With the door open, I saw a scene straight from a movie. Pillars intricately carved with scenes stood around around the outer edges, and a large curved ceiling painted with scenes portraying demons and monsters fighting with humans. I admired them for a bit until my attention was drawn to the premiere object in the room, a large throne upon which sat a woman whose age I couldn't begin to guess. At first glance, she seemed to be in her mid thirties, but she had this ageless quality to her, and her eyes seemed to have seen entire ages pass. I shook my head, and noted everyone else start to kneel. I was maybe half a beat late in kneeling, and nearly fell over in my rush to get to one knee.
The man who had guided us here began talking in a loud voice, I'm assuming to announce who we were. Taking the small token that Iosyo had, he brought it up to the ageless woman. I stayed on one knee, trying to resist the urge to look around, when the woman I assumed to be a queen said something, and everyone else started to stand. Yet again, I was a half beat late, taking cues from our group rather than knowing what to do myself. Standing up, I looked towards my group, worried that maybe looking directly at the queen could be construed as an insult. Seeing my group look at her with no worries alleviated that fear, and I went back to trying to figure out her age.
My musing was disrupted as she began to talk in the most regal voice I had ever heard. I only caught a couple words as she talked, but Alya was soon responding, sounding more stiff than usual. I was simply acting as a bystander, when the queen turned to me, and I'm ashamed to admit I panicked a little.
My miniature panic attack hopefully not showing too much on the outside, she asked me something. I just stood there awkwardly for a moment, not sure what to do. Alya came to my rescue however, saying something to the queen, likely telling her of my lacking ability to communicate. I shifted a bit from foot to foot, and simply hoped whatever Alya was saying would satisfy her. Soon, Alya turned to me, and said one of the words I knew, “speak,” and so I decided to speak a little.
“I’m pretty sure you can't understand me, so I'm not particularly sure why you're having me do this, but I suppose I'll do what's asked of me,” adding a belated “your highness” at the end. I doubted she’d be able to understand me, but it didn't hurt to be safe in a world of magic. The queen then nodded, and said something to the man that had guided us here. I watched, still confused, as he gestured for me to leave with him. I followed him out, stepping back on the platform that had taken us up to the floating building, and with another wave of his medallion we were headed back down. He began walking away, and I hurried to follow him. We soon arrived at a squat building made of the same seamless stone everything seemed to be made of.
Going inside, I was greeted with a group of guards, and I started to get a bit worried. The worry grew larger as we went down the stairs, and I was greeted with what were obviously jail cells. I was considering making a break for it when we came to a certain cell, and I saw a man in shorts and a t-shirt rather than the standard tunic. I raised my eyebrows, his attire certainly seemed to be from Earth, but I wasn’t sure until he spoke.
“Great, they brought another person to see me, you'd think they would have had enough of listening to me.”
I grinned at hearing a familiar language before responding. “Well I'll give you one guess as to why they brought me to you.”
The man popped his head up in surprise before responding. “Oh thank God, finally someone I can understand. You'd think these savages would learn a more civilized language.” I looked at him quite confused. How were they supposed to learn the language we spoke when we hadn't made proper contact with them. What really offended me though was that he referred to them as savages. They may not be as technologically advanced as us, but they were still people.
“Don't call them savages. They're humans, just like us.”
“Well what should I call them then?”
“How about we go with a nice neutral 'people’ for now.”
The man seemed a bit annoyed, but acquiesced. I nodded and looked to the man who had guided me here. He looked at me for a bit before taking out a key and unlocking the metal bars functioning as a door. The man who had been locked inside seemed to sag a bit in relief, and I soon introduced myself.
“I’m Lucas. How did you manage to get stuck in a cell anyway?”
“Blake,” the man’s expression turned dark. “Our camp got overrun by an insane amount of ogres, and I was out hunting when it happened. I came back to see everyone either escaped through the gate or dead. There were way too many of the things for me to try and get through the gate, so I simply went another direction. I ran off until I managed to find this oversized town, but nobody here speaks English. I had to sleep outside, and then I was brought to here.”
“Ogres?”
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“ridiculously tall, green, humanoid, every hunting site sees them.”
“So goblins.”
“Those things can grow as large as twelve feet! There’s no way you can call them goblins.”
I raised my eyebrows, all the goblins who had attacked our camp had been around eight feet, but I guess if they could get that large, goblin may be a bit of a misnomer. Oh well, I was going to stick with goblin for now regardless.
“So you know how to get back to your camp then?”
