Our first mission had been successful. There was only white bread cheese and ham in the fridge, but we promptly ate all of it as we dressed in a slightly oversized t-shirt and jeans. There had only been black jeans and white t-shirts inside the cupboard, as well as dozens of medical garbs, all covered in dark spots that hadn’t been washed properly.
We weren’t going to wear that, but I hated the fact that me and L looked the same, and now dressed the same as well.
I pressed her hand in annoyance as we examined each other with clothes on.
“Don’t get used to that. I won’t wear your clothes or go cosplaying with you.” I told her.
She gave me a puppy eyed look. “Oh, come on, I was just thinking about it. Think at how fucking popular we could get.”
“I don’t want to be ogled at by fat geeks.”
“Don’t be an asshole now, the cosplay scene is very diverse, a lot of people don’t even play games and participate.”
“…Fine, let’s find the way back home and we’ll talk about it.”
“I can’t imagine how we’ll explain this to our parents.” Gaëlle said out loud.
That stopped me in my tracks.
“L…they could be dead, didn’t you see…”
She turned to look at me. “Oh Daniel! No, no they’re not dead. Didn’t you…Oh, of course you didn’t. When you went missing mom and dad got in a big argument, dad’s been sleeping on the couch. The video Benedict showed us…”
“…Was both of them in bed. Oh. So that was fake.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Now the inheritance would have been pretty great but…”
“L!”
She gave me a look that I knew very well.
“Stop defending them, they’re scumbags.”
“No they’re…” But I remembered the hallucinations I had about them. Unlike with Lila’s, what my parent’s hallucinations had said to me were actual things that had happened. So maybe my parents were scumbags.
“They paid for our education.” I tried weakly.
“Sure. They paid for our education. First of all that’s the bare minimum, second of all they did that only because they’re good Christians and they want to look good during Sunday lunches.”
“You’re being cynical again.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. They don’t even call me anymore Daniel. And if I call, they barely give me two minutes of their time.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah, oh.” L was pissed.
I squeezed her hand a bit tighter in mine.
“Sorry L, I didn’t know.”
Her anger went away as soon as it had come.
“Not your fault, you did your best to hold this family together, but honestly, I’m not even sure I want to tell them what happened to us. Tell them we’re alive, at least so that mom can sleep again. But then we’re on our own.”
“I…I’m not sure.”
“Well. Think about it.”
“…Let’s find that library.” I changed subjects, looking at the two other wooden doors behind the bedroom area.
My sister nodded. “OK. So, which one is door four?”
As we walked towards the bed, I tried to look at anything that would have told me which of these doors was the right one.
“Maybe we just try one at random?”
“Don’t be an idiot, just ask Bonnie.”
“Sure, but I’ve got a feeling…Bonnie, which door is door number four?” I asked loudly, trying to pronounce everything perfectly.
“…An image of Door 4 is available at the main terminal.”
“Hm.” I said, surprised. “That’s easier than I thought. Bonnie, where is the main terminal?” I hadn’t spotted anything of the like in the room, but maybe…
“The main terminal is situated in section four, library area.” Bonnie said with what had to be sass.
Gaëlle started laughing.
“It’s not fucking funny.” I added.
“You…seems you were right…she likes to fuck with you.”
“Well, how funny is it that we’re going to try randomly?”
“Haaa.” She caught her breath. “It’s fine. I’m not scared.” Her smile was wild.
“You’re shivering.” I noted.
“I’m tired.”
“Mh mh.” I looked at the two doors. They were very similar to each other, the wood was the same, only the front panel was sculpted slightly differently.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…” I began singing with my finger out. “You!” I pointed at the left door. “Want to do the honours?” I asked my sister.
She looked at me in confusion. Then her expression cleared with resolution. “You know what, sure, hold on to me, don’t want to lose you in the nether dimension.”
“The nether what now?” But my sister didn’t answer me, she grabbed the door handle.
And we were now somewhere else, and that somewhere lit up. The walls were always the same aluminium-steel ones, but the room was very, very different.
We were on an elevated platform, with what seemed like a lift in front of us, but it was closed with a glass barrier and a code panel. Behind the glass lift, you could see a gigantic open area. It was still indoors, but it looked a bit like the rows of pods where human slept in the Matrix. Rows and rows, floors and floors of glass cubicles all connected to a vertical rail system. It was all very well lit up, everything pristine and squeaky clean. The reflections of the silvery metal walls were almost blinding. But instead of humans being harvested as batteries, inside those cubicles stood doors.
From this far away, it was hard to see them in detail, but I saw large red ones, like ones you would see before entering a throne room, unassuming ones that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an apartment building, some made of planks of wood roughly nailed together, some made of a viscous material that seemed to be moving, or ones just a black veil over a metal tube, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t infinite though; I could see the ceiling and the bottom of the room.
“Woaw.” My sister exclaimed. “That’s huge. One. Two. Three…”
“Are you trying to count them?” I asked, disbelieving.
