by Eddie Patin
Before bed, everyone was hungry except for Jason. He was still being plagued by ideas of immensely-strong giants pulling him apart. If big, strong hands grabbed him, Jason would be powerless to stop them from tearing him limb from limb. The idea really bothered him.
He cooked minotaur steaks for everyone anyway, then slowly picked at his, unable to eat more than a few bites. Morgana made some delicious noodles with sauce. She was astounded by noodles—she'd never seen them before.
After dinner and cleanup, everyone went to bed. Riley and Gliath disappeared right away.
"You okay?" Morgana asked Jason as they worked together to turn all of the lights off.
"Yeah," he said, unconvincingly. He didn't have such jitters thinking about fighting a troll, and DnD-style trolls were goddamned monstrous. "Just some jitters, I guess."
"Jitters?"
"Nervous."
"Oh."
Before heading into the bedroom with Morgana, Jason went into his craft room and pulled out some paracord from his supplies. He found a male and female lanyard clip then—in the light of his computer desk's lamp—he put together something to hold the focus key to the lava world. Using the clips and weaving two lines of paracord through the hole in the chunk of molten metal, Jason crafted an adjustable bracelet that he could tightly attach to his wrist.
He was applying the finishing touches when he heard soft feet padding on the carpet behind him. Morgana's hands suddenly appeared around Jason's shoulders, exploring the armor of his chest. She drew in close behind him and kissed his neck. Her breath tickled his ear.
"What are you making?" she asked.
"My lava key," Jason said, holding it up so that she could see.
"A bracelet?"
"Yeah," he said, clipping it onto his left wrist and tightening it down. Playing around with contorting and bending his hand and wrist while it was on, Jason adjusted the bracelet until he could grab the lava key at will. "I'm making it so that I can grab it at any time."
"You're going to make monsters fall into lava?" she asked. "Just like you did when you made the necromancer's huge statue-thing fall through the air?"
"Yes," Jason said. He imagined it. He could literally cast a creature into molten lava. It was terrible. "Pretty horrific, really. It'll be very effective, I'm sure."
"I hope so," Morgana replied, kissing his neck. "Very strong of you." She kissed Jason's neck again and let out a sigh that flowed across his skin and roused the fire in his blood. "Come to bed?"
"Okay," Jason said. He turned off the lamp and turned to follow Morgana. She was wearing nothing but a big t-shirt. He watched her lead the way across the hall into his little bedroom, watching the fabric of the shirt slide across her buttocks.
Jason followed, pulling down the front zipper of his armor. Then, he went into the bedroom and closed the door.
Chapter 9
It was like stepping into the place where Yoda had trained Luke. It was like Dagobah, but more red.
Not quite like it, Jason thought, his boot setting down on the spongy ground. Not as wet.
Jason followed Riley through the rift into u1243, into the place that he'd bookmarked as 'Troll Swamp'. The orange rift roared around him and threw sparks down into the soggy bog around the spinning, vertical portal. The instant he was through, Jason's nostrils were filled with the odor of sulfur and mud.
Jason had expected to see water everywhere. He'd dressed for it somewhat, wearing his tallest hiking boots with socks that would dry quickly and gaiters strapped on to hopefully help keep his feet dry. Despite the measures, Jason still dreaded having to deal with walking through waist-deep muddy water and muck. He was resigned to wallowing in swampland and tolerating the misery until they found their troll.
But this wasn't too bad. It smelled strongly of sulfur, but it might not be too hard to keep dry.
When Gliath and Morgana stepped out behind Jason and Riley—the young woman carrying her AR-15 uncomfortably and looking around with astonishment—he released the portal. Gliath had the large metal case strapped onto his back, and it clunked against the leopardwere's torso armor as he moved.
