OTHERBORN: THE CREVASSE

EPISODE ONE, PART ONE

CORNELIUS

I seem to have jumped somewhere else in time.

Light flickers. Fire. I see through the blurry slit of vision I've mustered...to a shape in the darkness. I squint and wince again. Lightning forks down a crevasse, outside a cavern. I sense cold. Picture is clearing...

The shape before me pokes at a fire...a hunched over and forward kind of a shape. The figure is rocking.

Who's that?

And I squint, still on my side...

I see flashes again, but my brain now flips—backwards...or forwards? What led up to this vision?

Suddenly...clear: I'm back... Angie's kitchen. Relief. I try again to grasp reality, but...then fragmented moments happen, once more, with...earlier scenes from before "this fire guy?"...
It's...

Fresh air. Teetering...

I'm in a truck...a dead guy and me seesaw...somewhere. Why are we tilting? We are up, then we're down. The horizon is moving. Pain rakes my neck. I peer up, no longer unconscious...and then...over the edge...out from the truck...

We hang in mid air, tilt on the rocks...

* * *

I find my voice. "I'm a detective!" I protest, quickly returned from the eeriest procrastination-type vision I've imagined just yet. I hear Angie's voice.

"Or...You can hope," retorts my so loving girlfriend.

I scowl. "Nice! But you'll be the one hoping. I'm going to be good at this job. Not everything's a joke all the time."

"So what do you mean? Hoping?"

"Hoping I'm going to accept your apology one day when you realize how great I am at this work."

"Ah! Don't you think you are getting a little intense, Cor? You're not saving the world. You're just trying to help, right? Just 'part' of the picture. Little humility?"

My annoyance amuses her. I give her a glare. I'll prove I am good! Detecting is going to be my thing this time—my thing that fits me! This IS serious. Inside, I scream: But I AM saving the world!

Angie opens the kitchen door to the yard and calls in the dog, shoving his plate down, whilst he snuffles straight into his gruesome, brown mush.

"Can't he wait even a second, at least?!" I remark.

"God, you're a grouch," says Angie. "He's hungry. Just decode the damn thingy already! You're stressing me out. I'm calling Brenda. We're going for lunch."

Outwardly, I shrug like I could care less, but really, I'd like to do something with them. Lunch would be great. I am so hungry.

She throws a pillow at me.

"Goof."

She thinks everything's funny!

And I know I can't tell her...maybe not ever...why I've enrolled in the Franny Sanhill Online Private Investigations Academy, and how this ball is already rolling.

My head!

She leaves.

So, I take the opportunity alone in what's now Angie's quite silent house. I quickly go through my kickboxing routine: multiple flips, then some kicks, alternating with punches to the imaginary bad guy. I shake off the mood, and I focus instead.

I return to the puzzle. I wrestled with tumblers inside the lock of the box, but instead of the fancy tools I should have, I only have what's in Angie's far-too-sparse cutlery drawer.