Chapter 5:The Story of Ro
"Ronaphanes Ronan, but instead of having two names everyone just started calling me Ro."
The white bark door was closed behind them as they entered Ro's hidden refuge. It was much bigger than Harmonia had expected. Yet with the amount of strange contraptions and odd gadgets littering the room there was little space left for anything else. Tubes connected pans to beakers which contained a peculiar looking golden liquid. There were wooden pulleys and metal tripods stacked one on top of the other. A nearby pile of junk held the remains of a dismantled contraption that had needed wings. But what had caught her attention above all else was the white planks that poked through the wall; this was end of the watery trail that had led them to Mine.
"So you're the one who built that weird thinger in the mountains!" declared Harmonia.
"Ah," answered Ro finally taking off his comically large goggles, "You mean the aqueduct. I guess if you found it. That means there will soon be others too. I worked so hard to try and keep it hidden but...."
"No, no, no," interjected Harmonia. "You did a great job. No one would be crazy enough to take that same trail."
"Chirp, cheep-cheep, chirrup," Bird answered in acknowledgement before landing upon a steel doohickey.
"How did you even get all the way up there? You must have had a few people helping you right?" the curiosity was starting to boil in her stomach.
"Nope," answered Ro while placing a white weathered lab coat over his ragged outfit. "It was just me. I don't really have any friends in Mine. The other children just work all day."
"You did all of this by yourself!?" she exclaimed in shock. "It must have taken you years! And how did you even learn how to do all of this stuff?"
"Ha," chuckled Ro turning to face his guests. "My uncle did most of the work. It was actually me who was helping him. The Corporations used to call him a...what was the word...a genius!"
"Your uncle?" a habituated suspicion took over. "I thought you said you lived alone down here? What's the real story and what are you trying to hide?"
"Sorry that's my fault," Ro began scratching his head. "My uncle used to live here but he doesn't anymore. I'm sorry. I keep forgetting other people can't hear the thoughts in my head. You don't know what I know. It's been a long time since I've talked to anyone else besides myself. I must sound pretty confusing, huh?"
"You don't have to explain yourself to me. Before I met Bird I didn't have any friends, well besides my Grandpa George. I used to talk myself for hours and hours. If anyone would have walked by at the right time they would have thought I was crazy."
Ro only smiled, the thought was more than comforting, "Speaking of your friend Bird, how did you come across him?"
"Oh it's not a him, it's an 'it', in a manner of speaking. I'm not sure if it's a girl or boy, so I just call it Bird," confessed Harmonia. "And it found me. When I was travelling along the top of the jagged mountains I found it by a pool of fresh water. Since then, Bird and me have been inseparable. Right Bird?"
"Chirrup, cheep-cheep, chirrup," it sang in gleeful reply.
"Amazing. I have never gotten a chance to see a real life red-feathered skylark before they vanished. Fascinating!" Ro moved in closer to examine its feathers as Bird stared back. "This is a fine specimen. Bright white plumage on its underbelly, very unique pattern of brown designs amongst the whites, and its feathers, the way they almost seamlessly blend into one another is magnificent. Bird must have been able to hide perfectly amongst the red leaves of our trees. After all, it is their main source of defence from other animals, or was anyways."
Harmonia took the chance to examine the strange boy as he rambled about his fascinated findings. The mesh of black hair that had first poked out from above the roofs of Mine was a tangled mess. Even now it remained even curlier than hers had been before she had washed up. His face was a little narrower than the other children she had seen before, and his nose, a little sharper. Two green emerald eyes sat resting just below two darkened brows. Ro was much smaller than Harmonia, and much skinnier too. No matter how long she examined the boy the fact remained, he gave her a good feeling. It was a feeling that told her she could trust the wild haired Ro.
"So that's what Bird is," smiled Harmonia. "A red-feathered skylark."
"By the looks of it," Ro suddenly began picking at the bridge of his nose as he busied his mind in thought. " I've never seen a real life red-feather skylark, but my father left me a book about them. The same one my uncle used to read it to me before bed. Instead of bedtime stories, I learned about birds, animals, closed circuits, physics equations, and so much other stuff you'd probably find boring. Nobody really likes to hear about that stuff anyways."
"Whoa now, relax Ro. Why are you being so down on yourself?" observed Harmonia. "I know it probably doesn't mean as much coming from another weirdo outsider, but...you seem like a good person. And you don't need to read bedtime stories to be interesting."
Ro suddenly blushed, unable to hide his shyness, "Can I get you anything? Water or food? I'm afraid all I have are vegetables and potatoes, but I have some spices I can add to them."
