Timelines: What if Spain Failed to Control the World?

grayghost: Haha , you should hear me sing it ...

coz1: update coming tonight . I was frantically studying for my midterm yesterday so I have a small break tonight before more studying for the midterms next week . YIKES

grubnessul & grayghost: ROFL

15 November 1608

The city was a beacon of pride for the vastness of the Persian Empire, and its minarets could be seen even from as far away as where Jafar now rode on horseback. Spires and domes piled atop multicoloured paints hemmed in by the tightness of the outer wall represented the grandeur of Islamic architecture.

Jafar held his staff in his right hand as he managed the reins on his animal. The Tigris was glimmering in the gentle moonlight of the Mesopotamian evening. “Peace be with you,” a voice said from his flank. Jafar kept trotting along.

“Peace be also with you,” Jafar replied quietly. “How are my preparations?”

“As well as can be expected,” the voice said again as the figure of another horse crept to pace with Jafar’s steed. Traveling down the same road and looking ahead, both eyes avoided each other. “The soldiers are restless for their gold—it is not enough that the Spanish have given us so much insult.”

“Someone once told me: ‘gold does not always get you good soldiers,’” Jafar quoted, “‘but good soldiers can always get you gold.”

“Who told you that?” the still companion asked.

“A ghost.” Jafar picked up his pace as if the reminder of those words spurred impetus towards the city.

“Shall I have the men prepare for your return?” the voice asked again from the flank being slightly left behind. Jafar finally passed a glance to the man’s direction. It was obvious why he disdained to look at the face of he who spoke to him—it was marred with the malicious scars of battle as if an eagle had come down to this man’s face and warred with it with its ravenous claws. Even an eye was claimed and hidden by a piece of cloth as dark as a night without stars. It only took Jafar a second to remember why he feigned ignorance to such seedy company.

“Yes,” the tall gentleman replied, “I’ll meet with your men tonight—there is much work to be done: I’ve received word from the Sublime Porte that we’re expecting someone with our gold and that we should welcome him. He will be arriving three days from dawn tomorrow.”

The man trailing behind the vizier narrowed his eye at the intonation and let his silence testify to his obedience. “I shall make the preparations for the arrival.” With that, the subordinate veered off in a separate direction apparently to enter the city by a separate venue. Jafar moved his eyes forward to the main gate by which he was to enter. Although Jafar was much older, the other man with the unfortunate face betrayed all the signs of age before his time—perhaps it was the kind of life that he had asked him to live—that profession which really does seem to take the life out of someone.


16 November 1608

Raul chewed on his stiff piece of bread with a utilitarian bite. His back rested against the wall that was on the verge of dropping its scaly paint veneer and revealing the earthy contents underneath. It was definitely a run down place that he now inhabited, but the veiled window did afford an impressive view of that target city of Baghdad only a few leagues in the distance.

As he ground teeth against grain, he rose to his feet to part the veil at the window near him just enough to peek a blue eye towards the Persian citadel of the West. The sight of it, however, impressed a scowl onto Raul’s face. From bastion to bastion, the length of its wall from that distance seemed to stretch on in a giant bowl around its river. With its domes and turrets it carried the weight of Persian Imperial prestige into the valley between the rivers. In the reddening sunset of the evening, its sandy walls and long shadows reminded him of that city which a great Poet had visited—the City of Dis.

A trembling shudder and the door behind him propped open and closed hastily. Riku’s figure bolted the wooden partition in place and presented himself. Raul covered the window and turned to look at him while Willem sat up from the makeshift straw bed that he had been resting on.

“What have you found out?” Raul’s question bolted towards the arriving one.

“It’s not good,” Riku admitted. “It was hard enough trying to get into the city being as pale as a sheet of snow, but finding that man was a tenuous task. Luckily, that’s why I brought this.” Riku held up a grappling hook with what seemed like a coat of sand coloured paint on its many prongs.

“Speak to me of your plans, not of your toys,” Raul grunted with an exaggerated wave of his hand. Riku hardly stopped in his enthusiasm despite the insult and Willem’s dispassionate soldier’s gaze.

“He has no guards around him, at least none that I’ve seen,” Riku continued, “though I have noticed certain individuals that happen to get near him an inordinate number of times.

“A secret bodyguard?” Willem asked.

“More like twelve secret bodyguards. Each passed him by at least twice in the marketplace or near the offices with different costumes each time with two hour shifts spread out randomly.”

“What about the location of the box?” Willem asked while Raul continued to ingest the report.

“The offices were the easiest to get into, but they’re not there. His estate is more heavily guarded, however.” Riku glanced at Raul as he explained, anticipating some kind of negative reaction.

