A sterilizing whiteness washed over him, erasing every corner of darkness. It was as though he had awakened in a deity's waiting room. The wall in front of him slid open with a subdued buzz, and he stepped into an octagonal shaped chamber filled with technology that had no place in a medieval setting. It looked like the bridge of a ship, not that he had ever stood on one. The very idea of sailing over an abyss of water under an infinite expanse of sky could give him a wicked case of agoraphobia. His only fond memory of a ship and the sea was the ferry trip with his mom and dad as a child.
He called out “Hello?” There was no reply. The room was replete with oddly tilted chairs, each one designed to closely fit a human form and each within a semicircular console. A central platform with a single chair and console dominated the center of the room with a clear view it gave of the entire space. It was a cross between Star Trek and IKEA, but without any windows. A bonus for Alek's sea-fearing sensibilities. The walls were bare too of the maps, tables, calendars, photos he might have expected to find in the bridge of a vessel. All surfaces were clean and shiny, and the small colored lights on the consoles flickered off and on incessantly. The circuits were powered and the system was running on automatic. It was as if the crew had gone on strike.
Alek’s eyes returned to the same round white tube he'd woken up in, like a cat sniffing its own butt. A door? A panel? Maybe there was a magic stone or a convenient plot device he missed. He turned back towards the entrance and blinked. Gone was the bridge, replaced by a cavernous, circular room filled with gently glowing circles at his chest height in a single line around the circumference of the walls.
"Hello?" he called out but no answer was returned.
When in doubt call up the HUD.
The stats were unchanged. His health was a full 100 and his mana a strong 85. Strength and Dexterity, both holding at 20, were proof enough to Alek of his masterly, steady resolve. Wisdom and Intelligence, sat at a respectable 18 and 17. His experience points were comfortably high, given the lack of immediate danger.
Suddenly glowing text flashed before his eyes. It told him the crew were asleep in their hibernation tanks.
“Okay, so how do I wake them up?” he muttered to himself. It was then he recalled the Dormire Excitare spell, a simple yet potent incantation that could rouse a sleeper to wakefulness. He held up his hands and peered closely at them. Satisfied he could see a visible aura around them, he cleared his throat, drawing on the mana within, and began to chant. He had no idea what the ancient, arcane language translated as in English but that didn’t matter at all, his avatar made the sounds and Alek was there for the ride. It came out naturally, like Chinese learned at high school he thought he had long forgotten, but suddenly finds when a tourist stops him on the street for directions.
He held his breath, waiting to see if the magic worked in this new environment and was disappointed to find it did not. It wasn’t entirely useless. He saw the line of wall lights around the room slowly brighten but he decided that had nothing to do with the failed spell. When he called out again, there was still no answer.
It would not be good if my HUD failed me. Alek began to feel a tendril of fear twitch in his gut. How he hated that feeling.
He decided to give it another go and called up the HUD once more. This time he selected a more powerful spell, one he was sure targeted the ships control system, requiring it to obey his command. Imperium Excito packed a punch, causing very large and otherwise inanimate objects to bend to his wishes.
He closed his eyes and tapped into his mana reserves. His right hand moved through the air, tracing ethereal runes in a dance of finger and wrist. A soft, iridescent light began to swirl around him, gaining intensity as he continued the chant. The energy rippled outward, coursing through the walls of the round chamber, consoles, and screens, intricate glass wiring and microscopic layers of fine filaments that carried the impulses driving the ships system, then it swept back in a wave that turned up the lights throughout the craft.
The HUD flashed but Alek was too focused on his spell to pay attention to the text alert or the bright red icon that pulsated with urgency.
WARNING: User attempting to access and manipulate complex electric field of vessel. Potential energy backlash may lead to user mana depletion, a system malfunction, or both.
A rising graph of energy flux appeared beside the text, showing a sharp spike in power.
