A place both wonderful and strange.

— Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

There was blackness at first, and then purpleness, and then yellowness, and then greenness and then a mixture of it all, rectangles of lightning popping up everywhere, electronic sounds tearing up the elemental sky.

They hadn’t fallen yet. Or, they kept falling, but now it felt like going up. A cone of abstract light and noise, the telematic thunder enveloping them in their ascent, chunks of code appearing and disappearing like temporary clouds. The Worldjumper pulsated around Sarah’s finger, changing colors in a quick pattern, whole worlds coming and going as it reflected all of them in succession. Sarah wondered if her eyes, the eyes this game had given her, were also reflecting all those worlds, all that information coming at once.

“What the fuck!” Maggot exclaimed, his face transfixed by terror. Sarah herself was afraid — but at least she knew what she was doing. He, on the other hand, had found himself pushed down a great height by surprise, and now he was speeding up a chaotic space between worlds, clueless about what it was or what it all meant.

“Hold tight,” Sarah said, trying to sound self-assured and cheerful. “I’m going to take you to someone.”

As they kept ascending, their relative speed seemed to decrease, and the abstract sky started looking like an enormous dome of sideral proportions, its shape only delineated by the constant flashing of patches of rotating color, lines of code appearing and disappearing, and what looked like bright plasma clouds popping up and opening holes in the structure that lasted for a few seconds and then closed by themselves.

At one point, their ascent stopped.

There was no crash, no thump, no rolling on a nonexistent ground. They just stopped, and remained there, at the center of a surreal landscape, the strangest place Sarah could have ever imagined.

Shadow skill acquired: World Jump

“I— I think we can let go of each other now.”

Maggot hesitated, then loosened his grip, probing with his feet. Sarah did the same. Yes, the nothing below them felt solid now. They separated and turned around, their eyes drinking in the epileptic non-world they had fallen into.

“What is this place?” Maggot asked, his voice still faltering.

“I’m not sure,” Sarah replied. She raised her hand to show him the Worldjumper. The ring was still shining with quickly cycling colors. “Remember the waves that used to throw us from one realm to another? Well, this time I did it on purpose,” she explained. “But I don’t know where we are now. I guess it’s a place between realms. I’m not sure how to continue the jump.”

“The jump... where? Where are you taking me?”

“I’m taking you to the Sorceress,” Sarah said. “It’s important, for some reason. Have you ever met the Sorceress?”

Maggot shook his head in denial.

“OK, then the next thing—”

A prodigious rumble interrupted her. Somewhere nearby (though it was hard to estimate distances in this abstract land), a flash of lightning had rent the air, or the nothingness, and something was coming out of the tear.

Zombies!

Only they looked strange. They seemed to be always reaching the point of dissolution, glitching as they walked towards them. Every few steps, a face or a body got momentarily swapped with something else, then went back to its original appearance.

“Maggot!” Sarah shouted. “The knives!”

But Maggot had already retrieved his weapons of choice. Evidently, he’d had some time to practice while in the Castle. His attitude was as uncertain and fearful as ever, though. When the first zombie got near enough, he tried to strike it, but when his blade was about to make contact with it, the damn thing changed. It was now a knight in full armor. Metal clashed against metal in an ineffectual strike.

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“No!” Maggot cried, and covered his face with his hands, while still holding the knives, in a futile attempt to defend himself.

The knight raised one arm above his head and the flail he was holding shone under the everchanging electronic light that flashed all around. Sarah tried to intervene, but she was already surrounded by the undead.

Retrieve...

Retrieve what?

In a flash of despair, Sarah realized she didn’t know which weapons were available to her in this void outside all realms, if any. She invoked her Inventory. The table appeared in front of her. She had to dismiss it because the zombies were already almost over her and the superimposed image made it hard to see. She kicked a moving corpse, punched another, and took a step back. Then she called her Inventory again.

It was a mess. Her available weapons changed on their own, in an unpredictable cycle. One moment she could retrieve the arquebus, the next second there was a pistol in its place, and in one instant it had been replaced by a spear. The same thing was happening in the other slots.

