The box contained a heap of loose paper with notes scribbled on them and a small journal. His grandmother’s handwriting was hard to decipher, but he started on the journal. He kept an eye on the time, and ten minutes before his dad would normally get home from work, he packed everything away and headed inside, where he hid the box again before his father got home.

A week later, he hadn’t learned anything much in the way of magic as the pages he’d read had mostly been information on people and places she had been traveling through when she started the journal. There was a reference to her stunning two men who were obnoxious but no information on how that spell worked. He made a note of it on his computer, packed up well before his father was due home, and started on his homework.

He made steady progress studying the stuff in the box every day over the rest of the school week, apart from Thursday when he just had too much homework to do. He did learn a few things, mainly mentions of things his grandmother had done or considered doing. She mentioned using a sleep spell lightly on a male pest at a party at one spot, while at another, she said she had been shielding herself mentally at one point, and at another point, after the same function, she had used a shield spell to protect herself from heavy rain and hail.

The biggest takeaway he got that week was her mention of how she could close her eyes and sense the people around her. Apparently, she could tell where people were around her and the difference between a normal person and someone with some magic genes. He had no idea of how to go about that, but he decided to close his eyes and see what he could achieve.

He let his consciousness settle, and he could “see” glows. Hmm. He moved his head and studied what he was sensing. There were two bright glows to his left, and beyond them, at what he felt was probably some distance, there was a whole group of dull glows. To his right, there were four dull glows fairly close. Beyond these nearby glows, which he could sense clearly, there were more glows, but he got the feeling they were all further away.

He considered where he was. The two bright glows had to be his mum and sister. The four to his right were the Kings, the people who lived next door. Interesting. In his mind’s eye, his mum and sister, who both had a fair number of the engineered genes, showed up brighter than everyone else nearby. He studied the Kings some more and noticed that two of the glows were a little brighter than the other two. Not by a lot, but noticeable.

Over the next couple of days, he practiced sensing others, and he also began noticing other things when he closed his eyes. There was a blueness that he found strange. And things that he could sort of see, maybe, that appeared to be just floating around. Hmm. He didn’t know what to make of them. He wasn’t even sure they were real and not something his mind was making up.

“It’s not like it used to be, dad. People are proud of their engineered genes these days.”

“Being tall or purple isn’t the same as being able to do shit. Having powers scares people. Trust me, I know.”

His father used his hands to compress the sunlight into a small ball of light between them. Andrew looked at his father and realized that he was further advanced than his father. He didn’t have to do his father’s extravagant hand movements to achieve the same effect. He decided his father must’ve repressed his abilities to hide for notice. Damn. He’d been hoping his father would teach him more advanced techniques rather than the fumbling self-teaching he had been managing.

” I guess I was hoping you would teach me all those fancy magical tricks I’ve heard all the stories about, dad.”

“Your grandmother tried to teach me a couple of times, but I wasn’t interested. It was just too dangerous. You only had to do one thing once in the hue and cry would be up and, if you’re lucky, escape and be able to hide somewhere else. I don’t know how many times your grandmother had to move in her life, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t get older. A lot of the time, it was because she did something accidentally that made it obvious she had power.”

His father stood up and looked down at him, a frown on his face.

“I can’t stop you fooling around with that stuff, but you won’t do it under my roof, do you understand?”

“Yes, dad. I understand.”

“I want your word. No magic in this house.”

Andrew shrugged. “Ok, dad. I give you my word. No magic in the house.”

“Good.”

His father gave him a sharp look and then left the room. However, all was not lost. On Friday afternoon, when his father normally went to the pub for drinks with the boys from work, his mother took him into their room and pulled out a box she kept in the back of the bottom drawer of her dresser.

“This was left to you by your grandmother. Your father thought I had thrown it out when we went through her things. I showed them to my father, but he and his fellow soldiers had never really received much training in power techniques. I could do some simple things, but I think I lack the right genes to do much. Your father can’t do much either, but I think with him, it’s more a matter of not wanting rather than not being able to. Take the box and hide it in your room somewhere.”

He took the box and smiled at his mother.

“Thanks, mum!”

He hid the box under his bed and refrained from the incredibly strong temptation to go through it right then! He had told his dad he wouldn’t do stuff at home, and he wouldn’t. There was no opportunity over the weekend, but Monday afternoon after school, he grabbed the box and went out behind the garage. It was still on their property, but it wasn’t technically under his dad’s roof.

