Raine VS The End of the World (5 page)

She glared. He glared back.

“Go ahead, then. Ask,” she conceded at last.

“What is your birth date?”

“June 23, 1977.”

“That can’t be right. Oh, well. What is your L-mail address?”

“L-mail address?”

“How odd. You must have forgotten the orientation. Seeing as how you’re not on our records, it looks like we’re going to have to create one,” Astro said, and with his help, Raine was soon signed up for a free account under the username
rainorshine23
.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No, actually,” Raine said, surprised at how smoothly this whole thing was going.

“One more question - would you like to appear male or female?”

“Female, of course.”

He flashed a devilish grin. “Do you have a preference for men?”

Raine raised an eyebrow.
Most likely? It’s not like I have any experience in the matter.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” A smattering of pictures of faces, some human, and others otherworldly, flashed before Raine. Sensors studied her eye movements.

“Very well. We have deduced that you prefer human characteristics to those of otherkin, and would do well on the South continent. Now, Raine, before we can proceed with the contract, I’m going to have to give you a shot. You’ll feel a bit woozy afterward.”

“Oh, no.”

“Just a quick one, it won’t hurt.”

He pulled out the terrifying-looking syringe, filled with robotic sea monkeys zipping around in a tube of mercury.

A voice rang out in her head.
You don’t want the shot.

Raine leapt off the medical bed.

“Sorry to have wasted your time. I don’t know where I am or what’s going on, but I can’t trust you; you’re a complete stranger.”

“Oh, I’m no stranger, Raine. Everyone sees me at some point or another.” His leering grin was too wide, too gaping. Too insincere. He looked less friendly now, more like a hungry lion than a giraffe. “You signed up. You’re under our care. You’re going to have to trust us.”

Raine spun around and burst from the office. She made for the door. It was locked.

“Stop, girl. Stop holding up the line.”

The dozen-odd people in the waiting room ambled forward like zombies, reaching out to grab her ankles. Thinking quickly, Raine tossed a potted plant through the glass door. The old crone was just a few feet away. Raine kicked the remaining shards in, crawled across the broken glass, sustaining cuts all over her hands and knees, and made her way down the long hallway towards the exit.

True to the view outside the shapeshifting window, the whole world was whitewashed, with a few specks sticking out in the far distance.

“WHAT’S GOING ON?!?” she yelled at the top of her lungs. She began pinching her arms and cheeks. “Wake up, Raine! Get your lazy butt out of bed! Beat it!”

At first there was no answer, but a large message from above restored the girl’s hopes. It probably wasn’t a response from her brain.

“Homepage not specified. Enter URL.”

“HOME! Send me back to the real world!”

A few seconds passed as the message reconfigured itself in a flash of artificial clouds. The next prompt read, “Error 404. File not found.”

“I’m not looking for a file! Home, you stupid sky! Shut down! End program! Reboot!”

“Error 400. Bad request.”

There’s no going back. Damn it all. If this is a dream, let’s get on to the good parts.

“That doesn’t tell me anything!” she groaned. “Where am I?”

This time, the sky lit up in fire.

“The End of the World, version 3.0. Server
Avidya
. Account Creation.”

Raine’s jaw hung agape.
This weird blank wasteland is the end of the world?
What happened to everyone?

Just then, maniacal cackling emanated from the nondescript medical building. Fearing that Astro would be after her, Raine tore away at top speed until the solitary structure was almost out of view. Her track coach would have been proud. When she stopped to catch her breath, another message materialized above her head.

“CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE OUR 1,500,000,000
TH
VISITOR! CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE GIFT!”

Raine ignored it. She stared at the space between her futuristic sneakers.

These are pretty cool sneakers
, she thought as sweat pooled between them. The girl fell into routine breathing exercises, preparing for another sprint.

“Describe your ideal match’s hair color.”
The message had appeared on the floor. Buttons beneath delineated a few choices.
“Brown, Redhead, Black, Blonde, Bald.”

Raine grabbed at her hair.

“I don’t. Understand. These stupid questions.” She stomped on the text and pinched her arm again. Nothing.

I really don’t know how I’d come up with a dream like this
.
I’ve got to be sure to write it down.

A terrible noise from the hospital spun Raine back around. Astro was playing musher on a dog sled, syringe held high. The ravenous kid and the elderly lady led a pack of humans gunning on all fours.

That’s not something you see every day.

