“Explains a lot,” I blew on my coffee. He began eating.
“No you know, don’t feel bad about killing people, they’re not real, right?”
“Are you real?” I asked him.
“I was a military officer in World War 2. I had a wife before I was pulled out onto the field. Give me a sniper without a scope and I’ll shoot down twenty in a row from two hundred yards away. War ended, and I received news that my wife died under the rubble from an artillery shell hitting the house.”
My gaze was fixated upon the table. His story sounded intense, and I could barely allow myself to have a sip of coffee while he was telling it.
“You know, glorious war, friends dead, wife dead, severe injury, no future. I took my pistol, limped my way up a hill next to a lake. I thought, if I kill myself I’ll at least go out with a nice view. The moon was bright that night,” he kept eating like it was nothing. I took my first sip of very real tasting coffee. “And then I see it – some sort of strange light by the lake, and out comes a man out of nowhere. The gun was pressed against my head, all I had to do was pull the trigger. But I watched, as this man flew up into the sky, came over to me, and said… Not yet, soldier. Your job isn’t over yet. And that’s how I met Wilmort.”
“Wow,” I nodded genuinely.
“Back to the question, he trains me god-knows-where and god-knows-how, and I learn to open my first portal. Then he shows me that I am indeed, not real. There’s the answer to your question.”
“Hah! I almost forgot I asked that. And now that you’ve told me everything, you sound pretty real to me.”
“He brought my wife back, from the dead,” he placed down his cup. “I don’t know what’s in it for you, but what’s in it for me is that, at the end of all of of this, I get to go back to her and live a, according to him, ‘beyond regular boring life’.”
“Sounds like a lot of light at the end of a very dark tunnel,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed. I started eating my breakfast. “Maybe that’s why I don’t mind killing people, it’s all for the mission. It’s all for the better tomorrow.”
“And you trust Wilmort?” I asked casually.
“We all do, he’s given us something none of us have ever had, and is giving back things a lot of us have lost.”
“What about Violet?” I asked curiously.
“Violet’s story is not mine to tell, hope you understand that.”
“I do, absolutely,” this breakfast felt so real, and I let him know that, for the sake of changing the conversation.
“Your eggs and sausage are oddly very delicious, for lack of a less generic word.”
He laughed a little, “well yes, the secret that I found is that, despite being able to just make cooked food appear, in order to make it seem real you have to cook it from scratch first.”
“Oh! Makes sense,” in contrast to how Violet once gave me coffee out of thin air and I called it fake. “So Douglas, what’s the plan?”
“Plan is simple, Raymond, I teach you the not so basic things, you learn to apply it, in the meantime. We take our time, no dying until I drilled down everything you need to know, alright soldier?”
“Yes sir,” I placed my straightened hand against the side of my head briefly.
Our training began after we finished our breakfast. He buried the dead corpses under the concrete with his Light control.
“Can you do absolutely anything?” I asked.
“If you can imagine it, you can do it. There’s limits that you’ll find out soon enough, and tips to get you started.”
“Okay,” we were in an empty room where the dead soldiers previously lay. All the extra stuff was removed with only two chairs in the middle.
“See this?” he positioned his arms as if he was carrying a heavy machine gun, and surely enough, out of golden photons the machine gun appeared. It was oddly modern, yet oddly reminiscent of the Second World War in the dark wood and dense metal that it was made out of.
“Yeah?”
“This is my gun. I’ve imagined it and used it a countless times. It’s got unlimited ammo, can shoot three different types of bullets, has a sniper mode,” he pulled out a scope from the inside of it, “auto fire mode,” he flicked a button, “and artillery mode, which Violet helped me arrange. This gun is my go to in any situation. When I need it, one second and it’s there. I don’t have to imagine anything, I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to waste precious seconds thinking up how it would look like if I want the scope to come out. This is my gun, and it does what I’ve developed a habit for it to do.”
“Yes,” I listened attentively.
“Now I tell you to make me a coffee, you have to be able to make it like this,” he snapped his finger, and a cup of coffee appeared in the air, and dropped to the concrete floor before breaking and spilling everywhere. “But if I tell you to make me an orange scented peach and sandalwood martini with a cherry on top you won’t be able to make it in an instant like that, would you?”
“No,” I shook my head.
“Alright, I’m not telling you to make your own gun or sword or whatever you want, but I’m telling you that you’ll have to learn a few tricks and learn them well so when push comes to shove you whip ‘em out like whipped cream on a cake, am I clear?”
“You’re becoming very army like,” the corner of my mouth lifted.
“Old habit of mine, I apologize. Let’s get to work!”
We spent hours, and hours, and hours. What he did better than Violet was encourage me when I failed, and showed me examples and broke it down into pieces when I didn’t understand something. I only assume that he was teaching me the way Wilmort taught him. Or maybe I was simply more motivated? Violet did say that the first step to making the fork disintegrate was believing that you could do it. And surely enough, I did do it. Now if Douglas told me that creating a coffee with a snap of a finger or a heavy assault alien rifle with three shooting modes are both on the same level of difficulty, then by god I would believe him and achieve it.
“How does it taste?” he made me taste my own coffee.
