William had no guidepost by which to measure how much time passed after the sedative took him under. There was no transition, no LOADING… screen, all he knew is that one moment he was exchanging jokes with the nurse, closing his eyes as everything faded from existence, and in the next, as though the transition occurred within a single blink, he found himself walking along a sidewalk in a moderately developed city.
The transition was jarring, and he stumbled slightly as his mind registered the new physical orientation of his body, barely managing to avoid falling over.
Buildings composed of gray-tan concrete lined the street he found himself on, and small tendrils of familiarity wound their way into his mind. He knew where he was, but also didn’t. Doctor Burrill had told him that the construct would be pulled from his memories, and he made the logical assumption that the reason his surroundings felt familiar was that he had been there before.
He started walking, feeling the need to see more, to understand more. A sparse population of strangers strolled up and down the street, ducking in and out of shops, sitting at sidewalk cafes, weaving between parked cars and crossing from one side of the street to another. His mind drank it all in, building upon his opening assumptions about where he was. He must be downtown in whatever city he was in, because none of the traffic was moving all that quickly. If he were on the outskirts of the city, far fewer people would be walking because everything would be too spread out.
With every minor realization, William felt a little more comfortable. He might not know where he was, but he understood the flow of the area, how to get from place to place. Needing to lock down a few more assumptions, he checked his pockets. He found a wallet, with a few hundred dollars inside. Cash, but nothing else. No identification, no social security card, no credit or bank cards with his full name on them. The cash at least gave him the reassurance that he would not starve in the near term, though shelter might be tougher to come by, the vague understanding that the money wouldn’t be enough to secure an apartment. He could probably swing a cheap hotel room for a few nights, but that wasn’t going to get him very far.
He wasn’t very hungry or thirsty, hot or cold, or tired, so he continued in the direction that seemed to hold taller buildings, more development. More opportunity for answers.
It all seemed counterproductive to him, that he should seek out a more populated area to feel safer. Maybe it was enough for him to be part of a crowd, to hide in it and enjoy the anonymity provided from being one of many? Maybe he just wanted to be around people, in the same way that children, who also don’t really know who they are yet, seek out social interaction to have references to model their behavior and seek approval from.
He didn’t know, didn’t have enough knowledge of himself yet to even know that much. He felt...empty, like a piece of long abandoned electronics, all wiring and antique silicone, it’s reason for being unknowable until electricity is applied.
He merged with the foot traffic on his side of the street, rubber-necking around like a tourist. Which, he was...and wasn’t. The buildings around him had begun to look more and more familiar, but it was hard to say why. Somehow he knew that most buildings tended to look the same nowadays. Gone were the days of humans and companies building great edifices of architecture, wanting to create a legacy in stone and steel. No, most buildings now were contracted out to the lowest bidder, more utilitarian shelter and workspace than anything approaching the monuments of the heyday of the industrial era. Anything not strictly necessary was kicked to the end of the balance sheet, and ultimately abandoned.
Passing an alley, he heard the sound of trash falling over, and glanced in that direction. What he saw brought him up short.
A person, wearing a brown leather jacket with a hood, sprinted out from between two buildings. William instinctively took a step back out of view, leaning out around the corner of the nearest building to get a clear view. Nobody ran like that in the city unless they were being chased by someone or something tougher than they are, and this person looked plenty capable on their own, leaping over a stack of trash cans while barely breaking stride.
William glanced back between the buildings where the figure had entered the alley, but couldn’t make out anything distinct in the alley, the tall buildings looming above blocking everything but the most indirect of sunlight. As his eyes made their way back to the figure, he saw movement among the shadows, but still couldn’t discern anything specific. By that point they realized that there was no throughway, only a solid, uninterrupted expanse of building exteriors blocking their path. They stopped, glancing in William's direction, as though trying to decide if they had the time to escape the alley before whatever they were running from chased them down. Again, he jerked his head back out of view, silently hoping that the figure wouldn’t draw whatever was chasing them in his direction.
William heard a growl, half grunt, half snarl, and then a rapid sequence of popping sounds, followed by muffled screams. His curiosity overwhelming his fear, William glanced back around the corner. The figure stood in the center of the open space of the alley, turning slowly as though attempting to fend off a squad of attackers that had them surrounded, but all William could see were places where the shadows were darker. The more he stared, the more it looked like the person was surrounded by a circle of invisible beings that could not entirely escape their own shadows.
One of them flashed at the figure, the marginally brighter light in the center of the alley providing more contrast for the nebulous shadow. The figure responded instantly by snapping a hand in it’s direction, another one of the popping sounds finding Williams ears as a cloud of smoke erupted from the figure's hand, a portion of it continuing on towards the shadow monster in the form of a short conjured dagger. The smoke dagger struck the creature in what William assumed must be it’s chest, sending it back into the darkness and causing it to emit an unearthly wail. Others began dashing in, braving the muted half-light of the alley for only the briefest of moments to strike at the figure, who always seemed to be a step ahead of the shadows. Spinning, rolling, lashing out with the conjured shadow daggers, the figure took them all on, but even from his vantage point at the end of the alley, William could tell that it wasn’t going to be enough.
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He wanted to do something to help the figure, jumping to the conclusion that the shadow monsters were the bad guys in the equation because...well...shadow monsters. Now that he had seen enough of them, he thought they looked like dementors from Harry Potter, only with their opacity slider ticked down to 50%. He had no idea how the figure moved so quickly, but as the battle wore on, their movements became more labored and desperate.
