by Simon Archer
I looked down at my own clothes and avoided looking at that naked guy, relieved to discover that I was still in the pajamas I had left the apartment with by way of… acid trip, I guess. Was this what an acid trip felt like? The only hardcore drug I’d ever tried was ecstasy, and that was just once at a party, and the girl selling it was hot. Man, we had fun. Not like this. This wasn’t fun. This was just confusing. And I didn’t feel any different from before. I was confident to say that it was a clear indicator of any drug experience. Despite all of the nonsense that I was just in, I was sure I was in my right mind. Whatever had happened to me was actually happening to me, and not my mind slowly unraveling from chemical exposure.
Oh, shit, all that stuff the ghost voice was saying was true, wasn’t it? Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I felt so dumb. I must have sounded like a jackass to that voice back there. I couldn’t have believed it otherwise. I mean, if, maybe, he did some kind of magic thing before he started shouting like a streetside doomsayer, then maybe I’d have been more receptive to the idea of having to travel to another realm to save it from evil.
As everyone gathered their bearings, they tried to talk to each other but were all speaking different languages at each other all at once, turning into a bubble of noise that just filled the emptiness with angry and confused people. An old man started shouting upward in what I assumed was Russian, probably wanting to ask about what was going on. If he was propositioned by the same voice as I was, or someone similar, I was sure that they had just as many questions as I did.
In short order, as more people decided to shout to the heavens, the noise grew to unbearable levels of nonsense. How could any of them think enough to speak with all of this clutter in the air? Maybe they weren’t and were just crapping out of their mouths. That made more sense to me.
Well, none of this was getting us anywhere fast. If we were stuck here, I was going to see what ‘here’ really was. While the rest of them chattered away at nothing, I took a walk through the white void to do some exploring.
Every step away from the fog of sound was like a fresher breath in my lungs. They, and all of their angst and anger, were dwindling away as I drew farther and farther into the endless nothingness. With a bit of space between me and everyone else, I was free to do some thinking about the next course of action from here.
Honestly, there really wasn’t much to do except stare at all of the pretty nothingness around here. It was actually kind of soothing without the tension of existential dread in the atmosphere. From what I could remember from my conversation with the magic voice, I had some kind of task that involved fighting evil. Well, if there was evil here, it was officially my job to start smiting it. If I didn’t find anything in a bit, I was going to head back to the group and plug my ears, just hoping that wherever brought us here would show up to tell us more.
After all of this build-up, it would have been disappointing if I was just drugged after all. That was fine by me at this point, however. I was more than happy to stay away from the real world for as long as possible and could only dream that whoever broke into my place had drugged me enough to put me in a permanent coma. That was the worst-case scenario, and I was so ready for it. If this actually turned out not to be some kind of fever dream from some nasty drugs, and actually was the call to adventure that I was promised, that was just gravy on top. Either way, I was free, baby.
After a while, I’d just given up the search when my eyes started to itch a bit. Not a good sign in favor of ‘not drugs,’ but still proof I was alive with a body. As I rubbed them a bit, trying to relieve the irritation I couldn’t quite touch, something started fading into view. It was tiny, and I couldn’t quite make out any details, but it was definitely a dark green, it wasn’t going away as I blinked, and it wasn’t moving with my line of sight, so it was an object not created by the eye-itching problem. As I walked toward it, it started getting a bit bigger, which was telling me that I was getting closer to it. The details were becoming clearer, and it soon became obvious to me that this speck of dark green was actually a little floating eyeball made of green crystals. It had a jagged iris along with a diamond-shaped pupil, and the jagged formations around it made it look like it was just chipped out of some fantasy mine.
My eyes itched again, and something else appeared right above it. It was a floating, red, transparent square with text on it. In English. Readable English. In this fantasy void in another dimension where a ghost voice from ‘Neo Ceissein’ lived. That seemed oddly convenient on my end. Or, to beat around the bush less, tailored for my purposes by someone else. We were in a fantasy land now, or realm, or purgatory, whatever the technical term for this place was, and I had to stay on my toes. Anything could have been dangerous
The text read:
Arcane Spy, ??? Lv ???
Health: ??? Magic: ???
Armor: ??? Aegis: ???
Abilities: ???
That was unhelpful. But, to be fair, this actually said a whole lot about this world in general. This was a roleplaying game display, with stats and everything. Was I inside of a game right now? Did they, like, jack me into some big sci-fi computer and beam me into this place? I kinda hoped not. However, the most important thing to note was that ‘Lv’ meant that this game worked off of levels. Was I going to have a level? Could I raise that level?
Oh, this changed everything. If this all turned out to be a dream after pulling my leg for so long, I was quitting my job tomorrow to rethink my life. I could not go back to that after knowing that this was possible. And it was so real. There was air between my fingers and breath in my lungs.
