I'm Nine Again 15 19/01/2008: The Caretaker

"What?" I asked, "You want to comment on my clothes when you're wearing a black singlet under a white shirt?"

"What I am wearing is practical," Alice laughed, "What you are wearing is like you came right out of a video game!"

"Hey this is practical," I said, "It's hemp fiber so it's breathable in the summer heat."

"Why don't you just wear a short sleeve shirt?" she asked.

"Because I don't like the feel of the wind," I said.

"You don't like the feel of the wind?" she asked, "How, after all of the years we've been training together have I never come to possess the knowledge that you do not like the feel of the wind?"

"Well, it's not like I walk into a room like, hey guys, what's up? It's ya boy Sean hear and I don't like wind," I said.

"You look like an edgy teen," Alice said as she finished cleaning the handgun that was in parts on the table. She started to rea.s.semble the pieces.

"Grey called," Alice said, "At 09:30 hours our caretaker will be arriving."

"Our caretaker," I scoffed, "He must think we are a bunch of actual kids who can't take care of ourselves."

"Well," Alice said gesturing with her head over towards a small stack of pizza boxes.

"We do order a lot of pizza," I said.

"Besides, apparently this guy is the real deal, he is going to take care of our investments while we are away," she said, "He'll clean the base, cook food, drive us around and even defend the base while we are away."

"Defend the base," I scoffed again, "What is this guy, ex-special forces or something?"

There was a loud knocking on the metal door upstairs. I looked over to the stairs and then down to my watch. 09:25.

"Oh, you meant like, now. He's here now?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's what I was getting at," she said, "Go and let him in."

I walked up the stairs and pulled pushed open the door to see a tall middle-aged man in a suit and red tie standing at the door. The natural light hurt my eyes as I took a moment to adjust. The summer temperature hit me with a wave of heat. The man raised his sungla.s.ses to his receding hairline and smiled at me with his sunspot face creasing into wrinkles around his eyes.

"You must be Sean," he said with a slight crackling voice. He extended his hand forward, "My name is Harry, I'd like to tell you that Grey has told me all about you, but he didn't tell me much actually."

I shook his hand, "Your real name isn't Harry is it?" I asked.

"No," he confirmed, "No it's not. Do you mind If I come in?" he asked, "The one thing Grey did tell me about in detail is the base and all of its perks."

"Of course, he told you about the base," I said, "He built it. Yeah come on in," I said. We started to make our way down the stairs.

"What are you expecting with this job Harry?" I asked. Even I was curious as to what it would mean to have help from someone who wasn't from the future.

"Grey told me that this job would be one of the more peculiar jobs I've worked," he said, "He said that Alice or you would fill me in on any details that you felt necessary, but that I shouldn't pry too much."

"That's a good thing," I said, "There is a bunch of stuff that you might not want to know."

We got to the bottom of the steps and walked through the door. A shifting sound of moving feet and the clunky sound of a gun being handled. Harry moved quickly and with precision. I turned around to look.

A gun was held in the air above Harry as he clasped the wrist that held it. Alice's wrist. He stood over her, holding her wrist with one hand and her neck with this other hand.

"What the!?" I started to ask.

"You must be Alice," he said, "You almost had me, but what gave you away was that you c.o.c.ked your weapon as you attacked me, and when you stepped forward in ambush, your food slid along the ground for a moment before you jumped out at me."

He let go of her wrist and neck and Alice smiled, intimidated, and regained her composure.

"Did you just try to ambush him, Alice!?" I asked.

"It was just a prank," she said to me with a cheeky smile.

"It's okay," Harry said, "Grey told me all about Alice and how she likes to point guns at people."

"She does like to point guns at people," I said remembering all the times over the years she would ambush me while I was brushing my teeth or handling a load of washing, just so she could see me using my powers. In this instance, I was too unprepared for the situation to even think about using my powers.

Harry straightened up his suit and then moved his sungla.s.ses from his head to his top left suit pocket. He stepped forward into the base and looked around.

"Grey wasn't lying," Harry said looking around, "This is impressive. Is that a pool table!?"

"Grey was pretty fond of that choice," I remarked.

"So, aren't you worried?" Alice asked, "Don't you want to know what you are doing, working for a bunch of kids with an underground base and walking around with guns?"

