Tanner and Liam signed independent contracts with team Rebels after Liam refused to join without his best friend. Rebels was a minor league team, backed by a major multi-marketing company valued in the high hundreds of millions, that was trying to push into the major leagues. They had already created a pretty solid team for league captained by “InstalockJungle” and were trying to lock down on a team for Echoes. They were the perfect team for them; they already had every spot filled expect Commander and Flex, and they had deep enough pockets to make it worth it for Tanner. The most recent season had ended so they had to wait a few months for their contracts to begin. They spent some of their off time playing with the other guys on Rebels, developing team standardized strategies and continued to they daily jobs working at True North.
Tanner eventually notified Ashley of their timeline left working at the office, she didn’t exactly take the news well. They both started getting shitty tasking, or at least what she thought was the shitty taskings. Most recently they had a mandatory company wide conference that each branch had to send a representative to. She ended up choosing to send Liam thinking that it was going to be super boring and inconvenient. What she didn’t realize is that the conference was being held in Austin, Texas. Not even 30 minutes away from Rakes house.
All four of the guys had gone to high school together in Port St John, but when Rake was 19 he moved to Texas to live with his dad and start learning his lawncare business so he could eventually take it over. Initially it didn’t sound like exciting or lucrative work to tanner until rake explained that his dad ran the largest lawn care business in the greater Austin area and his company was pulling in over a million dollars a year in profit with over 100 people working for them. Which made it seem a little more reasonable. It still sounded boring, but he understood not everyone shared his value of finding challenging work.
The morning of Liam's second day, Tanner woke up to a strange feeling. It was the same feeling you get when you feel like someone’s watching you, but there was no way some one could have been without triggering his home alarm system or being seen by one of his cameras outside. It was also different cause he felt like it was almost coming from all around him, it was a very disconcerting feeling, and it lingered the entire time he was getting ready for work. Eventually he decided to ignore the feeling and finish his morning routine. He brushed his teeth and used his water flosser, put moose in his hair and combed it off to the side, got dressed and put on his loafers, tied his tie and left the house. When he turned on his car, he though he heard a faint noise; something like “the new king” or “nude king” neither of which made any sense to him, and then suddenly the feeling was gone. At that point he’d gotten used to it and he had lost concern, attributing it to some weird anxiety or something.
Tanner opened up the front door at work and found himself in a vast field of patchy flowers and tall grass. In the distance could see what looked to be a small forest with a path loosely carved through it. He instantly fell to the ground, frantically looking all around but not really seeing anything. He tried to find his building but there was absolutely no sign of the world he knew. He spent the next ten minutes on the ground hyperventilating trying to figure out what had happened to himself. He didn’t feel any lingering effects of drugs in his system or signs of people. There also were no signs of any vehicles having been through the area. He was so stunned he couldn’t speak, but he decided to get up and figure out where he had been abandoned and maybe why. He looked across the field at the path carved in the woods and decided that was probably the best way to go to find some signs of civilization.
Once he made it to the tree line, he decided to find something that he can defend himself with, he figured the best option he could find quickly would be a large and sturdy stick. After about 5 minutes of scavenging the area, he found a fallen tree limb about 4 and a half feet in length, relatively straight, and about 2 inches thick. As he swung it around a few times, he mentioned to himself “Oh yea, this is a good one”. Instantly blushing when he realized how nerdy he sounded, especially given his circumstances. Once he was comfortable with his newfound weapon, he decided to follow the path from inside the trees. He was not sure what he was doing here but he wasn’t about to get caught in a trap.
Tanner traveled along the road for around 15 minutes before a small clearing became apparent in the distance. Nestled within the clearing was an odd house, it appeared to be a perfectly square building made of some kind of flawless white marble and completely absent of windows. He decided to stay hidden in the tree line and monitor the area for any movement. While he waited, it occurred to him that since he appeared in this area, he hadn’t seen a single bug, animal, or even animal track anywhere. About 20 minutes into his shadowing of the building, he seen a man stumbling across the field toward the building. It almost seemed like his was drunk, the way he wobbled side to side with each step. Tanner stayed crouched behind a tree watching to see what would happen to the poor drunkard, but the man just stumbled to the double front door and knocked so hard tanner was concerned for the integrity of the stranger’s hand. After a few tense moments, the man opened the door himself and just walked right in.
Not long after the first man entered, tanner saw another figure dart across the field with what appeared to be a small stick that had been broken in such a way to create a point on one end. “wait a second” he thought. “is that…. AUSTIN?!” he said in a hushed yell. Instantly he recognized his blunder by revealing his position and identifying his friends advance. Austin’s gaze fell on him instantly, causing Tanner to push his way through the brush and out into the open. He crossed the open field to the side of the building that Austin was pressed up against.
“What the fuck is going on around here?”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“That’s a great question, another good one is why the hell are you yelling in a situation like this?”
“Sorry… obviously I’m just a little off my guard right now. Did you see that other guy stumbling into the front door?”
“Yea, I’ve been watching for a while, but I haven’t seen anyone else. When no alarms were raised and I didn’t hear any screaming, I figured I should come check it out too. I’m not sure if I should feel grateful to see you here or worried.”
