Lucas woke slowly, refusing to open his eyes. His head was spinning. A sensation like something precious and irreplaceable was gone forever left him on the edge of tears, but he had no idea what it was. It had something to do with memories… He had been playing video games late, like usual, letting insomnia battle it out with exhaustion until exhaustion won. He rolled his computer chair over to the bed and flopped gratefully into the sheets, letting sweet oblivion wash over him. Since then he had been dreaming, sensations of vast power lingered at the edges of his mind but the dream crumbled as he reached to remember.
Lying still as the sensations passed, he became aware that something was different. Lucas sat up with a start, his head spinning violently at the sudden movement. He was completely naked, the grass under him tickling his exposed skin. The ground was damp with chilly dew but the sun was warm and pleasant. He was also hungry, and thirsty, painfully so.
He was sitting on a patch of grass in a very strange place. Before him spread a lush glade, full of crumbled stone covered in vibrant green moss and tangled vines. All around crowded a forest of old oaks and birch. The dense trees loomed like a threat, as if nobody had ever set foot in it and the forest preferred it that way. In the clearing, Lucas noticed suspiciously symmetrical patterns in the stone formations he had assumed were natural. Along the ground straight lines and right angles among the stone seemed to describe the floor plan of unfathomably ancient buildings. As the vertigo faded, Lucas tried to figure out what could have happened while he slept to explain what he was seeing. He should be home in bed.
‘Am I in a dream?’
It looked real… not dreamlike at all. Lucas clapped his hands together and they stung from the impact.
‘Maybe some kind of delusion? Have I gone crazy?’
After a moment’s reflection that didn't seem right either. His thoughts were clear and orderly. It wouldn't be so easy to calmly analyse himself and his surroundings if his brain was trying to fabricate some delusion, or so he imagined. Not that he had much experience with psychological delusions.
‘Possible I guess,’ Lucas admitted as he eyed a row of rocks that might once have been pillars.
They stood in perfect alignment like ancient sentinels draped in mossy cloaks.
He cautiously stood up, looking around for a reason to pick one direction over another. The forest was too foreboding so he opted for going further into the glade, among the ruins. The moment he took his first step the vertigo struck. A wave of deja vu washed over him as the sensations of vast power that he had woken up with came back in force. He stumbled with a grunt and fell, but never hit the ground.
His vision started stuttering, the sound of his own grunt reverberating back at him in a loop of escalating pitch. Lucas felt he had been sucked into an echo or some kind of impossible recursive loop, like falling into the reflections found when holding one mirror up to another. Just as suddenly, it was over. Now he stood, having never even stumbled, and the memories of what just happened were already fading. Feeling nothing more than frustration now, Lucas took another step and was immediately confronted with a strange blue box and text hovering in front of him. He stared blankly for a moment, expecting his vision to clear, or reality to simply collapse around him. When it didn't, he shook his head. That was a mistake. The blue box shook with him, glued to the centre of his perspective, even when he closed and rubbed his eyes. The effect was disorienting and panic inducing.
[https://i.imgur.com/h1kG5XE.jpg]
“Riiiiight...” he said out loud.
After staring blankly for a moment, he decided he wanted the box to disappear. It did.
‘Did that box just disappear because I wanted it to?’
He tried ‘wanting’ it to come back and it did. He dismissed it again.
‘That’s ahh, extremely disturbing,’ he thought, rubbing his eyes as his mind raced to reconcile his understanding of reality with what had just happened. When that failed, he willed the popup back again, reading over it a second time.
‘A quest.. As if I’m in a video game. Or, maybe a simulated reality? An alternative universe?’
Lucas stooped to pick up a bit of papery tree bark, staring at it closely, as if he might be able to see some pixels or perhaps a lack of detail up close. He knew enough about programming to know a simulation or game of some kind would not be able to generate extremely small details or truly organic textures on the entire environment.
The bark looked and felt so real as he peeled away its papery layers that he was sure it wasn't simulated. Lucas shook his head and dropped the bark. Despite the impossible blue box, his instincts told him he wasn't dreaming, or going crazy, or playing a game. He was, admittedly, curious what would happen if he did complete that quest. One thing was certain, he wasn't going to find answers, or pants, standing here.
