The Two Travelers Episode 1: The Kingdom of Angels

By Richard Phillip Hoffman

Two lovers awaken one thousand years into the future amid what remains of the world they once knew.

As they seek out each other, and other remnants of their old lives, they discover strange and often hostile kingdoms spawned from the last breath of what had once been the United States of America.

Justin’s thousand-year sleep ends with an awakening into a society utterly devoid of men.

All positions that men might have held, socially, emotionally or physically, have been replaced by women as far as physicality would allow. The existence of any genuine male, who they have no emotional or physical resistance against, sends powerful waves that shake the society to its core and threatens to unravel it from the very root of itself.

Almost instantly, Justin finds himself deeply entangled into their lives. He is more valued than any individual could, or should, ever be and he soon finds himself the centerpiece of every hope, the catalyst of every scheme and the source of generations of untapped desire. As the one thing everyone needs, but by no means available to all, he understands that he is a ticking time bomb. One misinterpreted act as seduction too many, or to the wrong person, and the entire society might very explode into an extraordinary level of violence that could leave most, if not all, dead.

(Rewritten, edited and expanded from 2012 original)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Phillip Hoffman
• Release date: Oct 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463840450

Book preview

The Two Travelers

Episode 1

Pomona, CA

The Kingdom of Angeles

-------------------------------------------------------

Richard Phillip Hoffman

PUBLISHED

Richard Phillip Hoffman at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 / 2018 / 2023

Richard Phillip Hoffman

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental.

LICENSE NOTES

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

Photo by Ryan Waring on Unsplash

Table of Contents

Series Recap

Chapter 1 – The Sleeping Adonis

Chapter 2 – The Changed World

Chapter 3 – Conversing with the Council

Chapter 4 – The Dangers of Hypocrisy

Chapter 5 – Where the Knights Went

Chapter 6 – The Price of Narcissism

Chapter 7 – Indecisions

Chapter 8 – Expected Visitors

Chapter 9 – A Moment’s Respite

Chapter 10 – In the Land of Women

Chapter 11 – The Heart of Pomona

Chapter 12 – The Most Valuable Person in the World

Chapter 13 – The Outsiders

Chapter 14 – Changes Made

Chapter 15 – The Father of Angeles

Chapter 16 – Journey to the North

Chapter 17 – The Golden City

Chapter 18 – The Princess of San Francisco

Chapter 19 – The Hollywood Showdown

Chapter 20 – The Return to Reality

Series Recap

The Two Travelers is a series of adventures primarily from the perspective of two people, a young man named Justin and a young woman named Laura, who fall in love at the end of one era and then awake a thousand years later in another. As with any such long book series, it is always recommended to read from the beginning on, but here is the short version of what transpired before.

The adventures begin one thousand years after nanite bombs have killed most of the population and destroyed our societies. For Justin Biryukov and Laura Adler, nothing has changed, two teenagers frozen in time while asleep in their pods while the world shifts to the great winds of time and society. Kingdoms have risen and kingdoms have fallen but there are hints to what was before in the strange new world they awaken in.

***

But before all that, in the prelude, Beyond the Glass Wall, Justin and Laura are placed in a concentration camp called Reclamation Facility 59 in Washington DC.

In our close future, parts of the world have fallen back into fascism and the nanite bombs of a great holocaust are about to fall. The fascist United Country Law Divisions, or Faction as they are often styled, control many countries, including the United States, while the remaining free countries of the world have allied themselves together in what was called the Alliance. As the stalemate between the two sides begins to break, the fingers of the powers that be inch ever closer to the bombs’ launch button.

Justin was a member of one of the last groups of the United States Military before they were disbanded and was being groomed for one great battle against the Faction that was to free the United States from its grasp. Before that happened, a small nanite bomb killed the remaining soldiers and Justin and his friends were spared only by the sheer happenstance of being too young to be part of the mission, Justin being only seventeen at the time. When the Faction had learned of their part in it they were hunted down one by one until second to last, Justin himself was finally caught.

