Episode 117: Outside Tier One Episode 5: The Legend Of The Baxter Eye

SUMMARY

You can handle a little blood and guts, can’t ya, Jam?

[Warning: This episode contains a description of violence. Listener discretion is advised.]

CREDITS:

Rae Lundberg as Jamilla Gardner

Ben Rowe as Felix

Seb Junemann providing additional voices.

TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE 117: Outside Tier One Episode 5: The Legend Of The Baxter Eye

I have heartbreaking news, dear listeners. News that I don’t want to be true. News that I take absolutely no pleasure in reporting. However, as a podcaster, it is my duty to face these harsh truths head-on. Eagle… is one of the best grillers that I have ever witnessed. His barbequing skills are unparalleled. You know my stance on Eagle. I don’t want it to be true, but I have to admit that the food at the Second Annual Base Barbeque was delicious. I ate so much that I thought that I was going to explode and I savored every bite. The man knows how to cook.

The Second Annual Base Barbeque was held at the “Satellite Base,” a ranch that is run by three iterations of a cowboy named Sylvester August Baxter. As such, the barbeque was a cowboy-themed event. Everyone at Base got free cowboy hats. I might be wearing mine right now. Yeehaw. In the timeline that Edgar consolidated with and that he is trying to bring this timeline back to (henceforth referred to as “Edgar’s Timeline”), the cowboy had not been iterated and was known as “Sly.” Sly was notable for being the boyfriend of a cowboy iteration of Mike, who went by the name Michael. In the not-too-distant future, Edgar is going to die and, in Edgar’s Timeline, the widow Mike Walters becomes Michael the Cowboy and starts dating Sly. I did not think it was appropriate to ask Edgar for further details about his imminent death. How horrible it must be for him to seemingly know exactly when it will be.

Suddenly, the myriad of offhanded mentions of cowboys that I had encountered since finding Mike Walters made sense. H had sloppily excised the cowboys from this timeline. They lingered in the spots that were hard to clean out, ghosts on the prairie. His penchant for keeping his enemies close (and alive) allowed Michael’s spirit to sneak back in.

The three iterations of Sylvester August Baxter had different positions on the Mike Walters problem. Edgar had consolidated the middle iteration, Sly, with Edgar’s timeline, so Sly remembered being Michael’s boyfriend and everything that entailed. Conversely, Bax, the oldest iteration, was good friends with Eagle. I considered Bax a lost cause. In all likelihood, Eagle had told Bax about killing Mike Walters and Bax was, presumably, still on his side. I considered anyone that friendly with Eagle to be an enemy. August, the youngest iteration, seemed neutral. He didn’t remember Mike Walters, but he also wasn’t chummy with Eagle. As far as I knew, he had no idea what was going on. Outside of the mission to save Mike Walters, they all seemed fairly similar. I usually told them apart by the way they were dressed. There were “oldest” and “youngest” iterations, but they weren’t separated very far through time.

I was only mostly full of pulled pork and potato salad when the time came for Edgar and I to launch the principal piece of our barbeque mission: to get Sly alone, so that we would take him to see Mike Walters, in the flesh. I was skeptical of this approach at first. It would be safer and easier to tell Sly that Mike was alive, instead of transporting away from the barbeque in order to show him. But once I saw Sly’s reaction to seeing Mike, I understood why it had to be done. I don’t think that I can fully fathom the sort of joy that Sly felt when he saw Mike. Sly knew for a fact that Mike was dead, because Mike truly had been dead. There was no reason to hold out hope. Then everything reversed. He had something that it was impossible for him to have: his “Big Bear,” which is Sly’s cute nickname for Mike. I’ve had dreams where loved ones that I’ve lost were inexplicably alive. That must be similar to how Sly felt. It must have felt like a dream.

We transported back to the bunker under the Baxter Ranch, Sly had a good cry, and we returned to the barbeque. He was floating on air after we got back. He was the life of the party. Edgar and I spent the rest of our time sizing up the remaining Field Team members, seeing how amenable they would be to consolidating with Edgar’s timeline. It was through these conversations that I learned that both Chris and Marissa had an encounter with someone named Boone “Grizzly” Babcock on the night that my record player went missing. Boone was so obviously Mike. When I asked him about it, Mike confessed that he shot my record player while he was holding Chris hostage in my cabin, trying to rule him out as one of the WOE.BEGONE gamerunners. Chris left out those details when I asked him about Boone, as if he were trying to protect his new friend. He and Marissa both seemed to dismiss Boone as some weird little guy who crossed their paths. This made me hopeful that they would be receptive to our plan if we broached the subject delicately enough. Could it be as easy as taking them down to the basement and saying “here’s Boone. H wants him dead. Do you want to help us keep him alive?”? Would that work? 

