Presents

Chapters

Prologue - Of Black Holes And Power (February 13, 2024)
Artist's Loft (February 13, 2024)
Conqueror (February 13, 2024)
Conquered (February 13, 2024)

This content is produced by the artists indicated on the site, including myself, Brian Joseph Johns.

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Shhhh! Digital Media

Brian Joseph Johns

Quick Introduction And Notes

This is the one before the really big one, though this one will keep you until the really big one is written and published sometime in the early spring.

This is going to be the sloppiest first draft I've ever done for a Tales Of The Sanctum/A Lady's Prerogative story so far but it will improve with each substantial layer of editing and revisions as I add more chapters. When I return to add more to the story, I'll give it a once over and do most of the editing and cleanup at that point and that will improve the overall experience.

So each new section I write should improve the sections that came before by a fair bit and as a result, it will by the end of the writing process read like what you've come to expect from this particular story line. I will however be writing The Two Butterflies as well simultaneously and giving a lot of effort in that direction as well. Sometimes both in one day as I did today. Also, look forward to the benefit of new artwork as has been the case with The Two Butterflies.

Enjoy!

Brian Joseph Johns

Shhhh! Digital Media Presents

Tales Of The Sanctum: A Lady's Prerogative

Crystals Are Forever

Prologue - Of Black Holes And Power

[Sadistic Mika Band - Time Machine Ni Onegai]

Mutano closed the door behind him as he stepped into the large study where he'd disappear to whenever the need arose. In this case, the need had as much arisen since their failure during Autumn In Alivale.

Gestured with his hands, and the sensor immediately picked up the motion, dimming both the lights and the windows until the empty room was simply as dark as the depths of space and time.

Ironically, the darkest of points in both space and time happened to be the point of most illumination, and from that whirling chaos the room was bathed in the primordial light of matter that had once existed at the birth of the universe. It was contorted and stretched by forces beyond fathoming into a wiry mass of matter and energy, around a central point so completely massive, that nothing - not even light could escape once close enough.

Around this mass, a band of firey orange energy twirled at speeds approaching capacity, the universal speed limit, it was at this point however that something even larger and more massive than this point of space defied these limits, for it was much older than the universe itself. Beyond time and space. Beyond everything.

The serpentine dragon's body encircled the massive singularity, whose diameter was large enough to consume our entire solar system a hundred times over, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, the Oort Cloud and Kuiper belt objects. It was so incredibly large and massive, it was beyond fathoming for all mortals except a few in the universe.

The dragon Witherwyrm as it was known in our own archaic languages entwined this particular beast of a black hole, the dragon's head turning to face Mutano as he came into its field of realization. The dragon's eyes narrowed, its eyelids moving faster than the speed of light, for they were light years across as its pupils focused on the solitary man in a seeming island in space. The singularity churned in the background.

"The time has come for our next move, and I come seeking your assistance in dealing with these ever mounting nuisances that have been a scourge to all our plans thus far..." Mutano addressed the dragon, bowing before he spoke.

"To which nuisance do you refer, for there are many, and yet my resources are limitless..." the dragon responded, its jaw, mouth and lips larger than imaginably possible and moving faster than light as it spoke, given its immense size.

"I have the nuisances at West Meet East International in my sights and am readying for an assault upon them soon. However, it is these others from the Alivale region. The ones that foiled our first plot and the efforts of Clee Wonderward... They have proven resourceful beyond our means to infiltrate and Mentis grows impatient with my lack of progress..." Mutano admitted to Witherwyrm.

"It is so mortal of you each to seek my loyalty and audience. While you speak with me, he plots your demise and you would be wise to counter similarly, though I hold no loyalty to either of you, only our efforts to ensure that humanity fails to overcome the challenge of the next Epoch... and falls once again as the only contender to transcend its universal limits are of consequence and concern..." Withwyrm elicited to Mutano, who understood perfectly despite the limits of having a mortal mind from the dragon's perspective.

"Then how shall we deal with these Sanctum dwellers? These Wytch-kind? These wielders of the Mystical Weave?" asked Mutano of the dragon Witherwyrm.

