Finding the Way Home

The Temple had changed again, in ways both obvious and hidden to John Newman.

The structure of it had returned to its pale glory. He had his doubts about the shadowy remodeling it had undergone during his imprisonment and ****, and so he welcomed the glow of the false sun from beyond the glass ceiling. Gold lined most edges again, the gray lightning streaked through the pale marble of the walls and floors, and John felt fairly certain that the Temple was, in sheer floor size, bigger than he had remembered it.

But he didn't have much in the way of time to contemplate it, not when the first sound to greet him was a low, worried murmur. He followed it out of the entrance and into the main hall, with Juniluny already following behind as she stepped from the psychosphere.

There were all his normal occupants, slowly revealed as he approached the Hall: from Fairy to "Yulie," formerly Uulosootas, his monstrous companions were accounted for and alive. Alysha remained in her noble form, despite her earlier disgust with it; Fairy floated lazily overhead with a smirk on her face as she pretended to not notice John's entrance; Durr, huge and miserable, found himself idly play-wrestling with the string-bear; and all the rest were in fairly predictable positions...

... except Tita and Ju. Tita was busy sprinkling water on the trembling back of a headless body that still had some soap suds on it. Ju was busy holding and patting that missing head on her robed lap as it continued to whimper.

Regan was here... and of course, for some reason, all of his minions were. John had come to accept it when he heard Tara's voice, and sure enough he spotted the Hellbat as she marched from his right. She was not alight at the moment and wore rather plain, navy-blue sweatpants and a hoodie that, combined with her sneakers, were wildly out of place amid the opulence of the Temple.

"You're **** kids, now?"

The head on Ju's lap had calmed enough to catch sight of John. The Gamer couldn't be sure how to react, to either of them. How am I even going to get them back...? "She's... eighteen."

Tara gave a doubtful glance to the trembling Irish girl who, perhaps stunned to see a new, naked man, fell quiet. John quickly realized how his aura was affecting her; despite still not being introduced, she had shot up to +200. Well, if it keeps her calm long enough to explain things, maybe it’s for the best-

"So what now?" asked a voice from behind John. The slight accent was... Spanish, John decided. But he didn't have any monsters who were Spanish. He didn’t have any odd, “hybrid” monster girls that could merely pass for human that had one, either. "You told me I could go free, but this lady tells me you told her the same."

John slowly turned to contemplate the woman half-hidden by a pillar... to contemplate Rosa. Rosa, the human mage. Rosa, who was neither a monster nor some mixture of man and Abyssal creature. Rosa, the human woman who shouldn't be able to get into the Temple.

"Bueno? Anything to say?"

Gamer’s Brand
Permanently and invisibly marks a creature that you've dominated, making it your ****. Brand guarantees loyalty but not respect. Branded creatures are sent to the temple. Gamer's brand cannot enslave Outsiders or Outsider hybrids.

It... it had changed, John was sure of it. He struggled to recall, but he knew that humans were meant to remain on Earth; it had promised as much before. And how was Rosa a creature? But John didn’t have the moment to argue with the Game. “You can, and you will,” John hastily assured, “as soon as I figure out how to get you back to anywhere that freedom would mean anything.”

“Forget that: why did you pull me back?” Tara scowled at Juniluny who glared right back. “And are you telling me you captured her? You got any idea how much shit you’re in with the Cabal?”

“I can answer both, Master,” Juniluny mockingly offered.

“You... can?”

“Well... I mean I have a theory.” John’s nod authorized it. “Well, several of these slaves were on the field right before... well, you were evidently killed, to believe that Lightbearer. But here they all are the very next moment: recalled to their ‘home’ inside you. I confess to studying little of proper Summoners, but if your ether connection to their existence was suddenly snuffed out, it follows that they would dematerialize as they do when you send them back here. The only strangeness is that... you’re not dead.” Juniluny grinned toothily. “And as I’ve said: you’ll no doubt have earned the Cabal’s interest.”

Tara folded her arms in obvious discontent. “So what, this was an accident?”