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“Well, why not?”
Now, I was pretty confident in my counting skills after my numerous hours of counting veins, but I knew this would have taken a while.
“Bonnie, how many doors are there here?”
“…5984 doors.” The computer answered. She was harder to hear, the little platform where we stood only had a little speaker in one corner.
“Holy shit. Hey L, do you think all those doors are like…” I didn’t need to finish my sentence.
“I don’t know. That would be seriously mental. But my guess is we’ll find all our answers in the library.”
I nodded. “Good point. Let’s go.”
We turned around and I grabbed the door handle again, not hesitating this time.
Instantly, we appeared back into Benedict’s living area. The lights turned on again, and without further ado, I tried to open the neighbouring door.
It teleported us straight into a new room. This one lit up slower, the lights dimmer and more gradual than the previous ones. But what we saw was clear, this was the library.
It wasn’t enormous, but it was big. The rows of books reaching far above our height, even with stretching our hands.
Gaëlle, always the critic, immediately noticed the lack of ladder.
“Where is the step-ladder? How can there not be some sort of ladder! Who designed this shit?”
If there was one hobby that both me and my sister shared, it was books, we mostly didn’t like the same genres, but we both enjoyed a good library.
“He didn’t even categorize his rows. Look, Daniel Defoe is next to Joseph Conrad.”
“What!?” My sister came closer to the shelf to grab at the books. I saw her grab it and then…the whole section was pulled with Robinson Crusoe.
“What the…?” I started.
Gaëlle turned to face me, fury in her eyes. “Daniel. Look at this.” She showed me the whole book section. Those weren’t books. It was wood that had been sculpted and painted to look like covers.
“This isn’t a library, it’s a fucking rich guy scam to look good!”
I couldn’t believe it, and I pulled a book above the row of books that had already been removed. Same as with my sister, the whole thing got out. It was very light.
I threw it on the ground. It burst into pieces. “That’s evil. Plain evil. We need to burn his body.”
My sister, seemingly liking my move a lot, copied it in full, crashing the whole row of fake books on the ground.
We stopped to look at each other.
We smiled.
Fifteen minutes later, all the bookshelves were empty, and the room was now littered with broken pieces of wood. I had had to carry my sister on my shoulders to reach the upper parts of the fake library, but I was strong, and we were both lightweight, so it hadn’t been that hard. That left only the central desk untouched. It was a metal desk, with a seat and what seemed a large electronic tablet embedded in the middle.
“Is that a K*indle?” My sister asked out loud, a bit short of breath.
“So that’s the actual library, huh. Who wants to read?”
“Dibs. You can clean up the shards, it hurts my feet.”
I groaned. “That’s unfair.”
“Just push it to the side.”
“You’ll have to let go of my hand.”
That made her pause for a bit.
“I’ll be fine. With a good book in hand I’ll forget all about you in minutes.” She decided.
“You bitch!”
She stuck her tongue out to me.
“This is crazy Daniel.”
“Uh uh?”
“We’re orbiting a black hole. We’re harvesting a black hole. The reason why there is gravity? Well that’s because this spaceship has the fucking mass of Earth. Not only that, but it also extends all around the black hole. The whole thing is larger than our solar system.”
“Aha! So we are on a planet!”
“We’re on fucking Death St*r 3.0. It barely registers as a station! It’s the most enormous power plant in existence! So sure. I’ll accept a draw.”
“Wait, really?” I asked, not really believing it.
“Yeah, there are logs, science documents and everything. Benedict wrote everything down. Pictures, crazy explanation about using a wish stone, apparently had to destroy a world to get it.”
“No I was asking about the draw.”
“Shut up.” She smiled and continued reading.
It took me a few more minutes to make the central part of the floor crossable, then I started reading over her shoulder, my hand on her back, comforting her.
“The doors are from another world?” I asked, puzzled. “He was serious about other dimensions!?” What I was reading was increasingly unbelievable.
“They’re fucking magic! Magic exists!” Gaëlle said in a perfect rendition of a thirteen-year-old that would have realized Hogwarts was real.
“Technically, it doesn’t. It says we’re in A1, a non-magic world. You want magic you need to go someplace else.”
“But we can go someplace else! All those doors! The ones we took simply let you teleport, but the other ones let you switch dimensions!”
“…I don’t trust this.” Did that mean the Stone was real? Did I really save a whole dimension from eternal suffering?
“Look! There is a list with all the worlds!”
I tried to follow her frenzied research, stopping her by pointing at a sentence.
“Look at how it’s classified. Laws of nature define the Dimension type. Type A is a non-magic, origin-like world. Examples include Earth (Original), Earth (Old) and Earth (Early formation), A1, A2 and A3 respectively.”
“Boring!” My sister concluded. She went to the next page. “Type B is a Type B dimension with slight law deviations…those deviations are even more boring holy crap kill me now!”
“Go to Type K.” I asked.
“Why?”
“It’s where the Stone came from.”
