Chapter 1 - The Witch and her Three Stooges

Name: Taen Movorio

Level 1

Class: None

Name: Chris Ederson

Level 1

Class: None

Name: Michael Noren

Level 1

Class: None

Years ago in the past…

Long before the more major waves of Earthborn came to these lands…

Long before Trey had ever met them… his future guild mates were having a rather rough time.

***

Everyone has dreams. Most people have experienced some very moving ones at that; emotions that excite, terrify, or bring to light memories you would otherwise suppress... the ones lingering in the back of your mind. On numerous occasions Taen had dealt with nightmares like these, but usually he wasn’t self aware during those moments. Usually he didn’t realize that he was dreaming. Usually he woke up and laughed about it with friends or family and moved on immediately afterwards. Most of all, he usually didn’t - in the truest sense of the word - “feel” anything in previous dreams.

So... why was he in so much pain?

“This has got to be the weirdest acid trip I’ve ever had.” Muttered Chris as he stumbled around in the dark. Catching himself on a wall and swearing profusely as he did so, he began to descend into what seemed to be a shallow cavern alongside the perimeter of his prison.

Waking up in what was likely an incredibly large pit with steep walls encircling the perimeter, he was unhappy and very confused to find himself here.

Wherever here was.

The starlight and strange, green-glowing insects that flashed frantically about him (what Chris had assumed to be fireflies) were all he was able to use to make out his surroundings. Rubble and debris littered the ground with old broken structures about him. Vegetation was scarce, and what little was present could be found in patches whose placement seemed oddly intentional.

Little had Chris begun to think about such things when he heard a heart-wrenching scream, and he grew cold with fear. It had come from only twenty or thirty yards away to his right. It took him a minute to muster the courage to get up and walk over there; but after his eyes had adjusted and many minutes later, he hesitantly tip-toed over the rubble in the direction from which the chilling sound had come from. Getting closer and swearing as he stubbed his foot and nearly toppled over, he began to hear the sounds of moaning as well.

He dropped to his hands and knees, and he began to crawl... not wanting to fall into the pit face first. A moment later as his right hand extended into the darkness, it came upon a surprisingly moist patch of dirt. Pausing for a second, he gradually continued and within a few feet he felt out and touched a warm, wet, clay-like material that he couldn’t quite make out. He began to feel around some more, and the outlines of the corpse came to light when a flashing green insect flew directly to land on the dead man.

Chris launched himself back and tried to contain himself to no avail, vomiting up what had been his late night munchies just hours beforehand. “It’s just the acid man… just the acid… maybe it’s the shrooms, or the weed got laced, but this shit isn’t real man… it’s probably just the acid… calm down man…”

Chris went on and on for another minute or more before he finally looked back over his shoulder at the now dark outline of the corpse. He was becoming frantic and began to think out loud, trying to reason with himself as to what was happening and why he was here. “I took the drugs like eight hours ago, right? Maybe? Wait... the sun isn’t out yet and I’m still trippin’ so yeah that’s gotta be it, I didn’t sleep as long as I thought I had so I’m still feelin’ it. This will all be over soon, so just hang tight there trooper you got this…”

A voice called out, causing him to jump and interrupting his train of thought. “...Hey, I think… I think I need some help.”

The voice was close, only a few yards away.

Chris whirled around, picking up a fist sized rock and pulling his arm back threateningly. His voice also became high-pitched with fright. “Who’s there!? I’ll beat your ass!”

“...Seriously, I’m bleeding out… the right side of my body is crushed and my arm got it especially bad. I don’t know what’s going on, but please call an ambulance. I think we’ve all been in some sort of accident.”

Chris shifted his weight, getting ready to fling the rock full force in the direction of the voice. “I haven’t been in some accident, this is one of two things; either I’m hallucinating because of all the fun time funk I took last night and I’m going to wake up to laugh this off soon, or someone abducted me and put me here. Regardless of which it is, I have no problem shoving this rock down your throat.”

“... I’m going to assume you don’t have a phone.”

Sure enough, Chris found that his phone was missing.

