Vaile had just finished packing the last of his things when a knock on the door gave him something else to think about. Given the treatment the doors had received during the majority of his time here, he had expected the thing to be facing a similar treatment, but this was not to be the case any longer. Now that there was no hurry to get to him, it seemed as though the myriad Lovecraftian beings here were in far less of a tizzy. Unlike the prior dates, they had much more than a mere two hours each night to try and talk to him and they didn’t need to worry about the other people here either.

Vaile opened the door and stepped outside, only to find that, once again, the place that the door led to had shifted. Previously, when he had first started to reclaim what he had put down, each door would first lead him to somewhere he wanted to be, only to shift to sending him somewhere else once his business there had been finished. Now, instead of walking from one room to another, he was staring out across a cityscape that would drive modern architects mad simply due to how impossible everything was.

He seriously wondered if he had walked into a realm that was a cross between M.C. Escher’s pictures and those inspired by the works of ‘Providence’ himself. He wasn’t exactly sure where anyplace here was, nor was he quite certain that, if he tried to walk forward, he would actually go forward instead of some other, random direction. Then again, the human mind wasn’t designed to truly comprehend the weirdness that was non-Euclidian architecture, nor was it exactly suited to understand the designs of things that should not be.

Still, he needed to take a leap of faith regardless, and so he stepped out into this weird new world, hoping to high heaven that he didn’t go absolutely batshit insane after catching a glimpse at the new rulers of this realm.

…

It was… well… unnerving. By his counting, the number of people he had seen who looked to be utterly broken to the point of simply giving up was far too high for his liking. Sure, he had a bit of disdain for them due to their treatment of him up till recently, but he could understand why they acted that way. Plus, he was damn certain that he was seeing more mind-fucked slaves than there were people in the Fog City before he left to free the so-called God of this realm.

He had estimated that the former city had around 400,000 people in it, based on the number of districts that he had mapped out and the density of some of them. He considered himself lucky to have remembered that he possessed a few more speedy modes of transportation, which helped him greatly back when he was mapping everything out. But even with (roughly) 400,000 people being the total (counting the shape-changed Mind Flayers and other such things among the normal people) he was sure that the number of slaves that he saw now eclipsed that previous figure by at least 300%.

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

He could not have been busy for that long, so it begged the question. Where the flying fuck did all of these extra mind-fucked people come from? His question was answered when, after following what he assumed to be a path leading to where he needed to go, he saw what seemed to be a group of triumphal arches that were of various sizes, but each had an active portal where the open space should have been.

Actually, when he looked closer at the gates, he saw that each one was marked with a symbol of one kind or another, possibly pointing that these were gates to other members of the Alliance. He stared at one for a bit before he quickly moved on. He remembered what that symbol meant, and he would be damned if he sat around and waited for the crazy rat ladies to show up.

Eventually, he made his way to an open area with a runic circle etched out on the floor. The circle was massive, and the text scrawled upon and around it was written in a language that Vaile could not understand. He had memorized every written language in the MMO, and could both write and read them perfectly, but this one was most certainly not a holdover from that. In fact, if he had to hazard a guess, the script looked more like lines of computer code than an actual language, and this gave him pause.

It was only for a moment, but he remembered the old philosophical question about whether anything was real or not and if reality was just a simulation. However, that thought was seemingly smashed out of his mind the moment it came in, as though something did not want him to even begin to think of such a notion. Vaile didn’t notice it at the time, but that forceful banishment of a single thought was, in and of itself, quite possibly just as bizarre as everything he had experienced thus far, if not more so.

Vaile found himself drawn to the center of the circle. Standing there, he saw the runes and text light up in a beautiful color before a flash of light blinded him. When the light faded, the circle was empty, and Vaile had been sent back to the main reality.

…

It would be quite a bit different here, now that Vaile was gone. It could not thank him enough for the services rendered, but it knew that any attempt to talk with Vaile would be a risk that it could not afford to take. It had selected the place to which Vaile had been sent for a certain reason, which it intended to keep to itself. It could only watch the threads of fate weave and unweave themselves as the truth of existence laid itself bare. In its dreams, it had seen many paths forward, and it knew that Vaile would have to be the one to decide which would be taken and when. It could, however, give a simple nudge to (hopefully) push him in the direction that it wanted him to take, but given Vaile’s ability to simply defy the odds and both obliviously ignore and actively defy the desires of higher beings, it had no idea whether it would reach the future it desired.

The past was static, but the future was fluid, constantly shifting with each action, both great and small. It may have been able to see the most likely timelines, or at least the most likely events in each timeline, but those visions were mere predictions at best. The world beyond was opening up, bit by bit, and thus it would only be a matter of time until the final prison break was set in motion.