Earth to Me

I wasn’t the first one there.

No, it was Chance standing in space first, and my mom was floating in front of us. She smiled warmly at me when I materialized, and then mere seconds later, Andy tumbled in, followed by Chuck and Riley at almost the same time. Tegan dotted up next to me, while Anthony awoke just a few feet away right before Mick showed up as the last of us.

We all must’ve been around the same level of dog-tired, judging from the quickness of it all.

It didn’t matter, though. Around here, our energy levels didn’t matter. We were gaining it all the time, since our other bodies were technically asleep.

“Hello, all,” Mom greeted, her voice a little nervous despite her friendly demeanor and casual wave. “Glad to see you all made it…”

“Let’s do this! Woo!” Andy whooped, immediately getting elbowed in the ribcage by Anthony.

Mom laughed a little under her breath, but then she sighed. “I will transport you to the scene through a portal. Hold on one moment.”

It was something straight out of a movie, the way she simply stood to the side and held her arms out, motioning like she was ripping a hole in clothing. Space folded in her hands and tore in a slit that we could all see through; from my point of view, all I saw were more stars and a cool tint to it all.

We were all ready to jump through, but Mom held her hand up and said, “Wait. I want you all to know that you must be careful out there. You need to watch each other’s backs and make sure that nobody gets hurt, because any harm done to you out there will reflect on you when you wake up.”

“Yeah, we figured,” Mick shrugged, hands in his hoodie pockets.

Mom closed her eyes for a few seconds and inhaled slowly. “I know you can do it. Many other planets are already there but your assistance will help. Just be safe. I have faith that this will not be the end.”

And even if unconditional optimism always sort of scared me, I knew she was telling the truth. She really did believe in us, and so did we. It all boiled down to whether or not we could live up to our own expectations.

I was nearest to the portal, and heaving a heavy sigh, I just decided to go for it.

The others followed, tilting their bodies forward to float through space. I put one arm through the portal and closed my eyes, hoping my soul wasn’t being ripped from my body, and then in an instant I was on the other side.

By the time I whipped my head back to look at the portal I was long through, Mom was waving at me through the little window, and then the crisp edges forged back together.

There was no going back at that point.

The other guardians must have seen the look of complete worry and shock on my face, but I carried on and looked forward. And when I caught sight of what was in store for us, I almost leaned back and stopped dead in my space tracks.

A huge portal was opened up just a few hundred feet in front of us. It was pulled so taut that it was almost circular, the crinkled edges a bright yellow that burned like the sun. I couldn’t even see what was on the other side – there were too many creatures gathered at the portal, most of them from our side, I had assumed. There were aliens from every walk of life in our shoes.

There were groups of similar aliens, like the big group of humans that were currently floating towards the mess with wobbly knees, and there were smaller planets that only sent one or two guardians to defend their planet. There were dragon-like beings that stretched taller than my dorm building, and there were three-foot-tall creatures that looked like chameleons with Chihuahua heads. Some were shouting in languages I couldn’t compute and could never wrap my frazzled mind around, and some had translators hanging around their necks to send radio signals to other aliens.

Well, I guess it would be weird to call them aliens when we were all different to each other.

The only thing we had in common was the fact that we were all fighting for the same reason – to protect our section of the universe, hoping for peace all across space and time.

That’s what I thought at first, anyway. When you come from all sorts of other planets, it’s weird to imagine them having anything in common with you. But as we got closer and eventually meshed in with the crowd, I noticed something crucial – many of these creatures seemed to have similar powers as the eight of us did.

I was squeezed in between a very squishy tentacle-clad alien and what appeared to be a vaguely humanoid robot with scaly skin on the chin. They both had their appendages raised, and when I looked up, I saw that they were just blowing air.

Air! I was in a section where air guardians were meant to gather!

Already feeling the pressure building, I scattered around, trying to weave my way through the crowd so I could feel like I was doing something useful. I had lost sight of my fellow guardians long ago, and even if I didn’t quite come to terms with it, there wasn’t much I could do. I was lost in this intergalactic dance-floor and I didn’t have the first clue of where to get out.

Just as my breathing got tighter, I heard a synthetic voice rise above the crowd.

“OFFENSES TO THE FRONT! LIGHTNING, FIRE, FAUNA, AND WATER BEARERS TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE! AIR IN THE BACK! LIGHT ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE PORTAL! SOIL DOWN BELOW IN FRONT WHERE THE COMETS ARE SHOOTING, AND PSYCHE TO THE RIGHT SIDE!”