As Alek's second spell took effect, the hibernation tanks began to hum, filling the room with sound. Consoles were flickering, with lights dancing in the semi-darkness. Cylinders slid from the wall like silent phantoms, hovering like apparitions over the chasm left behind. Their see-through lids revealed a light show pirouetting over the sleeping figures inside before they eased into an upright position on the floor.
Alek noticed a few strange looking humanoids among them. He sighed with relief when after a quick glance around the room he confirmed there wasn’t a single goblin or ork among them.
He tried his first spell again and snapped his fingers, watching in satisfaction as a shower of sparks issued forth. With a hiss the transparent top of a cylinder disappeared and the sparkling lights were replaced with a glowing interior. The woman inside awoke with a start as though someone had hit the play button, her emerald eyes popping open like those of a surprised cat. Any trace of sleepiness sloughing away as she stepped onto the floor.
“You don’t look like you belong here,” she told Alek. “What are you wearing?" she asked staring at his gown and continued without waiting for an answer. “You need to be in a suit on this deck.”
Alek looked down at the gown of a mage, “I thought I had one on.” He fingered the gown. Well, that figures since I’m obviously still a mage. The reason why his magic still worked. He wondered whether a spacecraft had landed near the road. That would explain the wind and the noise. He had been taken aboard, and soon enough he was going to find out why. The main thing being, he was still in the game with Orion, the rogue knight, all of them. Like it or not, and he didn’t like it at all. It meant this was all to do with the weird glitches he had noticed.
“I’m Alek,” he began.
“Isolde,” she replied without looking up at him. She placed her palm over a panel and read a holographic display that sprung up over the cylinder. “Hmm, this can’t be right.” She looked around at him.” What has happened?”
“I, um, I woke you up,” Alek told her.
She moved quickly, working her way around the cylinders, pressing her palm a panel on each to wake the crewmember. Then, with a low hiss, the transparent top of each of the cylinders retracted, revealing the crew members stirring within. They were much slower to step out of the cylinders than Isolde had been.
Having released the last crewmember from hibernation, Isolde turned her attention back to Alek. “What’s going on?” she asked him. Her cat -like eyes were much wider than before. “Who are you? What are doing here? Why did you wake us? Is this an emergency?”
“I don’t think it’s an emergency,” Alek began. “I only just woke up myself.”
“Where is your hibernation pod?” she asked. “It’s not in this chamber. So where?”
Alek frowned. His HUD was working, so he knew he was still in the game. It followed that he was talking to an NPC. So, what’s with an NPC ask me all these questions?
The chamber was filled with the sound of groggy crew members sucking in air and coughing noisily. Isolde ignored all of it, her focus entirely on Alek.
Alek found himself truly mesmerized by her gaze. He thought about reaching for a spell to protect himself, but that didn’t seem to matter. He was only faintly aware feeling strangely relaxed under her intense gaze.
“I’m the ship physician,” she told him. “I’ll check on your condition, but I need to attend to the crew first.”
“Of course,” Alek replied, finding himself nodding obediently, and still flooded with calmness. He knew that given the circumstances, that feeling wasn’t normal, but he was okay with it.
“I’m taking you to the med bay, she said, once she was done checking the status of the waking crew. She pointed to the white chamber he had woken in. “This way.”
No sooner had they reached the open door into the transporting device than they heard a metallic groan and felt the ship shudder. When the siren sounded, Alek remembered the warning he had ignored. His magic must have stirred more than just the sleeping crew. In fact, the spell he used had altered the ship's delicate security protocols and awakened a beastly instinct in the vessel.
Isolde’s crewmates, were roused into flurry of activity. The groggy officers and engineers sprung to life, slipping into sleek suits that emerged from lockers beneath the row of empty pods. They worked frantically to soothe the ship's ruffled feathers. The crew hastened to calm the ship's newly-discovered temper.
