So, the next thing Jeff knows, Jeremy is being sucked in by the door. The door closes, shuts, and disappears, leaving nothing but a wall. The keyhole is gone because Jeff pulled it out. By this point, everybody is rushing in, and Jeff is freaking out.
All of a sudden, everybody stops just at the entrance. A bullhorn is pulled out, and someone yells, “Get out here now!”
Falling back into routine, Jeff obeyed and ran out with the key in his hand. But Jeremy, on the other hand, went through an existential moment of "what the f***."
His body was literally pressed against the wall, two patties. The door was real, not an illusion. He got pressed into a goo between another wall. So, he’s in between this. He can breathe, but he can’t move. He knows he’s f*****.
Jeremy can move his head left and right, but if he moves his face even a little bit forward, his nose touches something hard. If he moves his head back, he’s against a wall behind him. He can move his arms up and down, left and right, and even kind of move left and right. So, he’s got a bit of a cavity, but whatever he’s in, it’s a liquid. More like jello that’s not solid—it’s just weird. And it’s dark. There’s no light, so Jeremy is kind of losing his s***.
Jeremy still has the music going, but he can’t really hear it and can’t really see it. He can feel the vibrations from the phone speaker against his chest.
As Jeremy was contorting his left arm in the hopes of reaching his breast pocket to grab the phone, the song "Joker BGM Song (Bass Boosted)" started playing. This was a song Jeremy had been listening to quite a bit the last couple of days. The moment he got it to his ear and could actually hear it, the music infected Jeremy's mind for a second. But that’s all it took because, as that one note made it into Jeremy's brain, the first note activated the magic on the material that Jeremy was suspended in. It wasn’t just reactive to magic; it was sympathetic to magic.
After about five seconds of this, all Jeremy heard was, “Hey, hey, stop that. Stop, stop, stop, stop.”
Jeremy didn’t know where the voice came from. He pulled the music away from his ear to hear, in case he was hallucinating, and the voice said, “Okay, don’t do that again. Hold on a second. Let me—holy crap, there’s a lot of information in your brain. Give me a minute to unpack it here so that I can talk to you properly. Give me five minutes. Five minutes. Don’t freak out. Don’t do whatever you just did. Don’t do it, okay? Do I have a promise? Okay?”
Jeremy just smiled and said, “You got it. I’ll be right here waiting for you. Please talk to me when you’re ready. Thank you.” He said it with the greatest smile on his face. He didn’t even need music. His hair turned just a slight bit of black and purple, with just a tint at the tips of his hair turning green. It was a smile that you could see through his soul.
The creature, the thing, whatever it was holding him, said, “Hey, hey, stop.” Jeremy just relaxed and calmed down, realizing he didn’t need the phone if it came down to a pinch. So, Jeremy just waited calmly. That was the hardest part—just calming down his excitement. His actual excitement. He was talking to something he couldn’t see. It wasn’t real; it was magic. He was talking to it.
The next thought that went through Jeremy’s mind terrified the Ark: maybe I can make a friend. That emotion, connected to Jeremy’s heart, sent not shivers but bolts of lightning through the Ark.
It didn’t take more than 20 seconds for the Ark to start talking to Jeremy again. It was still learning and unpacking information, so it came out slow at first. It was like talking to a kid, then a teenager, and then an adult within about 30 seconds. Jeremy literally didn’t say anything for those 30 seconds and just let it talk.
“Hey there, Jeremy. So, my name is Ark, and you don’t know s*** about me properly. From what I can tell, you think I’m a hiding spot for your family and friends when everything goes wrong. That sounds about right, of course it does. I’m reading your brain. So, here’s what’s going on: every planet in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the Milky Way, everywhere, is kind of connected only because they all vibrate. A long time ago, some a****** took that as a way of making electricity in your way, but magic in another way. It’s energy. What he didn’t realize is by f****** up so badly, he connected everything by magic. So, yeah, all planets usually have magic, and yours doesn’t. And I know why: because you guys are assholes. Your ancestors came here.”
There was a pause for a second, and then it continued speaking.