“Of course it- Tara, I didn’t mean for you to come back,” John spat, “I made you a promise and... well, I did my best to keep it.”

Tara continued to eye John... and let a smile creep onto her face as her eyes drifted. “Well, who can stay mad at a giant-dicked fuckboy like you, hmm? Just send me back, then; just... not where I was. And not wherever you are... no offense.”

“I’m somewhere called ‘Vantage,’ a Kingdom that’s ruled by someone named Bianca the Peak. Is that somewhere safe to be dropped off?”

Tara raised an eyebrow before glancing around. “I’ve been around, granted, but I’ve never even heard of a place called Vantage.”

“Are you saying you can’t send us to Earth?” Rosa interrupted.

“I... I can only send you to wherever I am,” John confessed. “I’ll do my best to get to Earth and do that, for you guys and for the others who got stuck here like me... but I’ll just need some time or some answers.”

CRACK.

The room flinched at the sound of something breaking, splintering... and slowly being smashed apart.

“Jesus Christ, what now-?”

What now was scrambling out of the garden, half-hidden by railings and bodies, until it was bounding across the marble tiles with taps of its short claws. Its snout opened as a pink tongue flopped out in an awkward, animal smile, and it sprinted towards John for the attack. It lunged at his face...

... and toppled him over as it obsessively licked his face. “Gah! Woofr- haha, Woofroot?!”

The beast had been mobile for as long as it took to sniff out and find his master, but find him he did. The shrub had become even more dog-like. As close as John could figure, it had become something like a wolf in size and shape but with large, verdant green eyes that were too friendly to hang with wild killers. Its hide remained a bushel of thick green leaves over a skin of bark; its “fur” of greenery was thinner around its brown legs that terminated in wolf paws with thick, black claws. The whole beast probably weighed nearly 70 pounds but could stand to a human height if it desired, and it used all 70 of its pounds to slobber and wrestle with its master.

“Arf!” Despite its intimidating size and wolf-like maw, it continued to bark like a small poodle. The effect was... revitalizing.

John hugged the slobbering beast as a touch of relief washed over him. He scrubbed and scratched the creature’s hide; despite its appearance, it was closer to flesh than bark, and the dog grumbled happily. “Good to have you back, boy! Let’s look at you...”

Captain Woofroot
Level 12 Plant Pupper
HP: 390/390
MP: 100/100
XP: 0/4,750 (TP: 3,803)
Stats: Str 16, Agi 16, End 13, Int 4, Wis 7, Cha 14, Lib 8
Skills: Fetch 6, Haste 2, Lunge 3, Photosynthesis 10, Regenerate 3, Rollover 6, Vine Nova 1, Vine Attack 8
Status Effects: Life Sense
Qualities: Plant

Despite the beast’s warmth, then, he had indeed become viable in combat. Of course, not until I find out what we’re even fighting... The moment had given John the briefest respite, but it was enough. “Woofroot, we’ll play later, okay?”

Woofroot whimpered but obeyed, letting John stand anew. With the other folks given as good an answer as John could provide, he had only Regan to speak to. Calmly, he approached her... and suddenly felt very inappropriate in his nudity. “I... need clothes.”

“Just a moment, Master,” came the call from Thumalk. He still seemed a bit eager, but John chalked up his distrust to so many days of being quasi-sexually harassed by the elf.

While they waited, John awkwardly tried to hide his beat stick as he addressed the blushing teenager. “Regan, you probably heard part of what I’m going to say, but... I wanted to tell it directly to you: I promise I’ll return you to your family as soon as I’m able.”

Regan’s hands waved awkwardly as she half-stood from the pool, realized her nudity, and dove down even deeper. The purple flame where her head ought to be resting seemed to grow more vibrant as she quietly stammered, “T-Thank you, but... who are you?”