The Baxters grilled steaks for all of us for dinner, Eagle bragged about slaughtering the cow we were eating, and then it came time for the grand finale. It began with Marissa blowing up an old refrigerator with a grenade. I don’t think Bax intended for that part of the finale, but Marissa has a way of making a splash. Once the dust settled, Eagle got our attention and announced that there would be a motorcycle race between him and Bax and the winner would determine who would win a special prize. The prize was a one week getaway to Satellite Base. The place that we already were. Don’t get me wrong, the Satellite Base is very nice and it is situated in the mountains in an absolutely gorgeous part of the country, but it was a strange prize. And, maybe stranger still, that prize was won by yours truly.

…It was obviously rigged, right? I don’t think that I’m jumping to conclusions. The prize was rigged in order to get me to stay at Satellite Base. Nothing about the giveaway made any sense, not even the concept of a “vacation.” Vacations mean nothing when you have access to time travel. I could use the technology to travel back in time a week between this sentence and the next and you would never know the difference. I can go anywhere in the world for as long as I want and I can come back the second after I leave. Base has guidelines that discourage this. They would prefer that everybody stick to a linear schedule in order to keep things organized and to prevent people from aging faster than the time period that we are living in. Still, I could do it and I wouldn’t even need Base. I could go through Tier 2. And if I took a vacation on my own terms, I wouldn’t be stuck with three iterations of the same cowboy the whole time. It just wasn’t a well-thought-out prize. And this not-really-a-prize just so happened to go to the new recruit, right as they were working with Edgar on a plan to return Mike Walters to the timeline? What a coincidence. Something smelled fishy and it wasn’t Flathead Lake.

Maybe it wasn’t a prize at all. Maybe it was an instruction. “You need to be at the Satellite Base, Jam. Something is going to happen there.” But who was sending the message and what was going to happen? It could be H and Eagle keeping me away while they thwart our plans. It could be Edgar accounting for something necessary for our plans. Edgar hinted at the barbeque that he wanted me to accept the prize, which is why I did. But without knowing who was involved, I didn’t know how to act. So, I acted like I didn’t suspect anything. In hindsight, that might have been how whoever set up the prize wanted me to act. I didn’t know if we were playing 2 dimensional chess, 3 dimensional chess, or if there is even a chess board at this point.

I kept in contact with Edgar while I was at the ranch. The messages were brief and coded. I was to stay at the Baxter Ranch in order to keep up appearances as an enthusiastic member of Base and to keep an eye on the cowboy iterations. While I was there, Edgar would begin prepping the field team for consolidation and begin the process as soon as it was safe to do so. As much as I wanted to help with the consolidation, there wasn’t much that I could do. Besides, what was going on at the ranch ensured that I was going to stay busy.

I’m Jamilla Garner. This is Outside Tier One Episode 5: The Legend Of The Baxter Eye. Stay with us.

[OUTSIDE TIER ONE THEME PLAYS.]

For some reason I thought that iterations would be substantially different from one another. That didn’t seem to be the case with Sylvester August Baxter, other than Sly who had been consolidated with Edgar’s Timeline. They were pretty much the same. All of them were hospitable and effortlessly easy to get along with. Even Bax, who was horrifyingly close to Eagle, was kindhearted and happy to have me staying with them. I spent my days relaxing, walking around in nature, riding the horses, and eating all of the leftover barbeque that I could manage. A few days in, we took a break from leftovers to enjoy some homemade baked rigatoni that Bax prepared for us. It was equally as delicious as the barbeque. I was living high on the hog. Maybe this was an actual vacation, after all.

Bax was collecting plates and bringing them to the kitchen sink. “Hey, Jam. If you look in the fridge, there should be a bottle of red wine in there. Grab that and we’ll sit around the fireplace,” he said. 

“Ooh, sounds good,” I said. I opened the fridge and looked inside. There were two bottles of red wine in there. I took both of them.

“Did you mean this one or this one?” I asked, holding them both out in front of me. They both had names that were difficult to pronounce and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

“Bax can’t see you if you’re on his right side like that,” August said. 

“Huh? He can’t? Sorry, I didn’t know,” I said. 