Even with these obvious game features, it would have been cooler to have actually visited a new world no one had ever seen before. And video games had to be put down to return to real life. I wanted this to be real life. So, to preserve that hope, I was going to refer to this ‘game’ as a system and just bank on the amazing coincidence that a whole world operated on video game math and logic.
That was a problem for later. Right now, I had to familiarize myself with every ‘mechanic’ this system had. So far, most of these seemed straightforward. ‘Health’ measured how much damage something could take, ‘Magic’ was the fuel for spells, which was especially exciting to think about, and ‘Armor’ measured how much damage was mitigated. Simple, easy to understand and infer, and quick to check. I liked it. Abilities were probably the things that passively helped monsters be a bigger pain in the ass. If this screen let me see those beforehand, then that was a major advantage for me.
Whatever this display power was needed a boost pronto. With all of my body’s faculties available to me, I could do more than in any video game ever played by man. I could have climbed, jumped, dove, rolled, and done anything else I was physically able to do on Earth. That in mind, knowing what my enemy was capable of doing was more important than blindly increasing my own stats and trapping myself in a shitty build just because I didn’t understand how something worked. I wasn’t going to take the chance that I would get a second try if something bad happened to me. Couldn’t have counted how many times I ‘died of dysentery’ on The Oregon Trail. That was not happening here.
The first thing to learn about: what ‘Aegis’ represented. Wait, that was the word fantasy writers used for ‘shield’ that sounded fancy and magical, so it was probably some kind of shield against magic. Did it work like a second health bar for magic spells, or was it just like armor, where it provided a certain level of protection? Without any numbers or other stats to see here, it was impossible to see how any of these stats interacted with another. For that matter, what kind of stats did a person have besides these? Classically, there were three or four stats representing the body and mind each, and I’d have liked to know what I wanted to build up, or what kind of stat build I should have been going for.
Back to the display, my guess was that the question marks after ‘Arcane Spy’ said what kind of monster this was, whether it was a constructed thing or a mythical beast or an anim
al or anything else this new world had. I was sure that’d be important for certain effects and abilities. Undead monsters probably didn’t have to sleep, for example, and most animals were going to be better at perceiving their surroundings than most people like me. Something to keep in mind for the future.
Last but not least, this thing was called an ‘Arcane Spy.’ Just by inference, that meant that some magic being summoned it to spy on things. And the only things around here were us people from Earth. At best, this was nothing to mind, being some curious observers wanting to observe and report on our behavior like lab rats, and at worst, this was really, really bad.
As I realized I’d just exposed myself to whoever was on the other end of this spy, I fell down, like an idiot, in an attempt to avoid its path while it flew right at and over me. I looked behind myself to watch the arcane spy as it passed me. With no sense of urgency or panic, it fluttered and stopped in place, turning to its left and right, and then fluttered over to its left, continuing this search pattern in random directions as it scanned the area.
I stood up, walking up to the Arcane Spy again and waving my hand in front of its crystal iris. It didn’t respond, staying on task just as before while almost hitting me again in its flight path. Being objectively one of the only things worth noting about this place on the visible spectrum, I had to guess that the spy either didn’t care about finding people or couldn’t see me, for whatever reason.
Well, it was time to use that to my advantage and get rid of this spy. In the small chance that this spy belonged to the guys who sent all of us here who were looking for us, they would have never found us if my experience was anything to go by. And that scenario was only likely if something went wrong. Everything going smoothly would have meant that they wouldn’t have had to look for us in the first place. They’d have had everything prepared for us, tea and biscuits at a table, with a host to help us all transition between our world and this one with the fancy magical system in place.
In the event that something had gone wrong, the much more likely outcome was that the spy was something sent by the ‘DARKNESS AND DEATH’ forces looking to find this final hope for Neo Ceissein and crush it before it even got anywhere. With this kind of response time, not being quite immediate but still being quick to find our general location, meant that they could have sabotaged the warp between worlds and were prepared in their own way for it. They’d have essentially staged an interspace highway robbery, and we were the cargo to either be captured as slaves or slaughtered as potential threats. If all of that was true, it was imperative that we not even risk being spotted.
Maybe we could have still used this evil magic rock eyeball to get out of here, even if it spotted us. I mean, if it couldn’t see us anyway, what was the harm in letting it just fly by us? Still, I wasn’t entirely sure that it couldn’t see us or that it wasn’t just looking for a cluster of people instead of just little ol’ me. Letting this thing roam around freely meant risking this mission, and that was now the most important thing in my life.
Yeah, there was a chance that we could have been stranded by abandoning the first piece of real contact we’d come into since we got here. And maybe a lot of the reasoning behind my decision was speculation based on not a whole lot of evidence. In all honesty, I had no way of knowing if there wasn’t another way out of here or if this eyeball was our only way out of here or not. The only thing I knew for sure was that we’d retain the element of surprise if we could have gotten out without letting anyone know.
