It was your average getting ready for school morning.
You know what, that sounded like the old horror tales we were told as kids; "It was a dark and stormy night......" that usually involves people getting trapped in an old abandoned castle or something.
But, my morning started out pretty normal, except that my crazy inventor of a dad shot me through time. Yay me.
I've never really labeled my Dad's profession other than "Inventor," but the closest thing that comes to mind is the Dad from "Honey, I shrunk the kids!"
Come to think of it, I don't really blame him for everything he created. He had PHDs in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Physics, and quite a few others that I happened to forget. I guess after Mom died when I was just a wee lad, his mental state just went downhill from there. He still took care of me, with our neighbor taking me home from school till I could ride the bus, and his former military pension funding our weekly grocery run trips and the parts for his junk.
Other than my Dad being a mentally broken person with a teenage son, my morning was pretty normal, till the fire.
My phone went off at the usual 6 A.M. Today was December 7th, 2016, and if my history serves me right, today was the anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941. I awoke to my daily motivational messages every 2 minutes, consisting but not limited to; "WAKE UP YOU LAZY BUM," "GO SHOWER," "GET UP" and "U GOT SCHOOL."
I rolled out of bed, cleansed the filth off my body, dressed in a lovely pair of jeans and a Star Wars t-shirt, (cause of Rogue One premiering the 16th!) made my lunch and shoved it all into a plastic bag, which contained the classic PB&J, some off brand oreos, a good 'ol Granny Smith apple and some chips. Then, I had to grab all of my school stuff that I laid strewn all over my desk, cause you know, I'm lazy. I shoved all my notebooks, pencils, laptop, chargers, lunch, and a lovely blank notebook that i've been holding on to for close to five months, into my backpack, and slung that sucker over my shoulder.
I was five feet from the front door, bus right around the block, and the kitchen fire alarm goes off: you know, your everyday emergency that prevents you from finishing your first semester of your third year in highschool.
I rushed to our kitchen, which opened to our basement stairway, grabbed the nearest chair, plopped it under the fire alarm, and ripped it out of the ceiling, then popped its batteries out. I also had a very quick return to Earth when I lost my balance and fell, spraining my left ankle when I landed.
Still wearing my backpack, because it's really heavy and i'm really slow (mentally) sometimes, I grabbed our up to code fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink, and hopped across the kitchen to the stairs, favoring my left leg, and started down the stairs to find out what my dad has managed to set fire today.
So I rush, more like carefully hop, down the stairs fire extinguisher in hand, ready to spray foam over everything. I ended my stair escapade with a pretty large wince, and busted through the door that separated our basement; one third of it being a nice finished area with a TV and some couches, which haven't been sat on in over four years, and the other was a my dad's "bunker."
I called it his bunker because he rarely left it; he slept, ate, worked, spent leisure time there, and conversed with other online inventors that all happened to really like the same game made by Blizzard, Overwatch. I think he was going to implement a bathroom down there, but from that, he only left his bunker to resupply his food stash, which was a mini fridge, use the restroom, go to Home Depot for parts he couldn't order online, go to the grocery store, and shower, which was about once every two weeks.
When I say the bunker reeked, I mean it REEKED.
Anyway, when I ripped open the door, I saw the most confusing scene ever before unfold before my eyes; my dad was trying to throw his musty, rarely washed, bed sheet over a jury rigged generator to put out an already spreading fire, to which his smoke signals ended abruptly in more flames than smoke. I wanted to laugh, but I genuinely felt sorry for him.
On my left, the flames danced from machine to workbench to console to tool cabinet, laying waste to all his hard work that he never got patented because he was a grade A hermit, and so was I. I rushed forward, remembered my safety training from my summer job as a lifeguard and from the years on the internet, and shot my foamy white load from the fire extinguisher at the fire, no sexual joke intended.
The fire seemed to all try to converge to the one most secluded location, which held a contraption my dad completed around six or seven months ago. It was a large cylindrical machine, with a sliding glass door on the front and blinky lights and buttons on the back. Falling over the glass, from the bottom and top and extending a foot all around it, was this space mobile thing with large orbs instead of planets that supposedly swung around it.
I still didn't know what eighty percent of my dad's contraptions did, and now that I look back upon it I wish I spent more time with him. I do know that one little robot he created would pass small dining condiments across the table to whoever it commanded.