“I know what we’re talkin’ about around the fire tonight,” Sly said. He sighed, as though prematurely annoyed by what was going to happen next. “Pour me some of that wine, too, Jam. We’re in for a long night. I hoped we could make it the whole week without Bax tellin’ one of his stories.”

“What story, exactly?” I asked.

Bax turned his left side toward me. “Put back that one in your left hand and y’all gather ‘round the fire. Jam ain’t heard the Legend Of The Baxter Eye.” He winked at me.

Sly groaned. “Bax, do you gotta tell a nasty story? We just ate.”

Bax chuckled. “You can handle a little blood and guts, can’t ya, Jam?”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “I watch horror movies while I’m eating and it’s never bothered me. This is a story about… why you can’t see out of your right eye?”

“Ain’t no mystery why I can’t see out of it,” he said. Then, he struck his eye hard with his index finger. He didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. “It’s fake.” He grinned at me. “Surprised ya didn’t notice yet. Guess I wore sunglasses the whole barbeque. Gotta protect the one I got left.”

“I didn’t notice at all,” I said. I looked closely at his right eye. Even knowing that it was a prosthetic, I could still barely tell. It was intricate and extremely realistic. It matched Bax’s other eye perfectly. It was impressively crafted. Someone would have had to craft it specifically for Bax in order to make it look so perfect. Exactly the right shade of brown, all of the small features of the iris and the pupil. It was indistinguishable from the real thing.

Bax casually spread his eyelids apart with his right hand and popped the eye out with this left hand. He held it toward me so that I could see it better. I was mesmerized. It wasn’t as round as I thought it would be. It was fairly asymmetrical. There were two little bumps at the top so that it was easy to tell which way it was oriented. Bax looked satisfied with himself. He wanted to captivate me and it worked. It had been a long time since anyone had been interested in his eye. The other iterations were clearly tired of hearing about it.

“You gotta be careful out there, Jam,” Bax said. He placed the eye back in its socket as casually as he had taken it out. “I lost the original on a Base mission. You don’t wanna end up like that. It ain’t glamorous.”

“What happened on the mission?” I asked. Sly shot me a look that said “don’t humor him, Jam!” Sorry, Sly. I wanted to hear the story.

Bax rubbed his hands together. “Our story begins, as all good stories do, with a transport. Base needed some muscle, so they sent me and Eagle out on a mission. They dropped us into the mud in front of some guy’s house in the middle of nowhere. And I mean in the mud. We were up to our knees in it before the effects of the time travel wore off and we were able to get our bearings. It was pourin’ down rain. Pourin’ hard. Eagle insisted that we had to do the mission on that day, come hell or high water and the water was high. We were wet and miserable, sneakin’ up to this guy’s door. And this guy was expectin’ company. He kept peekin’ out the blinds, but we were so muddy it camouflaged us. The driveway was so flooded we were basically swimmin’ up to his door. So we get up on the porch, I look at Eagle. He gives me the nod that means “kick the door down.” So I count down to myself 3…2…1… and I kicked that sucker down. And, wouldn’t ya know it, the guy was waitin’ for me to kick down the door with a knife in his hand. I didn’t see him there. Stabbed me right in the eye. Guess I was lucky that he didn’t go for the throat because I never woulda made it out. I went down. Eagle wrestled him to the ground and got the knife away. And then… Eagle held him down while I got my revenge. An eye for an eye, plus interest. It weren’t pretty and it sure weren’t painless. I don’t remember what happened next. Eagle cleaned up and found what we were there to get. The next thing I remember, I was gettin’ stitched up. H paid for the glass eye outta his own pocket.

“Wow. That’s brutal,” I said. “If you got that hurt on the mission, why didn’t Base issue a correction to prevent you from getting stabbed?”

“That was the correction,” Bax said. “It was an improvement to Eagle gettin’ blown to bits by a shotgun.

“Correctin’ wasn’t as easy back then,” August added. “This was a long time ago, back when we first got iterated. Corrections were a lot more sloppy back then. It took more to justify a correction because it was risky.”

“Could you have them do the correction now that the technology is better?” I asked.

“I’m used to it now,” Bax said. “We’re already tinkerin’ in the past more than we should be. No need to add to that on my behalf.”

“That was a great story, Bax,” I said. “You and Eagle seemed fond of each other at the barbeque. I guess now I know why.”

“He’s a ruthless bastard. That’s why I like him so much.” Bax laughed. “A good man to have on your side and problem if he’s workin’ against ya.”