“Oh... ha! Yeah, it’s been quite a... well. I’m John Newman. I’m from America, and-”

“Yer the one who saved me, right?” John paused, causing Regan to hastily add, “I-I just mean, I recognize your voice, and... I guess I just don’t know why you moved me again, brought me here with all these other...” One of the Giggle-foots lumbered past on a stroll, its bizarre hodgepodge of body parts clicking and stumbling as it went. “... people?”

John noted the strangeness of how her eyes gave up on things once they entered her peripheral; despite Ju so tenderly holding the girl’s head, there was still no mechanism for turning of her own volition, detached and neckless as it was. Right, this isn’t a cartoon where heads just move on their own... wait... John eyed Ju... and found her gaze distant. Meditating... how is she alright with this, though? If combat scared her, a detached head ought to be... John thought better of asking now of all times. “I didn’t mean to bring you here or anywhere near what’s coming. I thought you’d stay with your family, but... it looks like I fucked up pretty bad, ha.” Regan didn’t join his awkward laugh. “Right, well... the point is, I’m working on it, and I don’t want you to want for anything while you’re temporarily stuck here.”

“Here you go, Master.” Sure enough, Thumalk was in his proper dress and stone-faced as he came with the spare Academy uniform and spare casual clothes John had kept in his temple. John scooped the clothes up, vanished them into his inventory, and then slowly popped them back into existence, fully equipped and buttoned.

His polo shirt was the last to appear, and that was when Regan finally reacted, “Whoa. Are you... are you a wizard?”

John gave the head a grin. “Nope, just a Gamer. Let’s get you some clothes and I’ll do my best to explain it while I check a few things...”

Ten (Temple) minutes later…

“… Well, this isn’t great.”

Forge Hopper Inventory:
(1) Umbral Voice of Southern Winds
(1) Crown of Fear
(1) Choker of Silence
(1) Scepter of the Fond Memory
(13) high-quality longswords
(1) yukai hide
(3) pieces of naturally spiked leather
(1) elastic yukai membrane
(4) pulikano teeth
(1) pulikano hide
(21) **** pearls
(1) jug of misery water
(3) tufts of kakamal fur
(7) jars of halfling laughing gas
(3) human baby skulls
(3) kegs of dwarven beer
(4,914) coins of various, defunct nation-states and Abyssal auction/gambling dens
(1) jeweled dagger with a diamond blade

Summoner’s Chest:
(1) Ashcroft Academy uniform shirt
(1) Ashcroft Academy uniform pants
(3) plain black boxers
(2) pairs of jeans
(3) polo shirts (blue, blue, green)

John had ignored the “0/174” of his inventory when he first woke up in “Vantage,” hoping to find his phone and other possessions whisked away into the hopper or his armory chest. Neither one, it turned out, had anything more than what he had left there before; as it was, the magical gear he had left in the hopper was what remained after binging on the treasures of the Brightons and melting it all down for better gear.

Gear that was, by John’s guess, “consumed by the First Truth” like everyone else apparently had been.

“So… what’s wrong?” John turned to address Regan and paused when he found her at eye level. Her hands gripped her head with a finesse that seemed undulled by years of separation; the only long-sleeve shirt he packed in the armory chest was the best he could offer her, and now its bright-red lengths covered her hands and buried her body. A lack of fitting pants meant she borrowed one pair of his boxers as shorts, though the shirt hung well past her crotch and hid the fact.

Erotic… stop it. Meanwhile, her curiosity was all too sharp: she had asked him about the Game, the Temple, every other summon, what Woofroot ate, if Woofroot ate biscuits, if veggie biscuits would be considered cannibalism, if John had any non-veggie biscuits… All in all, she seemed oddly adapted to the harrowing experience of being displaced from home and parents on another world by a complete stranger who welcomed her in the buff. “Well, I used to have more magical equipment to help me fight… but most of it is apparently gone, along with everyone else’s equipment back on Vantage.”

“Will we be alright, then?”

“O-Of course! I’ve got everything… eh, I’ll have everything under control, soon enough.” His confidence wasn’t a complete farce: he had had barely ten minutes to contemplate the situation while fleeing from strange, golden policemen. The time spent here, however, had cleared his thoughts. In total, the situation was simple enough: he was in another Kingdom and he had the Bridge spell. He pulled it up to verify, earning more curious, over-the-shoulder spying from the Dullahan teen.

