Ray leaned his head back against the headrest of his seat, letting the usual sights and sounds fill up his mind.
The same faces he saw on the Hop every time he took it in the morning. There was the spiky-haired woman at the back rocking out to music, the muscular guy near the front who had the air of a veteran, the old lady keeping a tight hold on her little poodle’s leash.
Then there were the same noises, melding into a droning melody. Muted music from the back, the tiny dog’s occasional yips, and the constant churn of the streetcar’s engine.
The familiarity of it all comforted him.
Something he would need in his upcoming unfamiliar situation.
Ideally, Ray would have tried to get some shuteye right about now. But the prospect of starting a new job added a strong tinge of nervousness and anxiety, held together by turgid resignation.
The hiring manager had joked Ray was an ideal recruit if only because of the Hop. Milwaukee’s newest streetcar—which Ray had ridden a lot during his old occupation—would deposit him straight on the doorstep of Golden Windows Corporation’s office on Ogden Avenue. That he lived a two-minute walk away from the boarding station was an added bonus.
All of a sudden, he found the woman with the headphones and the messy, punk-girl-from-nineties hairstyle staring at him. And… he realized he had been staring at her while he had spaced out.
Ray mentally berated himself and looked away. The window faintly reflected his slightly tired face back. He took solace from the fact that his beard was neatly trimmed short, that the few unruly brown locks of his hair were easy to ignore, and his shirt and tie looked fine enough. First impressions were important.
He had to be serious. Ray had to look like he was taking this job seriously. He really couldn’t get fired again.
Fired for getting bitten by a dog, fired for assisting an injured protestor lady, fired for the dumb shit one of his old coworkers had pulled… Ray gave his head a little shake. No more getting fired. He had to keep his head down, act sensible, and avoid any trouble.
A distant glint of growing white caught his eye. Whatever it was got interrupted by strange words, white on a floating screen of blue, popping into existence in front of his face.
[System Integration]
Integration of Omniversal System on Instance 213C, local title “Earth”, has been initiated. Root Locus of Tower of Forging set at local coordinates 45°44'16.6"N 87°04'23.7"W. Bounds of Tower of Forging set to expansion rate of local speed 1.97 miles per minute. Radius of Bound from Root Locus set to local distance 290.7 miles.
All unintegrated Omniversal Denizens, prepare for impact.
Ray stared. “The hell?”
Was he hallucinating or something? Sure, he hadn’t had a full six hours of sleep last night, but it shouldn’t be this bad. He’d had sleepless nights before. None of them had induced visions of floating, senseless sentences.
He moved his hands through the screen. The words shimmered but didn’t disappear. They reminded him of dialogue boxes, but a bit stylized like how they appeared in video games.
“Anyone else seeing this?” he asked.
No one answered. Ray looked around, and as he did so, the floating screen and its weird words disappeared.
“Wait, what?” He waved his hand before his face. “Come back! I wasn’t done with you.”
No one was paying him any attention. Probably a good thing, since he was acting like he had gone insane. But the reason behind why no one was staring at him like he had lost his marbles—why nobody was looking at him at all—turned out to be even more concerning than the words themselves.
Ray followed everyone’s gaze to look out through the streetcar’s windows. The distant shimmer of white had turned into a wide bank that covered the entirety of northern Milwaukee.
Worse, it was growing.
It was like someone had decided to pull the Aurora Borealis down to earth and turn it the colour of pasteurized milk.
“What in good God’s name is that?” the brawny vet from in front asked in a gruff voice.
The woman at the back had pulled off her headphones. “I got no clue, but it’s too early in day for this shit,” she muttered.
Other people were speaking too, raising their voices in concern. The wall of light was closing in with the speed of an avalanche. Ray frowned. What was that? Was the city admin testing a new kind of lighting? Surely, they would have warned people if it had been something of this scale.
Ray unlocked his phone to check the web for any information, but there was no signal. What?
The streetcar’s speaker crackled. Maybe the government had sent out some sort of warning. But the speakers died as soon as they started up. They got nothing.
Ray’s heart skipped a beat. He sat straighter. And of course, because things weren’t troubling enough, all the lights in the streetcar went out. Great. Perfect start to the morning.
Everyone was talking with rising anxiety now. Several people had gotten up, some going ahead to get to the driver. The streetcar was still moving. Someone was shouting at no one in particular to let everyone out.
Ray turned to the window. The wall of light had almost reached them. Beyond it, the world was simply gone.
No, not gone. Not completely.
There was something beyond it. Something huge. His breath caught. Some sort of titanic pillar towered into the sky, as gargantuan as the veil of light in front of it. No, he was wrong. It wasn’t any pillar.
It had to be that Tower those words had mentioned.
“Ah, crap,” Ray said just before the light wall struck him. He grinned before it did, though. “I better not get fired for this before I even start my job.”
Then everything went—predictably—white.