“Tell me about it,” I thought.

“You can have Eagle all to yourself,” August said.

“Y’all just don’t like causin’ a ruckus like we do,” Bax said.

“Sure don’t,” Sly replied. He stood up from his seat. “I gotta get a couple chores done while it’s still light out. You wanna head down to Flathead Lake tomorrow, Jam? I know Marissa was spinnin’ yarns about the Flathead Lake Monster.”

“The Flathead Lake Monster isn’t real, is it?” I asked.

“Sure he’s real. We seen him before,” Bax said. “A couple times, actually.”

“Uh oh. He’s about to launch into another story. I’m outta here,” Sly said and left.

I stuck around, sipping on red wine, incredulously listening to Bax recount the tale of the time he almost caught the Flathead Lake Monster.

[SCENE TRANSITION.]

Flathead Lake was supernaturally clear and stunning, positioned among the mountain ranges. It is one of many pure, clear lakes in the region, the result of the glacial runoff that gives the nearby national park its name. Sly and I sat in a small rental boat, lazily drifting across the water on a warm summer’s day. He had suggested that we go fishing, but neither of us were in the mood once we got in the boat. We floated, aimlessly. I nearly fell asleep, being rocked gently by the water. My sleep schedule had been erratic since I discovered Mike Walters and my body would take any letting down of my guard as an opportunity to rest. The only thing that kept me awake was Sly occasionally chiming in with conversation.

“Ya know, there was a three year old kid that said that he saw the Flathead Lake Monster,” he said. “The kid was drownin’ and he said the monster pulled him up outta the water.”

“Seems inappropriate to call him a “monster” then,” I said.

“The Flathead Lake Hero Fish,” he chuckled. “‘Cause it’s always a fish when folks say they seen the monster. There’s huge sturgeons in this water.”

“You don’t think it’s real? Bax said that y’all saw it back before y’all were iterated,” I drawled. Yes, I was wearing a cowboy hat, thank you very much. It looked damn good on me.

“You can’t trust a word Bax says when he get to tellin’ tall tales,” he replied. “He was tryin’ to impress ya last night.”

“Why would Bax want to impress me?” I asked.

“I reckon it’s because Eagle thinks you’re cool,” he said, “and Bax is keen on Eagle.”

“Eagle is a killer. I don’t care what he thinks about me,” I said. I could feel my jaw reflexively clench.

“Don’t I know it,” Sly said. “Eagle’s a killer, alright. There’s a reason that we had him kill Bluebell and Barnaby– those were the pigs we harvested for the barbeque. I coulda done it, I do it all the time, but it does break my heart a little. Eagle rolls up his sleeves, no muss, no fuss, just two hogs slaughtered and ready for butcherin’. It gives me the creeps, but he’s in the right line of work. That mindset comes in handy for him. If you want pulled pork, you gotta kill the pig.”

I sat up. “Shit! I just remembered that I told Mike that I was going to bring him a pulled pork sandwich. Do you think it would be safe to bring him some leftovers?”

“Maybe some time soon, when it’s safer…” he trailed off. “Hey, Jam? Do you think that you can help me with something? Tonight?” I felt the whole mood change. It felt like a pocket of cold air had enveloped the boat. I looked over at Sly. He was staring out across the water, wistfully.

“Help with what? Something to help Mike?” I asked.

“Yup. Somethin’ to help my Big Bear. It ain’t gonna be easy, but it’s time to get it done. I’ll do all the hard work. I’m just gonna need help with one thing, after it’s over.” He closed his eyes. “But I’m gonna need help when it’s done. And I’m gonna need someone to be there. Can you do that, Jamilla?”

“I’ll help any way that I can,” I said. “I’m as committed to this mission as you are.” His eyebrows were furrowed and he was scowling, still looking out at the water and not at me. “You can tell me what you’re going to do. It will give me time to prepare.”

“I ain’t tellin’ ya ‘cause I ain’t gonna argue with ya about whether or not it’s the right thing to do,” Sly said. “It’s what I’m doin’ and it’s what’s gonna work out best for us. You ain’t gonna be happy about it and I ain’t either. But we’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do.” He sighed a deep sigh and finally looked over to me. His face settled into an artificial calm. The truth lingered in his eyes. Panic, animalistic and frenetic. He was preparing to do something dark and ugly. He smiled at me. “We gotta get everything ready for Big Bear. I’ve been talking to Edgar on and off all week. Everything is going according to plan with the Field Team. Once they’re all consolidated, he’s going to consolidate Michael and from there, we’re off to the races. We need to get everything organized out here so we’ll be prepared when Edgar is ready for us.”

