Roll Play

Just ten minutes later, John was idly inspecting a merchant stall filled with all manner of potions and brews when he heard a set of footsteps distinguish itself from the crowd. Firm, purposeful steps that grew louder quickly enough they were certainly headed in his direction, and which only slowed when they were nearly upon him. John tilted his head to catch the reflection of whoever was approaching in the sunlit glare of a large, square bottle filled with a viscous purple fluid – and his smile returned when he saw Layla just a few paces behind him.

“Ya want that one for sure, it’s fortified against Necromantic curses. Drink that and you won’t have to worry about anything rotting or decaying off ya for a whole day,” the woman behind the stall said, smiling proudly. She was a thin woman, but with thick, coiled muscles in her arms and enough calluses and dirt stains on her fingers to give away that she grew and likely brewed all of these herself.

John gave the bottle a quick Observe to confirm it was what she was claiming, then nodded. By the time Layla had closed the last few steps, John had a pouch of mana crystals pulled from his inventory that the very pleased woman was busy counting.

“A little shopping while you waited? I hope I wasn’t letting you get bored.”

John smiled without looking away, watching the merchant finish counting while an enchanted pen hastily scrawled something on a pad of paper. “Honestly, I don’t find excuses to just wander around very often, so it’s been kind of nice. Mostly window shopping anyway.”

“Did you want to stick around the area? We have a little time, if you’d like to just walk around for a bit.”

“No, that’s alright,” John said, grabbing the potion from the now smiling woman and tossing it into his inventory as he turned to face Layla. “We can head over. I’m looking forward to seeing what this place is that’s so perfect.”

“I do think you’ll like it. And I promise it’s an experience only the Abyss can deliver.” Layla turned down the street, but waited for John to reach her side before she started walking in earnest.

“So, what exactly is this place? You mentioned lunch, so I’m assuming some kind of restaurant?” John asked as he fell in beside Layla.

“Of sorts. I don’t want to give away too much of the surprise though.” Layla threw him a caring smile as they walked, her eyes only wandering to the street ahead of them just enough to keep her from bumping into anyone. The way she was always so focused on him, like she thought that in spite of her aura reading abilities he would find a way to disappear, was sweet – though perhaps a bit unnerving when they were this close.

“Well, then perhaps we could talk about something else? We haven’t really had a chance to talk much since the drive back from Springfield, and… well, we had a lot to deal with back then.” Surely the understatement of his life, considering that the drive home had been with Adantia and a freshly Purified Farrah…

“Oh, of course! I always enjoy talking with you, John. Did you have a topic in mind?”

“Well, we usually end up talking about whatever crisis is going on at the moment… How about for once you just tell me a little bit more about yourself? This is our first official date, so we might as well get to know each other.”

“Ah, well, that’s a bit broad, but I guess I can try. I was born and raised in Springfield, but my parents aren’t around anymore. I was fortunate to get into an academy that trains young mages; that’s where I learned most of what I know, and where I found out about my ability to sense auras so acutely.”

“An academy? For Abyssals? I guess I never realized that there was a place like that,” John said, eyes widening slightly at the thought of what that must have been like. “I kind of figured that Abyssals all got their training and education from their parents, or allied clans, that kind of thing. What was it like? A school filled with the kind of magic I’ve seen in the Abyss sounds like something out of a video game, or a really over the top anime.”

“It’s certainly an interesting environment. And I suppose the schoolyard fights are a bit more concerning than they are in a normal school. It wasn’t terribly different other than that. The first few years are very similar to what I’m told mundane school is like – learning to read, write, perform basic math… all of the basics, things you need to function as a human as much as a mage. It isn’t until the third grade that they actually begin teaching us the fundamentals of magic.”

“Third grade… wow, that’s still so young. I would have much rather been doing that than reading Animorphs and learning about the rain cycle.” John chuckled at the vague memories of his early school years. “Sounds like you had to learn all that stuff plus the rest, though. And try not to get hit by a fireball during recess.”

“Hmmhmm, a little like that, though it felt a lot more boring than you make it sound most of the time,” Layla acknowledged.

“Maybe you could take me there sometime? I haven’t been inside a school since I dropped out of Ashcroft after getting my powers… it would be neat to get to see what an Abyssal school looks like, y’know? Where I might have gone if I had gotten my powers a few years earlier, or even when I was born.”

“Visiting a mundane school is already somewhat restricted. Visiting my school would be a little bit more… complicated. There are many who would seek to destroy or subjugate the students and teachers alike there, if they could,” Layla murmured. “It is rare for them to allow non-students inside for anything except official business. Almost unheard of.”

“Ah, that’s fair. I guess now isn’t the best time to go poking around anywhere as a stranger anyway. Well, what about now that you’ve graduated? You mentioned an apartment in town, so I know you live in Springfield at least. What do you do to make a living?”

