Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One

by Albert Ruckholdt

  I laughed nervously to myself. “Well, I guess this is it….” Looking about the bedroom, I eventually directed my gaze up at the ceiling. “Well now or never, Game Master. I’m ready when you are.”

  To my dismay there was no response, and my heart skipped a beat when I heard the sound of something dragging itself along the ground in near the distance, possibly out in the corridor.

  Damn it, I cursed inwardly, then was abruptly startled when my surroundings suddenly became dark as the lights in the apartment all turned off simultaneously.

  “What the Hell?”

  Pushing myself away from the doorframe, I depressed the lightgun trigger and activated the targeting beam. It shone out and faintly illuminated my surroundings as it reflected off a bedroom wall. Moments later, I gasped in fright when a voice emanated from the lightgun and loudly announced, “Stage complete. Prepare for final translocation.”

  I stared down at the weapon in disbelief and a modicum of distrust.

  If I was to believe its words, then The Game was at an end, and final translocation could mean a return to the booth at the gaming arcade. Yet I refused to relax just yet, nor succumb to the sudden relief that threatened to wash through me. It could all be a lie, nothing more than a cruel feint to throw me off as I dared to hope this nightmare was over. Thus, I chose not to lower my guard.

  “Is that true?” I asked the lightgun. “Is it over?”

  “Final stage complete.”

  “Then where are we going now? Are we going back to the arcade?”

  “Brace for translocation.”

  Clearly the weapon wasn’t going to give me an answer, so I hastily dropped to the ground and lay on my back. Abruptly, I remembered my carry-bag left behind in the hallway, and scrambled onto my hands and knees in a desperate attempt to retrieve it.

  “Wait—!”

  I was knocked to the ground and onto my belly by the unpleasantly familiar earthquake that preceded every change of The Game’s stages. Then came the weightless experience in utter darkness, followed by a hard landing. After a dozen seconds lying on the ground, I raised myself up on my elbows and looked up at my surroundings.

  As soon as I realized I was back in the booth, I expended a great deal of my remaining strength to stand up and then approached the perforated wall where I expected to find the door.

  “Hey—open up! Open up the damn door!”

  “Final translocation in progress.”

  “What?”

  “Final translocation in progress.”

  “Wait—you said the stage was over. You said that was the last stage.”

  “Brace for imminent translocation.”

  The ground was swept out from under me, and I was weightless once again, but that lasted only a moment before my body was suddenly swept away in the void. It wasn’t something I’d experienced before, and akin to falling down a twisting, corkscrewing ride at a waterpark, only it was much wilder and acutely terrifying because it took place in total darkness. This went on for a long, long while, and ended when I felt myself tumble and strike something hard with my back.

  It felt like a curved wall, and I when I blinked away the stars circling my head, I looked up to see soft pinpricks of light tracing arcs within a domed ceiling. I was back in the booth, however something felt out of place and I soon realized it was the fact that the walls weren’t damaged any more. The lightgun that had served me well was no longer in my hands, but when I looked about the interior I saw the pedestal at the back of the booth, and unexpectedly my school carry-bag on the floor beside it.

  A feminine voice spoke into the interior of the booth. “Please exit the game compartment.”

  I had other ideas as I pushed myself up onto my knees, before rising to my feet. “I want an explanation. What happened to me? Where was I?”

  “Please exit the game compartment.”

  “Not until I have an answer.”

  “Please exit the game—”

  “Give me a goddamn answer,” I yelled upwards.

  “Initiating purge protocol.”

  I didn’t need an explanation as to why a misty white gas began filling the interior of the booth. A pungent, gastric smell made me recoil from the mist, and the booth’s exit opened with a soft swish.

  “Bastards,” I hissed from behind a hand covering my mouth and nose. Moving quickly, I grabbed my carry-bag and hurried out of the booth.