“You trying not to scare me is scaring me,” I said.

“Don’t be scared. Just be ready tonight,” Sly said. “Now then, I think I wanna try to catch some whitefish before we head back. You ever had whitefish? Tasty little buggers.”

I wasn’t going to squeeze any more information out of him. He had decided how much he wanted to tell me before the conversation even began. He was going to do something tonight, something that I would advise him against doing if I knew, and there was nothing that I could do to stop him. All I could do was be there for Sly when it happened and help when he needed me to help. That’s why I was at the Satellite Base. Whoever sent me out there wanted me to be there when Sly needed me.

“You rigged the lottery,” I said. “You made it so I would win, so I would be out here to help you.”

Sly smiled a… sly… grin. “You or Edgar. Either one woulda been fine. The vacation was my idea in the first place. I sent a note back to myself after you showed me Big Bear. Can ya blame me? We’re so close to gettin’ him back and I can’t trust Bax. Hell, I don’t know for sure that I can trust August. I need someone out here by my side, Jam.”

“You owe me big time when we make it back to your timeline,” I said.

“Anything ya want,” Sly said.

“A record player would be nice, for starters. The one “Big Bear” bought to replace the one he broke is a piece of crap.” We both laughed.

We floated on the lake for a couple more hours. We didn’t catch any whitefish.

[SCENE TRANSITION.]

Dinner slipped through my fingers that evening. Whatever Sly had in store was rushing towards me with no way for me to prepare. August and Bax were as talkative as ever, tellin’ tall tales and “shootin’ the shit,” to borrow from their cowboy parlance. Sly had to make a concerted effort to avoid being suspiciously quiet. I watched him all evening. He spoke up enough to seem natural, but I could tell that he was acting. Whatever he was planning was weighing on him. I got lost inside my head while August and Bax talked. I imagined what Sly was going to do. Edgar killed two Mikes in order to save one. Nothing seemed off the table. We had pork chops for dinner. I wondered what the name of the pig was. I wondered if Sly would come get me when it was time or if I’d know somehow. Bax was too busy telling stories to notice that I wasn’t paying attention. I humored him as much as I could, repeated back things that he had just said. There were stories and more stories and more stories. The whiskey came out. More stories. I drank some whiskey and tried to let go of my anxiety. By the end of the evening, I had tricked myself into feeling calm and warm.

The warm and pleasant dinner came to an end. I was full of food. My body was telling me that it was time to sleep until morning. I had almost forgotten that Sly had come to me with serious business. I said that I was drowsy and didn’t want to transport home for the evening. I retired to a room that Bax prepared for me. Hours passed. There was a knock on the door of my room. I opened it. It was Sly. He had a grave look on his face.

“It happened… Jam, it happened. I need to take you to the bunker,” he said. He turned and walked, expecting me to follow. There was no room for me to ask questions. I followed him to the bunker. He unlocked it and motioned for me to go in, as though he wasn’t going in with me. I looked at him, puzzled. He motioned down the stairs, turning his head as if to instruct me to go. I descended the stairs. Sly closed the door behind me.

I made my way into the bunker, unsure of what I would find. I reached the bottom of the stairs. There was another iteration waiting for me there. He was covered in blood, but there were no visible wounds on him. He looked nauseous, perhaps in shock. I went to his side. He was holding something. I couldn’t tell what it was. He looked up at me. The panic that I saw in his eyes on the boat could not compare to what I saw then. Distraught, frantic.

“It’s done,” he said, his voice quavering. “I need your help.”

I looked at the object in his hands. A small, asymmetric acrylic ball. An eye. Bax’s eye. Sly was holding Bax’s eye.

“Where is Bax?” I asked.

“He’s gone. I took care of him,” he said.

“You killed him?” I asked. I needed to be sure.

“We couldn’t bring back Michael with him around,” he said. “I made an iteration, the one that brought you to the bunker. He’s upstairs making sure that August doesn’t come down here.” He took a deep breath. “He’s going to be Sly. I’m going to be Bax from now on. I can’t do it on my own. I’m sorry. I need your help.” He looked down at Bax’s eye and then at me. “Eagle would notice if the eye was gone.” He balled his hands into a fist around the eye. “I have to cut out my right eye.”

