There was mud in my mouth. Thunder growled overhead and I could feel raindrops beating down on my body. I closed my fingers around soft, mushy earth before pushing myself up to my hands and knees and spitting out the wet dirt. I didn’t remember it raining, or looking like rain. I didn’t remember being outside. I didn’t remember much at all about how I came to be lying face-down in the middle of an unfamiliar… moor? Were there moors in central Ohio? Maybe. Some of the uncultivated stretches of land between the farms, cities, highways, and villages had a tendency to look like their own separate biome, but this was a lot of undulating elevation for the notoriously flat landscapes I was used to, and there wasn’t a soy plant or corn stalk to be seen between the thin sheets of rain. I certainly didn’t recall anything quite like this in my routine travels down the highway, to and from work or the closest grocery superstore. I felt like I was driving before waking up just now, that seemed right… but what extraordinary place was I headed that this is where I came to? For that matter, where was my car? I pulled the sopping hair from my face and behind my head to squeeze it out, and the small remnants of packed mud kept it in place enough for me to get a better look at my surroundings.
There was no flaming wreckage, parked vehicle with an open door, or even a recognizable road anywhere in sight. No buildings, no street signs, not even so much as a water or cell tower looming in the distance. The dark skies worked with the rain to hamper my visibility, but even with what I could make out it was hard to think of a place I’d ever been where signs of civilization were this absent without some kind of tree cover or a mountain in the way. I scanned the nearby hillocks to see if one was taller than the others for me to maybe use as a vantage point. If I could at least find a landmark I could stick by it and call for help, assuming I had cell signal. Thinking of my phone, I patted my pockets to make sure it was still with me and chewed on my lower lip in consternation when I discovered it missing.
“Son of a bitch…” I groaned to myself. Swearing out loud helped ease the tension building within me a bit. It anchored me to reality, added my own voice to the noises around me, and kept my head clear in a moment where it would be all too easy to succumb to panic. I took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. The phone would likely survive being submerged just fine, but having to fish it out of the slop was just another entry on the list of things that were not going my way at the moment.
I turned to begin my search, but was stopped by a hazy, wavering shape approaching me. I could’ve sworn it made a noise, but it was gone before I could scrutinize any further. Great, a little memory loss was one thing; I’d had my share of it in response to mild trauma and it wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t that concerning either, given my present circumstances. But hallucinations? I hadn’t had those since high school and preferred to file them away as the result of an overactive imagination. A return meant… well, I didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be positive. My eyes fixed on the spot for just a few more seconds, hoping the anomaly would reappear and allow me to apply a legitimacy to the audiovisual blip I’d experienced, and just before I resolved to look down and find my phone… it did.
“—uman! Hey, human! Y’gotta help me!” The words were coming from the mouth of an anthropomorphized cross between a cat and a fennec fox that was running toward me on two legs, arms pumping in time with his steps. I’d guess he was at least thirty feet out (although I’m a terrible judge of distances longer than ten feet) and flickering a bit, not quite like a holographic projection in a Star Wars movie, but still somehow not-quite-there. His eyes met mine before he disappeared again, and I thought I saw two more strange shapes following above and behind him before the whole phantom scene cut out.
“Uh… … hello?” I didn’t honestly expect a response, but I felt stupid standing there suddenly alone and in silence. Imagine my surprise, then, when the cat-fox abruptly appeared again at my feet, still shouting in desperation.
“C’mon, I ain’t got all day! Help a guy out!”
Actually, you don’t have to imagine; I shouted “JESUS CHIRSTMAS!” and jumped in shock with my entire body.
“Calm down, big guy! It ain’t that complicated. Just pull me through the veil before those assholes get their hands on me!”
“Pull you through the… veil?” In hindsight, I was proud of that being my first point of confusion. I adapted to a literal fantasy creature asking for my help rather adroitly, all things considered.
“Yeah! You’re a chainer, ain’t ya? So… use your magic an’ yank me over!”
To the best of my knowledge, I was not a chainer, whatever that was, and I did not know magic. I’d been witness to a couple of events I’d describe as being supernatural (or, again, the result of an overactive imagination) and I was a dab hand at tarot cards (or cold reading, maybe?) but this was all a bit beyond my ken. Still, when an extradimensional creature asks for your help, it would probably be in your best interest to at least try. So, I tried. I reached my hand out to his raccoon-like paw, made a fist around the nothing I was touching, and pulled. There was a crack of energy, not like the lightning in the sky above but more akin to popping open a shaken can of soda. Softly glowing runes in a rainbow of shades spread out from the point of contact and faded away as I pulled the little creature toward me, and there was a sort of warm spark between our hands. I lost my footing with the effort, falling on my ass in the mud. He landed safely on top of me, standing up to dust himself off and hop neatly over the worst of the muck to a grassier area. I dimly saw the translucent silhouettes of two orb-shaped fang-toothed flying creatures above us before they faded away.