She glanced back up at the sky. The question had moved there, along with the five choices. Raine realized that with no hope of outrunning them, her only option was to answer this survey and trust to fate. She flung one of the pixels like a frisbee at the ‘redhead’ option, but the square curved downwards and landed on ‘blonde’.

The next question appeared.

“What kind of steed would he ride?”

“Automobile, Hovercraft, Dragon, Flying Saucer, Unicorn
.”

Raine tossed a pixel at ‘Hovercraft’. She’d always wanted to try one of those.

She spun around anxiously as the next question began loading. The people had now turned into foul beasts, and Astro whipped them forward with an insane vigor.

“Hurry up!” Raine demanded of the sky.

Instead of another question, however, a portion of the boundary flapped about like a loose corner of a tarp. A thick breeze whooshed in from the absolute darkness.

Arming herself with another pixel, Raine took aim at the torn section and tossed with all her strength. The sky ripped open almost immediately, triggering a vacuum that whipped the girl’s hair around her head.

A swirling storm of color emerged from the fusion of white sky and dark space, piercing the blandness of this realm. Raine suddenly recalled the dream before this one, where she was sliding down the façade of the arcade machine.

“Hey, giant hand! Get me out of this place!”

At first, there was nothing. Then, the vortex gave way to the colossal hand, which set its opened palm on the floor before Raine. Quickly calculating her trajectory, she pulled off a running jump, grabbed onto the thin ledge between the sand-fingers, and pulled herself onto its palm.

“COME BACK! I’m not done, damn you!” Astro called. The gray machines from his syringe broke free and formed into an arrow that fired itself up at the hand, but fell far short as the sand-arm whisked her away. Raine gained altitude at an alarming speed; she saw the deranged man and his beasts disappear like dust motes on a bed sheet.

As the giant thumb once again combed her mind, a rush of memories flooded Raine’s thoughts. For a fleeting second, she recalled the night spent on that island, the truth about her parents, the identity of the strange woman, and her reason and purpose in this world.

But when that instant passed every one of her recollections wandered off and swept their tracks clean, knocking her out cold and leaving nothing but muddy shadows.

III. Endless Metaverse

“Find a place where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

- Joseph Campbell

Upon opening her eyes, Raine jolted up in a brightly lit room and reflected on the tiresome nature of these false awakenings. This place wasn’t Agnes’ condo or the old arcade, she reasoned, but it was much prettier than either.

If this dream isn’t an improvement over the last one, I want my time back.

A translucent scroll unfurled in thin air before her. She reached out to grab it, but her arm passed right through. A quill pen scribbled out a message.

“Welcome to
Endless Metaverse, rainorshine23
. You are playing on the
Avidya
server.”

And then, the scroll rolled itself up and out of existence.

Raine studied the bedroom: it resembled a royal dwelling straight out of the Renaissance era, except for a table with a few hi-tech trinkets, and the beautiful domed skylight, covered in a network of vines. Splintered streaks of sunlight brightened her face. So curious was the girl that she neglected to notice the smiling, older woman now lurching overhead.

Before Raine could react or say anything, the mystery matriarch turned to her mechanically. From its smile, Raine recognized the spectre as a terrifying replica of her biological mother, clad in the summer dress from her old photo.

“You all right, there?” it said in a melodic monotone. “You must have had quite a dream. Your father and I could hear you mumbling in your sleep.”

Raine tried to speak, but the words she wanted to say wouldn’t quite formulate themselves.

“M-mother?”

Raine awkwardly reached out towards her. No reaction or response, not even a flickering of the eyes in acknowledgment. This was not her mother, just an empty shell. She recalled SBB’s cryptic words:
“There is an even greater evil to vanquish before you can discover what is most important to you.”

The most precious truth I can imagine would be gaining knowledge of my biological parents, and learning why they chose to give me up. Not that I want to continue blaming them for my lot in life; in fact, it’s the opposite. I simply want to understand, to forgive them in my own heart, so I can move on. But this creepy mannequin is a twisted lie.

The woman spoke again.

“That’s good,
rainorshine23
. Come on down for breakfast, your friend Nimbus is over and he wants to talk to you about his newest invention.”

With that, she descended the staircase, leaving Raine to her own devices. A pastoral symphony kicked in from an invisible speaker system. The entire experience was unnerving, and worst of all, SBB was nowhere to be found. It was time to remedy that.