“Mostly odd jobs. Aura sensors of my skill level are rare, and there are uses for it beyond simply locating people. I don’t find work often because of the niche nature of my ability, but when I do, it’s more than enough to fund myself for a while. The rest of the time I spend training my own abilities and doing what I can to prepare for whatever may come in the future. Things are hectic right now, of course, but… they usually are, in the Abyss.”

“Hm. Well, today we can forget about that for a little while, and just… try to enjoy ourselves,” John said, holding his hand out toward Layla so that she could see it as they walked. Layla’s eyes drifted down to his hand and he couldn’t help but notice them widen a bit as she saw it. Still, it only took her a second of realization before she was eagerly reaching out. Her fingers laced between John’s eagerly, her soft skin sliding against his, the comfort contrasted somewhat by the very firm grip her fingers quickly placed on him.

“That would be wonderful,” Layla agreed, a slight quiver in her voice. Her strides became a bit erratic as they walked, so John decided to try to give her something else to focus on than the strange effects he always had on her.

“What about hobbies? You must do something for fun. I game when I can, though it’s not as much as I’d like anymore… at least not until I finally get an electrical setup going that I don’t need to worry about burning down my house if something goes wrong.”

“You mean for that private world you talk about sometimes?”

“Yeah,” John nodded, “I was planning on buying a bunch of generators from some of the mundane stores around Springfield and wiring them up to the house, but Build apparently doesn’t cover electrical wiring, at least not in a pre-built structure… and I didn’t want to wait days for the whole thing to get deconstructed and rebuilt, much less waste the materials.”

“Have you looked into converters for mana to electricity? You could use as many of those as you need, as long as you can provide enough mana to power your electronics. They’re essentially just little fake outlets hooked up to mana crystals, so as long as the devices themselves are safe, you wouldn’t have to worry about needing to wire anything up and risk shorts or breakers being thrown… or learn how to wire a house yourself,” Layla explained, letting a hopeful look cross her face. “They’re relatively cheap too, so we could even pick some up later. Perhaps you could take me to your world sometime? For our next date? I’d be happy to show you how they work while I’m there, it’s nothing too complex to get them set up.”

“That’s… nice, but I’m still a little… on edge about bringing people back to my world. Haven’t really let anyone into it in the last year, not counting Tricia’s drones… and I guess technically Arista, though that wasn’t exactly as a guest.”

The silence that fell between them was a heavy and awkward one, a few steps passing in an uncomfortable haze of memories. John didn’t particularly enjoy either the memories or the shadow that was being cast over what was supposed to be a carefree day, so he did his best to break them both out of it.

“But I do appreciate the offer! And the knowledge. That would make so many things so much easier around the house… we could actually hook up an oven. The magical lights I think I actually prefer – did I tell you about those? We never made mana converters, but Vallya and Orria worked together to hook up this neat enchanting system. They even made them look like lightbulbs. And hey, if we get the actual mana converters set up, I could have game systems again. Maybe I could even get Tricia to run some Wi-Fi through one of her drones. I was thinking about asking her to get my phone working properly anyway. I wonder what the latency is like across a multiversal connection, though…”

“Tricia has drones in your world? And they function with a connection to the outside?” Layla noted, sounding understandably surprised considering what John had just explained.

“Yeah… it makes me a little nervous sometimes, but nobody else has managed to figure it out, even after a couple of her drones got hijacked a while back. Even the Albidians went to the trouble of hunting down the enchanted stone I made, and they risked going up against Lord Brighton for that. I figure whatever method Tricia figured out is either extremely difficult to replicate or it’s only good for transferring data. Maybe it requires some Gorbachev technology I don’t know about?” John gave a quick shrug. “I stopped worrying about that one a long time ago. One worry down… only about a thousand to go.”

He said the last part as jovially as he could, even throwing in a **** eye roll for good measure, but Layla still had a worried look on her face as they continued on. Thankfully it wasn’t much farther before she started steering John across the pavilion they were coming up to, weaving their way through the scarcely populated street to enter one of the larger buildings John had seen in the Market.

There wasn’t terribly much about the building that made it seem remarkable, aside from its size. Two stories high and twice as long in both directions as any of the buildings around it, it had simple brick walls which were only decorated by a few posters near the entrance. Each of the posters had a few people in various costumes, emblazoned by large and often extravagant titles at the bottom.

“A movie theater?”

“Close. You could call it the Abyssal version of a movie theater, but I thought you’d appreciate a bit of a more interactive experience than just watching. Come on, you’ll see what I mean.”

Layla led John across the street and into the building, entering into a particularly large lobby that would’ve been right at home in a mundane movie theater. It was a large, mostly black room, with even more posters like the ones outside sitting in illuminated glass cases. At the end of the room, large hallways branched off to the left and right, with multiple doors on the far sides, though they were much closer together than any theater John had ever been to, and the doors seemed to have no handles at all. A staircase on the right-hand side sat directly across from a service counter, where a young man was hastily straightening up and sliding away his phone.

