Chapter 73: Abduction

[Edited by: Bunny, Arthur300000, deathbricks, ArchmageNaoki]

"Hmm, from what you said, tanks, jet fighters, and attack helicopters are troublesome." Finally, my brother began to take this world’s combat prowess seriously. I tried to talk him out of exploring this world for a while, but it proved to be very difficult. Thus, I had to exaggerate those war machines a bit. I told him that some of them might be equipped with nuclear missiles even though my country didn't have any of those.

"There are also tasers, a type of weapon which shoots electricity to pacify you. It’s really painful if you get hit by it." As he began to consider it seriously, I described my worst run-in with a cop. He mistook me for a real criminal and shot it at me while I was panicking.

"Oh my, what a barbaric people. They shot a little girl with a lightning bolt!? Dear, maybe we should teach them a lesson." My mom interjected, and my dad nodded along. ... Heck, my persuasion attempts seemed to have backfired and given them all the more reason to go out.

"N-no, no it was a mistake mom, and the officer already apologized to me." Well, not so profusely and more offhandedly, but the cop in question gave me a bowl of pork cutlet and a box of donuts to take home. They were very delicious.

"Anyways, nuclear warheads and tasers aside I think you got our priorities wrong, Kuro. Shouldn't you focus on how we can blend in instead?" Said Cocoa while pointing at her triangular ears. Crap, I forgot that Cocoa also knew about this world. That's why she chuckled when I told them about missiles.

"Oh, right..." I resigned myself to my fate.

"Also, how do you know that this is your Earth? It could be some other similar world." Cocoa made a sound argument. It was logical reasoning in her point of view, but I didn't tell them the biggest secret. Up there was my old mold infested room which was even smaller than this basement.

"It's more likely to be her Earth as she said." Aunos began to explain. "When the dimension was destabilized by a tremendous amount of energy, the outside world turned into a state of multiple worlds superpositioned on each other. Only when an observer opened the door out, would the world state collapse back to one of the known worlds of the one who opened the door." So, I was the cause of this predicament, huh?

"Hmm, so it’s like a reverse Schrödinger's cat thing, huh?" Cocoa mumbled something nonsensical.

"Still, can't we just stay here? You said it’s only temporary, right? So there is no reason to go out there at all." I tried to dissuade them again desperately. I knew that they wanted to see what my previous world was like. But I feared that when we would come back, this basement would’ve disappeared. If someone was left alone in this world, I would surely cry.

"Kuro, don't you want to meet your real parents?" My mom asked.

I almost blurted out something like 'Screw my real parents', but I noticed that the trapdoor had begun opening from the outside. I quickly sprang into a defensive stance by reflex and stared at the door. Maybe it was my landlord, he always inspected my room from time to time. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a girl instead, more specifically, it was my niece, Barbara.

"Who are you guys?" The girl behind the trap door asked us but her eyes fixated on Cocoa, the cutest fox girl in the room. I was relieved that she didn't seem to realize who I was. The faint noise of traffic outside my room indicated that the time had already passed rush hour.

My niece, Barbara, was the daughter of my elder brother. He sent a family photo every year to mock me. I hated it when he bragged about how good his family was, and kept asking me when I would get married. It always made me recite the words that a wise man once said: a successful man should just explode.

Because my brother married a beautiful foreign woman, she had a bit of an exotic look about her. In my honest opinion, Barbara was the prettiest person in my family.

If I remembered correctly, the last year’s email from my brother told me that Barbara was already in eighth grade. As she climbed down, oblivious to all kinds of magical weaponry my family secretly drew, I noticed that she was about a half foot taller than me and already had started developing curves in the right places. Not a girl, but not yet a woman would be the right phrase to describe her.

"We live here, and who are you miss?" My dad attempted to smooth talk her as he helped her down the ladder to the basement. Considering that she came through the trap door that magically appeared in my room, and there was a fox girl and a flying pig here, it would be a miracle for her to believe that.

"O-oh, m-my name is Barbara, I-I came here to look for my uncle. Have you seen my uncle?" ... She bought it! Wait, more importantly...

"Uhm, why did you try to look for your uncle?" I couldn't help myself but ask. While I was still living on Earth, none of my family ever came to visit me at all not to mention a girl like her. Something big must have happened.

"Before that, let’s talk while we have breakfast together." My mom smiled brilliantly, and put blankets and mattresses away into her storage device and gestured for me to arrange the table. Oh right, I was also starving. I put the table and chairs down at the center of the room. Eight chairs should be enough for everyone to sit. This was a bit cramped but Mr. Bobo always became restless when he didn't have his own chair.... Crap. I forgot that this world didn't have anything like a storage device.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Uhm... You see, this is..." I looked at my niece and saw her eyes went wide. I didn't know how to explain this to her anymore. If I told her that this was just a dream, would she believe me? However, while I was still flustered, she walked over and sat on one of the chairs I provided and started grinning from ear to ear. My mom, who didn't know this world’s common sense, took out pre-made breakfast and served tea to each of us like there was nothing wrong.