Stepping past the stone sentinels, Lucas navigated his way awkwardly over the rocky field. The soft grass and moss that coated the grove was cool and pleasant but the rocks played havoc on his sensitive feet. Soon the terrain began to slope downwards. As he descended, the stone seemed to increasingly resemble its original state; edges were sharper and shapes less worn. The pillars grew taller, and he could see what might once have been cobblestones. Lucas knew the lower elevation had protected the ruins from the elements, but still got the impression of walking backwards in time as he descended.
A strange sound, so faint as to be hardly distinguishable from his imagination, began to make itself heard. Lucas followed it, not having anything else to go on. Winding his way through the rubble by ear brought him further down the slope, until at last he was presented with a wall covered in dense flowering vines. The deep echoing quality of the sound made it obvious that Lucas would find an opening behind the flora, so he began to pull it aside. The vines were old and thick, layered over each other for many generations. The oldest ones had calcified into a rock-hard support lattice that the younger ones tangled themselves amongst. With a concerted effort, Lucas managed to clear enough to peek through, revealing a stone entrance to a descending staircase. The light of day died immediately inside, giving the impression of a black portal. The sound could be heard clearly now. ‘CLANK-ratatatat, CLANK-ratatatat, CLANK-ratatatat.’
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Lucas continued yanking and untangling the vines, but a sense of dread was building the longer he worked. Only once he had cleared a hole large enough for him to crawl in did he come to understand the source of his growing unease. The sound was getting louder. It was coming up the stairs. “CLANK-ratatatat” it sounded, louder than ever. Suddenly afraid, Lucas backed off and hid behind a nearby pillar. He felt like running away, but was stopped when considering where he might run to. He was so utterly lost that the fear of the unknown was ubiquitous in any direction. Whatever came out of that hole, it would at least give him a scrap of context he could use to piece together his situation.
Lucas’s dread grew, until each and every CLANG set off an involuntary flinch. Before long the sound began to lose its resounding echo, which must mean it was nearing the top of the stairs. Lucas had been wracking his brain to try and predict what would make a sound like that, but was completely surprised by what he saw. It looked like a bundle of junk. As if a frustrated giant had grabbed a handful of random detritus and scrunched it into a ball. The core was made of rows of little rectangles with bronze knobs. They looked like a metallic rendition of a Napoleonic military coat, or perhaps a chest of drawers. One side of it was a big, jagged piece of scrap metal attached to a rotating bolt like a helicopter blade. The other side looked like part of an engine. A rapid fire piston was shooting out of it, tapping the ground at an angle to create forward thrust.
The big piece of scrap CLANKed into the stone, propelling the thing a metre forward as it continued to spin. The piston would then maintain the momentum until the scrap-rotator could come around to hit the ground again. Lucas almost laughed at the absurdity of it. He struggled to imagine a less efficient way to design a robot that could still actually move. Having seen what was making the noise, he now felt silly at getting so worked up about it. Coming out from behind his pillar, he moved closer to get a better look.
The smell of burned wires, or an overheated soldering iron, filled Lucas’s nostrils as he approached. When he was within an arm's length a little pipe of linked joints extended from its core. At the tip was a shard of crystal that looked like a lens. The crystal flashed at him, whiting out his vision temporarily. Lucas grunted and rubbed his eyes. By the time his vision cleared a second appendage had extended towards him, this one tipped with a clamp.
Before he could react, it had grasped the skin of his thigh. Lucas tried to yank himself out of its grip, but it had the intractable strength of a machine. When the clamp at the tip began to spin, a fist sized piece of Lucas’s thigh skin was ripped off entirely. Lucas fell backwards screaming, kicking at the ground to get away. The robot made no move to follow. It opened up a little compartment from what was, in fact, a chest of drawers. There it placed the bit of Lucas’s skin it had sequestered, then went still.
