A voice rang in my ear “Grey, get up here. I need you for an experiment.”. Sighing, I found my way to the stairs and began to ascend the tower. Slowly, I began to get closer to the top, though my old bones ached and moaned with every step.  My pointy hat brushed against the top of the doorway as I entered the room.

“Finally, you’re here. What took you so long?” a young mage asked in a haughty voice across the room. He had not turned to look in my direction, and instead was focused on tinkering something that resembled a stone archway in the far back of the room.

I retorted “I’m an old man, Edward, you know that full well.”. I scanned the room looking for clues on what I was about to be subjected to. The room was a mess, books were splayed open across desks with no rhyme or order, vials were left used and unwashed and the ceiling was covered in cobwebs. “Your slothfulness knows no bounds, does it?”

I could sense his frown despite the fact that he had not lost his focus on the task before him. “It’s Lord Edward to you, and I’ve been busy. You know that full well.” he replied in a mocking tone. “It’s finally time for our final experiment together”.

While I was irritated that I had to act as a labrat for this man, I was also relieved that I would not have to deal with him ever again. I had been caught looking through grimoires held within the Magician’s Guild without permission using a clairvoyance spell, and was sentenced to be a temporary slave. Luckily, due to my magical expertise, I was bought to be used for testing new types of magic. I was set to be a slave until I had participated within 100 experiments. Due to my old age, I would not have been able to handle physical labour, so even though the risks of being killed or maimed by an experiment gone wrong were not non-existent, it was a much more preferable task to the nigh-impossible alternatives. 

‘Fuck the guild. I’m never helping them out again.’

Edward turned towards me, seemingly finished with his tinkering “Right. This experiment will be pretty simple. I just want you to walk through this archway when I tell you to do so. That’s all, and the experiment will be over.”.

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I raised an eyebrow. Usually, the experiments were repetitive and took hours of rigorous testing. I was expecting him to milk me for everything he could, seeing as this was the final experiment I would participate in, yet it seemed that he did not choose to do so.

Cautiously, I walked towards the archway and examined it. Carved onto the inner edge of the archway were runes, some that I had seen before, while others I had not yet encountered. Surprisingly, the ones that I had not seen before looked very simple, and due to my prior knowledge about magic, I began to doubt that they were runes at all. All of these ‘runes’ were similarly sized, and were composed of very few lines arranged in a simple fashion. 

One was a vertical straight line, with three horizontal lines protruding from the vertical line towards the right. One was two diagonal lines that met at the top, with a horizontal line combining the two in the center. One was a vertical straight line, with a curved loop at the top right of the line, and a diagonal line facing towards the bottom right attached to the bottom right of the loop. One was a simple vertical line, with a horizontal line on the top. The last one was two vertical lines spaced apart from each other, with a horizontal line in their centers connecting them. I committed these to my memory, and began to wait for the command to enter the archway.

The runes, both the known and unfamiliar, began to glow. An effect similar to distortions created in the air by heat could be seen within the space between the runes. “Alright, time for you to go through.” Edward impatiently said. I saw an excitement in his eyes that I had not seen before, which set off a lot of alarms in my mind. I began to sweat, and became fearful of what was to come. However, I knew I had to enter the archway, or I’d be punished for disobeying orders with either more experiments, or worse.

‘Ah, screw it. Let’s just get this over with, quickly.’ I head towards the archway, and hold my finger out to touch the ripples that could be seen. As I touched the space within the archway, I noted that it felt like water, and that I felt no pain. I decided that the archway is probably safe, and passed through completely.

Suddenly, I was barraged by flashes of light, and extremely loud sounds, louder than I had ever heard before. In front of me, many people were holding rectangular devices, which I assumed to be magical, and pointing them towards me. The beeping was starting to irritate me, so I turned towards it, and saw a large metal box with a man inside directly to my right. I look behind me, to ask Edward what the hell was going on, yet behind me there was no Edward, and there was no archway. I stood in place, bewildered and confused, as people continued to stare at me and point their rectangles at me. I began to hear wailing sounds in the distance, which slowly got louder.

‘What the fuck?’