Levi had given Ace a wonderful referral to work at the Atan Police Department, but it made him feel that there was some sort of underlying reason, and he couldn’t understand why.

  Every time Ace went to work inside the arching halls of Atan Police Department #40, he started to think about Levi, because he got the job thanks to him. So he worked extra hard to prove that he belonged there, and he quickly became a valued member of the department, getting the eye of Captain Abaster Almuz.

  Much to the chagrin of Peter Forthright.

  Peter Forthright, like many others, had been leaving Earth in a mass exodus, the oddities of the paranormal making everyone question if it was still safe to live there. Forthright didn’t want to deal with another repeat of what he had seen on Earth, so he jumped ship the first chance he could get to somewhere, anywhere, and left for the pnet of Paradis, with possibly the Gactic Union’s loosest work visa policy.

  Peter found Ace chatting with the other officers in the break room before his shift, telling a joke about shoes. Everyone ughed, but then they muttered something about having to go once Forthright walked into the break room.

  Ace was too kind to know any better.

  He was also too stupid.

  Someone who was having a mid-life crisis decorated the break room, and it was bright yellow. The couch was yellow, the fuzzy rug on the floor was yellow, and somehow the fridge with the beled and still stolen lunches was yellow.

  The only not-yellow thing was the table, pstic grey, humble metallic foldable chairs, standard stain that would not come out, origin unknown.

  Ace was making coffee when Forthright came into the breakroom.

  Peter didn’t like Ace, but he was his supervisor. He found silly little inane ways to bother him, like taking all the sugar and hiding it before he came to the break room, or recommending terrible pces in town because he was new, and didn’t know any better.

  The cogs in Peter’s mind found different ways to bother him because frankly, it was a little fun. He was bored in Atan. There were plenty of things for an officer to do, as Atan was the center of trafficking of all kinds, the city a hub for travel and tourism, but tely, the police have been winning.

  Things were quiet.

  Words escaped him as Peter didn’t know how to ask about how he was connected to a local drug lord and money underer, The Fearsome Feardorcha. The other day, someone had given him an anonymous tip, with plenty of proof.

  It was day-night when a small, young, pregnant woman came to the Atan police department to discuss info she knew about a criminal and his illegal enterprises. Night only occurs every two thousand years on Paradis, their strange orbit between their tiny two stars, so they referred to it as sleeping hours, day-night, and the quiet hours.

  During the quiet hours, the small woman, her long bck hair and brown oval eyes shuffled into the precinct, sweating from the constant bearing heat of the sun, and stared at the ground as she entered the building. She had made an appointment, was promised her safety, and had agreed to only come in the middle of the quiet hours.

  The anonymous source was not handing over information out of the goodness of her own heart, but out of jealousy, fear of the life of her unborn child, vindication, and many other personal reasons as the former employee of the man she was betraying.

  The Fearsome Feardorcha.

  Peter Forthright was tackling money undering in Atan, and Feardorcha was one of his targets, always slipping through his fingers, but tely, Feardorcha had become x, appearing more often in public and social gatherings, and soon they would have enough information to arrest and imprison him.

  The small woman sat in a tiny, grey, and clinal room with a one-way mirror and cameras telling Peter Forthright everything she knew about Alto Feardocha, an Alterian, during her time she worked at his estate, at the edge of Atan, where the city met the tropical jungle. The government knew where it was, it was legally acquired, the same as all of Feardorcha’s other properties, so there was nothing they could do about it.

  The information she gave over was useful, she had pictures as well from the inside of the house, acquired from the time she spent there, taken with her coworkers. Then the most valuable information of all she gave was that the Fearsome Feardorcha was getting married.

  A perfectly wrapped gift had been pced into Peter Forthright’s p.

  One of the worst criminals in all of Atan was going to prison, possibly because of an angry lover he had gotten pregnant with. She had given them enough information for them to press charges against him, and they knew the time and date of his wedding, the location, and the person he was getting married to.

  It was a very short and long-haired man with red hair, and Peter Forthright felt all the color drain from his body when this person had the same face as Ace. So exact, that it might as well be him.

  The young woman asked if something was wrong and Forthright muttered a quick and continued on with the interview, but the cogs in his mind continued to spin and he believed that is what all connected with Captain Abaster Almuz.

  Abaster was always so friendly with him, talking, and making jokes, Forthright knew that they were in on it together! Ace must be a retive of Feardorcha’s partner or be his partner, undering money in conjunction with Abaster. It was a masterful pn from the top down, and Forthright saw fame in his future, a promotion, and a shinier new badge.

  Yet Forthright himself started to doubt himself.

  Was Ace really the criminal mastermind that he thought he was?

  Forthright wasn’t sure, as he watched Ace in the garishly bright break room fumble with the coffee machine, spill coffee on the floor, clean it up, put ground coffee into the machine without the paper filter, try to clean it up by throwing it out into the sink creating another mess, and a simple task turned into a twenty-minute show.