The land was flat and grey with brown growths that were like a mix between bushes and twisting, tubular vines. There were strange, wooden spikes sticking out of the ground all over, ranging from knee to waist high. Jason had believed that they were defensive installations at first, but quickly realized that the spikes were some kind of root-knees; like cypress knees in the Southern states. Pockets of water stood here and there, thick with crimson-red algae, and much of the area was moist and soggy. The ground under Jason's feet reminded him of walking in the soft, grassy bogs of Colorado at really high elevations—back when he used to hunt deer and elk with his father in October—but it wasn't frosty. The world wasn't cold. In fact, it was rather warm.
"Not as hot as the Wilderlands," Jason said aloud, drawing everyone's attention.
"Yep," Riley said. "I'm picking up lots of life signs in the air—probably big fruking bugs—but nothing really on the ground around us except for small insects and frog-like things."
Jason looked up. The swamp was full of impossibly-tall tree trunks. The trees' canopies were over a hundred feet in the air. Now that they were standing in the world, Jason knew for sure that they were trees, but when he'd spied on the world from his garage, the strange woods looked more like gargantuan mushrooms by their shapes and pale trunks.
He saw the shadows of what might have been mosquitos the size of cats drifting through the murky air, perhaps fifty feet high. It was misty all over. The sky through the treetops was pale and white. The mist wasn't as thick as the fog that came with the gargoyles on Morgana's world, but it was constant, hanging in the air like a warm cloud. As he watched, Jason could faintly hear the sound of the large mosquitos' low buzzing wings.
As Jason's hearing adjusted to the quietness that always came after stepping through a loud rift, he paid attention to the other sounds. He focused on the drone of insects. There were repeating patterns of dull croaks and other strange, unidentifiable sounds mixed in. All around them was a constant drone of buzzing bugs and unseen animals calling. Some of the animal calls were odd indeed, but they all seemed small and repeated endlessly.
In addition to the knee-like structures sticking out of the spongy ground all over, there were huge thickets of roots surrounding the bottoms of most of the giant trees like bulbous, organic cages, expanding in random patterns like massive tumors. Pale green moss hung from most of these root-structures. Several had clumps of red strands of algae thrown around and on them as if tossed around in a hurricane.
That was strange...
Jason looked around the water pockets again and the thick red algae that choked them. If they were careful—in this destination area, anyway—they could avoid walking in water for the most part. There was plenty of spongy ground to stay on.
There was a suddenly vibrating groan from the Reality Rifters' right side. Jason spun to face it, throwing his AK up to his shoulder and looking down his sights.
Through the bog and convolution of huge tree trunks and root structures, he saw nothing.
Jason heard Riley's gear creak as the soldier relaxed and began looking around again.
"What was that?" Jason asked him.
Riley shrugged and looked around, scratching his beard. "Some animal." Then, the cyborg smiled as if he'd had a great idea. He pulled out his CamComm. "Let's take a picture!"
That helped everyone relax. What must have been a very large frog or something croaked deeply and repetitively in the distance.
"Okay," Jason said, smiling at Morgana. She lowered the muzzle of her rifle and smiled back.
"Come on, Gliath," Riley said. He ushered them all to stand around him, then aimed his camera at the four of them. It looked like the CamComm from Ebonexus had a camera app a lot like the one on Jason's phone. He saw Morgana's face surprised as she moved her eyes and lips, staring as her electronic reflection moved with her. "
Smile!" Riley exclaimed.
The three humans all smiled in the reversed camera window. Riley took a photo of the four Reality Rifters against the grey and red misty backdrop of 'Troll Swamp' with towering mushroom-shaped trees going on and on forever behind them. Gliath didn't smile. He stood in the frame but stared off into the distance with his big semi-auto shotgun at low ready.
"It's like a mirror, but a device?" Morgana asked.
"It's a camera," Jason replied. "It takes pictures. Let's see it, Riley."
The cyborg smirked and went into what must have been something like a 'gallery' app, then he pulled up the picture and showed them. Jason smiled. He remembered seeing several of the pictures that Riley had taken in the past with him and Gliath in front of a variety of weird worlds. Now Jason was part of that. This was Jason's second picture. Morgana's first.
"Like a painting," Morgana said. "Or like the pictures in the necromancer's book."
