Livia felt the rushing air and had to blink her eyelids, but then once she was positive she had opened her eyes… There was still nothing to see, and the air blowing in her eyes and ears was still easily felt, but in a sort of strange way. Her open eyes should have been drying out if the sensation was real, even if she could not see.
It was surreal.
Then she suddenly found herself in space, with nothing but the deepest darkness and the pinpricks of distant stars all around.
She was floating, and her jaw dropped.
Once her brain started working again she tried to move, and while she didn't feel stuck, there was nothing to use for orientation, she could not even see her body when she looked down.
The one thing she saw were the distant lights. But then she tried squeezing, and she could tell that she was still holding the big hammer that had been in her hand.
It became Livia’s focal point, that solid feeling.
Then a voice from behind her suddenly spoke up. “Uh, hello little lady.”
Livia shrieked in surprise and panic, with a hundred different thoughts of being a captive, due to strange drugs and international kidnappers, running through her head.
She turned around and there was a floating blue wizard’s hat with several small, five-pointed stars decorating the thing, of the kind you might find in a toy store.
Right beneath it was a void, a sort of dark silhouette, but with a floating gray beard just underneath the hat.
Livia's first instinct was to get away, but when the distance between them did not increase with her flight, it quickly became clear that the beard was following her somehow; and so she freely entered the collision, hammer first.
But even as Livia's desperate arm went to strike a devastating first assault, and the beard got ruffled slightly, the effect was merely that of a blunt tool passing straight through nothing, where the stranger’s face should have been.
“Hah, I knew you were going to try that, I told them. But there’s no point I’m afraid,”
The voice sounded way too young to belong to that gray beard, but the surprising words finally reached through, and the surreal nature of the experience suddenly let Livia disconnect from the danger that her brain was still trying to convince her that she was in.
“What the hell is going on, where am I?” She tried lamely.
“Come now, you can figure it out, I happen to know how many of these stories you’ve read,”
Smug. The voice was being smug.
But what it was saying was impossible. Far less possible than Livia's brain just not working correctly today.
"You're being chosen, and I'm the guide, as of right now we're frozen in time,"
When it seemed like Livia had no response the beard added "And space."
Livia’s hope for something more turned out to be futile, and so eventually she was forced to respond: “You can’t be serious, am I dead, uhm, i-is this LitRPG heaven?”
Her mind was barely keeping up with her new reality and she was on the very brink of just freaking out.
“No, no. Hold on now, it’s nothing like that. You’re just being recruited, kind of,” The floating beard said.
She finally managed to respond with a note of hope. ”What, you mean like to Middle Earth?”
But all she got in return was a mocking laughter. “What the frigg, of course not, you’re going to the latest book that you just read, you’re going to planet Ross.”
And that was when Livia freaked the fuck out.
----------------------------------------
… After what felt like a bit more than an hour later, Livia had finally gotten over her panic. The floating beard had tried to keep talking in the beginning, but when he could tell how he was making it all worse, he decided to wait her out.
Once Livia spoke she finally said. “So, I guess I’m not dead yet then,”
The beard responded quickly, obnoxiously chipper. Clearly it had been waiting. "Far from it, you’re very much needed and I know you know why, humanity is on the brink o-,”
"Just about to be," She interrupted with an aggressive glower.
"Yes, you’re right, I do happen to know your situation. And you're all fucked!” She was breathing heavy, despite no air being present here in space.
“You mean to tell me that this was the plan? This was the big reveal at the end of your story, the actual grand finale? ME!?" She was shouting and gesticulating wildly with that outburst, despite not being sure the Beard could even see her. "This is something new, something worse than a joke!" She was getting worked up again, and facing the infinite patience of a time-locked beard wasn't helping. “I’m not even a soldier or anything, WHY ME OF ALL PEOPLE, did your ridiculously ambitious story really get so few readers!?”
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By the end she had started screaming, but now the Beard talking over her, calmly. ”We have warriors, haven’t you been reading? We have mages, we have the System; and it’s not enough,”
For the first time the Beard seemed to grow even graver than the kidnapping victim it was talking to.
“We face the Cloven, the Ogre Clans. The Foxkin Sects, and even the collected Mantis Hives at times. And too many others to list. Even with a System of our own, I guess we didn't use it right. You saw what was happening to us, at our end,"
Livia was still grumbling but the lack of choices made it hard to argue back. And Mr Beard pounced on the opening.
"You’re exactly what we happen to need. Humanity distilled, from pre-integration and with mountains of creative works memorized; outside-the-box thinking, that’s what we need. And guess what little lady, you’re going to be providing it, whether you wish to or not I’m afraid,”
The words were giving rise to a panic, as the reality of Livia’s situation started hitting home.
“As you’re aware, planet Ross is no joke,” He was warming up to his subject now. "And don’t you think we’re not aware how you've got some grit too, I saw the scene with that bad dog at the park going for your hamburgers and you stubbornly giving it your forearm to chew instead. You're going to need that attitude,"
"What the hell are you even saying, would you have expected a girl to give up her hamburger's just because of some brainless, aggressive dog?" Livia didn't really believe her tough words enough to really sell them, and they ended up not fazing the Beard at all.
She murmured to herself. “This can’t be happening. You’re all under siege, every town is suffering, what can you possibly expect me to do?”
The beard finally got to the vital part. “We’re not sending you to our time, we’re sending you a couple hundred years back, to tell you the truth it's not very exact,"
Livia's stomach was twisting into knots.
"And as I said, we don’t need your fighting. We need you to innovate, promote culture and lay the foundations for institutions or rediscover lost or even new Classes. You know, whatever you can think of,” Livia was still finding the attitude on display to be stunning.
“And if you can’t manage that then at least make sure you get laid and spread some new genes, anything might help,”
She finally snapped, and just when he'd been starting to make some sort of sense.
She yelled at him. "I will not become some breeding cow for humanity!”
“Sure, as you wish, now are you ready?”
She was not. “What, no wait. Is this all you can tell me?” Her sense of dread was cloying.
“We did our best to put it all in those books, all the stuff we figured could be useful for us to have known about earlier,” The beard seemed to hesitate before it went on. “To remain in this spirit of honesty, the exact time we’re sending you to, well, we’re a bit unsure of the details. You know, with all the history focused Classes having sort of died out and all, what with our current situation,"
Livia was hanging on every word.
"What we do know is that we were relatively peaceful in that time and that it’s far enough back for you to actually change some things, even inadvertently. Just make sure you survive for as long as you can.”
The words made Livia glower return again, and she considered going on another tirade, but she was too sick of this situation. She just wanted it all to end, and return to normal.
“Why me, you must have had options,” She said pitifully when it seemed the beard had no more to add.
“Yes, and we're sending others, but since we don’t know exactly where you will end up... We just tried our best to aim it roughly at humans," Livia did her best to convey a look of disbelief from her silhouette state. "And roughly past 500 years ago."
Livia would have facepalmed if she could, but she was still squeezing the hammer and doing a facepalm half-heartedly seemed futile, especially as the beard was still talking.
" ... and as most of the Spell’s energy went towards imprinting this guide, and creating this space-bubble,” Its speech was coming to an end, but Livia thought she could spot a little smile of hope. “We’re running out of time. But like I said, we don’t need warriors. We need thinkers, so we wrote that book for nerds like you. And at least you’ve gotten lucky with having hold of that big hammer, unlike the others. So, good luck!”
And before Livia could think of another response her world turned dark once more and the rushing wind’s return drowned out her surprised yelp. She had one last moment of hope that the spell would fail and she would wake up back at the Scoville library.
It was not to be.