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Chapter 15: Waking Nightmare: Everlasting Hell
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Meridian Tower Arena—Competitor Card: The Rouge Titan
Competitor Name: Owen Atami | Competitor Title: The Rouge Titan | Rank: 3
Wins: 297 | Losses: 41 | Win-Streak: 79
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Logan, Huck, and Ryan sat at a booth adjoined to the wall, an array of steaming dishes sitting on the table before them in various states of consumption.
Ryan raised a wooden spoon to his lips, blowing on it before shoving it into his mouth for a brief second, swallowing, then plunging it back into the bowl for another scoop. He repeated this process twice more before looking at his spoon as if it had done something to offend him.
He set the spoon on the table, forgotten, then wrapped both of his hands around the large bowl; tilting it towards his face, he greedily devouring the liquid within.
Logan wasn’t far behind him, having already started on to his second bowl and closing in on his third. Logan slammed his empty bowl—the second—onto the tabletop, jerking his head to look at Ryan and smacking his lips.
“Ha! I win!” Logan said, raising both arms in the air and looking towards the ceiling, rotating side to side in his seat as if basking in the glory of some imaginary crowd’s applause.
“Victorious!”
He looked at Huck and said, “So this is where you got your soup recipe! Do you think she’ll come with us as a travelling chef? You’re great, Huck, but why settle for the student when you can have the master?”
The bigger man winked at Logan and laughed before biting into a bread-roll he’d dipped into his own bowl.
“Don’t forget to tell her you like her cooking, if you don’t, she might ‘accidentally’ add scorch-pepper to your next meal,” he said around a mouthful of food.
A few slurps later, Ryan smacked his bowl onto the table, glaring at Logan, then his spoon.
“Damn you, traitor,” he said, flicking the innocent length of wood.
Huck punched Ryan’s arm.
“Watch it fella, or I’ll tell Bretta you’re disrespecting her utensils.”
Ryan paled, turning to look over his shoulder at the wall across the Inn’s dining room. Bretta waved at him through a window in the wall, chopping something with her knife in the kitchen beyond.
They seem happy... I’m a little worried about Ryan though. Hopefully Huck will talk to him tomorrow about what happened.
Huck had told Bretta that Logan was a visiting relative—one of Orianna's, Huck's wife's, cousins—staying with them in Woolam for a few weeks. Apparently the two of them had a strong friendship that went back decades, Bretta even knowing Yram, Huck's father.
Being the owner of Tarik’s most successful Inn and the wife to the captain of the town’s guard, Bretta had a good sense of the types of people floating around the town and had agreed to help them find hired help for their fight against the Forest Llort. She said that she already had a couple of people in mind, and that she’d arrange a meeting for them the following evening.
With a majority of the preparations out of the way and only the tasks of recruiting allies and picking up their armor remaining, Logan felt relaxed for the first time in a while.
The run-in with the bandits—Bretta had mentioned that their leader was a known criminal and must’ve bribed the guards to let him into the city—had caused a spike in his anxiety. He had a bad feeling that they weren’t done with them yet, but otherwise, he felt good. They had a clear, actionable plan to progress past the Suko’s: kill the Llort, sell the Brightwood Deer’s antlers and whatever else the llort kept hidden away in its cave, buy provisions and supplies, organize the villagers of Woolam, and make the journey through the mountains.
Having a clear, well-defined purpose comforted him, and he realized that he actually felt good. That emotional vigor, that sense of happiness and ease which in the past had been so insanely rare for him, was something that he felt nearly every day now. The realization struck him, and he contemplated how profoundly lucky he was.
He looked around, taking in the scene.
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They sat in high-backed booth seats that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern diner if it weren’t for their fully wooden make and the pillows filled with hay underneath them. Lanterns and the open flame of candles gave a warm orange glow to the Inn’s interior, and several hours having passed since the incident with the bandits, the tables and bar had become occupied by happily chattering patrons.
Even though he occasionally felt like he was trapped in some sort of action-adventure romcom set in a Medieval Times theatre, and despite the fact that he often found himself missing the simpler things of his past life like Reign energy drinks, Lenny and Larry protein cookies, air conditioning, showers, hot water, 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, safety razors—ok, the list was actually pretty long and he needed to do a deep-clean of his body—he couldn’t help but admit that he felt more present and alive in his new reality than he could remember ever feeling in the past several years he'd spent back on Earth.
He watched Huck banter with his son, and thought of Mikey and Susie, who perked up, sensing his mind’s eye on them. He had friends here—more than friends, even: he had a family. The word sat in his mind, a heavy weight that sunk him deeper and deeper for every moment he lingered on it. He dispelled the beginnings of black memories that threatened to rise to the surface and returned his attention to the two people sitting next to him.
Huck. Ryan. They accepted him. They cared about him, even though they knew hardly anything about his life or who he was before meeting them.
Huck said that I was one of them. We’re fighting the llort soon, and there won’t be a better time than this. It’s now or never.
Logan cleared his throat.
The two stopped their conversation. Huck looked at him, and Ryan used the distraction to snatch his spoon back from Huck, who’d taken it and had been holding it over the boy’s head, out of reach.
Logan met Huck’s eyes, then quickly looked down at the table. He’d never been good at this sort of thing. Having difficult or even slightly uncomfortable conversations, especially with men older than him who’s opinion he felt like mattered, always filled him with a deep sense of dread and trepidation.
“So… remember when we met, and you asked where I was from?” Logan asked, sneaking a glance at the large man’s face.
Huck frowned slightly, his eyes turning vacant for a moment as he recalled their first meeting, then his lips turned to a small smile.
“I asked what town you were coming from, west or east, and you said further. Well son, further either puts you in the crags, the ocean, or beyond the mountains, and you sure as hell didn’t come from over the Suko’s with your reaction to that lil’ fish,” he said, a knowing look in his eye.
