Priest looked at the pulsing key then at Phaze, “Yeah, but can you tell us—”
“Do you understand!?” Phaze6’s yell caused him to cough so hard he lost a couple of health points. He coughed up globs of blood and ash.
The game master blinked hard and nodded, “Y-yes. Yes, I understand.”
“You may see a Gatekeeper… she’s like... like a monk. She’s following me. Don’t try to stop her. She will end you. Don’t attack her and she won’t body you. Just stay here and let no one from the corps come through. Notify the Game Master Corps that I will return with the lost heroes if I can. Tell them that the Gatekeeper is too strong to fight or escape. We’ll have to find another way if this doesn’t work. Ok? And… tell Debra… tell her I love her.”
Priest nodded. Phaze6 handed Priest his broken portal gun and patted him on the shoulder. He limped forward pushing his little brother out of the way. He pointed the key forward and a shining golden portal appeared around the key. Phaze twisted the key and walked into a blinding golden light.
His brother was gone. Off on another one of his epic adventures that would make him even more famous than he already was. Priest looked at the portal gun in his hands. It was warped, cracked and smeared with burnt blood.
“What the hell is happening?!” Stokes looked at Kiera and pointed a thumb at the golden portal. “That was Phaze6.”
Cryptic asked, “What’s a Phase 6?”
Angel squinted at the golden light and put a hand over her eyes, “Phaze6 is a level 50ish elite fighter, portal mage and commissioned game master. A special operations corpsman, part of Team MarySue, if I’m not mistaken. He is also Priest’s big brother. MarySue does high-level ops… like where it’s not a game anymore. Quests that would be impossible for us.”
Stokes interrupted, “But my question is, what the hell happened to him? What’s going on, Kiera?”
Kiera shrugged and squinted at the golden door, “I think he was on a really hard quest.”
Cryptic was sticking a knife through the golden portal. Them pulling it out to examine the knife, “By the looks of him, he lost that quest.”
“Stop that,” Kiera slapped Cryptic’s hand. The knife fell through the portal.
“Hey!” Cryptic looked up at her. “That was my favorite blade.”
“Well, don’t stick things in there,” Kiera scolded him.
“What are you, my mom?” Cryptic said. “You owe me a blade of equal or greater value.”
“Can someone tell us what the hell is going on, man?!” Stokes asked.
Priest put his shades on. He stepped up to the golden doorway, “I’ll tell you what’s going on.” He pointed to the portal and smiled, “This is our ticket out of scavenger runs.”
Kiera shook her head, “No, Priest. Didn’t you hear what he said? Phaze6 said don’t let anyone go through. He said—”
“He said don’t let any other people from the Game Master Corps go through. He didn’t specifically say us,” Priest said brushing the spittle off the front of his white shirt. It smeared.
“I’m pretty sure that would include us,” Kiera said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Priest said.
“Yes, it does.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Priest shrugged.
“Yes, it—” Kiera interrupted herself walked up to Priest and spoke quietly, “Please, Priest. Don’t do this. Do you want another Undead WarPriest situation? It almost cost you your Game Master role. Don’t go through that portal. Look at us, Priest… we’re all noobs. My sister is way too young for this. Stokes really needs practice. And I don’t think Cryptic can get us out of the portal once we get in. You know they’ll follow if you go through. So, don’t—”
He embraced Kiera and kissed her on the lips. He didn’t normally show such a public display of affection in front of the crew but he wanted to get through to her. A sudden kiss was his wife’s weakness, “Babe, we’ll be fine. We just peek our heads in. If it’s something we can’t handle, we get the hell out, and we call the cavalry. But there might be something we can do to help. We can take part in the glory. Save my brother’s ass. Maybe get some sweet system artifacts… get ourselves out of these BS scavenger quests.”
Priest moved away from Kiera and addressed the group, “Team Kali,” he said. “This is our opportunity to get out of scavenger quests. We’ll go in for a moment. We’ll see if we can assist Phaze6. If it’s too much for us, we get the hell out of there fast.”