He had been arguing with himself about whether he should tell his father about his abilities over the last few months. From things his father had said, Andrew had gotten the impression that his father didn’t think much of tellies or people with any sort of power. He could remember his grandmother always saying not to be obvious and attract attention. But he was starting to think that these days that may not be such a problem as it used to be. His dad had been down the coast at Ballina on business for the last week and was supposed to be back today. Andrew’s father had taken the train that ran through Mawillimbar.

Cars were few and far between still. There was a steelworks near Gilong now, and there was talk of a car manufacturing plant being built there to use the steel. So far, though, nothing had actually happened. Most cars in use were salvaged ancient vehicles converted to mostly run on steam power, at least up here in the north. So many gardens had contained decorative rubber tree varieties that rubber, at least, was something that was plentiful.

There were a few coal mines in operation out west, and that was the main fuel for transport and industry alike. And the power station that was at the back of Coolangatta. With the site of Brisbane still radioactive, coal was exported from Southport, the rail line feeding docks near where there had been a large swimming complex, or so he had been told in the history class. The fighting, pestilence, and starvation that had followed the nuclear war had reduced the population to almost subsistence levels, and it had taken centuries to recover.

He had seen pictures of the incredibly tall buildings that had stretched along the coast in the old days. They had been gutted in the aftermath of the nuclear war before some had been destroyed in the fighting, and the rest had collapsed over the centuries, more or less. A nuclear winter and mini ice age that had followed the war had reduced sea levels for several hundred years, but things had since returned to normal, with the huge rubble mounds forming a good base for people to build houses on with great views of the ocean.

Farmers still turned over the odd artifact from before the nuclear war in the farmlands that ran up the length of coast inland from the mounds of rubble. According to the history books, nearly the whole area from the ocean to the mountains had been covered in houses and industrial areas. Nowadays, it was mostly crops and cows with a few towns dotted in between all the way to the edge of the radioactive lands north of Yatlar.

Chapter 2

New skills

He finally summoned up his courage and told His father, who wasn’t impressed when Andrew told him that he could do things.

“Well, don’t do anything! It will only bring unfavorable attention to us all. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to move again.”

Running behind with Arturo 8 – but here is the cover

The whites in South Africa had nearly been exterminated following the war. As he looked and sounded the part, he was able to pass himself off as Indian. He managed to eke out a living there for several years until he could get a job on a ship heading for Indonesia. The Indonesian archipelago had not been as severely damaged by the nuclear war as more important island groups but lacked the industrial infrastructure to maintain civilization.

Fortunately, there was little racial discrimination in Indonesia. He was able to find work on first one island until his lack of visible aging became a problem and then another. Andrew wasn’t sure how long he spent in Indonesia, but it was several centuries, apparently. He married at least three times and had several children who were still there, Andrew assumed.

Eventually, as civilization recovered, it became harder for him to hide his existence, and he moved on. He moved first to Tonga, which, while virtually untouched by the war, had suffered from the breakdown of modern civilization. This was followed by Caledonia and then Nuzeeland, at first on the North Island, and then later he moved to the South Island.

Finally, he was forced to move again and headed for Ostraya. Now he was truly starting to age. He settled in Ballina and met Isabel McHenry, whom he genuinely fell in love with as far as the accounts that were handed down seemed to think. Unfortunately, they only managed to have one child, Andrew’s mother, Cheryl. Andrew still had vague memories of his grandfather from when he was young, but they were only faint.

What it meant was that Andrew had full-blown tellies on both sides of his ancestry. Exactly what that meant for him, he wasn’t sure, but he was pretty certain he could set off fires in his near vicinity when he got angry. He’d managed to avoid losing his temper when being bullied on several occasions, but when he was alone in hiding down the back of the park, he had caused several fires to start simply from the anger he felt. Fortunately, he’d managed to put them all out before they became a serious threat or anyone noticed them, but it had scared the hell out of even the first time he’d done it.

With practice, he found he could cause a bunch of dry leaves to burst into flame with a bit of concentration. Next, he had worked on getting twigs to catch alight as well, and these days could make a big lump of firewood catch alight without too much effort. He found that by thinking hard and pushing out his arm in a stop motion, he could project a force in the direction his arm pointed. He’d discovered this by accident when a large dog had rushed at him three months ago. His action of self-preservation had pushed the dog back about three meters and scared it so much it had run away.

late again – sorry people – got really busy.
Anyway – here is this weeks.

Most people seemed satisfied with that. He kept moving south along the coast, although at one stage, he had to detour to a considerable distance inland to avoid the radioactive ruins of a large city. He had a run-in with a small group of armed refugees, or thugs, or survivors. They’d tried to shake him down for whatever he possessed, which at the time wasn’t much, but he took exception to it. Unfortunately for the six thugs, most of them allowed themselves to get too close to him, so when he moved at his genetically enhanced speed, they died quickly and without being able to injure him. One man did manage to get a couple of shots off, but they went wide in the confusion of the fight.

