That mist, it turned out, had marked us. ‘Sigil of Emptiness,’ Joe had read from his interface, though there was no further description that he could call up. He had also received a ‘fortified essence foundation’ status effect, which seemed as good a description as any for the power boost the essence mist imparted.

My powers having been returned to working order, I reached out and touched the barrier again. My recently sharpened mystic senses picked up on the connection it made with me, but I still wasn’t able to peer into the game function area, where the connection seemed to reach. My guess was that it was looking for that newly placed sigil, and that these functions were not meant to be tampered with.

While that connection was maintained, the black bars of the barrier melted away at my touch, reforming as soon as I withdrew my hand. Looks like we would be able to move forward from here, but we weren’t opening the way for everyone, and probably couldn’t even hold the way open for specific others. Not without breaking the barrier entirely, which I wasn’t certain I could manage.

We made our way down the stairs and found another hovering pink crystal. I marveled at its utterly perfect clarity. Even with my sharp arcane senses I could detect no patterns, either like the magical items or Hollow Men’s shells I had seen, or the more organic patterns of the entropy spirit boss within. Its magic seemed to be purely an expression of its nature - absolute stability, if my general feeling on the matter could be trusted. That or this was also a part of the game that wasn’t meant to be messed with. Though sooner or later we would certainly try anyway. I raised my arm to make contact.

[Would you like to bind yourself to location: Earth-Human-UpperCheckpoint-11?]

I sent an affirmative. I saw, for the briefest of moments, a glimpse of some complex magical construct deep within the core of the crystal. That part looked a lot more like something I could mess with, once I got a better grip on this crafting or enchanting system. Maybe hacking the game functions from within the game was an intended progression path? Worth keeping an eye out for, as that sort of progression definitely suited my skill set better than just playing the game normally.

Lindsey and Joe bound their locations as well, and we were off. The stairwell below was identical in every way to the one above. When we reached the first landing, I continued downward. The others wordlessly followed after me. I wanted to see if there was another barrier and maybe even check out the boss before we worried about the other floors.

As we descended the staircase I realized that I wasn’t winded at all, despite the rapid pace and an enduring allergy of stairs I had picked up from my previous apartment building. Placing a hand on my midsection, I felt like I was probably a bit less soft than my actual body would have been. Good. It would be terrible if every Mystic was stuck in their real life body. I wasn’t terribly inconvenienced, but these towers weren’t exactly handicap accessible. I looked over my shoulder at Joe, at how he effortlessly handled the stairs despite being in a totally different body. No tutorial, no acclimation period, nothing. There was definitely an order of magnitude more mind-body fuckery going on than I had been prepared for.

We reached the twentieth floor landing, and did indeed find something different. Two somethings, in fact. First, there was a massive pile of random objects filling the stairway down. Magically, it looked almost exactly like the bars of the previous barrier, so it probably served the same purpose, if in a physically different form. The objects I recognized were human artifacts, historical but useless stuff like trophies, tires from old style cars, wooden furniture, primitive screens with dials and buttons, and a whole host of stuff I wasn’t immediately familiar with. I bent down and picked up a cube with each side covered in grids of colorful squares, but it dissolved before I could properly examine it. In my peripheral vision, I could see the pile shift. I looked up in time to see a lamp materialize, displacing some of the other junk.

“Well, we aren’t getting through here, not without the key or some serious planning, and we’ve got low hanging fruit left,” I said. I turned to the second unique feature of this landing, the elevator doors. If we stipulate that the doors leading to the actual floors were on the north side of the stairwell, then these elevator doors were set into the east side. The doors themselves were sturdy looking things, older style than even the oldest I had ever seen in an apartment building or office, but in much better shape. There was no floor indicator, and there was only a single call button.

“Elevator, or check out the boss?” I asked. My companions both stiffened at the mention of the boss.

“Elevator, I think,” Joe responded right away, “that last boss was a lot worse than I was expecting.”

“I agree. Dying before an insurmountably larger and stronger foe was not something I would like to repeat so soon,” our European comrade contributed.

“I wasn’t saying we try to fight it,” I defended my suggestion, “but yeah, we can check it out another time.”

