The world broke apart around Zack after he crossed the event horizon of the blue portal. Everything exploded all at once, the grass, the people, the buildings, everything. Smoke like puffballs of every color imaginable surrounded him and changed, growing brighter or dimmer in a stunning display of chaos. Then all at once everything began to work itself back towards order. The colored puffballs joined together and turned white until a new world reformed itself around him.

He stood in the middle of a featureless white expanse. Looking down, he could see that the ground was a little bit transparent but it didn’t appear to be glass, after giving it a hard look he could see stars on the infinite blackness of space beneath it.

Zackery asked “Have we reached the barrier dimension?”

A loud deep voice that he had never heard before resounded “YYeeess. HHuuman.” the words running long.

A silver line streaked across the space above him. It circled in tighter and tighter circles until it slowed. Then it fell and surrounded Zack, who found himself to be in the center of some kind of coiled mechanical sky serpent. The body must have been at least a thousand feet long and as thick as a city bus. Multitudes of short fragile looking wings protruded from every one of the segmented sections of it’s body.

A round face made of flesh with a dozen black eyes outlining it’s perimeter looked down on Zack from directly over his head, in the center was a mouth that spoke “Climb aboard and I will take you to your camp.” digital text displayed over it’s head:

Basic Likiper

Akma was manipulating his vision to bring him information.

“Bloody hell.” Zack mused as a spherical hole opened in one of the segmented section, revealing a container with a seat inside. As Zack was walking towards the entrance he reached his hand out to touch one of the wings, it looked so soft. “Don’t.” said the giant winged cyborg snake “They are razor sharp and you will cut yourself.” Zack pulled hand back and carefully entered the compartment. A light went on and then he could see through the walls as if they were transparent. Zack messed with a few of the controls on the side wall to see what they did. The body became more and less transparent as he slid a bar from side to side. The organic head of the snake remained entirely visible.

Zack asked “What is the purpose of this?”

Akma answered “If you’re ever part of a raid, you will know.”

The head with a dozen eyes pointed straight up and the wings in the front sections began to beat at a furious pace like a hummingbird’s. It rose with a speed comparable to a rocket launching into space. Zack felt himself getting pushed back into his seat for a much longer time than whenever he flew by jet plane. There were no landscape features to judge their speed by but Zack guessed they were moving above supersonic speeds.

The Basic Likiper picked up several more people. Some of them were in various states of disability, from morbid obesity to full body paralysis. Loading them took longer since the Likiper had to carefully drop down directly on top of them. After reaching full capacity, they sped towards a massive black dome.

Akma said “The Alpha Dome. If anyone enters this eight thousand square mile barrier dimension, then the people within will know where.” A hole opened in the side of it to allow the Likiper entry. The wings stopped beating and the body weaved, Zack was pressed against the straps in his seat from the sudden deceleration. The Likiper entered the dome and several meters of concrete rushed passed Zack. A thought struck him and he said “How could this massive structure have been built in a week? It’s bigger than some of mankind’s greatest works of architecture.”

Akma said “Just wait until orientation.”

The Likiper exits the tunnel and Zack looks at a metropolis filled with skyscrapers. Lights shown from every room, occasionally bright flashes came from the larger areas as if there were successive explosions within them. The Likiper entered a highway with wide lanes that had been built just for it’s kind. After traveling for a short distance, it stopped before a building that had a sign that read: New Arrival Center.

Every single type of person from planet Earth imaginable was standing in the large auditorium. All creeds, ethnicities and professions. Each person eager to give their all for a shot at immortality. But what caught Zack’s attention were the numerous disabled veterans with briefcases.

Zack said “Those are guns right?”

Akma nodded “They were told to bring their weapons of choice.”

”Huh, well should I have brought my keyboard and mouse then?” said Zack, feeling a bit out of place among such large dangerous men.

Akma shook his head and said “The multiverse introduction ceremony is about to begin.”

