Chapter One
Mikes Start, Sort Of
Mike fell towards the mountain face at an alarming speed. He could feel the air moving past him with a ppfffshh. He was alarmed not for his human body, he didn’t have one anymore, he was alarmed for his current body. A heavily modified wizard stone, he didn’t know what would happen when his stone met the mountain. This was not a situation of his choice, but by simple fate he was going to survive, get his body back, get rich and powerful and then get back to earth or have a nap, either one would do. First things first the rapidly approaching mountainside.
‘Bing’.
It didn’t hurt at all!
But he did bounce.
He bounced down the mountainside directly towards a large shelf of gray rock sticking out halfway down the mountainside.
There looked to be a large amount of green moss leading down into the shade at the face of the mountain where the shelf and mountain intersected.
God willing he’ll land there and set up his ‘Power Tower’ the way the wizard who did this to him wanted, win this contest, get a new body and get out of here.
He hit the upper edge of the shelf with a ‘bong’ and bounced back into the intersection of shade at the bottom of the shelf next to the mountain face and unexpectedly kept going.
He rolled to a soft stop on top of a thick squishy layer of moss. He took in his surroundings, if he could have sighed with relief here he would have. It looked like he was in a grotto formed when the outside shelf had peeled off the mountain face. He was ⅔ of the way into the grotto having just missed landing in a pool of water at its center. From his current angle he couldn’t tell how deep or shallow the pool of water was. There was moss covering the floor and one third of the way up the walls. It looked like there was a crack in the back wall, he couldn’t see how far it went back but it ‘felt’ deep. The moss continued out the grotto entrance and a third of the way up the rock shelf. The shelf blocked the view of the valley below and the distant town and fortifications guarding the opening to it and the stupid wizard tower power games below.
All Mike could see was the deep blue sky with a couple wisps of snow white clouds in the distance out the grotto’s entrance. A sparkle above him drew his attention upwards to the ceiling of the grotto above him. The water was reflecting bits of sunlight from outside across the ceiling in a vibrating pattern. It was beautiful.
A dull roar drew Mike’s attention outside to the rock shelf as the top third of it crumbled and fell away. ‘Huh, it seems I landed a little hard.’ Mike thought to himself.
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Abruptly a wave formed at the outside edges of the moss and rippled towards him, getting larger and larger as the distance to him, well, his stone, shrunk. The wave piled up in front of him towering over him like when he was kid looking up at the calgary tower. He could feel a gaze looking at him. ‘Not good’ he thought to himself.
“Hello?” He tried to say out loud. But it came out as a barely perceived wave of distortion in the air.
The moss paused in its movement.
“Dude, not cool man, this is my spot. Find your own”
What Mike, now realized, was sentient moss, promptly rolled Mike's stone body into the pool of water.
It was ice cold water. Mike's first thought was ‘wow I can feel cold, but not impact?’, his next thought was ‘ah crap, it is a deep pool of water’. As Mike fell through the water the sides of the pool rapidly narrowed to a slit smaller than his wizard stone body. His downward journey stopped with a jerk as he became jammed between the walls deep in the pool. He looked around at the Inky black below him with a sewer lid size of light above him.
Mike waited for what seemed like a minute to him to see if anything else was going to happen because how could his situation possibly get any worse than it already was? Nothing happened. Good. ‘Okay’ Mike thought to himself, ‘time to create my own space, just like I was tortured, I mean taught to.’
Finding the ‘tower’ mold he’d so painfully learned to copy from another wizard stone as per his torturous training from the evil, crazy, digusting, hatefull wizard. Mike trailed off as he wandered and waddled in his hateful thoughts. Mike paused, ‘what was I doing?’ Right, find the mold in his internal ‘well of memory’ and fill it with mana from his ‘internal reservoir’ and push it out into his claimed space. He did it. Nothing happened.
He did it again. Nothing happened, except the equivalent feeling of a headache coming on, a painful one.
What did he do wrong? He poured mana into a mold as per his instructions, he pushed out and oh, oops. He had to ‘claim’ the area. Right, claiming ment pushing his mana into the area around him in a sphere, ‘bathing’ everything in his mana making it ‘his’. He remembered it feeling weird. He soaked the area around him with his mana, beginning to feel the rock and water around him like it was part of his wizard stone. Weird feeling. Wait.
The ‘him’ or mana in the water started to fade away like smoke on the wind, he had to push more out to ‘claim’ the water. More of ‘him’ or mana disappeared. This was not good, not good at all. He had been told that no mana ment death and he would lose all his mana at this rate without ever ‘claiming’ the area. He was not going to die!
He yanked all his mana back into himself unintentionally ‘copying’ or as the wizard called it duplicating the rock and soil surrounding him and storing its ‘mold’ in his well of memory. This also had the unintentional effect of converting the rock to mana and heat. The mana got stored into his reservoir, the heat caused a cascade of bubbles to flow up to the surface of the pool.
This also resulted in the rock walls beside his stone unintentionally disappearing and he began to fall down, deeper and deeper into the water again. ‘Well things got worse’ Mike thought to himself as he watched the circle of light above him shrink smaller and smaller.
The new mana in Mike’s reservoir started to quickly create more and more pressure on Mike’s mind quickly turning into pain. Great overwhelming pain. Mike fought the pain but eventually his conscious self shut down and all that was left was a gibbering, crackling mad man howling into the passing dark.