  Outside, I breathed clean air and turned around to stare at the black booth. However, as I stood a few meters away from it, I grew aware that something was drastically amiss with my surroundings, and slowly turned to sweep my gaze over a deserted level, enveloped in silence, wrapped in stillness.

  I took another deep breath, and other than the smell of drying sweat emanating from my exhausted body, I noted that while the air was clean it was also stale, as one would expect from a room long closed and shut away.

  At first, I suspected the Arcade had closed while I was still playing the game, so I quickly checked the time on my wristwatch. However, by my hasty calculation scarcely three hours had elapsed since I stepped into the booth, so the Arcade should still be open for business. I didn’t expect Felicia, Angela, or Class Rep to be waiting for me, but I had expected to find the gaming center a hive of activity. After all, it was Friday evening, and the place should still be packed with young gamers enjoying the end of the school week.

  Instead, the place was devoid of a human life and the machines on this floor were silent.

  Walking to the gaming level’s guardrail, I looked down to see the ground floor of the Arcade was also deserted. After spending a minute carefully searching for any signs of movement, I cautiously made my way down the steps, then followed a path between the game booths that ended at the Arcade’s entrance. The automatic glass doors were closed and failed to respond to my presence, so I slung my carry-bag’s straps over a shoulder to free up my hands. There was an upright banner beside the entrance advertising a new updated release of the Gun Princess Royale game, and after picking it up, I started to swing the metal banner against the glass of the closed doors. However, I stopped abruptly when I caught sight of my reflection in the glass.

  My appearance befitted one who had survived a war zone. My clothes were ragged, my hair was a grimy mess, my face was smudged and bruised, and my uniform was splattered with blood. I began to understand why Erina had been initially afraid of me. I would have been afraid too had someone approached me in such a state.

  Briefly closing my eyes, I shook my head a little, then took a deep breath before swinging the large banner into the permaglass doors. It took me a dozen attempts to fracture and subsequently shatter enough of the glass to make a hole for myself large enough to squeeze through. Wary of the sharp edges, I succeeded in worming my way out of the gaming center and into the open-air plaza, suffering only a few additional cuts to my uniform along the way.

  More desolation greeted me, and truthfully my heart raced as I expected the silence to be broken at any moment by the appearance of a legion of undead. Unarmed, I was vulnerable, and though the quiet persisted for a long minute, it did nothing to quell my steadily growing fear that somehow I had been brought to another stage of The Game. But when I looked more carefully at my surroundings, I noted a telling difference between them and The Game environment.

  The light cast on the buildings and storefronts lining both sides of the plaza looked wrong. The colors appeared dull and washed away, lacking vibrancy. But it wasn’t just the colors. The air outside the Arcade was just as stale as it had been inside building. When I looked up, I saw a sky of various shades of grey roiling about in a disturbed, murky mix. I had the impression there was no sun behind that grey sky, as though the sky itself generated that pale, ghostly light that now fell upon the silent and deserted entertainment district.

  As far as I could see, this part of Ar Telica was devoid of any sign of life other than my own.

  I couldn’t even begin to fathom why, but believing that stan
ding here for too long would invite danger, I briefly considered walking to the northern end of the plaza, as I had done after completing the first stage of The Game. But before I could take more than a dozen steps in that direction, I felt myself grow lightheaded as one might when the air is thinner than the body is accustomed to.

  Clutching my chest as I began struggling for air, I staggered toward the fountain some twenty meters ahead of me. No sooner had I arrived beside it when I fell to my hands and knees. My legs had stopped responding to the signals from my brain, and soon I lost touch with my lower body. Panic rose within me, strangling my ability to think rationally, but that was only the start of my problems. I looked down and stared at my splayed fingers on the ground…and my heart almost stopped.

  My fingers were…slowly crumbling away.

  Horror overwhelmed my panic, gripping me in icy bands of steel that crushed my chest and prevented me from breathing as I watched the skin of my hands flake and turn to dust.

  What the Hell is this? What the Hell is happening to me?