“Well, we don’t know what’s happening, so our best bet is to try and protect ourselves and gather information. This building is weird though. It almost looks artificial? Like it was built in a simulation for the DEV’s to experiment on items with.”
While conversing with Austin, it occurred to tanner that he had also armed himself with a large stick he had whittled into a makeshift spear. His arms and head and some small scratches, while his khakis and polo were wet with a few small scraps with loose thread hanging down and a lot of dirt and grass stains. It was apparent he had been traveling for quite a while longer than Tanner but had made excellent time and somehow arrived at the same destination as him.
“What do you think is in…”
“Did you suddenly appear in a field of flowers out of nowhere?” interrupted Tanner.
“No. I was driving through the parking lot at work trying to find a spot when all the sudden I was in a river. I fell flat on my ass and tumbled under the surface.”
“What the fuck is going on here…”
“I have no idea, but your description of a generated world feels more accurate than id like it to.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted you, what were you saying?”
“That this place is freaking me the hell out and I need to find someplace to get clothes and change. Might as well go see what’s inside.”
As the pair entered the building, wielding their spear in front of them in defensive stances, they were quickly disarmed. The spears dissolved into nothing as they crossed the threshold of the front door. A strange intercom system sounded in the room as if it was coming from all around them, but Tanner couldn’t pinpoint the origin.
“Welcome to the initiation center. Please have a seat while we wait for the surviving participants.”
Tanner instantly paled “What the fuck do they mean ‘surviving’?”
“This feels like a setup. Should we leave?”
“I’m not sure, but whoever that was is clearly implying that its dangerous out there, we might have just gotten lucky. I think id rather take my chances here.”
The small room itself was completely surrounded in concrete chairs that looked to be apart of the structure of the building. In one corner of the room was the man they saw stumble in earlier, passed out in one of the chairs like he was in a La-Z-Boy recliner. His clothes looked to have throw up on them but there were no signs of any on the chairs around him or the floor. Tanner and Austin decided to sit on the opposite side of the room while they waited for whatever was to come. Austin had tried to door to see if they could leave but it appeared to be almost welded in place. Not that I mattered, after watching their makeshift spears dissolve right in their hand they knew something supernatural was going on and they were in the hands of fate, or what whatever person had spoken through the intercom earlier. As they sat down, it felt like they were almost sitting on a cloud, the concreate didn’t feel rough or hard at all.
After a few hours passed, the room had filled. Nearly every seat had filled with an assortment of people that seemingly had no connections; besides himself and Austin of course, but they decided to play that close to the chest for now and they had no idea who could be trusted and if any other these people were plants from the intercom person or the person themselves. After speaking to a few people, trying to be friendly and gather intel, Tanner met a women named Sarah who told him she had appeared on the edge of a desert. While trying to figure out what was going on she wondered a little bit farther into the desert and suddenly got a bad feeling. When she took another step, her foot contacted some invisible wall and she got a bad shock. When she woke up, she heard the same intercom system telling her to “report to the initiation center”. Once she got on her feet, she could see a small pulsing line going off in this direction.
After a bit of small talk and trying to get the stories out of a few people, Tanner determined that all 36 people in the room had come through similarly carved paths in the forests but had come from a myriad of different terrains initially. Some had to swim across a small channel of 3- or 4-feet deep water from an island, some had woken up on a isolated beach with the forest right behind them, it even went as far as some people having appeared in the lower reaches of the small mountain range you could slightly see over the tops of the trees. Everyone had a different story about where they had been originally, a man named Derrick had been asleep in his bed and had been violently awoken when he fell from the height of his bed to the hard rocky ground at the base of the mountain range, gouging a nice cut on the back of his head. Tanner had also learned that everyone seemed to be from distant places. Sarah was from South Georgia, Derrick was from Havana, another woman; Camilla, was from Ponce Puerto Rico. Austin pointed out that it was strange that all these people seemed to be, not only speaking English, but with their same accent despite being from varying countries.
As one more person entered the small building, the door slammed shut and melted away leaving behind only flat wall, trapping everyone inside. The concreate chairs all shifted simultaneously, expanding to take over the space of some of the empty seats. Only 37 of the original 40 seats remained. Everyone that had still been sitting seemed to slide along with the sudden shift but didn’t shake or bob around, like they didn’t preserve the motion that had just been placed on them.
“WELCOME INITIATES! I WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE YOU ALL ON SURVIVING TO ATTEND THE INITIATION CENTERS BRIEFING AND TRAINING PROGRAM. You all will be pleased to hear of the refabrication on your home planet and universe to accept the Magic Administration Program or MAP for short. Your entire race has been placed in temporary holding spaces with training and integration programs to ease your way into this wonderful new system. Once these briefings are completed you will be granted access to your Neural Adaptive Genetic System or NAGS for short. For the duration of this training program, you will have access to quests, dungeons, monsters, and maybe even other adversarial species! How exciting! Each of you will enter the initializing room and be instructed on the selection of your profession and your first Strand. Once everyone has selected their Profession and Strand, we will commence with the next briefing.”
“What the fuck is a strand” Tanner wondered, a little too loud.