The next few hours of my life were the strangest yet. In giving Lantor to Brand by way of Nurse Stewart, I’d unwittingly made my game-world into a multiplayer server for two—three, if you counted Stewart, not that she was with us. Brand and I were fire and water. He was having the time of his life. I, meanwhile, was barely holding myself together.
Depression is weird. It’s there even when it’s not, like an undercurrent or a persistent itch. Sometimes, it storms over you, drowning you in its shadow. Other times, it quietly percolates, staining your experiences with its murk, ripping your thoughts away from what you want to do and who you want to be.
Brand, not being the most socially aware person out there, didn’t notice it. He was lost in his own jaunty mood, confident that it was as infectious as it seemed. As far as he could tell, I’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker, but the truth was muddier, and far more complicated. I tried not to let it show, and for the most part, I think I succeeded.
For the most part.
There was a lot Brand had left out of his explanations. For one thing, he’d done more than just “poke around”; he’d combined creations of his own with Greg’s Wyrmware to flesh out quite a bit of the half-completed projects I’d been working on in my spare time.
Apparently, in sharing the world with Nurse Stewart, I’d also shared administrator privileges.
At first, I’d felt a little resentful toward Brand for meddling with my personal project and, more generally, for continuing to push me out of my comfort zone. But, that resentment quickly faded when I saw what he’d done. Much to my surprise, rather than make Lantor into something entirely his own, he’d stayed quite faithful to my original vision.
Most importantly, he’d taken my “beachhead” plan and run with it. That plan, recall, was to set up a buffer zone between my mind-world and the parts of Lantor that had come under the influence of the otherworldly minds (wyrm or otherwise) whose memories—as per Brand’s theory—were behind the Incursion.
He’d made a mighty mountain range—Hoduul—separated from the rest of Lantor by a vast, merciless desert—the Forgotten Sands. The mountains had no peaks. They stretched up and up, piercing the clouds. Precursor constructions jutted from the rock, glassy and glistening. The Hoduul Mountains walled off the Incursion, establishing a clear boundary between it and Lantor. Beyond the mountains, the alien memories took over, robbing Brand and I of our administrative privileges, just like it had in my misadventure with Kreston.
Winding caverns in the mountains’ depths allowed for passage between the two zones.
We’d stocked up on supplies and prepared for the worst.
In hindsight, we probably should have gotten more scrolls.
You can never have too many scrolls.
“Fudge!” My swear echoed through the damp cavern.
A sizzling green laser beam had just grazed my left forearm, singing my keratin scales. I swore not because of the pain—there wasn’t any—but because of the unexpectedly large dent the laser had made in my precious HP. Worse still, for a couple of seconds, my body refused to do anything other than gently twitch.
The lasers had a chance of inflicting a minor paralysis effect, and, unfortunately, I was getting hammered on my metaphorical dice rolls.
We crawled through a dungeon dark and dreary. A cave system, to be precise. A cave system filled with goblins. Goblins with laser rifles; expies from Gregworld, courtesy of Brand.
I kept trying to raise my arms until they finally responded. I shook off the paralysis and yelled.
“
A stream of light trickled down from overhead, surrounding Brand and I in a dome of swirling motes. Laser beams that struck the barrier dissipated harmlessly.
“Those lasers did a lot more damage than I thought they would,” I said, feeling more than a little bit nervous.
“And that wasn’t even a direct hit!” Brand said, speaking with what I feared was glee.
At the moment, he was a robot; meanwhile, I was my Half-Pangol cleric character.
I had to keep my arms raised, otherwise the protective veil of divine energies would fall and expose us to harm.
“Why did you bring the laser goblins here?” I yelled. “They gave me a bit of trouble when I was a pangolin dragon.”
“The paralysis effect keeps things at bay,” Brand answered. “They also reproduce like you wouldn’t believe.”
I groaned. “Lovely.”
The game mechanics were fully operational. Brand told me that Greg’s setting—currently named “Gregworld”—was doing much the same, and if the latest version of Greg’s laser goblins were any indication, he’d finally gotten around to fixing the graphics.
The red laser goblins were far more intimidating than their voxel predecessors. They were fiends, through and through. Three-quarters as tall as a man, they sported serrated teeth stained in plaque and blood. Their eyes were pure voids of inky black that glared at us from between their piercing noses and jutting chins. Their wiry bodies seemed more bone than flesh, yet they moved with startling speed.
It was hard to know where to aim when the cave system’s gloom echoed with the pitter-patter of the goblins’ taloned toes and the brush-rush of their moldy fur clothes. It felt like we were surrounded, and—as far as I knew—we were.
Another round of laser fire bombarded the shield of my
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“I can’t keep this up forever!” I said.
I glanced over my shoulder at my robot companion..
All things considered, Brand’s robot-self looked pretty sweet. His body was made of two smooth-edged chrome cubes—torso and hips, respectively—connected by a short pipe, in a shape reminiscent of a dumbbell. Though inhuman, he was decidedly humanoid, with pipe-like arms and legs jutting out in the appropriate places. His head was sleek and elongated, like the elite white troopers’ helmets, but with a pair of signal antennae in back, and with a black display screen in front. The screen rendered Brand’s face in electric green LED—stylized smiley.
But Brand wasn’t just a robot. He was a sorcerer, too.
