Little did the students of Best State University know that at that very moment in time a large object of unknown and questionable origin was hurtling towards the Earth at around 17MPS (That’s Meters Per Second, not whatever your weird brain was trying to make it stand for), which is really quite fast for something moving through the atmosphere. Don’t Believe me? Ask a Scientist.1 All BSU students would remember where they were that night. Mostly for different reasons than what was about to happen to our main characters. It was a night of close encounters leaving a fiery impact on the lives of many students and faculty. A lot of weird shit happened that night is what I’m saying. To describe it all would take a truckload of books. So we’re just going to focus on what Dante and Emily did. And so, to further set the scene, Nearly a week had passed since their first ghost hunt and our heroes found themselves wandering across the west side of Campus...

“Abuse,” she quietly shouted, garnering attention from random passerby as the pair walked down a sidewalk near the eastern edge of Campus, “abuse!”

“We should never have gone to that show...” Dante sighed as he spooned a bite of chocolate ice cream out of his cup. He had a distinct feeling that this joke would never die, just like that work place violence training he went through years ago... (enter PTSD induced flash back here).

“But it’s abuse Dante. Abuse of your rights, plain and simple. You’re a college student, yet you’re eating plain chocolate ice cream out of a plain simple cup. Where is your sense of adventure? Where is trying risky new things like a normal college student? Where are the God Damned Mother Fucking Sprinkles?” She licked away at a sprinkle covered cone, intentionally trying to make it as teasing as possible. She was doing things like that a lot now. He really didn’t mind. “College is supposed to be all about trying new things. Fun things...” She was being very suggestive. She obviously wanted him to do stuff, sexy stuff, to her. And when I say obvious, I mean to you, not to Dante. You as the reader should already clearly be able to tell that Emily is totes into our Hero and that He has not really been picking up what she was putting down, if you catch my drift. He probably thought she was just weird or something like that, and to be fair she totally was. Dante could be a little thick headed that way. Some would say he is also equally weird.

“That’s what you said about going to see that show just because your roommate was in it. ’We need to try something new, maybe experiment a little’ I believe were your exact words. And yet now every thing’s been about abuse for the last hour, especially that show. It was awful. That has to be the least fun thing I’ve done in my college career, and I took Math 125 last year. I even went to about half the lectures. Besides I’m holding off on the risky experimentation until I happen into a three-way." No he wasn’t. That had been his attempt at a joke. Unfortunately for him his delivery had been off and it was clear to everyone. Strangers gave him awkward glances while Emily merely raised an eyebrow. She didn’t believe him. Few knew this, but at the time Dante was a virgin. No girl had ever gotten close enough to kiss him, let alone sleep with him. That three-way was still a long way off, or so he thought. Maybe Emily might be into one? He tried to brush past the terrible joke. Emily let him. "So, I can’t believe your roommate actually starred in that show. ”

“Yeah, Sonja can be a little weird sometimes." An interesting statement coming from Emily, the absolute weirdest person Dante had ever met. Keep in mind that this is a person who once wore a mask and fought super villains on a regular basis. "But she’s pretty involved around campus I hear. A good student too apparently. All in all she’s really a good roommate. Guess I got lucky this year.”

“At least you have one positive influence in your life...” Considering Sonja to be a positive influence would actually be a bit of a stretch with everything she’s going to get up to later on. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

The fiery object from space streaked by overhead, ripping through the atmosphere with an almost deafening roar. Forgot about it didn’t you? Call that the ol’ bait and switch, It took out the top three floors of the Prefect Dorms near the west side of Campus and came down just out of Emily and Dante’s eyesight. A large mushroom of smoke puffed up where it must have hit. Dante’s eyes narrowed. A shock wave of hot air followed next knocking limbs off trees and pushing cars out of place. He stepped in front of Emily, shouldering the blast with relative ease, a barrier of green light appearing in front of him. The shock wave passed a moment later leaving the pair undamaged and very interested.