Sarah stepped back again, kicking and punching as the zombies tried to reach her and bite any part of her. One of them turned into a Nazi soldier, then quickly reverted back to zombie. Another changed momentarily into a boar.

Maggot was still covering his face, trying to protect himself, but the knight lay now on the nonexistent ground. Or, rather, half a knight. One arm and two legs had disappeared and he seemed to be bleeding brilliand pixels of gold and emerald. Sarah noticed that similar things were happening to the zombies attacking her: once in a while one of them lost a limb, or its head, or acquired twenty additional fingers in one hand, which dissolved in a bright puff of electronic garbage in the next second. The whole horde was glitching, faltering, degrading, at the whim of some cybernetic madness.

They were still over her, though.

Maggot came to the rescue, jumping over a corpse and cutting its head off with a quick motion of both hands. Then he stabbed another zombie in the face, and sunk both knifes into a third zombie’s throat, penetrating its head until he impaled the brain. Sarah used those few moments to try and make sense of her Inventory. Her mana counter was also flickering wildly, its legend alternating between “Mana”, “Fuel” and several other things she couldn’t read quickly enough.

This is not fair.

Up there in an indeterminate point above their heads, a new tear opened and half a bomber jet entered the space. It crashed against the solid nothingness and burst into flames. A soldier in a parachute followed it through the hole; the parachute turned into an iron plank midflight, and both man and object disintegrated in a bright flash a second later. The hole closed itself in a puff of code.

Maggot kept knocking down zombies. Sarah sent him quick glances as she tried to get rid of the undead coming at her, still unable to retrieve any weapons. Evidently, her friend had stepped up some notches in Melee Attack. He didn’t look as defenseless as the first or second time she had met him. He still paled in comparison with Uberyn, but there he was, fighting against multiple enemies and for the moment, winning.

She, on the other hand, was losing.

Her shoulder was still hurting where the sabre-toothed wolf’s fang had pierced it, and she found it hard to hit the zombies with that arm. She stepped back once more as a corpse’s mouth got dangerously closer to her ear. Dead hands were tugging at her clothes, trying to grab her arm, her face, whatever they could get a grip on.

“You hungry motherfuckers!” Sarah yelled, punching and kicking as hard as she could. But the bodies were too close now, and her kicks and punches were mostly ineffectual.

I need to get out of here. The Ring. I need to use the Ring.

Only she didn’t know how.

Also, she would be leaving Maggot.

I won’t leave Maggot.

What was the alternative, though?

To die.

I will die here.

Sarah kept throwing her arms and legs against the zombies, but she was now falling backwards, half collapsing under the collective weight of the undead. In a couple of seconds, it would be over.

A couple of seconds.

A couple of seconds.

Time seemed to lose its meaning then, and Sarah thought this was what you feel when you’re about to die. The sensation of time slowly, very slowly coming to a stop, and a peaceful, subdued glow filling the scene.

The zombies were moving at a snail’s pace now, their faces caressed by a faintly golden light; her body was falling backwards morosely, as if she was underwater. All noises were lower now, as if somebody had turned the volume way down.

Everything had a golden tint.

Maggot’s knives traced their slow deadly lines in the air, eager to meet the eyes and throats of the corpses that dared attack him. He was bathed in a golden light, too. Everything was. It was like a ballet.

“Oh, my first visitors,” said a voice behind her.

It was not slowed down. It sounded like a normal voice, peaceful, certain, amicable.

The voice of an old man.

Everything was now frozen in place, Sarah noticed, including her. She could still move her eyeballs, though, and when the old man walked beside her and came into view, she could take a good look at him.

He was a mage. He looked exactly like the archetipe of the old, wise magician in countless books and movies and videogames and whatnot. An old, tall man, with white beard, a slow pace, wearing a dark robe and a pointy hat with stars and arcane symbols drawn on it. He was, of course, holding a staff.

“Hello,” he said with perfect friendliness. “Welcome to the Void.”