placed it in an Omnitrix and burned a hole in vault 60237849, the lottery number. Suddenly, Bob felt a cold hand on his shoulder.

    Abruptly, he spun around like a top, to witness nothing at all. "Quit it, Otherbob" he fumed, but when he finished his rotation, Otherbob was conked out on the floor. Bob lifted his gat(gun), and broke into a cold sweat. "What's going on" he stuttered, as a figure suddenly appeared in front of him, solid. It was Edward, who kicked the gun straight out of Bob's clutches, and vanished once more, quick as a bullet. A split second later, a plank of gold had knocked Bob out as well, and the police had just arrived.

    The next day, in Tustin, an auspicious counselor denominated Samuel Rogers read about the mysterious savior at the bank, and pondered the possibilities. After looking into it a bit more, he knew that the cause for this was either invisibility or time-hankering. He instantaneously knew, a bulb in his head, that he desired a superpower of his own, but couldn't discern how. Thus, he looked into some possibilities.

    First, he endeavored to track down the superpower he craved, and settled for time-hankering, due to the unlimited possibilities, changing the course of time and it's events. Also, he was discouraged after being fired from his former job and is taking up lowly careers such as vile smoking and bargaining through the black market. His first instinct was to erect a time machine. After observing notes from Back To The Future, dismantling and mantling clocks, and tinkering with solar power, he finally gave up after the boiler in his basement blew up one of his house's legs. Then, while reading the Sunday paper generously donated from Chinmaya Mission, he read up on moksha, an act of meditation which leads to spiritual embodiment from a lord of your choice. At this point, he was desperate, so he decided to give it a shot. Due to his survival of emerald-hued poison, blue-throated Lord Shiva has deemed the best option to Samuel.

    After sauntering a while in Laurel Glen Park, Samuel finally pinpointed a sheltered oak tree to carry out this act of  'moksha'. Relaxing in criss-cross applesauce position, he uttered a long om and commenced the lengthy incantation he had memorized. After several hours of executing this, the magic started to occur. A blue gust of wind set his eyes open like the snap of fingers, and eventually, the solidified shape of Lord Shiva appeared. Now Samuel's eyes were really open, and he jumped to his feet like he was sitting on a porcupine. "G-god?" he stammered his knees jelly. "I wish you two boons, and make it quick because a brahman in Udupi is awaiting me", Lord Shiva boomed in that Mariana Trench voice of his. "O-okay" Samuel stuttered, still quivering like an earthquake struck him. He took in a gust of wind and absent-mindedly articulated "A marvelous scent would be nice, as my b.o is really stinking up the place". Then, after Shiva enabled this, he got down to business.

    "I vote for a trillion more wishes, make it a quadrillion" he grinned, and Lord Shiva shook his head and wagged his finger to tell me, no can do. "Well then", Samuel paused, "I request the ability to time travel please". With a devilish grin, he found a wonderful sensation squirm through himself, and Shiva evaporated back to heaven. Samuel decided to test his powers out, by summoning a bony triceratops and unleashing it on the company that fired him, Samsung. First, though, he had to figure out how his powers worked.

5 minutes later

    Samuel had officially given up. After trying virtually everything, from snapping his fingers to pressing his brain and even electrocuting his cerebrum with a simple circuit board, he just couldn't do it. As he was walking back to his laboratory, he saw engraved on a tree, the letters Touch Me in default tree handwriting. As his fingers curled around a stub in the bark like vines, the world went black.

    
Out of the blue, his vision was colored with lines that looked as if they had come from ice cream sherbert, and he found himself swirling in an alternate universe, with no control whatsoever. His brain was being compressed against itself several times, and just as it felt like it was about to explode, everything paused, and the universe undid itself in a TIME WARP. He was standing exactly where he had been with the tree exactly one millimeter away from Samuel's fingers. He pulled his hands back and thought that everything he had just experienced was a nightmare from being overworked, or in actuality, underworked. I guess meditation doesn't work then. For some weird reason though, he felt odd, as if something had changed, and he just couldn't put his finger on it. Suddenly, a colossal droplet of drool moistened his shoulder. His first instinct was to look up, but he really shouldn't have, because the shriek he emitted after that was so ear-piercing that a window in Rome broke. Seriously.