Through my dad yelling gibberish, (I think it was Elvish from Lord of the Rings) and me trying to contain the fire, a large portion of the ceiling fell through and crushed the stairs, and believe me when I tell you they were the flimsiest things on Earth. Every time you walked on them, you almost had to wear a safety harness to prevent from falling off, and they creaked so much you wanted to go deaf to prevent constant, never ceasing creaking to settle into insanity. Well, we would've gotten the stair fixed years ago, but we're very lazy, and being lazy kills, literally.
Since my dad never really like the outside world, we didn't have anyway to call 911 for help, and I don't think the local fire department would respond quick enough to emails. But what really brought a tear to my eye was the fact that his super beefy, twelve thousand dollar PC was melting under the heat of the flames.
After the stairs collapsed, my dad dropped the hammer he was cradling, tossed the screwdriver he was fighting the fire with and let out the most rated R slew of curse words even a sailor's mum wouldn't be proud about.
Once he stopped adding points to his "I'm Going to Hell" meter, he spun around, eyes wider than a Giant Squid's, with each one brimming with tears of fear and loss. He dashed across the concrete floor to where I stood, and scooped me into a big hug that caused me to stop giving the fire a good fighting. "I'm not going to lose you too!" he shouted over the roaring cracking of the flames.
He started pushing and shoving me toward the tube-mobile-machine-thing, and I hobbled along.
"Dad!" I blurted, "We can stop the fire! Dying is absurd!"
"Sorry Alex, but there's no time," he said, barely audible by the flames and the noises he made while choking back tears. As he spoke, the ceiling started to crumble, with small pieces of the plaster falling down on us.
His shoving stopped by the tube and he said "Here, take these," as he handed me five small pentagonal coins. They each had five small pentagonal holes, and an engraved five pointed star, with each vertex touching the pentagons. Whoever made these coins loves the number five.
"Just two of those should get your to Aegir," he paused momentarily to let this foreign information process, but as soon as he stopped, he continued with "Each one is worth two hundred dollars in today's money, so use them wisely."
"What? Where am I going? What are these? What is Aegir?" I questioned, obviously not putting that one second of information processing he has blessed me with to use. After he heard this, he smiled a cold, dry smile, filled with slowly falling tears, sorrow, and absolute dread. For him to even be smiling in his state of fear, was astounding.
Then he pushed me into the tube.
"This is a time machine, and i'm going to send you a few hundred years into the future!" he shouted, not realizing that he could've sent me forward a few hours or possibly a day, just to avoid the flames.
"No! What about you?"
"I'll be fine Alex," he replied, letting my name roll slowly off his tongue as if he would never say it again.
"No! You'll die!"
"And I've already come to peace with it."
"Dad, stop being so morbid!" I shouted as he started pressing buttons and flipping switches on the closest console, which happened to be secluded from the others and not on fire. "No Dad! I can't afford to lose you too!"
"Neither can I," he whispered as he opened a hatch and his hand hovered a large glowing red button, the ones you find in military movies that launch nukes or something else.
His tears fell upon his hand, and he faltered for a moment before rearing his hand back, and pressing the button so hard, I could see the plastic crease from the force of his hand. He quickly spanned the four feet from the console to the time machine, and closed the front hatch. He placed his hand on the the glass, and so did I, symbolizing our final moments together.
The mobile like arms started spinning the glowing orbs around, slowly at first, but hiking it up after a few seconds to the point that my brilliant, genius, creative Dad, moved away to avoid being clunked on the head. As he stepped back, he smiled again, the one of fear, and sorrow, and the tears began to flow freely from his eyes, their salty embrace dampening his dry skin.
"NOOO!" I shouted as as the orbs spun faster, enveloping me in a swirl of baby blue and white.
"Goodbye, my son," he mouthed, before a quite sizeable plaster chunk fell from the ceiling and knocked him out of my decreasing viewport. The swirls of baby blue and white turned dark as night before enveloping me, knocking me unconscious and sending to only God knows when.
Before I forget, my recently deceased father was Albert Rook, and I'm Alex, Alexander Rook, your everyday quiet nerd of a teenager who was orphaned and sent through space and time within an hour of being awake, on the morning of December 7th. A day that will truly live in infamy.