The Oracle of Orbville

Lazer Rayz paints away his pain. Intensely and athletically attacking the wall in a meditative dance, the light-ray painter of Orbville, known well as Rayz, renders a scene of manicured rose gardens framing a cemetery. Always meticulous in detail, he usually busts out layered aerosol art as a daily duty; depicting family scenes of comfort, of rewards for obedience and adherence to rules. This day is a deviation from his employment by the Orbville village authorities - of serving to remind the community of their humble obligations to logical order. As a special dedication to his mother to mark the beginning of his journey as an orphan, Rayz is spraying a memorial mural of her grave site, which lays in another village that she was herself raised in, worlds away from Orbville.

Rayz slides backwards, gazing into the illusory view now adorning an old stone wall. Across the rose bushes and graves, upwards, into the magic hour. A vanished sun leaves a trailing gradient of blue hues to contrast against vivid roses in every color.

Rayz mother Jeneva had been a charlatan who’d used powers of psychic impression to implant past negative experiences into the minds of visitors to their family guesthouse, advertised as a ‘place of healing.’ She would research upcoming guests through the governing network’s files, which were discreetly opened up to her to by her boyfriend in a village records department. He was an established local with multi-generational force. Finding data on any inflicted traumas in a guest’s past – Jeneva would set up flashback scenes with scents and props. By hypnotically whispering triggering names and words around them, they were likely to fall into the set up trap. Next, she would sell them the cure - treatments ranging from diamond wand reiki, to gold-dust baths of purification. Jeneva actually believed strongly in her own abilities but had been under-appreciated in her quest for a higher role during childhood. And so, she imagined the reputation earned from healing these guests would boost her status.

But Rayz had no idea that his mother’s magic was never completely genuine.

As much as Jeneva exploited strangers, she doted on her only son. From birth, he was worshipped in a shrine built around his cot. Rituals he recalled from his early years include being hoisted through the streets in a chariot carried by fanatical adults singing songs about him. He was even named originally as Light Ray, in his mother’s hope he would inherit her imagined psychic condition, the rituals leading to his potentially becoming a chosen child. She had dreamed that he be identified as a living deity in early adulthood, then foreseeably, their family would be elevated into the realm of the rulers.

Memories held sacred by Rayz himself of his mother diversified greatly from the truth, as the effect of the years of his schooling led only to total trust in any elders, numerically consolidated by simply, age. Reflections of Jevena brushing his blonde afro curls straight, wrapping them into plaits for the ceremony celebrating his induction into the ranks of civil servitude on graduation day only a few years before, are interrupted by an abrupt bump into the body of another. Rayz leaps and swivels around. Inside the fragmented moment, his eyeballs are locked with those of a tall teenage boy, perhaps around five or six years younger than himself. A gaze etched in kohl peeking from a ruby red hoodie takes over him.

Rayz realizes whose energy he has fallen into.

‘Oh… sorry. You are – The Oracle of Orbville!’, he drops to The Oracle’s feet. The dusty roadside puffs up in clouds around the feet of The Oracle as Rayz bows, his imagination injecting an illusion of Orbville’s newly discovered God of Fortune floating up in it.

A hand gently reaches his to lift him. The Oracle speaks, ‘You don’t have to. Please, call me Ory,’ and Ory reaches for his other hand. ‘Close your eyes.’

Rayz feels a sensation in his palm, softer than skin with a fluttering tickle he imagines is what butterfly wings may feel like to a rose.

‘Open’, Ory instructs.

Rayz unfolds his palm to see it filled with gold rose petals. Ory closes Rayz hand back over, then re-opens his fingers for him. A full rose has materialized. Stunned at the sight of this perfect golden flower that has seemed to be magically restored from pieces, the precision and beauty of nature is right there in Rayz’s hand.

‘Your true destiny is in your palm. But it is intricately entwined with your past. Your mother.’

‘Wow! You know that?! This new mural is for my mother, but no-one else in the village had yet been told. Thank you…’ Rayz is overwhelmed at the magician’s energy, a chosen one who at just thirteen, has been declared unanimously as a gifted receiver of insights, and an interpretive articulator of the natural resource symbology - to be trained in the higher arts of prediction as taught directly by Orbville rulers. An esteemed role in this village of gods and goddesses. ‘You are the latest talent comp winner - the next incarnation of the Fortune Finder! I heard the stories, now… I know! You live up to it!’

‘Yes. I won the talent contest here in Orbville. Although I am from over the mountains’, Ory gestures upwards.

‘But before? You must have been here? I remember your last life, you visited mother when I was little. Is it – are you… it is you, oh Uncle Oracle!’ Rayz feels a rising glow from within, ‘It was you who gave me the secret pens!’

His mind reclines back into memory. Seeing himself as an early rebel, drawing in his room unseen, late at night. The Fortune God as acknowledged in their previous embodiment had been friendly with his mother and gave him pens which were usually forbidden at home, being used only in classrooms or offices, then handed back at the end of every day. Intuitively Rayz had stolen blank pads from school to accompany the secret pens, swiftly swiping them under his shirt while the teacher blinked. Alone in the deepest dark hours, his talent had flourished.

The institution of family ruled Orbville. Equality was in fashion also, but many persisted in innate competitive ways regardless of the policies of shared wealth and fair allocation of resources. This was particularly rife in the minds of those who sought to enter their children in the talent quest events, where reincarnated deities were believed to be found through talents displayed in the contests. Couples would even deliberately time their conceptions based on estimated guesses for when the next in line in a sacred sequence would be deemed to be reborn.

But Jeneva's hopes for being discovered the mother of an avatar were shattered when Rayz was discovered drawing in the back of class one day. His teacher was morally obligated to hand him over to the local government. He was only lucky his secret supplies were never discovered.

The Oracle pulls him back to the present, ‘I have just one thing to say… but first, do you believe in the magic? Do I have your full trust and discretion once again?’

‘Of course – anything!’ Rayz replies instantly.

‘You must follow me. We will depart this entrapment together! See, I am real. We are real. But this village, the order it is cursed under, is not… Did you ever know why you had to hide your drawings?’

‘Well yes, it was because of the poorest villagers and their insane jealousy from the old world…’

‘Yes. But no. There is more. But before I can tell, you must escape the enchantment Orbville has over you – with me!’

Ory leads Rayz upwards to a lookout. Sweeping his hand across the landscape below, he enquires, ’Why did you follow me? You think the magic is real?...’

Rayz nods, confused, yet trusting the lure of The Oracle.

‘Let us ascend, higher,’ and so they begin climbing and slipping kicking rocks sliding down into an avalanche. Once the peak is reached, the beautiful village in the valley appears replaced by piles of rubble. Ory only laughs wildly, ’You should never have trusted me, you will never see your home as it was, ever again…’

Ray gasps. Feeling a sense of levitation as the stretcher is lifted from the base of the mountain he has plunged down, pummelled by rocks, when a dangerous daydream sent him reeling from his rock-climbing adventure.

‘He looks concussed’ and ‘His mother is the headmistress, do your best!’ and ‘That other kid fell here on the same day 6 years ago!’ Voices swirling around him.

Days later, Ray checks himself out of hospital. Never looking back. Lazer Rayz now signs streets everywhere with his name, projecting art, beauty invoking truth. He leads a color revolution - tumbling grim greyscale buildings where living bodies were trapped inside. As he shakes his cans, the artist who sprays the light rays disrupts a world of deceptive dependencies that were imposed by ruling illusionists.