A man with a deep voice tells a boy: “In the past, humanity lived on one planet: this was Selector, the world that was sculpted to the millimeter by the Odyssey itself; everything had the right measure, the exact conditions for humanity; the perfect planet. But in life, son, even the perfect one day becomes… boring. Then came the first ships, which soon became space, and so humanity spread across Odyssey, planet by planet until almost everything was inhabited. for us… for them, because not all of them – and remember this, Jorge -, not all of us are equal because we are human, because some are more than others. And in this story, the others are the powerful rich that history made.
After humanity took over Odyssey, some humans wanted to take over humanity, and that was the power. This ambition spawned wars and more wars that ended in the worst way: without a winner. Until one day, some of these rich people found a powerful object, and it was of ancient magic, the purest and strongest; it was the magic itself, which should have been in the hands of the Magic Order, but instead…” he took a deep breath to control the anger that was rising in his speech “instead, it was lost… but no more! For when these rich found the divine chalice, used their power and finally won the war… and do you know what power this is that contains the holy chalice, J?” He asks rhetorically to the child, who curiously and tensely answers “no!”.
“Immortality… and you know what a man does when he doesn’t have to fear death?” Ask again in the same tone.
“No!”, replies the young man.
“Everything!” Says the father looking into his son’s eyes. “This is the story you’ll never hear again of how Odyssey Central Command was born. And that’s why we exist: others cannot reign; we are the last line against this rotten system that rules our beloved Odyssey.” .
And everything remained as told by the father for hundreds of years in the galaxy – until the great invasion -; power over humanity entirely with Odyssey’s Central Command, which in turn ruled the galaxy well. Covered by a great layer of advertisements that encouraged above all the love and appreciation for “Our Odyssey”, this institution was immaculate before the public opinion.
Always preaching progress, the OCC was constantly carrying out large missions, from supplying poor populations to those that generally had a smaller proportion: reconnaissance and/or scientific research missions. The people were not interested in the latter, so they did not take place under intense supervision, but freely. And so the Central Command controlled the course of society with frightening ease. Since it is enough to control the past to control the present, and thus the future, everything depended on omitting and manipulating past historical facts, and this could be done by altering the evidence of what happened, or simply erasing it.
And in the year 240 before the invasion, that was the intent of the deadliest team at the OCC’s disposal on the planet of Parpango. The mission was simple: find and, with a single shot, split the head of someone who called himself “The Last Mage”, also known as “Black Mage” and “Orisus the Sage”. The reason for the mission was as simple as it was: for anyone who wants to control people, one of the first fundamentals is to control their beliefs, and the big heads of the OCC knew that. Turning the mages, the Magic Order, and magic itself into nothing more than myths was necessary for a belief to be created and kept manageable by the Command, and to turn all of what had once been real and tangible into mythology, it was necessary that there was no proof that they were really more than legends – even more such proof, alive, within the reach of the people. The Last Mage was a serious risk to the stability of the system, as there was a good chance he would know more than he should; needed to be contained.
Turns out the top five OCC agents were no match for Orisus. He excelled in every way, and even captured two of these five agents and held them captive. With the situation already critical, the seven leaders behind the OCC appeared in person on the planet Parpango. And with a little sentence – something like “I know your primal secret, I just need a spotlight.” – Orisus won the consideration of the seven to his demands: if they left him alone, he swore to keep the secret. Deal closed! And the OCC returned to its headquarters, with the exception of the two held captive; they were thought to be dead.
In fact, two things were part of Orisus’ plan: first, to these two prisoners he told everything about the true history of the OCC, the mages and many other secrets of Odyssey, and thus formed the two minds that would be responsible for the beginning of the mighty OCC antagonist – Jorge and Helan founded the secret organization called the Ulyssys. The second thing was an extraordinary power that the OCC guarded, and that was certainly only in the possession of the seven great lords: the Chalice of Immortality! This was his biggest secret. And this magical artifact Orisus wanted at least a few hours around him, so he could take the chalice and use it in some fancy plan. “Stealing the cup?” asked kidnapped agents Jorge and Helan when he explained his plan, and in Orisus’ wise words, Orisus replied “Stealing from someone who stole it is a relative crime!” Fact is, he succeeded: the long wait for a deal was a distraction to keep the seven and the chalice in Parpango, and easy as taking candy from a child, Orisus just broke into the heads’ special cabin on his ship and rummaged through the drawers. They thought they had no reason for such a well-designed hideout, since no one had known about it for hundreds of years except the seven. And that was his biggest mistake: underestimating Orisus! The latter, in turn, emerged victorious, as he took possession of the chalice and made them leave with the previously sealed agreement. And that’s how the seven lost the cup, and something then was about to collapse!
