Topher's blood froze. "2033. What? You think I'm from the... the future?"

Abruptly, Hana was standing; she had her hands free and ready to grab something from the pack at her hip. "How could you not be? I was summoned in 2023, and it has been ten years. What other explanation can there be?"

"2023. When in 2023?" Topher's head spun; he had to fight to keep from scrambling away from the tiny Japanese girl in fear. "I was summoned in March. March... shit. March 19. March 19, 2023."

Hana glared at him; Topher stared back, uncomprehending. What the fuck is going on here?

Finally, after many long, tense moments, the other woman sat back down. "January. January 2023. I don't remember... what day, anymore."

"Time," Topher whispered, awed. "Time's faster here." His mind ticked over, exploring the idea. How long have I been gone? Ten years is 3,650 days. No, wait, shit, Leap Years, 3,652.5 days. Say 60 days back home. That's a little over a 60:1 ratio.

Two days. It's only been two days.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to bury his head and his hands and weep, exhausted at a bone-deep spiritual level. Everything he'd been through was only two days back home. He was vaguely aware Hana was saying something, but his ears were full of a roaring sound; he couldn't think, couldn't handle this right now. "I'm sorry. I need a minute." He stumbled away, leaving her confused and forlorn behind him, and walked away into the rows of shrouded zombies numbly, mumbling the incantation for his Sanctuary spell as he went.

He didn't go far; he didn't want to get lost or eaten by something. But he went far enough that he could no longer see the Japanese girl, though he could still pick her out by the light from her tiny fire. He stared into space, numb.

"Bailey-sensei? Can you hear me?"

He sighed as Hotaka shimmered into view in his peripheral vision. "You got real crap timing, kid. The first time in days I want to be alone, and now you show up? Where did you go earlier?"

Hotaka looked uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, Bailey-sensei -- the connection cut out when the others appeared. I think I might not be able to maintain the projection when your attention is elsewhere."

"Business as usual," grunted Topher. "Well, in typical fashion, things just got weirder. The girl is Hana -- Ichirou's girlfriend, the last remaining F-Ranker from the summoning ten years ago. And we just found out that time's sped up here -- she was summoned two months before we were, despite being here for ten years. That means only a couple of days might have passed since we were summoned back on Earth."

Hotaka was silent for a few moments, then nodded. "I can find no reason to disbelieve it, Bailey-sensei. It doesn't seem very relevant to our current situation, though."

"Kid, are you listening to me?" Topher rasped. "Our lives are still there. All our lives. If we could get home, we might be able to..."

"Have you found a way for us to return home?" prompted Hotaka, cocking his head slightly. "If not, does it matter?"

Topher squeezed his eyes shut. "Shut up. Just shut up." His head was pounding again. "Jesus, don't you understand how big of a deal this is?"

"Bailey-sensei." Hotaka's typically patient voice was flat and sour. "If you are attempting to convince me that you would choose to return to our world, you are not being honest."

Topher sucked in a long breath, ready to shout. Then, after a few seconds of silence, he blew it out. "No. No, I guess I'm not. It's not like there's anything for me to go back to." Sorrowfully, he looked up at the bespectacled boy. "But you might. Maybe the others, too, if any of them are still alive."

Hotaka shook his head. "None of us want go back either, Bailey-sensei. You heard what our lives were like; even being a powerless F-Ranker in a magical realm is better than what we left behind."

"For us, maybe," Topher acknowledged. "But what about the rest of the Otherworlders?"

"I humbly suggest that we worry about that problem when it becomes relevant," responded Hotaka a little sharply, cleaning his glasses on his shirt. "In the mean time, Bailey-sensei, you must focus on survival."

"Sure. Right." Topher's mouth twisted. "Because surviving's so great."

Hotaka opened his mouth to retort again, but abruptly fuzzed out and disappeared; Topher could tell without turning around that Hana had caught up to him and was standing behind him, panting slightly. He sighed. "Sorry. I just needed a second to deal." He turned, drawing in a breath, but stopped when he caught sight of the girl's red-rimmed eyes.

"No, I am the one who should be sorry, Bailey-san," the girl demurred, running a tanned forearm across her eyes. "I apologize if I offended you with my distrust."