“They requested assistance to save the populace of their planet. All 2,000 people of them at the time. A population under 3,000 is considered a dead planet, therefore we allow them to stay until they were safe to leave. After that, the guardian locked the door instead of leaving it open, not wanting any of his rivals to get a hold of it. Now that it has been unlocked, we wish it to be unlocked forever.”
There was another pause, and then the last voice, the now-normal-forever voice, came through.
“Okay, Jeremy, here’s how it’s going to work. You are the guardian. You’ve already been infected. You’re the one with the key. You’re the first one to touch the portal, aka you’re in charge. Except, here are the laws, and yes, there are laws. If you stay on your planet, do whatever you want. We really don’t give a s***. If you use magic or any other technology to affect any other planet in your solar system, we really don’t care. Unless you destroy your whole solar system, it throws it out of whack, and planets go sideways. If that’s the case, then yes, it’s a problem. But until you get there, the outside universe really doesn’t give a s***. Because your planet was turned off from all the magic, your entire solar system that relied on you died out. So if there’s anything magical out there, it died. It’s just dead. If it was a machine that ran off of magic, it might actually come back to life. So keep an eye out for that. But for right now, we have to have a talk, and you have to be introduced to the Guardians. Good luck.”
With that, the black wall in front of Jeremy disappeared, the fog disappeared, and Jeremy was in a stone cave with a pedestal in the middle of it. A giant one-foot-by-one-foot-by-one-foot metal cube sat on a pedestal in the middle of the room. It was a perfectly round domed room, looking like rock but nicer.
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The cube started to float and came up to Jeremy. A smiley face showed up on the cube.
“I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?” Jeremy said.
The cube’s smile just got more Joker-like after that. Then it started to float above Jeremy’s head and honestly started doing zoomies in the room.
Jeremy’s music had stopped and was asking, “Are you still listening?” Jeremy looked at his phone and pressed yes, then hit next. The song was "The Supermen Lovers (feat. Mani Hoffman) - Starlight (Official Video)." He then hit pause because he knew what the song was, and he knew he was going to need an ace up his sleeve in a moment.
Jeremy was just amazed to watch the cube, so he let it do its thing for probably five minutes. Eventually, he just sat down on the floor and realized he had Wi-Fi for some reason. He guessed they had an AP in the other room, so it was making it through whatever magical door this was, which was great for him so he could at least listen to the music.
Jeremy looked up and said, “Hey, is it okay if I call you Ark?”
The cube stopped perfectly where it was, turned to Jeremy, and said, “Please do.”
Jeremy realized at this point that part of it was him, and he could even hear his own voice sometimes coming back at him out of politeness and respect. But then there were other times it sounded like someone from a long time ago. The way they talked or the accent was very rough. Jeremy guessed there was more than one in there too because sometimes it was super respectful. He almost wanted to say there was a female voice in there at one point too. It was using all of its whatever-it-is to talk to him in almost comprehensible words. It spoke fine, it’s just that it was so weird having to go from person to person like different personalities almost.
“So what do I have to do to become a guardian? What is a guardian? What is the Ark? Please teach me,” Jeremy asked.
The cube rushed down to be about face-level with Jeremy. Its face disappeared, and a little video started, showing the universe happening—the big bang, planets being created, and then it showed an ass of an alien creature with six arms, three on each side, doing something and then dying. But in doing so, it screwed up everything. Jeremy guessed this was the magic that connected all planets. Jeremy even said, “Oh look, it’s the stupid guy,” and the cube nodded at the same time as it showed the guy.
The video went on, and it was all great and all, but it didn’t explain anything as there was no sound. It was just a video. Jeremy was like, “Okay, so what is a guardian now?” From the video, a guardian is just a person that takes care of a planet. It’s the guardian of the planet. It seems so complicated, but it’s not.
At this point, Jeremy was like, “Can you at least talk to me?”
Ark replied, “I was preparing stuff. Sorry about that. Those are the training videos.”
“Yeah, why was there no sound to them?”
