Candy

*** *** ***

Greetings, Traveler α! You have been accepted into the Grand Tapestry of Rhofhir. The following announcements will inform you of your ability to affect the Grand Tapestry. Introduce new patterns that the Grand Tapestry may absorb or strengthen existing patterns to increase your ability to affect the Grand Tapestry. Your acknowledgment is required to proceed.

*** *** ***

Candy blinked open her eyes. She was used to ignoring randomly weird thoughts. There were days she swore she had to have some kind of multiple personality disorder to go with her hyperactive brain. There was her inner snark, her inner bitch, her inner deviant, her inner puzzler, her inner optimist, and her more socially acceptable engineer and flirty sides that got to step out of her inner mind. This could have been straight from her inner weirdo were it not for the strangely foreign feel to it.

Her eyes did not want to open.

*** *** ***

Your acknowledgment is required to proceed.

*** *** ***

If I acknowledge that I'm hearing things, will I be able to open my eyes? Candy asked herself.

*** *** ***

Acknowledgment of comprehension received. To review your current capabilities within the Grand Tapestry, project the command [Status].

*** *** ***

Okay, her inner weirdo was working overtime.

She tried again to open her eyes and, this time, it worked.

She screamed.

*~*~*

When Candy calmed down enough to have thoughts again, she found herself wedged into a shallow indentation in a cave wall with seven mostly black-scaled, big-assed raptors holding their heads and looking at her with a small measure of the What-The-Fuckery filling her brain.

The largest of them had a silvery sheen on its shoulders, and as she looked at it, she realized it was way too anthropomorphic to be an actual raptor. It lowered its hands (three digits and a thumb) and cautiously stepped farther away from Candy. When nothing else happened, it took another step back, then a third. It said, its voice - his voice - masculine, "Fall back, troops. Let's give the human more room to calm down."

"Holy shit on a stick! You talk!" The words tumbled out of Candy's mouth before she realized she thought them.

The silver-sheen raptor guy stopped moving, then he nodded. "We're arassi. You … look human. You're a Traveler?"

Even as she focused on the speaker, Candy caught the frowny faces and narrowed eyes most of the rest of the raptor guys gave her. Damnit, they talked and she'd be pissed if someone dismissed her as a freaky animal or whatever, but these were raptor men!

"I don't know what you're talking about, but where the hell am I? What- who are you? And, wait, you said troops. Are you some kind of secret super soldier initiative? Why do you look like raptors?" The questions came out of her mouth in rapid fire succession, and the more questions she asked, the calmer Candy felt. Well, not calm. Just not panicked.

The rest of the raptor men, arassi, straightened up. A couple of them, both with more of a green iridescence over the black of their scales, kept their focus on her, but the rest turned to the silver-sheen guy.

He, too, straightened, but slowly, and Candy thought he was doing a good job of trying to be calm and non-threatening considering he had sharp pointy teeth that flashed in the light of the cave-room as he spoke. "I am Kargerran, sergeant of the Third Squad of the First Patrol Talon of Lotrot. We are hardly secret or super, and I don't know what a raptor is, so I don't know why you think we look like them. We found you while on a routine patrol of the Mana Waste borders as we were seeking shelter from the Mana Storm raging outside the cave. We thought you might be a citizen of Lotrot, took you with us, and began rendering [First Aid] as soon as it was safe for us to stop."

Candy's feet slipped and she slid down to land on the ground on her butt, just then realizing that her shallow hole in the wall had been about a meter up it.

The raptor-guys tensed, and it suddenly struck Candy that they were scared of her. Her inner weirdo slipped a comment in, not directed at anyone in particular. "I think maybe I'm a long way from Kansas, Toto."

"My name is Kargerran, and I have never heard of a place called Kansas."

Candy shook her head. "Sorry, that wasn't -. It's too much to explain, sorry. But. My name is Candice Sterling, and since you don't seem ready to eat me, and I have no flipping clue what's going on or where I am, how about we have a nice, careful sit down and figure out what's going on from here."

Kargerran sat. "Why don't you tell us the last thing you remember?"

Candy nodded, caught a glimpse of her clothes, tried to simultaneously fold up in to a ball shape while pulling her shirt closed, and blushed a furious bright red.

*** *** ***

Traveler Design Completed. You have acquired Aspect of the Gamer.

*** *** ***

*~*~*

"I get that you're telling me this is not Earth. I'm having a hard time believing you," Candy said, several hours later.