***
When Ray could see again, he wasn’t sure where he was or what he was doing there. How had he been transported from the streetcar to… wherever this white-tiled room was?
Also, why was he naked?
He looked around. Peered around, actually. No sign of any hidden cameras or anything in the seemingly blank tiles around him. Nothing overhead save for a swirl of the same white light that he assumed was what had somehow brought him here. The sensation under his feet made him think of ceramic tiles.
Panic and confusion were starting to rise side by side. There was nothing here. No windows. No doors. How?
Hold on. Was he… dead? Ray took a second to centre himself. No, he didn’t feel dead. His chest still rose and fell as he breathed, and it stung when he pinched himself. The latter also meant he wasn’t dreaming either. So what in the world was going on here?
“Uh,” he said to the emptiness before him. “Hello? Anyone there?”
There was no answer. Ray didn’t know how long he remained that way, just standing there in white nothingness. He couldn’t tell how many feelings ran their course through his head. Panic, desperation, restlessness, fear, all claiming their respective times before a dreary listlessness was all that was left.
And then Ray got an answer. Sort of.
[New Denizen Initiation]
A new Denizen has been inducted into the Omniversal System. System will begin reviewing Denizen’s history, processing character information, and calculating aptitudes.
Reviewing history, pre- and post- moment of gaining ability to interact with locality, local terminology “birth”…
New Denizen, please wait until initiation is complete.
Finally! Something to change the monotony. They were the same style of words, white on a blue screen, just like he had seen before the blinding light had struck.
“Uh…” Ray wasn’t sure who—or what—he was speaking to, but the words helped ground him. “Can I get some pants?”
No response again. But as though to mock him, the words on the screen changed.
[New Denizen Initiation]
Reviewing history, pre- and post- moment of gaining ability to interact with locality, local terminology “birth”…
Reviewing history… calculating aptitudes…
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Reviewing history… calculating aptitudes…
Reviewing history… calculating aptitudes…
…
New Denizen, please wait until initiation is complete.
“Error?” That didn’t sound good. “If you don’t have pants, that’s alright. I can make do with some shorts too.”
The list continued expanding with the same message. Error after error after error. Something was wrong, and Ray had a bad feeling it was something wrong with him. Or maybe that was just his past talking.
He waited for a while. There was nothing else he could do in this blank nothingness. But with time on his hands, his thoughts started to trail back. Started to poke and prod and question.
Ray shook his head. It wasn’t worth questioning things when he wasn’t going to receive any answers. It also wasn’t worth forming any hypotheses when he didn’t have even the most minimum of information to make any logical conclusions. Towers? Denizens? Systems? Off the top of his head, those meant next to nothing to him.
But he could remember what he had seen. He recalled what he had read before that rapidly expanding wall of white had struck the streetcar.
Prepare for impact…
Impact with that wall of white? Was it his lack of preparation that had led to him ending up… where this place was? What sort of preparation was one even supposed to take for something like that? No, this was just another stupid wall he was hitting. Not worth pondering.
The other thing had been that tower. What had the words called it? The Tower of… Forcing? No, Forging.
Ray found himself swallowing a little, a nervous smile creeping up on his face. The Tower of Forging sounded ominous. He was pretty certain it wasn’t referring to the smithing kind of forging. Not literally, that was for sure.
It had been the Tower expanding. He was certain of that much. A Tower that had grown to cover all of Milwaukee, no all of Wisconsin at the very least. Probably even more too. Hadn’t it said a radius of nearly three hundred miles? He didn’t know where exactly the centre was that this radius was being measured from, but that was huge.
Ray laughed. “Oh, we’ve got the Yoopers and the Canadians in on this too, huh?” It was almost refreshing to realize he wasn’t the only one involved in this madness. Hopefully.
A strange table and stool appeared before him. They were literally just a small white block in front of a much bigger one, but the pointed arrangement could be nothing else.
Ray supposed if he wasn’t getting pants, a seat was better than nothing.
Ray looked around. He saw no one. Besides, that disembodied voice had come from everywhere. It was strangely also impossible to tell whether it had been male or female. “Um, hello? Can someone please explain what in the absolute fuck is going on? And I’m still waiting for some mercy on my privates. I’ll take a speedo at this point.”
“You’ve got some nerve talking about covering things…” Ray muttered. He didn’t raise his voice, though. Finally. Some long-awaited answers.
“Omniverse?” Ray asked. He wished he could ask for a timeout and take like an hour to just absorb everything that had just been said. “Not universe?”
Ray felt a little bit faint. He wasn’t a slouch about stuff like parallel dimensions and whatnot. Ray had read and enjoyed his fair share of superhero comics with their wild, dimension-breaking crossovers. But enjoying it in reality was a whole different bag of beans. “And this true potential business? What’s that?”
Towers connecting the different planets that bore life in space. Ray shook his head. Wild. “Why Towers?”
