"Three points! Yes! Who's the man?"
"You are so full of it. There's no way that was outside the line."
Nick Carter stopped his somewhat demented victory dance. "What you talkin' 'bout, fool? That was out!"
"No way," repeated A.J. McLean.
Nick sighed in exasperation. "Brian, tell him. It was out, wasn't it?"
Brian Littrell crossed his arms. "He's right. You're full of it."
"Kevin, Howie-"
"Didn't see it," they chorused. They weren't participating in the game of pickup basketball and were instead sitting on the sidelines of the basketball court at Nick's house while his visiting brother Aaron attempted to engage their attention by telling them about his new video game.
"It was out!" Aaron exclaimed.
"You didn't see it either. You were talking to us," Kevin pointed out. Aaron pouted.
Nick groaned dramatically and walked off the court to get his water bottle.
"Who's the man? Who's the man?" A.J. mimicked in a falsetto.
"Shut up," Nick mumbled, seconds before he went flying rather spectacularly into the air.
"What the heck was that?" asked Brian.
"I tribbed," Nick said through a mouthful of dirt. He spat it out and removed the rest of it from his tongue with his shirt collar.
"Dumbass," said Brian. "There's not even anything there to trip over."
"Yes there is," he responded automatically. He stood up and grimaced with the momentary pain. "It's right, it's right.." Nick was about to give up the search when he saw something black and white protruding out of the slope from the raised basketball court to the ground. "There." He pointed with his large foot. "Like, a rock or something."
"It's not a rock. It's in Saran Wrap," Howie said.
"It's in Saran Wrap," Nick echoed. He knelt and started to dig around it with his hands, then abruptly stopped.
"You break a nail, or what?" Brian joked.
Nick looked up at him. "It's a book."
"What?"
He didn't answer, simply resumed digging around it while the rest of them gathered around, silent. When a little less than half the book was visible, he felt something soft beside it. He more carefully removed the dirt around it to reveal a small, decaying bag that appeared to be made of leather.
"Don't touch it," Kevin warned.
Nick nodded and returned to the book, loosening enough soil to let him simply pull it out. Its black and white speckled cover named it as a "200 Page Hilroy Compositon Book", and the font used was not modern. The notebook was, indeed, tightly enclosed in Saran Wrap. He handed it to Kevin and dug out beneath the bag so that it fell into his hand, then gently pried it open, some of the top edges crumbling away at his touch.
"Shit," he said.
"Hey! There are little ears present!" exclaimed Aaron. Everyone completely ignored him as they leaned forward to see what Nick had found.
Five coloured, translucent stones glittered in the summer afternoon sunlight: green, blue, red, yellow, and orange. They were perfectly circular. Nick carefully removed the green one and held it up to the light.
"Jesus!" he exclaimed, and dropped it as if he'd been burned.
"What the hell?" Brian said.
"It glowed!" His voice cracked and went up an octave. "And it felt warm all of a sudden! The thing is fucking radioactive!"
"Such language," chided Aaron. He was again ignored.
"Just put it back in the bag," Howie advised.
At Nick's touch, it glowed again, and all of them saw it. He quickly dropped the stone back in the bag and looked at his friends and brother.
"Uh..." He laughed nervously. "Y'all wanna go inside or something?"
"Yeah, I feel cold," A.J. said.
All six walked towards the house, leaving the water bottle untouched on the grass.
* * *
When they entered Nick's living room, Nick plopped down on the sofa, looking stunned, and gingerly placed the bag on the coffee table. He grabbed the remote and turned on the TV to a football game at low volume. Kevin put the book in front of him. They all stared at it, then looked expectantly at Nick.
"I ain't touchin' it," he said.
A.J. made a disgusted noice, sat down next to Nick, and began to rip the clear plastic sheeting off of the book while the others seated themselves around the room.
When a pile of torn Saran Wrap has settled around A.J.'s legs, he opened the front cover.
