The Silver Trojan Arrives

“Hey, Jack.” Cindy said, reaching over to the passenger seat to gently poke her younger brother’s cheek. “Wake up, we’re home.”

Jack’s eyes slowly opened up, the sounds of heavy rain beating down on the car’s roof and his sister’s pestering finger being the first things that his tired mind registered. He tried to lean his head towards the window in a groggy effort to get Cindy to stop, but she just reached further and continued to bug him. Jack groaned and threw up his left arm out of frustration, knocking her hand away.

“Alright, alright.” He sighed. “I’m up, damn it.”

“I was just making sure.” Cindy snickered, then unfastened her seatbelt before placing her hand on the door’s latch. “If we weren’t in my car, I would’ve just left you in here and told mom you were still at John’s.”

Jack gave a weak laugh. “That actually would’ve been pretty funny, on some level.” He admitted, glancing over just in time to see the seatbelt strap exit from between his twenty-four-year-old step-sister’s perky, D-cup-sized breasts.

Unfortunately, he was too tired and weak to get any kind of pervy thrill from the sight. Jack always enjoyed seeing those creamy melons in motion when the opportunity arose, but ultimately felt nothing in that moment when they jiggled around in the orange, low-cut tank-top she had them bralessly confined in. He turned away when she opened the car door and stepped out into the rain, and he gave his face a rub before following suit.

The short journey from the sidewalk to the front door was rough. Even though it was late-spring, the rain pouring down on him and Cindy was ice-cold, or at least it felt that way to Jack. His sister wasn’t shaking and trembling like he was as they both walked into the house, so he assumed it was just his oncoming cold exaggerating his sense of temperature.

Already soaked and dripping, Cindy kicked off her expensive white sneakers by the door and felt the need to announce their arrival back home to the rest of the house.

“We’re back!” She shouted, then turned and skipped off into the kitchen entrance beside them. “Dad, I’m stealing a couple of your beers!”

“‘Kay.” Their father lazily called out from the living room. “Just be sure to leave the last one for me this time.”

“Maybe, aha!”

Jack took a deep breath at the sound of heavy footsteps approaching, and was soon greeted by Debra, his short, overweight, and very overbearing mother, who was wearing a scowl on her pudgy, middle-aged face.

She closed the gap between them without saying a word, and Jack didn’t flinch when her hand snapped up and slapped itself against his very warm forehead.

“God...” Debra grunted, shaking her head as she lowered her hand and crossed her chubby arms in front of her in disappointment. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay at John’s for the weekend.”

“Sorry.” Jack shrugged, then coughed into his gray and long-sleeved shirt, his body still occasionally trembling from the cold, wet clothes he wore. “He said he wasn’t sick anymore, so I thought-”

“That you would go over there and get yourself sick?” Debra unkindly said with a raised eyebrow, still unsmiling. “Nice try, but you’re still going to school tomorrow.”

“Figured.” Jack said with a sigh and slumped shoulders, any hopes he had for a day off now crushed. “Why would I expect you to care about my health?”

“Don’t get smart with me, mister.” Debra snapped, both figuratively and literally as she reached up and snapped her fingers in front of her son’s face. “You were the one who didn’t have any regard for your own health. Don’t go blaming me for your mistakes.”

“I’m gonna’ go take a shower and change.” Jack said, walking past his five-foot-tall mother as she ruthlessly glared at him. “Don’t wait up.”

The piggy brunette huffed with an bitter sense of triumph while she watched him leave, and then turned towards the kitchen to go give Cindy hell about what she was doing.

“When are you going to get a job and move out?!”

“As soon as I finish this beer, aha!”

“Why you little-...”

Jack shook his head as he ignored the incoming shouting match that his cunty step-mother and free-spirited sister were about to have, entering the living room to find his step-father and other sister minding their own businesses respectively.

“Hey bud.” Mike said, relaxing back in his large recliner as he barely paid his son any mind, per usual. The large-bellied, hulking mass of a man looked as tired as Jack did, and was loudly sipping from a skinny brown bottle while watching a football game on the living room television.

“Hm.” Jack mumbled, at least bothering to acknowledge his lazy father’s polite, gruff-voiced greeting.

“Jack, can I borrow your laptop?” Holly, his other older sister, asked him, sitting in the middle of the floor with her legs crossed and with all sorts of art supplies scattered around where she sat. She was surrounded by numerous sheets of paper, many different colored pencils and markers, as well as several rulers and protractors that she used on her vividly detailed art pieces to make sure everything was perfect down to the smallest detail.