Jason and Riley laughed. "I keep forgetting," Jason said, "that you haven't seen a lot of this kind of stuff before."
Morgana shook her head and smiled. "Jason, I have resigned myself to accept that I will have an unending parade of strange things put before me, between your world—which is wild and novel to me—and the things that even you consider odd."
"Well, that's good, I guess," Jason replied. "Better than not being able to handle shit that blows your mind. Believe me," he added with a laugh, "most of this is new to me, too!"
"Flexible minds," Riley said, staring up into the treetops. Jason saw movement up there, but he had no idea what hid in the mist. "Good to stay that way, so you don't go fruking insane when you see weird shet. We'd better get moving."
"Good idea," Jason said.
He looked down at the little compass on his backpack strap. He waited for it to settle onto North, but it didn't. As Jason turned it this way and that, the needle just floated along, unresponsive.
Weird, Jason thought. This planet's poles aren't magnetic?
"Jason, didn't you want to use these primitive radios?" Riley asked, pulling his orange walkie-talkie from his belt. "I reckon we have to power them on, yeah?"
"Oh, yeah!" Jason exclaimed, pulling his own from a shoulder strap of his CamelBak. "Everyone turn them on by twisting the dial at the top all the way to the right, then, let's all try Channel One. I doubt the ettins and trolls will be using that channel, ya think?"
After the two veteran planeswalkers and the woman from a dark-ages world played around with their walkie-talkies for a minute, Jason made sure that all radios were on and set to the right channel. They tested them all.
Then, Jason pulled up his OCS. His actual compass wasn't working, but would the compass on his OCS still be able to figure out directions? When he unlocked the screen and looked at the compass feature, he found that it was reading just fine. Turning, Jason watched the directionals change consistently, then he opened his mouth to share his findings just as he stopped, facing south...
The distance was black.
It was pitch freaking black.
There was a sudden sound of rising wind. Jason realized that a storm of darkness was heading straight for them from that direction!
"What the hell?!" he asked, then pointed as the others all looked at it, too.
"Storm rolling in," Riley said. "It's been on that horizon for the last minute or so heading this way. Weird fruking weather, but I've seen worse. Let's head over to that root-thing over there, and wait it out."
Riley pointed at one of the mangrove-like structures growing around a nearby tree.
They all hurried over there. Jason turned on his night vision. The normal, cloudy sky was pretty damned bright, but he wanted to see if there were any giant animals or bugs inside that weird root-cave. It looked like the storm would make things very dark, too.
The roiling black clouds swept in on them with a vengeance. They were immediately buffeted by heavy, twisting winds and fat, warm drops of rain. The gusts and dank humidity immediately brought Jason back in his mind to the furious rainstorms in the Wilderlands; back when he faced down the wyvern in the storm—except here, it was very dark. The winds and blowing storm was loud as hell and Jason squinted against the rain in his face. He looked for the others. His image intensifier was a mess of swirling colors, but he saw Morgana standing near him, hanging onto a root, her hair flying all over. Riley and Gliath crouched together, holding onto the root-structure with grim faces, unimpressed. They looked as though this sort of thing happened to them all the time.
"Why's it so black?!" Jason shouted above the noise. "It's so dark—it doesn't make sense!"
He fingered the lava key bracelet on his left arm, then realized with a cold stab of fright that he'd never bothered to test it. He should have opened a rift to that lava world at least once before coming here so that he'd at least know what to expect!
"You tell me!" Riley shouted back. "Who knows?"
A pinprick of blue light stabbed Jason's right eye with its brightness.
"What the hell?!" he muttered to himself.
Closing his right eye, Jason looked with his natural left through the black storm. He saw a bright ball of blue in the distance. It looked like a tennis ball of blazing blue fire, tumbling around in the dark storm. Then he saw another farther away. Then another.
Jason wiped his eyes. The water was intermittent, but flecks of mud and algae-muck stung his face. At times, it was like being in a deluge back in the Wilderlands. Other times, the wind whipped at his face and threw stinging drops of swamp water at him.