Bridge, variable mp
Bridge allows travel between distant points within a reality or directly into or between Kingdoms. Other, non-quickcast spells, and other style spells regardless of speed, cannot be cast while maintaining a Bridge.
Reality Bridge: casting time and mana cost are one minute and 50MP per 100 miles crossed. A reality Bridge can only span a maximum of [style level x 300] miles. A reality Bridge acts as a Tunnel with stricter rules: each end of the Bridge has an HP of [style level x 10] and no damage reduction. The Bridge ends can only be anchored in reference to the Earth's core or to a Kingdom's Throne (that is, static places in the air). Any significant pressure on the edges or back of such a Bridge opening deals damage to its HP. A broken or closed Bridge shunts anyone or anything in the middle out to its originating point, unharmed and in whatever position does the least harm. Maintaining a reality Bridge costs 50MP per minute; no mana is reserved for a reality Bridge.
Dream Bridge: casting time and mana cost are a minute and 50MP per layer of the Dream crossed. A dream Bridge creates a warded, physical bridge through the Dream, themed after the intent and soul of the caster. Such a bridge is 50 feet long per layer crossed to a maximum of [style level x 300] feet in real length. Both ends remain open for the duration of the bridge. Closing the bridge shunts inhabitants safely to their originating end. Maintaining the dream Bridge costs 50MP per minute.

Satisfied, John pulled up the paragon skill he had already maximized.

HACK: SEARCH 5/5
Allows Eye of the King to identify Kingdoms that are proximate to the present location, allowing for spells and effects that require knowledge or familiarity with such places. Almost all Kingdoms in range will be detectable. Any previously visited location will always be detectable.

Satisfied, John walked Regan towards the Expedition Office as he continued to give her the uncensored, honest truth of the situation. “So as I was saying: because I had uncovered the truth about the Order, and what they do to their Knights… and… some other less important facts, he decides I’m the criminal.” John scoffed aloud as Regan listened attentively. “So that’s how I ended up in the prison, followed by the prison break… followed by finding your body in a prison cell.”

He glanced at Regan, who was clearly starry-eyed in awe. “Wow... s-so are you going to keep fighting them?”

John’s steps slowed as the question sunk in. “Well…”

“‘Mean, if they’re brainwashin’ people, kidnappin’ others, killin’ babies, and… and so many horrible things, and they’re like some kind of crazy Illuminati, I mean… d’you think you could stop them?”

”Of course I could.” John flinched at his own reaction. “I mean… if it came to that. It’s…” Moira’s sad smile flashed into his mind. “… complicated. You know, you’re… taking this all a lot better than I would’ve guessed.”

Regan lowered her head to cradle it against her body. “Whaddya mean?”

“I mean… you were home, and your body was being experimented on or whatever they were doing to it, and suddenly you get teleported to another place, then back home with your body, then back to another another place filled with monsters and everything else I keep here, and now I’ve told you everything about-”

“I guess-” Regan hesitated as she realized she cut John off, but he nodded for her to continue as they walked. “‘Mean, oh, I don’t know… I’m just being moved around a bit by someone else. It’s not all tha-hat different from when I lost me body,” she chuckled. “It’s… I guess it’s more interesting than anything else? It’s like one of mum’s audiobooks, it is.”

The Expedition Office was largely as John remembered it: the decorum of an old trading post of a bygone era, with quills and scrolls and different maps of Earth coating the walls. The ceiling was some kind of rice paper-like glass, opaque enough to turn the bright white light of the false sun into a warm, yellow glow. But John was only here for one device that might yet yield something useful: the so-called “hypothesized” map of Kingdoms.

