Tale Of Souls (Cathartic Nightmare)

PROLOGUE The Lone Wolf's Letter

Fairy tales are much of legend are they not?  Some speak in riddles, and some speak of rhymes that only future generations can translate.   The past has been written, and the fork in the road has become ever so apparent.  What becomes of the narcoleptic broken hearted?  Nightmares, dreams and disasters are scattered in notebooks across my living room.  I try and piece every puzzle that has been given to me, as if I were some professional code cracker.

 I sit here, writing a memoir knowing that you’re only getting one side of the story that becomes history.   You see it all starts with a van, a young girl and a trip to the wild blue yonder.  On many accounts, that’d be considered rape – or sexual assault.   Yet, what happened from there wasn’t anywhere near abduction of the illegal kind…

Oh by every account what happened next was terribly legal.   This young girl was ripped from a daily routine, into a van to be experimented on.   The trip was to a Lab, somewhere in the vicinity of Downtown Minneapolis.   A young girl of seventeen, in her blue jeans left for dead like pieces of a failed experiment. 

An experiment ran by the U.S. Government, you could say it was the Republicans – you can say it was anyone…   A government is never what you see above the ground – it’s always what is going on under the ground.   In this case, the project had a goal – a very typical goal of course - to create soldiers.  Except this wasn’t your typical cloning project, nor was it some twenty third century warehouse filled with life-force pods to keep people alive.

This was a project that had started in the last moments of the 1970s. It seemed as if they’d said ‘Screw the Vietnam war, let us get ahead of the enemies, and make the perfect weapons’, only instead of using nuclear warfare, they used human beings. Indeed it became a project that was to secretly contain the wars that would be started in the names of religion and politics.  In the media you’d see everything pertaining to modern mechanics, bombs and weapons of mass destruction.   Behind the curtains was a very different story.

Seventeen minutes into the project, they knew they’d discovered an ancient gift. 

Loop holes, rules they could bend, taboos that they were able to break.  Before they were able to procure their first humans in this project, they had to study the science and history behind it.  A government full of classified information, suddenly stumbling upon the keys to their future - alchemical research, ways to jump the lines of time, portals and pathways other worlds.

They always mentioned toying with life, and the human body was a taboo function.

But let me tell you something, that doesn’t concern them – their hunger and their thirst and desire for their quest was high.   We aren’t talking Watergate, that’s pretty much peanuts compared to most of this.  I'm not even talking the OJ Simpson trial, or even the Monica Lewinski affair – M & M’s and skittles compared to what I've seen.

By the time their seventeen minutes of fame was up, they’d found their perfect candidate to try something new.   A family divided in political affiliations, and a child requiring entry into a school for ‘gifted’ people.   No, I'm sorry I'm not saying ‘gifted’ as in sparing fireworks at an electronics machine, I'm speaking about mentally gifted, again maybe not of the MENSA variety – but children with different switches and light bulbs compared to the rest of society.

The money that exchanged hands was a loan, or a grant – signed off by the parent that believed straight lies from either side of the government.   My father, bless his heart, the fool – didn’t realize his child, his young daughter was about to be torn into three.   Torn into a triune mess and left for nearly dead, and what was left could’ve been shipped off to the morgue…

I suppose to tell you which leaf of the clover I've become – would be spoiling the story.  I'm Ryan Christopher Hotchstettler, a name that came out of the unspoken depths of our family name choices. Mothers know best what their children should be called, and in this case – the government had been spying on mine from day one.   I was born Lillian Merideth Hotchstettler, in the earlier parts of the 1980s during one of the most interesting blizzards of the decade.

No, sadly I'm not a female to male transgender.   I didn’t get much of a choice, and nor did the others.

They nicknamed us the Trinity Trio, only to find out one third of us doesn’t even remember at first anything about us.   That is of course apart from the shell,  the one that everyone thinks of as the broken one – the weak one – the one that needs protecting.   Where was our protector when all of this was running down the proverbial hill?

That’s right.

Gone.

One night, dead middle of a thunderstorm – drove up to see ‘her’ only to break up with her in the moment the bolt struck midnight.   An older but mature figure, he’d claimed to be everything anyone needed.   A memory that only I've kept through everything – a memory the others can’t even grasp at for fear it may trigger dire effects.

The third wheel, or in his case maybe the first wheel – Justin David Terrance lays awake in his new form. Away a few feet from the others, assuming they are just cold bodies.   He realizes he has a future ahead of him, only to trip and fall because of my mistakes.   We are one, we are three – yet we are none.  The disasters that lay ahead are blamed on him, because nobody knows fully who we are.

Except the Government.

Justin David Terrance,  Ryan Christopher Hotchstettler,  Lillian Merideth Hotchstettler – all of the same parents, the same DNA.   It would take a fire wielder’s past, and familial history to figure out the puzzle that we cannot even begin to solve.  A strange alchemical reaction gave way to a new life on our eighteenth birthday.   A strange set of warring figures in our lives began to twist and control the way time was set out. 

Something was screaming between the lines about those that think they’re the best for us.  People aren’t always who they seem to be.  There is more than just one puzzle, more than just one door.  No one key will solve this riddle.

You’ll have to excuse my story telling motives,  I only merely write to leave the message and warning to the past and future.

My story will come in time, but for now I feel that I must digress, the information and introduction that is the other parts of my skin.   A memoir maybe, a chapter based novel to explain the disasters that Justin attempts to face.   The visions, the dreams, the nightmares we all shared when we were one – and the new ones that become truth as he walks the pathways to a lyrical journey.    I will give you his voice on the story, as there is no way I’ll be able to recall it correctly.   They think he’s the demon,  because of his black and red eyes – but what is white is not always pure, and what is black is not always impure.

I bid you goodnight, and will see you on the flipside.

Ryan Christopher Hotchstettler
P.s.  Don’t accept candy from a pink haired stranger named Izuchi, the man’s psycho – and his appearance is misleading.   People think he’s some form of a savior, I think that he’s out to do worse than the Government ever planned to do.