Aetheria awoke. The darkness of closed eyes parted with great reluctance, and her body felt charged in a manner it never had before. Her pajamas were missing. No underwear either. That was unlike her. Aesca maintained a rigid nightly routine of getting into her pajamas after finishing her raiding in Eldest Fantasy Wars Online. Why had last night been different?
The world first boss kill? Yeah, that’s why I went to bed later than normal. Pete and Callie wanted to talk afterward, and then I just fell into bed, still dressed.
That did not explain why she was naked. Tiny glimpses of memories and images flickered through her mind. Something about EMT’s giving her CPR? How could she have watched someone give her CPR?
That isn’t physically possible.
She exhaled in a giant sigh and then started coughing. Thick dust was everywhere. Her slow awakening sped up as a mystery beyond being naked scared her awake.
Where the hell am I?
The building held only a single room. Dust covered the floor so thickly her deep breathing had caused it to fill the air. The exterior walls were taller than a person and curved into a dome. No other walls or pillars existed inside the building. It made the room feel spacious. The stonework looked ancient, yet the building seemed stable.
It’s like a giant circus tent. What’s holding up the roof?
Once she asked herself that, the thought it was going to collapse upon her wriggled through her mind like a sour taste she couldn’t dispel. The very little she could see of the stone walls showed extremely faded murals once covered them. Maybe another building could reveal more of who once lived here?
Besides her and the inch thick dust, only two other things were in the building. Next to where she woke up, a fire burned. The flames were blue. Two one-foot-long pieces of wood crossed each other, and a circle of stones surrounded it. Despite the blue flame burning on wood, it did not seem to consume the wood as fuel. The imprint of where she had lain in the dust made it look like she’d been sleeping next to the fire for warmth.
Cripes! I don’t remember drinking before bed.
A large wooden chest stood at the edge of the light provided by the blue fire. It looked neither old nor new and had no dust upon it. The chest had a small metal plate on the front. Even with the help of the firelight, she could not make out the writing. She stood and walked over to the chest, trying to brush some of the dust off her skin as she walked. It was futile with how omnipresent the dust was.
Aetheria.
The chest had her EFWO character’s name on it. She pinched herself.
“Ow.” It hurt. She did not wake up.
“Mrrrrrrrr.” Half groan, half curse at life. She moved her hands to push the lid of the chest up. It came up easily. For a fraction of a moment, she thought she saw a flicker of teal energy glow around the chest and vanish. Aesca braced herself for incoming trap damage. Nothing bad happened. “Me and my overactive imagination while lucid dreaming.”
There’s an idea.
Aesca focused on the idea of the fire getting bigger and providing a more intense light to the room. Nothing happened. She tried to will a hot-dog into existence in her hands. That didn’t work either. She pinched herself again. Nope.
“Get a grip, Aesca Lampi.” Scolding herself in her best imitation of Sister Bethany, the nun at her catholic elementary school, she squared her shoulders and set about seeing what was in the chest. Clothes! The cure to nakedness. Naked beggars couldn’t be choosey beggars.
A few different outfits were inside the chest. She found socks, underwear, a sports bra, black canvass like pants, a sleeveless turtleneck, and a long coat, really more a duster, that she immediately fell in love with. All of it went on immediately, as well as the front lace combat boots that seemed to match the coat. Unlike the coat, the boots’ coloration was hard to discern in the dim firelight. Black or dark red? Who cares? They fit nice and could crush a lot of peanuts at Texas Roadhouse.
She even gave the empty room a twirl or two. The perfect fit for each piece of clothing blew her mind. Every single piece fit perfectly. Maybe it’s magic?
Twirling, jumping, stepping side to side. It all fit and fit perfect. The calf length long coat somehow never got in her way, either. Definitely magic. Man, I need magic bras in the real world.
The side of the chest held a few belts and a knife. It even had a sheath with it, so the belt and sheath went on. The blade of the knife was very sharp looking.
Must be magic, too. She glimpsed her eyes reflected in the metal. It looked like it was reflecting two teal lights. Did her eyes glow now?
The only other thing in the chest besides clothes was a scroll. Straight out of a video game and in a chest in front of her. Ugh. I’m firing my subconscious. Tacky gold holder? Bitch please, you know most scrolls didn’t have a holder.
Annoyed at historical inaccuracies within her dream fantasy, she pulled the scroll out and unrolled it. For a moment, the characters on it danced through her mind. Strange glyphs and sigils that she couldn’t comprehend covered the scroll. This was an undecipherable divine script the mortal mind wasn’t meant to understand. The world turned sideways. Her mind shot through a prism, refracted a million times, and infused with who knew what, recombined in another prism with a drop of lemon, and the world turned right side up. Suddenly, the scroll she was looking at made perfect sense. Why did she feel a little dizzy? Oh well.
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Dearest Aetheria,
Welcome to the family. We believe in you. Good luck climbing the Tower.
-Aetherius
Why was she getting a scroll from a god in the Eldest Fantasy Wars Online? Stupid. This was a stupid dream, and she wanted to wake up now. If this dream had a manager, she was prepared to call him to her table and go full Karen on his ass. Why was it addressed to her character?
Just because I have blue-green hair down to my hips, and it sparkles in the darkness with its own internal illumination, they go and call me Aetheria?
Wait a minute!
