'Til Kingdom Comes - The Banished Prince Vol 3: The Prophecy

Smart Heather

"This White Room feels like a classroom, don't you think so, my dear? We got an unseeing lecturer and there are only two students here in this realm of yours. Hehehe." Heather was gleefully swinging left and right on the revolving high backed seat this time and she used her feet to control the movement so it would not spin out of control like the earlier time...!

"Yeah, it feels like so. Well, Ceres, you can begin right now." I called out and soon, Ceres was moving a kind of cute little hand across the screen and pointed to each of the following items as we repeated what she had explained like mouse, keyboard, CPU and monitor screen.

I wanted very much to ask her how come this little cute thing with two buttons and without a tail could be called a mouse but Heather beat me to it.

Heather lifted it up and looked at the underside, only to find a red tiny light underneath and there's no legs or any gender to indicate if the mouse she was holding was male or female.

There wasn't a tail to it but somehow the mouse looked like a mouse if the two small buttons in front could be considered as its eyes, even though it was missing a head and the buttons were facing upwards...!

Everything was cordless and we were soon introduced to the keyboard as Heather lifted it up and place it on her lap instead. The keyboard had a back-light and the keys illuminated in the low light environment of the White Room.

What we had seen on the big screen before us was exactly the same as what we see on our monitor screen. Those little cute figures on the screen were called icons and all the necessary icons were there — word processing, desktop publishing and even a drawing program that had a palette of colours and a paintbrush on it.

We were told to move the mouse on the surface and we watched the same cute little hand moved along the monitor screen. The buttons on the mouse were used to click on the icons to activate the program.

I looked at the keyboard and decided to place it on my lap too, just like that Heather was doing and the feel of the light and strong material looks rather pleasing to the touch and sight.

I saw the keyboard had a clickety feeling to it and when I pressed on it, it came back right up immediately. It seemed that there's a little something underneath the keys they make them bounce back once it's being depressed.

After we had been shown of the full introduction of the personal computer, we now moved on to moving the mouse around and the little hand that moves across the screen was known as the pointer.

"We will now do a simple word processing where you would be learning how to type. The Shift button makes the words to be in uppercase when depressed and the Caps Lock key would make the whole words to be in uppercase throughout until you depress it once more."

"Pressing the Shift button allows you to insert special characters on the top row of your keyboard and releasing it would insert the normal numerical instead."

"Now, what I want you to do is to move your mouse and hover the little pointer over the 'W' that signifies the word processing program and click the left-hand button once."

Ceres was guiding us on how to coordinate the movements of the little pointer across the screen, activating the program, bringing up the word processing blank screen before us in the monitor screen and then, we would soon be madly hitting the keys like a chicken pecking for food on the ground, with two hands and one finger each at a time...!

Within a short period of time, we were able to hit the keys and type out our names, learn how to clear the screen back to its normal state, learning how to cut and paste and lastly how to click and drag to highlight the words on the screen to adjust the fonts and its size.

There weren't many fonts on the screen (maybe to keep up with the current fonts from the Gutenberg machine) but we were able to make huge sizes of our names and then highlight the whole name to add bold, italic or strikethrough styles.

We were having fun using the word processing program and before we knew it, an hour had passed since Ceres and taught us on how to use the desktop publishing program where we could insert some images that were found in the library.

The only thing is to remember what kind of icons to press because Heather was seamlessly printing her name as well as our children's name.

It seems that she had used all the colours that are available on the program and wanted to make labels for the twins.

Ceres concluded that the visual tutorials and I turned to Heather as I told her we could come back here and practise some more. I juggled the boxes of medals in front of her to remind our main purpose of coming to this realm and she slapped her forehead, totally forgetting about our main intent...!

"Ooh... Ooh... Sorry dear, this machine here is really fun to learn and see how many prints that I had made from small to biggest. Hahaha. The children could have these to learn their alphabets and also to read out and see how their names would look like when it's printed this way...! "

Heather was happily collecting all the printouts and placed them on the handcart as she pushed it near me. "Let's go to the Fusion Chamber now my dear. We could run a few machines to reproduce these medals, am I right?"

"Yes, my honey bunny... Let's go then. We got 2 more hours here and I wonder how long we need to spend while waiting to reproduce these medals." I beckoned to Heather to come closer as I clicked on the information system panel and slowly swipe the room to our intended destination.

Once we had reached there, I placed the printouts elsewhere as I place 4 empty crates near 4 machines. "Let's do a test reproduction and see how well it does and how long it takes to complete one. I intend to make 200 Macleod Star medals, 500 Bronze Good Service Medals, 200 Silver Good Service Medals and lastly 50 Golden Good Service Models."

"Since we had successfully brought these medals to this realm, I don't think we would have any problems to make reproductions of these medals and bring it back with us once it's completed."