Logan found it oddly amusing that people from Tiris shared the concept of “hell.”
Maybe eternal damnation in brimstone and fire is a human universal, he thought.
Grimacing at Huck’s description of the gargantuan Steam Fish as “lil,” and how easily the older man seemed to see through him, he continued.
“Well, by far I meant, like, really far. I’m from another planet: It’s called Earth.”
Ryan projectile-spit, a fountain of soup spraying from his mouth onto the booth’s seat next to Huck’s head.
“Nor-damn it, boy, I knew it!” Huck said, grinning like a fool, then turned to address his son; “Ryan, you owe me fifty bronze.”
“You taught your son how to gamble?”
“I’d rather he learn it from me,” he said, shrugging.
Ryan, having recovered from his soup expulsion, turned to Logan, wonder in his eyes.
“No wonder you’re so weird and useless! Why is your planet named Earth? Isn’t that kind of self-explanatory?”
If that line had come from Mikey, I’d have thought he was making a pun.
“I like this kid!” Mikey chimed in.
“Of course you do,” Logan said in his head to the Celestial, struggling to stop himself from rolling his eyes: the gesture would confuse Ryan, who’d think it meant for him.
He still didn’t know if he was ready to tell them about the voices in his head, that seemed a step too far, even if they were willing to accept that he was technically an alien.
I’m not even a human anymore if my status page is to be believed.
“I guess it is. And what do you mean weird and useless? I seem to recall that I’m the one in the lead whenever we go hunting.”
“You can’t skin animals without that weird magic power, you didn’t know how to shoot a bow or swing a sword even though you’re an adult, you make me start all the fires which now I think means you don’t know how, and you squeaked like a little girl when you saw the rohm,” Ryan said, unashamed at the bluntness of his words.
That’s kids for you, Logan thought.
“That thing’s twice the size of a hippo, it could crush me with a single step, of course it scared me, you’re the weird ones, riding things like that,” he said.
It was a weak defense.
“The kid’s not wrong, it is pretty pathetic that you can’t even start a fire. What’s a hippo?” Huck asked.
Logan shook his head. They were a handful, but they didn’t seem to mind having a planetary interloper among them. He wasn’t sure what kind of reception he'd been expecting, but in a world of monsters and magic, he supposed it might not be so far-fetched to assume that his situation wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.
He added it to the ever-growing laundry list of missing information to investigate once he emerged from the Southlands into the broader world of Tiris.
Sahir, that’s what Huck had called this continent. A few more days and we’ll have killed the llort and be on our way out there, he thought.
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Logan awoke feeling well rested and refreshed. The night spent in the Firestone Inn marked his first sleep in a real bed since leaving Woolam, and his body thanked him for it. He sat up and twisted, reveling in the satisfying pop-pop of his spine cracking as he stretched.
“Rise and shine! Up and at ‘em! The bird that wakes up first gets to eat before the other birds! Hot potato!”
“Susie, does the menu come with a self-destruct feature?”
“I’m afraid not, Master Logan. Perhaps my creator secretly exchanged afterlife option 39817264B.197H with option 22766679A.000Z; Waking Nightmare: Everlasting Hell, and has played an elaborate prank on us,”
“That doesn’t sound unlikely,” Logan said, donning clothes from his inventory.
Huck and Ryan were going to spend the day buying more arrows, stocking up on medical supplies from the apothecary, and fulfilling the laundry list of requests from the Woolam townspeople. Logan had some shopping of his own to do now that his inventory was comfortably near empty; mainly he just wanted to buy out the gyro stand, but he also wanted to explore the city.
Before he left, he took a seat at the foot of his bed and did his best to clear his mind. Meditation had become a part of his daily routine since arriving on Tiris, but it still didn’t come easy to him—especially with the addition of two other voices in his head besides his own.
He could feel that he was on the cusp of… something. He was unsure what it was that he felt there, a concept dwelling in his mind just outside of his grasp, but it was immense and powerful beyond measure. He felt as if he were on the edge of discovering a new sense, like a blind man anticipating the miraculous gift of vision. He could almost see it, feel it, touch it, this mysterious power that would reveal a new world once hidden, but it evaded him.
He concentrated on the feeling, but it was as if he were trying to recall a word that mocked him from the tip of his tongue, evading recall. Alas, the sensation eluded him, and, giving up on it for now, he turned his attention elsewhere.
He visualized his mind, his internal being, as a vast, flat plain of grey emptiness.
He turned away from the building feeling of the nearly detectable something and returned the gaze of his mind's eye to the center of his being.
He could sense Mikey’s soul connected to his own. A foreign entity with a domain to himself, Mikey was separated from his direct observation.
Their consciousnesses merged into each other on the border where they connected like the beginnings of food coloring in water, tendrils extending shallowly into the other’s realm but neither overtaking the other.
This overlap, he knew, was the means by which they could tell how the other was feeling and, vaguely, what they were thinking.
Susie was only a creation of Mikey’s power, and though she was a sentient being, she was perfectly merged with Logan’s soul and was indetectable to him as anything other than a function of his menu skill.
Logan could detect the presence of two other entities in his mind. One was the ring, Hedia’s Annulet, an inert whirlpool, a wormhole leading to nothing. He was unsure of its function other than the overwhelming desire to consume that emanated from it. He suspected that since the ring was a soulbound item, it became, in part, merged with his very being—not that he was sure what that meant at the moment.
The final entity was one he’d been aware of well before he started meditating. It had been a weight within his soul for years, a cold knot of hate and despair that ate at him, daring him to come closer, to confront it. His eyes snapped open; Logan rose, strode out of the door, and left the Inn.