‘The city of Philadelphia was rich with history.’ That was a sentence in the official website, and the statement was true. Unfortunately, Philadelphia’s tourism industry died a dog’s death when super powered monsters became a thing. The feds did their best to maintain public morale, but even the most uninformed pedestrian became xenophobic. Or they died. It was one or the other.

Physical tours were replaced with virtual ones, but that could never draw in the same level of revenue. Having been born afterward, Eric grew up in a gilded city. With a dull groan, the twenty-two year old brunet slipped out of bed. When the weather report warned about the potential for sleet, he strapped on a waterproof digital watch. His poncho went into his duffle bag along with his empty egg carton, milk bottle and idea-notebook.

After a minute’s bike ride, he stood at a nearby bus terminal. The bus terminal represented the condition of the city for him. Any part that was visible to the casual onlooker was pristine, but unseen parts like the bottom of the bench were neglected.

Eric grunted a ‘g’morning’ to the bus driver, slotting a dollar into the fare box and flashing his bus pass. With only one other person at a bus stop to stop for, the bus went through its driving cycle in no time and took him to the city’s edge. He biked toward a particular farm.

Special government subsidies should have allowed the farm to undercut competitors, but they had to transport their own produce. Eric thought people were being idiots, but their loss was his gain in dirt cheap groceries. If the inmates of Asylum East broke out, the people of Philadelphia were toast whether they used the ‘Asylum’s farm’ or not.

The weatherman’s warning proved apt a quarter way through Eric’s grocery run. That was annoying, but his morning continued as usual. The sleet’s cold kept his poncho from getting muggy, so it was at least better than rain. An earthy smell filled the air as the sleet melted and soaked the dirt beneath the grass. The pedicured look of the grass disgusted Eric, but the scent soothed him.

At the twenty minute mark, Eric reached the parahuman asylum. His normal day lasted until he noticed a fissure gouged into the building. The dull haze of his bi-daily routine disappeared, but before Eric could flee, the ground shifted and threw him off his bike. A dozen three-story buildings shot up out of the ground. The one in front of him carried away his bike. In a moment of dissonance, the writer in him thought it looked like a druid decided to grow a city. The rest of him regretted ever thinking using the Asylum farm was okay.

The strange plants of concrete and glass caught fire and mad laughter filled the air. Shortly afterward, a cloaked man with a staff came hurtling out of a second story window. Only one man ran around as a dnd wizard without his hat, but every cape seemed like a magic user to Eric.

Myrddin dusted off his cloak, “I would be much obliged if you were to leave the area. It is not safe for civilians.”

Something in Eric snapped at the dismissal. “I would if I could, but I doubt your asylum escapee stole my bike away from me by accident!”

Myrddin scowled when Eric pointed out where his bike was. Confirming Eric’s suspicions, the fires of the buildings gathered into a ring of fire around them.

“Just let us go, you have kept us trapped long enough!” Eric thought the fires themselves spoke until he noticed someone’s silhouette flicker about the flames.

“I am afraid you pose too much of a threat to the public.” Myrddin boomed, “You Shall Not Pass!”

The crackling flames dimmed and grew less erratic for a brief moment. Eric froze in shock himself.

“Are you seriously trying to have fun right now…? HOW DARE YOU!”

The fire flared higher than the buildings, and white smoke filled the air as the sleet sublimated. Eric shot Myrddin a scowl. Why did he piss off the pyromancer? The hammy cape stepped forward and slammed the butt of his staff into the ground. At the tip, a hole in reality appeared and began sucking in the flames.

Eric ran for the first opening he thought he saw in the flames.

“Hey, you shouldn’t–!”

Eric tumbled head first out of his world and into unconsciousness. When he woke up, he only saw darkness.

A primal fear raked through his heart, but Eric managed to remember the first rule of any disaster scenario. He checked the time. The faint glow of his watch said only five minutes had passed. Maybe Myrddin was still busy fighting the asylum escapee? With forced optimism, Eric pulled out his notebook. The glow of his watch wasn’t enough to write with, so doodling gave way to concept drawing.

Hours passed as he used up his notebook. Maybe drawing comics was in his future? Writing about capes wasn’t his cup of tea, so maybe he’d hunt for a Japanese Comics to emulate instead. While drawing up intricate concept art of a wizard robot, Eric saw a light in the corner of his eye.