   
 Samuel found himself facing, mano a dinosaur, the most ferocious-looking dinosaur in history, a three horn-plated triceratops. It's horn glistened in the humid sunlight, curved back like daggers. It pawed the soil with its boulder like four-toed feet, and when Samuel caught a glimpse of just a handful of its 800 teeth, he couldn't help it. He ran for his life. Just as he was a good distance away, he remembered his recon mission. He snatched out a tranquilizer dart and aimed it at the general direction of the triceratops, who forsooth, wasn't even following him! He quietly snuck back to the tree, whose leaves were a pastry to the triceratops, and poised his weapon at a good chunk of flesh, and fired. The noise heard when it collapsed onto the ground was so loud, Samuel had to wait 10 whole minutes before his ears cleared up. Then, with one hand on the triceratops and another on the bark of the tree, he was sent back home.

    "Hello, this is news reporter Hermione Scout from Channel Six News, and I'm here to report a highly pestilent triceratops parked dead center in front of the Samsung building, leaving it impossible for the employees to exit the building. It is currently sleeping, and authorities are doing all they can to..." the news person reported as beaming Samuel switched off his television. He thought that he had won. This news had been playing for the last hour, but he never bothered to finish viewing it. If he did, he would have known the real fate of the Triceratops. You see, what had actually played of was that Edward, the invisible superhero, had gotten to the battle scene at the nick of time, as the Triceratops was waking up inside a humongous net. The Triceratops was pretty grumpy about this and tore straight through the net like it was a silly string, and the net flopped over an impending car. The car ran out of control and smashed into the triceratops, which locked it into full rage mode.

    A few dozen helicopters prodded into the scene, and a clump of headlights and bullets rained down on the hapless triceratops. For cover, it ran into the Samsung building, showing so much care to the glass doors. Loads of Samsung Galaxies A8's tumbled to the floor, and the entire mid-range section shattered into sub-particles. Suddenly, in the blur of shrieking humanoids, an ear-splitting creak was heard. The building was going to crash.

    Out of the blue, a nearby crane moaned in revolt as it came to life, with nobody in its seat! The hook of the crane weaved around the lightning pole atop the building's hemisphere and stopped it just before it collapsed. As everyone scrambled out, a menacing roar broke into the air, and the triceratops slammed into the crane machine. "Oh no," Edward cried while activating the wrecking ball function. The titanic ball collided with the triceratops and knocked it off balance. Then the hook, still clinging on to the pole, slammed into a water hydrant and built an electrical charge. Finally, just as the triceratops was recovering, the metal pole was thrust into the triceratops’ gut and electrocuted it into a nighttime session of sleep. Just to make sure though, the wrecking ball wiped out the triceratops’ three crude horns. Relieved, Edward limped out of the crane. As he tried to reach the standards of visibility(not invisible), there was suddenly fire all around him.

    Blood. This was one way to describe Edwards' head, or at least what was left of it, as Edward recovered. There was also part of a construction pip stuck in his solar flex, and he had definitely sprained his toe. A good twenty feet away, still invisible Edward could make out the crane, along with the Samsung building, in ruins from a deadly blast. In the shadows, he could also see the cynical figure of Samuel Rogers slugging away, a grin on his face, He had thought that he had one, but Edward decided to alter that. On a limb, he balanced his body weight upwards and limp-ran up to Samuel. Of course, Samuel couldn't visualize him, and it came as a total shock when he was on the ground, blood coming out of his nostrils, and an Edward-fist-sized dent in his face. The remote used to detonate the bomb was kicked out of his hand and fizzed to a dead beep on the far side wall of the alleyway. Nobody was around him when he stuttered "Who-who's there". "You greatest nightmare", an Edward responded and immobilized Samuel's neck with a knife hand strike to his nerve point.