"Time as you know flows in many directions at once, and fate has a counterpart in each of those directions. As certainly as my counterpart senses, there is a threat in their immediate fate that none could have foretold, for this universe is full of bizarre strangeness that sometimes even baffles the Dragons Of Beyond Eternity. Myself and the dragon Weltherwithsp," Witherwyrm explained to Mutano.

"Tell me what I need to do to prepare for this fate, and it shall be done," Mutano bowed once again.

"You need do nothing, but wait and watch, and when it is over, you will report back to me. No matter the outcome, our next move will deal with both the Butterfly Dragon and the Sanctum Seclorum. However, the twist of fate that in store may be the undoing of everything to suit our needs and in such a case, we will have won..." Witherwyrm explained to Mutano.

"Then I will watch and wait, and when I have seen and come to know, I will report to you oh ancient one..." Mutano bowed again, backing off and away from the dragon, never giving the tremendous creature his back.

Mutano closed the door behind him as he left the study and returned to the living area, grabbing a bottle of sixty-six thousand dollar whiskey from the liquor cabinet and pouring himself three fingers deep in a glass.

Glass that had been forged in the depths of a black hole, and it was from this glass that he drank.

Artist's Loft

[Windows - Jan Hammer]

Mila sat comfortably on a rotary stool, spinning herself with her feet as sunbeams poured in through the skylight of a studio that Barris and herself had recently installed. What had once been their attic (a dark, dingey and foreboding place) was now a well lit studio of life and abundance. Mila had risen from the subterranean abode that once housed her art studio, to the heights of the fourth floor loft in their Alivale Manor home on their own Alivale Apple Orchard.

Her easels lined the walls, each with its own canvas (none of which had any brushstrokes or charcoal drawings upon their faces by that point). Plants were hung from the ceilings, catching the bright lights of her studio loft and skylights, giving it an organic element that her basement studio never had.

She spun on the stool once more until she was sufficiently dizzy, at which point she retrieved her phone from her purse as she tried to draw her seat in a straight line before her new desk. By some miracle of balance, she managed to arrive at the desk though from her perspective (and that of her churning insides), the room was still spinning.

By the time she'd dialed her phone, the chair had stopped and her body had resynchronized itself with the unmoving walls around her. For a moment, she felt as if she had been thrown onto the chair from a distance, as the illusionary sense of her motion ceased and at that moment, she could empathize with the astronauts working in the space station just above the reaches of the Aerth's atmosphere.

"Girtrude And Wilbert's Alivale Paradise Museum, Barris speaking," Barris' familiar voice greeted Mila.

"Good morning Barris speaking. And how are you today?" Mila's voice was cheerful and yet seductive at the same time, and very much like the ear candy it had been when Barris had first met her many years ago.

"I'm always doing good when I have a scrumptious and sexy woman call me at eleven in the AM," Barris responded, shining his nails on his shirt in plain view of his understudy, who sat across the room from him behind a computer screen, currently engrossed in an article about an upcoming massively multiplayer video game.

Barris raised his eyebrows at his understudy, who slapped his own forehead with his hand and dragged it down across his face. The only way he'd learned to deal with the generation gap between him and his employer.

"You have a sexy women call you in morning? Who ever could that be?" Mila responded innocently and with the edge of the shock of discovery and betrayal, pretending to be oblivious as to whom Barris might be referring.

"Every day, and I'm speaking with her right now," Barris flared his eyebrows once again so that his understudy could see, but by that point, the much younger fellow had turned his computer monitor just enough so that it blocked his view of his employer.

"You flirt! Wait 'til you get home!" Mila responded playfully, reaching across her desk to retrieve her tablet computer.

"So how is everything? I take it you're enjoying the loft?" Barris asked her as he noticed that his understudy was now beyond his line of sight, behind a computer monitor.

"Its the best renovation we've done on the manor so far, but its sooo different I haven't been able to start anything. I'm just sooo... excited I don't know where to begin!" Mila added, using her fingers to rouse the tablet from sleep mode as it lay in front of her on the desk.