Chris screamed back at the voice in frustration. “You must have taken it! So you gonna tell me about the body?! You gonna kill me too?! What is this place and why am I here?!”

The voice from the darkness didn’t respond. Only complete silence followed.

Chris didn’t move a muscle, just waiting in the dark, poised to strike out with his rock for breathless seconds. Cold sweat began to move down his face and neck, fear slowly taking its place in his mind... as he was torn between running or confronting this unknown person.

He could barely make out the sounds of ragged breathing coming from the dark. Chris really had no idea what awaited him, so he decided that he would stand there for as long as it took. If he heard the sounds of someone approaching, he’d be able to use that as a guide to chuck his impromptu weapon.

He never even knew that the strike was coming before something heavy and hard hit him square in the head, knocking him unconscious and dropping him immediately to the ground.

***

Chris woke up with the sun beating down on his bloodied face, the rock that had been thrown at him the night before lay next to him alongside his own. Coming to his senses, he got up and swung around as fast as he could. Spotting the face down body of the corpse first, Chris then noticed the still barely-breathing man who he’d talked to the night before. To his surprise, Chris knew who it was.

The man struggling to breathe was laying face-up on the dirt about two yards from where Chris stood. In the light of the sun, Chris could make out the familiar wavy-brown hair… even if it was matted down with blood. He was somewhat muscular, though he was on the leaner side of things. Blue, bloodshot eyes and handsome features that usually got him into trouble with the ladies contorted into a pained grimace; and stared back out at Chris with a glint of relief.

Taen even gave him smile. “Hello Chris. Nice seeing you here…”

“Taen? What the hell Taen! What happened to you bro?” Chris scrambled over to the limp form of his friend. Taen had been right when he said that he was injured. Taen’s right arm was bent around completely backwards and snapped in 3 very obvious places. After looking him over again, Chris noticed that a few ribs and left lower leg were also broken. Dried blood was strewn across the rubble around them, and he REALLY didn’t know how Taen was still alive.

Taen gave a weak attempt at a laugh. “Sorry about the rock to the face, Chris. I didn’t know it was you because you seriously sound like a little girl when you get scared. That, and my left arm is still somewhat usable so I’d figured I’d go out with a bang. Thought you were going to kill me in some sort of sick joke after killing Michael there . Though, surprisingly enough, I actually feel better than I did last night. I thought I’d be dead by now.”

“Yeah, you look terri--- wait, what?! Michael…?” Chris turned to look at the corpse again. To his horror, he also recognized the man lying dead on the ground.

Chris brushed his long, blonde, hippie hair over to the ideas he examined the body from afar with disbelief. He felt sick, and seeing his dead friend laying there in the dirt made him relive the key event that’d unfolded to entangle the three of their lives.

Taen was a local medical student who had moved to Texas from Tennessee to pursue a career as a general surgeon. Michael had just graduated from a very prestigious university that Chris had forgotten the name of and was working in banking. Michael often looked the part too, very clean cut black hair often slicked back and usually was seen in a suit. Meanwhile Chris had dropped out of college to become a drug dealer, and a very successful one at that according to him. Chris liked to listen to old school 70’s and 80’s rock bands, many of his friends claimed he was a hippy. The odds of them becoming friends would have seemed low knowing their different paths in life and different personality types, but regardless it had happened when they’d met that fateful day at the krav maga class all those years ago… The trio of stooges had been hanging out ever since.

Chris rubbed his chin, then covered his mouth to try and hold back the bile. He didn’t succeed, and vomited all over. “God… damn…”

“Yeah. Apparently someone really has it in for us. Have you taken a look around? This place is some sort of ruins. But that’s not the weirdest part. Look up.” Taen pointed to the sky.

He was correct. Up in the clear, cloudless sky, outlined against the blue... was an enormous, faintly-orange circle with various patterns struck out across its surface.

That’s when everything else surrounding Chris became ever-more prominent.

The objects and rubble Chris had been making his way through in the night were what appeared to be the remnants of a very peculiar, walled-in city. Oval shaped stone buildings that had probably once been houses decorated the interior of the deserted medieval metropolis. Patches of trees and scarce bits of vegetation outlined various pockets inbetween the broken buildings and stone debris piled around.

