02 - Stranger in a Strange Land

Consciousness returned slowly and painfully.

Maya gagged at the taste in her mouth. An awful stench assaulted her nose. Pain radiated about her entire body. She felt sick and exhausted.

“Gods, it’s like Shelly’s bachelorette party all over again,” she groaned as she cracked open her eyes.

She was greeted by an appetizing sight of dried vomit. Maya groaned again, getting her bearings. She lay upon the bench seat of the truck, vomit covering the seat and part of her arm.

“Great.”

She pulled herself into an upright position, gagging again as the world began swaying and stuttering. The worst hangover ever would have been a comfort to the pain that spiked through her brain. Maya rested her head upon the steering wheel, slowly taking a deep breath.

The pain running through her body began to subside and she began feeling her head clear. In and out, deep breaths. Try to ignore the stench of vomit. In and out. Get some oxygen into the brainpan.

“What’s that annoying light,” Maya muttered. A small red light was blinking at the edge of her vision. She remembered she was in the truck and wondered if it were an engine light.

But, she realized, her eyes were closed and the blinking moved as she turned her head. The small light continued blinking at the edge of her vision.

A sense of unease and fear began rising as she thought of what she had experienced before going unconscious.

Black lightning, a chimera of random animals, screaming, and messages that filled her vision.

Maya snapped her eyes open.

“What the fuck,” she croaked.

Unease and worry was drowned out by shock and surprise, which was inundated by a flood of terror and horror. Maya hadn’t known she could feel so much in so few seconds.

She wanted to screamed, but her throat was a parched desert. She wanted to hide, but the only place to hide was in a truck cabin surrounded by windows.

Instead, Maya stared in slack horror at the sight before her.

She wasn’t in Dallas anymore, she realized, she probably wasn’t even on Earth anymore.

Maya had a fascination with sunrises and sunsets. She’d spend hours looking at images of skies bathed in reds and oranges, reflecting off clouds until fading into deeper purples and blues. There was beauty in those images that brought a sense of calm to her.

What she saw as she peered out of the windshield of her truck was similar, but also vastly different. Instead of a horizontal gradient of colors going from reds to violets, the sky was a smeared chaos of colors. Reds, oranges, yellows, purples, teals; all the colors she could imagine created vertical streaks across the sky in defiance of the color spectrum.

It was unnatural. Maya stared at the sky and knew in her bones that it shouldn’t be possible. From the distant dark horizon she could see the colors rising vertically and then passing overhead. She could see the colors slowly swirling in a sickening manner.

“Where the hell am I?” She looked away from the sky, feeling her head beginning to reel and her stomach begin to churn. “What’s going on?”

She closed her eyes, trying to make herself wake up. It had to be a dream. But she could feel her body, she still smelled the stench in the truck cab, the rough cloth of the seat, the steering wheel cover making indentations in her forehead. She could feel it all and she knew it wasn’t a dream.

“What the hell is that light!” Maya muttered. A red light flashed in the corner of her vision and it would not go away. She swiped at it and then jerked back in surprise as messages erupted before her.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Lost Soul

Unstable Survivor

WELCOME!

“Ow, my head,” Maya rubbed her temples. Each message gave a little chime that seemed to echo in her head.

She remembered the messages that popped up when she was fled from the black lightning. Now the messages floated in the center of her vision, moving with her as she turned her head.

“Oh, man. This is going to be a problem,” she muttered. She reached forward and touched the “Welcome!” floating letters. She felt a slight pressure as if touching a button and like opening an email or drop down menu, words began appearing in a new window.

WELCOME!

The Integration of your world has commenced.

You will note many changes occurring on your world in the coming days, months, and years. This is to be expected.

Integration is a necessity for the continued health of the multiverse, but do not look at it as a tragedy but as an opportunity. For Integration will allow you and your species the chance to surpass the limits of your mortal forms.

Integration of previously un-contacted universes causes temporary high levels of Universal Essence and Mana, which will lead to mutation in non-sentient biological life. To incentivize local populations dealing with Essence and Mana mutation incursions, a reward system will be instituted to offer Universal Credits and rewards for culling mutations.

Integration is not a punitive measure nor should it be seen as one. It is an opportunity for you and your species.

“Okay…” Maya said. The message continued to dominate her sight, but after a moment it blinked away. The other messages were still floating, awaiting her attention.

It wasn’t a dream and she wasn’t insane; that Maya knew. Therefore she had to assume whatever was happening was due to the whole “Integration” thing the message was talking about. Multiverse, essence, mana? What was this? A game?

