Everything had gone black as I pulled myself into the dark portal that sat inside my virtual reality pod. Just a second of nothingness as my torso and legs were pulled in, and then things began to happen.

First, and perhaps most disconcerting, was the fact that I was not floating anymore. THere was cold, hard ground beneath me as I took in the sights. Grass, a sensation that was only a bit off in virtual reality, was tickling my fingers. I could smell the grass and the dirt, feel the touch of sun on my face.

I could take in the thirty feet of field that I sat in easily. Mostly because that was almost all there was. Everything else was the blackness of space and stars. We were on an island suspended in space that didn’t seem to have a roof on it, had atmosphere, and the physics-breaking champion of it all was the fact that there was somehow earth-level gravity on something that was smaller than a large building.

By we, I of course meant myself and the captain.

“Jackson, where the hell are we.”

“No idea, sir. Perhaps someone drugged the water supply?”

“We tested that already, Jackson. After your squid-sighting we went over everything filtering through the system for tampering.”

The captain paced forward towards the edge of the grass. We could be on a plateau, I guess. Still wouldn’t explain the gravity without an incredibly dense planet right beneath us, but it’s a start. I’ll follow behind like the good subordinate that I am.

“What I want to know, Jackson, is if we are still in whatever nightmare realm we were kidnapped into, or if this is reality.”

“Frankly, sir, I have no idea. The grass feels more real than the simulated stuff usually does.”

We reached the edge. Instead of a nice rocky wall and a planet below us, there’s just space. Floating island confirmed. We take a moment to admire the view. Lots of pretty stars. Captain McGreggor is muttering something creative involving tentacles and japanese ancestry.

“Real grass and an unbelieveable island makes it hard to decide, sir.”

“Very helpful, Jackson.”

“If you had a computer telescope for me to use, sir, I would be happy to-”

“Shut up and let me think for a moment?”

“Absolutely sir. Yell if you need anything.”

“Mmph.”

Nice guy. Now that he seems more calm with all the grass and no tentacles, he might be able to figure something out. Meanwhile, I’m going to wander over to the other side of our island and poke around a bit. Maybe take a nap in the sun in a bit. For how small the sun is, it’s rather nice and warm.

All this place needs is some water and food and then it would be halfway to paradise. THe other half is elecricity and internet, obviously. Alas, there isn’t anything around that looks anything like a computer or a virtual reality pod. There aren’t even any trees. Just grass and sun and earth. Maybe the tentacles are attempting to bore us to death?

Ah, no. Here’s something interesting. Maybe the world had to wait while it was buffering or something. As if the rest of the field that we were standing in was just invisible, the are expanded just in time to catch the wave of humans being vommited out of portals. Most of the portals were a foot or two above the ground, but one guy took a dive from four feet up before jolting awake. He may have screamed like a little girl right before he landed. I may have stifled some laughter.

Now, instead of a tiny boring island, there was a big island that looked just as boring but was filled with lots of shouting people. THere were some voices saying “What’s going on” or “This isn’t the fantast server” with a few calling out “Hey, this is my real body model” or “What was the deal with those tentacle monsters?” The kind of stuff that nobody was able to answer but everyone asked just to be sure that nobody knew what was going on.

I just sat and listened hoping that there isn’t another yank through reality waiting for us and that some sort of resteraunt appears out of the blue next. I’m not super hungry at the moment, but being stuck on an island without food would be awful.

Oh, and the captain seems to be yelling over everybody to get some sense of order around here. At least half of the people are ignoring him and looking around. One person even looks like he’s. . .huh. . .yeah, he just jumped off the edge. THat’s a whole new type of brave. Also stupid. Who in their right mind would try skydiving in a strange new location without a parachute? Maybe he thought this was still in-game and he normally had wings or something? Either way, it’s a bit. . .yeah.

Thankfully, if one guy jumps off a cliff, the rest of the thousand or so people who are standing around do not immediately follow him. Everything got a bit quiet with one or two people shouting questions at the man, even. Maybe the saying is wrong, or it just didn’t account for so many highly educated people in one spot? More likely, the crazed whooping and maniacal laughter coming from below marked him as crazy.

The fact that the ground picked that direction to suddenly expand toward does not bode well for the crazy guy, though. Most people hadn’t seen this happen, so there was a mix of shocked expressions and “Awesome!”s going around. The fact that the skydiver just suddenly cut out after a second may have contributed to the shock part. Also the giant cathedral building that was materializing into view. That was worth paying attention to.

Instead of forming the entire front, the bottom of the building began to materialize rushing forward towards the rear and the roof in similar speeds. It was a large building of large grey stones, fit snugly together into a spider-webbing of seams and inset crevices that held sculptures. Larger statues sat above the arched doorway and upon the bell-tower that forced viewers to crane their neck backwards for a glimpse at the top. Twelve limbed lizards, lopsided birds with exquisitely carved feathers, snakes with way too many eyes, and even stranger creatures were the more visible statues, though there were a few more normal looking creatures like a cat and what may have been a cloaked human.

A few of the more adventurous or perhaps clueless people wandered towards the building. I began to approach out of a driving fear of boredom, mostly. No more people had been vomited out of rifts in space, which means that the building was the new thing being introduced, perhaps to get people less interested in jumping off cliffs.

When the quicker explorers approached the giant doors, they began to creak open in a dramatic, if painfully slow, way. There weren’t any windows that I could see, but the inside was lit up with torches on stands that dotted the inside of the area. There weren’t any columns like you might expect to see in a giant building of this size, so it made sense that the light sources couldn’t hang on them, and the walls. . .well, there was a reason that there weren’t any windows. To the right and left of the giant empty hall were walls covered in something very familiar to us: virtual reality pods. They were very likely the same pods that were on the ship originally, numbered one through around one thousand. Whoever attached them to the walls was deliberately trying to mess with anyone who had OCD since the pods were lined up in what appeared to be a completely random order. I would need to work to find mine in the chaos. If I wanted to find my pod, that is. Sure, it would be great to see if there was a connection to the game servers up right now, but figuring out what exactly was going on here was probably more important.

People were already chattering about their own theories of course. Some people thought that this was the best simulation that we had launched while others were more worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Probably a mix of both. The back wall was composed of a giant mural of stick figures standing on top of a planet holding swords or shooting magic while creatures like dragons crawled up the sides at them. Above it all were countless stars and the silhouette of a giant squid with a single eye that seemed to be watching the conflict below. Along the edges were more creatures, odd, alien creatures that alternated looking inwards or outwards, sometimes stretched out of a tentacle-filled rip in space. In the lower center of the mural was an opening with the same space-rip pattern around the edges that opened into a stairwell.

It was quite a bit to take in, which meant that the people outside shouting about it “starting again” made me jump a bit. I was still near the doorway, so I could turn and see what was going on. Kind of obvious based on what I heard, but the edges of the island began to expand once again. More grassy plains showed up, the grass began to grow taller, the land sloped into hills, and most importantly, the expanding landmass did not stop expanding. Makes finding food out there more and more likely, so I’m all for it.