The air was quite dry and very hot, likely due - at least in part - to the absolute lack of cloud cover. The outskirts, what Chris had originally thought to be cliffs, turned out to be man-made stone walls that soared to be at least eight or nine hundred feet high with occasional windows or holes shedding light down onto the interior.

It was quite a sight. The perimeter of the walled ruins must have been 40 or 50 football fields across.

“Ha! I knew it! I’m still tripping.”

“I am most-definitely not tripping Chris. That thing in the sky is what you think it is.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“That’s a planet Chris. Or a moon. Or some enormous painting someone painted over the sky, which sounds just as feasible.”

“No. It isn’t a planet or moon. That’s impossible.”

After a few minutes of staring, Taen began to laugh. His laughter was weak but genuine, and soon Chris joined in to laugh with him. It then quickly turned into hysteria on both accounts.

Chris ended up calming down not long after and sat down on the dirt next to Taen, sitting cross-legged with his arms supporting his chin. “You do know how ridiculous this is right? If there was another planet there, we would have seen it in the night sky last night. This has to be a trick of some sort. On top of that, how did we even get here? Do you know?”

Taen, who basically looked like he’d been run over a few times, just barely shook his head. He glanced over to Michael’s corpse and let on a grimace… but there was nothing he could do now. Michael was gone. Taen had to focus on getting himself out alive, along with Chris. “Technically, the planet or moon we are on could have rotated on its axis and that would have been a reason as to why we couldn’t see it - if it was theoretically possible for us to be on another planet right now. As for how I got into this place... no idea. I was studying for my Neuroanatomy exam. Fell asleep, next thing I know: I woke up next to Michael’s dead body, in a lot of pain. I scream. You run over and threaten me with rocks. Now I’m here looking up at what appears to be another planet. Good shit.”

“You didn’t happen to take any of my stash lately, did you?”

Taen rolled his eyes at the idiocy of the question, along with the implication. “No, Chris. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be likely to be sharing the same hallucination. In a situation where I did take your drugs, which I didn’t, you wouldn’t even be real right now. But everything is too accurate for this to be fake, Chris. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now since you’ve been knocked out. All the details are too vivid. The feeling of it all, it is too vivid. My ulnar nerve is completely screwed and is firing every couple seconds, my bones are fractured, it’s too painful for it to be fake. The images are too real to be fake. I don’t know what this place is or how we got here, but I’m pretty sure this is real. Though I don’t know how.”

Their conversation was abruptly interrupted.

“He’s quite right, you know! This is all VERY REAL! HAHAHA!” Squealed a man’s voice from behind the two friends with what seemed to be keen delight.

Startled, the two turned to look... but no one was there.

Again from behind them a sharp crack of noise and burst of light appeared. They didn’t have time to turn around before another startling crack of noise and burst of light appeared from within Taen’s body. Taen jumped up in bewilderment, and was immediately even more bewildered to see that he could jump up in the first place. To his amazement: his arm, along with the rest of his body, appeared to be back to normal... aside from the patches of blood and dirt covering it all.

Chris’s jaw dropped, and then another noise sounded out from behind them. They then simultaneously turned to see Michael’s once-limp form starting to move. Michael’s ‘corpse’ groaned, coughed up blood and bile, and then slowly got to its knees.

Chris pointed and squealed out in a high pitched voice: “IT’S A FUCKING ZOMBIE!”

Slowly, Michael turned his head with a very confused and pained look on his face. “...Taen…? Chris? What… What’s going on? Why… where am I?”

At this point - Taen and Chris were having panic attacks, and started scrambling over the rubble to get to Michael. They screamed out confused explanations or possibilities as fast as they could muster, though Chris did a little bit of just the screaming part too.

Yet another crack of sound, quickly followed by a flash of light, exploded inbetween the three of them - resulting in the figure of a little blonde girl. She wore a white, Sunday church dress with no shoes and many varieties of brilliantly colored flowers woven into her hair. She appeared to be about 5 or 6 years old, and held an amused expression upon staring them down.