“Did you see that?” Emily asked excitedly throwing her ice cream to the side, barely eaten I might add, though it was quite melted now. Dante watched it fall to the ground as dark opera music began to play in his head. He had paid good money for that. “Did you see it?! That was no asteroid. It was metal and saucer shaped.”

“I saw...but....”

“There were thrusters!”
“I saw...”

“We should go investigate.” Emily was literally bouncing up and down at this point. “First contact, first contact!” It couldn’t really be first contact. That movie came out in the 90’s or something...

“There could be people in trouble,” Dante added, finally letting go of the lost Ice Cream and focusing back on the now. He grabbed her hand, dropping his own ice cream. The pair was gone before it hit the ground.2 3

They reappeared in what felt like a war zone on the edge of a small crater. Dante recognized the place, or rather what the place had been. A few pieces of play equipment were still standing, though partially melted. A single spinner was spinning ominously. What trees that were left standing were burning. Smoke was pouring out of the crater in thick bellows making it almost impossible to see the bottom.

“Rose Well Hill.”

“Roswell?” Emily asked in a daze as she took in the apocalyptic scenery with wonder and awe.

“No, this was the park at Rose Well Hill. You can still see some of the old well over there.” Dante motioned towards an old stone well that had, earlier that night even, had a lovely wooden canopy covered in blooming rose vines over top of it. Now it was nothing more than a stone circle surrounding a deep hole in the ground. One that had claimed the lives of numerous children, and children at heart, over the the years.

“I guess your right-” she cut off suddenly. “There’s someone down there...”

“Done or down?”

“Well that one,” she pointed over to a flame broiled corpse near the craters edge, “is definitely done. But I think there is someone down at the bottom too.”

“Stay here,” Dante ordered jumping from the ledge and into the smoke. His feet hit the ground a few yards below and he slid to the bottom of the crater. Must have been several dozen feet all the way down. In the center he wasn’t surprised by what he saw. That had definitely been no asteroid. A large saucer shaped object with twin thrusters, was there, heavily battered and pouring out smoke. A figure was trying to drag another figure out from a small rounded part on top, but he appeared to be stuck. It was only a moment before the first figure let the other drop, then turned to walk away. But he didn’t make it to far before collapsing. Dante ran up, jumping on to the super heated metal of the space ship. He could feel the soles of his shoes melting underneath him. If only he had ice powers. One of his only shortcomings. Within seconds the shoes were toast and his feet were burning. Fortunately he healed quickly.

Dante ran for the first figure, scooped him up and threw him into a fireman’s carry. He glanced at the other figure, but he was already beyond Dante’s help.

“Dante!!!!” He heard Emily shout from the edge of the crater. He was already running. Jumping up the crater walls a dozen meters at a time. He reached the top and paused for a moment, turning to Emily. Why hadn’t he just teleported?

“We’ve got to move,” Dante said, seeming to have a firm grasp on the situation even though it was definitely something he had never encountered before. “They’ll be here soon.”

“They who?”

“Later,” Dante grew suddenly serious. “We can’t be here when they show. Follow my lead.” Dante began running towards the trees in the distance that were still standing and not on fire, clutching tightly onto the person he had pulled from the wreckage. Emily was right behind him. They made it to the tree line as a strange light began to glow in the sky over their heads and the noise of helicopters was all they could hear. Dante found a fairly shady copse of trees pretty well hidden by some large bushes.

He than laid the person down and finally got a good look at him. He was not what Dante was expecting. Taller than your average human, a little thin with well defined muscles, His skin was a rich chocolate color and he was covered in burns. He was, at least Dante assumed it was a he. It looked pretty masculine. Any way he, or her, was....surprisingly human and even seemed to be about their age. He, or her, had a heart beat, and he or her seemed to be breathing.

“Is he alright?” Emily knelt down on his right side.

“He will be soon,” Dante said, placing his hands over the man’s chest. They were just going to assume that this alien was a he until evidence was presented otherwise in order to avoid a lot of unnecessary additional words and grammar. A faint glow began to surround Dante’s body as well as the man’s. His breathing soon normalized and the burns began to fade.