The cup had kept the seven alive for hundreds of years – since the beginning of the OCC; were the founders. In fact, this fact was shocking to Jorge and Helan; perhaps the most shocking, to the point of making them find the system unfair and idealize a parallel power that could one day change that. The greatest crime was that seven human beings were more than human; to have a power that no one else had access to, and thus prolong their tenure over the most powerful institution in the galaxy for eternity… it was absolutely unfair for anyone to circumvent Mistress Death herself and her kingdom! The crime was so absurd, that this argument was intensely and constantly introduced into the doctrine that formed the soldiers and agents of the Ulyssys Organization, which from its creation only grew, in the background, so that not even the highest echelon of the OCC knew about its existence.
And Ulyssys has taken on great proportions, thanks to agents who have become true martyrs in the organization; the secret was to create truly loyal agents through their doctrine, and so it was done, in 60 before the invasion, with one of the most important agents of Ulyssys: Cristhian Jorge, who, in what became known as “The legendary compilation of missions” , among many small failures and one great success, brought one of the seven leaders of the OCC to justice, and he was arrested and died in prison shortly. Cristhian Jorge became world famous for his feat as the man who showed that there was hope in the system, and things could be done through legal means. Of course, he never revealed Ulyssys publicly, as he knew that even though he had achieved success, there was still a lot of work to be done. Only one person was privileged to hear the complete and entire stories of Cristhian of Ulyssys, and that was his son, Josué Jorge, to whom he told all about his trajectory.
Josué Jorge, more than his beloved son, was his successor at Ulyssys; a “fuller Christian,” some said, even speaking of a kind of messiah predestined to unmask and end the OCC. The boy was already a legend before he even started to walk, and he had everything to fulfill his destiny, because his eyes shone with every story of his father, his emotions were on the edge of his skin, he felt shivers down his spine at each description, he teared up and laughed at each ironic ending. He was certainly well on his way, but his early teens were marked by a great tragedy: “Cristhian Jorge, the legendary hero who arrested the great being behind the corrupt part of the OCC, and thus preached faith in the system, died today of natural causes!” was the headline that day. There was nothing he could do, he had no one to blame, he could only get on with his life. Of course, Ulyssys couldn’t leave the boy adrift, so Josué was taken and kept in the care of the organization, where he was secretly trained and groomed as a future leader; “advanced military physical and strategic training” was one of the nomenclatures he never forgot. Publicly, he came under the care of his considerate uncles.
And it was in this context that, from eleven – when his father died – to eighteen, Josué Jorge grew up. A master soldier, the best strategist, the most knowledgeable of Odyssey and an outstanding leader formed; many would say “the biggest shot at justice in Odyssey!”. He was putting the first foot on his inevitable destiny when an important event took place: the return to his life of the one that had disappeared fifteen years ago: Marla, his mother.
Cristhian and Marla had a rocky relationship, but she satisfied his greatest yearning at the time: a child; a successor, and that was enough in his life, he didn’t need love. So they drifted apart, but for years Marla had always cared about Cristhian and their son; she still loved him, and maybe he did too, but the fact is, they never saw each other again. Perhaps out of remorse, perhaps out of a sense of justice, or for whatever reason, Marla was not content with the way Cristhian had died, and like an eagle that stalks its prey, relentlessly for seven years, she single-handedly investigated Cristhian’s death until come to the most tragic conclusion possible. Then, at eighteen years old, Josué discovered that his father had died, not by Time, but at the hands of another. Marla told how it happened, and described why:
Jorge was the biggest promise of the century for Ulyssys, but for Cristhian he was a son, hence the conflict of interests between the secret organization that wanted to turn him into a leadership and war machine and a father who wanted his son to have the basic right to free will; it was what he believed in, what he had always believed in. But one man was not as powerful as an organization, and it was easy for the organization to take the boy by force and begin assembling the machine; all it took was one night and a high dose of adrenaline in the blood, cardiac arrest, no suspicions. This is more of a story of how to take the most important thing from someone, like candy from a child… maybe Orisus taught Jorge and Helan too much.