    Quick as sand, Samuel reached into his pocket and affirmed the tree bark, shouting "Sayonara!" while he was at it. With a turbulent gust of wind, he was whirled off to another universe, with Edward hopping into the time portal at the final second. Samuel had taken Edward back to prehistoric times, in the Jurassic era. Edward started up clearly startled by this transportation, his jaw dropping to the ground. As Samuel noticed this jaw indenture made in the ground, he felt his way towards Edward. However, Edward was a cheetah against Samuel's turtle-like moves, as he was trained especially at West Coast Taekwondo, the best Taekwondo in the west coast. With a fiery yell, Edward jammed his foot into Samuel naval, crossed his legs together, and pummeled him to the ground. However, Samuel was prepared for this situation spun around and made a shoe print int Edwards' face. Then, grabbing a stick, he lurched after Edward and missed his invisible target, giving Edward the lead. As Edward was preparing to literally kick Samuel's butt, a deafening, ground shaking, telltale roar hugged the air. It was a tyrannosaurus rex.

    Now Samuel and Edward had bigger problems than each other. As they started to dash away, Edward realized something he had watched in a movie. T Rex’s can't see, and all he needed to do was hide somewhere while the dinosaur chased Samuel, who was shrieking like a monkey who had lost his banana. Just as they were making a turn, Edward reached out into Samuel's pocket, grabbed the tree bark with a sweaty sleeve, and leaped into a bush, disregarding the thorns and crouching as low as possible. Just as he had thought, the T-rex kept on jogging. Edward knew that the T Rex would catch up to Samuel eventually, and took several deep, aching breaths. Then, repealing his sleeve, he coiled the tree bark and was teleport-ed back to the present. Home, sweet home.

    As Edward lumbered into the sweet city roadside, he grimaced at the tremendous wreckage caused by the triceratops and decided to preoccupy some labor with his final boon. "Narayana, Narayana!" he called to the air, and a whirlwind of amethyst smoke and gleaming light shone down from the heavens to redeem the shape of Lord Shiva. "What calls me hear, my kind servant" Shiva beamed, then shriveled up when he saw Edwards life-threatening scars. "Would you like me to unlawfully fix those wounds for you second wish", Shiva offered. "They will heal in time" Edward consoled, and continued "What I would truly be in favor of is to fix this gorgeous city, Irvine. Please be sure that  Samsung employees don't pee their pants any more over today's events". Edward reveled in a deep breath, lifting his shoulders and widening his (George W.) bushy eyebrows. He blinked and spun around like a top, and marveled in the city's unscratched, brand spanking new aura, with all of the buildings remade and cars uncompacted, etc. With a reincarnated puff of smoke, Lord Shiva had vanished.

    Edward found himself standing on a creaky wooden stage in front of a highly congested auditorium. Adjacent to him, the mayor of Irvine spoke."The current events of today were highly disturbing and terrifying for Irvine, and I'm sure everyone here was and still is scared. I know I am. Prehistoric catastrophe never before visualized have hit newspaper headlines worldwide, and the culprit behind this, Samuel Rogers, is to blame" the mayor addressed while the audience booed at Samuel's name. He continued, "I am very honored, for that matter, to present the Nobel peace prize to Irvine's savior, the one who rescued this entire city from impending peril at the hands of this destructive dinosaur. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Edward Cross!!!!".

    The audience went absolutely bonkers. A dozen or so hats flew into the air like doves, and confetti rained down like cats and dogs. Citizens pushed shoved and screamed as if a celebrity went on stage, and shaving cream created a cloud of mist. One family even launched flowers on the stage from a bazooka rifle. Edward bowed, humbly soaking in the glory. The mayor held a hand up to silence the crowd. "Is there anything you would like to say to the audience" the mayor inquired. "No" Edward replied, timid around public speaking. "There is so much for me to ask you, but I'll save it for the reporters", the mayor dissed. "I do desire to know though, what do you call yourself?" the mayor queried. Edward pondered this for a while. Finally, he uttered his sole superhero name, one that would be registered with him through the thickness of any fog. He said, in the boldest voice he could possibly muster, "Incognito".

The End