A horse and rider appeared in silhouette like a tiny mirage. The hoof beats quickened, and the mirage became real. There was nowhere I could run. My nervous breathing produced billowing clouds in the cold air. Steam blasts from the horse’s nose became visible as they grew closer. The man yanked the reins, the horse reared up, and I came face to face with someone who looked like he’d just stepped out of a spaghetti western. His clothes didn’t look thick enough to keep him warm, but he didn’t seem bothered. He had a futuristic firearm strapped to his back.

A plus symbol appeared between two brackets. [+]. Quite small in size, showing at the corner of my vision. It looked like something you’d engage on a web page to expand a collapsible menu. I recognized it intuitively, and I ‘clicked’ it with my mind.

The plus symbol turned into a minus dash between the brackets. [-]. Beneath the symbol came the following text, appearing as though it was attached to every move this man before me made:

Tool:

Hitting 20

Power 20

Fielding 20

Running 20

Throwing 20

Overall Future Potential (OFP) = 20

I clicked the minus symbol mentally, and the text went away. Duly noted.

“Adam?” He said. His eyes squinted against the bright, overcast sky. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed porcupine quills.

“Yes.”

“Name’s Flint,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Negative.”

Didn’t seem as though there was much room for argument. The guy was intimidating.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Somewhere warm.”

This was a guy with answers. He reached down from the saddle toward me. He wanted me to grab his forearm. As soon as I did, he thrust me up onto the saddle behind him with such force I felt like a child being lifted by his father.

“Warm,” I said. “It’s a great idea. What’s with the climate around here, anyway?”

“You’re in the Frost League,” Flint said. “This is where you begin.”

“So, the System sent you?”

“Affirmative.”

“Are you always going to speak this way?”

“Affirmative.”

Flint spurred his horse, I wrapped my arms around his torso, and we took off across the flat landscape.

Flint’s horse flew so fast you wouldn’t have thought he was carrying two people. It was all I could do to hold on as we sped over the frozen field.

After a few minutes, the land dipped, and even with cold, watery eyes I could see the outline of structures in the far distance.

A torrent of chilled air rushed past our cold faces. I could feel the outline of Flint’s futuristic rifle pressing into my chest.

“Where are we going?” I shouted into Flint’s ear.

“The village,” he said.

“Does the village have a name?”

He chose to ignore the question, and I didn’t bother to press him. He came across as a guy who had his reasons for everything he said and did.

“This place is pretty flat, huh?” I said.

“Affirmative.”

“Not a lot of trees.”

No response to that one.

We traveled downward, a slight decline from the flat prairie. Flint’s horse carried on at a constant rapid tempo. The distant structures morphed into the shapes of buildings, or rather, houses. You’d likely refer to them as dwellings, stone hovels with grass roofs. As we neared, a brown dirt road came into view that split a row of dwellings. And, there were other people (people!), just milling about. I could feel my anxiety rising.

I didn’t dare click the ‘open’ plus symbol to see everyone’s stats for fear my vision would be so flooded I wouldn’t be able to find the minus symbol again.

Flint slowed us to a trot, but I still bounced up and down enough to cause my jaw to flap open and closed like a complete noob. Everyone in the village stopped what they were doing, and stared at us. Most of them wore muddy cloaks, had dirty, ruddy cheeks, and had hair that said ‘I haven’t bathed in a fortnight’.

“Can I go home now?” The words spilled out of me on automatic pilot fueled by fear, but it was under my breath enough I was sure no one heard me. Still, I was scared, and I wanted to crawl under a boulder.

“Negative,” Flint said, with the obvious reply you’d expect from him.

The horse’s trot became a saunter, and soon the mud people multiplied in number. Folks were stepping out of their stone houses to glare at the newcomers.

“Flint,” I said in a hushed tone. “Maybe this isn’t the best place to be.”

Without a word, he directed the horse toward a larger stone building adorned with a hanging wooden sign while the road filled in with locals behind us. Dozens of murmurs, and whispers surrounded us like mist.

‘Ye Moonlight Inn & Ale’, read the building’s maple sign.