Now, all cards on the table, deep down in my gut, I was acting selfishly. I wanted to be a hero. Not a famous hero or a respected one. Just a hero. The kind that did at least one thing that saved other lives over their own. It would have been more than enough for me if just one of my own, honest-to-God, self-determined actions actually helped something bigger than myself. If I really wanted Neo Ceissein to be real, I had to act like it was. That meant giving a shit about what happened to it and its people, even if no one would ever know what I’d done to preserve them. Even if it meant making a morally questionable choice that might have bitten us in the ass later. Ultimately, a hero acted selflessly, and that was what I wanted to be.
A hero.
Channeling my inner heroic martyr, I grabbed the eyeball in both hands, about the size of a soccer ball now that I could measure its smooth facets more tangibly, and threw it in the opposite direction of the cluster of Earth visitors. It puttered about in the air before stabilizing and facing away from me. Without so much as skipping a beat, it returned to its search pattern, turning left and right, picking a direction to move, and floating away in its right-angle turns. It zigzagged away from us as I turned to find the group of people again.
With nothing else to do in my stroll, I could have only prayed that I didn’t just make a huge mistake.
3
As I returned to the group, it was like I had never left. The only change was that the noise was now tolerable, as some people had stopped shouting to something above us that wasn’t listening and turned to each other to attempt connections. Admirably, they were attempting to create a passage through the language barrier with lots of hand gestures, but with little success, judging by the looks on the general look of the recipients’ faces. At this point, being only a halfway-decent communicator with people who speak my own language, I took it upon myself to keep an eye out for more arcane spies and an ear out for anyone speaking my language. Occasionally, I experimented with that fancy new ability to see those stat block displays for people, trying them out on the people in the crowd to find out what they were working with.
At first, it wasn’t working at all. I must have looked a bit stupid, and perhaps a little racist, just squinting at people suspiciously and intensely for seemingly no reason. However, the itchy sensation came back to my eyes, and the display screens started appearing over people’s heads. The funny thing was, it only appeared over one person at a time, the previous one disappearing in half of an instant as the next one blinked into existence. Another odd thing was that it was nothing but question marks for every stat, even the name, unlike the arcane eye. Was that because we were foreign to this new world, so we weren’t incorporated into the system yet?
Maybe not. After appraising a dozen or so of these people, one of the names suddenly appeared on the very next square, transitioning from the between the question marks in a quick fade. As it turned out, the elderly lady in the kimono was named Hatsugi Ichika. Looking back at the others I’d just scanned before, their names were now in place of the first question marks.
Did I just level that ability up? Damnit, if only I knew what my own stats were. Hopefully, these kinds of levels weren’t permanent, and I still had a chance to level up everything else I wanted to. As much as I wanted to be able to scan things more effectively, knowing what to do and being able to do it were two different things.
Would I have needed a mirror, or could I have just thought really hard about it? I swiped my hand in front of me to see if some kind of menu opened up. No such luck. My stats couldn’t hide from me forever. Regardless, I’d just found something to level up, and I was going to scan every last person here until I milked all of them for their ‘experience points,’ if that was what they were called.
I did just that, and I was right on the money about my theory. In short order, every person here was not only named but labeled as a “human,” then a “human commoner,” then a “human commoner Lv 0,” followed by their other stats, one by one. Besides their Health, which was collectively at “1”, with a few “2’s” from the tougher looking of the group of us, everyone had “0” at every other score on the display. Lastly, their abilities appeared on the floating displays, which were “None.” Not unexpected, but also not great to think about for my own stats. Hopefully, there was some way to change that description from ‘commoner’ to something cooler.
And that was every person scanned and tagged with this new ability of mine, with nothing like nationalities or des
criptions showing up after all of that, so we weren’t learning anything new from them. Except, now that I knew their names, there was one last avenue of information I could have explored.
But did I really need to explore it? I mean, I could have just waited if I really wanted to get technical. Most of this was just busy work until something actually happened, if anything happened at all. But if nothing was going to happen, and it turned out that we really were on our own, then I needed all the information I could get as soon as possible, but it meant doing something I really didn’t want to do.
Oh, I was going to regret this.
“Tobias Schroder?” I approached a man who looked like a skinny lumberjack and said the name on his display. This guy was the most likely to either be American and know English or be European and have some understanding of English. His name sounded German, which, if that one Linguistics class I stupidly took in college because it was full of hot ladies taught me anything, meant that our languages had some similarities to them, and we could have worked out some kind of ‘pidgin’ language between us to communicate at a basic level.
“Yah!” the man exclaimed, his accent being straight from a German beer commercial, “How do you know my name? Can you understand me?”