Like a really patient engine

“You blow a head gasket?”

It was Luke. His clothes were a blend of fantasy ranger, cowboy and 80’s action hero. The twins stood next to him, Nova dressed like a rainbow hued sci-fi wizard, and Angel in dark armor under a green silk cloak.

“Uh, can’t figure out how to make it go.” Gradie looked at the black and clear craft like someone else had wrecked it. “Maybe I need to imagine like an engine, or…”

Nova zipped over like a supersonic insect, his shoes sprouting wings that buzzed and glowed.

“Don’t worry about it bro, we’ll help you later. Mike and them always want the newbies to make a craft first. It's bullshit. Sam spent three days orbiting the big ball in a fucking Astro van.”

Gradie laughed at the image, then felt it pull on his chest, and looked back at his craft like it had made a wrong noise.

Angel zipped over to the craft in half a second and started looking it over, his dark armor with silver trim reflecting a starry sky that was nowhere around. Gradie noticed the matteness of his own craft reflected dully in it.

“This is cool,” Angel said. “Most people make a car the first time, or some shit that looks like an X wing.”

“Hey we’re gonna hit up Gunmaze,” said Nova. “You wanna go?”

“Gunmaze?” He remembered the name from somewhere.

“Yeah, bro. You been yet?”

“No. I think I’ve heard of it.”

Angel snickered. “Yeah, bro he’s heard of Gunmaze. Probably in big guys fucking video or maybe ol’ smokey worked it into an insult.”

“Aight bro,” Nova said, smiling and nodding like it was a sure thing. “You’re fucking going. Forget this shit. Making a craft is its own thing. You need to just move around the world for a bit.”

A maze of guns in a dreamworld with some new friends. The old suspicion that this was a hallucination came back to him, but it had lost most of its power now.

“Sounds good. As long as you don’t mind carrying me.”

Nova nodded thoughtfuly at the immobile craft.

“Yeah sure bro. No problem. You can ride in our ship and we’ll load yours up.”

“No, I meant in the game.”

“Oh! You never know man. Sometimes people are just naturals at it.”

Angel stuck four baseball sized lights to the side of Gradie’s craft and they flared up and it went flying towards the front of their massive ship. Despite all the frustration trying to get the fucking thing to move, Grade felt a twang of jealous protectiveness watching someone else fly it away.

Nova and Angel zipped back inside the cube and Luke floated lazily after, sipping something glowing on ice. Gradie followed them all inside the dark doorway stuck on the bottom of one of the square faces like it had just been drawn on.

The interior was about the last thing he expected to find.

It looked like any of the suburban houses his friends had growing up, if the living room had eaten every other space. There were couches, chairs, hammocks everywhere. Bottles of liquor floated around in zero g.. Angel was sitting on an oversized beanbag made of tigerskin and making a finger gun at the far wall. A bolt of light shot out and zapped the center of a target. Nova was standing in front of a bay window with the blinds pulled up looking out at the big ship floating in space, which clashed with the mundane window and wall around it in a way that made Gradie even less sure any of this was real.

The door shut behind them and the whole Cube hummed. Out the window, the ship suddenly filled the black void, the only sign that they had accelerated towards it. The cube sailed over the pyramid and the window was all black void again until the metal horizon of the pyramid rose up from below as they dropped down into it.

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Suddenly, the room fell away into a million pieces, and when those disappeared too, they were all standing on a massive starship deck with towering slanted glass views all around.

Nova kicked up into the air and flew to a small floating platform surrounded by lights.

Something flashed behind them. Gradie looked out the back window at the glowing ocean that surrounded the ship, towards a strange horizon that dropped down on the sides. The dark sky glowed and changed colors as if the sun was rising. The other sun, at least the one that permanently lit the day side of the Allworld, was somewhere down out of sight and Gradie knew that the one rising at the other end of the ship had come out of the ship itself. The black void and the Allworld disappeared as the new sun turned the sky a radiant orange-pink. When the sun had settled, Gradie was looking out at a tropical ocean under a vibrant sunset with a curved horizon.

“Hey Gradie.” Angel motioned for him to look to the front massive viewport, and the sky went from pink, to purple above, to solid black as he turned around, and the sky ahead of the ship was the same black void sprinkled with lights that it had been before. The ship made a soft humming sound, like a sibling hum to the drone of the Allworld.