"I'm liking the sound of that. Should I make a quick trip home during lunch? I could have Earl take care of the afternoon tour group," Barris crossed his fingers.

"No. Its alright. I still have so much arranging to do for the wedding," Mila replied, causing Barris to cringe, even clenching the knuckles on the same hand of his crossed fingers.

He let out a whinny of pain in doing so.

"Everything alright?" Mila asked him as she brought up a list on the tablet's screen.

"Perfect honey. Couldn't be better," he lied, checking his swollen middle finger to ensure it wasn't broken, when over the top of his understudy's monitor, a hand and extended middle finger peered out at him mockingly.

"I saw that!" Barris said aloud to Earl.

"Oops. It was an accident. Honest," Earl responded blandly.

Conqueror

[The Who - My Generation]

"You know Mila, the younger generation just don't know how to treat their seniors...!!!" Barris said frustratingly, though she was already engrossed in her todo list.

"I'm sure that Sato could leverage the same argument..." Mila replied, recalling the cantankerous bickering between the two the last time he'd been a house guest.

It was at that moment that by some strange coincidence that was beyond the fathoming of even of the best minds the Aerth had to offer, that the static charge that had built up between the carpeted floor of Girtrude and Wilbert's former home, and the computer monitors that sat upon each of the desks of the office had reached its peak threshold. The air could no longer contain the potential of electrons to convert gaseous moisture in the room into ionized charged gas clouds, invisible to the eye.

An arc of electricity cascaded between the carpet and the monitors several million times in a second, as a stream of electrons liberated from their surrounding oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen approached the speed of light in a sudden but silent burst. In that moment, a micro-fracture in time and space opened, connecting two unlikely places which were billions of light years apart from each other.

By another even stranger coincidence, the two places in question just happened to be composed of the exact same atmosphere and the exact same air pressure, meaning that when this fissure opened, there was no exchange of air between the two spaces for they were already perfectly balanced.

It were as if the universe in its sometimes poor taste and bad sense of humour, had created an artificial ear phone, like the kind you'd make as kids out of tin cans and twine. Except this one extended four billion light years and into an entirely different galaxy, and consequently, into another much larger and more lavish office than that of Barris and his fledgling Alivale tourism company.

"So honey. I wanted to know..." Mila spoke as she fingered through the list.

"Yes. How can I help you my buttercup?" Barris responded, still trying to move his swollen finger.

"Well... You see, its about the dishware. Actually for the wine and champagne," Mila reminded him.

"I thought we'd sorted that out? Aren't we going for the glassware. The high quality, volcanic process crafted variety?" confirmed Barris.

"Well, you see, they use the same process, the volcanic process for what I'm thinking, and what I'd prefer is..." Mila tactfully negotiated with her husband to be.

"Go on..." he urged her, sincerely wanting to know about this seemingly minute and redundant detail in as much elaboration as she was prepared to, and already providing.

"You see, I'd prefer if we went for the volcanically crafted crystal... crystal... crystal... crystal..." Mila's voice trailed off, and the air carried the sound of her voice out of the phone in a three dimensional expanding bubble of waves. rebounding off of Barris' ear, off of his computer monitor and directly into the micro-fissure that had opened to another office some four billion lightyears away.

...

[Spaceship Superstar - PRISM]

The sound emerged from the other end of this fissure, having only traveled a few meters through folded space rather than four billion light years, and happened upon the ocular implant of a large muscular bipedal looking fellow, wearing what appeared to be high tech, LED covered fashion of some form.

When Mila's words hit his ocular implant, they were instantly translated through one of the most elaborate translation devices in the history of the universe, bar the babble fish, but that's another story.

Her words quickly and efficiently were converted into dark matter charged pulses, the basis of all of the technology of this fellow's civilization, where it found his cybernetically enhanced brain and cognition center, rousing him from a morning nap at his desk.