One of the three arassi with a copper tone to his scales snorted. Even with a couple of hours to study them - politely, of course - she still could not identify which of them was whom without relying on where they sat. Kargerran the sergeant had the silver sheen. Vilbraltian, or Vi as he preferred, and Nilis had the green sheen, and Nilis was almost as tall as Kargerran. In the wrong shade of light, the red sheen of Stylard's scales looked an awful lot like the copper of Perth, Cord, and Krar. All four of them seemed about the same height, and were close enough in build that the only hope Candy had of separating them came down to a line up style comparison. She wanted to say the one who snorted was Krar. He avoided speaking when he could.

Kargerran shrugged. "As long as you don't do something stupid because of that, I don't particularly care."

Vi added, "Besides, all you have to do is think [Status] and you'll get proof of the Tapestry."

"I'm just saying that the physics of travel between dimensional universes, even if some version of String Theory style multi-verses exist, is insanely not feasible given that we were working on biofeedback. Nothing quantum at all!" Candy said.

"And I'm just saying nothing you just said made a lick of sense to me. What in the Wastes is quantum anything?" Perth poked the fire while providing his bit of commentary.

Vi and Nilis jumped up, their scales lifting like the ruff of a dog catching an intruder's scent.

Kargerran stood, facing the wall opposite of the cave opening, and drawing his sword. His voice deepened. "Get behind us, human."

The rest also rose, drawing their weapons and taking a defensive position.

Candy got to her feet and stepped where Kargerran indicated. "What's going on?"

"Mana's coalescing in the back wall," Vi said. "Feels directed, patterned."

One of the copper scaled guys said, "Hey, at least it isn't likely to be a random monster spawn."

"Unless the storm's made a new dungeon," Nilis said, "we just have to worry about someone stupid enough to try working with raw mana. Thanks all the same, but I'd rather have a newly spawned monster."

A sound like rock grinding over rock barely preceded the cave shaking worse than a 5.0 earthquake. Candy got right up next to the force shield covering the cave entrance and tucked herself into a ball, covering her head and neck just like she had learned in the drills in grade school.

"Dungeon! Take cover!" Kargerran ordered.

"Rot!"

"Blighted Wastes!"

The shaking ended abruptly.

Candy counted to ten before she uncurled to look around. Just in case. She wasn't sure what that was in case of, and her inner puzzler was sure she didn't want to find out.

A crack had opened up in the far wall, and it seemed to lead into a dark cavern. From that cavern, Candy caught a voice, faint. " … better … safe … home …" and a tone to the unfamiliar words that sounded like her cousin on cleaning days.

"Cord, point scout. Perth, Nilis, back him up. Krar and Vi, you're on tail sweep. Human, you stay behind me and you do what Stylard tells you to do when he tells you to do it." The non-threatening Kargerran disappeared as the sergeant took up active command of his squad.

*~*~*

Lena

The re-made portal started up like the last two and, like she discovered with the one that brought Aaron and Rob to them, Lena couldn't pass through it.

"Candice better damn-well be safe on the other side of that thing or I am making the homey sock from hell to beat someone with," Lena muttered to herself, glaring at the portal.

Jason glanced up, looked around, found her toon - Lena decided that this light show she'd made was like a video game character, a toon she piloted - and he frowned in her general direction, but said nothing. He returned his focus to his friend.

While Lena had been busy making a portal to find her cousin, Rob had gone from pale and shaking to freaked out and bawling over his brother. Seeing the guy with the best social skills of their group broken like this was far from relaxing. On one hand, Lena wanted to wait until Rob had himself better in hand. On the other, what the hell was happening to her cousin?

Almost before Jason finished refocusing on Rob, a pointy metal tip pierced the new portal, sliding right into Lena's toon's chest. She jumped back and squawked, looked down at where the pointy tip pierced her light, dismissed her toon, then looked back up at the pointy thing. The more it pushed through the portal, the more it looked like a sword. A sword held by a black, reptilian looking hand.

*** *** ***

Portal cannot be closed while in use.

*** *** ***

The announcement came before Lena realized she had gotten beyond thinking, "What the what?"

On the heels of that, Lena decided that she probably wasn't in danger, being all non-corporeal and all, but the guys? They were vulnerable to swords and claws. A vision of Jason sliced to the bone flashed through Lena's mind. Oh, no! Not on her watch!

She cut off all the lights away from this platform and stopped maintaining a couple dozen cubic meters of water plus the walkways connecting the platforms, then watched her zone's mana pool creep up to the point where she could start walling in this platform.