"Come, dear, you take two medals and then follow my instructions." I motioned her to take the bronze and silver gold service medals that would be reproduced 500 and 200 sets respectively.

She went to one machine, opened the sliding door and placed the bronze medal together with its mini ribbon clasp and the box holder too and closed the sliding door of the machine.

Upon my instructions, she turned the first dial to duplicate, then multiple and lastly accessories. She checked the dial for the quantity and turned to 500.

She had made sure that the medal inside the machine was bronze as her hand held the silver one and once she had confirmed of the process, she pulled the lever.

Immediately the machine hummed slightly as the revolving lights in front of the label moved around clockwise and she discovered that a single revolution means a single item had been duplicated.

The empty crate that was placed in the marked out area on the floor remained empty as she moved on to the next machine and related the process.

After doing so for the Silver Good Service Medal, she turned the dial to 200 before she cranked the lever towards her. After she had done so, I was pretty sure that she would have no problem to continue the test of the medals in my hand as I handed them to her instead.

She gladly took them from me and proceeded to place them into the machines for the Golden Good Service Medal and for the Macleod Star medal too.

After doing so, she brushed her palms together and bounded next to me as the machines were slowly doing their work for us.

"Let's go back to the White Room dear... There's so much I want to do and haven't finished what I was doing."

"I wanted to see what the desktop publishing program could do since I clicked on the image library and found thousand of pictures I could insert in."

"Since the words could be used to be enlarged or shrunk, I think the images could be done the same way too...! "

Heather was literally bounding beside me like a small little girl and her ample bosom was running against my arm, even though I was wearing the full suit of armour still. Her bounciness could really give someone a nose bleed...!

I nodded my head as I looked at my information system panel and clicked back to the White Room where we were when we arrived earlier. Heather was excited as she released my hands and bounded back to her seat and started to call up the desktop publishing program by clicking on it.

It seemed that she had more ideas than me as I sat down and stared instead at the machine after I had taken a cup of hot tea and was calmly sipping on it.

"What are you thinking of Audemars. I wasn't able to read your mind right now at all." Ceres sounded in my mind since it's rather personal and doesn't want to disrupt Heather who was hitting the keyboard with her fingers as she moved some images over around the screen.

"I don't know, Ceres. It seems that this environment before me is very familiar. Not the setting but the way I'm sitting here in front of this machine is like I was used to this type of environment as if I was used to working in such places before."

I reached my hand out to the sides of the seat I was sitting on and I felt some lever were there. Subconsciously I moved my hands and pulled back a lever and the seat I was sitting on dropped lower by a few inches.

I raised my butt off the seat and pulled the lever once again and the seat raised back to its normal position. Heather turned her head and looked at the commotion and she too tried to pull the lever at the sides of her seat but instead of bringing it up and down, the seat suddenly inclined backwards, making Heather scream for help again...!

Heather didn't notice that I was actually pulling the other lever but Heather was pulling the one that makes the seat incline backwards and forwards. I went over to Heather and adjusted the seat for her once again and she was looking rather pale as she thought that the seat would make her fall backwards.

This little silly girl... Hahaha...!

I returned back to my seat and I held the mouse in my right hand. Somehow the feeling of holding such things like the mouse and keyboard was like a part of my original self before I started to transmigrate through multiple characters and parallel universes.

I looked at the many icons on the screen before me and I saw a blue colour orb which I recognised as a globe with the words 'WWW' underneath it. I wanted to click on it but the words seemed to be greyed out.

"I'm sorry Audemars, but you won't be able to access the Internet and the world wide web. It's unavailable here in this era and the information that you may receive would be like a few hundred sets of encyclopedias filled  to the brim...!"

"Tell me Ceres, who am I in the past? Is there's any way I could recollect some information to know who I was from the start and I am sure I don't happen to start this life in the Polynesian era, am I right?"

I asked since I am rather curious as there might be some clues to know who I was before. Did something happen to me that threw me to the first transmigration trip to the Polynesia Islands where I started to learn about meditation, opening the chakra points and also the third eye?

"I won't be able to answer that question that's lingering inside your mind because I was only created recently when I was the former self in the parallel universe as Audemars Macleod too."

"Max existed before this and the only person that could answer any questions that you may need to find the solution is you, Audemars. You yourself hold the key to the information that is safely tucked away at the back of your mind."

"Sigh... How I wished you could be more transparent, Ceres." I let out a long sigh audibly and Heather glanced back at me and wondered why I was sitting there doing nothing at all.

Heather was intent to perform her desktop publishing programs and from my angle, I could see that she had done quite a lot of things on the screen. Guess she had gotten a good grip on the task at hand even though she was only at it for an hour.

Smart and bright, my dear little Heather... Hahaha.