  Forthright helped him clean up, feeling bad.

  Still, Forthright was positive that Abaster was a bad cop, no doughnut.

  Abaster Almuz had sshed his tires, and broken the windows to Peter’s apartment. One day he sent him a picture of Peter, sitting at the beach, drinking a beer, ignorant of the danger that lurked in the shadows.

  All because he had turned down an offer to help him move “ product ”.

  Peter was brave, stupidly brave, simir to Ace, and the universe was truly pying an ironic joke that he disliked him.

  Believing that there were enemies among the mist, Forthright went to the higher-ups, requesting help, and they told him that he could give the case to another department, or he would have to tell Abaster because his worries about him were unfounded.

  Peter had no proof, other than hearsay about a conversation he cimed had happened, a picture sent to himself sitting at the beach that couldn’t be misconstrued as threatening to anyone else but himself, and a strange coincidence that the partner of a criminal looked like a man a that worked at one of the precincts.

  He couldn’t prove that Abaster sshed his tires or broke his windows, so he looked paranoid and angry. Peter’s superiors got word of his affection towards Officer Sena. She worked at another precinct, and Ace was dating her, and now he was nothing but a jealous man.

  Peter wanted justice more than he wanted to be brave, so he handed over the case file to another precinct hoping that it would go somewhere, it must, because the precinct he handed it over to, he hoped, he prayed, did not have another Abaster Almuz.

  On the day of the raid at the wedding, Peter Forthright took the day off of work.

  He went to the beach because he knew he could not look Almuz in the eye and wondered if he knew, fearing that Almuz would pull out his gun and put a bullet through his eye, his brains spttering over the tiled floor, showering his desk and a small picture of his mother on it in blood, with her permanent smile, dressed in her Sunday Best.

  So he sat at Florentine Beach, sinking into the warm yellow sand, gazing up at the fuschia sky, heart racing, repeating his positive thinking meditations because in life you can’t control everything, and you have to sometimes let go.

  So he let go of his problems, leaving it up to precinct #15 and their highly trained team, with their higher budget, and SWAT gear, because at the end of the day, he might not get a shinier badge, but the respect of his colleagues and Almuz put behind bars.

  Instead, the world burned down around him.

  Peter Forthright left Earth for a quiet life, but not too quiet, but that was not how things worked, one could not choose their challenges in life. He could not control the colors of the entire town, fade away, rip from his skin, the sand, and the sky, and fly off to some unknown destination.

  He could not control the soundless void that surrounded him, the fear all-consuming as the color pummeled his cells, returning into his body, the tears of pain that flew forth.

  Everyone on the beach ran for their cars, flew off into the sky, grabbed their children, called the police, anything because something had to be done, there had to be something in their control because life was too scary when there was nothing that you could control.

  Forthright’s phone rang immediately and he was called to the station, emergency services over flooding, accidents in the street, and people crashing into each other out of surprise from the sudden shock. He sprung into action, got into his car, and hit the hyper-way, ignoring the speed limit, when another thing out of his control happened.

  Whatever had caused the freak occurrence was sucking fmes out of the air, from every source in the city, the pyres of fire swirling into one point towards the nicest part of town, Ascension Hills.

  Peter turned his car around, flying through the hyper-way because it was no coincidence that this was happening on the same day, during the same time when the wedding was set to occur, and all the fmes were flowing where the wedding was purported to take pce.

  Soot covered the front of his car, and he kept using the window wipers to move it out of the way, swerving, avoiding the random cityscape objects that were crashing into the side of his standard pale blue car, bought for required transportation to work. The sound of airpne engines rattled the windows on his simple car, shaking, cracking the sides, and bending the thin pstic and metal frame.

  Halfway there, the swirling fire was gone, and when he arrived at the home where the wedding had taken pce, nothing but ash was left.

  Whatever obscene and foul beast had eaten the fmes in the town had destroyed the rge mansion, burned down the wn to a crisp, and mutited the team that had attempted to arrest the Fearsome Feardocha. The wreckage of a helicopter was on the front wn, sizzling, another at an awkward angle wedged inside the house, the bottom of a corpse hanging out of an open door.

  The backyard was razed to the ground, chopped up body parts, heads exploded inside their tactical armor helmets, the blood seeping into the hellscape, coaguting onto the ground. The mutited bodies, the meat exposed to the air cooked well done, were an open-air barbeque sans sauce and appetizers.

  Forthright was not brave for the first time in his life, and others had paid the price.

  It was worse than anything he had seen before, and Peter started to think that he had stumbled onto a conspiracy of epic proportions.

  Ace pretended to be a friendly coworker, going to weekly bar nights, singing bad karaoke, and telling terrible jokes while facilitating money undering with his retive, who married Feardorcha and partnered with Almuz to kill the members of precinct #15.

  It was the only theory Peter came up with, as he waited for the ambunce to come, standing in front of the wreckage of a wedding and his hard work.

  He swore from that day on to defeat Ace because he was evil personified.