"You see, I'd prefer if we went for the volcanically crafted crystal-ystal-ystal-ystal..." her words emerged into his immensely complex brain, echoing through an infinity of dark matter pulse transceivers he'd had installed as part of a recent two-for-one sale at a local warehouse hospital outlet.

"Huh?! Who goes there!!!" he awoke with a start, leaning forward on his chair, the most incredibly high tech chair ever conceived in the universe and so much so in fact that one didn't even need to sit down in order to use it.

He then stood, when the holographic dark pulse display emitted a visual translation of Mila's words which had traveled four billion light years (through a fissure of nine meters distance) to get to this very grouchy man.

His cybernetically enhanced eyes focused upon one word. One that stuck out more so than any other word, and no, it wasn't the word the.

"Crystal? CRYSTAL?!!! WHO DARE BRINGS THAT CURSE OF A WORD INTO MY OFFICE!!! THE HIGHEST OFFICE OF THE EMPIRE OF THIRTEEN THOUSAND GALAXIES!!!" he spoke aloud, despite the fact that in his society and civilization, such crude means of communication were no longer used and the organs for doing as such had long since shriveled into minute prune-like bags behind their ears.

As he spoke, he gurgled profusely as phlegm emerged from said organs accompanied by a putrid smell that had not been experienced since the market extinction of mouthwash, in the absence of their use.

Their civilization was so advanced that every thought of the members of their society, traveled the entirety of their dark pulse powered network, which spanned most of the space just above and west of the Bootes void from our perspective in astronomical polar coordinates.

Theirs was an intricate network of neutral anti-particles suspended in the zero-point field that connected their empire of thirteen thousand galaxies, all directly to his office and brain, for he was as his title made him: Overseer Under the Thirteen Thousand Administrative Hyperplexes of the Eternal Raging Empire, or just OUTTAHERE for short.

By the point he'd used his own cybernetically enhanced organs to elicit speech for the very first time in a thousand years, several of his guards frantically entered his office, their weapons drawn.

"Are you alright our Overseer? We heard you from the..." they didn't speak, but he heard their words directly in his mind.

"NEVER WORSE! SOMEBODY SWORE AT ME! CURSED ME WITH THAT FILTH OF A WORD: CRYSTAL!!!" he exclaimed, once again using his own bodily organs to speak.

The guards gasped at the stench emerging from his two dilapidated vocal speech organs, but they didn't dare remark about it.

Somewhere, an alarm sounded, though it was entirely silent so in a sense it was completely useless. It was more like a having an annoying eye floater just out of view of your peripheral vision, but it worked nonetheless for this civilization. Soon, his office was filled with guards and a fleet of ships emerged from a dark giant hyperspace shell, which was not unlike the portals of the Sanctum Seclorum, however greatly varied in size.

The skies outside of his office were soon filled with ships and the halls of his building complex with guards, all awaiting his orders.

"WE HAVE CONQUERED EVERY CORNER OF THE THIRTEEN THOUSAND GALAXIES! CRUSHED EVER SINGLE ONE OF THOSE SOFT AND CUDDLY CRYSTAL POWERED CIVILIZATIONS AND THEIR HEALING CRYSTALS!!! THEY WERE ALL CRUSHED BY US AND OUR BLACK HOLE POWERED CIVILIZATION, WERE THEY NOT?!!!" he exclaimed, pausing for a moment to cough due to the fact he hadn't used his speech organs for a thousand years.

Most of his guards had never heard anyone cough in their life, so when he did it, they were horrified just as much by the sound, as they were the smell and at that very moment, an industrious member of their guard corps had an idea that combined the social proclivity of mouthwash with the health utility of cough syrup. He would twenty years later go on to become the single richest member of their civilization's history, but that's another story.

"WE HAVE ERADICATED EACH AND EVERY SINGLE CRYSTAL IN THE UNIVERSE, OR SO WE THOUGHT! AND WHAT IS IT THAT FINDS ITS WAY INTO MY OWN OCULAR IMPLANT? THE STAIN OF THAT EXTINCT STENCH OF A TECHNOLOGY OF CRYSTALS!!!" the Overseer tapped the ocular implant on the side of his head, and what he was hearing through it was now relayed to his entire fleet.