Maya pondered the message for a moment, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. Her mother was big on meditation, it helped calm the mind and slowed the run away effects of panic. Maya breathed in and out slowly.

It was difficult to find peace of mind when the messages were still being displayed while her eyes were closed.

Maya racked her brain for a moment, trying to see if she remembered anything from Pops about being stuck in some rainbow sky world by herself. For a man who had something to say about everything, she came up blank.

“Must be the end of the world,” Maya smiled. “First thing’s first. Deal with the email, then get to work.”

She touched the first floating message.

Stranger in a Strange Land

The multiverse is infinite with infinite places and pocket dimensions. You have arrived at one. You should not be here.

Intention I

“That’s unnerving,” Maya remarked.

They were game notifications, she realized.

She was stuck in a real life game brought on by some extra universal being. She wanted to laugh, but was gripped by a sense of horror. Some being had come into the universe and fundamentally changed it. A being with such vast powers and abilities, but it also knew who she was and was sending messages to her. Maya shuddered at the thought.

She tried tapping on the message again to see if she could get anymore information, but it vanished.

“Help menu?” Maya asked hesitantly. Nothing. “Help?” Nothing.

Sighing she tapped on the second message.

Lost Soul

Even the System doesn’t know where you are. That’s fine, though, because the System will always be with you.

Evaluation I

“Even more unnerving,” Maya remarked. “Lost Soul? System? Evaluation?”

Maya pondered the message. So the thing that had changed everything was called the System, which was an oddly bland name. Yet it sounded more like a computer program than a powerful god like being. If it was going about changing whole universes, then it probably had to automate things.

She felt somewhat calmed by that notion. It was better the cold indifferent eye of a machine than the hot attention of some god.

Still, she didn’t know what to make of the secondary part of the messages. Intention? Evaluation? What did they mean? A wiki would be nice.

She moved onto the third message.

Unstable Survivor

Luck is on your side. You had one in a billion chance of surviving the Dimensional Instability in your area. Congratulations.

+ 10 points to Luck.

Dimensional Awareness I

Dimensional Inventory I

Dimensions 101

The cold hand of dread gripped Maya again as she digested the message. One in a billion. She shouldn’t have survived what happened. All those people she had seen vanish when the lightning had hit them. They were all dead. They weren’t trapped in some rainbow sky world like she was. They were dead.

Yet this was the most game like message she had received. Luck was a stat, right? She had played some games in her youth, but hadn’t been as keen on them as her brothers were. She barely remembered the phrase “S.P.E.C.I.A.L.” from some big franchise game. That one had luck as a stat too.

How did one even quantify luck?

Dimensional Awareness was similar to Intention and Evaluation. They were abilities, she realized. If there was a Roman numeral “I” in front of it, it must be upgradeable. Maya smiled bleakly at her discovery. She was definitely in a game world.

Inventory was straight forward. Every game had an inventory system, though Maya realized that the dimensional aspect of it was different from plain old inventory.

“Inventory,” Maya said.

She jerked back as the messages slid away and in its place rose up a black and empty space. She reached toward it and felt a chill as her hand passed through. After a thought, she reached into the side pocket of the truck door and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. She then pushed it toward the black space.

There was a slight resistance and the paper vanished from her hand. In the space, an icon of the crumpled paper appeared. At the bottom of the window words appeared.

.05 grams

“Awesome,” Maya smiled. “I won’t ever need pockets anymore.”

She removed the paper, a touch of the icon making it appear in her hand. Then she tried willing it into the inventory and it vanished. She tried it in various places and saw that it was connected to only her hands. She couldn’t set it on her thigh and send it into the inventory.

After a few more minutes of playing with the Inventory, Maya realized she didn’t even have to say the word “Inventory” to make the window appear. She could also change the window size and move it around her vision. The menus she could stick onto arbitrary spaces, so it didn’t follow her around when she looked elsewhere.

She moved the Inventory window so that it sat on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel, appearing as if it were a monitor. She found the items she had purchased from the convenient store and willed them into the inventory window. Four icons appeared after the crumpled paper. An energy drink, a candy bar, a pack of gum, and a plastic bag. She pulled the plastic bag out and saw it was only the bag, not the items that had been in it.

“Interesting. Auto sort.” Maya mused. The icons were in neat horizontal rows and Maya touched them and slowly managed to move them over, without pulling the items out. She thought about it again and willed it with her mind; the items moved from one end of the window to the other. Maya smiled. “Awesome.”