A hitching post sat to one side of the big oak door. Flint deftly de-horsed without kicking me, and held out an arm beckoning me to do the same.

My head swiveled side to side taking in the unwashed horde collected in our midst. There might’ve been a hundred people with scrunched up faces ready to pounce. One odd looking fellow with an asymmetrical bowl cut, and one arm a good foot longer than the other reached for Flint’s weapon. Flint snapped the thing off his back faster than you could spit. The entire village gasped in unison.

Flint glowered at the man. “Don’t touch,” he grumbled.

The man winced away like a small child who’d had their hand slapped.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

An old woman in a knit cap, and with bulging cheeks jutted her bony finger in my direction. “Who’s you?” She said.

What do you say in this situation?

“Who’s you?” I shouted back.

My response confused her. She shook her head, and slunk back into the crowd. Turning toward Flint, I pointed at the wooden sign hung from the structure before us.

“Are we going in here?”

“Affirmative.”

A man with an impressively close cut beard, given the overall lack of grooming on display, stepped forward. “Someone should say ‘hello’,” he said.

What a relief to know all of these people aren’t some insane, incomprehensible mob. He extended his forearm toward me, and at first I thought he was interested in a handshake, but as I offered my hand, he grabbed my whole forearm and shook that instead. Okay, then.

“I’m Dillard,” he said.

“Adam,” I responded.

We shared a quick smile.

“Nice to find a friendly face,” I said.

The comment caused Dillard to cock an eyebrow. He glanced at the crowd around him. “Actually,” he said. “We were just sizing you up for our next meal.”

I could taste acid as my heart jumped into the back of my throat. Sure that my eyes were the size of dinner plates, Dillard and the others around him broke out into laughter. A cloud of breath burst out of me in the dank air. Chilled relief, we’ll call it.

Jokes… these people had jokes.

“Fooling with ya,” Dillard said. “We only eat the ugly ones ‘round here.” He laughed again.

“That’s funny,” I said with a nervous chuckle. “That’s… really good stuff there.”

Flint, for his part, showed a lot of patience. He just stood there waiting outside the inn while I spoke to the villagers.

“Where ya from?” Yelled a bulbous man with the cleanest clothing of the bunch from behind a group of gawking children.

“Well, where am I now?” I asked.

“It’s called Moonlight,” a female voice cut through the din like an electric knife.

I knew that voice. I knew it intimately. It couldn’t be.

The crowd parted like the Red Sea, and a beautiful face I hadn’t seen in twenty years emerged from the slack jawed gatherers. Aubrey, as I lived and breathed.

She too, appeared as though she hadn’t seen the inside of a hot shower in a good month. But, it didn’t matter. Even with her hair up in a bone comb, soot smudged on her forehead, wearing what looked like a potato sack ordered off some fifth rate website, she was a stunner.

I couldn’t help myself but rush forward, and grab her in a bear hug.

“Easy there, slugger,” she said. But, she laughed, and put me at ease right away. What a relief to see a familiar face in such a sea of strangeness.

“You made it,” I said, “through the System, I mean.”

A tear formed at the corner of her eye. “This is all so crazy,” she said. This time she grabbed me, and her grip was so tight, I could detect her heartbeat. She vibrated, as though a prisoner of war who’d just been given release. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just… a genuine shock.”

“You’re telling me?” I said.

We let go of one another to lean back, and check to see if we were both real.

I glanced back at Flint who was busy showing off his strange rifle to curious locals. The novelty of our arrival began to wear off. Many of the villagers decided to wander back toward their homes.

“You’ve been here longer than me,” I said.

“Feels like a month,” Aubrey said. She gave a firm nod at the thought. “Yes, a month. Has to be. I don’t know that for sure though. They don’t have calendars around here.”

“Strange, you think it’s been that long,” I said. “I just got here. How does that work?”

“Strange doesn’t begin to cover it, Adam,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you in a bit,” she said. Then she pointed toward Flint and the inn. “You’re staying there? Must be nice.”

“You haven’t been?”

