The Two Travelers Episode 3: The Legend of Blue Water

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 travels to Reno, Nevada where water is more valuable than gold.

In the big cities of Nevada, people are either extremely poor or extremely rich, often with a slum separated by a wall around a paradise interior city. Water is the primary force of control the government uses to control its citizens, water that requires people to gamble and risk permanent, generational debt in order to pay its outrageous prices. The masters of Nevada, led by the Hodge family, control everything and everyone through this system. Now, with the introduction of technology from Justin’s time, they have greedily raised the price of water sky high.

Justin’s arrival coincides with that moment of great desperation for the people of Reno. In order to make some desperately needed money, and maybe help some people in the process, he utilizes his era’s technology to get some water and sell it low-priced. This is not something the Hodges can or will tolerate, viewing any stranger selling water as an unacceptable loss of profit, and they are willing to do almost anything to balance the score.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Phillip Hoffman
• Release date: Jul 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005218775

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The Two Travelers

Episode 3

Reno, NV

The Legend of Blue Water

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

Richard Phillip Hoffman

PUBLISHED

Richard Phillip Hoffman at Amazon

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 Lyle Hastie on Unsplash

Table of Contents

Series Recap

Bridge

Chapter 1 – The Biggest Little City in the World

Chapter 2 – The Water Sellers

Chapter 3 – An Encounter on Robb Dr

Chapter 4 – The Perfect Crime

Chapter 5 – The Seller from Nowhere

Chapter 6 – Commerce of Nevada

Chapter 7 – Games and Consequences

Chapter 8 – The Runner and the Tiger

Chapter 9 – A Genuine Kindness

Chapter 10 – A Lady of Mississippi

Chapter 11 – Surprises on the Black Road

Chapter 12 – A Camp Near Vegas

Chapter 13 – The Ending of a Dream

Chapter 14 – The River King

Chapter 15 – Assault on Red Rock

Chapter 16 – The Traitors of Nevada

Chapter 17 – The Battle of Las Vegas

Chapter 18 – Main Event at the Blue Water

Chapter 19 – The Final Act

Chapter 20 – Surprising Consequences

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.

***

In Episode 1, The Kingdom of Angels, Justin awoke from his sleep in a chapel devoted solely to him in what was once Pomona, California. Disoriented, he stumbled out into a crowd of women and learned almost instantly that he was the only man around. What very few other men he did see appeared as extremely old, infertile, and weak, despite not even being twenty, and he realized then that he was the only healthy and attractive man the women had ever even seen.

The first thing he did was remove his bio-blocker from his neck with a pair of sheers, releasing his bio-armor from inside his body and his own AIC, a stuffy, serious-minded engineering model in the form of a flying, bumble-bee-like android the size of a hawk named Lincoln. Such technology turned out to be is far above the technology of the society around him, which appeared to somewhere in the twentieth to twenty-first-century range.

The Faction had vanished, and so had the United States, and everything else he knew as well and with no other options, he simply allowed himself to be taken under the control of Pomona’s strange society of women and their even stranger city council.

There were two kinds of women in their society. Some were called eminine who appeared as typical feminine women while the others were called asculine, who appeared very mannish and often quite a bit more masculine than Justin himself was. The asculine women were clearly the ones with power but all of them argued aggressively over what to do with him.

After he and Lincoln snuck away, he discovered an information booth left by a then-fallen Canadian Empire from three hundred years past. There, Justin learned that he was trapped in the kingdom of Angeles run by a queen and that no man there, ever, lived past twenty due to a scientific alteration in the Y chromosome set about by a misandrist female dictator shortly after the bombs fell. The remaining healthy men escaped to the east but they surrounded California with a barrier of genetically engineered giant insects and arachnids that kept the women there to that day.

According to the last Canadian imperial scout’s recording in the booth, the kingdom of Angeles was slowly dying in every possible way. They had millions of people after the bomb but only tens of thousands left presently. Justin knew that breeding was at the heart of that and it would soon become a very serious issue with the women around him.

While pondering how to escape, Justin distracted himself by fixing an old truck. Upon doing so, he inadvertently made himself even more valuable, suddenly finding himself the only individual capable of fixing almost anything, and they unsurprisingly become instantly dependent on him for that new reason as well.