Priest extended his staff and tossed Phaze6’s broken portal gun to Stokes, “I’m not forcing you to go through. Anyone who wants to stay can stay and watch the storage.” Priest walked through.
Kiera called after him, “Priest!”
Stokes tossed the broken gun to Cryptic, “See you on the flip side,” Stoke said and jumped through.
Cryptic shrugged his shoulders. He tossed the broken portal gun to Angel, “I gotta go get my knife.” He walked through.
Angel handed the portal gun to Kiera, pulled out her swords and ran through, “Whoohooo!!”
“Angel!!” Kiera yelled. She looked at the bent portal gun and then at the portal. “Damn. Wait for me.” She followed them through.
Chapter 4:
Priest’s Lost Memory
*6 months after the events of the Artifact of the Lost Portal Quest
“Game Master 343, wake up.”
Priest McKenna opened his eyes after a few slaps to the face. He was looking up at a bored bearded face framed by dreadlocks.
“Stop!” Priest fought off additional slaps, “Stop, damn it. I’m awake! You get a kick out of slapping people, don’t you?”
“Let the record show Developer 6174 has slapped Game Master 343 for 10 points of damage. I can see the reduction of health points,” the Developer recorded notes into a tablet. He looked down to ask Priest. “Are you detecting damage with your health bar? Are you seeing system notifications? Can you even interact with the system interface?”
“I’m going to bitch slap YOUR interface and see if you detect damage,” Priest rubbed at his red cheek. “You son-of-a-Bitch! How many times have you slapped me before I logged in?”
The bearded man added to his notes by tapping on the tablet, “30 slaps. Game Master 343, you have arrived in simulation Universal Set .0001 of the Czarzakian Multiverse—”
“Dee, my name is Priest McKenna. How many times do I have to tell you? Call me Priest. Or McKenna. Do not call me a number. I don’t know how you developers are taught, but in the system, we have names. Feel free to use a system name or even a surname. Not a number.”
The bored man continued, “Your location is 244 1st Street, Alamogordo, Colorado, United States of America, Earth. This simulated Earth is in a pre-singularity era in the middle of the sixth mass extinction; Anthropocene extinction; information age; Current risk level-”
Priest let out a loud yawn to cut him off, “Dee, you don’t have to tell me where I am EVERY damn time. I know this is your first official gig but... you gotta relax, man.” Priest moved to a sitting position on the bed and rubbed his eyes.
This developer noob had not looked up from his tablet even once. The kid was hopeless. Dee was a brand-new developer on an internship with the Czarzakian Multiverse Developer Labs. Developers were such egg-heads that they usually refused to give their avatar’s a name. And they wouldn’t usually take a role inside the simulation because they didn’t see a need to do so. They didn’t normally enter the simulated multiverse to play or go on adventures exploring new worlds. They only entered briefly to test out objects or conduct code analysis. Developers were there to help facilitate player interaction with the simulated environment. They only went by their Developer Lab designation. Dee’s designation was D-6174. Priest just called him Dee.
They had been assigned to each other on this quest. The quest was: “Collect Data on Game Master 343’s Avatar to Determine Why He No longer has Access to the System Game Master Role, Class and Abilities.”
You could
always tell if it was a BS developer generated quest because the names of the quests were hella dumb.
“I am just following protocol, Priest McKenna,” Dee flashed a light into his left eye and glanced at the tablet, “Did you see or hear any system messages when your consciousness logged into the avatar?”
Priest sighed, “No.”
“Can you access the Personal Reality Subset?” Dee asked.
“No,” Priest said.
He flashed the light into Priest’s other eye, “Did you see or hear any system notifications during the consciousness login process of your other avatars?”
Priest shook his head, “Not in the mage or warrior avatars and not in this one either. This one’s my favorite… never thought I’d like a cleric but—”
“Can you see my health bar or my system user statistics?” D-6174 interrupted tapping on his pad. “Do you have access to the system interface at all?” he asked.