Getting up from her bed, Raine noticed she was dressed in a black t-shirt and tights underneath leather armor and a pair of leather boots, as well as owning a snazzy-looking digital watch.

This won’t do
. She headed towards an armoire. An earth-colored steampunk dress was just about the most normal garb; she touched it and the outfit immediately appeared on her person. A menu on the full-length mirror displayed choices for accessories. She chose a neutral blouse, a corset, protective shoulder bracers, and some warm leggings. The leather boots were the most comfortable footwear and went well with the outfit. The watch, it appeared, couldn’t be removed.

On her desk was a note informing Raine that to return to this room at any time, she need only to hold the ‘home’ button on her watch while stationary for ten seconds.

She glanced at the sleek device. A holographic menu of options materialized from its face. On the top-right, a readout next to a coin symbol told her that she had 500 Gold available.

Before she could figure out the shiny new thing in earnest, fake mother called her fake name again. It was time to leave.

The messenger bag on the desk was soon filled with a couple of apples from a fruit basket, a wheel of cheese, and a loaf of sourdough. She also grabbed a pair of brass goggles, a towel, a hand mirror, a rolled-up sleeping bag, and a lovely set of theater binoculars. Strangely, the small bag remained light as a feather.

Sneaking a look down the second floor balcony across her doorway, Raine studied her new foster parents, and Nimbus, a determined-looking blonde boy attacking a bowl of oatmeal. All three ate with clockwork uniformity more robotic than human in nature, and she didn’t trust a single one of them.

She backed into the room and flung up a latch on the skylight; the dome peeled away to a gentle breeze, accompanied by a cacophony of voices. The girl hastily climbed up and over the ledge.

The view took her breath away. Raine’s stone-and-brick house stood amongst thousands of near-identical highland suburban cottages bordering a vast medieval metropolis.

Within the castle’s rocky walls, instead of skyscrapers or bland blocky buildings, aged Mediterranean structures colored a luscious land populated by olive and mulberry trees.

A street-spanning banner read, “Clyde Castle Town, 30
th
Anniversary.”

Roosters down in the valley crowed to flying vehicles caught in the rising sun. Carpeted walkways cluttered with foot traffic from all sorts of creatures. A deep braying sent shivers down Raine’s spine - without warning, a
two
-headed wyvern whooshed past and sent her hair into tangles with the beating of its great wings.

Holy two-headed cows
. She leapt onto a pile of hay outside and made her way down the street.
This realm is mine for the taking.

A gentle drizzle made landfall; it was unlike any Raine had ever seen. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and yet small black pixels roughly the size of raindrops materialized far overhead, danced in descent, and promptly fused to the ground and disappeared. None seemed to take notice.

Nobody paid her any attention either. That fact brought Raine some comfort until she began observing some of her dream-folk’s more curious behaviors.

Some kids paced around in circles. A cleric slept right in the middle of the street, yet passersby walked over him effortlessly. Suspicious dudes scanned the scene from dark alleys.

Faint, floating green nametags hovered over every head. With a look into a nearby pond, Raine confirmed that she sported one as well.

Teleporting warriors made for the heart of the metropolis. Some wore remixed costumes of famous game characters. She peeked over a cliff to pinpoint the nearest path to the wall, all too eager to follow.

This is just too much to take in at once. I’ve got to head down there and see what’s what.

₪

Gerrit lazily balanced his broadsword on his pinky finger, then flipped it upside down and caught it again. Several of his guild mates watched from the corners of their eyes, waiting for him to mess up and lop off a digit, though based on the boy’s infamous reputation that would be highly unlikely.

The
Oathbound Hunters
had been sitting there for well over fifteen minutes, and even Jolly Peter, who could be counted on to spice up any gathering, had run out of things to say and contented himself with crafting protective rings to sell at the bazaar. Many of the younger warriors used the time to polish up their schoolwork. Gerrit wished that something would happen already.

“Won’t something happen already?” he asked.

“Be on your toes,” Guild Leader Lance warned, grabbing Gerrit’s shoulder with maladroit passion. “It’ll be any second now. Soon as that goddamn thing appears, we’re all counting on you to rush. You know where the exact spawn point is, right?”

“Yeah, bro. Got this,” said Gerrit, although he didn’t. His thumb jerked in a general direction to the town square they were all facing.