The reptilian hand was soon enough followed by a raptor-man looking creature, then another. The third was pushing through when Lena had enough juice to bring up some walls.

The first had made it to the edge of the platform, slinking low, making himself as small of a target as he could. He was focused on the guys on the far platform. The stone of the wall made contact with his chin as it flowed up to block off any possible aggression on his part. The walls on the other sides of the platform started to go up just slightly behind the one cutting off their line of sight.

The front lizardman cupped his jaw with his free hand, rocking back on his heels to get farther away from the wall. "Waste Walkers!" he snarled.

"Is the dungeon still taking shape?" The second lizardman asked, slowing his step away from the portal.

The third moved to clear the entrance and pulled a stone from his belt pouch. He glanced at it, watched the walls rising, then gave his stone a second glance. "Ambient mana's pretty low. It's possible. Do you know what triggered this shift?"

A fourth lizardman came through, also making sure not to block the portal. How many of these things were there?

The first growled and the second of the lizardmen said, "The walls went up as Cord got to the edge."

The first, Cord, said, "There's an odd shape on the water. I was trying to get in range for my Dark Vision skill to trigger when the dungeon clipped my chin."

The fifth person through was Candy, her clothes looking the worst for wear, but without any obvious damage to her person.

Lena brought back her toon. "Candy! Are you okay? Do I need to drop homey socks on these guys?"

Candy screeched and jumped onto the back of the lizardman in front of her. He swung around, his sword sweeping through Lena's toon and smacking into the portal, where it lodged.

Which was a good thing for the fifth lizardman. "Sand! What in the Wastes, sergeant!?"

"Light Wraith! Don't let it touch you!" the lizardman with the stone called out.

"Suck a sugar stick, scales!" Lena snapped at him before stepping back so she could meet Candy's gaze. "Candice Ruth Sterling, so help me God, I will bring down the wrath of Mamaw if you don't shut up and tell me what's going on! Do you hear me?"

Candy's shriek cut off. "Lena?"

"Are. You. Okay?" Lena scowled at her cousin.

"Ye-yeah." Candy slid off the big lizardman's back. "These guys have been on the up and up so far. What happened to you?"

Lena flopped to the ground, relieved. She absently noted that the lizardman nearly sliced by Candy's defender got shoved through her as another lizardman came through the doorway. "Oh, thank God! How the hell do we get out of this mind-scape thing?"

"Ah-. What?" Candy asked. She went to move around the side of her lizardman defender, but he caught her and pulled her back.

"Stay behind me. Light Wraiths are tricky bastards."

Lena shuddered. "Seriously, girlfriend. How do we get back to the real world? And have you seen Brad? Rob really isn't handling this funky sugar-ball of a nut cluster, and I'm more than ready to be back in my flesh and blood body."

The sixth lizardman snagged the fifth and pulled him behind the one blocking Candy. Lena realized that the first two lizardmen through the portal had a copper cast to their scales, the third and sixth a green shine. Candy's defender had a matte silver sheen. The fifth's scale had a red hue to them, and, oh, hey, a seventh lizard dude walked in, this one with a copper cast, too. The two greenies talked quietly over the red guy's head.

Candy flicked a glance at Mr. Silver Scales before looking back at Lena's toon. "That's my cousin. I don't know why she's all holographic and stuff, but that's my cousin!"

The interaction reassured Lena more than Candy's words. Her cousin had a hard time looking away from something she mistrusted. The impotent fear Lena felt eased up considerably, and she made a few snap judgments. Lena didn't know enough about the scaley dudes, but they were acting more like cops than robbers. Lena dropped the maintenance of the portal, just in case they tried dragging Candy away.

The second of the greenies hissed, a snake-like sound.

Lena looked up from her seated position, meeting Mr. Silver Scales' gaze. "You're defending Candy, so I'm not going to open my can of dungeon whoop ass on you. Give me a sec and I'll pull up some benches or something so y'all can have a seat while we all calm down and figure out what's going on."