“Move it,” a man with a jaw straight out of a comic book barked, bulldozing past Isolde and Alek. He paused at the doorway to point at Alek. “Doc, get him in the brig and keep him under wraps till we sort this out. Make sure he stays put and unharmed. I’ll be down as soon as I can. We interview him together. Understood?”
“Understood, Captain,” Isolde said loudly standing to attention.
Four crewmen joined the captain in the room. The curved white door closed and a moment later opened again to reveal an empty space.
“What kind of magic is this?” Alek muttered to himself.
"That, my friend, is technology, not magic," Isolde corrected him. “You were not on board when we left DACRO 5, were you?”
Alek shook his head in answer to her. “What’s DACRO 5?”
"That's our home base," she said, shooting him a look of utter disbelief, as if he had just sprouted a second head.
He watched as five more crew members bundled themselves into the transporter, and on the opposite side, the last five crew from the hibernation pods disappeared into a second transporter entrance that had appeared in the wall.
The siren droned on, accompanied by a red wave that swept the white walls of the chamber and the transporter in which he and Isolde had walked. The door opened to reveal a much larger chamber lined with equipment, lockers, and empty suits on stands.
Alek surveyed his surroundings and concluded he was likely on a futuristic deep-sea diving vessel several miles below the ocean's surface. His virtual heart attempted to beat its way out of his virtual chest, demanding a supreme effort to regain his composure.
“Hey,” Isolde said. “Calm down.”
“Uh, okay,” Alek said sucking in a deep breath as he stared into the green cat eyes and relaxing.
She pulled on a bright yellow black striped lever in the wall, and a thick metal door opened to reveal a large rectangular metal room. She gestured for him to go inside.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
But Alek refused.
“It’s no good using your goo-goo gaze on me either,” he said, turning away from her gaze. “That’s an airlock if ever I’ve seen one.”
“It’s just one of several airlocks,” she answered.
Alek stood his ground, "I don't care if you've got a dozen of them, I'm not stepping foot in there."
"You can get in yourself, or I can always assist you."
Alek made the mistake of meeting her gaze and found himself walking into the airlock.
When the door shut with a loud click. he hollered for her to let him out, but the door remained locked. He saw the interior release lever on the wall and pulled on it, but the door remained sealed tight.
“You can’t keep me in here,” he called out. There was a dark screen beside him, and he placed his palm on it. The image he saw from an array of outside cameras were not the ocean floor, it was the vast emptiness of outer space. One section of the large display showed a curving flat sleek spaceship that resembled a pudding bowl with an open outer ring that was connected by vast fins to an inner torus. The vessel appeared to be lined with shining chrome and gunmetal, and the surface of the inner body was studded with sparkling lights. The thing was gigantic. At least as big as a stadium, and dwarfing the craft was the expanse of cosmos looking like a dark pool with a scattering of glittering diamonds.
“I’m in a bloody spaceship!” he shouted. “This is not my game?"
Isolde’s voice came over the intercom. The tone was quite matter-of-fact which didn’t do a lot to reassure Alek. “You are safe. I am here, and the captain will be soon.”
“Tell me what this is?”
“You are on the Excalibur,” she told him. “The newest ship in the Earth Guardian fleet.”
“Where are we going?” Alek shouted. Trapped in a spacecraft in the middle of space on a mission was making him think fond thoughts of the time he had spent in a land of boss wolves and murderous knights.
“We will rendezvous with a supply ship heading for the planet Argos in the Janet B star system.”
“How far away is Argos?”
“It's a long way.”
Alek slumped in the corner of the cold metal box. His mind was racing. If the journey required the crew to hibernate, he could well be looking at a lifetime in space. What did that mean for Alek slumped across his desk in the real world? Perhaps Alek was awake and getting on with his life, without ever knowing a part of his consciousness existed inside his own game. If he didn’t wake from this nightmare soon, then clearly anything was possible.
“Is it pretty?” he asked her.
“Argos? From what I know of it, I’m not sure that’s the way I’d describe it. I’ve heard it has its charming vistas.”
