Some people were a bit louder than usual. Some were silent. The breakfast buffet met high standards.

» Why do you scrape up a group of old men to drive ambulances? The last time I drove anything bigger than a shopping cart was ten years ago.

» Does this feel like some secret project to you?

» What are those idiots in government up to now?

» Do they need us to talk to aliens?

» You’d use biologists and linguists for that.

» What makes you think aliens need to be biological?

The TV set under the sign stating that we were to assemble on the golf course at 9:00 unmuted:

… breaking news. Again I repeat that a government of national unity has been formed and both chambers have voted to declare a state of national defense. We are now showing you ...

We assembled, as requested, on the hotel golf course. I am not sure everybody turned up, but I seriously felt dread by that time. Federal police, US military police and a few men and women in grey suits showed up. Were we under NATO command? What was going on here?

It was a sunny day, yet I shivered. My mood shifted to rapt attention and the whole group shut up as on command. One of men in a grey suit walked up in front of us. He felt like The Godfather. He spoke:

You are here today to be told the truth and to serve mankind. …

I zoned out. Up to this day I remember not a word he said beyond that cheesy intro, yet I stood motionless at attention.

--

We drew numbers – I got number 4 – lined up and pulled cubes out of a dark sack. Mine was boring. A plain dull grey, vaguely polished, vaguely metallic featureless color. The girl – I couldn’t see her badge and, as I said, bad with names - in front of me had gotten something like a conflagration in a cube. We were led to compartments made from plastic over metal frames and plastic dividers. It looked like an improvised security check stalls at a festival.

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I stepped into the one the uniformed guy with a face that discouraged all small talk and was exactly how I imagined a bouncer at a jetset club would react to me, led me to. I confronted a technical guy in sandals. With perfect skin, an athletic figure and teeth right out of a toothpaste ad. And speaking American English.

» Number 4? Good morning. You are the first one this morning. I see you got a gun there. No, not literally, the essence of a gun. We think that an essence will let you better perform the detection ritual, so we got some cheap surplus from the US stockpile. Mainly animals nobody likes. You are lucky.

» What?

» I am sorry we need to do this without the proper induction but your government requested haste and we from the Network are fulfilling that request.

» What?

If this was a test for eloquency I just failed. If it was a test for not acting prematurely or readable facial expression, I still had a chance. But then, did I want to pass? Would they send me home if I failed or would I be stuck reviewing some stupid code for meeting all the rules of checking for errors in the most trivial of functions for however long this would take? I did what I usually do. I took the path of least resistance and waited.

» As the colonel may have mentioned we are facing an existential threat. We need to ramp up our numbers and Magic Ritual Conquest allowed us to teach you some basics in its advanced mode we will train you in the next ten days. But we make you do the essences first in the hope of you learning faster.

» What are we to learn??

» You speak more than a few words of English. Good. You had me worried for a few moments. The reward is in the test. Just wait a second for the compatibility test. We’ll do medical after the practical test.

Wait, that game was real and they are doing the power stones on me? Though they seemed to call them „essences“ instead of „stones of power“. I wondered what they are calling the „gems of expansion“. That sold me. I wanted to be able to materialize a magic gun. If we were living in a world of such things, it was clear which side of the divide was safer to live on, even if you needed to use such powers in anger.

He waved a blue translucent rod at me, put it into a socket on a tablet, typed in some stuff from a list and a green light lit up. He pulled the curtain and I saw one of the basic rituals of the game only that it was missing some parts.