The Wyvern in the Wilderlands: Planeswalking Monster Hunters for Hire (Sci-fi Multiverse Adventure Survival / Weird Fantasy) (Monster Hunting for Fun and ... Hunters and Mythical Monsters) Book 1)

by Eddie Patin

"Yeah. There’s a lot. It’s really confusing. I’ve been trying to learn about the different dimensions but it’s kind of ... mind-boggling? Like—I get that the fourth is time, but I’m not sure about the fifth and the sixth. There’s an analogy about an ant and a fly inside a garden hose, but I’m not sure about the difference between the fifth and the sixth. And then there's the seventh, eighth, and ninth...? I have no idea how those fit into the others! I set what I guess is like a bookmark to here in the garage, but I don’t really understand if it's coordinates for this place, or this time, or..."

  Jason trailed off, suddenly feeling the weight of the responsibility that Riley expected of him. He felt his face turn hot and felt a conflicting mix of embarrassment and anger. He felt like he should be smart enough to figure this out, but was angry that he was expected to just get it automatically as if he was Jason 113, the seasoned planeswalking adventurer...

  Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Jason snapped out of his broiling fugue. He looked up to see Riley smirking—no, more like smiling—warmly through his short, scraggly beard.

  The soldier sighed. "Jason 934," he said. "I get it. It’s a lot. Jason 113 sent us to you for a reason. I reckon he knew that you were ... um ... inexperienced, but he did it anyway."

  "I never saw the guy. I never met Jason 113."

  "Of course not," Riley replied. "He wouldn’t have—"

  "Maybe he just sent you here because of the portal to the Wilderlands in my backyard."

  Riley smirked—that time it was an actual smirk—and he shook his head. "That might have been part of it, sure. It’s starting to look like a permanent rift to that universe is really valuable. But still, Jason 113 must have had some kind of faith in you. He had to believe that you’d be able to figure this rifting shet out, or this would have been pointless."

  "How do the dimensions work, Riley? This is really confusing..."

  Riley sighed and looked over Jason’s shoulder at Gliath, who stood by silently behind the man. Jason looked over his shoulder and saw the Krulax’s big shadowy form. The yellowish-green eyes were impassive and revealed nothing.

  "I can tell you as I understand it," Riley said. "But remember: I’m a soldier, not a physicist. Let’s get some beers..."

  The three of them headed inside. Gliath closed the door behind them.

  "Get me a red, will ya?" Jason said, seeing Riley heading to the kitchen. He walked into the living room and sat in his armchair.

  "Sure. Which one is that?"

  "Laughing Lab."

  Zelda, Jason’s little calico cat—mostly white with an orange-brown patch over part of her face—was curled up sleeping on the couch. Gliath followed Jason into the living room, walking across the room to a corner, where he shifted. It still surprised Jason whenever he saw it: the transformation was as quick as taking a long, deep breath. The massive, bipedal werepanther-like form of Gliath shrank down—within his harness of armor and gear—until the impressive creature was suddenly a still-respectably-large natural-looking black leopard, slinking out from his harness’s shoulder straps a moment later wearing nothing but fur.

  Jason realized that he was staring. He saw the panther’s yellowish-green eyes meet his as it strode across the carpet, an honest-to-God normal-looking black leopard. Gliath was a big leopard—maybe two hundred pounds or so—but still a lot smaller in this form than he was as a hulking bipedal hybrid. Gliath left his armor and gear in a pile where he’d changed shape; it lay like a shucked snakeskin. As the panther walked back and forth through the room in front of Jason, the man felt a stirring of something primal in him—perhaps the valid fear of a great cat pacing right in front of him and his chair...

  What had Riley called Gliath? A Krulax? Krulaxian? Gliath was more of a cat that could turn into a person than a person that could turn into a cat.

  Jason heard the hisses of two beers opening in the kitchen and the tinks of their bottle caps being discarded. A moment later, Riley returned and handed Jason a red ale. The soldier promptly sat down on the closest end of the couch, leaning forward and watching Gliath for a moment.

