Peter and Serena sat on top of the garden wall eating sandwiches as they stared at the outside of the Ffrwd Dylluan and wondered what was happening inside the house.
Without using mystical sight, the old two-storey house, set in its large, overgrown grounds, looked completely and utterly abandoned, boarded up with its upper windows all smashed. That was just the house’s protective glamour at work though and it was very effective at making people want to pass it by without exploring its mysteries. The reality was very different, the house constantly repaired itself and was much larger on the inside than on the outside.
More so now that Akira had agreed to Adrian Eldrich’s Nerian Nexus being interfaced with the house – a task that had required a great deal of initial negotiation with the house itself (Seven and Akira refused to explain what they meant by that).
Currently, there was a battle for dominance going on inside the house and everyone had agreed to leave the two entities to work it out amongst themselves. The sprawling multilevel library from the Nerian nexus had been the first room to claim victory – in part, because Tom Cyprus had refused to leave the room since his shard conversion. He had found his heart’s desire amongst the books and wanted to stay there forever. The library had responded by creating a bedroom for him with a dumb waiter in the back of the room. This allowed the kitchen to send him his meals directly, so he had no need to leave, even though the kitchens were on the other side of the house on the same level as the library.
The Nerian library had gained dominance and Akira’s library had integrated with it so that nothing was lost.
Rooms that had no similar version within Ffrwd Dylluan had assimilated instantly, only requiring a corridor or door in the building being added to the existing decor. The observatory was added that way as had the Aerary, though in the display room’s case, access was now via a hidden panel off a back corridor. For the most part, the integration had been amicable and merely doubled the amount of space in the interior. It was the sitting rooms and bedrooms that were still in contention with each other, according to Seven.
Peter had failed so far to discover any clues as to whether his foster mum had actually made it to Ffrwd Dylluan and the house itself was in no mood to provide access to its version of ‘CCTV’. The mirrors had started to turn vicious and were too busy fighting each other for dominance… and that included Seven’s scrying hand mirror, the Cheval Eye, which seemingly functioned via the Nerian mirror mosaic.
Instead, he took the opportunity to ask Seven who or what the Atlans were. Seven tried to explain that all she knew about Atlans was what Adrian had mentioned in passing. He thought that they had been the origin behind the various pantheons of Gods. He believed that they had first appeared as an already advanced civilisation around three hundred and sixty thousand years before the common era, when early Homo Sapiens were still fighting its hominin cousins.
Adrian had assumed that they were time travellers fleeing some future persecution, but given the Ziru Sirkan’s Empire of the Stars being composed of several displaced human sub-species, it was always possible that they had come from the stars instead.
However, she understood that the immortal Daedalus had confirmed that the ancestors of the Ziru Sirka had been kidnapped by an alien race much later than that and had seemingly come from Earth in the first place. No, time travel seemed the most likely solution and they apparently all had superpowers as well as being immortal, though that might just have been due to people maintaining or adopting the same identities over a number of generations.
He believed that the various human races in the stars had been kidnapped when a race of ancient invaders had arrived on Earth about sixty thousand years later to harvest the various subspecies of humanity and use them as servitor races. They had been responsible for subsequently seeding the stars with humans. Daedalus did state that he believed the Atlan may have also been responsible for this race eventually leaving the Earth alone, though he had no proof.
Seen by Homo Sapiens as godlike, the Atlan initially maintained a distance from the less evolved races, but gradually accepted leadership over the primitive tribes that came to worship the god-like Atlan. They helped form and guide a number of early civilisations and enjoyed being worshipped, in return they offered protection from extra-terrestrial threats while mostly ignoring local disputes.
It’s believed they had built themselves several cities around the world, only to suddenly vanish almost overnight – Adrian believed that this was due to what he had referred to as the Great Concord or had he called it a Covenant? Anyway, brought to the brink of extinction by the machinations of certain Altan traitors and dimensional invaders, these ‘Gods’ agreed to distance themselves from contact and involvement in the affairs of humanity as their only lasting recourse available. They agreed to leave Earth alone and to retreat with their kith, kin and sub-races into pocket dimensions. After that, there was no more direct contact, supposedly.
Seven took another bite of her sandwich and left Peter to his thoughts. What he did next was completely dependent on how far he wanted to go down this particular rabbit hole. Seven did think that it might not be a bad idea to have a talk with Professor Dalus (as Daedalus called himself when teaching) when she returned to school.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 