“No,” Priest replied. “It’s been months, man... I don’t know.”
Dee put a hand to his chin as he stared at the screen of the tablet, “What’s very odd is that the anomaly seems to be based on your consciousness… the issue follows YOU. Not your avatars. Your consciousness logs in, and your avatar wakes up with no class, no role, no ability and no access to the system interface. Right now, you are like a system sleep non-player character. We don’t even know if this avatar will respawn.”
Priest asked, “Hasn’t the system told you anything?”
“No.” Dee said, “It doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work? I always heard that you developers talk directly to the Czarzakian Multiverse System,” Priest said.
D-6174 always seemed lively when talking about the system, “Well, actually it’s the same system interface as everyone else. We just say more to her. We make statements to her to create or edit system objects and she responds. Of course, those statements have to be made in perfect Czarzakian Command Line Script which, as you know, is based on the programing language SigularityBasic.”
“Of course, everyone knows that,” Priest lied.
Dee continued, “So, we have to know the right things to ask in the correct syntax. I have made a query about the loss of your abilities. She says there is no data currently available on that anomaly. That means she doesn’t know.”
“It… the system is a she?” Priest asked.
“No. What?” Dee asked.
“You said ‘she’ when referring to the system…” Priest said.
Dee smiled, “I may have mistakenly humanized the system. It is WAY beyond us mere mortals… let alone something as superficial as a gender, Priest McKenna. Would you call infinity ‘he’ or ‘she’? Developers are reluctant to even call it a ‘being’… at least not in our sense of the word. I would say… it’s like a living infinity. In truth, no human can say anything about it that will come close to explaining it because our neocortex just cannot grasp it. Even top developers who have mastered the neuralink cortex can’t fully grasp this place let alone the Multiverse System itself.”
Dee sat silently for a moment looking down at his pad, “There’s not much more data for me to collect. We’ve observed you for months. Quick scans, Enemy scan, and Advanced scans, don’t reveal any anomalies. We’ve studied data on your other avatars. We’ve tried sleep and waking tests. We’ve tried sending you through mapped portals… the only thing we haven’t tried is a portal to an unmapped location. A portal to a new destination. I think that might work. And if nothing else, I could analyze the data as you step through.”
“Exactly, Dee,” Priest said. “That’s why you need to get me into that school so I can talk to Sam—”
“Sam?” Dee said looking up from his pad. “Oh, you are referring to Samantha Roberta Monroe, the young lady you’ve been stalking?”
“The young lady that WE have been stalking TOGETHER, Dee,” Priest corrected him. “I got a few ladies from our group to get to know her so we can convince her to join us. I just need to get into her class to get closer.”
The developer tossed the electronic pad on the bed and stood up to pace the room, “I-I’ve- been meaning to talk to you about that, Priest McKenna. Our quest is to ‘collect data on game master 343’s avatar to determine why you no longer—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Priest interrupted. “I know what the quest is… that’s not a quest, man. It’s a homework assignment.”
“Yes...Well,” D-6174 continued looking down and away from Priest’s intense gaze. “I-I am going to stop stalking Samantha, hacking systems and monitoring that warehouse—”
Priest put a hand on the young developer’s shoulder, “Come on, Dee. We’ve come so far. We’re a team, man. I met all the potential magic users that your app helped us find. By the way, a few of them are some hot NPCs! Wait, until you meet ‘em… But this last girl, Sam, is almost definitely a portal mage!”