Alek groaned. “It’s awfully cold in here,” he told her glad he couldn’t see the monitor from where he sat on the floor.
“I am monitoring your life signs,” Isolde said. “And, apart from your anxiety, you are doing fine. Your body temperature has dropped but that will help to calm you. I could give you medication, but I’m not even sure what you are yet.”
“I’m human,” Alek told her. “I’m from planet Earth.”
“Hmm,” she replied. “We’ll get to the bottom of that, when the captain gets down here.”
Alek called up the HUD and selected the Transitus Locus spell. It was simple yet effective, a trick of space-time manipulation that allowed him to move instantly from one location to another so long as it was in his sight range. He closed his eyes and braced himself holding his palms flat against his thighs, and visualizing the other side of the airlock. Then he muttered the incantation under his breath.
Isolde's felt his presence behind her and spun around. She yelped in alarm at the sight of a shimmering Alek solidifying before her eyes. Her next reaction was the pure reflex of a native from the High Plateau on Klaxon honed to lethal perfection by the years of martial training with the Earth Guardians.
Alek had no chance of seeing her coming. Isolde threw him to the floor in a headlock. He turned his head to glimpse the fiercely determined face.
“If you fight me, I will hurt you,” she snarled, baring her sharp incisors.
“I believe you,” he gasped and did his best to focus his eyes on the alert from the HUD.
Your carotid artery is compressed and you are about to lose consciousness. Cast the Vinculum Frango spell immediately.
As he felt his consciousness fading, he chanted the incantation as best he could. It was good enough. A vibrant pulse of mana radiated from him, and Isolde's hold on him loosened. Alek sucked in a lungful of air as he slipped out of her grip, and rolled away to a safe distance. He was hurt but free from her headlock.
Isolde leapt onto all fours and hissed in surprise. “How did you do that?”
“Keep the heck away from me,” Alek gasped, getting to his feet. “I stay here, and you stay where you are, okay?”
Isolde wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and got to her feet, doing her best to resurrect her pride. “There’s no way an Earthling can do that,” she said, shaking her head.
By the time the sirens subsided and normality was restored, Captain Javid arrived flanked by two humans and a grumpy-looking extraterrestrial Alek recognized from the hibernation pod.
“I’m in command of this cruiser,” Captain Javid said to Alek. He tapped the thin gold stripes on the lapels of his uniform. Then he pointed to the other two men accompanying him who also had the same insignia, only with one less stripe each. “I’m the captain, and these are my top three officers.”
“Impressive!” Alek said. He wasn’t sure how to respond.
Javid ignored Alek’s sarcasm and pointed to Isolde who was brushing grit off her dark blue flight slacks. "And Doc here, you’ve already met."
Alek ran his fingers along edge of the coarse material of the light blue gown he wore. “I’m a mage.” He said with a shrug. “I have stats, but they change all the time. I don’t have a ranking as such.”
“A mage, hmm.” The Captain said
“That's my role in the game. Actually, it's the role I chose for myself in the previous game.”
“You were playing a game?” Isolde asked with a look of puzzlement
Alek nodded. Okay, I shouldn’t use the word game. Big mistake.
“This is no game, son,” the Chief Engineer Hugo Tompkins said. A tall, dark, and hairy Earthling hailing from Ontario, Hugo was built like a bear, and with a personality to match.
“I ordered you to put him in the brig, Doc,” Javid said gruffly to Isolde.
“I did,” she said. “He got out.”
“How did he do that?” Hugo asked. “You locked him in, right?” he asked, checking the locking mechanism on the door
“That’s what I asked him,” she said.
“And you’ve been standing there staring at him ever since?” Javid asked.
“No. We’ve wrestled on the floor a while,” Alek informed him.
Incredulous, Yara asked, "Then how come you're still in one piece?"