Brand raised his staff of polished petrified wood, waving his hand over the massive emerald on its head. Brand’s ragged, dark green cloak fluttered behind him as the gem began to glow.
“Intúcion…” he whispered. The word came out tinny from the speakers in his chest.
I clutched my crossbow to my chest.
In but a second, Brand’s spell was cast.
A flash cracked from his staff’s emerald, sending a whirling cyan flare hissing forward, shattering my shield. The cyan bolts ricocheted off the tunnel’s walls, transmuting the cold stone into glass. The
“Nice shot!” I said.
“Their hostility did not compute,” Brand said.
The glow in his staff smoldered and vanished.
I took the moment to use my prehensile tail to pluck a fresh bolt from the quiver at my belt and reload my enchanted crossbow.
Prehensile tails were stupidly useful.
Brand walked up beside me. “This isn’t good,” he said. “They’re likely aware of us now.” He turned his LED-display face toward me. “We should expect significant resistance.”
For better and for worse, I tried not to voice my deeper feelings. Beneath my superficial engagement of what should have been fun, I was agloom with foreboding. A bad feeling had taken root in my stomach the moment we’d set foot in Lantor. It was equal parts premonition and presentiment. As curious-worried as I was about discovering the truth of the Incursion, I couldn’t take my mind off Suisei and the stars.
I was standing on a precipice. Discoveries lay on the horizon, ripe for the picking, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that these discoveries were forbidden fruits.
What if Brand was right? Could there really be other worlds? Not just worlds in my head, but the genuine article: places with space and time and earth and sky? And what would that mean if it was true?
What lay beyond the Night? And what would happen to me once I knew?
But that was what journeys were for: to quest in search of an answer.
The caves were incredible. They were filled with fever dreams of lost worlds. Though the Hoduul Mountains had cut off the Incursion’s advance, whatever force was behind it showed no signs of giving up. If anything, it had redoubled its efforts, seeding the Forgotten Sands with swaths of alien vistas that, even now, were slowly spreading across the land.
Thankfully, while we’d still had editorial control over Lantor, Brand had cursed the great desert to be forever plagued by storms of pure vacuum. Blobs and funnels of rasping voids hurtled through the desert like murmurations of birds, tearing through the glitched-up intrusions of otherworldly memories, felling silver trees and orange air; cutting up glassy plains and molten rivers. The vacuum packets interfered with the violent chemical interactions playing out between the worlds’ incompatible skies, biting back at their advance.
Within the cave, the Incursion’s influence was even stronger. We’d hopped along a maze of hovering skipping stones to cross a bottomless ravine that had opened up in the darkness. We’d passed walls eaten away by nooks and chasms that opened onto impossible vistas. I saw violet skies overlooking a massive orb circled by glorious rings; I saw a fog-bound swamp, thick with crooked trees and mossy curtains; I saw a castle in the mountains, glorious and grand, built from blocks of faint blue stone, its towers roofed in golden spirals. Static glitched across the vistas; entire views flickered in or out of existence with no rhyme or reason.
“How much further do we need to go, do you think?” I asked.
Brand looked down over the edge of the curving tunnel. A familiar frigid, ammoniac stink wafted up from the depths.
“First we gotta get to the bottom,” Brand said. He raised his head. “Then we go up.”
“Are we going to encounter one of those half-mile long, diamond-studded grubs of yours?” I asked.
“No,” Brand said. “They died eons ago.”
“Lucky us,” I muttered.
Because Brand never gave less than 100%, he’d taken the liberty of devising lore for the tunnels. The way he told it, they were most likely formed eons ago by the Precursors’ slaves, polymorphed into monstrous forms; acid-drooling centipedes, those half-mile grubs; sapient clouds of neurogenic plasmic—and so much more.
I resumed walking, descending through the spiraling tunnel. The lantern on my hip jolted and clinked with my steps.
He turned to face me. “I want to conserve my spell slots. I don’t think I need to tell you that it’s not a good idea to try and have a long rest here. We’d be attacked, I guarantee it.”
“I’m aware,” I said. My voice echoed through the cavern.
“I think we should use the same strategy as the one for the terrorworms.”
I stopped in my tracks and shuddered, my tail curling in fear.
Angel, the terrorworms!
Because we’d still had administrative control through much of our trek through the desert, we’d used that leg of the journey as a trial run to test out various tactics. The terrorworms were a bunch of mobs we’d encountered while traversing the Forgotten Sands. As Brand had explained, forsaken by the gods, the Sands were plagued by the heat of a never-ending midday. Even when night fell, the sand still radiated warmth, as if the sun was still in the sky. It would have been unbearable without the help of the portable winters we’d purchased at a village on the desert’s outskirts. The winters were eyeball-sized marbles of white-swept blue. Speak the magic words and, a couple seconds later, a season’s worth of wintery weather exploded out from the marble—ice, snow, chilling cold. The marbles’ chill and the Sands’ insufferable heat averaged out to form a pleasant experience.
The strategy to which Brand was referring was based around my giant pangolin beast shape. In that form, I made for a very effective tank, capable of occupying enemies up close while Brand used his magic to blast them from a distance. I could also use my sticky, absurdly long tongue to pull in foes from afar. Given the dangers I’d faced when I’d ventured into the Incursion with Kreston, Brand and I had prepared buffs in advance to make pangolin-me as resilient as possible. We had potions, scrolls, and spells galore.
It never hurt to be prepared.