“You’re a healer too?” Emily asked in a surprised sort of way.

“There’s still quite a bit you don’t know about me,” Dante mumbled, concentrating on healing the crash victim.

“You’ll have to tell me sometime. What do you think is going on?”

“At the bottom of the crater was a ship. An alien ship.”

“Serious?” Emily asked it even though she already knew the answer. Dante nodded as the being coughed and Emily let out a little squeal of excitement. “I knew it. The thrusters! Are you sure it was Alien though? Could have been a secret military Jet.”

“Of course it was an alien ship. Don’t see many people flying around in saucers these days. Not really a popular mode of conveyance on this planet yet, you know.” The person began to cough as his eyes opened. “But since that is the case we’ve got to get out of here. They’re definitely already here. That was probably their helicopters and they’ll be looking for survivors.”

“Who?” Emily inquired.

“The Men in Black.” as he said it something began to shimmer in the sky above their heads and a quiet humming sound filled their ears.

“I should have known,” Emily cursed to herself. The Men in Black were never far behind Alien crashes, and they were always covering things like that up. “Think Jay or Kay will show up?” Some times Emily really should just think before she talks.

“How bad is the situation?” Dante asked the crash victim who was now more or less aware of his surroundings, ignoring Emily’s question. “Are they more like X-files Men in Black or the movie Men in Black, or the comic book the movie was loosely based off of?”

“Comic book,” he replied, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “Cultist Fascists like the blue hands from Firefly.”

“Shit, we are so boned,” Emily mouthed, “do they have one of those stick things?” A little more of a description would probably be helpful here.

“I don’t know? Maybe. They’ve got a lot of alien tech. But more importantly they’re relentless. They’ll eliminate everything here in the the area, wipe the memories of those they can, kill those they can’t, then make the whole thing look like it never happened. Probably even call in a bunch of landscapers to fix everything up before dawn.”

Emily looked over at Dante, “Can you teleport us out of here?”

“Not three people, and not through this barrier,” he answered, “I already tried. It won’t let us through.” Emily sighed a little, then got kind of excited.

“Looks like we’re fighting our way out here than. Can you move space man?”

“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’ve made it out of tougher situations.” Like what? Honestly, seems like a pretty tough situation to me. They heard voices approaching.

“The barrier projector has probably been set up in the middle of the park. We’ll need to dismantle it if we have any hope of escaping. But it will be heavily guarded. Not to mention all the operatives they’ll likely have combing this place. And not all of them will be human. We’ll have some tough resistance.” Dante suddenly disappeared into thin air and the nearby voices went quite silent.

“But we’ve got him,” Emily smiled as Dante reappeared and handed each of them an alien looking assault rifle.

“Ready?” He asked as Emily looked over her new gun, figuring it out quite easily.

“Betelgusian, nice. So you’re a time-surfer, but where’s your weapon?” The space man was feeling a little too curious for someone who was recently rescued from a burning ship and brought back from the brink of death.

“Right here,” Dante’s fists lit up with fiery red light.

“Interesting...”

“What’s your name by the way?” Emily asked as they began to make their way out of the bushes.

“Well my real name is quite unpronounceable by human speech, so down here I go by Issac.”

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Dante’s notes: Issac’s real name is actually easily pronounceable by humans, but when done so properly it often sounded somewhat like ’Your mother is the lying son of a Monkey and a Goat’ in russian. On his home planet this is actually a traditional name given to children expected to become great leaders of society. ’Issac’ turned out not only to be much easier to say, but also saved about ten minutes of tedious back story every time he introduced himself.

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A few minutes after leaving their nice hiding place in the bushes:

“Hurry, head for Fort Washington,” Dante shouted as he sent a wave of flames towards the two operatives firing at them from behind. Fort Washington was a play fort for children at the park. Dante’s awareness of this raises many questions that will likely go unanswered. They had made it to the bike trail that would lead them to the park’s center with only a couple of close encounters and so far Issac was still the only one of the Third kind. But as soon as they hit the secondary play ground they came under heavy fire from human and inhuman operatives alike. Unfortunately this meant that the group was now running in almost the opposite direction they wanted and the MIB was hot on their trail.