Lieutenant Commander Yara was of a similar build to Hugo. He was large and bearish, but without the hairiness. The face of a Tropian could best be described as resembling that of a grouch as depicted in Earth’s western tradition of graphic art. Yara’s mouth turned down at both sides, like that of a fish. It had two large puppy-dog eyes that were set well apart and stared mournfully from under heavy brows. It also had much smaller and darker third eye between other two and slightly higher. The third eye of a Tropian was often mistaken for a mole, but there was no mistaking they weren’t form Earth. Yara was known as Grouch to the crew when he wasn’t on the bridge. He didn’t mind. It was a good thing that Tropians had a sense of humor.
A commissioned officer of the Tropian Guard, Yara was on a semi-permanent exchange between Earth Space Command and Tropia’s equivalent. As a point of interest, no one on the ship knew if the Tropian was male or female. If asked for its opinion on a species having two sexes, Yara would say a species with more than one sex was disadvantaged in the wider world of evolution, when it came to reproduction, one was simply more efficient. Yara acknowledged the possibility Tropians didn’t know what they were missing out on, but even if they did, they wouldn’t care.
The captain stared at Alek in silence. Javid was a man of few words, but he was intrigued as much as he was suspicious.
“You are not thinking of putting me back in that airlock, are you?” Alek asked.
“There doesn’t appear to be any point in me doing that, does there?” Javid replied. “You’d just walk through the door again, or whatever it was you did to escape.”
“What caused the alarm,” Isolde asked the officer.
“We are off course,” Yara told her.
"That’s an understatement," Javid said. “We are in an entirely different star system.”
“How could that happen?” Isolde asked in disbelief. Then she turned her head and glared at Alek. "What did you do?"
“Oh, you are quick to blame me,” Alek said indignantly, but the look in their eyes told him they knew.
“AJ says we jumped,” Yara confirmed, referring to the ship’s AI. “Jumping isn’t possible using the technology on this vessel alone. We’d need to use a wormhole or portal to do, and there’s none in our immediate vicinity.”
"I think I may have disrupted something," Alek admitted.
“First things first,” Javid said, placing his hands on his hips. “How did you get out of that airlock with the safety lock activated.”
“I did it with these,” Alek lifted his hands for the four officers to see. The glow of residual magic was still dancing on his fingertips, a feral flame. “It’s basic magic,” he said. He looked around and saw disbelief etched on their faces.
Yara stared at Alek in fascination. “You can use magic?”
"Yes, I’m a mage," Alek said again.
“Technology can be magic, until it’s understood.” Hugo said shaking his head at the Yara. “How can you be a scientist and believe in magic?”
“You said it yourself,” Yara told him. “It can be understood. I don’t understand it, but I know it exists.
Javid rolled his eyes. “Only on Tropia, I guess.”
Yara ignored the comments and hunkered down before Alek. "Tell me, where did you learn magic?"
"In the game, the same place I got this ridiculous gown," Alek replied. “That’s where I came from,” he added quickly.
“What is ‘the game’,” Javid asked, his face creased with puzzlement.
"You emerged from the Transference, didn’t you?" Yara said, as if it were obvious enough to all.
Javid turned to the Tropian with a blank look. "Are you suggesting he transferred from a spacecraft?"
“No, he wouldn’t need a vehicle to get here,” Yara replied. “He crossed over from one plane of existence into another, ours. Tropians recognize a variety of planes existing along with our own.”
“You mean different dimensions?” Hugo asked.
“It’s more like the physicist's notion of a sixth dimension where different worlds exist," Yara said. “Think of all dimensions, including this one we are in right now, as existing on a single plane. And, this plane has a direction. Let’s say its horizontal. There are other planes out there. Some are Vertical and some are diagonal, but they are different from one another by degrees. An untold, probably unknowable number of then that float around in what we call existence, which is like a sea of shifting currents. The planes not solid, they can come into contact and intersect one another. When a point of intersection occurs a Transference will take place. Elements from one plane embed in the other and vice versa.”