“Good. You’ll all do well to remember, it’ll lash out with AoEs right off the bat, so fall back at first, even if it means other guilds get the first hits in. All that matters is where we are when the killing blow lands. We should be in close proximity; Kyle’s on flare duty. In fact, Marcie and Bonnie are – hey, you two! Customize your hair later! This is no time for trading fashion tips…”

Gerrit tuned Lance out by tapping two fingertips together against his thumb thrice, a secret shortcut he programmed to mute any external sounds. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts wander.

What am I doing here?

With a username like
“NinjaMageKnight99”
(he didn’t remember picking it), Gerrit seemed destined for a life on the battlefield. It was impossible to keep time in
Endless Metaverse
, for allegedly complicated reasons including constant server updates that often led to widespread memory modifications, but there was one thing he recognized in his heart of hearts: he’d been doing this for a while.

If Gerrit had been aware of the truth, he would be quite astonished to know that in the span of three years, he had fought for, at one time or another, dozens of major guilds in the
Avidya
,
Tanha,
and
Maya
servers.

When he opened his eyes again, the boy stole a glance at good old Sala, falling asleep while leaning on his quarterstaff. Gerrit surprised himself by considering that he could completely relate to the old man. He tapped his fingers together again.

“…can’t stress that we need the tank trio to pull aggro properly if things get too hot on the front lines,” Lance continued. “I really don’t want any other fools to get in on this, so we have to kill it quickly and methodically. Arthur and Kid Hugo, remember: unless the Pallies are in trouble, you’re doing nothing but casting debuffs and time-slowing spells on non-guild members to ensure our victory.”

The band of about forty nodded blankly. It was an off kind of day, and no one was particularly jazzed about the upcoming battle. Fighting the world boss was more of an obligation – there’d been slim pickings since the reptilians had gotten involved in the war and the local economy took a turn for the worse.

Gerrit looked at his allies in turn and realized that while the new recruits seemed ready for bloodshed, some of the higher-leveled warriors were where he was two months ago. Lance was trying his best, but it wasn’t good enough. Even he seemed to be infected by the virus of apathy, at some minute but noticeable level.

Most of them had been at this as long as they could remember – leveling-up, fighting, strategizing, dividing the spoils, spending their Gold, crafting, looting, synthesizing more weapons, and fighting again in carefully calculated cycles, playing at pride and satisfaction according to sets of rules that could be changed at any moment, that it was unthinkable, sacrilegious even, to consider that it was getting boring.

Gerrit on the other hand knew that it was getting boring. He knew it deep in his gut. What he’d been experiencing was something more profound and psychically painful than boredom. It was the kind of empty feeling that drives men mad with longing.

And then he sneezed. A black pixel had gotten lodged in his nose. Gerrit gazed skyward at the falling squares; a data storm was inbound. He hoped against reason that whatever changes to the
Metaverse
were being made, they’d make things interesting, if only for a little longer.

∑

After descending a few hundred feet of stairs to the city proper, Raine felt she needed a breather, although physically she seemed to be fine. She walked over to an inconspicuous vending machine among dozens that promised lemonade for 3 Gold. Raine had only to hold her hand over the device before glowing buttons appeared over the choices. She was surprised to feel the button as she pushed it with her fingers – it had appeared in thin air, like a hologram, but it had weight, mass, texture…

Her wristwatch beeped. Its face informed Raine that she’d spent 3G and now had 497G in the bank.
No bills, no wallets, no change. If there are any arcades here, getting continues will be an absolute cinch.

Clunk!

The lemonade plopped down at the bottom of the machine. Without delay, Raine expertly chugged about half of the cold, refreshing drink. It was suspiciously delicious for a dream. She re-capped the bottle and dropped it into her messenger bag.

The girl took two steps forward before realizing that her bag did not feel an iota heavier.
What sort of sorcery is this, anyhow?

A peek inside revealed a hologram with a list of all the items in her possession.

It was straight out of an inventory menu from a role-playing game. By placing her hand in the middle of the hologram and rotating her wrist, she could access dozens of compartments. Weapons. Armor and clothing. Accessories. Food and drink. Loot. Quest items. Spell tomes. Gifts. Luxurious pet storage. Furniture. Possessions could be hot-linked to simple hand gestures.

I could fit a whole room in here,
she marveled, and took a seat on a bench to catch her breath.

Towering knights were stationed between gates: silent, faceless sentinels with black spears and polished shields carrying the city’s crest.

A man with a strange glimmer in his eye chanted that the end times were coming. People shuffled past him without a glance.
Okay, that isn’t really anything new.