Her Royal Majesty Debolorah Olostema, Queen of Olo.
While orbiting the blue planet, Flash happened to pick up the Ololian book. Thumbing through the last (or most recent) section of the book, an image caught his eye. He paged back to look more closely, and there was an update on the colorful little planet. Buffy and Skip had taken up residence in the crystal castle, and had chosen royal names. They ruled the planet with a sense of playfulness, reveling in the joy, not only of their enchanting world, but also in the liberation of their hearts and minds.
Flash only smiled. A part of him had been liberated as well.
The book continued to write itself while in Flash’s possession. Pages appeared, where He read tales of those who inhabited the glass towers, the creatures that lived in the silver lakes, in the caverns and on the rainbow plains.
The white whales hadn’t been the only subterranean inhabitants of Olo. Many more were awakened during Olo’s renewal, and so every living thing on the planet was freed.
Flash longed to be back there. He longed for such a home. Yet, he felt that his permanent presence there could jeopardize the health of that paradise. Man had done so much harm to the earth in such a short time, he decided to love Olo from afar.
The whales would eventually return on their migration. The atmosphere of Olo was their breeding grounds. The new calves would play just at the edge of space until they were mature enough to break free of that bubble and follow the pod into the unknown reaches of space. Here, they also learned the ancient song their ancestors knew, a song Flash would never forget. It came to him in his own recurring dream of being swallowed up into his grandfather’s painting. At times a hint of that song came to him in his waking hours… through the vibration of his ship… through his own heartbeat… but he always shook himself back to the tiny, sterile confines of his ship.
He looked down again on the living planet below him and it filled him with a longing for home.
The more Flash looked down at the surface of the planet below him, the more familiar it seemed. The land masses to the north and south of the equator were nothing like the continents of earth, and yet it seemed he had seen them before. How could that be possible? It couldn’t. Unless he had seen them in a dream. He was perplexed, and all the more determined to go down for a visit.
The ship’s computer had been compiling a satellite map of the the entire planet, and Flash called up the image onto his screen.
Flash “parked” the mother ship in orbit and made preparations to enter the pod. He ran through his checklist, making sure everything was in working order, and that all seals were secure. As he was pressurizing the pod, an alarm chirped. He turned to face the computer screen. A match had been found for this planet in the database.
There, superimposed on his own satellite maps, were the names of the north and south land masses.
To the north was Laurasia, and Gondwana lay to the south. The heading over the map read Pangea.
He stared at the map in wonder. He had learned that the most unlikely things often turned out to be true, and in this case, he did not doubt the information.
He looked closely at the map in front of him, and tried to make out what would become the familiar continents of earth.
So it seemed Flash had found his way home. Sort of. It wasn’t a question of where, it was a question of when.
Flash passed through the hatch into the TNI2, and sealed the door that separated the smaller ship from his living quarters in the mother ship. He looked up from the cockpit and gazed at the view below him. The two supercontinents were connected by a land bridge near the equator, and to the east lay the Tethys Sea. If this was indeed Earth, Flash estimated this to be the Triassic period, a world in which he would not be born for at least 200 million years.
Surely this could not be the Earth! For one thing, the living moon was only about 100,000 miles away. And oh yes… It was living!
Flash just sat for a while, not only taking in the view below him, but also happy to be aboard the TNI2. He loved this little ship, and it offered a much needed change from the mother ship. The mother ship provided safety, and all that he needed to survive in space. The pod offered the promise of adventure, and possibly passage to the outdoors.
From his stationary vantage point, he could not see the moon. Still, he planned to study it. But now to the task at hand.
He released the moorings and initiated separation. He fell away from his home, rolled the ship, and was soon skimming the thin upper atmosphere. Brilliant stars faded as the black sky brightened. Shadows became less harsh within the envelope of air as he dropped into it. The landscape rose toward him as Flash sped through clouds. Light from the star, or the sun, as Flash had come to think of it, reflected off the shimmering sea, and Flash could see his chosen landing site… The isthmus that bridged the continents. He decelerated and flew above the rain forest canopy until the trees dissipated, opening to a rocky plateau bordered by sand beach.
Flash Meridian’s ship came to rest on a flat rock which gave him a clear view in every direction. White capped waves crashed on the open sea, and were broken by a rock reef. By the time they reached the beach, they lapped gently against the sand leaving a line of seaweed and foam to dry in the sun.
Flash longed to run along the water’s edge, to bury his toes in the wet sand and to feel the sun on his skin. Before any of this could happen, however, he sent probes out from the TNI2 to test the safety of the atmosphere. As the onboard computers did their work, he stared out the windows, lost in the beauty of this dreamlike place.
The rock on which the ship was perched dropped off on one side in a sheer cliff to the beach. On the other side, a gentle slope stretched out, becoming dunes in the distance, and hugging the rock to form a gentle path down to the water. Pure white clouds hung in the blue sky.