"...I think its a wonderful idea honey. I mean, I thought we'd decided that already, but I'm one hundred percent with you. If ~x~ crystal ~x~ is what you want, then ~x~ crystal ~x~ is what we'll have..." Barris' voice echoed throughout the entire dark pulse net of the OUTTAHERE fleet.

"Overseer... I've determined that the offending signal is coming from a galaxy more than four billion light years away. That's three billion more light years than the maximum range of our own fleets... even if we did go there at top speed, we'd only get there twenty five thousand years from now," the Overseer's Chief Advisor told him.

"Then we'd better leave now!" the Overseer pushed his way through his troops on his way to his own flagship.

"Sir. I suggest we take another course of action..." the Advisor responded.

"We're wasting time! We must go now!" the Overseer continued impatiently, his troops parting for him as he made his way for the nearest Cronenberg Telepod.

"You see Sir. A fissure has been created thanks to the static charge generated by a neutral pulse of our dark pulse technology based telescopes. This dark pulse field seems to have interacted with bits of their own technology and created a wormhole between our space and theirs..." the Advisor explained.

"Then tell me we can travel through this wormhole, and save ourselves twenty five thousand years of travel through the most desolate place in space!" the Overseer suddenly stopped, turning to face his Advisor.

"Better yet, Sir, we can simply transport the offending beings here..." the Advisor responded, rubbing his own hands together menacingly as he envisioned a plan whereby he could secretly use such a ploy as a distraction and usurp the power of their empire for himself, secretly murdering the Overseer to take the reigns of power for himself.

That same Advisor was promptly executed less than five seconds later, for every one of his thoughts had instantly been shared with the fleet and the Overseer, who delivered the sentence himself. The Advisor's last thoughts however had been of gratitude for delivering him from the stench of the Overseer's own thousand year old breath.

"Next in line? Whatever your former had in mind, make it happen and make it quick! All except for the betraying me and taking my empire part. Would that be keen?" asked the Overseer of the next Advisor in the chain of seniority.

"I shall have it done in two days, As you wish my Sirey Sir of an Overseer... Sir," the Advisor spoke, knowing much better how to butter up his superiors than his former.

Conquered

[If You Were Here - The Thompson Twins]

"...miss you..." Barris replied for the tenth time.

"I miss you too..." Mila played back once again.

"Dessert tonight? I mean dessert dessert?" Barris asked her anxiously.

"We'll see. I mean I do have that negligée I've never tried..." Mila reminded him.

"You mean the one with all the speed bumps? Oh I'd like that..." Barris smiled at the thought of it.

"I was thinking that since your bachelor party is only two days away and my bride's maid party is on the same night, that we should maybe... hold off until after..." Mila suggested playfully.

"Oooh! Don't do this! Please! I haven't had enough of you this week! I can't wait three days!" Barris responded, sounding very frustrated as he kept his voice down.

"I wasn't thinking three days. I was thinking until the wedding..." Mila's voice was still soft and seductive in his ear.

"That's a month from now! I can't wait that..." Barris said to her, biting his fist as he spoke.

"See you tonight. You be good!" Mila blew him a kiss through the phone, and then hung up.

Barris hung up the phone reluctantly, placing it on the desk before him.

"Earl?" asked Barris, very much trying his best to sound like a boss once again.

"Yeah. I'm like in the middle of reading an article on The Finals... do you mind...?" Earl responded to Barris.

"Not at all. I don't mind a bit. You know, as a worldly man... uhhh of the world and your employer, I have lived a life that few have. It might behest you to lend an ear or two to my words, and in return, I might ask you a thing or two..." Barris began lecturing the younger man and student.

"Do you know what Steam is?" asked Earl of his employer.

"You mean the gaming storefront or the stuff that sputters from your ears every time you attempt to concentrate?" Barris came back at him quick, recycling one of Sato's responses.