Laura was a former member of the Faction military, dishonorably discharged for refusing a direct order, and had been attempting to build a life as a professional racecar driver. However, when her friends from the academy days joined a Faction splinter group that was moving to replace the former United States as an anti-Faction force to return the country to the way it was, she was taken as well, despite not participating.

The world was about to end and everyone knew it. When one bomb fell, they would all fall, creating mutually assured destruction on a global scale and all there was to do was wait. Justin and Laura, were scheduled to wait in Reclamation Facility 59.

Life in the reclamation facility was unsurprisingly hard but also bizarre. The male and female sides were segregated, blocked off from each other by a glass-like wall in the center of the quad, and the prisoners within were separated by class. The white tags appeared to be normal everyday people, and quite expendable, while black tags appeared to be educated and or trained people who might be useful, such as Justin, a bionic engineer, and Laura, a highly trained Faction Ranger. The last group was the red tags who were once-in-a-lifetime talents such as world-famous great artists, engineers or architects who tended to be world famous.

It was the white tags who suffered the most, doing what is called law labor, where they disappeared from the camp to do brutish, unnecessary work somewhere outside of the facility. Everyone else remained in the facility and time seemed to stretch on forever. Justin and Laura soon began to find the days so similar that they would psychologically merge and one day would become impossible to determine from another.

The guards were primarily Faction Law Enforcers, the equivalent of police officers, who were not particularly sympathetic to any prisoner, regardless of tag or former affiliation. They were equipped with bionic augmentation armor, bio-armor for short, hidden in molecular form inside their bodies that could come out at will over their clothes. With the high-velocity vibration blades that were part of it, they were almost invincible to the unarmed civilians within.

As former soldiers, Justin and Laura had bio-armor as well, along with artificially intelligent companions, or AICs for short, which were given to all soldiers on either side. However, their armor was blocked from use by artificial devices on their neck known as bio-blockers and that left Justin and Laura as helpless as everyone else was.

Justin fit in well with the prisoners as a former soldier of the deeply respected United States Marine Corps but Laura was immediately ostracized due to being a former member of the Faction. She also had the immediate attention of Captain Rupert Jackson, who attempted to coerce her into a sexual relationship. Upon her refusal, he claimed the prisoners would band together and savage her but they were too afraid she was a spy to do anything but shun her.

One day, not long after entering, Justin and Laura looked through the glass wall and saw each other. When they spoke, there was an instant connection and within a shockingly short amount of time, they became inseparable. They were both surprised at the romantic elements of their situation as neither considered themselves particularly romantic.

The days stretched off into infinity and people started disappearing in the night. The white tags went first, in bed one evening, missing the next, off to places unknown. Near the end of their run, one white tag named Juan Reyes accidentally smirked at a guard who had embarrassed himself, and he noticed it.

To teach a lesson to Reyes, and everyone else, Rupert Jackson pulled Reyes and several other white, black and red tags, including Justin, out into the back of the facility. To psychologically assault Reyes, Jackson attempted to use his Catholicism against him, religion being something the Faction despised from the religious riots that preceded their arrival. He murdered a ten-year-old boy named Denzel Kelly to push the blame of his death upon Reyes; but when that didn’t work, he murdered Reyes as well.

It was a sign of the end as Denzel Kelly was the son of a world-famous red tag artist named Joan Kelly. He had been used as a tool by a high-ranked Faction officer in order to get Joan to be his personal painter. The indifference to the loss of such an individual indicated to Justin and others that the end must be very near indeed.

Afterward, Jackson attempted one more time to coerce Laura in a sexual relationship, attempting to rape a waitress and assaulting an inner-circle member of the Faction’s daughter in the process. He tried to gaslight Laura into taking responsibility for it, promising to free both of them only if she submitted, but she knew he wouldn’t and it didn’t work. If the murder of Denzel Kelly did not do it, the assault of an inner circle member’s daughter killed whatever doubt Laura herself might have had about what time remained.