John neared the device, which still looked as he remembered it: a CD-sized map of stars with a tiny, marble-sized Earth as its center that lazily rotated while four stems of glittering metal grew out of it at the angles necessary to form an upside-down tetrahedron. At even intervals, from near the Earth to the very tips of the silvery sticks, were nine glass plates. Nine layers, John had mistakenly guessed. His proximity made the widget react: its rotation continued, but the entire thing flew apart slightly while still floating calmly over the Earth. An interface appeared over it as an interactive item:

Open Kingdom Map?

Huh… I guess the minimap doesn’t get this feature. John went ahead and clicked it, and Regan and he watched with wide eyes as the silver sticks flew upward and outward until they neared the ceiling. The largest glass pane flew straight up and, between it and the four stems, projected a holographic nebula of rainbows, prismatic clouds, and shifting seas of imagery and color. The other eight panes arranged themselves in a neat row on the left side of this bizarre, three-dimensional illusion, each pane facing John. Then, the third-to-highest pane, a full head above John’s height, quickly shifted and slid through the hologram towards a radiant speck in the sea of chaos. The glass slid over this speck… and magnified it into an image that then projected towards John and Regan. This image, projected from the prismatic map, was that of a sea of purple clouds and, floating over it, a kind of cone made of nine disks, each separated by a layer of air and pipes down to its widest, bottomost level. At the tip on top, the structure terminated with a tiny, elongated pyramid. Over this frozen image appeared the text:

VANTAGE, THE FALLEN CROSSROADS
DOMAIN: Mourning of Societal Leaders
ABYSSAL LORD: Cassiel
KING: Bianca the Peak
DEPTH: 14,495 Layers

Fourteen thousand... John blinked at the astounding number. What did depth mean? A glance at the marble Earth told him as the lowest glass disk, barely the size of John’s thumb, slid over it and showed an orbital photograph of the western hemisphere.

EARTH, THE SEAT OF THE ABYSS
DOMAIN: Creation
ABYSSAL LORD: N/A
KING: Gaia
DEPTH: 0 Layers

John’s intelligence stat made the calculation simple enough: 108 layers at a time was as far as Bridge would take him. Presuming he found other Kingdoms, ones where he could hopscotch across to get everyone back to Earth and each one at the maximum distance, John was still looking at some 135 or more jumps. Coupled with how dangerous or unknown any given Kingdom might be… presuming he even found them so usefully placed…

John looked through the haze of the map for almost a full minute in a **** search for some other shimmer or glint that might indicate a Kingdom but found nothing.

“So... are we stuck… here?” Regan meekly asked.

John looked back to answer when he caught Tara and Rose standing just outside the Expedition Office entrance, each contemplating the map from afar. Rosa had a simple, blank curiosity, but Tara looked notably upset.

“We’re not,” John declared, doing his best to sound confident. “I think I can find our way home once I’m back there and looking for it…” John thought to Gamer’s Dream, that new, amorphous skill he picked up in the Brighton dungeon… and its promise of help in spanning such space. A “1-99%” reduction in the distance, so long as he was the sovereign. All he had to do was become King; Lily had described the process, simple as it sounded, and Gamer’s Dream would let him do it sexually, presuming whatever he found to be the “King” of Vantage was even remotely fuckable.

Why is this… always the easy way out? No, more than easy: probable. What if he couldn’t get back to Earth using this leaping method? How many Kingdoms were there, and how near one another could they be? Fate seemed intent to **** his hand… and possibly his dick… into questionable but useful acts. John began to question the Game, the motive it clearly held…

Tara no longer held her silence. “So do you have something in these crazy powers of yours to just get us back, at least? Because while I’ve never seen the Abyss mapped before, I can tell when we’re stranded.”

“Crazy-?” The Waypoint Chamber! John didn’t take the time to explain; he blinked to that backmost chamber, the one behind the reception pad, the room he had so rarely found need for-

… and found the quiet, empty black tiles, each and every one waiting for some kind of assignment. The marker for his bedroom back home was gone. What… why? “Why?!”

The Game offered him no answer…

“You really did it, didn’t you?” John spun around, anger flaring across his features… which softened when Fairy visibly flinched back from the doorway.

“Did…. Did what?”