I pushed the call button, and with a chime that sounded like it may have been made by an actual bell, the doors slid open. We stepped into the elevator, the three of us only just able to fit. Joe took up half of the space himself, pressing himself backwards to make as much room available as he could. The doors closed behind us, and I could feel the space shift somehow. I wasn’t able to pin down what exactly had happened though, my senses weren’t sharp enough yet. The interior of the elevator was carpeted in a plush, rich red. The walls were wood panelling with brass accents. There were twenty-six brass buttons, labeled ‘10’ through ‘34’ and ‘H’.

“H?” I asked.

“Try ten. I have a hunch,” Joe suggested.

I pushed the brass button labeled ‘10’, and the elevator shuddered for a moment as if to signify that it was moving, and then went still again. After a few moments, it shuddered again, and then the doors opened. We stepped out onto the exact same landing we had left behind. Except… it wasn’t the same. There was the elevator door we were stepping out of, the door up to the 20th floor and presumably the next boss, and the pile of random objects. But the objects in the pile were different. There was this big obvious black box that had what looked like two speakers taking up most of its face, which definitely wasn’t there in the pile I had first examined.

I looked over at Joe. “Is this...”

“A different tower? I think so.”

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“It was a guess, mostly. Tower instances are the only numbered thing we have run into.”

“Why can’t we go to the single digit towers?” I wondered aloud.

He shrugged.

Lindsey was looking apprehensively at the stairs leading up.

“Will your company be satisfied with this circumstantial evidence,” she asked, “or will we need to actually climb up to the crystal to confirm?”

Joe and I eyed the stairs, gears within our heads turning away.

“Yeah, no.” I said, “We can always come back later. We can’t really leverage this without coordinating with some of our other coworkers, who are probably already fighting their respective bosses. Let’s see what ‘H’ is all about.”

We piled back into the elevator, hit the ‘H’ button, and waited for the doors to open again. When they finally did, we stepped out into a small concrete room. It was visually similar to the stairwell we had left behind, but there were no stairs up or down, just a single door. I pushed the door open and heard the sharp intake of breath.

Spreading out before the doorway was open sky, the strange teal of the sky above gradually fading into a soft lavender below. A glossy transparent surface stretched as far as I could see. I stepped out onto the strange surface, and found it to be solid and slightly slick to my weird cloth starter shoes. Behind me was a skyscraper, rising hundreds and hundreds of feet above, and descending down into flowing clouds, a difficult to discern distance below. There were other skyscrapers in the distance, gleaming vertical pylons breaking up the horizon. They seemed much farther away here than they appeared from the roof. While I was looking down, there was a momentary break in the clouds, enough for me to catch a glimpse of/

/saw a pair of crimson orbs, stark against the background of rolling, white clouds. I narrowed my eyes. I had been looking at something, or for something, but I couldn’t remember what. It felt like it was on the tip of my tongue, like I was just on the verge of being able to recall, but... nothing. The sudden appearance of a third red spot shocked me out of my haze. I brought my hand to my face and it came away red. I tore my eyes from the clouds below. I could recall that there was something fucked up down there, but that was about as close as my mind was willing to approach the memory. I checked my pigeon for any mental damage, and found him to be whole.

[I experience the world from your impressions, when you allow it. You have shielded me from this harm.]

I also found him taking notes on what I had seen and experienced and on some of my conclusions, something that I had not told him to do. He was already nearly halfway through the only bottle of ink I had. He was also rather more mentally complex than I remembered him being.

[I grow from your power. Together, we promote synergy.]

Of course we do. I looked around to my human companions. Well, human on the inside. They were both sporting similar nosebleeds, shaking themselves out of whatever stupor the thing below the clouds had put us in.

“Eyes up,” I said, “let’s see if we can avoid that happening again.”

“There’s something in the direction of the central tower,” Joe said, pointing.

I looked in that direction, trying to keep my eyes off the clouds below as much as I could. There was definitely some debris or something around the base of the tower below the glowing orb and the inverted mountain.