Harmonia smiled, "I could kill for a glass of that fresh mountain water we followed all the water down here. What do you say Bird?"
Bird gave no reply, all of the excitement had exhausted it to the point of collapse as it drifted to sleep atop Ro's doohickey.
"Make that just for one." It was then that Harmonia's curiosity poked its head up, and for lack of anything better to say, she asked, "So Ro, what's your story? Has it always just been you and your uncle?"
"No. I had parents just like everyone else did before the war, but I was too young to remember them that well. What little I do know I learned from my uncle and a few charcoal drawings of my mother."
"But wait, I don't get it," she replied in confusion. "Your uncle was probably old enough for conscription. Why didn't he get taken away?"
"Well he didn't in a way," Ro began scratching his head as he brought back the glass of water and a freshly washed carrot. "He actually worked for the Corporations. They made him live in the Capital for what...three years...four? We lived there so long ago I can hardly remember."
"Wait, what!?" exclaimed Harmonia before quieting her voice in hopes of letting Bird sleep. "You lived in the Capital! Like, the same Capital run by the Corporations? You've got my attention Ro. Start from the beginning, tell me how an dirt looking kid like you ended up here."
"Well, let's see...I guess I'll start with my family. It's the reason I have two names in the first place. My grandmother was originally from Oceanas. She came over when the two planets first discovered each other. Oceanas tried sending representatives to connect with the people back on Sky. That's where she met my grandfather. He originally worked for the Corporations, before they became greedy and decided to take everything for themselves. From there my family kept up with the tradition of giving everyone two names. Even my mother had two names before she was taken away."
"Your mom's family was from Oceanas?" Harmonia could hardly believe a word of it. "Are people from Oceanas really different?"
Ro only laughed, "Ha, ha. No, not at all. They are very much like you and me. Even those who look a little different here or there are still just people."
"So what happened to your mom? I heard everyone from Oceanas was allowed to go back home after the war started."
"I don't know where you heard that from, but no one was allowed to leave. Whoever was on Sky after the destruction of Gaia was put in a prison. My mother got taken away just like everyone else, and my father, he tried his hardest to get a job for the Corporations. After all, him and his brother were scientists. They were both way smarter than I could ever be."
She did her best to avoid the boy's self defeating attitude, "Why didn't the Corporations take them in? Everyone knows all the scientists end up working for the Corporations anyways."
"They did take scientists, but they only considered my Uncle Wylie a real scientist. My father was a zoologist, an animal expert. By the time conscription was put into effect, there were barely any animals left on Sky. The Corporations didn't want an expert on something they didn't have. So, they sent my father to fight in the war and put my mother in one of their secret prisons. That was when Uncle Wylie took me to live with him in the Capital, but he couldn't handle that for very long. He used to tell me all about the bad things the Corporations did to their own people. Taking away their food when there was more than enough to go around, treating citizens more like numbers than people at all, and destroying the planet without even blinking. He just couldn't take it anymore. So...we left...."
Harmonia was already letting her imagination run wild. She could not picture a proper city like the Capital. All she had ever known was Ralph's Castle, or at least, before she had stumbled upon the burrowed town of Mine.
"Wow! How old were you when you left?" she continued. "Can you remember what it was like living there?"
"Bits and pieces. I was seven when we left, but even from what I can remember it wasn't all that great. Just tall grey buildings everywhere with no room for the sunlight to get through. It was always cold, even in the middle of the day. Bone chilling winds constantly funnelled through the steel towers of the city. People were always in a rush to go nowhere all that important. Everyone was pretty rude and scared to talk to one another. Then again, at least they talked, no one in Mine says a word. They're all afraid that the Privateers will report them."
"So what did you and your uncle do? You fled the Capital and came straight to Mine?" Harmonia was eager to continue the story.
"If only it had been that easy. Uncle Wylie had kept us moving around for almost a year. He would fix up whatever needed fixing in the towns where the children were left alone. In return we got somewhere to sleep, even sometimes food. There were always troops from the Corporations passing around our picture, every Privateer of the towns knew what we looked like. We were constantly on the move, that was until we found Mine. Well, not exactly the town itself, but a nice little cave far enough away. We started digging, building tunnels and rooms where we would conduct all sorts of experiments. Uncle Wylie taught me something new every day. How to fix a battery, how to build the aqueduct, where to plant seeds to get the best crops. He knew everything and then...and then he left...."
A look of sadness crossed Ro's face as Harmonia asked the question he did not wish to answer, "Why did he leave you all alone?"