  As soon as Riley sat, the big cat strode over, slinking between the couch and the coffee table. Gliath reached out with his big, black snout to Zelda, giving her a little sniff. Jason’s cat stirred, stretched, and climbed up onto the couch arm as if making room. Then Gliath ponderously leaped up onto the couch with a deep, growling huff that made Jason’s guts tingle. He curled up with his massive, sleek haunches resting against Riley’s hip.

  Riley smiled and patted the big panther’s side, letting his hand settle into his fur.

  Gliath descended into a nap and little Zelda found a spot on the cushion where she could curl up next to him.

  "Okay," Riley said after taking a sip. "So ... the ten dimensions..."

  "Yeah," Jason said with a sigh. "There’s a lot of stuff in the OCS about String Theory and other stuff I’ve heard about before—I was in college majoring in Physics for just a semester before I dropped out because of the plane crash—but it’s like ... information overload. I’m not connecting the lines with the ... um ... practical application of the ten different dimensions."

  "Alright," Riley replied. "So ... my world teaches quantum physics and interdimensional travel in school—I was just a year from graduating when the Concord discovered it and started changing everything. I learned about Everald’s Many Worlds Interpretation, and—"

  "Don’t you mean Everett’s Many Worlds...?"

  The soldier ran his fingers through his beard and took another sip of beer. "In my world it’s Everald. Anyway, that stuff changes all the time the more they learn, but Jason 47 explained dimensions in a way that made a lot more sense to me. He said that it’s just a way to visualize it. Says it’s hard for us to stretch our heads around it all—really cooks your egg, you know? But it goes like this. Ready?"

  Jason took a drink of his beer. The hops were bitter and fresh-tasting. Malty. Great. He looked over and saw that Gliath and Zelda appeared to be snoozing soundly, snuggled up against each other on the couch. Riley was idly petting the panther’s side.

  "Alright, shoot," Jason said.

  "Okay," Riley said, "the first dimension is just a line, right? From point to point. The second dimension is when you add another degree of movement and now you can work with flat shapes: rectangles, triangles; whatever. They’re flat. They move along the X and Y axes."

  "Yep."

  "Then, when you add the third dimension, it’s another right angle; it’s another axis. You’ve got depth. The circle becomes a sphere. The square is a cube."

  "That’s where we live. The third dimension," Jason replied.

  Riley shook his head. "No, not exactly. The third dimension is just a space. You don’t actually live in it. We exist in the third while moving along the fourth. We live in both. Being in just the third dimension would be like ... just being in a single Planck frame. It’s more like ... we're physically in the third, but our perception and existence is depending on the fourth—ah, I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, the third is another dimension of depth, okay? Now the fourth..."

  "The fourth is time," Jason said. "I know that."

  Riley smirked and leaned back. "You want me to tell you Jason 47’s way or not?"

  Jason sighed and took a long draught of beer. "Sorry."

  "The hose, ant, and fly thing is just one way that people explain the fourth, fifth, and sixth," Riley said. "I realize that this all mighty confusing until you get the big picture. So, let’s back up a little bit, and group the dimensions into a certain way of seeing things..." He took a drink. "So think of the first, second, and third as a group. The first is a line, the second lets you move sideways, and the third with depth, right?"

  "Okay."

  "Now, imagine the fourth, fifth, and sixth in their own group too, all involving temporal shet. A line, sideways, and up and down—depth. We physically exist in the third dimension, but we perceive the fourth, moving along that line—a line lik
e in first dimension, okay?"

  "The fourth dimension is like a line."

  "Moving forward—for us anyway—in one direction, toward entropy. Destruction. Decay."

  "How do you move sideways or up and down through that? What’s it mean to move sideways through time?" Jason asked, kicking his feet up onto the coffee table. It was amazing that his bad knee didn’t hurt anymore. Somehow, the time he spent in the Wilderlands cured the permanent injury that had plagued him for the last fifteen years. It wasn't permanent anymore.

  "That’s the fifth and the sixth: whatcha call phase space. Also called probability space," Riley said. "In this multiverse, there are infinite parallel universes shooting off from every decision—every fork in every path—like branches in an infinite tree going off forever..."

  "So ... when you’re in the fifth dimension," Jason said, "you can jump around to different worlds based on those forks in the path?"