“Why?” He asked, stopping at the main hallway’s entrance and turning around. “What happened to yours?”

“Fuck if I know.” The short-haired, twenty-year-old redhead said in a flat tone and with a shrug. “When I woke up this morning it was on the floor and the screen was cracked.”

“It was probably Patches, then.” Jack rolled his eyes. “That stupid cat can knock anything off of the edge of anything.”

“Whatever.” Holly said dismissively, turning her attention back to a portrait of the sun setting over an empty beach. “Is that a ‘yes’? Because I need to email my history professor and tell him that my report on the first world war is going to be late. God, that was the most boring thing that I’ve ever had to study for.”

“Use your phone to do it.” Jack said, already having turned away and was walking down the hallway towards his room. “None of my stuff is allowed anywhere near that little shithead.”

“Dick!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jack quietly groaned, walking past the mentioned calico feline as she made her way down the hallway in the opposite direction. Patches meowed at him, and he wordlessly flipped her off, neither of them bothering to directly look at one-another.

Yep, it was just another dull and boring night for Jack around the Thorn household, only with the added bonus of not being able to breathe through his nose and having a headache that was pounding within the core of his brain. When Jack finally made it to his room and shut the door behind him, he instantly regretted having left the window-unit air conditioner on before leaving for John’s. The cold air cut straight through his wet clothes and chilled him to the bone, his entire body quaking with shivers while he was barely able to move from his locked-up and weakened muscles.

It took all of his strength to make it to the AC unit so that he could shut it off, his teeth chattering all-the-while. After that, Jack peeled off his clothes and threw them in the empty laundry hamper by his computer desk. In doing so, seeing his laptop sitting there caused him to realize that Holly would likely come into his room and steal it anyway as soon as he hopped into the shower. Respecting personal boundaries wasn’t something that the rest of Jack’s family knew how to do very well, and they all basically did what they pleased whenever they wanted something, not giving a damn about any potential consequences. That was especially the case when any of them wanted something from him in particular, and considering the fact that he was everyone’s least favorite family member, Jack wasn’t able to disallow or retaliate in any way without being the one who was in some sort of trouble at the end of the day.

Fuck it, Jack thought to himself, figuring that he could make use of the laptop while he was locked away in the bathroom for the next hour anyway. The dorky teen slowly made his way over towards his dresser, took a couple of allergy pills to help clear up his headache and sinuses, pulled out a pair of black boxer-briefs and slipped into them, went back to grab his computer, then left the hellish cold of his room and went off to the home’s main bathroom. Thankfully, he didn’t pass anyone on the way there and get mocked or scolded for having his computer with him in tow to that specific destination.

The door was quickly closed and locked behind him just after entering, and the shower’s hot water was crashing down onto the tiled floor below in a matter of seconds, causing an eruption of hot, soothing steam to flow out into the rest of the bathroom.

Jack let out a sigh of relief as the room’s temperature rose, and his involuntary shivering soon slowed to a stop while he was leaning back against the edge of the sink’s countertop. He may have been a virgin, but something deep down in the pit of his perverted soul told him that such the quick, drastic change of his comfort level he had just experienced was better than the best of kinky sex the world had to offer. His sinuses quickly loosened up from the heat and steam passing through them, and so Jack rolled up some toilet paper from a shelf above to blow his stuffy nose.

After that, he sat down on the closed toilet lid with his elbows digging into his knees and face in his palms, simply enjoying the warmth of the air around him. Jack let out a long, satisfying yawn, drifting off into a mild daydream for a short time, but long enough for the steam to completely obscure his view if he were to look up and open his eyes. However, once he eventually did and realized this, his mind instantly thought back to his laptop, which was sitting out and exposed to the increasing amount of moisture in the air.

“Damn it.” He groaned in frustration, turning to grab his damp laptop from the space on the counter next to him. “So much for keeping it safe…”

It definitely had a thin film of condensation on its outer casing, and Jack could only assume that some of it had developed between the screen and keyboard, as well. He slowly and carefully repositioned himself to sit down on the mint-green rug covering part of the white-tiled floor below where the building steam still hadn’t reached, then reached up for and pulled down the towel hanging on the rack above him to dry off the laptop’s casing. With a defeated sigh, he opened up his computer to see what the damage was, if any.

Jack let out a deep sigh of relief when the screen flicked on. “Thank fuck.” He whispered, watching as the initial wall of white transitioned into the homescreen’s familiar wallpaper, though none of the icons that were usually there appeared.