The sensory deprivation of darkness could warp the human mind, so at first, Eric ignored the light. He dismissed it as a hallucination, but curiosity and boredom overcame him. He took a few cautious steps toward the light.

The light’s intensity rose like an actual light source in the distance and flickered like how fires would.

Eric almost leapt into a sprint towards the light but restrained himself. What if it was bait for some sort of trap? Insufficient caution was how he got stuck in the darkness in the first place. Despite his efforts to keep himself busy drawing stuff, he couldn’t help but imagine beasts like an angler fish ready to eat him up.

His drawings became infected with ambush predators. The time was past noon, and his stomach growled. He also had no clue when his watch would run out of battery.

“Fuck it, I’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper. Who knows, maybe it could be a way out?”

Eric stuffed his milk bottle with crushed up bits of his egg carton, and then made a hilt wrapping out of the paper of his first doodles and the wire of his notebook. The pages he didn’t use, he left behind. They could be his message in a bottle. Eric wrapped his duffle bag and poncho around his left arm, in case he needed to give a beastie something to chew on.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

With steps slow and methodical, Eric crept towards the light.

Looking at the light more intently convinced him that the light’s source was a fire. A small part of him developed the desperate hope that someone was there. ‘Surely someone was tending to the fire,’ but his caution didn’t lose this time.

Eric found a fire but not the natural kind. A small ball of flame hovered in midair, giving off a meager amount of light and heat. That gave him ideas on how he landed in this mess. Maybe the asylum escapee’s power and Myrddin’s power had a weird interaction?

Having made a little more sense of his situation, Eric felt some of the tension loosen in his shoulders. There was no ambush predator to fight off. He dropped to his knees in relief.

That must have jinxed him, because the second Eric sighed, the ball of flame started to churn. Since the darkness keyed him up to fight a possible eldritch monster, he tried to bludgeon the thing. As he should have expected, there was no sense of impact, but Eric invested too much momentum into the blow. He lost his balance and touched the strange fire with his right hand.

In a moment of hysteria, Eric feared losing his ability to write more than the loss of his right hand, then the ball of fire exploded and engulfed him. There was an ambush predator after all.

Eric couldn’t tell how long he burned for. One of the first things the fire ruined was his watch. His immolation felt nowhere near as painful as it should have. Dread compelled him to scream himself hoarse anyway.

[Query]

An image of a mass of crystals in the shape of a fire appeared in his head. The crystalline mass expanded and contracted just like fire. It seemed curious and exasperated about his scream.

“Please… help.”

[Contemplation] [Intrigue] [Suggestion]

An image of him touched a chunk of crystal, and the fire consuming him switched to burning the crystal instead.

“How? There’s nothing-”

A chunk of crystal just like in the image appeared before him. Eric needed to stop the burning, so he didn’t hesitate to touch the crystals. Just as the strange entity predicted, the fire jumped ship. The crystals burnt away in seconds to his horror, but the fire disappeared instead of jumping back onto him.

Eric took his first clear breath in what felt like ages. His eyelids grew heavy and his wrapped up left arm became a pillow. He closed his eyes in darkness only to open in his eyes to a world of dark red crystal.

Massive floating islands of crystal filled the air. There were so many, Eric took a moment to realize even the sky was a shade of red. His head throbbed when he looked at any single island for long. The island Eric found himself on felt tiny in comparison to all the islands.

“Good, I pulled you in on my first try.”

Eric heard a voice tinted with radio noise. After turning around, he saw what he’d look like if he was fashioned out of red crystal. It was like looking into a mirror with a red tint.

“Who the fuck are you, and why did you bring me here?!”

The crystalline-him raised his hands, “I will explain but you need to calm down before you attract the attention of [Endbringer equivalents].”

Images of behemoths leaping down from the islands above filled his head. Eric froze. Not trusting himself to speak, he motioned for his red doppelganger to continue.

“The first thing you need to know is that agent theory is real and in the worst way possible. Capes are lab rats to a multidimensional hivemind. Luckily for humanity, you stumbled across the weapon of a world that almost killed these parasites.”