“I wish. I don’t even think I went in a straight line away from it. I could maybe give you a general direction.”
I sighed, it’s not like I had expected him to be able to navigate by these unknown stars, but if he’d at least followed the sun he could have a slightly better direction for us. I had a better idea of how to get back to my camp than him. Shaking off the disappointment, Blake and I were soon being guided back to the floating building, where we met my group out front of it. I introduced everyone, although that was about all I could do with my mastery of the language.
“So Blake, how did you manage to survive getting through the forest? You don’t have any weapons, are you a mage then?”
“Yeah, I just throw fireballs around. Made it handy to cook the meat too. So why do you have what look like stone guns?”
“They’re a lot better than normal guns for hunting the monsters over here. I made them for hunting the bigger monsters, though they can’t get through everything.” I thought back to how the bullets had just bounced off of the wyvern. I needed to upgrade my weapons. Unfortunately, I needed tool to precisely measure out my progress as I made a gun, and all of my tools for that were back on Earth in my apartment. I paused for a moment, by now my apartment had to have been taken back.
“But they’re rocks,” Blake’s comment distracted me from my musing
“They’re magical rocks that are tougher than steel.”
Blake snorted, making my face twitch a bit in annoyance. “Why use those when we can throw fire?”
“I can’t throw fire. I can make things and do a bit of body enhancement magic.”
“So you’re like those idiots who use swords.”
At this point I felt sure that the frown in my mind was starting to show through to the outside as I replied. “Excluding the fact that I try to fight from even further back than you mages, those ‘idiots’ using swords are just as useful as the mages, if not more so.”
“Oh really?”
I was really starting to regret helping him get out of the prison at this point. “Yes really. Who do you think stops them from getting to you in the first place?”
“I can stop them just fine on my own.”
“And if there’s too many to do that?”
“Well it’s not like someone else would be able to help then.”
I mentally threw my hands up in the air, and sped up a bit to walk with the rest of the group. I started to zone out everything else Blake said, giving him monosyllabic responses, and simply practiced my vocabulary with Lilya. After a bit, I started where we were going, as we were still being guided by the guard with a fancy symbol on his cuirass. While I was musing on where we could be going, we arrived at a squat, wide building, and walked inside. The guard guiding us was soon talking with a man in a very fancy looking set of armor. The man guiding us had Lilya take over the conversation after a bit, likely to repeat whatever she had told the queen. Meanwhile, Blake was asking me “What are they talking about?” I shrugged, I caught some words, and quite a few mentions of Tesser, but I couldn’t put the words together into a coherent whole.
We were soon outside of the building, waiting for something. I soon figured out what that something was, as out of the building we had just been in, there started to be lots of chatter and clanking noises. Maybe ten minutes later, soldiers started to pour out of it, more than I had expected to fit in it, though to be fair I couldn’t see exactly how long the building was. Blake and I watched in surprise as they marched out in an orderly fashion.
They continued to stream out, heading towards the gate we had come in. When the last of them had trickled out, Iosyo and Lilya started to get in an argument over something. Their argument continued, and eventually I managed to get the idea that they were trying to get the other to stay with Grigyo, likely as both of them wanted to go with the army to find Dmiyo and Alya. At this point I realized that I should probably explain what was going on to Blake.
“Um, you may not want to stay with me for now, I’m going to be caught up in a war.”
“Wait, what?”
“Some people called the Tesser invaded, and my friends stayed behind to help protect the city. I’m planning on going with the army here and making sure they’re ok.”
“You’re fucking insane, you know that? You go have fun dying, I’ll stay here. A jail cell is better than that.”
I hesitated for a moment, deciding that as much of a prick as he was, I wasn’t going to leave him to be stuck in jail again. Handing over some of the chips of cores, I explained to him what they were and how he could use them. At this point, Lilya had won the argument, and Iosyo had grabbed Grigyo and was about to head off, when I stopped him, and tried to get across the idea that he should help Blake for now. He seemed to get the idea, and I informed Blake that he should stay with Iosyo for now.
We waited, as the army went into a large lot filled with carriages. When the carriages started to roll out on their own, I realized they had to be an old fashioned style of an APC, or armored personnel carrier. I watched as they streamed out of the lot and headed towards the gate as we tried to keep up. Once we arrived at the gate, we picked up our powered cart where we left it, and we were soon driving after the APC’s. Maybe thirty minutes into the drive, I finally nodded off, exhausted from not having slept the night before.