"I knew it! You people are wizards, right? So, you came to take me to the school of witchcraft and wizardry, right? Where can I buy my wand? Oh, I also want an owl. You know, I even tried pushing all the walls and columns at the train station when no one was looking. Seriously, you guys are hiding too well-" While she kept rambling on and on, my family members looked at me and tried to ask me what she was talking about.

"Hey, Kuro didn't you say that there were no magic related careers in this world?" My brother whispered while Barbara told her story about her efforts to awake her inner mystic power with all sorts of weird stuff.

"Uhm, a wizard in this world means a 30-year-old virgin." I whispered back while she bragged about learning magic theory to some extent from her magic instructor. Can you really hire that kind of people from the internet?

"Oi, isn't she a bit rude to us? Hmm, no, I don't think that’s what she meant. Maybe this isn't your Earth after all." Aunos went into his contemplation mode... This is the Earth I assure you. It’s just my niece that’s way out of it... Sorry.

"Hey, you do know that there is no such thing as magic, right?” … on Earth, I mean. I tried to interrupt my niece before things got too out of hand.

"Kuro, didn’t you say that you learned your magic from some kind of ruin in this world? Isn't there a chance that other people would be able to do the same? A secret cult, perhaps." Pristia, who had been listening intently to my niece from the beginning, argued, and she looked triumphantly while my niece nodded along.

Crap, she already believed my niece, and the cause of it was my lie. I looked to Cocoa for help, but she looked back at me suspiciously instead.

"No, that was another world." It wasn't another world per se, but I think Skyrim isn't the Earth, right? "I was born on Earth, and I went to another world, then for some reason, I went to your world." My lies kept piling up. I hoped that when they asked me next time, I would still remember this. I looked at Cocoa and she seemed to accept my excuse somehow. However, Barbara looked at me like I was somehow the proof of her existence.

"If she could do it, then I can do it." I heard her mumbling... Double crap. Then she suddenly proclaimed. "Take me with you!"

"What about your parents Ms. Barbara? If you went missing, they would surely miss you and worry about you." My dad reasoned with her. I'm glad that he was here because from the look of my mom and Pristia's eyebrows they seemed to disagree with him.

"This world isn't fit for a child." I heard my mom mumble.

"They are already dead-" Barbara looked downcast. She told us that it happened about half a year ago, they went to have a family party in the countryside. They had a car accident there and everyone died, her grandparents and her aunt included. She was the only survivor because that day she had a guild raid with her net-friends, so, she faked an illness and stayed home. That explained why they stopped sending me their money.

"Now that the money they left for me has nearly run out, I came here to smooch off my uncle." Barbara ended her tragic story with an honest remark. Too honest I might say. Also, sorry Barbara, even if I still was in this world, I would have nothing for you to smooch at all.

"And your uncle isn't here?" My dad asked.

"No, maybe he had known that I would come, so he left. I tried looking for him high and low for three days, but I couldn't find a single trace of him anywhere." Barbara told him.

"What a scumbag he is." My sister said... that scumbag is sitting here, though.

"Wait, don't they have some kind of life insurance here?" My brother who kept his silence all the time picked up the strangest topic to comment.

"My grandfather said that thing is useless. One has to be dead to profit from it. Also, the company will find all kinds of excuses not to pay when you actually die." Barbara answered. Yep, that’s what my dad would say. He was a conspiratorial and crazy man. He also said that I might’ve been born because aliens abducted my mom while he was sleeping.

"Please, I already have nowhere else to go." Barbara pleaded.

"Anyway, we’re still stuck here. Let's talk about it later when we find a way to go back-" My dad answered but Barbara interjected.

"Then let me show you around. I’ve walked around this neighborhood for three days straight. So, I already know the ins and outs of this area." She bragged.

"Uhm, how can we make sure that this basement will stay here when we go out." As it seemed that everyone had already agreed to go outside, I pulled Aunos shirt and asked. I will really put my foot down if there is a chance that we’ll be stranded in this world.

"Here, it's a dimensional scanner. Press it, and if it turns red, we will have more than a day to come back, but if it turns yellow we shouldn't leave this place. Green means we are back home. It has only ten charges, so please use it sparingly." My brother handed me a credit card sized device with only one button on it.

"Is this a thing that happens so frequently we have to have a device for it?" Perplexed by this device I asked.

"It’s not frequent, it actually happens very rarely I might say. But because the device is cheap to produce, every household has one in case of an emergency." He answered.

"So, it's like a first aid kit or the fire extinguisher, huh?" I thought, and pressed the button. It turned yellow... What did he say again? I look at my brother, and it seemed everyone frozen in place.

Then the color of the indicator turned green.

"The flying snow rabbit storm has passed. It turned out to be the most violent storm in history, with wind speed surpassing 200 kilometers per hour and the temperature at its center all the way down to 11.4 Kelvin. The government is doing their best to rescue a few houses who’s emergency barriers abruptly collapsed, but the hope of finding any survivors is very low-" The television went back to normal, and Skynet notified me that she could connect to the internet again.

I looked at my niece. She was dancing wildly while screaming "Woohoo!"

Strange, in most novels I’ve read, the protagonist always wanted to go home, but in real life, it seems that everyone I met is trying to escape from Earth, huh?