"Everything was going pretty well. We had dodged the Corporations for so long we thought we had finally found somewhere we could be safe. Until, one day, Uncle Wylie came home in a panic. One of the Privateers had spotted him outside of town and reported his location back to the Capital. There was never any chance to say goodbye, he was too scared they'd see where we were hiding. Uncle Wylie just left a letter for me which said he had to leave. He was going to try and draw them away from Mine so that I could be safe."
Harmonia could tell that retelling the story was not very pleasant, "By the sounds of it he was just looking out for you. Your uncle wanted you to be safe. Even if he wasn't."
"Maybe..." a distant image passed before his memory, "...and maybe not. There was a lot more written in the letter but I couldn't make sense of most of it. The only thing I could make out was that Uncle Wylie wanted to get to the Rim, a drifting asteroid belt that collided with the furthest plates of Gaia after it was destroyed. And there was something else too," Ro was struggling to recall the particulars. "He mentioned a place I've never heard of before, a place on the far side of the sun which he needed to reach. It was a weird word. I think it was called...now what was the name of that planet?"
"Eidos!" Harmonia shouted as she jumped to her feet startling the slumbering Bird who cheeped a disgruntled chirp.
"Eidos?" Ro folded his arms and began tapping his fingers on his chin. "That sounds about right. But I've read through every book I have on the planets and dug through all of the research I could find, but no one has ever heard of it. How did you know about it?"
"Well..." Harmonia was not sure how she could explain the vision she had experienced back in the mountains, "I sort of...saw it."
Ro jumped up from his relaxed position and grabbed Harmonia by the shoulders, "What?! That's impossible! Tell me everything. Are you from there? If so, are there others? Have you been here this whole time? So many questions, too little time!"
Ro was already in a frantic state as he began running back and forth while collecting a variety of notes from amongst their oddly sorted piles, "I'll need to gather star charts...coordinates and mapping interfaces...maybe a trajectory vectorator. Yeah...then we'll need a sort of...and a type of...."
Harmonia could only shrug her shoulders as she tried to stop the excited boy from playing with his toys, "Slow down Ro! Don't get hasty. Maybe you should hear my story before you can fully understand what I mean when I say I've seen Eidos before."
And so Ro did his best to calm his excitement in the face of such an impossible possibility. Harmonia did her best to start from the beginning, telling Ro all she could about her Grandpa George and all of his stories. She told him about the Privateers who had eaten one of her gardens, and her lonely journey through the mountains. It was not until she reached the part about her vision that Ro revealed a sudden change of heart. For if nothing else the boy was a scientist at heart, and with such a title came an unflinching skepticism.
"Wait just one second," interjected Ro. "What do you mean you had a vision where you visited Eidos? That doesn't mean anything. It could have been a dream, or your imagination, nothing more."
Harmonia had not expected such a reaction to her story, "Believe me, whatever pulled me through space was no dream. Eidos is real Ro. Even Grandpa George believed in it."
"And don't you think that's why you saw Eidos, because you wanted to see it?" asked the science minded boy.
"What do you mean?" the question had confused Harmonia.
"Hmm," pondered Ro as he examined the various stains upon his lab coat. "In science we have something we call empirical evidence, facts that cannot be changed just because we believe something else. It's how a scientist is able to separate what's real from what's not."
"Okay. But if we can't trust what we see and experience, then how can you prove something is real or not?" the young girl's defensive side was starting to show.
"By a different kind of observation. What we see and hear can often be wrong. So science relies on experiments and observation to figure out whether something is true or not. We run an experiment over and over again, then, if the same thing always happens it becomes a fact, rule, law, whatever you want to call it. It's what gives us an objective lens. But there is none of that in your story."
"That's just silly," argued Harmonia. "If you just go around making rules and laws about everything won't you miss out on something new?"
Ro could not hide his puzzled expression, "We need rules and laws Harmony. Otherwise people could justify anything they want. It's what separates made up stories like yours from real ones."
Harmonia would not budge as she began impatiently tapping her foot, "What about the first person who ever learned how to fly? I bet everyone made fun of him when he first suggested that people could soar through the air. But then, he built a ship and probably proved everyone wrong. Suddenly all the laws and rules changed."
"That's all well and great," sighed Ro. "But the fact of the matter is that people made more ships after the first one. We were able to make more and more because it worked, not because it happened by chance."
Harmonia was much quicker with her response this time, "You're missing the point Ro. All I am trying to say is that just because we haven't discovered something yet, doesn't mean we might not one day find it. When I 'saw' Eidos, I saw it with my eyes. I felt its energy beating in the emptiness of space like a ripple across my skin. I felt it Ro. I mean I really felt it!"