“Thanks, chief. You’re a real life-saver! I guess that’s the problem with bein’ able to talk yerself into anything; sometimes you talk yerself into somethin’ you don’t really want a part of.”
“Yeah, uh… no problem?”
I sat up in the mud and looked around again. Enough strange things had just happened that I would assume I was dreaming, except for two things; firstly, I was a lucid dreamer. Once I realized I was in a dream I pretty much had full control of what was going on, and that was not the case here. Skipping back to another point in the dream, viewing myself in the third person, or changing how another person or object looked were the easiest things to pull off, but try as I might none of that was happening right now. Secondly, there was a sort of fog to my dreams, more like the stylistic filter to a movie with too much chroma key than poor draw distance in a PS1 game. While actual mist was rising slightly from the rainswept moor, it wasn’t the Vaseline-smudged visual layer that usually permeated my nightly nonsense. My lips formed a flat line and my brows furrowed as I tried to piece together exactly what was going on. I’m sure to any observer I resembled that Brazilian lady trying to do math from the meme, and indeed when the cat-fox approached me again, he did so with a cautious smile.
“Hey, you look like you got a lot goin’ on an’ I ain’t in the habit of bargin’ in on other people’s business, so if you’ll just sever the link, I’ll be on my way an’ you can get back to whatever it was you were doin’ out here.”
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“I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you, little dude, I don’t know how to do that.”
“What? Don’t play dumb. You’re a chainer, of course you do!”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty valid line of thinking, given that I appear to have just magicked you out of a parallel dimension, but I assure you I don’t know what a chainer is, how I did that, or how to ‘sever the link’.” Honesty was usually the best policy in most circumstances of my life, whether I actually followed the aphorism or not. When this sort of thing happened in fiction, too many protagonists scrambled to make up a convincing lie or deflect, but that sort of thing just wasn’t in my nature anymore. The cat-fox squinted at me, mouth slightly open, as though trying to parse whether or not I was pulling his leg. “For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say I have amnesia.”
“Amnesia…” he murmured, and his eyes went from scrutinizing to serious. “You gotta be jokin’ me… for real? You have amnesia for real?”
“It’s… an exaggeration, maybe, but there are at least a few holes in my recollection of the last… hour? Couple of hours? And I definitely have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Well,” he set his tiny jaw firm and nodded once. “Then, in thanks for savin’ my bacon, I’ll help you get back on your feet or recover your memory… or whatever it is you need. The name’s Red, by the way.”
“Glenn. And… thanks,” I smiled. “If you’re in the helping mood, I could use some assistance in finding my phone.”
“Ah, the shoe’s on the other foot already! What’s a phone?”
“It’s a little rectangular thing, about the size of a—” I paused. ‘Hershey bar’ was the concept that popped into my head, but if this extradimensional being I’d encountered didn’t know what a phone was, it seemed perhaps unlikely he was familiar with the proper names for American commercial chocolate. “Uhm. Like a small book.”
“Y’mean this thing?” He’d barely turned around before marching to a tuft of overgrowth about five feet away, retrieving a large, leatherbound book from within it.
“Unless it says ‘Dungeon Master’s Guide’, that’s probably not mine. We’re looking for something smaller and made of harder material.” I finally stood up from the mud, grimacing at the squelching sound it made as I liberated my buttocks from its loose, wet grip.
“You sure? It’s got your name on it,” he rubbed away at some of the grime on the cover before handing it up to me with both paws. Sure enough, the golden plate near the bottom that drew my eye had ‘GLENN ANURA’ carved into it. At the top, in equally golden script read ‘GRIMOIRE di MAGI e MYTHE’. I brushed my fingers against the raised letters, feeling cold metal fixed firmly into the sturdy leather. “Unless that’s some other Glenn. Helluva coincidence if he left his book out here and who should stumble across it but you.”
“No, that’s me,” I confirmed.
The book had me admittedly a little transfixed. Something about it felt… familiar. Like we were connected. It wasn’t the sudden spark of power like when I pulled Red through the veil, but it still felt like magic. That felt weird to think in such concrete terms. I looked around the little hills again, as though something other than the cat-fox by my side would suggest to me I was, in fact, dreaming, but there was nothing. I would’ve pinched myself, but I never seemed to have the wherewithal to do that in an actual dream, and I’d taken enough bumps besides. If I was sleeping, I reasoned, I would’ve awoken when Red startled me a moment ago. Every time I jump in a dream, I try to jump in real life and wake myself up, especially when it’s sudden. That didn’t happen. Whatever I was feeling was real, and so was Red, and the veil, and this book. I wiped my hand on the back of my shirt to clear off as much mud as possible and chanced opening the cover despite the storm. If it had survived in the grass however long it had been there without getting sopping wet, it would probably weather the weather just fine.