They reached the wooden fort and made their way to the more easily defensible positions on the second floor. Taking cover on a corner wall just past the stairs, Emily was guarding against anyone who was attempting to come up, while Dante and Issac moved towards the glass-less windows to try and survey the situation. Dante heard gunfire coming from behind them.

“I’ve got three moving up the stairs,” Emily shouted back to the boys after letting loose a short burst.

“Get that other staircase covered,” Dante barked at Issac, "I see at least five more moving in towards us and who knows how many are already down below.” Issac nodded, rolling over to the stairs, laying down a volley of fire as he hit some cover. And now that they both weren’t looking....

Dante stood in front of the open window, bullets greeted him immediately, though they met nothing but air, forced to a stop just inches in front of his body. I will get her out of this. He vowed to himself as he sent the bullets back to their points of origin, watching a few bodies fall. Another wave was approaching from the center of the park. Dante smiled as the ground simply seemed to roll over and swallow them whole.

“How we doing over there Emily?"

“I got one,” she shouted back, “but the others are just playing it safe. I think they’re going to try and wait us out.” The agents at the bottom were staying in position, only firing the occasional burst of cover fire in order to keep Emily from maneuvering down the steps. Dante turned to Issac, who wasn’t there anymore. The gun fire stopped, and he appeared around the corner on Emily’s steps.

“I think we’re clear to move forward. Dante took care of the ones outside.” There was a certain understanding in Issac’s eyes when he said it, and that made the Reaper inside his mind just a little uncomfortable.

“Let’s move then.”

They didn’t encounter any more trouble from agents as they made their way to the center of the park. The group saw a few, but they had been engaged in various forms of incident clean-up and didn’t seem likely to bother them. So they let them be. The barrier generator on the other hand was an entirely different story. They could see it clearly from a spot in a nearby set of bushes. What is it with them hiding in all these bushes any way? Where the bushes some how not destroyed in the fiery crash? I don’t know how well this crash will hold up to scientific scrutiny. And is it really possible to hide in bushes that easily? I wouldn’t think so. But here they are, just doing it all the time anyway, ignoring everything you thought you knew about bushes and star ship crashes.

Back to the matter at hand. The Generator itself looked like a portable satellite dish that had mated with a hedgehog during an acid trip in the 60’s and just hadn’t been bothered to get the corrective surgery it needed. Also It may have been sitting on a microwave. Guarding it was, what Dante assumed to be, some sort of Alien. It was 12ft tall with bulging muscles, scaly yellow-gray skin, and dressed in a stretched out black suit. Armani, I think.

“Wow,” Emily mouthed, “a real alien...” She was shocked to silence. A rare feat.

“I’m a real alien,” Issac cut in, sounding more than a little miffed.

“Yeah, but you don’t look it,” Emily jibbed.

“It’s because I’m black isn’t it?”

“I thought you just said you were an alien?”

“A black Alien...”

“I’m just saying you look, well, a bit human, for an Alien I mean. Shouldn’t you be sort of gray, or have scales, or big black eyes, or tentacles at the very least. You know, Alien stuff. Even being slightly frog like would be acceptable. I mean, just look at that guy. Now he’s an Alien.” He, or it rather, was definitely an alien. At the very least he, or it, was some sort of secret and horrible government experiment. Either way he, or it, was at least extremely interesting. Emily was feeling a sudden urge to dissect it and film the entire thing on grainy 8mm.

“Don’t start pushing your stereotypes on me. Just because you people-"

"What do you mean ’you people’?" She was getting a little angry herself.

"Like I said you people, you humans, have been propagating various images of extraterrestrials for years-. I mean, here I am, a Procyonian and when I tell that to people they’re always like, ’oh, is that in Kansas?’ and then I- have to get all-” Dante couldn’t let this go on.

“Children,” he said harshly, “enough. Let’s deal with the giant alien monster first. We can argue over interplanetary species-ism later.”

