Collide Gamer

This was the third portal John managed to enter and it was by far the most unusual one.

The world was teeming with life, positively writhing with it. White-furred, mice-like creatures skittered about, devouring the fruits of trees whose intensely green leaves hung from silver-grey branches. There was fur on those trees, hairs, that waved in the soft winds. Pale elks peacefully trotted towards a sparkling pond. It had to check on every step not to crush the multitude of smaller lifeforms moving about. Everything moved with respect and abundance through this light forest.

For all of its life, the world was… sterile. The light colour of the furs and barks reminded John of the walls of a hospital. For all of the life that hushed about, he noted the complete absence of any kind of insect. This world appeared bereft of parasites of any form. Birds fluttered about, eating seeds.

‘No carnivores either,’ the Gamer thought and shied away from a supermassive sloth. He did not fear it, but he did not know what it was either. All of this felt unnerving, familiar, yet too different for him to put his finger on it.

John shook his head and headed back for the portal. There was no use in staying here. The dense presence of life would have made his scouting too slow. Better to save this body and his group the time of fetching a new one.

The moment he was outside, Lee approached him. “Yo, I just got word from Scarlett. Look at this.” She raised a photo up to him.

It was a portal into the same realm that John had just left. The pale colours and furred trees were too distinct to mistake them. Either this was the same place or a cosmic coincidence. The latter was unlikely, given other factors. “Do we have people there?” John asked.

“Yeah, Scarlett instructed the people who found it to set up a camera for her.”

“Excellent, time to verify our theory then,” John wandered over to where the rest of the harem was waiting and sat down.

Over the past few days, they had gotten a couple of new data points. First, the second portal the Creator Puppet had entered had, unlike the first, instantly cut his connection upon closing. The discrepancy meant that it, indeed, wasn’t his ability that had allowed it to persist for a few seconds. Some route had remained open. Secondly, the steady influx of pictures and videos of portals had allowed a pattern to emerge.

There seemed to be matching pairs of portals. So far, that was just a theory. They did not always find a match and the landscapes so far had been generic enough that it all could have been a long string of coincidences.

This one, in all of its oddities, could be the final nail in the coffin. If the two portals closed around the same time…

They did.

It took several minutes for the one on the other side of the livestream to break down. Then, half an hour later, so did this one. “All within standard deviation of the established portal strength,” Lee said, filling out an excel sheet on her phone. “The formula is applicable enough now… not the best estimate, but it seems these portals last between 31,5 and 32,283 hours.”

“About 47 minutes range of unpredictability,” John said. “That’s workable… but more interesting is that this virtually confirms the theory. Someone is travelling with these. Out of realm, then back into ours… but why?”

Scarlett had sent him an updated map of the portals before he was even finished asking the question. Coloured lines connected where two matched portals had been. In the cases where they knew, confirmed, which side would have been the exit, she had indicated so with symbols. There were only two such cases.

John scanned it all, trying to find a pattern. His erudite brain found a bunch of possible ones, filling out the gaps in the information with theories. Then, he applied Occam’s Razor and came to the simplest and most likely conclusion.

There was none.

Not any one pattern he could imagine smoothly lined up with reality. Whoever was opening the portals seemed to just… move around the place without rhyme or reason. The ‘place’ being the entirety of the USA. That this person kept to the borders of the nation was another pointer that they were dealing with an Awakened. Besides the country, the land borders of the USA had no meaning whatsoever. The entire north was just an arbitrary straight line and yet these portals remained within those confines.

Scarlet: I can’t make sense of this.

John: Then you and your computers are coming to the same conclusion as I.

Scarlet: Could be a lack of data points.

Scarlett: You are going to sweep the area now?

John: That’s the plan.

He gave Lee the phone back, then cleared his throat. “Alright, so, assuming that our target is indeed a Latebloomer and is indeed travelling using these gates, that must mean, given the sheer amount of portals, that they only stay in the mundane for short stretches before moving on. Which in turn means… that there should have been a second portal in close proximity to each of the ones found so far.”

There was one case of this on the map Scarlett had sent him. Why they hadn’t been found reliably was easily answered: no one who found one of the portals had thought to go look for a second one. Either they had ventured into it or they had reported it to the authorities and then waited. The one case where they had found two had been a stroke of luck.

Granted, all of this was a theory still. It could be that he was entirely wrong and that another explanation would emerge eventually.

“Any pointers on where to go?” he asked Lorelei.

The seer had been quiet all this time. It was far from unusual, especially given her company. While Lee, Metra and Nathalia had chatted away, Lorelei and Nia had quietly observed everything. Now prompted, the white-blonde woman tilted her head back just a bit, her gaze turning to infinity. “What left the portal, we will find in the library,” she said.

“…I don’t like that wording,” John muttered.

It was a random middle American city, one of the many in the stretch between fifty and two-hundred thousand people. It was noteworthy on a state level, but on a grander scale it was just a hub in a nation of over 300 million people.

Like all sufficiently large cities, it had a public library. In the digital age, it was a bit of an artefact. On principle, John was in favour of keeping one of their kind around though. Preserving humanity’s knowledge was always a noble goal. Electric and physical media both had their shortcomings, so having it in duplicate wouldn’t hurt.

John was about to enter through the front area when Lee grabbed his sleeve. “There’s an Illusion Barrier in place here,” she whispered to him. “A big one.”

“…Alright then.” John turned his head. Metra, Nia and Nathalia nodded back. Between the three of them and this unoptimized Creator Puppet, they had the firepower to take down just about anything they could encounter.

The Creator Puppet raised his hand, then the six of them entered the Illusion Barrier.

John had expected to step into a world of madness of some sort. As so often when he held that thought, he was met with a simple copy of the space he had just left. Since the Lorylim had been defeated, he hadn’t stepped in any such hell unexpectedly.