“We won’t get help this time around,” Raul stated more so to himself than to his companions.

“Barging in won’t be the best idea, either,” Willem said finally standing up. “We’re hundreds of miles from the nearest recovery point if we should be discovered." Dusting himself off, the mention of a safe house accentuated the barrenness of the small domicile they were currently holed up within. Nothing but tables and dusty flooring decorated the insides. The largest treasure—those bags containing the boxes of the other Artifacts were carefully hidden behind bricks somewhere in the degrading walls.

“And you failed to infiltrate the house?” Raul asked with a tone that did not ask for an answer. “I’ll head out myself and—”

“I don’t think he has it in his house, Raul,” Riku quickly snapped. “But I do have an idea as to where the final Artifact is.” His second sentence was smoother than the first—a calculated way of getting his superior’s temperamental attention. Raul uneasily waited in silence for the explanation.

“We both know that this Jafar was the leader of the raiding party that seized the Chrysosoplo when the Persians were expanding into the Russian Urals—”

“Yes,” Raul interrupted leaning his back against the wall impatiently, “it’s too hot to be rehashing past wars, Riku.” The Finn, however, was undeterred.

“We also know that his rise to power to Vizier ever since then was because all of his opponents died of mysterious causes,” Riku explained though he could already tell that he was not keeping Raul’s attention. “My point is, the way these men died, I think Jafar has been using the gun without knowing what it is… he might think it’s some kind of magical weapon.”

Willem listened to the history—something he had not heard before then—but forced back a word or two at the idea that such magical items exist. It was not that he did not believe in such magical properties, but that Riku would think that it was something other than magic baffled him. A weapon that can wipe out whole villages just from pointing it at them? He could not believe that such a thing was not some kind of supernatural item. His contemplations merely led to frustrations—those two spies in front of him have only given him tidbits of the truth and he thirsted for full disclosure.

“So you’re saying that he keeps it on his person?” Raul connected the dots.

“Let’s just say that the man does not need a cane for walking yet I had not seen him once divorce his hand from his walking stick.” Riku’s eyes flared with a proud sense of discovery. Raul did not disappoint him with a half impressed nod.

“Hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly hiding place,” Willem recapped, “and now you’re going to attempt to pilfer a man’s walking stick while he has shadows protecting him all hours of the day in the middle of the largest Persian city in the West?”

“We’re so close, Willem,” Raul answered, “we must do it.”

“But so close to what, Raul!” Willem’s frustrations boiled over.

As with all the other times he faced such dissension, Raul merely found the wall once more to lean back on. That young man, however, sighed and leaned the back of his blonde hair against the earthen structure. There was a kind of tiredness that overtook him. “You can go back the way we ca—” Raul was interrupted.

“You’ve said that over and over again!” Willem ground out of his throat. “I have my orders from Colonel Santiago but that doesn’t mean I can’t question what it is that you haven’t been telling me!”

Riku stood at the other end of the room as if too tired in the oppression of the loud voice and the repression of Raul’s steely stare. “Calm down, van Axel,” Riku tried to offer. The day’s heat had not yet left the room’s plaster like enclosure even though the sun was now dipping below the horizon.

Willem lowered his eyes at the rebuke. Although he could sense Riku’s frustration at Raul, both of those spies seemed to share an understanding that Willem was inexorably dislocated from. “Who is she?” the soldier asked in a low tone his eyes gradually rising to meet Raul’s astonished look. “Don’t pretend like you don’t understand my question,” Willem spat, “I see you looking at that necklace of yours every night like a wounded animal. Before every move, you touch your chest like you’re pressing that golden object into the hollowness you have in your middle!”

“Shut your mouth,” Raul growled as he took a step to the soldier. “This is none of your business.” As he slurred his speech in anger, Riku could not help but behold the two dangerously approaching each other.

“It most certainly is my business, Raul. You don’t think I don’t hear you at night talking to that little object you keep so close to yourself?” The question clearly made the other young man flush and a menacing stance grew from the two.

“Gentlemen, please,” Riku said moving forward to make a triangle amongst them. His eyes, however, spied the instinctive reach that Raul made towards his tunic—he was reaching for that object.

“Is she the reason we’re doing all of this? Risking our lives?” the questions came from Willem like punches thrown. The welled up indignation only cascaded on itself the more Raul was holding his hand against his chest.

“That’s enough, van Axel!” Riku yelled and forcefully held back the soldier’s shoulder. His stern Finnish eyes were like a colliding boulder to Willem’s anger. “The more you argue the more we have to spend here in this God forsaken place. Our orders come from The Room aside from just Raul’s whims—we must fulfill our duty.”