“Tasteless, it’s not even warm,” I said.
“Then throw that sorry excuse of a coffee to the ground and make another one! You can do it, let’s go!”
A good hour later, I could proudly say that I’ll never have a lack of coffee problem wherever I go. But that was just the basics, wasn’t it? There were so many things I had to imagine! It’s no wonder he talked about habit and getting used to your ‘spells’. The first cup of coffee was hollow, weightless, and even lacked physics. The coffee wasn’t moving inside the glass. The more I worked on it, I developed its heft, its temperature, its solidity and liquidity, its taste, its ‘aftermath’ if you will. When you pour out the coffee, there is a brown residue left behind, the cup doesn’t end up being clean after that. You gotta imagine that kind of stuff! It was difficult, and that’s why it required training. I didn’t even think about these kinds of things when I was writing my books, I was just writing them. If I tell my reader, ‘he leaned against a tree’ I expect the reader to already know that the tree bark is textured, hard, not warm not cold, and that the leaves provide a bit of shade from the sun. If I did that now, I’d get an empty hollow visual of a tree and that’s it. But Douglas was incredible, he made sure we went step by step and he did not move on until I got the little simple details that were easy to miss out of the way. He said it’s important to make sure I get the basics down because when it comes time to launch a rocket from my fist, everything had to go smoothly or the rocket would either explode in my face, or not explode at all. Small details on a grander scale multiply.
“That’s why we don’t create humans,” he said while we were on our break. When we needed a new place to sit he just motioned his hand and spat out a couch from under his sleeve like it was nothing. “Humans are complex, and infinite. You have to imagine a ticking heartbeat, working stomach, flowing blood, functioning mind and so many more
things just to get a human to not die seconds after being created. We can’t do that. We can’t create something we can’t fathom or comprehend.”
“What about the portal?” I asked.
“What about the portal?” he leaned back.
“Why do I end up in random worlds, and you can just walk in wherever you want?”
“Cause you’re not in control of the Light yet. The place through the portal is nothing but Light, and you gotta be able to read it steadily. You can’t let it control you, you have to control it. When you enter through there, what do you see?”
“I see random images passing by, and random sounds coming and going. It’s like I’m in a very vague dream until I appear somewhere,” I tried describing to the best of my abilities.
“Those images and sounds are random gateways to other worlds that you’re just passing by until you fall into one by luck of the draw.”
“No way!” I nearly got off my seat. “So that’s it?! Those stars I see through my empty TV screen are portals?”
“That’s it. Once you learn to stabilize yourself and stop falling, you can pull the portals towards you. I’m not going to boggle you down with that information yet, but nothing teaches you Light control as much as travelling. And that’s the hardest part too, arguably.”
Amazing. I learnt so much from just spending a day with this guy. How much more could he teach me? How much more was there to learn? I can create anything, and go anywhere! I have favorite movies I’d love to visit, characters I’d love to talk to…
“Alright, let’s keep it going.”
We spent two more days before we exited the bunker. I perfected simple Light control and from there all I had to do was increase the size and increase the details. He turned me into a fully fleshed Light user within the confines of a room.
Alas, we needed more space to do some crazy stuff. When we went outside, we shot some rocks, and he showed me how to fly with the simplest trick in the book – create a platform beneath you and lift that platform up into the sky. I lost balance and fell countless times, but it was fun enough to keep trying. According to him, we were far enough to fire blasters without getting attention towards us, but he refrained from firing his artillery. I tried some stuff though – controlled stuff that couldn’t kill me. Guns, knives, bows and arrows, even magic wands and staffs that ‘helped’ me levitate rock. The true levitation was achieved with my bear hands, but the wand helped me imagine that I was more powerful than I thought, and that’s all it took to make it work.
Douglas was very efficient, he didn’t let me spend too much time on things he thought wouldn’t be useful later. After getting a lot of the tricks down he decided it was time to move on to something more real.
“We’ll spar,” he said.
“Huh?”
“We’ll spar,” he repeated himself. “It’ll be the battle of creativity. Use anything you can imagine to hit me. Just don’t kill yourself with a grenade or something.”
“Wait…” I watched him walk away from me. With two motions of his hands, he spawned giant stone pillars that erupted from the coarse earth.
“I’ll use a dummy gun, so you won’t have to worry,” his jetpack ignited and he was airborne in a second. “Just try to hit me!”
“Oh boy,” I said. These pillars were massive – Doug was insanely powerful. If I tried I doubt I’d be able to recreate those. I watched as he kept walking wherever there was lots of space and created more pillars. The whole area basically turned into a sparring terrain.
The first thing I did was create a gun in my hand. I gave it a test shot and shot one of the pillars. The metal bullet left a large crack in the rock. I focused on the gun a little bit more, gave it a twist, and voila. Now the gun fired paint balls. “Alright, here goes,” I summoned a platform beneath myself and flew up. Focusing on keeping it afloat while aiming my gun was harder than I thought.
Douglas flew by just to say, “imagine that the platform flies on its own, like a stable magnet. All you gotta do is steer it. Remember what I keep telling you, focus on the result of the object the most.”