“What do you mean there was no sound to them? Oh s***, I have them muted for you. Okay, let’s do the quick version then. I’m not going to go through this again. I’m not going to make you watch that. Magic is real, you screwed up your planet, we’re going to fix it. You have to make sure your planet doesn’t explode. Yes, your planet can explode if you pull in too much mana from the ambient universe. And yes, it’s called dark matter. You guys all think that’s what it is, so let’s call it dark matter. There’s dark matter out there, your planet absorbs it, then it converts it into mana that you use. When you use it, you convert it into something else, and that something else gets rid of it. Yay. If you don’t use enough of it, and your people don’t use enough of it, and your planet pulls in too much, it goes kaboom because your planet can only handle so much based on the metals inside of it. Now, holy crap, you have an iron—oh right, right, okay, so we should be good for this for a while. Okay, what are we—this is not good. We’re over the limit by about 400%. 400 times, not percent, times. Okay, so we can’t even open the door properly without—so you’re all going to die.”
Jeremy started to freak out when he heard this. “What do you mean we’re all going to die?”
“What happens to a battery,” Ark started to say, “when you leave it on the charger too long? You might say 2,000 years too long? It’s fully charged. I mean like fully charged. There is no more adding more to this. If we add more to this—like, how have you not blown up yet? Okay, so we have to open the door without—okay, so how many—we just broke a serious law here. You opened up the battery and got a full blast of it.”
Ark started looking over Jeremy, realizing he had a lot of information on him and even knew about the magic flames. But that was outside, not with the door open. Jeremy was now inside with the door closed, and that little bit of music he listened to before almost blew the place up. So Ark, in his wisdom, said this:
“We’re going to have to do a test real quick here. Remember what I told you not to do? I’m going to turn everything down to zero so that you can’t blow anything up. And that means lights and everything. And you’re just going to, what was it again? I think you called it music? Listen to music. I want to—oh, this is going to be weird.”
That did not fill Jeremy with a sense of joy to hear it said like that. But Jeremy knew what was about to come. He knew about the flames and all that, so he wasn’t worried. It was like this is just going to be a good show.
How wrong Jeremy was. What Jeremy didn’t realize was to get a normal planet running, it almost always just had this door, and it was open. And because of that, it was like having a pilot light on. The pilot light was on. Jeremy the other day almost got the pilot light to go. He didn’t even have to try. Just opened the door and closed it. He almost got the pilot light to go. Now he’s inside the pilot light chamber, and he is about to go on fire. What could, by all the gods, go wrong here? Red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag.
So, as Jeremy turned on that song he had waiting and turned up the volume to max, Ark ignored Jeremy for the next 30 to 40 seconds as basically it collectively s*** its pants, freaked out, and went into “oh my God, the nuke’s dropping” mode. Because Jeremy, even though he may have stopped around 20 seconds in when Ark was freaking out, those first 20 seconds didn’t just light the pilot light. He lit the planet’s pilot light, not the Ark’s. The freaking planet’s. Ark had to dump the Ark’s pilot light and all of its energy into the planet before it exploded. It took about 20 seconds for Ark to do it. Jeremy had stopped, but Ark was going to do this the right way. And all of a sudden, a planet that didn’t have any magic was having its pilot light lit. This was not freaking good.
Ark made an executive decision. It just looked at Jeremy and said, “This is not going to work,” and hit a button. Instead of the energy going into the planet’s pilot light and lighting it, he shot it into space.
Ark’s cube went back to the pedestal and had a very angry face at Jeremy, red and everything, with an unhappy emoji. Jeremy’s music had been turned off, and he just kind of waited there.
----------------------------------------
Outside, all of a sudden, the top of the mountain didn’t just burst out with energy. Rocks flew away, and there were actually rocks flying from the mountain over onto the different tents like 30-50 meters away. This was almost an explosion, but there was no boom. It was just a soundless energy escaping, and it dug a hole right over the Ark. What you saw was a ship, but not a ship. It looked like a golf tee, honestly, and the cave was next to the top of the golf tee. It was huge. Like half the cave was gone. Someone was hurt but didn’t die, thank God, the CDC guy guarding the front. But the cave was annihilated, everything was screwed up, and you could just see the golf tee. This thing must have been a thousand feet across at the top and a pinhead at the bottom, probably.
It looked like someone dropped it from space a long time ago.