(Y7, January 12th/April 28th Earthside)
----------------------------------------
Henry “Quandocor” Esteban was doing staff katas in front of the farmhouse when the car pulled in. By now, he recognized most of the clunkers the Valkyries were using, and this one looked a lot newer. It gave “rental” vibes. He would have been surprised by who came out, but he should have expected it.
“Hello, Malika. No Oskar?”
“He’s busy scheduling our States’ return. Sammael can’t have his agents running around fruitlessly forever, you know.”
“I would have expected you to go back earlier. You don’t have jurisdiction or anything, so why insist?”
Malika Sascha, FBI agent and formerly of Operation Swordfish, made a pained wince.
“Because we all thought you’d be the last person ever to run away from the Bureau. After all, you did not resign. Sammael didn’t like that and didn’t want to let go. Hell, I still can’t wrap my head around it. Is your girlfriend…”
Henry shrugged.
“Erika is in, packing some supplies since we’re all going back in tomorrow. And she’s not my girlfriend. I’m just a guest here. So, you finally managed to find me?”
“I got a few friendly contacts with the locals. I could get a lead once we got a subpoena for your cellphone’s indirect cell location through the roaming. Your local Gater friends are known enough, and it was mostly canvassing the addresses.”
Henry bowed.
“Congratulations. You’ve always been good on the ground. Speaking of local friends…”
Malika turned. Another car was coming up the driveway into the farmhouse courtyard.
“Hi, Emeli!”
“Henry! Who’s your friend? From the States?”
“Emeli, meet Malika Sascha, FBI Gater. Malika, this is Emeli Lötvall, Valkyrie Veteran.”
“FBI Gater? What’s your build???”
Malika looked incredulously at Henry.
“Your girlfriend?”
Henry snorted.
“No. It’s not all about girlfriends. And don’t give Emeli ideas. She doesn’t need any.”
“Hey, I should totally have won that dice game!”
Henry rolled his eyes and mock-raised his staff, and the girl dodged, laughing. Malika looked lost, feeling like she had missed half of the conversation. That was a private joke, if any, she guessed.
“You’re going to try to convince me to go home, right? Come in.”
He gestured toward the farmhouse.
Malika found a young woman sorting through piles of packets. Looking closer, she realized those were MRE or at least their Swedish equivalent. It was labeled “24 Hour Meals” – in English, no less – and looked… well, like you’d expect a combat ration to look like. Malika had gotten pictures of the local Gater gang, so she recognized Erika Haglund, the farm owner to which her colleague had obviously fled.
A man typing furiously on a laptop was beside a window, and he looked briefly up.
“Who’s the visitor?” he asked.
“FBI Gater,” Emeli announced loudly. “Colleague of Henry!”
“Ah.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The man briefly looked back at his laptop before pushing it away and looking back at her, his arms crossing. Haglund stopped sorting her items and also stared at her. For a few seconds, it looked like tension was climbing until it was abruptly broken.
“So, what’s your build?” Emeli pressed again.
Malika looked at the Swede. She wore… a mix of Northworld and standard clothing. It hit her like a sack of bricks. In the States, that would probably be enough for a warrant. Here, it was basically tolerated, if a bit eccentric. Another factor that complicated any attempt at extraditing Henry was no real legal hook. Not only was being a Gater not yet illegal under Swedish law, making extradition impossible, but he could even argue in front of a Swedish judge that he was doing it under an exemption clause since he’d been under orders then. And, of course, she would be a hypocrite since she was one as well. A retired – “Exiled” – one, but one nevertheless. After all, she had gotten some stats from her two short stays, as their specialist had emphasized getting those for Earthside rather than investing into too many useless Northworld Skills beyond the minimum lottery needed to pass as a Gater.
“I used to be sword and basic sorcery. Mana, but not much Skills that way.”
“Used to?”
“I had… issues. So I pulled out of Northworld.”
“Really? Gater once, Gater forever. Don’t tell me you’ve not changed,” Emeli said.
“That’s why I pulled out.”
Emeli shrugged. She then beelined toward the kitchen.
“Coffee, Henry? Jasper? Erika?”