  Riley smirked. "Oh, no, man, you wouldn’t want to be in the fifth dimension. That would be fruking crazy. You—Jason with your OCS—you just use the fifth as a doorway ... if you wanted to for some reason. If you were actually in it? That’d be some crazy shet. You would be all possible paths all at once—it would drive you insane. But yeah, if you wanted to access a universe where you made a different decision, as long as you’re still in the same logical pathway—not like going to another version of 934 where ... for example ... dinosaurs never went extinct—you’d use the fifth."

  "Why would I want to use the fifth dimension?"

  Riley took another drink. "Well, you could use it for emergencies—like if something bad happened with one of our jobs—or use it to find another similar place for some reason, like if this universe got all fruked up and we needed a new place to go to. It’s kind of like hopping to alternate versions of here where everything is almost the same. Or, kind of like time travel, but also kind of not. Time travel has some really weird shet associated with it. It’s not like you would think..."

  "And the sixth," Jason said, "up and down ... the depth ... what’s the difference?"

  "You can use the fifth to go up and down the same branches, following the same logical path, right? The sixth lets you access anything that’s not in the same logical path."

  "Like Colorado with dinosaurs still being alive?"

  "Yeah, like that. Imagine like ... I dunno ... something really different that’s never been that way since before you were born. Like ... humans coexisting with lizard people."

  "Like the cannibals on the Wilderlands?"

  "Whatever," Riley said. "Now, you can’t use the fifth to go somewhere where humans coexist with lizard people. It’s not in the same logical chain, right? But you could use the sixth to get there."

  "Lines, sideways, and up and down," Jason replied. "I think I get the ant and fly in the garden hose analogy now."

  "Yep," Riley said, drinking more beer. He scratched his beard.

  "And the higher dimensions?"

  "They're simple if you look at it in the same way. It’s another group. Seven, eight, and nine go together in the same pattern. But where the temporal dimensions deal with parallel worlds—infinite universes within a single multiverse—the higher dimensions deal with totally different multiverses, all with their own infinite universes inside."

  "Wow."

  "You have no idea, Jason. So check this out: your universe here—u934—is part of a big multiverse that follows its own laws of physics, right?"

  "I guess. An infinite multiverse? I suppose I can see that..."

  "Yes," Riley replied with a smirk. "The right answer is yes. Anyway, there are infinite multiverses as well, all with their own laws, and they all have infinite universes inside—probability space—all of that within them. And the seventh, eighth, and ninth dimensions all allow you to travel across multiverses in the same way: line, sideways, and depth. So, if you want to travel in the seventh, you pick something about the multiverse you're in like ... I dunno ... the way gravity works according to mass. You can travel along the seventh—a straight line, one way or another—along an infinite spectrum of that one variable. Like ... rifting from multiverse after multiverse one way where the force of gravity gets stronger and stronger, or decreasing the force of gravity going the other way."

  "Why? Uh ... why would someone do that?"

  Riley scoffed and shrugged. "I dunno. That’s Jason Leaper stuff. There’s not many reasons why someone would want to travel on the seventh. You’d have to go through infinite variances of whatever line you were traveling on before you got where you were going. Jason 47 was talking about using the seventh to try to find a world that would be anti-aging to heal the damage that fruked him up back when he sent me to Jason 113."

  "What happened to Jason 47?"

  Riley sighed and looked down to Gliath, who was sleeping soundly. The leopard's big, black side rose and fell. The soldier sighed again and took another drink.

  "That’s a story for another time, dude. So you get the seventh?"

  "I think so."

  "And the eighth just adds another dimension, like sideways movement to that concept. It's kind of weird, but try to imagine choosing two different variables, and you can move through the combined spectrum of both of them. There’s not much reason to use the eighth when you can just use the ninth."

  "Is the ninth like the sixth, where you can just access anything?"