"July sixteenth, 1967." He read the date written in neat cursive, then fell silent as he skimmed further down.
After several moments, Brian cleared his throat. When that had no effect, he said, "We're waiting."
"Dude," A.J. said without looking away from the page. "This is pretty fucked up right here."
Aaron said nothing. He was becoming rapidly desensitized.
"Listen to this," A.J. said, and started to read from the notebook. "If you have found this notebook, a great responsibility now rests on your shoulders: the responsibility to protect this planet, and the life and freedom of each person on it."
"This sounds like something from a really bad comic book," remarked Nick.
"This sounds like something from your really bad comic book," Brian corrected.
"Oh, shut up."
"You're still mad about that make-believe three-pointer, aren't you?"
"Quiet," said Kevin. Nick stuck his tongue out at him, but he didn't see it.
"If you have not found a bag containing five translucent stones of assorted colours, you should immediately begin to look for it in the place where you discovered this book. It is imperative that you find it," A.J. continued. "For several years there has been speculation that we are not alone in the universe. We most certainly are not. I am confined to a wheelchair because beings not of this earth mangled my legs beyond repair and killed my parents when I was young. I didn't mention them when I had to give my statement to the police; I knew they would think I was crazy.
"Doubtless, you too think I'm insane, and I always thought I was, until I met three other men who told me about their own similar experiences, some of them recent."
"That's enough," Kevin sighed, and leaned forward to take the book away.
"It's funny if nothing else." A.J. carried on. "We are not alone, and our neighbours are not friendly. They are waiting, in the sky, in great ships, somehow hidden, to take our planet away from us. There are also some already here who have the ability to tamper with human perception and therefore appear as one of us. They understand our speech and can themselves speak all of our languages.
"Their science is far more sophisticated than any we could develop in the neck few hundred years. The only way that we can ever hope to equal or defeat them is to use an art that has long been seen as the antithesis to science, and was eventually supplanted by it.
"Within the five stones that you should have by now discoved lie powers beyond the realm of normal men. They will allow you to identify the impostors and fight them.
Another stone is hidden in a country farther north that will give the person who eventually finds it identical powers.
"I know that you must think that I am paranoid and mentally lacking to believe in what you've just read. But if you have read this far, perhaps there is hope.
"Whatever you do, whatever your age or line of work, it is your duty to take on this responsibility.
"You may not believe me. All I ask is that you find four other people, one for each of the stones, press them to the center of your chests, and close your eyes. And if what happens then is possible, isn't anything?
"John Michael Andrews, 1967." A.J. closed the book.
"The truth is out there," Brian said in a dramatic voice, and the others laughed nervously with the exception of Kevin, who just kept shaking his head.
"Hey, Aaron?" Nick said, fidgeting.
"Yeah?"
"Leave."
"What?"
Nick inclined his head toward the back door.
Aaron glared at him, then stormed out of the living room and slammed the screen door to the enormous lot behind him.
There were several awkward moments of throat-clearing and quiet coughing while they looked at anything but each other. The atmosphere was suddenly eerie. Nick stared at his feet, Brian stared into space and bit his nails, A.J. picked at the sofa, Howie looked blankly at the T.V., and Kevin snuck looks under the couch to check for dustballs.
"So," A.J. said.
They all stopped fidgeting and looked at him expectantly.
"So, uh, what are we going to do?"
They continued to simply look at him.
"You know, about the thing... from the book... that I read...out loud.."
They just stared.
"Jesus, guys! Non-funny Independence Day! Remember?"
"Oh, yeah."
"I thought you meant something else."
"Hey, man, sorry."
"I didn't quite know where you were going with that."
A.J. sighed laboriously.
"It's just a load of shit- pardon my French- anyway," said Kevin. "You might as well toss it now."
"But how do we know for sure that it's not true?" Nick said very quietly.
Kevin laughed. "You were stupid enough to fall for that?"