So, under the cruel truth and the most corrosive guilt of all feelings, Josué fled from what was his destiny. Where? Not even he knew! It just went. He walked, flew, landed, inhabited, lived, killed on the outside, died on the inside, and drank, drank and drank, until he drowned all his sorrows in moments of madness (this Josué Jorge would one day become a disease of the past, but not yet today !). He vanished in space and time, which passed fiercely, and made that sense of justice that Cristhian Jorge brought to the galaxy also pass, and then the remaining six heads of Odyssey Central Command had time to pull themselves up and take a deep breath.
By the way, taking a deep breath was a great difficulty for six old people of approximately 700 years each. Without the chalice, they could no longer delay Time, nor escape death – which by then would surely be brief. Ancient secret studies said that “a human who drank from the ‘Divine Chalice’ and today does not drink anymore, survives up to a maximum of 100 years after the last contact with the ‘magical artifact’; this is because the effects are intense and powerful, so its use is accompanied by great respons…” – this part of the leaflet did not interest the seven, who were now six and were literally falling apart – gradual dismemberment was a side effect. Given this context, they found the urgency of some actions, as they had already lived more than a century and a half after their last contact with magic…
If the heads all died, the body would go with it, and in the absence of the effective OCC as it was, Odyssey would surely collapse – as was already happening, as is the case with the unfortunate decision taken at the Council of Hidon-Fater, the case that it almost spawned an interstellar war against the great Pulsar empire, and that was only thanks to the Defenders of Liberty. Anyway, this was the reasoning that weighed until a solution was found: keep their heads alive. The means to this, obviously, was to find the artifact again. Work has not been spared, research, search, expensive spaceships and sensory satellites, over all the years that have passed since Orisus took the OCC’s cup and disappeared forever. Until the year 15 before the invasion, 235 years after the failed Operation Parpango; in short, enough time for the sensory technology to be impeccable. And by the satellites the divine chalice was found, exhaling waves of magic to the sophisticated sensors. However, now the problem was where the chalice was. “… Conscious Island of Ginnungahar, planet Parpango. Your mission is to recover an artifact that belongs to us, but due to unforeseen circumstances it is no longer in our hands.”, Jorge read, straining his eyes against the message, in a viewfinder that reflected the sunlight, barely disguising the hangover. Continued reading:
“Little is known about the island in question, other than that it is an extremely hostile environment by nature, so failed reconnaissance missions end with the disappearance of designated agents – probably by death. Much has been reported about wild native inhabitants in the region, extremely aggressive and physically capable, in a dialect unknown to all OCC sources, but as reported by our agents: ‘they praise something…’. These are your enemies on solid ground! an underground part, which is filled with water, and that is where the artifact that you must bring to the OCC is located. It is not known exactly where it is, only that the one selected for the mission must search through the water, in order to from one end of the island to the other. The sensors that picked up the signals emanating from the artifact sought also picked up a wooden cover, possibly a chest, inside which the object could be. underground, the only thing we know about is the fact that the water is salty. Enemies that can wait in the water can be quite offensive. The person assigned to the mission will have the appropriate equipment that allows him to breathe underwater, and thus have more agility to flee from any threat. And about the mission’s design, Mr. Jorge, the OCC has the most effective intelligence team in the entire galaxy, and you were the result of a search for effectiveness and mission fatality. This means that we know about all of his secretly successful missions as a contractor, we know what the greatest mystery solver is and certainly one of the greatest connoisseurs of our vast galaxy of Odyssey, but we also know about his heritage, and from whom it is inherited. . We know how you eat, how you breathe and when you sleep, we know about your instability and about the many blows you give your contractors; It means that we know more than Josué Jorge as we do himself, so don’t hesitate for a single moment in fulfilling the mission, which is: to find and deliver a golden chalice to the OCC. If there is hesitation in the performance of duty, we will also know, and the consequences will be hostile. Good luck on the mission!
From: Odyssey Central Command.
To: Josué Jorge.”