  "Yeah, man," Riley replied, gesturing with the top of his bottle for emphasis. "And really, truly, fruking anything. Any damned thing you can imagine. Infinity is ... ridiculous. You can’t even imagine the crazy shet that's out there—it’s beyond your ability to imagine, and most of it will kill ya. Just like when I came to you a few days ago. Gliath and I barely survived Jason 113 taking us to a universe along the ninth with really different laws of physics. The universe itself killed him and totally destroyed universe 113 as far as I know when it followed us home. I dunno—it might have been contained by the atmosphere of Jason's planet, but the Earth was destroyed at least. It was like ... there was something different about the air there. Gaseous molecules were constantly crystallizing into a physical form—maybe initiated by sunlight; I don't know—and when we were overwhelmed by it and Jason rifted us home, the air came through with us and started changing the air and the ground and ... fruk ... it changed Jason’s body and..."

  Riley trailed off, staring at his beer, and Jason couldn’t help but watch the soldier silently for a moment. The guy was stuck in some sort of hellish vision—probably still a pretty fresh memory still; a nightmare...

  "Riley?" Jason offered, reaching out but hesitating just before touching him...

  The soldier’s dark eyes suddenly came back to life and he shook his head, looked at Jason, then took another drink. "Yeah ... so the ninth can be really, really dangerous. I’d say that most other multiverses with different laws of physics could just outright kill us if we set foot inside. That’s why—just before he died—Jason 113 programmed in some sort of block into your OCS to keep you from using the ninth to rift into a multiverse that’s too different. I guess he thought it might make it safer. Maybe he thought it would be safer for you until you got enough experience and could get around the block. By then, you'd know what you're doing. That’s what I reckon, anyway. Since he knew you’d be starting from circle one."

  Square one? Jason thought.

  "How different?"

  "113 said that it had to be within ninety-five percent tolerance of universe 934."

  "That doesn’t seem really close," Jason said. Hell—he knew just from scientific tidbits he’d picked up over the years that five percent was a lot of variance when it came to evolution and science, like the fact that humans and chimpanzees shared something like 96% of the same DNA.

  "Eh ... that should help a lot in keeping us safe from the really crazy shet—the universes that would be instantly fatal. Hopefully. Remember, man, this is not my thing..."

  "You sure know a lot about dimensions and
multiverses for it not being your thing," Jason said.

  Riley chuckled, then smirked. "Well, this is elementary stuff. The science of it can get ridiculously more complicated, and thinking of what you can actually do with those different dimensions can get really, really complicated. Like this space in the third dimension. You think it's a solid point, but we're really on a planet flying through space all the time, aren't we? And check this out—let me see your OCS..."

  Jason handed it to him again.

  The soldier bounced his fingers around on the display, flashing through screen after screen. It reminded Jason of seeing teenagers flying through tasks on their smartphones. He figured that Riley must have some sort of computer in his brain helping him process things faster. He was a cyborg after all, right? Wouldn’t cybernetic improvements start with some sort of faster processor?

  "What are you looking for?"

  "Ah!" Riley replied, grinning. "Here it is. I’m not totally familiar with this thing, but I know some basics. You bookmarked—as you said—some coordinates earlier in the garage. And it looks like ... yep ... you set a marker along the fourth too. Try opening a rift from the living room here to those coordinates. Here, I made sure you’re going through the fourth..." The soldier handed the OCS back to Jason.

  "Time travel?"

  "Yeah," Riley said. "Just take a look. Don’t touch the rift, or it’ll appear to other you and you’ll totally freak yourself out..."

  A small knot of panic rose in Jason’s throat as he looked at the coordinates. Then, he faced the open area of the living room between the coffee table and the entertainment center and focused on the data of the OCS. He flexed that new muscle...

  In the middle of his living room, there was a loud crack and a rift opened up—just like all of the other ones that Jason had seen up until then—starting with a swirling fireball that expanded immediately into a whirling ring of sparks. As the disc of the window into the other world opened, shimmered, and smoothed, Jason found himself looking into his garage, staring at himself. The other, past version of him was scowling down at the OCS while sitting on the steps, fidgeting with the device’s screen, occasionally peering up at what must have been the metal ring of the portable gate. Jason was shocked by his clipped dusky hair. His face was a lot leaner and tanner than he normally visualized when he thought of himself. That’s right, Jason thought. I've just been through two weeks of hardcore survival on a dinosaur world...