Willem grunted a heavy sound and pushed Riku’s hand away. It was enough, however, to see him storming out of the room with sword and hilt in hand. Riku was left watching the still aroused Raul. “You will have to tell him what you’ve told me,” Riku finally said as he watched those plumes of hate soften on the other spy’s aura. “You eventually trusted me with this secret on our journey and you’ll come to find that Willem is just as understanding.”

“For a spy, you’re quite naïve. Trusting someone like him is useless,” Raul contradicted placing his hand back to his side. His exhausted body found its way to a wall again and held up a forearm to lean against the vertical barrier with.

“Not trusting him will be even more dangerous. Van Axel should not be mistreated this way.”

“He’s a common soldier, Riku,” Raul let out his vitriol, “he’s as good as an army trained thug.”

“Even thugs have their purposes to play in the greater plan of things, Raul,” Riku explained in his accented Spanish that emphasized the nearly philosophical nature of his exultation, “And especially now—he is an entire third of our enterprise.”

Raul sighed against the wall allowing his breath to be lost to the acrid surface in front of him. “I’ll talk to him…” he softened, “but make preparations… I don’t want to waste any more time—all three Artifacts are almost together again… after all these decades. We move in three days.”

“Why three days?” Riku asked sincerely.

Raul turned to him while hastily scraping his forearm off the wall. “Because that’s when a shipment is scheduled for the Vizier from the Levant. Gold perhaps from the Turks the rumours said. I heard about it on the way… we’ll sneak among the entourage.” This planned dissimulation was second nature to the Finn and he merely nodded in understanding. Raul, however, began to gaze at the doorway where Willem stormed out with more dread than any contemplation of covert operations could make on him.

“You will not regret telling him,” Riku anticipated the anxiety, encouraged by the small steps Raul was taking. “And he will finally understand as well; just as I did.”

“You weren’t as surprised as I thought you would be when I told you on the way here,” Raul admitted with a hint of humour in the recollection. The anger and frustration seemed to be venting in an unwitting smile.

“No,” Riku returned while grinning at the jovial turn of the usually neurotic Raul, “it made perfect sense to me that you were doing this for her. I would too, I suppose. But really, it just answered so many obvious questions for me.”

“Like what?” Raul asked curiously as he walked towards the door.

“Such as,” Riku said in passing as the other began to exit the room, “the reason why you have such stark blue eyes and dark blonde hair.”


Tanned fingers brushed aside dirty blonde hair from azure eyes before the mouth underneath those orbs elicited words into the air. “To think your cousin was just letting that thing lay around…”

A voice answered, “Poltok knew it would be safe with them; neither Taguchi nor Pablo know what the Key is.”

“I trust you, Hayato, but at least now that we’ve handed it off to Poltok, he can finally get it to Novgorod for testing,” the lips underneath the blue eyes said.

“It was a strange coincidence we had to go here… Taguchi was supposed to give the Key to Poltok anyway but I’m glad we took that off of his hands…”

“Despite our setbacks at least we now have this Key… It’s the final piece we need to put together,” the voice softened into a sigh and turning those oceanic oculars to the floor.

“I don’t like having to accelerate the plan, Rodrigo, but with Baghdad on the news I can understand your decision. If we don’t stop it now, then his world will come to pass even here…” Both voices somehow took a pause and the hint of their rumination lay in the direction those blue eyes now wandered to: a young man curled up on a bed holding his knees to his chest.

“What did that monster do you to…” the blue eyed voice lamented. Those thoughts, however, were interrupted by the screeching of wheels against pavement. Immediately, the eyes and hair rushed towards a window along with the accompanying voice. The sight before them was heralded by a block of ebony metal—a van. The twin blues witnessed figures fighting on the street and recognized a familiar professor in the mix.

“I’ll get Captain DeWitt,” the second voice immediately announced. The lips under the eyes could not speak, however, as a small puff of smoke erupted from below and he saw flying into the air those objects which the two had just been talking about—the last piece was now in jeopardy.

Chapter LXVIII: The Last Piece (coming soon)

grayghost: Haha , it was very spontaneous ! Glad you liked it !

coz1: Especially with the reaching for the thing around his neck kind of thing ? Haha totally unintentional but I totally see what you mean !

Murmurandus: thank you , sir !

English Patriot: Yes , Jafar is going to be a pickle .

Grubnessul: Just enough to give you hope that you'll find out more next installment !! Don't worry , I promise the next one is going to have another juicy revelation !

Avernite: I did drop that hint for a good reason =) You're getting close .

English Patriot: Let the guessing begin !

ColossusCrusher: LOL and how do you propose you'd like to be in the story ?