“So this thing has a mind of its own?” Lana said.

“Perhaps it has been programmed to take us to whoever needs our help?” I suggested.

“If anything goes wrong, I will grab you two and jump out,” Lana said.

Those words provided considerable relief. Lana could fly after all. She could bring me and Danor safely back to the ground if anything went wrong. Still I was unsure if Lana’s powers would work once we left the atmosphere of the earth. Or who knew? Maybe, the moon of the game world was in the atmosphere of the game world earth itself unlike the real world moon?

As the rocket rose, its speed increased. A peculiar sound ensued from below the rocket. And then next moment the rocket shot into the sky at top speed. We focussed our efforts on stopping our teeth from clattering and from keeping our faces straight. Even the Sphere had never moved at this speed!

After a while the rocket seemed to slow down and we could catch our breath.

“Look!” Danor pointed out through a small circular window that was near him.

Lana and I hurried to have a look. Outside, there were no clouds in the height that we had reached. Down below was the earth. Its spherical size could be noted easily. I could see a great chunk of the subcontinent as well. Mount Succubus was a mere dot down below.

“We are in space!” Lana said.

I reckoned even the game world moon was not inside the atmosphere of the game world earth.

The rocket kept advancing towards the moon. You could tell that it was moving quite fast. The moon was slowly getting bigger. I had never been as thrilled as this before. A succubi tamer in space! How crazy was that?

After an hour or two we had reached the half-way point of our journey to the moon when the three of us noticed a dot in the distance way ahead. We couldn’t make head or tail of whatever it was, until Lana told of the possibility that it might be a meteorite.

The hands of panic embraced me once again. What if that thing hit us?

Danor peered hard at the dot.

“Nah,” he said, “I do not think it’s a meteorite. It more like a… like a ship.”

A space ship?

“Ship?” I asked Danor. Being the younger man, he had better eyesight than me.

“Yes, you know, like the ones that are used to travel seas.”

Okay, that did not make much sense.

But after a while even I, with my eyes weakened by the lack of youth, could see that the dot in front of us was indeed a ship! One with sails that too. It even seemed to have a flag, one with the picture of the full moon. If there was a ship, I reckoned there would be people on it. Were they the ones who had sent the rocket?

We kept getting nearer and nearer to the ship, until a giant mechanical hand shot out of the side of the ship and grabbed the rocket. The mechanical hand took us to the deck of the ship.

There were quite a few people on the deck. They were all dressed in rather amusing clothes, that were a mix of the clothes worn by sailors of ancient times and the clothes of ordinary people in the game world.

One person, a senior looking man with a trimmed head but with a flowing beard opened the door of the rocket for us.

“We cannot thank you enough for coming,” he said to us as we went out of the rocket. While the man did sound grateful there was something about his tone that indicated that he was under considerable pressure.

Once on the deck, I noticed that the ship was surrounded by a very thin sphere on all sides made of some gas. Oxygen perhaps? It would explain how we were breathing.

“I am Modart,” the man with the trimmed head and flowing beard said, “I am the captain of this ship. Our king went into coma sending the message for help to you, but we are eternally grateful that you did not ignore our message and decided to come to aid us.”

“Well, you nearly burnt us to death with the meteorite though,” Lana said testily. “The meteorite destroyed our tent and we barely escaped it.”

Modart hung his head in a guilty way.

“We are sorry that happened,” he said, “but please understand that there was just no other way to send the message to you. We the moon people cannot enter earth’s atmosphere. There is an invisible magical wall around the earth that prevents us from going to the earth. To break this wall in any way, magic is required. A kind of magic that harms the one who uses it in unimaginable ways. Many of us are NPCs but many are also players. Players are randomly placed on earth or in the moon. The invisible wall appeared around the earth after the war broke out and some glitch happened in the system of the game world.”

“Why do you all have the same hair and beard styles?” Danor wondered aloud, looking at the other sailors. Why, Danor was right! It was odd that I should notice it only now, but every single one of the male soliders had a well trimmed head and a flowing beard. As for the female sailors, they had a unique hair style of their own. The right side of their heads had been trimmed while the other side possessed long hair. The hair style didn’t look as odd as it sounded.