  The urge to scream bubbled up in my chest and into my throat, just as I heard the sound of something large and heavy crash land into the fountain beside me, splashing water loudly into the air. Somehow, as my body continued to crumble apart, I managed to raise my head and look up at the fountain.

  Standing in the fountain’s pool was a tall girl with silvery white hair that reminded me of Shirohime, and at first I wondered if it was her.

  But there the resemblance ended.

  The girl was dressed in a white blouse and very short indigo skirt, with a matching sweater tied around her waist. What I could see of her long shapely legs was clad in golden brown stockings and thigh high boots of a dark purplish color with indigo trimmings running down their sides. Thin armor swirled around her thighs, leading to the impression that she was wearing holsters strapped to her legs. The sleeves of her white blouse were rolled up, and her hands and forearms were sheathed in gunmetal grey gauntlets.

  She looked to be of high school age, another reason why I initially mistook her for Shirohime.

  As I looked up at her, my eyesight began to grey out, and soon I could no longer see in color. Yet I could still see the girl as she ran through the pool water. She jumped out of the fountain and landed beside me on feet wearing thinly armor plated high heels. As she reached down for me, I thought she looked like a beautiful doll with flawless skin, perfect lips…large cat ears and eyes with slit irises?

  The cat girl picked me up with the ease of an adult lifting an infant into the air, and yelled something to someone out of sight, but my ears only registered it as a dull rush of sound before I lost my ability to hear. Unbelievably, the panic and horror I was feeling began to fade quickly, perhaps because I was entranced by the beautiful cat girl holding me in the air with one arm, or maybe my brain had deteriorated beyond its capacity to process emotions.

  In any event, my senses failed me soon thereafter, and my vision faded to black.

  What a hopeless way to die.

  To crumble apart like an old cookie in the presence of such a beautiful feline girl.

  Chapter 5.

  - I -

  When I regained consciousness, I saw that darkness surrounded me but that was only because my eyes were closed.

  I sensed that I was lying on my back on a soft but otherwise firm mattress, undoubtedly designed under the guidance of a dozen orthopedic surgeons or more, all specialists in the field, and all bootstrapped Alphas to boot. My cynicism stoked my awareness, and after a number of attempts to open my eyes, I eventually succeeded and blearily looked up at a familiar white ceiling with recessed panels emitting soft, weak light.

  Puzzled, I blinked to clear my eyes, then slowly turned my head and muzzily regarded my surroundings, slow to recognize the interior of my dormitory apartment adorned with numerous posters of Mercy Haddaway.

  I was home, but I had no recollection of returning here.

  However, I did remember a horrible dream where my body crumbled away.

  Raising my arms, I studied my hands, turning them over slowly above me. They showed no signs of having ever broken apart, and after inspecting them and my arms for a long while, I raised myself off my bed, indeed designed by a specialists to ensure students a good night’s rest so they could rise bright and bushy tailed the next morning, and took another long look at my small apartment.

  I could see nothing out of place.

  The posters, the shelves, the magazine and data disk racks, and the holovid projection system were all exactly as I remembered.

  Swinging my legs off the bed, I studied my small feet visible beneath the legs of my tracksuit pants that I normally wore to bed. Again, nothing that I could discern out of the ordinary, and yet the longer I sat on the bed, the more I was convinced I had experienced something horribly real and not dreamt it. Despite current appearances, my sense of caution insisted I not dismiss the vivid experience as just a dream, so I rose to my feet and walked into the bathroom.

  My familiar and disappointingly effeminate features greeted me in the mirror, including a bad case of bed hair. I noticed I was dressed in a well-worn Tee shirt that hung a little loose on my narrow shoulders. Feeling depressed at sight of my appearance, I chose to wash my hands and face, and pat down my hair in an attempt to look somewhat respectable. Nothing short of a shower was going to fix my hair, so deciding to leave that for later, I walked out of the bathroom and then across the living room that doubled as a bedroom. Arriving at the curtained wall that was floor-to-ceiling glass windows that offered access to the balcony overlooking the city, I instructed the apartment’s Monitor to open the curtains.