Harry turned back to us with his wrinkled grin, "Oh no," he said, "I am being paid a lot of money to not care about any of this. This is the kind of work I'm used to doing."

"This is the kind of work you do normally?" I asked.

"Oh yes, usually for criminal organizations or government operations," he said, "My job is to, take care of things on the home front."

"So you've worked for the government before," Alice said, "And criminals. Where exactly does your allegiance lie? How do we trust you?" she asked.

"If you're worried about me reporting what you do to the government then you have nothing to worry about," he said running his finger along one of the stair railings to collect dust, "I'm not loyal to any government nor criminal organization. My loyalty is to the money that I'm being paid. I think I've mentioned this before, but Grey is paying me a lot of money not to care about what it is you guys are doing."

After getting settled into his room, we showed him around the base. The kitchen and living areas, the gym, the training room the shooting range. After the tour, we all sat down on the couches with a coffee and explained our mission to Harry.

"So Grey is being vague with you as well," Harry said.

"Yeah, so far, all we know is that we have an enemy, one that isn't part of one of the factions we know about," I said.

"This Sean, Sean 2.0 has been training to carry out a mission set by Sean 1.0, or the original Sean as we like to call him," Alice started saying, "So far, our goals were to build up our investments with a hefty sum that he left us, and train to fight the enemy."

"Do you know why you are fighting the enemy?" Harry asked.

"All Grey told me," I said, "was that this enemy is a direct enemy of Sean. The reason we are fighting them is that they are fighting us. Grey told me that in the first divergent, the Alice and I were hunted by the enemy and that we were on the back foot the whole time. The reason for this second divergent is for me, Sean 2.0 to be on the front foot the whole time. Instead of being the hunted, in this divergent, we will be the hunters. We will find the enemy and figure out why they were hunting me in the first divergent."

"Hmm," Harry hummed pondering to himself, "This is by far, the most farfetched story I've ever heard. But the fact that you have this much money and resources behind you, it is my job after all not to care about what it is that you are doing, just to worry about taking care of the base."

"Grey said he'd give us more information eventually," Alice said, "He wants to drip-feed it to us so that this divergent doesn't stray too far from the first divergent."

"And you guys don't know how or why people are being sent back in time?" Harry asked.

"Not a clue," I said, "It might have something to do with why the enemy is hunting me. Because of my time manipulation powers, but that's just a theory."

"And Grey has traveled from the original timeline to the first divergent, and now the second divergent on orders from you in the first divergent," Harry said, "Forgive my intrusiveness but have you asked how Grey was transported to this second divergent?"

"I have asked him," Alice said, "But that's one of the things he wouldn't tell us."

"Maybe it's one of your powers Sean," Harry said.

"I told him that too!" Alice chimed in.

"I don't know," I said, "In the past five years of training, I've never once felt anything like the ability to send people back in time."

[Key Divergence Detected]
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"Key Divergence!" Alice said.

"What does that mean?" Harry asked, looking at the display message that was playing on the TV screen.

"It means that our future teammate has finally arrived in this divergence," I said, "She's now just waking up in her Melbourne house, stuck sent back in time and not knowing what is going on."

"And so, the reason I'm here now is that you two are going on your first mission?" he asked, "To find and meet this girl."

"YEP!" Alice said enthusiastically, "It's going to be awesome to finally have another girl around here."

"You can say that again," I joked.

"Shut up!" Alice said. She picked up her empty mug of coffee and went to throw it at me. It was a common thing she would do nowadays. Throw things at me.

As a show of power in front of Harry, I raised my hands and stopped the mug in the middle of the air. He looked at it in awe, suspended in the air with no motion. I reached up and clasped it out of the air and placed it carefully on the coffee tabled.

"Well then, Harry," I said, "You've got a day to get settled in, but tomorrow we are going to need you to drive us to Melbourne."

"You aren't going to get the plane?" he asked, still stunned by witnessing the power that we had spent the last half an hour discussing.

"We don't have any guns in Melbourne," I said, "We're going to need to bring our own."

I stood up and walked over to the pool table, Harry watching me every step of the way. I turned to Alice.

"Come on s.h.i.t head," I said, "We still have to finish our first to 100 wins."

The wall behind the pool table, marked with two names. Alice and Sean. There was a score tallied underneath the names.

Alice, 98. Sean 93.