Eric scowled, “so what? Am I supposed to try to kill this hivemind?”

“Something like that, if you want the world to exist past your thirty-seventh birthday.”

“Why–why the hell would the world end in fifteen years?”

“In fifteen years, the hivemind will [throw a tantrum].”

This time an image of superimposed earths entered his head. Most of humanity in countless dimensions disappeared in flashes of golden light. Focusing on the image hurt him.

“Luckily for you, the task isn’t anywhere near as impossible as it should be. We could have been facing two hiveminds that we’d dub as Thinker and Warrior, but only the Warrior is left. The Thinker isn’t responding to any queries so something must have killed her. We can take our sweet time preparing as long as we don’t alert the Warrior.”

Eric furrowed his brow, “what do you mean by preparing? You also didn’t explain what you are. Are you my agent? You seem pretty talkative for that.” Maybe the Faery Queen and some of the other crazed capes had something similar happen to them? That didn’t bode well for him.

“What I am is tied into how we can beat these parasites. You see, your unfortunate ordeal with the weird fire created me.”

“And I’m sure I should be grateful.”

“You do get both a peek behind the curtain and future apotheosis. Thing is, you and Other-Mimi will not be enough to take on the Warrior. We need you to convince others to go through something with what you did, so we can eventually bring them into the fold.”

“Who is Mimi? Did you put her through the same shit I went through?!”

His crystalline copy grimaced for once. Seeing that sign of chagrin felt quite satisfying for Eric.

“I kind of wish you didn’t notice my slip up. What the hell.” Red-Eric turned his head toward a clump of red crystal. “You can come out now, dear.”

The clump morphed into a woman and skipped over to slung herself onto his doppelganger’s left shoulder. “Hello, other-Eric!” Red-Eric kissed her on the cheek.

“Really?” Wasn’t this supposed to be a serious conversation? “Why doesn’t she hate you?”

Red-Eric ignored him. “You were an experiment to [Transient One], but I managed to hijack it. I needed help, so I gave its current host an agent-self like me.”

The red woman smiled, “I ripped that bitch of an agent apart for messing with my head.” Her smile flipped into a deep frown. “I hope other-me gets better soon. It would let me get better faster.”

Red-Eric frowned, “I hope you realize I’m being as transparent as possible.”

“Fine, but you’re an idiot if you think I can get anyone to let me light them on fire.”

“You’d be surprised. No one will go through the same pain as you did. You did, because you had no way to connect to an agent. For capes who already have agents, the fire will be a tingly light show. That fire burns mostly in this world, not yours. You just have to claim to be a Trump on top of being a Blaster and Mover like other-Mimi.”

Eric held up finger but realized he was just trying to be contrarian.

“I’m guessing the plan is for me to join the protectorate somewhere? Teacher made operating as a rogue trump impossible, but how do we keep from alerting the Warrior? I bet Watchdog works for him by accident.”

“We’ll help new agent-selves with maintaining their agents’ routines, and where else would you need to go but the cape capital of the world?”

“Fuck no, you can’t be–”

“The agents of blaster heroes are the safest for us to help hijack.” Red-Eric gestured towards the floating islands, “this world is more virtual than real, so the proximity of islands represents ease of connection. Most of the islands surrounding us are blaster capes of some kind.”

“I still don’t want to live in a city with a rage dragon and Nazis!”

“We both know why you risked using the asylum farm. You wanted something like this to happen.”

“Look on the bright-side! You’ll get to meet Miss Militia.” Red-Mimi giggled, “you have good taste other-Eric. Miss Militia is hot.”

Eric groaned, but in reality, he felt thankful for Mimi’s interjection. Feeling embarrassed about a boyhood crush was better than feeling like Atlas. He gazed into the abyss. Red-Eric was right. He wrote too many chosen-one stories to deny it.

When the abyss gazed back, he snarled, “Fine, I’ll write the greatest chosen-one auto-biography Earth Bet has ever seen!” Eric whipped his gaze back at Red-Eric and Red-Mimi, “can you let me go to sleep now, or do you have any more earth shattering secrets to burden me with?”

“I suggest avoiding Simurgh. She would either mindrape us both or call the Warrior’s attention to us.”

Eric shivered, “fuck you, I was kidding. Let me sleep.”