  Morning flooded the apartment, and the Monitor automatically turned off the ceiling lights, while the intelligent glass polarized the windows, preventing the sunlight from blinding me. I blinked a few times to clear my eyes and focused on my easterly view of the city and the harbor beyond it.

  The scenery was as I remembered it, with colors strong in the morning sunlight. The sky was a brilliant blue with cotton white clouds floating beneath it, and the tall megascrapers of Ar Telica city rose majestically before me, like steep sided pyramids of intelli-glass and krono-steel, towering a thousand feet or more above the wide streets running between their oblong feet. Traffic control drones travelled the airspace amid the buildings, riding the thermal updrafts like lazy birds, reminding me of the seagulls I watched from my window seat in class.

  I touched the glass window, feeling a faint warmth spread across its transparent skin, reassured this wasn’t a dream but the reality I was accustomed to waking up to. The sunlight didn’t just warm my fingertips, but my soul too, and I broke into a relieved smile.

  With a light sigh, I retreated from the window wall and then sat down on the edge of my bed facing the city vista.

  “Monitor, are there any messages?”

  I didn’t expect any, but it was a morning ritual for me to ask nonetheless.

  “Yes. There are nineteen messages for you.”

  Dumbfounded, I needed a moment recover my wits. “Who are they from?”

  “You have eleven messages from Tobias Matheus Praetor the Third. Three messages from Felicia Anjeur. Three messages from Angela Letrois. One message from Anri Shirohime. One message from Doctor Erina Kassius.”

  I had some trouble mentally digesting the report, stunned to hear I had a flurry of messages, and more in one day than I received in a year. But what truly surprised me was the message from my sister.

  “Monitor, what is the nature of Erina Kassius’ message?”

  “It is a voice recording.”

  I frowned, wondering why after years of communicating by text message, my sister had broken the norm and sent me a voice recording, so I chose to listen to her first. Despite being alienated from her and my family, she still meant more to me than my classmates did, though whenever I thought of her I felt a painful emptiness inside, and this time was no different.

  I took a
couple of deep breaths, wet my lips slowly, then anxiously cleared my throat. “Monitor, please playback the message from Erina Kassius.”

  A moment later, I listened to my sister’s voice that I had not heard in two years, and not since she joined the Telos Corporation’s research ship Asherah that sailed the oceans of Teloria, rarely returning to port. Like my parents had years ago, my sister too left me behind to pursue a life of scientific discovery that with my present Menial mental abilities I could never hope to enter. As I mentioned before, my immediate family lived in circles that were far removed from my existence. They were circles only the intellectual elite could orbit, and even if I eventually qualified for the Delta Tier, I would be fourth rung to them, and hardly worth a mention.

  For a time I’d wondered if my sister and I were an experiment conducted by my parents, one that delivered mixed results with an Alpha Tier daughter, and a Menial son. After all, they treated my sister more or less the same before and after her mental prowess blossomed and she was bootstrapped into the Alpha ranks. However, cut from the same cloth, my sister behaved no different than they did, and though she was legally my guardian since my parents had relocated off-world to some research facility out in the solar system, Erina and I hadn’t spoken verbally or face to face in years. At first she had left me holovid messages, but in subsequent months those degenerated to cursory text messages I would scarcely call letters, and during my final year of middle school, Erina wrote once a month to remind me she was still alive if nothing else and that I should continue to do my best.

  It was a phrase I was tired of hearing – do your best – well intentioned yet I perceived it as a reminder that my best would never be enough.

  I looked down at my hands, clasping them together as I listened to Erina, reminding me to do my best – as expected from her – and not be late for school, to take my vitamins regularly each day as she would know if I was skipping out on them, and reiterating in brief terms that high school was an important epoch in my life. Her sentiments made me laugh, and bitterness swelled up within my chest.