Talk to Me? Do You Deserve It?

Louisiana nights were damp and sweltering. The air was thick with the earthy stench of rain-soaked soil and the fermented rot of unknown plants, clinging stickily to the skin and making one deeply uncomfortable.

Chu Hang and Carol slowly descended from several thousand meters in the air. The entire process was utterly silent, without even stirring a breeze. Their toes touched down lightly on a fairly well-trimmed lawn, like two leaves silently blown down by the night wind.

Before them stood a typical Southern American wooden house. It had two stories and a wraparound porch. Its white paint looked somewhat weathered beneath the cold moonlight, bearing the marks of time. An old Ford pickup sat crookedly on the lawn out front, several empty beer bottles tossed in its bed. Beside it stood a basketball hoop with a tattered net that swayed gently in the night breeze.

Everything looked so ordinary, so full of everyday life, utterly out of place with the supersonic flight and energy resonance they had just experienced.

Carol stood there blankly, completely still, staring fixedly at the house. Her body trembled faintly beyond her control, not out of fear, but from a stirring deep within her soul.

She had been here before...

She did not remember how she had come here or when, but she simply knew. Her mind was like an old projector with faulty wiring, frantically flickering through fragmented, silent black-and-white images.

She saw herself in dirty coveralls, sitting in a rocking chair on this porch with a bottle of iced beer in hand, laughing and talking with a Black woman whose face she could not make out, seemingly arguing about something.

She saw herself on this lawn, holding a little girl with pigtails high above her head. The girl's laughter seemed to travel across