We set out toward the central tower, keeping our eyes up as much as we could. Considering that we were traversing a flat plane of glass, we didn’t need to worry about watching our footing, making the trip a trial of patience, rather than a hazardous trek. At first, our topics of conversation were mostly meaningless small talk, so I stayed out of it. I wasn’t good with that sort of thing at the best of times, and I was still shaken by our recent encounter. Joe and Lindsey were probably the types to be soothed by the conversation instead. After we had all had time for the stress of our disturbing experience to dissipate a little, we broached the topic.

“What do you think your recording will show?” I asked Joe.

“Probably nothing,” Joe said, “I blacked out, so I doubt the game was sending information at all for my hardware to record. That would be the efficient way to do it, for an effect like that.”

“I do not care,” Lindsey said, “I will be deleting that segment of my recordings. I hate horror movies, and this game has been reminding me why.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “Can you imagine if the recording could do to people what it did to us?”

I had no idea what sort of danger the recording could realistically pose, if it showed anything at all, but I was much happier knowing that there would be one less copy out there if she was really going to delete hers, at least until more players made it to this point. Another potential infohazard, and in another easily accessed location.

Joe and I shared a look. “That’d be wild,” I said.

“And I thought that all those old men warning about the dangers of alien technology were simply old and jealous,” Lindsey continued, “that their generation has come and gone without something so interesting happening.”

“Hey now,” I said, “Joe and I are old men.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “What? Really? You can’t possibly be over thirty,” she said to me.

“Forty-two,” I threw back.

“Well,” she said, “I did not know I was in the company of two dinosaurs.”

And with that, she and Joe tossed banter back and forth while we traveled. I didn’t participate, but with soothing pulses from my pigeon, I was able to laugh along, confident that we were laughing together. My social situation earlier in life would have probably been a lot different if I had had a confidence pigeon back then.

After about ten more minutes, we realized there was something wrong. We were no closer to our destination, yet we had managed to put substantial distance between ourselves and the tower we had come out of.

We discussed our predicament, whether we were caught in a trap, dealing with ongoing effects of our exposure to the thing below the clouds, or simply misjudging the distances involved. I voiced my suspicion, spurred on by the wildly different tower layout here compared to up top.

“I think it’s a partially conceptual space, like my main inventory.”

“And that would mean?” Lindsey prompted.

“Well, in my inventory, things seem to keep their position compared to other objects, but unless I set things at specific distances on purpose, distance ends up being kind of meaningless.”

“So if that’s the case here,” Joe said, “then we aren’t getting anywhere because we aren’t really focused. We’re just bullshitting, so we make no progress.”

“Or very little progress,” I said.

“Well, it is very easy to test. We just want very hard to be at that tower, and we walk there, yes?” Lindsey asked.

I nodded. I took a deep breath, and set out towards the tower we had been heading for. We took two or three steps, and already I could see the tower racing towards us. This was enough to break my focus, and I stumbled forward. I got an eyeful of fluffy clouds, and immediately jerked my head back to avoid seeing anything I would regret.

“That’s freaky,” Joe said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “a bit like an oncoming train, but bigger.”

It took two more false starts, but we managed to steel ourselves and stride towards the massive object rushing to meet us. Once we got going, we reached the area around the central tower in less than two dozen steps.

The base of the tower was different from the surrounding zone. The primary difference being the enormous wall of roughly cut glass blocks forming a ring around the tower itself, rising roughly thirty feet into the air and with no visible gaps. I could see some shapes and blobs of color behind the wall, though the roughness of the blocks made it impossible to see clearly. The glass below our feet was different too - it was scuffed and scratched to the point where it was totally opaque. We worked our way around the outside of the ring, speculating about the nature of what we had found, until we came to a gatehouse and proved Joe right.

“A town,” he had said.

At the gate, two guards seemed quite surprised to see us. Another of the stark white humanoids, this one male, and a rust scaled humanoid, roughly my height but with two thick snakes where his head would be. Both wore well-made leather armor, and had crossbows hung from straps, the way a modern firearm would be. NPCs, yet another can of worms.

“Was that one of the races you could pick?” I asked Joe, indicating the two-headed snakeman.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Ah well, not like I can reroll anyway.”