Aubrey shook her head, but slight and fast as if she didn’t want to let on to anyone else. And, she spoke in a lower tone so no one else could hear her. “Soon as I got here, we were put up in this woman’s house,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, imagining the unpleasantness of it.

“Yeah,” she said, “there’s mushrooms growing out of the walls.”

“The System works in mysterious ways,” I said.

“You’re telling me.”

But, something she said had caught me. “We,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘we were put up’,” I repeated back to her. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Oh,” she said with an eye roll. “That’s what I was going to show you. My crew.”

My nose scrunched in confusion.

“They gave me a film crew,” Aubrey said. “Okay, it’s not really a crew. There’s three of us. And, it’s not really ‘film’, it’s a guy with a smart phone, one with a boom mic, and then there’s me… I’m the host.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

She shook her head. “Wish I was, my friend, wish I was.”

“A smart phone? Here? What are you filming?” I asked.

Then she just burst into laughter out of nowhere. Again, I appeared confused.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“That’s the thing,” Aubrey said, her smiling teeth just as bright, and straight, and perfect as I’d always remembered. “We’re here to film you.”

She could tell I didn’t understand.

“Baseball, right?” She said.

“Baseball,” I said.

“You’re supposed to run a team,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “How did you know that?”

“The System spoke to me too, Adam,” Aubrey said. “It spoke to everyone who survived.”

“All of these people?” I motioned toward the villagers.

Aubrey shook her head. “I don’t think they were with us. I mean, you and me,” she said. “back in our time, you know? After all, it did say we’d be joining this world…”

“In progress,” I cut her off.

“Exactly.”

“So you’re here, to what, document my progress or something?” I said.

“Something like that,” she said. “They love baseball.”

I knew she meant the aliens.

“They want to be entertained,” she continued, “they were really adamant about this when I first got here.”

“That fall, the earthquake, falling for what, fifteen minutes,” I said. “Could you believe the whole thing?”

“Crazy,” she said with a chuckle.

I had to step back for a few seconds, and take everything in as best I could. You have to understand what a shock to the system (pardon the pun) this all had been. Plus, running into your high school girlfriend after the end of the world where probably 99% of humanity had been wiped out? The brain can only conceive of so much.

“I should probably let you go,” Aubrey said. “Your friend looks like he’s ready to murder these people.”

“My friend,” I said. “That’s Flint, apparently. He’s a bit…”

“Robotic?”

“You read my mind,” I said. “The two that are with you. Are they the same as him?”

Aubrey laughed. “Not at all,” she said. “They’re like us. They’re from our world.”

“Oh.” That took me aback. “And, they’re staying in the same place as you?”

I’d be lying if I said the thought of that didn’t make me a bit jealous. It’s ridiculous because that was twenty years ago, but you always have that one, right? The one from way back when who broke your heart?

“Yep,” Aubrey said, in answer to my question. “They’re probably waiting for me right now. Hag’s making goulash tonight, I guess.”

I couldn’t stifle a laugh. “Hag?”

Aubrey shrugged. “It’s her name, what can I tell you?”

I know, I know I probably shouldn’t have been thinking it, but man, she looked so pretty standing there in her frayed potato sack. I was immediately annoyed at myself. Pathetic.

“You warm enough in that thing?”

“Not as warm as you,” she said, “clearly.”

“Pays to be the guy running the team,” I said.

“Guess so.”

She turned slightly to glance back at a row of huts in the distance. “If I’m not back in time, Hag’ll throw out my portion,” Aubrey said. “The only other thing she has is oat loaf, and it’s really not good.”

I snapped out of it. “Yes,” I said. “Sorry. Yes, go.”

“We’ll catch up later, yeah?” Aubrey said.

“For sure,” I said. “Sounds like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

“Definitely.”

With that, Aubrey turned, and she rushed through the mud back toward the houses a hundred yards off. I chuckled to myself at the whole situation, and walked back over to Flint still standing by his horse. Only a few villagers remained in front of the inn.

The man with the close beard, Dillard, approached.

“Baseball,” he said.

“Yep,” I answered.

“What is it?”

Oh, how do I even begin?