Then she threw up her arms in excitement. To their further amazement, the little girl squealed out words in the man’s voice - the same one they’d heard just a couple second ago. “You were quite dead Michael. Very unfortunate. I had expected that your body would be able to take the trauma. I was mistaken, but I guarantee that it will change in time. Oh, I just can’t wait to get STARTED! We’re going to be THE BEST OF FRIENDS!!!”

Chris’ head was reeling with each subsequent event.

Taen severely injured.

Michael dead.

A fucking PLANET in the sky.

Then, all of a sudden, Taen is perfectly fine and Michael’s turned zombie? A girl appears out of nowhere, with the voice of an insane old man?

He’d had enough.

“Screw this, I’m out. Done. Mind is playing tricks on me. I’m selling all my drugs and never smoking any laced weed ever again, never eating any more shrooms, never chasing the dragon, never dropping acid ever again, just done. Done. Can’t take this shit. Gonna go to sleep, wake up, and write a book on how drugs are bad - mmmkay. Night.” With that, Chris turned and laid down, as if to try to go to sleep.

“But honey…” the little girl said in a progressively deeper voice, “I’m not done PLAYING WITH YOU YET!”

She reached out her hand towards Chris, and he instantly burst into flames. Screaming out in anguish, he started rolling about in an effort to put the fire out. Then, and as suddenly as the flames had appeared, they stopped again.

There was not a burn on his body, though his clothes were blackened and partially turned to ash. Chris lay there shuddering, looking up wide-eyed at the girl before him. Michael and Taen both did the same, not moving a muscle.

The grin on that little girl’s face had turned into a full fledged, teeth-baring smile, sheer pleasure blatant upon her features.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for you three.” Her voice now turned into a more natural form of what one would expect a little girl to sound like, and the deep man’s voice vanished. “Now that I have your attention, let me introduce myself. My name is Maltetious, and I am what you mortals would probably call a deity. I am an immortal Numen, which is very similar to what a god or goddess is but not quite that powerful. The same power structure of followers granting me power through prayer is followed though. Regardless, I am very VERY PLEASED to meet ALL of you!”

The three friends quickly exchanged glances before Michael burst out into jeering laughter. “You surely didn’t sound like a goddess, what sort of trick are you using? Voice synthesizer of some sort? And what sort of prank are you guys trying to pull on me anyways? I’ve got to admit this was funny, but I have to be somewhere today... you could have told me ahead of time you were going to abduct me! After all I alw---”

Michael was cut off and sent into a flaming, screaming fireball himself... this time for a duration that lasted nearly twice as long as the one Chris had endured. Writhing in pain and agony, blood exploded from his kneecaps - sending him into an even higher screech of pain.

In the next split second - he was back to normal just as Chris had been, though his clothes were scorched as well and there was fresh blood on the ground. Now terrified and in shock, Michael was able to get to his knees and look up in bewilderment at the self-proclaimed Numen. “She’s a witch…”

Maltetious sighed. “As I said, I am not a goddess - but a Numen! It isn’t very nice to interrupt your superiors, silly mortal! You should all get very used to the idea, and do it quickly unless you enjoy this type of punishment. I surely do! But even as that may be, I must get on with the games and to the point of why you are here. After all, THAT is when the REAL entertainment begins!”

Maltetious giggled and glanced down at Taen from her perch. The little girl then hopped down to the ground, taking Taen’s hands in her own and standing to be about his height while he knelt. She didn’t seem like a very imposing figure just by looking at her, but her huge smile and previous shows of ability (as well as a lack of perceived sanity) made Taen incredibly uncomfortable.

“You must have questions, they ALWAYS have questions! Tell me Taen, what do you wish to know before we start the games? I will give each of you two questions for now, and might, MIGHT, DEPENDING ON HOW I FEEL AT THE TIME, answer your other sniveling questions later. SO ASK. NOW!”

Taen stuttered at first at the abruptness of her request, but pulled himself together quickly after. “OK!... ok, yeah what the hell is going on here? Where are we?”