Lucas did not wait to see if it wanted other samples, scrambling to his feet and running fast in the other direction. Soon he was back where he had started. He didn't stop there, however. His heart was pumping hard, driving adrenaline through his body as he ran headlong into the forest. There his run became a scramble as he was forced to work his way through, over, or around thick scrub and densely packed trees.
The light dimmed considerably and the air went still. He pushed forward unthinkingly, stumbling and tripping constantly over roots, rocks and ditches. It wasn't until his body was completely at its limit that he collapsed against a thick oak tree, breathing hard. His heart was thundering in his ears as he turned his back to the tree and let himself collapse into a sitting position. His body was covered in scrapes from the clawing branches and shrubs, his leg was bleeding heavily, but he felt numbed to all of it.
Lucas was just getting his breathing under control when a bush began rustling ahead. He froze, watching as a black and white furry creature, about the size of a dog, came out of the bushes and stared at him.
“What the hell is that?” he mumbled to himself. It looked like something he should recognise, but had some features that didn't fit any animal he had heard of. As he strained to make sense of what he was looking at, two more blue boxes filled his vision.
[https://i.imgur.com/JTF5vf6.jpg]
[https://i.imgur.com/TCufein.jpg]
Lucas was reading the popup when a sudden pain in his leg forced an agonised cry out of his lungs. He looked down, the screens disappearing. The badger had clamped its jaw onto Lucas' left leg, curled up around it, and was raking through his skin with its claws.
In a sudden panic Lucas started beating it with his fists but the creature barely seemed to notice, continuing to cover itself in his blood and shredded skin. The pain was unbelievable, but seeing his leg getting shredded in front of his eyes was even worse. It felt like a nightmare was coming to life. Lucas wedged his fingers into the badger's mouth, gritting his teeth as he tried to pry apart its jaws, but the strength of the bite was far too great. He felt the badger's teeth sinking into his shin, the bone slowly splintering under the pressure.
As Lucas watched the steady, inexorable collapse of his leg bone, a primal part of his brain woke and pushed his paralysed rational mind aside. Not thinking about what he was doing, Lucas got up and shuffled around to face the tree he had been leaning on, the creature still attached. Bracing himself, he swung his leg into the trunk with all the force his body could muster. Lucas’s veins burned with adrenaline, giving him strength he didn't know he had. He swung again, and again. The creature grunted as it crashed against the tree but refused to let go. A primal shout tore from his throat as he put all his strength into another kick, feeling a crack as he made impact. The pressure started to ease. The badger's spine was broken, its lower half swinging limply.
Lucas spotted a fist sized rock at the base of the tree and sat near it, grunting as he extended his leg. It looked like the badger was already dead, or passed out, but its jaw was locked tight. He used the rock to smash at the joint of its jaw, sobbing with each strike. Finally something gave out and the pressure let up enough for him to dislodge it. Sitting back against the tree, his chest heaving, another screen popped into his vision.
[https://i.imgur.com/DgvtOvc.jpg]
Lucas dismissed the popup to look at his leg, a bloody mess. The bone was clearly visible as his skin was mostly gone along with a decent amount of flesh from his calf. Most worrying was the crushed section of his shin bone where the creature's teeth had sunk in.
Lucas stared at his leg in numb horror. It was hard to believe what he was looking at, as if something this nightmarish was so out of place that he struggled to accept it had happened. Lucas forced himself to breathe, trying to think clearly. He felt more ready to faint than to think after having his body driven to the edge twice in the span of a few minutes. Eventually his heart stopped thundering in his ears and the cold sweat began to dry.
As he calmed the pain set in, but he also got his faculties back. All that exertion had sent him from thirsty to feeling dangerously dehydrated. His stomach felt like a black hole, but there was nothing he could do about that yet. The bleeding wasn't too bad but the immediate danger was that his leg was likely to get infected and kill him before he could make it out of here. Both legs were damaged now, and he had nothing to treat or wrap them with. He wasn't sure exactly how far he had made it into the forest before encountering that very angry badger, but it was clear that this strange environment was thick with hostile creatures.