Ray stared ahead of him where the same words kept repeating on the screen. Error. Error. Error. “My true potential… you think you know what that is?”
“But I asked you.”
Error, error, error. “Except, apparently, my aptitude.”
Ray could start a philosophical discussion on how “unknown” and “undiscovered” were the same, but he didn’t want to argue semantics with… “Are you this Omniversal System?”
For some reason, he got the sensation that whoever he was speaking with was smiling.
The more Ray conversed with this entity, the more questions spilled through the hallways of his mind, but he clamped down on them for the time being. Something momentous was awaiting him. He could hear it in the System’s voice. “I am.”
[Manual Initiation Override Activated—Step 1: Class Selection]
Please review the following choices for your Ascension Class.
[Common] Ascension Class options: Warrior [Tier 1], Rogue [Tier 1], Mage [Tier 1], Cleric [Tier 2], Arcanist [Tier 2]…
[Uncommon] Ascension Class options:
Due to insufficient aptitude, Ascension Class options of higher rarity are unavailable.
Calculating aptitude for Path…
New Denizen, please expand and review your Ascension Class options.
Ray stared at the words for quite a while. “Wow. I know the screens looked familiar, but I wasn’t expecting this to turn into a full-blown D&D session.”
He looked through the options again. Only Common offerings. Forget Rare and Epic classes—as he expected them to go, with how rarity rankings he had seen in other places—he hadn’t even received an Uncommon option either. That was a little disappointing.
“If my aptitude had been calculated, instead of getting these errors, would I have received better starting options?” Ray asked.
Ray sighed. Accomplished? He had been too busy jumping from one thing to another to accomplish anything.
Well, there had been that time in college when he had won first place at a research conference for a presentation… Hold on. Was that why he had been offered this Arcanist class? For having done research? On biomechanics?
And the Cleric class. That was there because… he supposed he was helpful, in general. That injured protestor he had helped—and got fired for—could attest to that.
Accomplishments, the System had said.
“Step one,” Ray read at the top of the screen. “What’s step two, then? How many are there?”
He could feel that strange sensation of the system smiling again. It didn’t feel malevolent, like an evil grin, but he wasn’t going to call it benevolent either.
“That’s different from my class?”
“I… that’s a very vague explanation.”
Ray was tempted to shake his head again. This whole thing was too complicated for one conversation to cover. He resisted the urge to squirm. Heh, cover. “And it’s this Path business giving me errors.”
Ray’s breath caught in his throat as the words changed.
[Manual Initiation Override Activated—Step 2: Path Assignment]
Reviewing early history… Peak Attribute: Variance [57%]
New Denizen, please wait.
A strange sensation filtered through his head. Like a cool breeze gently wafting through where his brain should have been. It was so unexpected, so unfathomably eerie, Ray didn’t even know how to respond. But he was sure about one thing. The System was combing through his memories.
First came the memories of boyhood. Then his teenage years. Then college and getting his first job. Then all the way to the day his streetcar had been struck by that shimmering white wall.
And through it all, Ray could tell what exact conclusion the system came away with. Variance.
He had earned top grades at school, only to move away and start again at a different place because his parents never stayed at one location for more than two years at a time. In college, his GPA of three-point-five was marred by the big “Transferred Credits” letters on his transcript.
As an adult, he had always been steady at his jobs, until something unfortunate happened to knock him off balance. Helping the bookstore he had been hired at rake in the biggest profits in years, only to be fired in an unfortunate incident when he had helped a protestor. The poor lady had been injured. Who was he to know that rioters and cops would barge in and trash the whole place?
Kicked out of a beautiful apartment because his roommate had secretly been growing weed, fired from the delivery job he had been excelling in because some guy’s dog had bitten him and someone else had run over the rottweiler—Ray still had the scars—and the owner had tried to sue the delivery company…
Every time his life had been on an upward trajectory, some wild shit always happened to chop him down to a stump.
The question remained implicit. What did Ray want? Apparently, that was going to give him an idea about his Path.
[Manual Initiation Override Activated—Step 2: Path Assignment]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [75%]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [86%]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [93%]
New Denizen, please wait.
What did he want? He could ask for everlasting wealth. He could ask to never need to work again. He could ask for no more unforeseen disasters to strike his life. But, nice as though it would have been to have all of those, did he really want them?
[Manual Initiation Override Activated—Step 2: Path Assignment]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [96%]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [98%]
New Denizen, please wait.
The answer came to him then. What he was truly looking for. “I want control.”
[Manual Initiation Override Activated—Step 2: Path Assignment]
Reviewing recent history… Peak Attribute: Variance [98%]
Calculation complete… Peak Attribute percentile in eligible population: 94th percentile
Congratulations. You have unlocked a Path with greater power and potential than 94% of Denizens eligible for Paths.
New Denizen, please review your Legendary Path.
Ray stared. Then smiled. Those words…
New Denizen, please review your Legendary Path.