The inventory window was about eight by six items. She didn’t know if they stacked, but she was impressed by the size. She could carry forty-eight items with her and not even feel it.

The number beneath the window changed also.

0.61 kilograms

“I’ve never used metric in my life,” Maya said. “Why is it in metric?”

The last item on the list was Dimensions 101. It wasn’t an ability or a stat boost like Luck, but Maya guessed it had to do with the title. The Intention and Evaluation were first level numbers and the Dimensions was probably the same. The 101 college prefix, notwithstanding.

“So what are you? Information? A text book?” Maya shrugged. Whatever it was, she didn’t have it nor was she given it. If it was a game, then shouldn’t it have appeared in her inventory or dropped from the heavens? Maya shrugged again. Maybe it was already in her head. She tried thinking of dimensions and her mind wasn’t filled with otherworldly knowledge, thankfully.

“I’ve got enough strange things going on,” Maya said before willing all the windows and messages to disappear. It worked and she blinked for a moment, staring outside of her truck windows.

The terrifying rainbow skies had taken most of her attention, then the messages that had appeared, now Maya took the time to look at where she was.

She didn’t see a sun out there. Yet even with no visible sun there wasn’t an absence of light. Instead the world was bathed in the different shades of blue one saw before sunrise.

Maya wondered if it was the rainbow sky that was casting the light or maybe some blue star she couldn’t see. Perhaps it was some kind of alien aurorae borealis?

With no sun shining overhead and the world in blue, she could only see a few hundred feet around her before it became too dark. Yet as she looked at the horizon, the sky wasn’t blindingly bright so she could see distant peaks of what appeared to be far away mountains.

She was stuck on a flat plain bathed in blue light. The ground from what she could see was hard packed earth, gray in color. There were no trees, shrubs, or grass anywhere and the ground itself was a unmarred by animal tracks. Everywhere she looked was just flat gray land that extended into darkness and eventually into lumpy horizons.

It reminded her of the images she had seen of the Utah Salt Flats, just flat land boxed in by distant mountains. Perhaps she was in a desert also. She pondered leaving the truck cab and investigating the land, but was hesitant to do so.

“Baby steps,” Maya muttered to herself as she cranked open her door window. Pops had a strong dislike for automatics or anything relying on motors, so the window was a hand cranked one. She eased her head out of the window and took a breath.

The air smelled of nothing. There was no scent. It reminded her of an empty steel locker that hadn’t been used in ages. The air was stale and flat. Maya took a longer deep breath and then closed her window.

“There has to be trees of some kind, right? What makes the oxygen?” Maya wondered out loud. She peered into the distant gloom, but couldn’t see anything. Maybe she was in the deserts of this planet. Perhaps beyond those distant mountains were alien trees and grasslands.

Maya continued looking toward the distant darkness and felt a shudder of fear. Alien plants, alien creatures, alien civilizations?

“You ain’t scared of the dark, you’re scared of what’s in the dark,” Pops used to tell her when she was a child followed by: “I can kick whatever’s in the dark’s ass.”

She dug around the back seat of the truck and pulled out two things. One was what her Pops called the Negotiator, a three foot long heavy steel crowbar and the other was a bag that held a first aid kit, road flares, and some tools. She set the tool bag on the seat, frowning at the vomit that still covered it, and hefted the crowbar.

It was a good solid piece of metal.

Maya willed her Inventory open and then sent the crowbar into it. An icon of the crowbar appeared, taking up one square spot. Maya smiled.

She did it with the bag of tools and was annoyed to see that everything in it, as with the plastic bag, was separated. The band-aids, scissors, and minor stuff that had filled the first aid kit and bag were all displayed, taking up a dozen slots. Though she was also surprised to see that similar items did stack, instead of taking up a slot themselves. The dozen bandaids all stacked into one icon with a number 12 below it.

With her new magical inventory system, Maya was feeling a bit relieved. Her situation might be bad, but at least she had stuff she couldn’t seem to physically lose.

She pulled items out of her pockets and the small purse she carried, adding them into the inventory also. By the time she was done, nearly two thirds of her inventory was filled with random stuff she found in the truck. She played with it for a moment, taking things in and out before settling upon her phone.

There were, unsurprisingly, no cell or data reception. She was well out of range of any of that, but the clock and the rest of the phone worked. It wasn’t nine in the morning anymore, but two in the afternoon. Five hours had slipped by while she had been unconscious.

She willed the phone back in her inventory and looked around once again. The world was still gloomy and the sky was still a distorted rainbow. She took a breath.

“Now, what was that about a luck stat?” she wondered.