‘I really should stop listening to my paranoia all the time.’ As the disposable body of the group, John led the way. “In an emergency, Lee and Lorelei get out first. If the rest of you can’t follow her, we’re going for delay tactics. Lee will bring in reinforcements.”

“We can simply crush our enemies,” Nathalia stated dismissively.

“Most likely yes, but in the case we can’t, that’s what we are doing, okay?”

“…Fine,” the goddess relented with a heavy sigh.

They entered the library. It was the only logical thing to do. The Illusion Barrier was centred near its entrance, Lee told them, so whoever had made it had done so with the building in mind.

It was a surprisingly big library, a response to the college in the city no doubt. Tall shelves and wide corridors, allowing several students to wander about at once. Though the Illusion Barrier copied the looks of the shelves and the books on them, it failed in other aspects.

“Did someone really make a barrier to read?” Lee asked, a bit confused, and picked up a book that had been left discarded on the floor. “That’s a weird choice.” She flipped through the pages. Most of them were smudged lines of scribbles, the original letters unrecognizable.

Illusion Barriers were only perfect copies of reality on the surface. Fundamentally, Gaia lent the power to make a space that existed for a short bout between Abyssals. To that end, Illusion Barriers didn’t need a lot of details. Cars were another such case. Typically, parked cars weren’t copied over. To move a car into an Illusion Barrier, someone with decent skill had to drag it along with intent. Fascinatingly, decommissioned cars could be copied over, but any look into their insides revealed them to be reduced in detail to the point of being unworkable.

“Someone never heard of the Laws of Mobility, Effort and Ownership,” Lee stated.

“I have never heard of the Laws of Mobility, Effort and Ownership,” Metra added. “I’ll give you the chance to explain, young one.”

“First off, I’m now in my twenties, so I am now officially old,” Lee said, to general amusement. “Second, it’s the trinity of laws that we use to estimate what level of detail an object will have when copied over. First law: if it is moveable, it is less likely to be copied over. Second law: if it was created and is maintained by human effort, it is less likely to be copied over. Third law: if it is currently owned by a human, it is less likely to be copied over.”

“’Less likely’ makes for a poor law,” John commented.

“Yeah, but it sounds more impressive to the normies.”

John rolled his eyes, then suddenly stopped. He raised a hand, barely remembering to do that much before freezing.

A monster sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by books. When it came to monsters, he was a visually acceptable one. Chitinous plates on a broad frame mimicked the shapes of human muscles. The exoskeleton was a pale colour, just a tinge of brown away from white. Turquoise elements were present all over. Spikes that protruded from arms, shoulders and the reinforced neck. The claws and talons on the insectoid extremities. The bits of flesh visible beneath the plates. All of them had that green-blue colour. Black joined in the design of the creature, representing more flexible chitin, such as the mandibles that ponderingly rubbed against each other in front of wiggling hooks.

The creature’s eyes were intensely blue. In their unified colour and shape, they reminded of the bulbous eyes of bugs, though the intense glow hid much of the details. A pair of insect wings spread relaxed between the creature’s back. They, too, had the turquoise colour.

[AI Reference: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/91a271acc0ee.png ]

For several seconds, the creature continued to read. The rest of the party clustered around John. Only at that point, did the monster raise his head. “Oh, that is interesting,” he spoke, his voice calm, casual, and deep, a voice fitting his frame. “My apologies. I would have greeted you had I known you wouldn’t run away screaming immediately.”

“That’s fine, I would have greeted you if I had known you were capable of talking,” John responded cordially.

Externally, he remained calm. Internally, however, he was validating his previous worries. Observe bounced off the creature with no effect. That alone was worrisome. He was used to people taking anti-scrying measures, but monsters having them innately suggested a degree of power that was reserved to gods. The worry only went one further up because his Passive Observe wasn’t working either.

He rarely used that mechanic. It only told him emotions, which was scarcely relevant. This was an occasion where he would have loved to know if he was dealing with an entity that feigned friendliness. Instead, he got the knowledge that he was dealing with something that could block intel flow to the same degree as the Horned Rat did.

If the creature noticed his scrying at all, it didn’t display any of it. “Then let’s properly introduce ourselves now. I am Devos, the Mite King.” He extended a hand. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

John looked at the hand. Even seated, Devos’ shoulder was at the level of John’s midriff. He perhaps would have refused to the handshake, fearing for his arm, had this been another body.

“John Newman,” he introduced himself, while squeezing the black chitin. There was a warm and yet alien tingle to the contact. “Emperor of Fusion.”

“Oh? I must be in luck to run into a fellow monarch. You are the ruler of your species, then?”

“I can’t claim that, no,” John responded with a raised eyebrow. “Are you the ruler of yours? Where do you come from?” He took in the pale skeleton and greenish hues. “A portal, I assume?”

“I arrived in this town courtesy of the portal of the screaming one, yes,” Devos responded and sighed. “I truly must express my gratitude. I was beginning to believe that your kind was incapable of communicating other emotions than panic. As for me being the ruler of my kind, the Throthaxen, I shall be one day. For now, I am alone.”

The words the Mite King so casually spoke revealed several things at once. Several questions occurred to John all at once. The confines of linear time forced him to ask them one at a time. Before he could, however, Devos spoke up.

“I realize that we both have many questions for each other… to that end, may I make a request?” He turned around the book in his hands, revealing the smudges. “Can I enlist your aid in learning about your world? I cannot wrap my head around your writing system.”

John glanced at Lorelei. In absence of Observe, she was his best way to realize if someone was a threat or not. The seer understood the unspoken question and nodded.

“Then, as one monarch to another, let me offer you my hospitality,” the Gamer said. “We do indeed have a lot of questions for each other.”