William glanced back into the main street that fed into the alley, wondering if anyone else could see or hear what was going on, or if there was someone nearby that could help. He was startled to see that the once bustling street was now completely abandoned. No vehicle traffic, no passersby, nothing in the way of evidence that the city was at all inhabited.
His blood ran cold. Where did everyone go? He was about to turn back to the fight still raging on when he spotted someone sitting at a cafe a block or so up the street, sipping an iced coffee and glancing at her phone as though the entire rest of the city wasn’t awaiting the Langoliers. A woman with blonde hair, sunglasses. Tanned skin.
William drew in a breath to yell to her, but a gurgling scream from the alley stopped him. Snapping his attention to the hooded figure in the alley, he could see that one of the shadow monsters had managed to spear him through the left side of his chest. It raised another tendril of shadow for the killing blow, but the figure caught it with their left hand. It’s other hand, partially immobilized by the lance of shadow perforating it’s body, struck out with a larger conjured smoke blade, the even louder popping sound arriving at Williams ears mere moments before the shriek of the monster as the blade caused it to explode in a billowing ellipse of darkness.
The figure fell to a knee. William expected the fight to be over that instant, but the shadows held their circle, slowly revolving around the figure now struggling to stand. In the silence, William could make out their voices, overlaying whispers, more muted crowd noise than conversation. He focused his ears, trying to figure out what they were saying, but there were so many voices, it was impossible to tell when one stopped and another started. The kneeling figure spoke, the voice sounding louder than it should have due to Williams attention being wholly focused on the voices already..
“Fuck you. Fuck all of you. You want to kill me? Get on with it. I could use the break. It’s not like I won’t be back, and next time, I’m going to get stronger, learn the secrets of this place quicker, and eventually, you’re going to have to either let me die, or I’m going to kill every single one of you assholes.”
William started. The next time? Did that mean the figure was another patient? How did he get those abilities? Who were the shadow creatures attacking him? William had a dozen questions stampede through his head at once. He suddenly needed the figure to live. He needed answers. He stepped out from around the corner, drew in a breath of air to yell at the monsters, to distract them, but the figure again cut him off.
“Fine. Fuck it.”
William exhaled sharply, the air he had taken in to yell released in a shocked huff as the figure conjured a dagger and plunged it into the side of the nearest creatures head. Instantly, they dropped to the ground. The shadow creatures circled for a few moments more before leisurely making their way back from the direction they had arrived, into the darkness between the buildings.
William had ducked back out of view the instant the figure had hit the pavement, knowing that the shadows would be paying much more attention to their surroundings now that the figure was dead. He waited what felt like an appropriate amount of time before leaving cover and sprinting down the alley towards the body of the figure. Over the first few steps, he questioned the intelligence of running towards a dead body, likely to be noticed just in time to be considered a suspect to the murder, but he needed to see. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find once he reached the body, but the angst that had built over not intervening before had built over the course of the fight, and now that the imminent threat had passed, he needed to see if there was anything to be learned from the body.
On the surface, William knew that he was in a virtual world, but the thing about virtual worlds, especially realistic ones like this, was that in moments of high stress, they don’t feel all that virtual. If you fall off a building, your fore brain understands that you are going to be fine, but the virtual wind rushing through your hair, the rapidly growing sounds of the surface crescendoing as the ground approaches, all convince your lizard brain that it’s real. In that moment, your brain makes it real. William's brain had made the shadow monsters real, but now that they had disappeared, his rational mind had kicked in, and it demanded he check the body. Would he find items? The concept of looting corpses in virtual worlds somehow made sense to him, and he suspected that he had played these sort of games before. In fact, the idea that he handled the entire encounter without melting down into a puddle of his own bodily fluids on the side of the street as he watched what was clearly a very supernatural battle suggested he had more than a passing understanding of them, even if his specific memories of those experiences were still lost to him.
He reached the body, noting how there was no pool of slowly expanding blood, as he would have expected. Rolling it over, eh saw that the entire right side of the head and almost all of the face had crumbled away, It wasn’t an organic process like melting or rotting, the rough texture of the remaining flesh had a angular, polygonal quality, as though the figure had been made out of glass blocks a quarter of an inch square, the outermost faces being painted with skin tone, fabric, hair, whatever surface they corresponded to on the figure. A moment after William turned the corpse over, and while his hand still rested on their shoulder, the entire body lost cohesion and collapsed into a pile of glass like crumbles as a chime sounded.
He glanced up from the body, trying to decide which direction the sound had originated from, but a prompt appeared in his vision, floating like a transparent monitor.
ITEMS OBTAINED
CASH: $358
MAGICAL TOME...UNIDENTIFIED.
YOU LACK THE REQUISITE EXPERIENCE LEVELS
TO READ OR IDENTIFY THIS TOME.
William almost fell over. It worked. Sure, he had no idea what he had just gained, but it was something. It was also magical. The Doctor told him that this world had originated as a video game, and that not all of the game mechanics had been removed from the system, but at the time he hadn’t given it much thought. Part of him was terrified, likely the part that had just watched the fight between the figure and the shadow monsters, but the rest of him was fascinated. Again, this all felt surprisingly up his alley. He chuckled, looking around.
His alley indeed.