“Yes. You?” the man with the laptop – Jasper? – replied.
“No, thanks,” Malika answered.
“So, what’s your spiel?” Henry said.
“Why did you leave?”
Henry paused. That was a question he’d asked himself all the time. And one that he was confident of the answer now.
“Because Sammael didn’t believe in Northworld.”
Both Erika and Jasper smiled at the quip, but it surprised Malika.
“That’s funny because he sure seems to.”
“No, he doesn’t. Not really. Did he tell you what happened?”
“You had a partial wipe in a Northworld dungeon. And you became obsessed with it.”
“It was a bit more than a dungeon. Have you ever been in one during your stays?”
“Twice.”
“So? Ruins, decay, underground caves, right? I’ve been to quite a few. I know how it is.”
“That’s right. A set of caves with abstract pictorials in one. And a big ruined estate-thing, with cellars and everything. I pulled out just after that because it was full of… dwarves. They looked like they could be from somewhere on Earth. It was like I was killing extras on a Willow remake. And I realized I wasn’t bothered.”
“All dungeons I’ve seen are like that. The Pyramid… was not. It looked desert, not abandoned. No traces of ruin, no decaying stuff, nothing, not even dust. It was just an empty building that looked like it had been erected yesterday and was swept regularly. The only thing we found,” he gestured at the other two people still in the living room, “was at the bottom. A globe. A full globe, sitting on rotating bearings so you could spin it any way you wanted, and picturing Northworld itself.”
“That actually sounds impressive.”
“There was a kind of console; you needed Aetherist skills to activate. We had two with us, Jasper and another, and it was easy.”
“So?”
“So?” Henry echoed.
“What did it do?”
“Show up five… people. One of our party recognized Arnoldo Fontana.”
“The one who found the first Silvergate.”
“The First Gater. And the other four were… not humans.”
“Really?”
Malika found it weird. She’d seen multiple humanoids. Erectus Retorta, things that barely looked human. Those dwarves that looked like wrinkled albino children and that she’d had to kill with the help of the few Gaters she’d been with at the time. So, why would Henry be surprised by humanoid Northworld creatures?
“And the alarm got triggered, and we had to fight out our way with skeletal metallic versions, Terminator-style. Hundred-rank elites. If it weren’t for my friend, I would have been MIA. Nine went in, and only three lived by hiding in the walls of the complex. Literally, in our case.”
“There you are. People have compared Northworld to an ultra-realistic videogame that has run wild for years now. You stumbled on a high-end, running dungeon. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about those?”
“That’s what Sammael said. But he was wrong.”
“I’m sure you want those six people you said in your report to have died did it for something meaningful…”
“And they did. The globe showed our respective territory and that of the others. And we’re heading back there.”
“Back?”
“We found four of them, four ‘fake aliens’. Killed by a high-end monster. They had tents, food, enchanted gear, everything you’d expect of… Gaters.”
Malika stared at Henry Esteban, one of the most grounded agents of the FBI she’d seen, and wondered how he’d become a UFO witness or something.
“We have a few of those items,” he said, spreading the glove.
“You can’t get a descriptor Earthside, so you don’t get quite the weirdness that it has,” he added.
“I admit it looks weird, but…” Malika countered.
“But, yes, I agree, you could have a skilled artisan make a six-fingered glove with slightly-too-thin fingers as a prop. That is actually harder on Northworld, by the way, since all the serious crafters have skills that guide them when making things. Making non-functional items would be way harder. But anyone – even you – can recognize it’s something that comes from Northworld.”
“Then what?”
“I got them from the corpse itself. I was there, Malika. So, either I’m lying my ass off to you, right now, or it is genuine. It’s not about me being delusional from a weird scenario. Four 7’-tall blue six-fingered Gaters, with their Silvergates, their gear, and their tents even, killed by the monster we fought when we stumbled into their camp. And I have a sense that tells me the difference. Those four corpses once had levels in the hundreds, not ranks in the dozens. Those Pumilus that bother you have ranks. Everything else has; only Gaters have levels. At one point, Occam’s Razor applies. Or you can be like that weird guy on cable TV, saying that the world is only six days old, and we all have faked memories of things that never actually happened.”