The blue balls were like ... almost like will-o-wisps from DnD! He didn't remember seeing that on the huge list of fauna, and he'd looked at the list ranked by the things closest to the destination rift's position.
Raising his OCS, Jason squinted against the storm and unlocked the screen. He went to the scanning function and aimed the device's laser at the nearest bobbing blue ball of light. It was far, and all over the place, but if he—
The glowing blue orbs vanished.
"What...?"
Then, as quickly as the storm came, it went away. Almost as quickly as the will-o-wisps disappeared, the black storm faded from sight, pulling back and retreating the same way it had come.
Eventually, Jason could see again. He could see the others. Morgana's long hair was still tossing in the wind, but the effects of the storm were dying down.
Everything calmed down and the four Reality Rifters were left looking around. Jason and Morgana were both clinging onto roots that ran up higher than their heads.
Riley stood, brushing himself off and adjusting the sling of his lever gun.
"Well, that was interesting," he said. "Let's keep moving."
Everyone straightened.
"You okay?" Jason asked Morgana.
She nodded, unslinging her rifle again after pulling her hair together. "Yeah, I'm fine."
Gliath spoke up suddenly with his rumbly voice. "I smell something, Ranaja. Something like a man. Very dirty."
"Probably giants," Riley said, looking around the swamp. "Jason, can you see about having your OCS guide us to a troll? That was something that Jason 113 used to do sometimes. I don't know how he did it, but that would be really fruking helpful. Better than just wandering around in this shet."
Jason looked around as well but didn't see anything relevant. He turned his night vision off.
"Um, yeah. I can try."
Pulling up his OCS, Jason first tried the fauna section. He navigated down the list to the troll entry then clicked on the name. He'd done that before already and knew that it would take him to a data sheet where the device would try to assemble whatever information it could about the creature. He searched around for some sort of 'tracking' button.
"Got it?" Riley asked.
"I'm looking. Keep your pants on."
Riley smirked and shook his head. "You say some weird shet sometimes, Jason."
At first, Jason didn't see any way to track a troll. All he could see
was information. There were several paragraphs about its stats—or a range of stats, rather—and an infinity of sources including folklore, stuff in other Earth languages, lists of movie titles, books, and more. Everything was expandable, and almost every word was a link that would lead to information about that word. Jason could choose to learn more about whatever he clicked on, like using a huge Wikipedia. He could spend the rest of his life in his armchair learning about anything and everything that he could ever want to learn in a way that was attuned to his universe.
Then, Jason tried to imagine what he would do if he was to design this device himself. Surely it had some kind of function like Riley described. The Omniversal Cosmic Scanner had a direct conduit to the tenth dimension. It had access to the entire omniverse's data, condensed into a single point.
The OCS was designed by a Jason. It would work in a way that was instinctual to him—Riley had told him that before.
Jason tried to drag the troll's entry into the compass function in the upper margin of the screen.
It worked.
The top bar where the compass and time was suddenly expanded downward—just like pulling down the notification area at the top of a smart phone. Jason saw:
Unknown. Lore: Troll, 97% match. Universe 1243, Troll Swamp.
There was a little digital compass arrow next to the words with a readout that said "2.6 miles".
"Holy shit! I got it!" Jason exclaimed. "There's a troll—well, at least one; I don't know—2.6 miles in that direction!"
Riley held up a hand to quiet him.
"Good job, Jason," he muttered, staring into the distance. "Keep quiet. We've got company."
"Coming our direction," Gliath added, shouldering the shotgun.
Both of the warriors were eyeing a spot on the other side of the next huge tree. Jason knew that Gliath was going by his leopardwere senses, but for all he knew, Riley might have been watching little blips of enemies through the tree on his cybernetic HUD.
Jason felt a spike of fear in his stomach.
"Giants?" he asked.
Riley didn't answer. He kept his shushing hand up and stared, not moving a muscle. Then, he shouldered his Marlin and started scrambling backwards.