The girl continued to pace about the room of gadgets without stopping to wait for the boy's reply, "There is no way I can forget the feeling of a living planet. And no matter how much science tells me otherwise, I will never come to believe that the feeling wasn't real. Whether I wanted it to happen, or whether I actually flew around Helia to reach the far side of the sun, I felt it. And that is something I will never forget."
A strange silence followed Harmonia's rant. Ro could not find the words to move her stubbornness. In truth, there were more than a few cases in his own short life where he had experienced something unexplainable. Eidos had been meant to remain a secret, one too few had now. And somehow, a girl from the desolate edge of Sky had discovered it without anyone's help. Whether he liked it or not, there was no denying that singular fact.
"If Uncle Wylie was here he'd have a thing or two to say about that," Ro looked away in defeat.
"And if Grandpa George was here he'd have a thing or two to say to your Uncle Wylie!" replied Harmonia, plunging their conversation back into an awkward silence.
It was finally Bird, fully risen from his sporadic sleep, who eased the tension, "Chirp, chirp, cheep-cheep, chirrup!"
The song of their rested feathered companion was enough to evoke a smile upon both of the children. Ro had been the first to finally break, "I'm sorry about being so aggressive. I have to admit that I am quicker to trust science than my own experiences. And maybe...maybe there is more to it all than just observations and findings."
"Maybe," Harmonia let the smile warm her cheeks. "Who knows really. All I really know is that Grandpa George spent his last breath telling me to find Eidos. Not because he did a science experiment, or because he had found it out in space. All he had was the power of his beliefs. Isn't that enough sometimes?"
"It just might be," Ro was back up on his feet and pacing. "So what's next? What are Bird and you going to do after you leave Mine?"
Harmonia could only smile with pride, "We're going to find Eidos! We don't really have anywhere else to go. Now we just have to figure out how to get there."
"Well then..." Ro suddenly halted in front of a strange wooded contraption. "...that settles it. I'm coming with you."
"What?!" exclaimed Harmonia. "What about your mother? Won't the Corporations let her go one day? What if your father ends up surviving his military service and comes back to find you gone?"
A heavy sadness rested upon Ro's shoulders, "My mother...my mother is dead...and so is my father. When Uncle Wylie was still working for the Corporations in the Capital, he always made sure to check up on both of them. Updates from prison on mom, and reports about dad. Then the year we finally decided to leave was the same year we found out they were both gone...."
Harmonia was not sure how to comfort him, "I'm sorry to hear that Ro. They were probably two amazing souls."
"Even though I can't remember them, I know they were the best parents a kid could have asked for. But that doesn't matter anymore, what matters is that there is no reason for me to stay on Sky. And besides, who else could tell you how to read your map."
"Map!?" Harmonia burst in excitement. "What map?"
"The one your grandpa told you about the last time you were together. He said you'd need a ship, a crew and a map," Ro's confidence was starting to show.
"What map? We don't even have a ship or a crew yet, let alone a map," the words only added to the weight of their coming journey.
"Nonsense!" shouted Ro. He had picked up a piece of chalk as he frantically wrote across a weathered green chalkboard across the wall of rock. "You have a map alright. First we start on Sky...and then through the remains of Gaia....past Oceanas....and around to the far side of Helia."
"The vision!" shouted Harmonia in light of the boy's plan. "Of course! That was the map grandpa had wanted to show me. He had tried to show me for years, but...oh what a silly girl I was!"
"Chirrup, cheep-cheep, chirrup!" sang Bird in excitement as it tried returning Harmony's focus back to the task at hand.
"Exactly. Only we have to make one extra stop along the way. Just a slight little detour," responded Ro, chaotically adding to the complex picture he was drawing on the chalkboard.
"Which is?" asked the curious girl.
"The Rim," Ro suddenly stepped back from his drawing. "We'll have to visit my Uncle Wylie. He'll be able to help us get around Oceanas."
"You know I hadn't thought that far. I always figured the hardest part would be getting off of Sky," she responded while scratching her head.
A complex picture had been drawn across the worn and scuffed chalkboard. A jagged circle which was no doubt Sky marked the starting point of their journey. From there the faint white lines guided them through a cluster of fragmented shapes that had been meant to represent the shattered remains of Gaia. Their route then separated and shot out to the surrounding asteroid belt that encircled Helia. From there, their course continued beyond Oceanas and all the way to the far side of the sun. It was there amongst the rough sketch of their patchy plan that Harmonia's heart finally found a moment of respite. For the first time since she had left Ralph's Castle, she had finally found a new hope to aid in their journey.
With Bird resting on her shoulder, Harmonia walked over to the chalkboard and studied the sloppy map that would guide them, "Grandpa George, I certainly hope you were right about this one."