“Do Tropians have evidence or is it just a belief?” Javid asked.
“We have many recorded incidences over millennia. Our records go back a long time and are detailed and accurate, as you know. But, look! Here is your evidence sitting in front of you.”
Yara gestured at Alek.
Isolde rolled her huge eyes. “Get on with it, Grouch.”
“Right, so, we know of rare but multiple occurrences of beings like this one who are able to perform magic. That’s how our records describe their mysterious powers.”
“A ridiculous superstition if ever I heard one,” Hugo said with a chuckle.
Javid held up a hand to quieten his first engineer. “Go on, Lieutenant Commander,” he said
“There’s not much more to say,” Yara told them. “Usually beings like Alek have proven helpful to us. One or two did turn out to be hostile, but we successfully expelled them both from our worlds. This one looks friendly.”
“Isolde?” Javid turned to the physician.
“I detect no hostility, Sir.”
“So where is their planet?” Javid asked Yara. “What constellation is it from?”
“There’s a plane of existence, maybe it’s an entire universe, or even collection of universes, that sometimes intersect with our own.” Yara continued. “When that happens there is overflow.”
“This concept of yours is quite nonspecific, isn’t it?” Javid said to Yara.
Yara looked up at the captain. “Not if we were speaking Tropian. We know exactly what we are talking about.”
Javid sighed. “Alright, leave where for a while. Tell us how you got inside the ship.”
“I woke up on the floor of your transporter,” Alek said. “That’s all I know.”
“That’s what he told me,” Isolde said to Javid.
“Do you believe him?” Javid asked her.
“I think he’s telling the truth, yes,” she replied. “I think he may be suffering from amnesia. He’s obviously confused.”
“Yes, this is all very confusing,” Alek admitted. “I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t even know where the heck ‘here’ is?”
“We don’t know a thing about him,” Javid said turning to his officers in exasperation. He turned back to Alek. “I suppose it’s no good asking why you are here then, is it? Tell me what you can about this Gameworld? Anything you remember.”
“It’s not part of star system, or anything like that,” Alek replied. “This doesn’t make sense to me either. I shouldn’t be here, and I don’t understand why I’m surrounded by NPCs that behave like they are sentient?”
“I told you,” Yara said standing up, and placing one large palm on the captain’s forearm. “Alek is here because a transference took place. It was an accident. I think he knows about as much about how he got here as we do."
“He seems delusional to me,” Hugo growled, and turned to Alek. “Did you just say we are BEHAVING like we are sentient?” he asked in mock wonder.
“If that’s what he said, he’s delusional” he muttered in the captain’s ear.
Javid glanced at Isolde. “Doctor, run some tests on him and let me know what you find.” He peered closely at Alek. “We will talk more about this later. Meanwhile, you will be accommodated in the Lieutenant Commander’s cabin. I’ll see you are provided with a bed of sorts.”
“What?” Yara growled. “Why is it my cabin?”
“You are the only one who seems to knows anything about his species. I want you to observe and report to me.”
“Aye, aye, captain, that shouldn’t get in the way of my usual duties at all,” Yara grumbled.
“I don’t need a bed,” Alek said to Yara, his hands in the air as he tried to appease him. “I don’t need sleep.”
“Alright then,” Javid said, and nodded at Yara. “Lieutenant Commander, I’m assigning you to keep an eye on him for the time being. If you think the mage is likely to cause any problem, let me know, immediately. Right now, our focus is contacting space station DACRO 5, fixing whatever went wrong with the ship, and getting back on course.”
“No magic!” Javid said, raising a finger at Alek in warning. “Any more trouble from you and we WILL find a way to eject you from the ship.”
Javid was bluffing to a point. There was no obvious way to restrain the free rider outside of rendering him unconscious or shooting him dead. Eventually though, they would discover the mage’s Achilles heel. Every species had one. It was only a matter of time before they discovered Alek’s.