I applied it within a minute, and that tip helped insanely! Heck I even gave it a steering wheel and two pedals like in a car. Two buttons on the wheel made it move either up or down.
Douglas buzzed through the pillars like a fly, and I tried to move at a decent speed, shooting my unlimited paintball gun at him. The paint splashed in different colors as it hit the pillars, but missed him completely.
He was so fast, he shot me in the back with a soft ball. I barely felt a sting. This steering wheel was slowing me down too much, it wasn’t working out for me. I landed, took a moment, and copied him and created my own jetpack instead. Much better! I could fly like a super hero, but still did not come anywhere near hitting him. Minutes passed, and all that was happening was I was getting hit with his fake bullets every thirty seconds.
I flew down.
“Give up?” he hovered above me.
“Actually, I’m just getting started,” I summoned an axe. The axe was huge, three times the size of a normal human. I made it just barely heavy enough to lift, and its kinetic energy increased with its own speed and multiplied before releasing upon impact – that was the ‘law’ I imagined it to have. One single swing, and his giant pillar came crashing down in the loudest rocky thud.
“Wow, I see what you’re doing there,” he lit up a cigarette for himself, the flame coming out of his finger.
I knocked down a bunch of pillars and cleared the air a bit. It was easier to aim. This time, my gun wasn’t a single fire, but a fully automatic, and I had two of them. I kept optimizing, and I was slowly reaching my goal. He had to hide behind the pillars in order to not get shot, which was perfect. I had to corner him, no matter how many times he hit me, all I had to do was hit him once. My jet pack ignited, and I flew after him!
“I’m coming for you!” my voice echoed.
From two pillars on my left and right, two traps went off and large nets captured me. I came crashing down hard. The least I was able to imagine and create was a mattress under.
I yelled out from the impact, despite the mattress my shoulder got badly dislocated. He flew over to me.
“Good job, Raymond!” he cut up the nets with a knife. “We’ll get you fixed, don’t worry.”
He took me inside and we got my injury taken care of. In fact, I took care of it myself. All I had to do was ‘imagine the pay go away, and imagine I could move my arm normally’.
“Wilmort will be proud,” I said, laying down on the couch. You could fix your injuries and nullify your exhaustion, but the mental fatigue was definitely there.
“For sure,” said Douglas. “You did well, I’m incredibly proud too.”
“How do we fix the machine?” I asked out of the blue.
He placed a cup of tea beside me. “Wilmort gave instructions not to tell you until you come and see it yourself.”
“But you saw it, right?”
“I see it every day.”
“Hm,” I closed my eyes. I was getting sleepy – or maybe I thought I was getting sleepy. Several days passed and I didn’t even yawn, and suddenly when I decided to rest on the couch, the mere thought of going to sleep made me feel drowsy.
“Are we going to learn about the portal next, then?” I asked.
“Eventually, but get some rest first.”
“Do the others know we’re here?”
“They know, but they wouldn’t find us. I had to look for you all over the place.”
“How did you find me?” I was just throwing questions at him.
“It wasn’t hard. We see what world you enter and at what time you enter that world. Then we determine which major event is going on at that time and head there. You stand out from soldiers in bulky suits and aliens.”
“Sure do.”
“So when you appear in a world where nothing is going on, it’s really hard to determine where you could be. Like that android place, a
nd the dark forest. Wilmort went to look for you himself. I was tasked with this one cause I’m used to all kinds of gunfire.”
He dimmed the lights for me and went out. I stretched out comfortably and the rest was a dreamless sleep after my cup of tea.
Douglas stayed out and patrolled in the meanwhile.
It was a long night, or day, or I don’t know. The sun never sets or rises on this planet. When I had woken up, I went outside. When I saw that the sky was cloudy, despite it looking like Mars, I figured it probably wasn’t Mars – otherwise I wouldn’t be able to breathe here either.
I found Douglas sitting on the steps of the entrance to the bunker, smoking.
“Old habits die hard,” I said, sitting down next to him. I brought him coffee, along with my own cup.
“They do, don’t they?” he replied.
“How do you like your coffee, generally?”
“Black and bitter, and in a metal cup,” he replied.
“I guess it brings back nostalgia,” I nodded.
“Well what nostalgias have you got?” he asked just before taking a sip.
“I used to go out camping a lot. Sometimes I’d get lost in the forest, and every time I did I thought I’d survive by eating acorns like squirrels. They were mildly bitter and tasteless, but the forest-y smell was pleasant. I’d say acorns remind me of my childhood the most.”
“Back when we were out in the wild, we’d have acorn coffee cause there was no real coffee around. Tabaco was scarce too. But when we did get some, a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning made your whole week.”
My life was so easy compared to his, and the contrast – I was still in my relaxed clothes while he was in that suit with a few tubes connected to it.
“Anyways,” he got up. “We were found out last night. A scout flew by. They’ll be coming for us shortly.”
“Is that bad? Should we leave?” I looked up at him.
“Yes, but not in the way you think.”
“What does that mean?”
“I planned on flying over to the war zone again,” he threw his cigarette away.
“Say what?!” my eyes were wide open.
The Portal Page 11