The little battle presented him with weapons, useful supplies, and some useless money, as the economy had collapsed completely by that point. He did gain some half-decent clothes to replace the rags he had been walking around in for months. His other problem was that his combat boots were getting pretty ragged, but he had to keep them as none of the other men’s boots fitted. In the end, he only took three guns. He took two of the assault rifles the men had been armed with, with nearly all the available ammunition for those weapons, and a small pistol he didn’t recognize, but the man had clips for it, so he found a pocket on his uniform to fit them in and kept the gun.

One of the men had a usable backpack which he added to his ensemble and left all the other bits and pieces where the men lay. And the bodies. He felt no need to waste time and energy burying them. After that, it took him months but eventually, he reached the port of Karwar, which had somehow not been nuked. Although it was so damaged, it looked like a bomb had hit the city. He had to detour inland to finally get across the Kali River as the bridge had been destroyed at some point. As had the dam further up the river, which had caused a lot of destruction in the city, he guessed.

He spent some considerable time at Karwar, passing as a native from the north with his yokel accent. Eventually, his lack of apparent aging led to him taking a job on a ship as a deckhand. The ship mostly traveled the western Indian Ocean, calling at ports that hadn’t been bombed during the war. The trading wasn’t brilliant, and the lack of a suitable port where the ship could be dry-docked and the hull maintained would eventually result in the ship sinking.

Andrew wasn’t sure how long Mikail spent on the first ship, but at some point, he swapped vessels to one that traded between Southern Africa and South America. The ship was attacked by pirates in the South Atlantic some years later. Mikail was instrumental in driving them off but having shown his martial abilities to the crew, he thought it best to disappear and he jumped ship in South Africa.

–

Sorry people- real life got in the way. (I.e. I was busy and forgot)

His own father had lived for so long that he had been forced to do the fake death trick as well. In fact, both his father and grandmother had supposedly died in a boat tragedy off Nowra many years before Andrew was born. His grandmother had aged badly over the last forty years and died for real thirteen years ago. His father had not had any children before his first death, and it had taken him ten years into his new life here in Tweededs before he had found and married Cheryl Harkness.

His father had been fifty at the time but looked and passed for twenty-five. Andrew was their second child. Allison had been stillborn four years before Andrew had been conceived, and he was approaching his sixteenth birthday in two months. Which meant his father was at least seventy but still looked to be in his thirties. His younger sister Caroline was now ten, and he was worried about how she would go when she got to puberty.

But that wasn’t the end of the strange antecedents in his family. His mother was at least fifty and possibly older as she was careful never to give any clues as to her real age. She was the daughter of Arthur Harkness and Miranda Anderton. Except her surname was really Andropov. One of the events that led to the nuclear war was the assault on a train in the subcontinent by a group of Russians who were genetically engineered super soldiers who had managed to get free of their handlers and then immediately run amok.

While all the rest of his fellow soldiers grabbed women and then fled into the rough terrain, Michail Andropov had found a culvert and followed that to a stream where he had hidden for two days surviving on muddy water. The area had been searched thoroughly by allied forces, yet they somehow missed him despite troops passing close by several times. Over the next week, mostly moving at night, he kept up a southerly march until nearly a month after the train assault, he reached the coast in what had been Pakistan, and because there had been a nuclear explosion to his west, he headed east-southeast along the coast.

He stayed in the more sparsely settled farm areas, although there were plenty of refugees to hide amongst as the nuclear war lashed the world. He gradually picked up the local language or languages along the way, although at first, he presented himself as a casualty of the war. He had found a discarded robe or something that had been splashed with blood, now dried, which he ripped up and turned into a turban of sorts. He got around his lack of the local language by miming holding and firing a gun, then a shell dropping to produce a big explosion, and he point his blood-soaked, cloth-wrapped head and then wave his hands as if he couldn’t hear.

Andrew knew he was probably a Tallie as well, amongst other things. His paternal grandmother had been one of the very few full-on engineered people to escape North America. Perhaps the only one. She had been in the local town’s hospital when multiple nuclear missiles had hit the main genetic engineering site. Although severely burned, she had somehow survived radiation poisoning and slowly made her way south over the course of the next decade until she reached a part of Central America that had not been targeted.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-engineered prejudice in the area, so when a ship called planning to sail to southern Africa, she went for the ride. Southern Africa was not as badly hit as the northern hemisphere. All the big cities were glowing ruins, but there hadn’t been the saturation bombing that had occurred in most of the northern hemisphere countries. On the other hand, most whites had been in the cities, so she felt out of place and was treated like a second-class person because of her skin color.