"I'm not stupid."
Kevin snorted. Nick was about to say something when Howie cut him off.
"Come on, guys, chill. I figure we don't have anything to lose."
"Yeah. Worst case scenario, nothing happens and we feel like idiots," said Brian. "But what if- and just work with me here- what if it is true, and, say, ten years from now New York is a pile of rocks, and it's all on our heads because we didn't do anything when we could have. Do you always want to wonder if that guy was right?"
"Whatever happens, happens," A.J. shrugged.
The rest of them nodded, although Kevin muttered something no one understood.
"Well, then, let's do it," Nick said in a falsely jovial voice. "Everyone take one." He pulled the green one from the bag again, felt it warm and saw it glow softly. As Brian took the blue one, A.J. the yellow one, Howie the orange, and Kevin the red, each stone glowed and warmed at their touch. They all stared at each other in stunned disbelief.
"Maybe we should all do it at the same time," Howie said. "Maybe that makes a difference."
Nick shrugged. "Why the hell not?"
"Okay, then, on three. One, two..." The last number stuck in his throat. "Three."
Nick took a deep, shuddering breath, closed his eyes, and pressed the green stone to his chest, flat side down. For a second, nothing happened, and he almost laughed. But then a warmth enveloped him, spreading from the stone across and up to his shoulders and arms, and down his torso to his legs. Despite the fact that it was already a warm summer day, this warmth was not unpleasant.
He couldn't have said how long it was around him before it slowly faded to be replaced by a refreshing coolness, then nothing.
"Can we open our eyes now?" he asked.
"Yeah," Brian and Howie chorused.
"On three again?"
"Sure," said Howie. "One... two... three."
Nick opened his eyes and blinked several times before he had the courage to look down at himself.
The stone was still in the center of his chest when he took his hand away. His body from the neck down seemed to be encased in dark green plastic, but it was soft to the touch and supple. There were no seams, only lighter green ribbing that ran from the stone up over his left shoulder and up over the right shoulder, and then two more strips of it that went from the stone on a diagonal to his hips before disappearing from view to his back. There were shoulder plates, epaulettes that jutted out just past his shoulders on either side. His knees were padded and in place of his sneakers were pale green boots that ended above his shins and could be removed by a zipper near his instep. He hoped nothing had happened to his Nikes.
With his right hand, he followed the top right seam over his shoulder and felt his hand touch something cold and hard, then something softer. He gripped the softer part, which felt like a handle, and pulled up and to the right.
The grip he held was made of crisscrossing leather strips and ended in a round, flat circle of something that looked golden- a pommel, he remembered from his studies of the Middle Ages. Above the grip was a hand guard in the shape of a rectangular prism made of the same gold-looking stuff as the pommel. From the center of the hand guard rose a gleaming three-foot long steel blade whose sides were parallel until they came together to a precise and very sharp point. He knew that the longsword should have felt heavy in his hand, but it was nearly weightless.
He finally looked at the others. Each was wearing the same thing that Nick was, but in the colour of the stone that they had chosen: Kevin red, Howie orange, A.J. yellow and Brian blue. However, the weapons they were examining were all different. Brian held a small dagger with a blade of diamond that could have eventually sliced Nick's longsword apart, given enough scratches. A.J. was experimentally fitting an arrow into a large and very powerful crossbow. Kevin continuously turned over an impressive two-handed battle axe while Howie was afraid to fiddle with a small silver gun-like contraption in case he killed somebody.
"Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here," A.J. breathed.
No one even noticed that it was the second time he'd said it. They looked at each other in silence, trying to process the implications of what had just happened. It didn't make sense that everything had changed so much and the Buccaneers were still getting their asses kicked by Green Bay.
Suddenly, the door opened, and they froze. Thankfully, it was only Aaron, who was pissed off at them and had decided to return from exile. He only stood stunned for a moment.
"You know," he said, "the first thing that comes to mind is Power Rangers."
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