He smiled when he finished reading, at the irony of the message’s subject. Working for the institution your beloved father fought his entire life. It was funny, and like an unprincipled man, he decided to accept the mission. It felt like contact – in a bad way, but still vague contact with the past; accepting the mission gave him a fleeting sense of nostalgia. Maybe that’s why he accepted the mission… but the fact is that he accepted, and that was the news that traveled as a secret across the galaxy, until it reached the leaders of Ulyssys. In this way, the image of a lost and confused young man who needed time to accept everything that happened to him went down the drain. Now the idea of ”Josué Jorge” was that of a traitor, without scruples and who accepted whoever paid the most. Josué was one who did not deserve his father’s name; in whom there was no honor, and so, in the same intensity that Cristhian promoted belief in good, Josué with such betrayal promoted all of Ulyssys disbelief.
But perhaps in this way, Josué would be more effective than his father against the rotten OCC.
And thinking about it, the night before the start of the mission, when he read the files of the agents who entered the island before him, devised strategies to then penetrate it, studied the maps and everything there was about Ginnungahar, he heard sneaky footsteps that seemed to have come from the window behind him. He remained motionless in his chair until the two invaders approached him more and more, and at the exact distance, he turned in a flying kick that knocked them out. He looked at their robes, they didn’t carry any emblems, but by the way they pulled themselves together, how they regained their guard, he identified them: “What does Ulyssys want from me?” They did not answer. In fact, they suddenly attacked him again. And between blows and counterattacks, Josué, who was already exhausted, stopped them both again. By now I had already realized that they didn’t fight to kill, only to neutralize. Then, he connected the dots, analyzing the context of the moment: they wanted to kidnap him to prevent him from carrying out the mission.
Wearily, he explained to the two Ulyssys agents what was troubling him tonight:
“Not that I owe you anything, but think a little, my dears: I, son of the greatest agent your secret organization has ever seen, therefore one of the greatest connoisseurs of all this what we call ‘Odyssey’, really think that I don’t know what I’m after? My father told me stories about the divine chalice, which gives immortality to the six remaining old heads of the OCC. Don’t you agree with me that taking the chalice from their hands is the best chance of stopping them? we don’t need to kill them or anything like that…” he breathed tired of the fight, and a third agent came sneaking up behind him; he noticed but pretended not to, and continued:
“Just let Time and Death catch up with them naturally. Don’t you see the opportunity they’ve given me?…”, he continued ignoring the third agent, and stared at the two in front of him with hatred in his eyes. “They, like you, see me as an irrational machine following orders, so I ask you to keep underestimating me, so I can surprise them both! For me, Ulyssys and OCC only have one subtle difference: one already holds power, yet another tries to achieve it.”
“This is not true!” It was the speech of the third agent that allowed Josué to recognize him as his “mother?!”.
“I know Ulyssys doesn’t even deserve you to agree with how we act,” Jorge countered, “‘we’?” “Yes! There have been changes since the unscrupulous decision to…”, Josué completed “to kill my father?”. “Yes! Ulyssys lost her hand, and I know mistakes don’t go away like that, so I didn’t come here to ask for trust, let alone kidnap you!” Josué then looked around confused; it was all a shock.
“Listen to me, Jorge, I must be brief: that island, it… it’s not just an island… I mean, you don’t know everything about the chalice: its power is not immortality… it’s life itself! One day Orisus stole the chalice, and that story you already know; but whatever he did with the chalice, he left it after using it, lying on the ground of Parpango, on some island, where he could harm no one. But then more than 200 years have passed, and the chalice has turned what was once nothing more than earth, plants, wood and water, into something alive; a conscious island – who knows how, but will try to protect at all costs what it has given you. life… it’s not really known how the chalice works, but it is, like all magic… it’s treacherous! A magic works in a complex way, you know, but this… a magic linked to the creation of life as this one is extremely dangerous, it gives life to a certain extent, and at the same time takes life from everything it can… it means that the chalice will steal your time somehow. shape. Every second more on that island is hours, maybe days or even years less of life. That’s why I came to leave you this simple message: be careful.”.