“Good questions, mortal, good questions. Two for two... Yes, yes! So your first question… What is going on here? Well, I have taken you three with the All Spirit’s permission. You are mine and will undergo games and trials. Where are you, you ask? You are with me of course! So silly, you should have known that already!”

Mischievously winking at Taen, Maltetious turned to Chris.

“For you Chris, what questions do you have for your superior? For the one you will serve?”

Chris paused for a second at that last statement, then asked: “If you’re some sort of powerful deity being, the first thing I’m gonna ask is can you lend me something to smoke? Like cigarettes maybe? Sorry, this situation is ridiculous and I don’t think you can expect---”

Chris was cut off mid sentence and flung against a nearby wall with tremendous force as Maltetious flicked her hand towards him in annoyance. He fell to the floor like a limp doll and lay there unmoving. She then turned her eyes towards Michael.

“And you, Michael? Surely you don’t have such trivial questions as that?”

Michael just sat there, unable to respond. He looked like he wanted to talk, but couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth. After a couple of seconds, He just glanced towards the ground and kept his eyes there - having an expression of disbelief written upon his face.

“Very well then! Here are the rules: You must survive your FIRST trial by any means necessary; if you don’t then you will repeat the trial. None of you can move on to the next trial until all three of you complete the trial, though you may repeat the trial to help another move on IF you wish to do so. By doing so you reset your claim to victory and must claim victory of the trial again. At the end of each trial I will give you insight into various things pertaining to our future relationship and answer a certain number of questions depending on how I feel at the time. Only when you complete all the trials as a set of three are you able to move on to bigger and better things! Oh this is SO EXCITING I can NOT wait to see how you all fare! Do not disappoint now, I am rooting for you! And let Chris know how it all works when he wakes up.”

Turning as if to leave Maltetious glanced back exclaiming, “I’ll forward you the All Spirit’s prompts now, be sure to read them. By the way, your first trial starts tonight. TONIGHT! Good LUUUUCKKKK!!!!” And in a flash of light the little girl in white vanished with the biggest of grins on her face.

Bewildered and unamused, Michael and Taen grew grim as the following message appeared on teal holograms in front of where they each stood.

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At the beginning of time: Vehendratir the Creator and first of the old gods birthed a labyrinth of worlds connected by the very fabric of his being. First he created the spree, a plethora of failed creations that he later boxed away. Then the Heavens and the Hells with all of their inhabitants were created: the angels and demons with inherent opposing properties. The Spirit Realm and fairy-folk came next with the pit and dregs of Oblivion as it’s counterpiece. And then, in his disgust for the darkness he was born into, he turned away from The Void and left it to its own devices.

Tireless and without purpose he continued to create world upon world, star upon star, galaxy upon galaxy until he came to realize that he had no method to his creation; no meaning beyond idle amusement. So he turned from more simple inanimate objects to creating other forms of life similar to his original sentient creations. First came simple celled organisms, then plants and animals. Then he began to create the mortal races of dwarves, orcs, goblins, humans, elves, demi-humans, ents, and many other species to come. Curiously enough, the undead came next on happenstance and rose to power in their own right to challenge the power of the original immortal races. He created the 18 prime languages so that these lesser creatures could communicate with one another. With these new races came a myriad of new things to do, but his boredom was only abated for a short time and he soon began to despair. What purpose did he have being here? What was the purpose of existing? What was the meaning of life? He did not know, but the sentients he had created seemed unaware of this predicament. So Vehendratir the Creator decided to end his life, splitting himself into a hundred thousand symbiotic essence to experience life through the souls of their hosts and abandoning the creation he had spent so much time cultivating. With the creator gone and the throne of creation left unseated for the lesser gods to vie for, the races went their separate ways and began their own paths down the road of life.

Or so the legend goes.

Welcome to the Nirvana Worlds, participant. This is a Beta for the upcoming Labyrinth Worlds event, and you are now enrolled in a game of death alongside millions of your fellow Earthborn compatriots. Fight for your life... and good luck.

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