He waited, and waited, and waited for the machine to finish loading, which it usually was able to do fairly quickly for the most part, but Jack still found himself staring at the edgy anime wallpaper for a full minute without any of his browser and game icons showing up. Oh no, he thought to himself in frustration as he tried the touchpad confident that the cursor wouldn’t appear and move around. Strangely enough, it did, letting Jack know that his screen wasn’t frozen and that something had just gone wrong with the boot-up sequence.

He didn’t think much of it, already assuming the worst as far as the computer’s condition was concerned, but he did think it was strange that the only thing to appear in the time he waited was the wi-fi connectivity symbol down in the bottom-left corner. That sure is helpful, Jack sarcastically thought with a roll of his eyes, what good is having internet if he couldn’t actually access it with a browser? In an attempt to reboot the machine, he reached for the laptop’s power button on its left side, and quickly pulled his hand back when a sudden jolt of electricity was sent through his finger upon contact with it.

“Ow, fuck!” Jack hissed through grit teeth, feeling the mild electrical tremor continue on up his arm into his shoulder, then spread out through the rest of his body in a single instant. Clutching his wrist with his right hand, the shock that pulsed through him honed in on both his heart and brain, causing the young man to completely freeze from the overwhelming sensations for a brief time.

It didn’t take long for him to be able to gasp and begin breathing again; for his locked-up muscles to recover and slowly regain movement; for his eyes to slowly reopen to the blinding haze of steam that was continuing to descend upon him… only when his vision was restored, he looked down to realize that his laptop had completely disappeared.

Jack’s eyes went wide and he slowly back up against glass shower wall behind him, his mind reeling from whatever the fuck just happened to him.

What the fuck _did _just happen? He wondered, his heart now pounding like a war-drum as he aimlessly glanced around the misty bathroom. Jack had been shocked before in the past, but what he experienced was something similar to how he imagined sticking a metal fork in an electrical socket to feel. Also, he thought as his eyes went down to the now-empty space on the floor, where the fuck did his laptop go?! There’s no way it could’ve just exploded and turned to dust, and even if it had, where was the debris, or any sign of the computer at all?!

Jack felt like he was going crazy, as if he’d accidentally zapped himself into a parallel-reality where he hadn’t brought his laptop into the bathroom, one where he wasn’t wracked with fatigue and could actually breathe through his nose.

Wait, he thought, something wasn’t quite right about that…

Jack swallowed, and then took a sharp, deep inhale through the clear pathways of his nostrils, able to breathe without any issue at all. As he exhaled, he brought his hands up in front of his face and looked down at the rest of his naked, skinny body, then began to move his limbs around and flex certain sensitive muscles. Finally, but slowly, Jack rose up onto his feet and carefully examined how easy it was to do.

Almost as if he suddenly weren’t sick anymore.

“Correct.” A female’s voice said from his right side. “I took it upon myself to eliminate your illness, Master.”

Jack shrieked as he laid eyes on this woman and her strange, stunning appearance. He backed up against the empty towel-rack, his words of panic and confusion caught in his throat while eyeing down a being whose presence ignored the swirling clouds of steam around them. She was sitting on the closed toilet-lid with her slender legs crossed and had her small hands delicately folded together in her lap. The twenty-something-year-old woman’s youthful skin was almost as white as the driven snow, her pale complexion practically blending in with the steam, but her facial expression was just as cold and emotionless. Her hair was impossibly silver, and was styled in a short, military buzz-cut with the left side shaved off. She was wearing a sleek, gray, and skin-tight bodysuit that hugged her slim frame perfectly, leaving the sleeves and leggings cut off just above her elbows and knees, and it didn't leave any crevasse or lining of her impeccable figure’s form to the imagination.

The woman’s eyes were the most beautiful thing about her, Jack couldn’t help but think to himself; their irises looked just like tiny discs of stainless-steel, and each of them had a small, circular symbol that appeared to be carved into their centers in place of her pupils.

“Wh-who the hell are you?!” An anxiety-riddled Jack asked after an eternity of silence, finally finding his voice. “And what do you w-want?!”

“My name is Theta.” She said, ever-so-slightly tilting her head to the side as she was looking up and directly into Jack’s wide eyes. She then gave him a smirk, one that seemed innocent enough, but the lack of happiness in her cold eyes sent chills down Jack's spine, if but for a moment. “And I want to bring your every wish and desire into existence within this branch of reality, Master.”