Things seemed to move even faster then. The white tags were soon gone in total and the red and black tags began to follow. The former police that assisted the Faction Law Enforcers were soon gone as well, them by legitimately leaving their job, then most of the Faction themselves, and then, at the very end, only Justin and Laura were the only prisoners left.

In their last moments together in the past, they stared at each other through the glass wall. They made one final move as the Faction came to take them away, reaching through the holes of the glass wall with their fingers and touching each for the first and only time in that age before they were beaten and dragged away.

They were both taken back to the airport they arrived in, taken away in two different ships but, strangely, to the same underground storage facility somewhere out in the world. They never saw each other, weren’t even aware of each other, and at the very end of the facility, there was a factory where people were put in cryogenic pods. One after the other, they were inserted inside.

The intention seemed to have been to freeze them for some modest amount of time, perhaps twenty to fifty years or so, when all the Faction and Alliance problems, along with their bombs, had long blown over.

But something went wrong and they instead wake up a thousand years later and in different parts of what was once the United States of America.

Chapter 1

The Sleeping Adonis

It was an incredibly hot dry day in the middle of summer with no clouds in the sky to keep the sun from beating down upon the decagonal-shaped shrine located on a hill rising above the ancient village of Pomona. It was a simple white structure with a window on each of its ten sides save for the one that pointed directly east where there was instead a white door built beneath a large upside-down club shape carved elegantly into the wood. Each of the windows had them too only a little smaller and adorning the tops like little hats resting on perfect, rectangular glass panes that reached down almost to the floor. They had a deep tint of white that looked almost opaque and matched the shade of the outside walls.

It housed only a single room and that room went upward as high as thirty feet to where it merged into a pole that itself went upward another twenty to where it ended with the symbol of a circle with a lowercase t shape below it. Once that had been a bright shining pink color, the color of the Kingdom of Angeles, but so much time had passed that it had faded into a white that did not quite match the rest of the building.

Always there was some sort of guardian, some elder who wasn’t liable to gawk at the peculiar being within even though they almost always did and quite often despite regularly telling younger women and children that they weren’t supposed to even think of doing that sort of thing.

On that particular day, around 1500 in the afternoon, the old guardian left with a bundle of things in her bony arms for seemingly no reason at all and walked down the stairs built into the hill back toward the village.

Two girls watched her with no particular surprise. The security on the shrine was often lax since they put old Jan on the job. Jan, who preferred asculine woman over that of the being within, got bored often and if a girl watched her long enough, she could usually time her wanderings in and out with reasonable ease.

Kelly grinned widely from her spot on the bush northwest of the shrine as the elder crept down the stairs to visit the woman she had been living with for over fifty years. When she was out of sight down amid the buildings below Kelly casually went skipping down toward the shrine with Denise following unhappily after her.

We shouldn’t be doing this, Denise stately firmly.

Don’t be such a baby, Kelly said as she went hopping along. She was what was known as an eminine woman and should have been the soft one in the duo. She was wide-hipped, large-breasted, and tall but was also slender with virtually no muscle at all which was the primary reason she was part of that group. Her hair was brownish blond, hanging long with large natural curls down her back, long hair another eminine trait, and her eyes were a soft, gentle brown that seemed always wide with curiosity. She was wearing brown shorts, cut off above the knees, and a short-sleeved white button-up shirt. Her feet were covered in cute little green shoes that her mother, the local cobbler, had made for her.

In all ways, she appeared as all eminine women should but Denise constantly found herself somehow being psychologically pushed around by her. As Kelly was trotting along in front of her Denise watched her go with some appreciation and a little worry.

Denise was what was known as an asculine woman and nowhere near the center of the two as some girls were. She was tall at six foot four covered in heavy muscle from head to toe both from nature and self-creation with dark, curly hair almost buzz cut short to her head in the militant style popular for generations. Her eyes were pale brown, her skin was tanned from hours of work in the fields, and she wore a black sleeveless shirt that showed off her muscle and a brown pair of shorts almost the same as Kelly’s. Her shoes were the dull, brown heavy boots of a soldier.

