A long hallway with a glass floor that looks into the abyss of space, doors line the walls on both sides. Above each door is a plaque numbering the rooms. This place is a ‘school’ for lack of a better translation where each person represents a unique dimension from which they originate. I of course am from Earth, the dimension known for its nuclear energy and power generation.

Everyone gets assigned to a group of four and a room that has a suitable atmosphere and habitat for them to live in. I am assigned to room four alongside a nameless girl, a blonde haired boy with a buzzcut named Xavier, and a girl with long straight black hair who looks like they couldn’t be older than ten or eleven.

After some time getting to know each other the small girl and Xavier leave to get information on what we are supposed to do from the other groups. They are gone long enough for us to get worried when suddenly the door is broken down by what looks to be the entire student body, all of them trying to murder us in a mad frenzy.

Luckily the ones at the front of the group that broke down the door die in the rooms acclimated environment. The girl tells me to follow her as she has a way to escape. We use the bodies of the ones that dropped as a springboard to jump over the rest of them and run down the hall. They claw at our heels the entire way, indifferent to the deaths of their friends.

The glass of the hallway has turned murky and the serene scope of space has turned into a blood tinged void. We drop through a crack in the glass onto the girl's spaceship, a meaty looking contraption that pulses like a beating heart. She says the ship is mostly dead from the travel here so I have to help.

I pull off a panel from the wall and grab a handful of exposed wires. I feel pounding on the outside reverberate through the walls. I channel power through the cables, jumpstarting the engines, and the ship enters open space in just a few seconds. The overbearing pounding is replaced by the steady thrum of the ship's pulse.

Quickly the ‘school’ and surrounding suns and planets turn into specks in the distance. She thanks me for the help and wonders what happened to them, they seemed normal before when we all first met each other.

Unfortunately we are given no time to rest as the ship is rocked by an explosion, the cameras show swarms of four pointed star shaped missiles. I realise that our location is revealed every time the ship's radar bounces off a nearby planet.

I shut off the radar just in time for the cluster of missiles to veer off course and miss us. I could tell the ship's hull would not have weathered another hit. The girl, piloting, gets angry at me for this since without any guidance she misses the planet she was aiming to land on. Instead we land on one of the planet's moons.

The surface of the moon and planet is red and covered in storms which disrupt any scans of them from finding us. When the ship finally stops after searching the surface for a safe place to land it shoots out big spears into the ground from below itself. Each spear pulses with a deeper beat than the main ship, each pulse expanding a transparent sphere around itself and connecting with others to form a bubble of breathable atmosphere for us.

The ship had parked itself on top of an abandoned and destroyed military outpost. The base is square in shape and has a track for something running along its edge. I explore the base and learn that the moon didn't use to be full of red dust and storms and was used as a scrapyard, and distributer for the wealthy, for outlawed tech.

…

With the ship fixed and restocked we board it and leave the outpost and moon behind. On the way back to the ‘school’ to figure out what happened the girl notices something she says might be helpful. We veer off course towards a cluster of pale blue stardust that screams ‘danger’ to my instincts. She comments on how she had forgotten that she had already taken this star. I have no idea what she meant by this. We return back to our original goal.

We land on the planet that the ‘school’ orbits, curiously unimpeded by missiles or even any interception. We are however flagged down by a familiar name, landing by a destroyed Japanese styled house. My house. Xavier and the girl standing in the main room watching us land.

We meet up and discuss what happened. We are told that time flows differently between planets and what had simply been a few weeks to us was an entire year to them. They tell us to hide since the others will notice the ship and start attracting people. Asking them why the people are so violent Xavier tells me that he doesn't know, but it is definitely caused by someone and isn't natural at all.

We hide behind some mats in a small wardrobe and can hear riots forming outside and see the crazed mob through a small hole in the wall, for some reason they don’t enter the property. I also spot Xavier and the girl blending in with them near the back.

Every one of them goes quiet at the same time, calming down, when a group of eye-catching individuals walk up. They are from what I can see a family, the Father is a large brick shithouse of a man, the Mother looked relatively normal until her limbs split into eight spider-like legs, one of the Daughters is a goth girl with buttons instead of eyes and doll stitching along her skin, and I can't see the last Daughter through the crowd.

They enter the house to start searching for us and the crowd spreads out in a ring around the outside of the house and ship to stop us from sneaking away. The Father burns down walls and furniture while the Mother follows after him putting out the leftover fires with water so they don’t spread. I recognise their fire and water energy signatures as mana. We left the confines of the wardrobe since they were getting close to finding us and split up. I am unfortunately found by the Father and he chases after me with the Mother close behind him. I lead him towards the ship dodging blasts of fire that singe my hair and clothes. The crowd surrounding everything doesn't react when one of these fires hits and kills one of them, only shifting to reorganise the ring to fill in the gap, always wearing the same blank expression.

Inside the ship I overload one of the doors to lock it closed and buy me some time. With some preparation work I manage to trick the Father into the airlock setting it off with another overload and breaking the safety mechanisms. The airlock quickly turns the room into a vacuum suffocating him. He tries to burn through the door like all the other ones on the way here but his fires putter out, suffocating just like he is.

Confirming the Fathers death I try to run but when I try my arm is sliced off at the shoulder by a super compressed bolt of water like a water jet cutter. The Mother stalks up to me with expressionless fury written over her face and shoots a hole clean through my forehead killing me before slicing off the rest of my limbs in impotent anger.

Some time after the Mother leaves the ship to tell her Daughters about what happened and to help them find the girl, my body pieces crumble to dirt and rock. The earth joins together into a single pile and reforms into my body back alive and as good as ever.

Patting my body over I wonder what the fuck that just was. Putting my clothes back on I wonder if this makes me immortal. I go to leave but my legs give out, an unnatural exhaustion taking over my body and I pass out on the floor.