The lights in the sky moved to the right and the Allworld came into view from the left.

“All right, see this star?” Angel pointed.

There was a single star dead center of the wide forward view. It was one of the few stars in the Allworld sky that twinkled, a blueish purple four-pointed starburst, like something out of an old fantasy poster.

“Yeah.”

“That’s Gunmaze. We’re going the slow way so you can get a sense of where it is in relation to the Allworld.”

Gradie thought about his own ship, that rough chunk of stone that would barely turn, and wondered at the mental control needed to move a ship like this, much less make it. Suddenly, all the crafts he had seen flying around the Allworld held a deeper gravity, even the floating advertisement he had fled from.

“All right, we’re going.” Nova’s voice came from all around, as if the ship itself was speaking.

The ship began to shake, which Gradie somehow knew was unrelated to its propulsion, but was simply a convenient way to remind its passengers that it was moving. The Allworld slid out of view and the stars drifted away from the one in the center as it got brighter. Some of the stars zipped past while others barely moved.

“So, what is it?”

“Like all your favorite games had a baby,” Luke said.

“Fuck that,” Angel said. “It’s a video game like the world is the map.”

Luke gave Angel a tired, eyebrow raised grin that told Gradie he had heard this kind of thing before.

“Oh, I was gonna try and tell him what it is in people terms, but if you wanna geek out and confuse him—”

“It is a Gameworld, Luke’s right there,” Angel said. “But the challenges are not limited to the analog difficulties you find in video games. There are mind puzzles, tests of will, things that use your—”

“And lotsa shootin,” Luke said, bouncing his eyebrows at Gradie. Angel sighed.

“Yes Luke, lots of shooting. And a bit of fighting also.”

Luke grinned and raised his drink in a toast.

“Fucking A.”

Gradie tried to use his apparently limited knowledge of how this world worked to build a picture of Gunmaze in his mind, but there was a big hole in it.

“But how do you decide who wins?”

Angel frowned at him.

“What do you mean?”

“If you can just will whatever you want into—”

“You can’t.”

Gradie tried to keep the frustration out of his voice.

“Yeah I know I can’t, but what if someone else—”

“They can’t. Gunmaze is one of the most complex collections of schema in the Other, and it’s Princes are some of the best.”

“Princes…” Gradie said, mostly to himself. He remembered Celeste saying something about that, but it felt like ages ago, and he had gone through a thousand other hims in the Hardworlds since then.

Angel tapped the pommel on his sword and made a face that said he couldn’t believe he had to explain this.

“Yeah, so when you make something in the Other, you set the rules for it. Not just physical qualities, but laws, you could say. Who can come in, what can be made or unmade inside, things like that. The rules are called Schema, and the totality of the rules, the system of the thing that you’ve made, is called the Principality, or Prince. You might also hear them called Ghosts or Gods. They create the order you see everywhere in the Other. It’s the same thing that makes the money in your wallet—”

Gradie’s mind flew off with the idea of making his own place in the Other, but somewhere along the fantasy got weighed down as he remembered something else Michael had said.

“They were the first to capture souls, trapping them in places that couldn’t be found.”

“Can you make a place that people can’t leave?”

Angel stopped talking and looked at him like he had mentioned a dead relative.

“Uh, theoretically yes. That’s why the Saviors exist. You know, the guys in the white ships? Remember, uh, Big guy’s video?”

Gradie hadn’t thought about that in a long time. He had been too preoccupied with the real danger, the violence of the Hardworlds.

“Does that stuff still happen? People getting kidnapped and locked up in…” He remembered the square blackness in Michaels video, and wondered if it had just been a convenient visual metaphor or based in reality. The thought of being trapped in endless darkness somewhere in the Other made his skin crawl.

“Not really,” Angel said, wearily. “Most Spirits spend their time on the big worlds or the routes between, where the Prince’s are too strong to do something like that. Even if you go off into the black and stumble on some trap, the Savior’s speakers will find you eventually.”

Eventually.

The word rolled around in Gradie’s head, and Angel’s assurance of safety sounded like someone who believed that crime never happened in his part of town.

For the first time since he had found this place, he was afraid of it. It was like the whimsical glow, that euphoric feeling of possibility that was wrapped around everything in the Otherworld, had cracked, and something dark and horrifying was looking through.

“All right! Check it out!” Nova said, suddenly behind them, pointing at the big forward viewport.