“So just because he’s an Alien that makes him some kind of monster does it?” Dante rolled his eyes.

“Look,” Dante cross examined, “he’s obviously an alien, right?” The other two nodded. “And he’s also quite monstrous right?” They nodded again. “So there for, thanks to the transitive property, he is an alien monster.”

“You may have a point there,” Issac finally agreed, “but it just doesn’t feel right... ”

“So what’s the plan boss man?” Emily asked excitedly, letting Issac’s apparent insecurities fall to the wayside. “The ol’ Kansas city shuffle, or maybe a double cross flank?”

“You two stay here,” Dante suggested with a tone of voice that was something more than a suggestion.

He pushed himself out of the bushes and approached the well dressed alien. The creature stood there silently on the concrete pad that surrounded the sandbox,containing the shield device. It watched him approach with large beady reptilian eyes. It looked hungry.

Dante’s voice suddenly become dark and guttural as he stopped in front of the guard. “You’re in my way,” He said firmly. For a second Emily thought she recognized the voice, feeling she had heard it before.

The Alien replied by putting all its might into a single punch aimed for Dante’s face, breaking the sound barrier and leaving a vacuum in its wake. Dante caught the fist easily, arm barely tensing. There was a crash and the concrete beneath his feet cracked. The Alien was quite surprised and tried to throw more of it’s mass into the next punch in hopes of overpowering our hero.

“You’re tough,” Dante smirked, “but not tough enough.” He gripped down on the alien’s over sized fist and threw him over his shoulder and into a tree. Which was over a dozen meters away. It was also a very large tree, perhaps hundreds of years old even. The leaves had all burned off, but likely it would have survived had the alien’s body not gone clean through it, snapping it in half like a twig.

Emily and Issac gazed on from the bushes. “Space/time manipulation, water, earth (he had seen what happened back at the fort), wind, and fire. And now super strength. That’s a lot of powers.” Gears were clicking together some where deep in Issac’s alien gray matter.

“Yeah, he’s pretty good isn’t he?” Emily was still clueless, or mostly clueless, or was just pretending to be mostly clueless. It’s hard to tell with her sometimes. “Looks like it’s all clear now, lets go.” Issac and Emily ran out of the bushes and slid up next to Dante who was closely examining the shield generator.

“What are your thoughts,” Dante looked curiously over to Issac, who was now also examining the machine.

“Well, generally world peace, various forms of pizza, and a slight obsession with Hentai, but that’s not really all that important right now.”

“I meant about the machine here.”

“Oh right.... Well I wouldn’t suggest trying to destroy it. This thing could be running on some sort of fusion core or something similar. I would suggest we try to deactivate it though its computer interface.” Dante grimaced.

“I already tried that, but it wanted some sort of password, and the usual ones didn’t work, then it wanted me to try my security questions, and none of those answers matched up, and there was one of those little boxes with the funked up letters which I hate. Then it patched me through to I.T. where there was a four hour wait. So I punched the computer in its face and now it wont stop singing the star spangled banner in Swahili with a country twang. Fortunately that’s only playing though the headphones, but I can’t adjust the volume so don’t pull them out of the jack.”

“I see, so all of the reasonable options have been exhausted then. We could try and strike it with lightning in hopes of causing a temporary power surge.”

“The frame’s made of plastic, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky.” Dante seemed to be completely forgetting that he himself can control the weather as well as shoot and control electricity with almost no effort on his part whatsoever.

“Maybe we could find a hamster, or a rodent of similar size and let it chew on the wires?”

“I don’t think we’ve got that kind of time.”

“I found the power cord...” Emily tried to cut in but was being completely ignored. She had been wandering around the over sized sandbox while the boys conversed and just happened to notice a large red cord running from the machine and off into the distance. She decided to follow it to it’s source.

“Let’s crack open the control case and see what we’re dealing with,” Issac suggested, and they did just that. Inside there was a whole mess of wires and chips and other computery things. Some even made buzzing sounds. Perhaps there was also a cooling fan?

