Voyage: Embarkation

Episode 3 "Just a Game"

KAL SWIPED through the pictures, trying to reconcile the disparity between them and the world around him. They depicted a technologically advanced cityscape teeming with people, but he stood instead in a forest. Oaks and pines, aspens and birches, all with typical bark and green leaves, loomed over grasses and prairie underbrush. There were no flame-spitting fungi or crystalline ferns. No, this forest could have easily passed as one of the parks he’d visited in his youth on Earth.

He programmed a nanite to enter the metaxia and return to realm #1384. He waited, and his pad registered the nanite’s return. Kal shook his head. He was indeed standing on the world that the pictures had come from. But there was no city, no lake, and no people. Just the forest.

Kal latched his pad onto his white suit pants and furrowed his brow. In that moment, he realized just how much he hated the clothes he’d adopted for this world. They felt too stiff and formal, not at all appropriate for an Illinois summer. He wondered why he should even bother with them now. He pulled up the sartorial program and, a few button presses later, his clothing shimmered and reverted to the T-shirt and shorts he was used to wearing on Felis. Having the air against his skin felt much better.

He felt a pin prick against his neck. Thinking it was a mosquito, he rubbed it off.

Wait a minute. Mosquitos shouldn’t be able to penetrate the auto-defense nanites.

A wooden arrow with a metal tip and bright red feathers clattered to the ground.

Kal grabbed up his pad and reached instinctively for the auto-defense control panel. He maximized its interface and jacked the sensitivity all the way up to its highest setting. He heard the whiz of another arrow and, though he felt nothing, glanced a splintered tangle of wood as it fell to the ground.

“Hello?” Kal tried.

Two more arrows struck him and fell to the ground as crumpled masses.

“I’m willing to talk,” he called out.

A ferocious face leapt out of the underbrush at him wielding an axe. She lunged forward and slammed it into his chest. Instead of slicing into him, the weapon writhed out her hands, distorted and twisting, then fell to the ground as frayed, wooden shreds and metallic dust.

The young woman jumped away from Kal, her facial features twisted up in panic. He eyed her suspiciously, perplexed at her behavior.

She was about his age. Her hair was a tangled mess, her clothes hardly anything more than tattered, gray rags. Her eyes darted at him, then across the prairie brush, then up into the trees.

“Kill me!” she shrieked.

Kal covered his ears. When it seemed she would not scream again, he tentatively pulled his hands away from his head. “Why would I kill you?”

“Why?” she asked, as if the question were absurd. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Kal. What’s yo—”

“Rakan!” She leapt up onto the nearest tree branch, not pausing before scurrying further upward, away from Kal. She had started mumbling something to herself repeatedly, but Kal couldn’t hear what it was before she was out of earshot. She scaled the tree with incredible speed and ferocity. Kal spotted a bow and full quiver attached to her back as she receded into the foliage.

Kal sighed and turned his attention back to his pad. Maybe he’d glossed over some crucial piece of information his nanites had gathered about this world’s supposed culture. He doubted he’d find out anything more talking to Rakan.

That city he’d seen had exhibited all the indicators of an advanced and stable culture, not violently insane savages.

Rakan jumped down beside him and attempted to grab his pad. The nanites pushed her hand gently away from the device. Rakan’s face twisted up at the sight of her own hand being propelled backward against her will.