"Seriously?" Topher rolled his eyes. "Hana, you literally just met me. I'm perfectly happy being distrusted as long as you don't try to stab me or anything." He wrapped his arms around himself, cold despite his robe. "I just... needed a second to think. It's fine. Let's get back to what matters."

Hana looked slightly confused, but nodded; Topher fell in beside her as they began to walk back towards the camp. "I don't know what real significance such knowledge has, but it seemed as though you did." She glanced down. "Is there anything you can tell me?"

"Not really, I guess." sighed Topher. "Other then fact that we both went through COVID, I suppose."

"It was not as momentous an event for us as it was for you, Bailey-san; Japan is much more used to such contagion events, SARS-related or otherwise." The other girl stepped gingerly around a table with a zombie's grasping arm dangling limply from under its shroud. "But I suppose it does confirm that we are both who we say we are, at least to the best of our ability to verify such claims."

Topher nodded. "Close enough for me, to be honest. But what now?"

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Hana clenched her fist. "We must find the source of the undead if we are able. There is no shame in retreat if it becomes necessary, but I cannot turn back until I know for certain whether the answer is within my reach."

"Why, though?" asked Topher bluntly, despite his discomfort with the topic. "You're Level 7. Why isn't this somebody else's job who can actually fight down here?"

The other girl hung her head slightly. "I made... a reckless promise. Someone who has something I want very badly made a demand of me, and I... was not cautious enough to think it through before committing. I wish it were not so, but I cannot give up yet."

Topher chuckled. "Well, that at least I can understand." He turned to face Hana. "Let's compromise, okay? We get close enough to see what's making that light, and if it looks too dangerous, we turn back. That way, at least you get to take some information back."

The other girl hesitated for a moment, then looked down again and nodded. "It is a logical course of action. I am sorry to endanger you."

"Kid, I was already in plenty of danger," Topher replied dismissively as they reentered the light of the small metal can. "At least now I can blame something other than my own stupidity for it." At the sound of their voices, Zanasha stirred, murmuring; Topher immediately turned his back out of modesty and began to sweat profusely. "I'll let you two get ready."

He gathered up his own bedding and supplies, then spent some time conjuring up coffee and pastries; he wanted to make danishes, but didn't know if the girls enjoyed sweet dishes, so he eventually opted for brioche after some waffling. After they had all eaten and Zanasha had donned her armor once more, they set back out towards the distant glow, with Topher's Conjured Light illuminating the way for them.

After a time, Topher noticed that the floor had begun to slope downwards; the zombie-filled beds had also begun to get scarcer, with more space in between each one and a more ornate shroud on most of the shapes. Must be the VIPs, Topher mused. Maybe they get extra Virtual Brains to eat. Eventually, he noticed that dim shapes had begun to take form in the foggy, misty air on either side of the glow; after some additional travel, it became clear that they were walls, and that their path was being funneled into a bottleneck from which a descending staircase emerged. The stairs, which were translucent and glowed aquamarine in color, led downwards into a large open pit perhaps a quarter-mile across, empty except for a structure in the center which Topher could only dimly glimpse through the darkness and distance.

It looked, he thought, vaguely like a large traffic cone made of grayish stone or metal; the details were fuzzy, but as they drew nearer, they could tell it was some sort of structure which was covered with protrusions and carvings of various sorts, as well as a continuous arc of bright green energy which fountained ceaselessly from the top of the edifice. He kept glancing around, expecting guards or defense systems, but there were none that he could detect; everything seemed empty and devoid of life. "It can't be this easy," he muttered to himself.

Then, suddenly, they were near enough to see it clearly; he saw Zanasha squinting at it in confusion out of the corner of his eye, while Hana's mouth twisted speculatively. "It is mechanical," she observed neutrally. "Exhaust vents, fuel or coolant tubes... what purpose could this serve?"

"It's magic, too," Topher interjected. "Those rune sequences are definitely not writing or gibberish -- that's a Ghon rune there, and a Jhu-Zu inversion near the top." They stared at it collectively, marveling at its strangeness.

"It is big," Zanasha observed after a moment. Hana turned to her in exasperation.

"'It is big'?" She asked semi-incredulously, although Topher could tell she was more amused than anything. "That's your contribution?"