“Oh.” She pushed the right arrow a few times then started to read out loud. “Dimension K is all worlds that are affected by a class five evil god commonly referred to as, ‘Demon King’. Wow. So he wasn’t lying? Why the hell would they name it the Demon King really? Even I think it’s cringy, and I like Maria Holic.”
“…I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s an anime, I’ll show you sometime.”
I examined her expression before responding. “I think I’ll pass. What’s that class five god thing?”
There was a hyperlink on the class five part, so my sister pressed it.
“Oh shit god exists.” Gaëlle exclaimed. “Well, gods exist. Goes from one to ten…no god registered as a number ten…he would be the one overseeing all of creation, seems like even Benedict got stuck on that question. Then it goes from those that are completely immortal and all powerful in their dimension to not all powerful, not all knowing, not immortal, just invincible, not even invincible, the greatest being of their world, one of the greatest, and minor gods as number 1, who oversee just one thing. There are even side notes to avoid worlds with gods above six and seven, because he would be at their mercy if he came to their world. Fucking arrogant bastard.” I felt my sister tense at the memory of the monster, so I hugged her from behind.
“We’ll burn his body.”
“Nah, just drop him into the black hole, I’m sure we can do that somehow. Never start fires in space. If he kills us while being dead, I’ll kill myself.”
“L, are you okay?” I was still feeling her trembling in my arms.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. A lot to digest, all this.”
“…Sure.”
She stopped for a moment, then talked again her voice not trembling anymore. “You know what I want?”
“No, go ahead.”
“You won’t like it.”
“If it’s your idea, I rarely do.”
She stopped shivering and I could see the smile rise on her face.
“I want to go to a fucking magical world, learn magic and have fun. We can just go there and come back, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Bonnie? Can we travel to other dimensions?”
“…Pre-existing permanent doors are a two-way travel system as long as an uplink is kept with Andromeda Quescient Dyson Space Station. Unstable doors can be created between dimensions, with heightened energy cost. This current station is only able to create one unstable door every 500 hours.”
“How do we get an uplink?”
“Subject 247 and 248 have already been provided with an uplink, it has been embedded in the base of the cranium.”
Both me and Gaëlle started prodding exactly there, but we felt nothing weird. Well, nothing weirder than whole new bodies.
“She answered you even though you didn’t use her name.” L noticed.
“I knew she was fucking with us.” I said approvingly.
“I think it’s more of a case of not knowing if you’re talking to her or to me.”
“At least the uplink explains how she’s always hearing me talk, wherever I am.”
“Mhh.” My sister wasn’t listening anymore, tapping on the tablet’s screen.
“What are you looking for?”
She didn’t answer.
“Fine, be that way.” I stopped hugging her.
“Uh!” She said with sudden terror, looking blindly behind her.
I immediately grasped her shoulder. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m here.”
“Oh. Yeah. I apologize. I…”
“No, no. Don’t be. What are you looking for?”
“What I…?” She looked crazed for a single moment. “Oh, I found it. It’s the uplink.”
“The uplink?” I looked at the page on the screen. It showed a…
“…miniature door?”
Gaëlle shrugged. “Holy shit. We’re connected to this station through a tiny wooden door.”
“Ok. Cool, I guess? A bit hard to believe that that’s in our brains.”
“Takes the station a full week to make. I don’t even know how many zeroes there are in front of the energy cost.”
She pointed at one really, really big number.
“Ok. So to resume, we got kidnapped by an evil version of doctor who.”
“The Doctor. And did you just reference a sci-fi show? I’m so proud of you!” Gaëlle exclaimed.
“You made me watch the show. And I liked it but…”
“Matt Smith is such a hottie, honestly I wouldn’t mind if…”
“…But I really hated hearing you fangirling over the main actor every five minutes.” I was never going to let her finish that sentence.
“Oh. You have to admit though, he’s hot.”
“I’m 100% straight, I can’t even tell.”
“Even now? You know, with how you look and all.”
That pissed me off. “Seriously? You think that because a mad scientist put a vagina between my legs, I’m suddenly going full rainbow? Are you, you, seriously going to mix up sexual orientation and gender?”
“Erm. No. Sorry.”
“That’s what I thought.”
There was a long silence for a while, then my sister started searching for more information in the tablet.
A few minutes later, I heard a terrible sound exit her mouth. A mad cackle gripped her throat.
“Oh no, what now?”
“I found the world I want to go to.”
“And why did that make you go full James Bond villain?”
“Because it’s a System world. Dimension S. There are world with systems! LitRPG worlds! Magic! Levels!”
“A what world?” I read the definition above her shoulder.
“An RPG world, you know what RPG’s are! You played them!”
“I distinctly remember that, yes, then you stole my PlayStation 2 and I could only play when you weren’t using it.”
“We shared equally! Don’t lie to your sister, Shithead.”
“A cunt on two legs begged my dad, used every trick in the book, and finally got my PlayStation. I call that stealing.”
“That is not how that happened.”
And so we bickered for ten minutes.