The pages were heavier and sturdier than I expected, perhaps coated by wax or a similar material as means of waterproofing. There was no title or dedication page when I opened it, simply a table of contents whose letters seemed to flicker and scamper about within the confines of the margins. Only five entries and their page numbers were clear, with a number of garbled entries between them: ‘Esper Index’, ‘Spell Index’, ‘Record of Achievement’, ‘Esper Records’, and ‘Personal Record’. The Esper Index immediately followed the table of contents, and I was surprised to see a number of sketches of Red, or creatures like him. Across from the images was a heading that read ‘GRIMALKIN’, followed by information about their behaviors, habitat, and abilities. Interesting. The next page had a hazy image of the toothy orbs I’d spotted in the sky, somehow less defined than my own memories of them. Across from it, the text was garbled and refused to stay static, much like most of the table of contents. I remembered seeing this phenomenon in an episode of Batman : The Animated Series where Bats knew he was dreaming inside one of Mad Hatter’s mind control devices because he couldn’t read any of the books on his shelves. Books in my dreams were never like that. Often the words weren’t arranged in an order that made any sense, but they were words. Again, the idea sprung into my mind that this might actually be some kind of magic I’d stumbled across, so I continued to the next logical place in the grimoire: the Spell Index.
The pages between were all blank, absent of even the illegible, hyperactive symbols I’d seen so far. When I finally got to the Spell Index it contained only one, brief entry; Parting the Veil. The instructions were as simple as I’d performed them; a chainer only need to exert their will and reach through a point where the veil is thin, make contact with a creature they wish to call through and pull. It was listed with a casting time of a Direct Action and cost one quarter of the chainer’s maximum Mana. My jaw clenched involuntarily as the gears in my brain began to turn. Dreading what I expected to find there, I skipped to the last page of the book; the Personal Record. There, waiting for me, was an image very much resembling a character sheet from Dungeons and Dragons, or any other roleplaying game, listing my vital statistics, small notes of trivia, and even a rough sketch in the same style as the images of the grimalkin before.
“Noooo…” I breathed, with the wide-eyed mixture of disbelief and horror often portrayed by Rachel Karen Greene when using the same inflection. My mind felt sharper than it had since I had first found consciousness again, and the details that led to my sorry state became clear from the murky depths of my own fractured memory.
“Everything OK, there, chief?” Red looked at me over his shoulder, about ten feet away now and kicking through a different bit of brush in search of my cell.
“Weh?” That wasn’t a word; just a noise I made because I didn’t have an answer. “Have you ever seen a book like this before?”
“Eh, yes an’ no. Chainers an’ other magic-users might have a spellbook or two at home to practice new magic from, but most of ‘em ain’t built for travel. That one’s pretty damn fancy, besides.” His shoulders heaved with an exhaling sigh, and he turned to face me fully. “I don’t think we’re gonna find your phone, Glenn.”
“No, you’re probably right,” I agreed. “Do you know if there’s civilization nearby? A town, a place to bed down for the night… anything? I’d like to get a change of clothes and some better light to read by.”
“Ah… yeah. Should be, back that-a-way.” He pointed behind me. It seemed as good a path to follow as any in this unending landscape of rolling grass and rain.
Red lead the way, sometimes dropping to all fours to better climb the knolls that to him must’ve been proper hills, and I followed with the grimoire tucked beneath my arm. Some part of me wanted a walking stick, both to better navigate the terrain and complete the feeling that I was no longer near anywhere resembling home. I had been taking an innocent drive down the highway to work, last I knew, when suddenly an eighteen-wheeler with a full container behind it jumped the barricade and slammed into me at incredible speed. With the lights in my eyes and the horn blaring, I was too stunned to react. Perhaps something had occurred between the impact and my awakening, but I was familiar enough with pop culture to see the writing on the wall… or in the grimoire, as it were. Just like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, InuYasha, or one of the near-infinite pieces of amateur fiction on the internet, I had for some reason been chosen by the powers that be to transcend the mortal coil and arrive in a parallel world.
That, or I was lying comatose from the impact, and this was my own Tommy Westphall dream universe. Either way, it seemed better to take things as they came and make the best of the situation for as long as it persisted.