“It’s literally just plugged into this outlet right over by the bathroom hut,” Emily shouted from her new position by the bathroom hut about a hundred and fifty feet away. But the boys were to entranced in examining the control box.

“Which wire should we cut?” Issac asked, mysteriously pulling a shiny pair of wire cutters (Insert blatant product placement here) from inside the folds of his coat. “Is it the red one, or the blue one? Maybe the green one? Crap, is that an orange one? What the hell is that one for?”

“Hopefully this was wired using union standard wire codes. Because if there is anything I know about Electrical wiring, and there isn’t, it’s that the black wire is hot, the white wire is neutral, the green wire is a ground, the red wire sends a signal to the furnace and the blue wire sends a signal to the air conditioner.” What about the orange one?

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Dante’s notes: I don’t actually really know anything about electricity or electrical wiring, but I do work at a hardware store and I did once install a new thermostat at my place. Just got to match the colors together. Isn’t electricity fun and not dangerous in anyway what so ever? Yeah, yeah it is.

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“So what your saying is, If I cut the black one, it will probably explode, if I cut the white, the same. And if I cut the green, it will slowly overload then explode or arc and explode. And if I cut either the red or the blue it’s operating temperature will fluctuate and then explode?”

“Probably, maybe..”.

“I’m going to unplug it now!”

“If it’s death by explosion either way I’m going to cut the orange one.”

“Sounds good.” Dante gave him a ridiculously cheesy thumbs up. “Good luck” Then he turned to look for Emily while slowly edging away from Issac and the machine. Issac began to reach in, his cutters making contact with the wire. His hands were shaking, sweat was beading on his forehead. The machine lost power.

“But I didn’t even cut it yet!” Emily reappeared near them, bent over and holding onto her knees, her breathing labored as though she had been running.

“Well yeah,” She said, “if you had just been paying attention to me, like you should always be doing, you would have known that it was just running on a normal extension cord, so I unplugged it.”

“The barrier is down,” Dante agreed, making the obvious observation, “We should go.” He walked up and grabbed Emily’s hand. They flashed from existence for a moment and than Dante reappeared alone. “You want a lift?” Without waiting for an answer, he reached down and put a hand on Issac’s shoulder. In a second flash they were gone.

The duo reentered space-time next to Emily and near the university book store about five miles away, only a short walk from her dorm. Dante was breathing hard. Teleporting other people rapidly like that was always taxing. It didn’t help that they had been running around being shot at and what not for the better part of the evening either.

“Well that was a thing,” Issac commented, climbing back onto his feet from a crouching position. "And we even survived."

“I can’t believe we got out of there alive,” Emily lied. She had had no worries about surviving from the very beginning.

“Wasn’t to bad, I had always expected the MIB to be a little tougher I think.” Dante commented.

“They’re not done yet,” Issac replied. “They know I was on that ship and that I survived the crash. They’ll be looking for me.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“Go into hiding. This’ll blow over in a couple of days. When they can’t find me they’ll probably just assume I hitched a ride on another ship and got off world.”

“I guess we’ll see you around then?” Emily asked.

“Count on it.” He turned and began walking off in the other direction, leaving Dante and Emily to contemplate what they had just lived through.

“Hugh,” Emily gasped, the contemplation only lasting an moment. “I never got to finish my ice cream.” Dante laughed.

“Come on, I’ll buy you another one. The night is young yet.” Little did they know, that from the shadows they were being watched. It was probably a Vampire, or maybe a werewolf. Or maybe, just maybe, it was Agent S.

It was a vampire. You’ll meet her later.

1Preferably one that practices rocket science on a regular basis.

2. Please do not follow Dante and Emily’s example. Littering is a crime, usually punishable by a fine of up to $500 or $1000. When going off to investigate Aliens or save people, please take the time to throw your trash away. The Environment will thank you.

3. No, Seriously. Please don’t litter. There is a Hero that calls herself Mother Nature who doesn’t take too kindly to it. I once saw her smash a dude with a dumpster when he failed to place his recyclables in the proper receptacle. His body is composting in a nice community garden now. She’s hard core man, way hard core.