It was one of the dragon-creatures with their long head sticking out of the crowd, the translator necklace booming where there was supposed to be no air. Judging by the astronaut-like helmets on some of the aliens, maybe this section of space could be toxic, but they all apparently still heard.

As soon as I heard my element mentioned, I did my best to scoot forward. No matter how certain I was that nobody understood my Earth-English “excuse me,” they let me by – maybe they saw the purple lightning scars trailing down my arm that seemed to be getting bigger with every second, but they just peeled away and let me pass.

And even if it felt like miles before I’d get to my area, soon enough, there I was. Above my head, there were flashes of fire and static shooting out from their limbs. For a second I was terrified like I always was. Then, when I stood up straight right between two creatures that were much bigger than me, I never felt like less of a freak.

I shot my arms out and saw lightning streak out from my fingertips, beams stronger than anything I could ever conjure up while sitting in my dorm room, and the flashes intertwined with the steady stream of electricity coming from everybody else in my row. Behind us, there were living flamethrowers who kept their fire just at the right angle to make both weapons explode upon entering the portal and meeting our enemies – thousands upon thousands of five-foot-long crustaceans that looked very similar to the giant one Earth had to face a mere two-and-a-half years ago.

They were horrible, disgusting bug-like things, and I wanted to squish them as well as I could. As they fell from the portal from whence they came in a waterfall of troops, the psyche guardians suspended them and threw them back into the portal so they could litter up the space from whence they came. Tegan had only a few other guardians in front of her – I could spot her bright red hair from a mile away, and the look of concentration on her face was unmistakable.

And as the waste was shoveled back through the portal, so were the comets that were shooting below our feet. Ground bearers lifted them from their paths and hurled them up through the portal to smash the line of bugs that seemed to just endlessly spout. Riley was bound to be down there, dodging rocks and swearing with delight.

Next to the lightning and fire guardians were the lights, a small group of aliens that put Chuck up front since he was the smallest compared to their odd statures. They fired their beams at full blast and at an angle that blinded a good chunk of bugs before they even made it through the portal.

I couldn’t quite see what was going on behind me at that moment, but I could gather from the things I saw upon making it into the crowd. Above the flames and lightning, there was a sheet of water that tapered off so it wouldn’t interfere with the fire and put it out, and within the water were branches, leaves, cacti, and other various parts of plants that had the potential to be very dangerous. The water held the fauna steady, and that’s also where the air came in.

Air bearers, all the way in the back and above the rest of us, were shooting oxygen in a thin sheet all around us to keep everything aimed toward the portal, I assumed. Maybe that’s why humans could breathe, I wondered for a second.

But I had bigger fish to fry, and all of those fish were just lightning bolts aiming in with the other sparks that were created by what I now knew were my peers.

And it was weird, standing amongst other beings in the universe that had my same responsibilities and dangers looming over their heads. We weren’t all the same, of course. But this was something that kept us together, and it kept us from aiming anywhere else other than the portal where all of the enemies were pouring out of.

And soon, the tiny bugs had stopped flowing out.

It was a trickle. Less and less of them fell from the white-hot edge of space’s fabric, and for a fleeting moment my steady release of static had weakened out of awe. The sparks above my head died down, and the flames, water, leaves, and air quieted down as the last of the bugs were thrust back into their portal to die in their side of space.

Suddenly, the same robotic voice bellowed, “GO FORTH, CHOSEN LEADERS!”

And the crowds melted away.

More than half of my fellow lightning bolters had retreated into space, along with hundreds of breathing flamethrowers and a good chunk of every other group of guardian. When all was said and done, most of us leaders controlled either lightning or fire – the rest of them tapered off in numbers with light being the least populous.

We had not won. Not yet.

The time had come to charge through the portal and face everything I was terrified of, everything that had slowly been coming to a head over the past few months of my life.

My heart was still beating, pumping blood through my shaky veins, and as my best friends melted away from me and set off to wake up on Earth, I kept moving forward along with the crowd of other beings that somehow ended up chosen to lead their planet in the fight.

I never knew what I was really supposed to do, but out of all of us, I can’t have been the only one. I just kept on going.

Even when I saw hordes of giant horseshoe-crab aliens hovering just a few feet from the portal, something kept me coasting. Maybe it was the mob mentality that had made its way into my brain, scared to fall behind. Perhaps it was the fact that I had gone through it before, albeit with people I knew and liked. A part of me knew what I was doing.

The rest of me, as usual, didn’t have a clue what was going on or if I was going to make it out alive.

Just another day in the life, I guessed.