She turned her attention back to Candy. The signs that her cousin had gotten into one of her questioning head spaces, the intensity of her gaze, the set of her hips and the faint angling of her head, they were all present. The fastest way to get her talking was to get her from questioning to comparing mode. "After the 'are you ready' prompt or whatever it was, this weird voice was calling me a Traveler and saying something about becoming the arbiter of zone gamma. I went along with it being part of the demo you and Brad were putting on for us, because you were joking about how I like setting up the game stuff and this place -." Lena chuckled. "You're not usually this good at people reading, but between you and Brad, I could so see you two recognizing that this is my ideal studio. I don't … feel like normal me, not here. I feel like I can see things more clearly, and at the same time, it's so much easier to get lost in my art here. I got to the point where I had a place to put the portal thing, and as I built the arch, I was wondering what Jason would think of all this. And while I'm getting my breath back from that opening up, in he walks."

The zone's mana had recovered some more, so Lena made the benches she had promised. There wasn't much more to tell, especially since Rob's crisis needed to be handled first before she found out what their experience had been. By the time she had finished, she figured it was Candy's turn to dish details. "How does that stack up with how you got here?"

Candy shrugged. "Woke up in a cave with these guys around. They said they found me in something they call the Mana Wastes and have been trying to convince me that we're in a different dimension and this ain't Earth. It's flipping impossible, but unless you're a figment of my fried brain, it's an interesting hypothesis. And you're saying that Brad's still missing?"

"Yeah."

One of the greenies asked, "You're claiming to be in control of this dungeon?"

Lena pointed her finger above her head and made an illusion of the word "Yes" appear over her head. Then she pointed to the walls around them and pulled out the same word on each wall surrounding them.

"Sergeant, she isn't a Light Wraith. Stylard took no damage from contact with her light," the same greenie said.

The other green guy added, "I've never heard of dungeons having any sort of governor or arbiter or whatever, but this dungeon isn't acting like a normal dungeon."

"How does a normal dungeon act?" Candy asked. Lena thought she might have an idea or two on that, but she kept her mouth shut and looked at the two green-shiny lizardmen.

Mr. Silver Scales inclined his head. He hadn't taken his gaze from Lena, nor had he relaxed.

"They spawn all sorts of stuff, mostly monsters and mana crystals."

Lena asked, "Why do you call them dungeons, then?"

The two greenies exchanged curious looks and shrugged. The first of the lizardmen through the door - Cord? - said, "In the Way Back, we put criminals in them and only let them out after so many months. Lot of people willing to risk their life in a dungeon for a few months when the choices were that or years, maybe a lifetime, of being a slave."

The cousins turned to look at Cord with nearly identical looks of shocked repulsion. "Y'all keep slaves?" Lena asked.

"Not on Malta, not for a few hundred years or so," Cord said.

*~*~*

Feltz

Reibsamak Feltz took the memory stone off to his private quarters. He barely paid attention to his wards rising as he took a seat at his workbench.

Dibbs was a good boy, a little hot headed, and too intuitive by half for someone with such a block on [Tapestry Synchronization]. Of course, a man old enough to be a father himself rarely appreciated being called a boy, but Feltz had a hard time forgetting the youth who had pestered him for mentoring, even as he saw the wizard that youth had become. It was harder still when the boy so far outshone his ambitions.

"[Analyze]."

*** *** ***

Memory Stone

Composition: Sapphire

Mana Capacity: 453/500 ** Non-writable

Mana Channel: 10S

*** *** ***

The stone was near capacity, but there was sufficient capacity left to record the equivalent of two hours of speech. However, being non-writable meant that capacity was being held in reserve, which meant that at least one of the memories contained in the stone was capable of growth. That much growth indicated sapience.

"[Inspect]."

*** *** ***

Designation: Anomaly β

Species: Unknown (Contained)

Titles: Unknown

- - -

ACU: Unknown

BRW: Unknown

DEX: Unknown

INT: Unknown

WIS: Unknown

CHA: Unknown

HTH: Unknown

LCK: Unknown

- - -

Health Pool: Unknown

Mana Pool: Unknown

Will Pool: Unknown

- - -

Aspects: Unknown

Skills: Unknown

Designs: Unknown

- - -

Overseer: Casper Dibbons

*** *** ***

Feltz gently set the stone in a cradle meant for such objects. He leaned back and sucked on his lips while he thought. After some deliberation, Feltz rose and began gathering sand from the Wastes.

It would be cruel to force the poor demon out of the protection of the stone before ascertaining if it could survive integration with the Grand Tapestry. It would be equally irresponsible to release it without taking precautions. In the mean time, they would need a way to wake the demon and communicate with it. Feltz could begin building a few forms, perhaps even a golem, to contain the enstoned demon. Dibbs would have to provide the nuances of the translation spells he had grown to make the original contact for those forms to be of any sort of worth.