At some point during that time, the queen of Angeles had been alerted to his presence, and she sent a high-ranking young woman named asculine Chelsea to collect him. Instead of meeting the council as was traditional, however, she met Sandra, one of the middle-aged eminine council members who has become deeply, and somewhat sinisterly, infatuated with Justin. He had been rejecting her, becoming more and more uncomfortable each time and avoiding her, yet Sandra claimed she had him in her personal possession.

Upon arrival, Chelsea sensed something was wrong but she was a huge, powerful woman bred to have a body bigger than most healthy men ever did. She intended to take Justin for herself, by force if need be, before delivering her to the queen and did not fear Sandra in the slightest.

When she drinks some water that Sandra gave her while entering Sandra’s house, she crumpled over in agony.

Justin and the council learned of Chelsea’s coming, the council prepared to greet her the following day, but she did not show. Sandra, however, had arrived with an assistant no one knew about named Sally, who was a very skinny, petite young woman barely five feet tall with the same blond hair and blue eyes Chelsea had.

At that point, Justin had gained enough respect in the community for his engineering skills that they asked him to fix a factory. To his surprise, the factory was extremely simple, and only didn’t work because a long, dead woman had destroyed the control panel in a fit of rage simply after turning it off and without the controls, there was no other way to turn it on.

Meanwhile, the queen grew impatient and sent Chelsea’s grandmother to find Chelsea.

After refusing Sandra and causing her to explode one night, Justin is shocked to find a gorgeous, young woman throwing her body at him. She comes forward with far more experience than any of the other women around him had any likelihood of having, just about the sexiest woman he had ever seen. Until then, the women, asculine or eminine, seemed to have had no idea what they were doing or understandably even the value of their physical beauty from a man’s perspective.

Justin awkwardly refused her because he remained in love with Laura but, as she left in an insulted, heated rage, Lincoln noticed she shared the exact measurements of a very shy girl named Jeri that Justin had seen earlier. Justin had not recognized her because her personality had completely flipped from one extreme to another.

Curious, he followed Jeri to Sandra’s house.

There, Justin witnessed a scene he could not have imagined. Jeri was physically abusing Sally and he learns that not only was Sally Chelsea but that Jeri herself was Sandra and Sandra herself was another woman named Killian. According to her, she had lived lifetimes by murdering women and stealing their bodies and was even the same long dead woman who broke the factory.

She claimed she was a member of something called the Carousel.

When Killian discovered Justin watching and recording her confession of her true identity, she was released by the enchantment that kept her there. She thanked him while disabling Lincoln and temporarily blinding him before fleeing into the night to locations unknown.

Then while Chelsea’s grandmother dealt with the fallout of that, Justin was sent across the mostly barren, empty landscape of California to the remains of San Francisco, what they call San Fran, to meet Queen Veronica and her daughter Nicole. When he left, he barely escaped being assaulted by desperate women, who were on the verge of rioting over him.

In San Francisco, he discovered another man had arrived, one from his time and one that he recognized. John Haringer was a murderer for the Faction back in his time and so bad a man that even the Faction locked him away, but when Justin tried to warn the queen, she didn’t believe him and or believed she could control Haringer.

When Justin refused Princess Nicole’s advances afterward, she locked him in a tower and attempted to torture him into sexual obedience. At the same time, Haringer, sensing that Justin would eventually convince the queen, her daughter, or enough of the women around to be a problem, blew up the tower in an attempt to kill him. Then he murdered Queen Veronica’s twin daughters on his way out seemingly for no particular reason.

Justin escaped the exploding tower, saving Nicole’s life in the process, by leaping out of a window and clinging onto Lincoln’s legs with one arm and Nicole with the other. Then he rushed toward the Hollywood sign, accurately suspecting Haringer’s goal of blowing up San Francisco with the old imperial weaponry the imperial scout briefly spoke of on the recording in the booth.

They confronted each other before Haringer could send the missiles off and Justin fought and possibly killed him, dumping him into a long chasm at the bottom of the hill created by a satellite laser during his time. They did not find the body but Justin himself managed to survive and take refuge with the queen’s estranged daughter, Princess Vera, in Vallejo, which they call Sacrem.