A couple of years there, and when a rickety boat came through heading for India, she went with it. She arrived just in time for a war to break out between two rival successor states in the country’s southern half. As was the case elsewhere, most of the major cities had been bombed here as well as many of the military sites. There was also serious devastation along the border with Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, the border with China. The local warlord commandeered the ship she had traveled on to help transport a part of his army to land in the rear of his enemies. Which had left his grandmother high and dry in the port she had arrived in rather than where she had been headed.

Sixth months later, after the warlord’s overly ambitious campaign plan had led to his separated forces being defeated in detail, the victorious enemy army had swept into the city. His grandmother had become friendly with a young fellow at one of the few foreign-embassies still extant, the Ostrayan one, and found refuge with the young office worker. When he was transferred back to Ostraya, they had a quick marriage ceremony, and as his wife, she was allowed to come home with him.

Gilong was the largest city not to be bombed and had become the capital of Ostraya in the years following the war. It had taken ten years and a marauding mass of invaders from the islands to the north before both Kimberley and Pilbra had re-joined the Commonwealth. Through careful investments and judicious use of carefully made underworld contacts, she had periodically appeared to die, each time leaving her estate to a distant relative who was clearly several decades younger than her. Andrew didn’t know how many times she had managed this trick, but it had to have been several. She had finally started to age after his father’s birth, who was only the third child she had carried to term. Most of her somewhat frequent pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.

I have decided that on Mondays I will post a section from a novel I am writing set in Pam Uphoff’s Wine of the Gods series. If you haven’t heard of this series I heartily recommend it for sheer entertainment. Don’t be put off by the number of books – a lot are relatively short.
This is the first book. You can start elsewhere but The Empire of One is a good place but really, the beginning is the best place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/Outcasts-Gods-Wine-Book-ebook/dp/B005VFXN3U/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2CXFF6S6NS1QR&keywords=wine+of+the+gods&qid=1653894870&s=digital-text&sprefix=wine+of+the+gods%2Cdigital-text%2C277&sr=1-1

now to the first section of Ostraya part 1

Chapter 1

The dirt path that ran along the edge of the cemetery was not used by most people. The two-meter brick wall and occasional crypt upper works made it a gloomy place with its east-west orientation. When combined with the dense scrub, mostly lantana, that encompassed most of the path’s right-hand side, it meant the path was only used by the brave or desperate.

Andrew Harris walked along it steadily, hoping none of the small group of bullies that frequently made his life hell had noticed him duck down the track. The wall that surrounded the cemetery curved to the right just past the end of the track, so if none of them saw him duck right, then they would expect to see him around the curve of the wall. The track itself turned right about three meters in for about two meters, then returned east-west till it emerged on Franklin Street. The odd dog leg was obviously due to some ancient change in land boundaries at the western end, where there were two meters at one alignment and then the rest of the block at a more southerly alignment. It meant the block with the scrub had once been two blocks, really, now that he thought about it.

He glanced around before emerging onto Franklin Street, but he seemed to have escaped the other boy’s attention, if they had come after him at all, rather than just yelling abuse at him from a distance. He could deal with them if he had to, but he would rather not. Too much trouble and awkward questions if he got into a fight and beat up the four of them. Yes, he took karate lessons, irregularly as his mum could afford them, but his blue belt would not seem to be advanced enough to account for his taking them down. Better not to have questions asked by avoiding trouble.

Eight hundred years after the nuclear war, a lot of people had a few of the engineered genes in their DNA, and no one really cared. Andrew, on the other hand, had a lot. By the time society had rebuilt to the point they could actually test DNA easily, the genes had spread so widely from the few modified survivors that had escaped the holocaust in the northern hemisphere that there was not a lot anyone could do about it. In fact, there was a growing movement where people started proclaiming how many of the engineered genes they had like it was some sort of scout’s honor badge or something.

Two main groups were leading the charge, the Tallies and the Purples. The Purples were a group that had a gene that induced a purple shade to their skin and hair. It was not that common, and the purple coloration was extremely faint, but it was definitely there. The Tallies had an engineered gene or genes that gave them great height. Mostly in the plus two-meter category, sometimes approaching two and a half meters. They weren’t the same as normal tall people who tended to be thin, lanky, and somewhat ill-proportioned. The engineered Tallies were proportionally shaped for their height and made up a considerable proportion of the teams in sports that required height, like basketball, and strength, like football.