Aesca’s hair was brown. Also, it was only shoulder length. It did not glow in the dark. At all. Normal people’s hair did not glow in the dark. Even in dreams.
“Damn. EFWO never really captured the dazzling hair. Good job, my imagination.” Still, hair that long needed a manager. A quick search through the chest turned up some scrunchies. A few seconds later and her glowing hair was in a manageable high ponytail. Magical scrunchies, hopefully.
I wonder what enchantments a scrunchie could hold? Why don’t video games have a scrunchie slot? Some jerk would whine how men can’t use them, completely ignoring they could if they had long hair, then the devs would take it away because the loudest idiots get all the attention.
A feeling of queasiness in her gut interrupted Aesca’s internal monologue about the unfairness of just who game developers listened to. Something bad was about to happen. Uncertain what was going on, or even how she knew, she dived back towards the fire. Once there, she pulled her hands and arms over her head and rolled into a fetal position.
Crrrrrrrraaaak.
A terrible sound filled the air. The earth shook. Rocks fell. Dust filled the air. If this was what a huge earthquake was like, Aesca felt bad for ever making a joke about California sinking into the ocean after a Big One. The few minor earthquakes she had experienced on vacations hadn’t seemed so serious, so this enlightened her to the terror an earthquake could produce.
The ground continued heaving. A malicious and suffocating intent fell upon her. They directed it at her, but also at everything that was anywhere within a few miles of her. The intensity of the anger and its indiscriminate spread were irrational. No one in her life had ever directed so much spite, hate, and disdain at her. The earth continued to shake. The sounds of rocks falling or breaking, and some weird sound like tectonic plates smashing against each other in terrible groans continuously assaulted her ears. Dust fell from the ceiling like rain.
Then something hit the domed ceiling from outside, and large pieces of the roof fell. One crashed down onto her legs. She thought she screamed before blackness took her into unconsciousness.
The second time she blinked herself to consciousness sucked much more than the first time. Pain shot through her entire left leg. Aesca could not feel much of the leg, and the massive chunk of rock over the leg looked like it weighed thousands of pounds. The struggle of pushing at the large boulder with arms that seemed slenderer and willowier than she remembered tickled her mind. Where the hell am I?
Appearances aside, it seemed like her strength was higher in this dream than it was in the real world. She pushed, pulled, prodded, even kicked with her freed right leg. It felt like Aesca struggled with the rock for hours, but she freed herself within five minutes.
Another aftershock shook the ground and a terrible sound like something breaking echoed through the foundation of the building. Things quickly went from bad to worse as the ground went from a comfortable horizontal position to teetering sharply and then stabilized at a sharp fifteen-degree incline. The boulder that she’d kicked off herself went tumbling down the floor and smashed right through the stone wall. The fire she’d been near fell down the angled floor.
Acting before thinking, she threw her hand out to catch the logs. Somehow, she caught one log and balanced the other against it. Aesca saved the fire! Of course, her hand was in the blue fire now. A rush of excruciating pain and heat flared in her hand, and then the room descended into darkness. No more fire. No more wood, either. Had she dropped it in the assault of pain?
In her shock, she failed to stabilize herself on the incline and tumbled down to crash into the wall. Her right knee smashed into the solid rock wall in an agonizing impact that sounded like breaking bones. If that weren’t bad enough, another series of aftershocks occurred. Aesca heard the chest come tumbling down. It smashed into her torso, rebounded a little, hit her head, then fell to rest against the wall next to her.
Flashing lights filled her vision and an existence of pain consumed her.
The tide of pain and flashing lights before her eyes receded. The fire was gone, but between streams of light from the broken roof and the dim glow of her hair, she had limited visibility. Her left leg no longer hurt. Checking it left her stunned. She had no injuries on that leg. Even her clothes had mended. How?
Moving both legs revealed neither hurt. The pain had completely gone. Not even a scratch remained from the giant rock crushing her leg. Not even a discolored patch of skin marked where she’d broken a knee against the wall. Her hands came away with no blood when she ran them over where the chest had impacted her head. No blood on the ground. I didn’t imagine getting hit in the head.
“H e double hockey sticks. What the fuck is going on?”
Now Aesca, your father was in the Navy, don’t you go swearing like he does, young lady.
“Fuck off, mom.” Aesca snarled at the voice that lectured her in her mind.
One word kept dancing around in her mind. A dangerous word. One full of wonder and disdain simultaneously. A word that encompassed whole genres of media.
“I got Isekai’d.” Aesca said it out loud. It sounded more confident than she felt about the declaration.
The world apparently had something to say in response to this declaration. Another aftershock packed with intense malice hit the area. Another awful sound of some deep rock beneath her breaking. The floor tilted more.
“Jeez. I get it, you’re mad at me, whoever you are. I need to get the hell out of here.” Beyond the broken walls, she could see a ruined city. A subterranean metropolis. Rocks still fell from the ceiling high above. The angle of the ground kept increasing ever so slightly, with agitated movements whenever another aftershock struck. The ground had cracked open further down the high cavern to allow daylight to stream in and provide spotty illumination.
Aesca did not want to die inside the antediluvian ruins of a subterranean city.
The erratic beams of sunlight from above revealed a wonderful place. Spires that flowed like water rose into the sky, caught beams of light, and refracted streams of colored light in a glorious revelation of their crystalline construction. Large domes glistened with a mysterious azure light from within. Now isn’t the time to gawk.
She needed to move.