Princess Vera instantly recognized the danger one man in a society of women could cause and on the next day, Justin was given a hovercycle and a pistol and allowed to leave the kingdom. He took his vehicle east in the same direction the men went a thousand years ago and headed toward Reno, Nevada, which according to the old information booth, was the nearest, normal city.

***

In episode 2, The Pacifists’ War, Laura awoke in a museum as one of its centerpieces in Aberdeen, Washington with an unhappy, young artist named Matthew Michener looking on. Enthralled by her, he offered to help, and she happily agreed, but before she was even out of the museum, she learned that she was no longer in the United States, in a society known as the Greenlands and that it was bafflingly odd.

The Greenlands were obsessed with the color green, their color of patriotism, and it was everywhere she looked. They also used mindless robots for any physical confrontation, nothing like the AI that she was used to and they battled each other over any kind of gripe to be had between their owners. The more wealth a person had, the better their robot was, putting the average citizen well below the elites and politicians, the latter always being found wearing gold. The Greenlands claimed to be a pacifist society, despite their robot’s violence, and all the art in their museum without passion, aggressive emotion, or even a hint of violence.

It seemed to have made the society incredibly immature. On their way out of the museum, a bully of Matthew’s, a fifty-year-old man, attempted to grope Laura in a fake fall when she got between him and Matthew, and then he burst into childish tears and wet himself when Laura caught his wrist and caused just a little bit of pain.

Outside, Matthew attempted to take Laura to a doctor who could remove her bio-blocker but his vehicle was taken over by the Greenlands’ government and automatically sent toward the location of a bunch of violent, murdering savages known as the Vicks who had come from outside of the Greenlands. They were sent with the rest of the poor people while the elites and politicians were allowed to be free of them. Those who were there, due to their pacifism, were completely helpless against the Vicks.

The Vicks were looking for money and beautiful young women and or girls to rape, which the older generations of women offered up readily, stating imperiously that it is their duty for the Greenlands. Laura, a beautiful, young woman, is readily offered up with the other women but she beats the savage with at least as much violence as they give, capturing two of them while the others escape, all to the horror of the citizens watching. Elsewhere, the Vick leader, Mal Griftner, was greatly angered by her interference and he swore to get his men back and make her pay.

Laura finally arrived to at the doctor and he removed the bio-blocker, releasing her bio-armor and Dylan, her cheerful, sweet-natured espionage AIC shaped much like a fly who had once been her toy, and she then learned more of the society and its endless war with its nearly identical sister-country to the north, the Bluelands. Since both sides preached against violence to any living being, their war was done with robots that only killed each other but it never really made any progress all the while draining huge amounts of the money out of both their societies.

Matthew then took her to eat, the food without meat and just a salad, and there she met Sheriff Mart Manner as well as Mayor Pip Patterson’s assistant. She gave up the Vicks’ weapons she had acquired to the mayor’s man, both broken anyway, and they both left her, but not before Laura sensed a great tension between Manner and the assistant.

Elsewhere in the city, there was a great rage among the people of Aberdeen over Laura’s violation of their laws but Mayor Pip Patterson managed to calm them down easily. Meanwhile, Mart Manner took control of the Vick prisoners and, out of character for what the Vicks saw in the Greenlands, he did not hold back on torturing them.

The next day, Laura found her way to an imperial booth almost identical to the one Justin found and learned that the society was very wealthy, but otherwise useless, not really promoting any kind of art, technology or business that the Canadian Empire could use. It had a lot to do with the weakness of the people there, their level of pacifism softening them up and making them incapable of handling adulthood. The scout also had a sense that the elites and most especially the politicians were much more dangerous than they appeared.

Suddenly, the Vicks returned and attacked Aberdeen to free their men and get some revenge. While Laura rushed out to help, having felt obligated to do so after angering the Vicks, she was taken by Pip Patterson into his golden limousine. There, he attempted to get her to credit him for her successes with savages earlier and whatever she might do later to use it as a springboard for a position in the president of the Greenlands’ cabinet.