Dee shook his head, “Priest McKenna, we don’t have a ‘team’. You have already convinced me to do a lot of questionable things that are outside of our mission parameters. You’ve convinced a few system sleep NPCs to follow you. But you don’t have your cleric class abilities to even show them your powers or even your Game Master ability that would allow you to wake them up to their system abilities. There is no team. None of this stuff we’ve been doing is part of our quest. We are off mission—”
“Look, we are still on our quest,” Priest said. “Think about it, Dee. Our mission is to find out how I lost access to my class and abilities… this is pretty serious. What if others start having this ailment of mine? Have you thought of that, Dee? We have to find a cure for this. I don’t know what they tell you in developer school, D-6174, but the Czarzakian Multiverse is beyond a game. It’s a simulation of our multiverse which allows for major discoveries in science, philosophy, astrophysics and at times the very fabric of reality. The sim—”
“I know, I know—” Dee said, “I’m just worried—”
“Nothing to worry about, Dee.” Priest patted him on the back, “You’re a desk jockey developer. I get it. You’re not used to work in the field. I was a game master for 6 months before I lost my abilities. This is how we do things. We improvise out here in the field. We journey into the multiverse and we have to come up with creative ways to resolve issues. This is your opportunity to be a part of an epic adventure, Dee. I know developer’s dream of going on missions like this.”
D-6174 stifled a smile and nodded, “At times, but—”
“Yes!” Priest said. “And now... here you are a common intern developer on the system and your very first task is a dangerous mission with a freakin’ GAME MASTER! One of the best, I might add. Did anyone ever tell you how I lost my powers?”
D-6174 looked at him slowly, “No. I-I was told it was classified. They don’t want people to panic. I guess. They told me I can’t even talk about this mission.”
“Well, let me tell you, Dee,” Priest sat on the edge of the bed and looked off into the distance for the dramatic effect of the elaborate manipulation he was about to perform.
Chapter 5:
Classified // Lost Portal Files
“I had formed one of the best teams among all the Game Master Corps units,” Priest said. “Similar to the one we’re building now, by the way. We had a couple of warriors, a mage, and a portal mage. We didn’t have a kick-ass developer like yourself, though.”
Dee stifled a smile.
Priest continued, “Even though I was the youngest Game Master to have a portal mage on my team, we were the best unit. So, the GMC reached out to us to do one of its most sensitive and... important missions. A quest with the highest difficulty level. Our quest was to enter and explore a lost portal.”
D-6174 raised his hand to speak.
“Really, bro? You don’t have to raise your hand to talk,” Priest laughed.
“O-oh... yes,” Dee said. “Sooo, you were the group to discover the most recent lost portal? I thought it was Team MarySue? I heard that M
arySue found a Lost Portal, then they got a quest to enter it. They lost one person in the portal. He’s in a coma… or so I’ve heard.”
“Hah!” Priest said. “That’s what they want you to believe! Team MarySue was our back up. They were supposed to watch us enter, take notes and make sure no one else entered.” Priest stared at Dee a while to see if he bought it.
“Wow,” D-6174 bought it. “W-what about that lost portal? What system data did it give? Did it at least give a Universal Set designation? So strange that the system would lose data on any portals… I always thought that the system created all portals. But supposedly, there’s no system data on those lost portals. Not sure if the government has blocked access or it’s the system itself… or maybe it is a system from outside the multiverse? I mean, it’s all classified so all I know is what I’ve heard.”
Priest stared off in the distance again, “No, it didn’t give us any data at all. Just question marks and it said unknown destination… that’s it, Dee. Anyway, I was the first to go through… you like code, right? I saw mysterious code and programming, Dee. I bet that if I’d had a developer with your talent, we could have decoded it. Maybe it’s the source code of this entire system.”
“What did it look like? What happened?” D-6174 was on the edge of his seat.
“Some celestial event. No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet... Or a developer. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea,” Priest tried to evoke a tear but only managed a watery eye. “Beautiful... It’s not something you can understand unless I can take you on a trip through a portal with me. That’s why we have to find a portal mage as soon as possible. Unfortunately, when I came back from the lost portal, I had no more abilities and no more powers. We have to find it. It has to be the reason that I lost my abilities.”
Dee nodded and walked over to his computer desk. Four large monitors displayed moving fractal images behind a green backlit keyboard, “There’s no guarantee that finding a lost portal is going to get your ability back. We don’t even have a portal mage or a portal device. And even if we find a portal mage, how do you activate their power without your Game Master ability?”
Lost Portals Page 3