Jorge, with a very confused head, was full of doubts in his eyes, and when Marla noticed he said to him: “well, son, the explanation you expect is not at all shocking. This is the same story as always: at work I met your father, and when I walked away from him, I walked away from Ulyssys; he did everything to… it doesn’t matter, what matters is that what’s happening must be resolved, it’s something bigger than us.”, she took it and held it son’s hands “You know, son… Odyssey demands a lot from us, and if we want to change something here, we have to take a huge step against ourselves: we can’t prioritize ourselves.
The focus has to be completely on the mission… maybe this is just Ulyssys doctrine, but that’s what has worked…”, she smiled. “Now, as I’ve been saying: spare time is something I can’t even dream of having, so i have to go. When all this passes, if one day passes, we will talk like an ordinary family. Goodbye!”.
She turned around, and Josué remained silent, but his understanding face already showed her that he understood the situation. However, something remained to be said, and then she quickly turned around and, from a distance, said aloud to him: “Son… I’m proud. And I know your father is too!” And so she went out the window with her two companions.
Josué, tired, then went to bed, trying to rest for the next day. In the morning, when he set foot on that shifting ground, a strange sensation took hold of him: everything in that landscape seemed to notice him, as if things were waiting for his next step, even anticipating his thoughts. That place soon began to mess with him. Where Josué always saw himself surrounded by trees, fires, sand and natives – and these, by the way, he noticed: as he said in the OCC message, they really praised something, but it seemed to be the ground they walked on; the Conscious Isle of Ginnungahar was their god. And a mighty god, who seemed to be able to play with Josué’s mind and body; in a few minutes on the island, he seemed to know her through and through, as if an intimacy between the two had been strengthened over the years and years.
And Josué remembered again the message of the OCC, in the part that described the enemies: ‘the natives and the aquatic animals’; was wrong. The real enemy here was space, the island itself, which now seemed to smile with a shrill voice in his head. But he kept an eye out, and he was, sneaky and deadly, and while he did a good job of evading the perceptions of the natives, he noticed one more oddity about the savages: they had familiar faces, which he’d recently seen… “It’s the OCC agents who failed the mission!” “But how the hell did they turn into that?” a question that stuck in her mind. Which he tried to ignore to stay focused. But soon he succeeded; he took the key from the trunk and, imperceptibly – even strangely easy, in fact – as he plunged silently into the river, he decided which way to go; and down there it got more and more confused. The underground river then became a labyrinth submerged in water, and the deeper he penetrated, the louder the voice became in his mind. That’s when giant fish appeared from somewhere… but they didn’t even stray, didn’t pay any attention to Josué, as if they were dominated by some uniform emotion, which made them follow in line. And he understood that the uniform emotion was the island acting on his nervous system, and he thought of the natives, who also acted in the same way, hypnotized. And the dots began to connect, the voices increasingly audible in his mind. Suddenly, he was understanding this conscious island, which really wanted him there. She needed Josué to get in touch with her, because, as she said, “I’m hungry, I need to eat!” For that she thanked him at every turn: he was her feast.
Suddenly, in the face of this, the answer to the question that had been asked about how the agents became natives came to Josué’s mind. And for the last time the pieces fell into place. As his mother had said, the cup would somehow try to suck the life out of him, and here is the island’s feast: the time Josué had ahead of him; and when the island was done with lunch, he would then be a broken old man, a new native, a new failed agent, and one more number adding to all the circumstances. But he knew he was born to be an exception, and that’s why he had to finish his mission before the island finished the feast. It was a battle between man and island, and ultimately, between man and system. “And in this fight”, he thought, “the giant is Josué!” But, as Marla said, he finally remembered to put himself in the background, because what really mattered here was the future of the galaxy. Then his chest swelled with bravery and he advanced, when, in a genuine move of courage, he leaned against the wall of the labyrinth, and suddenly like light, he returned to the beginning of the mission. He fell into the ills of the island, and when he got up, it was like dying and being reborn. That was quite a reincarnation: intense as nothing I had ever experienced. So it was because there, in the space between death and rebirth, he seemed to have lived for a few years on the point of returning with an ancestor’s baggage. Finally, he understood that that mission would require something more than his conventional efficiency: he needed to be perfect – even more so because of the surprise that he was reborn heavier, with less vigor and little desire to try again… he actually aged with each death!
YOUR ODYSSEY STARTS NOW…