Kelly slipped up to the door, looked around, then pushed open the door and imitated being sucked into the building as she slipped inside. Don’t you be a baby! her voice called out from within.

Denise groaned and followed after. If anyone saw the way she obeyed that girl she would never hear the end of it and although it might have ruined her chances in the Academy once it probably wouldn’t anymore. With so few girls to choose from, she was practically guaranteed for Francisco Royal Academy but, even so, Denise still felt weak and humiliated for letting a silly eminine woman nag her into doing something so stupid and unlawful.

As the asculine woman, she was supposed to be the sensible one.

Inside Denise saw Kelly had slipped through the space between two long white tables, stepped over the painted white chain rail fence with her long limber legs, and then slunk down onto the silver coffin and spread her arms and legs over it. She seemed to melt on it like butter on toast, her body pressed up against it and staring intensely through the glass front.

Hello Henry, she said to the being frozen below. I have missed you ever so dearly.

Denise felt the instinct to punch herself right in the nose when she felt a slight ping of jealousy from that corpse. What do you think you are doing? Denise asked in a voice that was trying to sound aggressive. She should have pulled the girl off right then, and angrily too, but she knew if she did that Kelly wouldn’t come around anymore and that she most definitely did not want. We have to go now!

Nobody is here, silly, said Kelly as she leaned on her forearms, her lower legs curled up in the air behind her, and smiled happily. We’re all alone with Henry seven one four five nine four eight. She began to rub up against the coffin and groaned provocatively. You’re just a sexy little lady, aren’t you, Henry? You would use your powerful body to rip my clothes right off. I bet you could go for actual minutes before getting too tired.

Denise rolled her eyes. Only women can go that long, she stated and then added awkwardly, He’s not that attractive anyway. She heard that men like the one Henry had popped up from beyond the border from time to time but no one talked about them and furthermore pretended they didn’t exist if someone else brought them up. It was said asculine women who, like her, had more interest in other females had always been the ones sent out to deal with them if they ever did truly appear.

"He’s taller than most eminine women and just look at the muscles through his strange clothes. I wish he was frozen naked so I could see his meat. I bet it’s huge."

Kelly, he’s a corpse, and you shouldn’t— Denise suddenly and instantly straightened up in military style as the door behind her was flung wide open.

Damn! hissed Kelly as she was moving into action. She tried to fly off the coffin at maximum speed, stand herself up into a pose of casual interest, and pretend she hadn’t just been grinding against a dead man’s coffin but she couldn’t because to get off Henry took away the few seconds she needed for that last part. Things were only made worse when the person who came in to see what they were doing turned out to be one of the worst who could have ever caught them.

Why you little bitches, the woman said in an annoyed voice. The elder eminine woman stood in the doorway wearing a gray shawl of an elder, a long-sleeved blue shirt and a pair of brown pants reaching down to her small brown shoes. Her wavy brown hair was tied behind her head in the no-nonsense serious ponytail she always had it in and her eyes were big and green and wide like a deer’s with hips narrow enough to make childbirth hard. When Kelly finally looked at her, she saw the woman’s hands were on those slender hips and those green eyes were narrow in anger.

Looped into her right arm was a basket for a casual picnic.

Her two grandchildren looked up from behind her, both under six, both wearing the young hopefuls’ white shawls, blue shirts and brown pants. They were both blond with blue-eyed, both very clearly growing up to be eminine with their doll-like appearances and cute smiling faces.

They all knew each other, of course, because everyone knew everyone in Pomona.

Great, Denise thought unhappily. Out of all the people to come wandering into that room for a picnic it happened to be a would-be-politician. Apparently, old Jan had left on that occasion to give her fellow elder some time alone in the shrine with her family and Lady Big Meat.