"I felt left out," complained the half-orc. Topher opened his mouth to chime in -- what he would have said, he didn't know, although he felt that it would probably have been vacuous and superfluous. But then the light roaring from the top of the structure flared and shifted weirdly, and abruptly they were not alone.

The figure which formed out of the light was vast -- weirdly discontiguous and unmoored in space, as though Topher was simultaneously seeing something very large and far away, but also so detailed that his mind could not grasp its disparate components all at once and kept fuzzing things out in self-defense. It was vaguely humanoid -- he could definitely tell that -- but it was strangely warped and lumpen, with metal and flesh-like protuberances and accoutrements so multifarious and varied that he could not tell which were body parts, which were accessories, and which were prosthetics (if any such labels applied). It loomed over them, but it was also tiny before them; a lens that might have been an eye, might have been a jeweler's loupe, and might have been a glass-sealed nostril regarded them for a few moments.

Then, unexpectedly, it spoke. "Unauthorized. Corporeal creatures in restricted area."

Topher jumped; in his peripheral vision, so did Hana. "Uh. I didn't see any kind of sign."

"Topher," Zanasha hissed, "what are you doing?"

"Answering its question," Topher hissed back, only to be nonplussed by Zanasha's own confused expression.

"You can understand it? I only hear hissing and clicks." The half-orc's gauntleted fist gripped the hilt of her sword nervously. "Do you have a translation spell of some sort?"

"Complicated question," responded Topher with a wince, "but it looks like Hana might be able to understand it too." He nodded in her direction. "The Summoning Spell translates languages for us, sometimes. Maybe this time."

Hana nodded. "I can understand it." She stepped forward, took a breath, and squared her shoulders. "Identify yourself, please."

The figure paused. "Unauthorized. Unauthorized. Interaction failure."

"Great conversationalist," grunted Topher. His hands itched to summon his Stylus, but he didn't want to make any sudden moves that might precipitate a conflict.

Hana frowned. "It looks like it can't speak to us..." she tapped a fingernail against her teeth and grimaced. "What do we do?"

"We leave," Topher pointed out immediately. "It says we're not authorized to be here, which means if we take too long --"

"Commence integration," announced the figure, raising a clawed and triple-jointed appendage.

Topher sighed. "...then that happens." He summoned his Stylus, turning warily as the floor below them began to shake and rumbling noises surrounded them.

He had expected monsters of some kind -- more undead guardians, possibly, or perhaps the snake-thing that Hana and Zanasha had fought. But instead, the attack was metaphysical -- small prisms emerged from recessed apertures and began to illuminate them with cones of light, light which seemed wrongly-colored and diamond-hard. Topher attempted to raise his Stylus and begin spinning it -- a Magic Dart swarm might get a bunch of them -- but he couldn't move. Everything was frozen, as if he'd been sealed in stone; he couldn't even move his eyes. In his peripheral vision, he could just barely perceive that the others had been trapped as well; he could hear a low growl in Zanasha's throat and a choked-off squeak in Hana's, but that was all.

Then, horribly, he felt something crawling up his leg; something sinuous and immaterial, more thermal than tactile -- it was as if a snake made of solid ice were making its way up his body. He felt a cold sweat erupt from his skin as the thing rapidly slithered up his back, and could tell something similar was happening to the others, but he couldn't do anything about it -- couldn't even contemplate what might be happening. He felt a freezing touch at the base of his skull, and his mouth opened in a silent scream -- this was it, he was going to die or have his mind ripped out and shoved into whatever strange hell the zombies were experiencing. But what happened next was worse than anything he could have imagined.

For a split second, he felt a tearing pain in his head; then, abruptly, the thing snaking up him sizzled and fell away, shedding staticky gray flakes. On its own, his open mouth curled in a horrible smile, then spoke.

The voice which came out was his own, and yet not his own; it was unmistakably Topher's normal voice, but not as he had ever spoken. It was vile and hateful; it was black and cruel, as if his tongue had been soaking in poison for thirty years. Topher's skin crawled; he had never heard it before, but somehow he knew it intimately, and it filled him with a terror and dread far beyond any threat or monster. Despite the paralysis field, his fingers curled into fists so tight that his fingernails drew blood from his palms.

"Sorry, pal," said his mouth, sneering. "Occupado."