"Har har har. How about Deep Jungle Step? You know what that is?" Earl continued to grill Barris.

"I certainly do. Its the stuff that when you're in the jungle, you don't want to step if you're wearing low-cut boots or sandals," Barris smiled, thinking he'd solved Earl's riddle.

"Not quite. Its like a kind of electronic music. You're like sooo out of touch. Where did you come from, like the 1600s or something?" Earl shook his head in disbelief at their generation gap.

"Actually, its funny you should mention 1600s because I've... Oh, never mind. Forget I even asked," Barris turned and began to walk back to his desk.

"Alright. Answer my three questions and I'll consider your request old man," Earl responded.

"Old man? I'm barely thirty..." Barris responded as Earl asked the first question.

Question one: Have you like, ever stage dived in a mosh pit?" asked Earl of Barris.

"No," responded Barris, shaking his head negatively to go along with his half-lie.

Actually, he had in fact stage dived before. At a Polka festival of all things, which was a considerable achievement seeing as he had an intense phobia of both plaid, and cabbage rolls.

"Question two: Have you ever like, danced all night with your girlfriend at a rave and then like raided the bottled water truck the next day?" Earl asked him a second question.

"No," Barris responded again similarly in a half-lie.

He had in fact raided a bottled water truck with his girlfriend one evening and then, much to their chagrin, when they couldn't find any bathrooms nearby that night, they spent the entire night dancing in response to their insatiable urge brought on by all the bottled water they'd drank.

"Question three: Have you ever PvP'd a team of three level fifty warriors by yourself in World Of Warcraft?" Earl asked his third question.

"No. Never. I've never peed anywhere but the loo," Barris lied once again.

See his answer to question two, and fill in the blanks yourself.

"Then I'm not interested in anything you have to share..." Earl responded, returning his attention to the screen of his computer.

"Well then... in that case, I was wondering just off hand if you might happen to know what happens at a bachelor party?" Barris asked Earl, pacing around the young man nervously.

"You mean you don't know?" asked Earl, in disbelief.

"I figured I'd ask for a second opinion... professionally speaking of course," Barris responded honestly.

"First rule about a bachelor party, is that you don't talk about a bachelor party. What happens in the bachelor party, stays in the bachelor party," Earl explained to Barris, despite the fact that neither of them had ever taken part in one before.

"Very good then. I do believe I've found an expert..." Barris continued with the questions for Earl in hopes of uncovering the daunting mystery of what lay within the depths of a bachelor party.

...

[Cosmic Love - Florence + The Machine]

Meanwhile, back at Mila's loft, she'd just hung up the phone after arranging with the dishware company for the volcanically forged crystal dishware. As fate would have it, her phone once again rang before she'd managed to roll her chair less than three feet away.

"Hello?" Mila answered, frantically rolling back to the desk.

"Are you ready?" a familiar voice asked her a loaded question.

"Am I ready for what, Nelony," Mila asked her friend.

"The Strippers at your bride's maid party?" Nelony asked Mila excitedly.

"Don't be silly! We're not getting strippers, are we?" asked Mila in disbelief.

"It was Shaela's idea..." Nelony bluffed.

"I suppose next you're going to tell me Yirfir is in on it too?" Mila asked her friend.

"She's fine with the idea. Says its a great way of girl bonding..." Nelony replied as she put the food dishes down for her cat and three dogs.

"I don't know. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with this. I mean what's Barris going to say..." Mila replied, blushing as she spoke.

"Oh what are you talking about! The boys are going to be doing the same thing, only much, much worse..." Nelony let her imagination soar.

"Oh dear..." Mila responded, already regretting having answered the phone.

An hour's drive away and Barris was having the same feelings having asked Earl about bachelor parties.

Despite their current distance, they were in fact closer than they'd ever been and in the most uncomfortable and unfamiliar of territories they'd been in their lives and feeling very much like their friends had somehow become unfamiliar.

Deep inside, they longed for each other's friendship, preferring each other's company, to the exhibition warranted in some aspects of this ritual so-called marriage.

To be continued...