An eight foot tall alien woman took the stage, at least she had breasts and a humanoid body, but the rest of her was unlike that of human’s form. Long arms reached from her shoulders to her reversed knees, she had legs that ended in three toes with talons that dug into the ground. Skin tone was very dark but had slight orange tinge to it, her crew cut hair was bright green and her four eyes were yellow like a cat’s. Above her head was the name:

Kerink Mid-tierman Species: Elrin

The entire room stiffened at her arrival. Zack truly realized then and there that their world had entered a new age, where beings straight from Star Trek would be commonplace.

Kerink sounded very bored and a little annoyed as she addressed everyone “So you all are the pathetic primitives that froze the favor markets.” she swept the room with a glare “The front lines cannot spend favor to upgrade themselves until Akmadouric is done recuperating from breaking into your dimension. Not only that but he’s gotta fix your broken bodies so that you can be worth something. If any of you think that you can just get your limbs back and leave then just bear in mind; that failure to prove your worth in the war could mean that billions of these things invade your home dimension."

Behind her a twenty foot tall spherical black apparition appeared on the stage. All of the humans backed away but Kerink casually turned to face it. Dozens of tentacles with sharp sets of teeth on their ends shot forth from the creature but their green haired hostess swatted them away like flies, hands a blur, sharp cracks like gunshots came from the stage at every contact. Zack could see a dozen black eyes start to glow until they left their sockets and transformed into spiky blood red balls of energy that rotated around it. A moment later the eyes began to regrow, bleeding dark purple blood as they did. Kerink could no longer be seen clearly but a blur bounced off of the walls, floor and ceiling around the creature. White bolts of light shot from the blur at the monster from all directions, creating lacerations on the main body and severing tentacles. Zack watched closely and once he thought he could see her change direction mid-air, impacting with a near transparent pane that was only there for a moment. Then she was on the ceiling.

Time slowed drastically for Zack. She drew back her fist and white light wrapped around it, growing larger and larger, until she thrust it downward in a wide arc and a giant fist of ethereal white light shot from Kerink. Impacting the spherical many eyed black monster from above. Driving it into the ground where it broke up into…digital code?

It was a hologram used for training. But for it to be solid and not just an illusion was way ahead of Earth technology by centuries.

Looking around the room, Zack wondered just how many people within the auditorium had eyes capable of seeing every detail of the fight in the way that he had. Aside from whatever time manipulation Akma did during that final blow. Then he wondered how they all reacted to the display.

Kerink walked forward and asked “Now do I have your attention?” the looks on the faces of the people in the room ranged from shock to intense scrutiny. A man in a military uniform stepped forward on one leg and said “What is going on here? The way you killed that thing without using any kind weapon. Throwing those white projectiles from the palms of your hands, it may as well have been magic.” above his head was the name:

Sargent Becker

Zack frowned and thought ‘He was able to make out more details than I did.’

“Watch closely.” Kerink produced a white cube from her clothes and held it in the palm of her hand, everyone advanced towards the stage out of curiosity.

“This is formless matter. It does not occur naturally in any universe.” Her face scrunched in concentration. The cube shimmered for a moment then slowly turned into metal and then she said “Pure titanium.”

Zack said aloud “What did I just witness?”

“I used my mind’s willpower energy to change part of the universe around me into a form of my choosing.”

‘Might as well be magic. No, it is indistinguishable from magic’ thought Zack “But that doesn’t explain how you were able to shoot lightning from your hands like Zeus.”

Kerink shook her head and frowned at the Earthen culture reference “If a person is able to create matter in such a way, then they would also be able to create a type of matter that hasn’t before been seen in the universe. And then using that matter, they could also create new tools and, in my case, new biological systems.”

She paused for a moment to let her audience digest the information and implications of it “In Akmadouric’s case, he can use his willpower energy to write new physics into a universe, create formless matter out of nothing and create or copy a body or consciousness. The power of a deity is not something within the grasp of even an immortal like myself.”

‘Down the rabbit hole we go.’ Zack immediately asked “Don’t these deities have some kind of limitation?”

“Two actually.” Akma dropped out of his vortex and landed on the stage next to Kerink “The first is a finite amount of willpower energy, although it does replenish over time. The second is imagination, or lack thereof. For example, nobody can imagine a universe without numbers or light and darkness.”

‘The power of a deity.’ Zack repeated the alien woman’s words in his head.