[Pre Sort Complete]

In between there and here was something else. It might have been a place or a presence or it might have been neither, but Todd doesn’t know what it was.

[Subjects Spawning]

It’s not that he can’t remember, it’s that he could not conceive.

[Spawn Obstructions Detected in Zone]

Whatever it was had been too big, too far, too deep for him to process.

[Incomplete Spawn Count 12]

Not even a fraction of a ratio of a percent of it.

[Spawn Failure 0.12%. Within Bounds]

Every cubic centimeter of his body shudders into a bone deep chill.

[Load complete]

The entire arc of the sky is a pitch black, but the surroundings are lit bright as if under morning sunshine. An open courtyard is cobbled with smooth robin-egg blue tile, fitted with a reassuring inevitable snugness. The buildings which mark out the square are squat, only a few stories tall at most, and made from a cream colored stone which soothes the eye even though their overall shapes are numbly and uniformly featureless squares.

Todd is standing in a relaxed pose, though his stance is weirdly wide and his arms held awkwardly out at a slight angle before he lets them fall. He looks down at his body to see his soccer jersey still, his shorts, his cleats and shin pads and his body fit inside them as expected. He is still soaked from the exertion of his last push for the goal, but the ambient temperature here is much lower. His body heat begins to drop precipitously and his whole self tenses up, as shakes bring him back to a stable Fahrenheit.

But he’s not alone. There are more than a hundred other people standing in the square with him, maybe lots more; but as Todd looks out a part of his brain makes note that the distance between each of them sums to imply the grand enormity of the square around them. Todd re-calibrates his bearings, those buildings are much bigger than he originally understood.

Barely thinking rationally, Todd begins weaving almost drunkenly. He feels like there should be some kind of Cardinal direction that’s missing in between the four normal ones, which if he might only find it could navigate his way home. Then the first wailing cries rise out through the crowd and Todd ratchets one notch closer to clarity.

“Where?” He says dumbly, having found the letter w again.

Tutorial: Status Debuffs ⓘ

Todd stops rigidly still. An orange panel obscures his vision, with simple plain text. He looks away, trying to find some kind of explanation, but the prompt follows his gaze exactly. Reaching out to touch it, he finds it is somehow hovering between his hand and his eyes.

Hesitating, Todd slowly draws his hand towards his face, fingers inching closer to his eyes and expecting to but never reaching what’s hovering in space. The thought that this thing might be inside his eyeball, lurches into his brain by way of his gullet and he feels a rising terror.

The panel shrinks away and then vanishes, as fast as it appeared.

Panic status detected!

“Yes?” Todd confirms, his voice cracking.

Wisdom 5

Then suddenly the number scrolls down like a slot machine, landing at a reduced number..

Wisdom 2

“The f...” Todd looks around again, this time at the crowd around him. The smaller prompt has taken up less of his field of view. “..uhh...” He sees others similarly confused, similarly spacing out, even spinning around in place for no reason. “...ck?” He mutters in a long breath. Are they seeing these same prompt screens?

Tutorial: Status effects are temporary or permanent modifiers to your personal attributes, abilities, appearance, or function.

ⓘ Status effects may be beneficial or harmful, and come in many varieties! There are currently 104 811 901 254 112 known statuses and status variants!

The longer, larger prompts appear to last in his face for a longer period of time. Todd wonders if it’s to give him a longer chance to read. He scowls. Todd has always been a fast reader, and ever since he was a kid playing his first computer game he’d already hated waiting for the sluggish default text speed.

ⓘ Panic Status: a Mental Status characterized by a reduced capacity for long term decision making. Minimal impact to pattern recognition, short term memory or Intelligence based skill Arts.

Could he change the text boxes to advance faster? Was there some kind of Menu setting here?

“Menu,” Todd says out loud, cheeks blushing and feeling like an idiot. Then after a moment a new prompt appears.

Would you like to know more?

Yes

No

Todd looks at his neighbors again. A lifetime growing up with computers means that this experience, as alien as it is, touches on one of his primal familiarities. Not everyone is adjusting as well as he is. A grown man is swinging his fists wildly through the air around him. A pretty woman in yoga pants is crab walking backwards in a babbling state of alarm. A business woman in a suit just took off her heeled shoes to hurl them violently at someone else. Just to make life stranger, Todd sees whole lot of people here are dressed like they stumbled out of a Renaissance Faire, with leather jerkins and beads, and droopy linen shirts. At least most of those people have the sense to stand still while they freak out.

Unlike the previous prompts, Todd sees that the selection is not vanishing. It is however growing slowly transparent. Moving his head, he notices a few other strange things. Most notably, the color of the panel window seems to adjust to improve readability against the background.

It’s a nice feature, and Todd approves of the effort made to reduce his eye strain.

No, he shakes his head gravely. He can’t cavalierly accept this lunacy. He needs to figure out what’s going on. A shriek of pain rings out from far away, but Todd can’t pinpoint its source over the rising, raucous volume of the crowd.

Instead he taps his finger out in the air towards where ‘No’ might be, hoping to dismiss the prompt. “No,” he whispers, after touch fails to work. Then a gentle flashing indicator illuminates his choice and the window vanishes.

He jogs forward, towards a nearby middle aged woman who has a heavy set motherly look. He sees an anchor of normalcy in her floral print dress, her old leather boots like she just came in from the garden, the soft jowls of a person who rightly values dinner above exercise.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” He asks, realizing he kind of wishes someone would care to ask the same question of him. He touches her shoulder gently to get her attention.

“¿Cuándo llegamos aquí?” The woman begs him with an agonized expression. “¿Qué está pasando?” She says, as Todd releases her and wracks his brain to make sense of her words.

“No hablo espanol?” He apologizes, even less sure of himself now. The woman reaches out as if to pursue him, but he doesn’t know how to help her, doesn’t know how to help himself, so he turns to get away. His eyes seek out familiar faces, patterns, commercial logos. Anything which might indicate a friend, an acquaintance, an authority figure, anyone.

He doesn’t make it far, because the woman standing in front of Todd is not a human being.

She hadn’t been 50 feet from him. An alien life form. The two of them stand, just blinking at each other in shock. Had he been in denial for these last few minutes? He’d seen many dozens of these unusual looking people in the crowd, but up until now his mind had glazed over them. After all, there are so many innovative ways a human being could be ugly: especially if you take the interstate out east an hour or two, for example. This? This ain’t no regular accident of ugly at work.

The woman is human shaped only in the broadest strokes. Two eyes, a mouth, a nose. Arms, body, legs. But her face, her everything, seems to be covered with a short downy fur. The shape of her nostrils and bridge is wrong, like antelope weird, and her ears taper to points. Her loose, earth tone clothing looks like it came out of some kind of feudal peasant village, which finally makes the connection between the Rennfaire costumes and elf people click in his mind. After a heartbeat, the woman’s eyebrows knit up into an expression of fear in a very human-like way.

“Jesus!” Todd cries out, and the creature responds in kind, though not in any language Todd’s ever heard or even imagined could be spoken.

The two back away from each other. They both look around again, seeing their neighbors in a new light. About a third of the people here, aren’t people at all. Or at least not the kind Todd knows.

But if Todd is uncomfortable learning that humanity is not alone, at least he does not have to experience being outnumbered.

A great tidal shift ripples through the crowd like an electric shockwave, and thousands of souls try all at once to pick the same direction to retreat from an alien race.

It’s pandaemonium.