Sly was right. If he had told me this plan while we were on the boat, I would have tried to talk him out of it. Making sure that Bax didn’t sabotage the plan was important, but this was extreme. Though maybe it was time to take extreme measures.

“You can’t just cut your eye out and put the prosthetic in,” I said. “It takes time for the eye socket to heal.”

“I’m going away for 2 months,” he said. “There’s a safehouse I can stay in. I’ll use the Calculator. I’ll be back just as soon as I left. But I can’t cut it out on my own.”

“What the hell do you want me to do!?” I asked.

“Cut it out of me,” he said.

“Sly… no way,” I said. Not only did I not want to do it, but I was incapable of imagining myself doing it. It felt physically impossible. 

“Either you help me cut it out or H and Eagle will figure out our whole plan. I’m Bax now. That’s how this is going to work. Take my knife.” He produced a medium-sized, razor sharp pocket knife from his pocket. 

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“I can’t do it either,” he replied. He sounded like he was about to cry. Emotions were supplanting the shock. “But there’s no going back now.”

“We can go back,” I said. “We can issue a correction. We can try something else,” I said.

“There is nothing else,” Sly said. “Edgar is going to be ready for us soon. We can’t keep letting Bax snoop on us. I did what I had to do. And now… I have to become him.”

He took my hand in his. We were holding the hilt of the blade together. “I need my Big Bear back.”

“I can’t do this,” I repeated.

“I need you, Jamilla,” he said. His voice was trembling. “Please. For Mike. For Big Bear. Please. We made it so far. Please.”

I took a deep breath. Bax was gone. This iteration of Sly had to replace him. Sly made that decision without me. We had to carve his eye out. No amount of time could have prepared me for what he was asking me to do. But this is what we were doing. Sly wasn’t turning back. It was do or die.

“For Mike? For Edgar?” Sly implored. Our hands were still wrapped around the hilt of the knife. “Help.” His cry was small and exasperated. His demeanor shrank. For a moment, he wasn’t a cowboy. He was completely helpless, at my mercy.

I brought our hands up to his right eye. I steadied the blade in front of his pupil, which was staring, wide-eyed, out at our hands. He didn’t blink.

“On the count of three,” he said.

“One–” I did not wait for him to count. I plunged the knife deep into his eye socket on the count of one. It was better to not give him time to prepare or to flinch. That’s what he had done for me by not telling me his plan. He didn’t give me time to flinch. I cut and cut and cut and cut until the eye was detached from the socket, until it fell out onto the floor, until there was nothing left but empty space, room for the prosthetic eye.

Sly only sat in stunned silence for a moment, blood dribbling down his face and onto the ground. “The calculator…” he half-whispered and pointed over to the table he had sat it on. I brought it over to him.

“I’ll be back in a second,” he said. “I’ll see you in two months.” He held the calculator on his left side where he could still see it and punched in some coordinates. “I’ll be right back. Wish me luck, Jam. Thank you.” I could have sworn that he smiled through the blood covering his mouth.

I didn’t respond. I stood in silence and watched him. He pushed a button on the calculator and then was gone. His eye was still on the floor where we had excised it, covered in blood. The whole room felt as though it were covered in blood. Sly’s blood, Bax’s blood. 

Sly only disappeared for a moment. He reappeared the next instant. His eyesocket was empty and healed over. It had been two months for him. I handed him the prosthetic eye and he pulled his eyelids apart and placed it inside, just as I had seen Bax do it. Sly looked healed, restored. He looked strong and prepared. He opened his arms for me and we embraced. There was power in his embrace. He was back. He had months to process, while I was still stuck in that moment. I hugged him tightly.

“It’s going to be okay, Jam,” he said. “We did it. We don’t have to worry about Bax anymore. Eagle won’t suspect a thing. He won’t know what hit him. You did good.” I cried into his chest, wordlessly.

“We are strong. You, me, Edgar, all of us,” he assured me. “We are going to get our Big Bear back. Thank you, Jam. Thank you. Thank you.” His “thank you”s went on endlessly until they morphed into blubbering. Sly was crying, too.   

Thank you for listening to Outside Tier One. I’m Jamilla Gardner. Next time: we take back the timeline. Until then, stay safe.

[OUTSIDE TIER ONE OUTTRO THEME PLAYS]

Outside Tier 1 is a Drop Stitch Audio Production. Created by Jamilla Garner. The theme song is “Roadtrip” by the band Cutting Grass. The background music was also provided by Cutting Grass. Check them out at wearecuttinggrass.bandcamp.com/.