Laura found she did not trust him or like what he was proposing so she refused. When he dropped her off, he was annoyed and he decided she could not be trusted either. The gold robots he left behind with her, a special gold version that only politicians have, formed guns and attempted to kill Laura, proving the upper class to be totally hypocritical and even defiant against the core beliefs of their society just as the imperial scout had suspected.

She destroyed the robots and immediately sent Dylan to bash through the back door of Patterson’s limo and through Dylan, Laura aggressively demanded answers to his unwillingness to protect the people and attempt to murder her. Threatened and frightened, he answered Laura’s questions honestly and aggressively, stating all manner of contemptuous things about the poor and their unworthiness of being saved, admitting that he used violence, and even pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot Dylan. Unbeknownst to him, Laura sent the video Dylan was recording live to a giant series of monitors on a tall building in the center of town where everyone could see it.

Hoping that would finally turn the people against Patterson and desperate to protect the people of Greenlands against a much more aggressive threat than normal, Sheriff Manner, against Patterson’s orders, unleashes his own black-colored robots into the city where they terrorized the Vicks without killing them, knocking them out and taking several of them captive. The two Vicks Laura caught earlier were successfully freed but they lost several others in the process. Matthew had a mental breakdown during the battle, violently fighting his way through the Vicks, and got an epiphany that would lead him to leave the Greenlands at some later date.

Afterward, when Pip Patterson attempted to placate the people with a town meeting in the easy way that he usually did, it backfired on him so badly that he had a mental breakdown, and Manner’s group took full control of Aberdeen.

That greatly angered President Cliff Morgan, the highest politician of both the Greenlands and the Bluelands. He commanded Laura to go to Seattle and speak to him in his presidential mansion, the Cathedral, located on one of the city’s many lakes. She only went there because she had heard of another woman like herself, an outsider and savage in the Bluelands to the north, and wanted to speak to him about her. After an uneventful journey across the Greenlands in a bumper car-type vehicle, she met President Cliff Morgan, who was embarrassingly childish and sexist. She asked him about the other woman from her time and to her deep horror, she discovered the woman was none other than Lillian Vale, the girlfriend of John Haringer who was equally as psychotic, despite being lesser known.

Morgan didn’t believe her explanation, convinced he could control any savage with a simple command or snap of his fingers, and he imprisoned Laura in one of the Cathedral’s rooms until he could figure out what to do with her. However, it wasn’t long before Vale’s crazed plan, which was not too unlike her boyfriend’s to the south had been, was implemented. She had taken over Seattle’s Space Needle, connected to an override device located on its top that controls the robots in the armies, and reprogrammed both sides to wander beyond the battlefield into the other side’s country and kill people instead.

Laura was freed from her prison by the emergency protocols, made her way to the Space Needle, and confronted and defeated Lillian Vale by tossing her down the elevator shaft out into the air hundreds of feet below in the process. She should be dead but, like Haringer, her body was not found. Laura then disabled the robots and ended the bloodshed.

President Morgan made a similar error as Pip Patterson had, protecting only his own class and refusing to let his gold robots fight for anyone else and even pulling them back to protect his island while the lower classmen were shot and killed. Some of those same people were even killed by the gold robots when they attempted to cross the bridge onto the Cathedral’s safety. Angered and with the support of the people, Manner destroyed the bridge to Morgan’s island, used his black robots programmed to guard it, and effectively turned the Cathedral into a prison, where Morgan will likely be for the rest of his life.

The next morning, Laura was given a hovering scooter and asked to leave the society forever. She happily complied, leaving that very day on her new vehicle, eager to be away. Matthew didn’t go with her then but informed her that he may follow soon after.

Laura’s adventurers in Greenlands weren’t over yet, however, as Mal Griftner caught up with his Vicks in an armored truck, blaming her not just for the loss of his men but the country that was so easily plundered no longer available to Manner’s group and their black robots. She killed several of his men in the fight that followed but while he was far more formidable than her friends and herself in general, she still managed to blow him up with one of his own grenades, severely injuring him in the process.

Then, while his people were preoccupied with him, she escaped out of the Greenlands and Griftner’s men did not seem to be following. At least, not yet.

Bridge

Something’s wrong, Justin said after a while.

The sun had just risen and he