Mergi the elder, though usually complaisant, was not particularly lenient when it came to youthful impropriety. Everyone knew Mergi was a sure-in for the position of Mistress of Youth when Sandra finally retired or died and she took such impropriety seriously partly because she was just that way and partly because she feared too much leniency would lead to people believing her incapable of handling the post.

Denise took a deep breath. Mergi—

I would expect a whole lot better from a Royal Academy Hopeful, stated Mergi coldly. "And you, Kelly, what exactly do you think you were doing on Walter’s coffin?"

Kelly lowered her eyes and tried playing cute. I was just getting a closer look…

"Oh of that I am sure, Mergi replied and she placed her little blue basket on one of the white tables that surrounded the coffin. Wait here, children. She walked into the corner and Denise and Kelly followed instinctively and unhappily. What are you thinking, Denise? she hissed the moment they were away from the others. You know goddess damn well Berth’s opinion on males and distraction."

"I wasn’t doing anything!" Denise retorted unhappily.

Kelly twirled her hair around a bit, trying to be cute in a way that Denise knew would not work on Mergi. Well, this was her idea—

Goddess hell it was! Denise nearly screamed. She just knew she should have stopped Kelly when she had the chance.

I know Denise well enough to know that this was not her idea. She put her hands on her hips again and frowned at Kelly. Kelly, it’s over a hundred degrees F and I really just don’t have time for this. I need you to give me your word that you will never go molesting Walter again.

Kelly frowned at her. "I wasn’t molesting anyone—"

I repeat myself! ‘I need you to give me your word that you will never go molesting Walter again!’

There were some weird squeaking sounds from the girls and they were both hopping up and down and pointing. Grandmother! Grandmother! they both cried.

Children, I am busy!

Denise, wasn’t it your idea all along? asked Kelly.

That’s remarkably selfish of you, Kelly, said Mergi.

Oh come on! Kelly replied in a whine. "She’s going to get off because she asculine! Even Berth won’t do anything to her!"

That is not true, Mergi stated firmly.

"Of course, it’s true! Kelly cried. I’ve never seen an asculine woman in trouble for more than a week and that one was caught stealing! I’ll get a month of field labor for this! She’ll get a day, maybe!"

Denise wouldn’t deny that if asked but even if that was true, she wasn’t about to take credit for something she hadn’t done. While Berth would say and do nothing, or very little, the mark might still end up on her record and that could preclude her from any high post in San Fran’s military.

The squeaking was getting louder and one of the girls cried out, Louis! Grandmother, something is happening to Louis!

That is also not true, Kelly, stated Mergi, "And children, Grandmother is busy! Give me a few moments!"

"But Louis’s coffin is leaking!" cried one of them.

All three women blinked at each other, shared a look of confusion, and then slowly looked down. A small amount of icy mist appeared around their feet moving through the room like it was alive and when they raised their eyes, they seemed to notice only then that it become notably colder. That was an incredibly out-of-place feeling as the heat in the room was rather intense without the working built-in air conditioner that broke a generation ago.

They slowly turned in unison to look at the coffin.

Eight large holes had appeared, four on each side, and they were somehow open and spewing out that mist. There were grooves too, like gills on a fish that were releasing something like steam out in the air only it was cold.

"What is this?" asked Kelly.

Kelly, said Mergi in a soft, warning tone, "I better not find out this is somehow your fault. Mergi started forward carefully to the coffin and looked down at it. It’s— her eyes widened —the glass behind the door is gone!"

The other two moved up beside her. It can’t be, whispered Denise.

It is, Kelly said and she reached down and wiped mist off the icy glass front with her hand. The man’s face was clearly visible through the fogged window with none of the glass that had been between it and the window. "We can touch him…"

Mergi laughed loudly. "You are not going to be included in that right should it exist," she stated sternly.

"You think he’d want an old woman—"

He’s obviously dead, Kelly!

Was he? Denise could have sworn the man was moving somehow. Was it her imagination or was she was going crazy? She did not