”Must not have many customers with everything that’s going on,” John observed while he followed Layla up to the counter.

“Room for two,” Layla said, holding out her phone. The worker pressed a button on the counter and John heard a confirmation ding, although he saw no payment processor or scanner of any sort.

“Right, you’re on the second floor. Room 7-B, kitchen wait time is…” the middle-aged man glanced over to what must have been a screen underneath the desk before continuing, “...it’ll be ready almost as soon as you order, actually. Any questions?”

“No, thank you,” Layla said as she reached out, taking a small chip the man placed on the counter.

John had a lot of questions, actually, but Layla was already moving toward the stairs. John followed right on her heels, figuring she seemed familiar enough with the place to explain it to him once they were inside. At the top of the stairs, after they doubled back on themselves halfway up, the space branched out into two hallways, labeled A and B.

“Well, it’s definitely reminiscent of a theater… but these rooms seem kind of small. And did he say there’s a full kitchen?” John asked as they strode off down the right hall.

“Mmhmm! The food here actually used to be very good, but I heard their chef fled town recently, so I’m not sure how their replacement is doing. Thankfully the main entertainment is always good quality no matter who is around,” Layla said, sounding genuinely enthusiastic. By that point they were already at their room, and when Layla pressed the chip she’d been given against the door, it swung open automatically, with a glowing rune appearing where the handle should have been.

“Neat. And this is… a booth. Just a booth?” John noted, glancing inside. The room was no more than ten feet in both directions, with a large table made of what appeared to be a dark, solid glass from the base to the top, surrounded by a large circle of well-cushioned bench space, with only three small gaps to allow people to slide their way into the spacious booth.

“It’s not the booth that’s impressive, come on,” Layla said, giggling a little as she took John’s hand and led him inside, the door clicking shut behind them. They took seats next to each other at the table, with plenty of empty space surrounding them – enough that a party of six or seven could’ve fit quite comfortably, even more than that if they didn’t mind giving up their personal bubbles.

“Okay, I’m dying to know. What’s about to happen?” John’s eyes darted across the table, not sure what was going on. There was a certain smoothness to the table that made him wonder if the whole thing was a touch screen or massive display, but now that he was a bit closer, it seemed more like a stone surface or something similar – almost like a darker quartz, or a solid obsidian countertop with no white lines or speckling, a void so black it seemed either without depth or nearly infinite depth.

“Well, like I said, I thought you’d like something a little more interactive than just a movie…”

Layla tapped twice on the table with the small tab she was still holding. As soon as she did so, a brilliant light shone from within that endlessly deep black, flowing from the center of the table and outward, forming intricate patterns in the stonework, seemingly just under the surface. The light oscillated between every color of the rainbow, slowly forming into a large circular sigil that covered the entire table. Once it had filled the entire surface, a pillar of light rose out of the table at the center, rising up and cresting itself with a smaller version of the sigil on the table atop the simple pillar.

“Welcome, travelers! Your party leader will now select an adventure for you.”

A spiral of glowing squares, like projected tablet displays, spun its way out from the pillar. They slowly enlarged as they rotated outward, so that by the time the first was in front of Layla, it was nearly three feet from corner to corner, like a small television or a large computer monitor situated directly in front of her. The image on the first one seemed to be a video of a colonial era family working the fields, seemingly plucked right out of the late seventeenth century, though as it continued the video flashed over several scenes from a similar era.

“An… adventure? What exactly are we doing here?” John asked, eyes wide with amazement as he glanced down the line of displays, trying to see all of them. It was a bit futile – not only did the displays remain small enough down the line that they were difficult to see, even for his magically sharp eyes, but they continued on seemingly endlessly into the pillar, leaving their exact numbers a total mystery.

“We should start with something fun but familiar…” Layla mused, a playful smirk on her lips.. “Any preferences on setting? What’s your favorite kind of game?”

John could tell that she heard him by the coy smile she threw his way as she ignored his question, putting her hand up and flicking it to the right in midair. The screens began to flow along, the next one presenting itself to Layla as the first moved off to the side and shrank away until it disappeared entirely. The second video seemed to be some kind of underwater setting, with fish-people swimming around in a vast, clear blue paradise. Layla flicked again and a third display moved into position.

“Um… RPGs, usually. I like a lot of settings, though I guess if I had to pick… fantasy with a little medieval twist? JRPG style is cool too, where there’s some modern elements but still swords and magic, and usually some version of knights running around… preferably high magic though, maybe something with dragons if they have it? Mythological stuff is cool too, though, especially Norse or Greek. Sci-Fi or cyberpunk gives a lot of options for fun builds, though…”

“Well, that narrows it down.” Layla chuckled, holding her hand over her mouth as she fought back a full-throated laugh. “Why don’t we try… all of them?”

Layla flicked a few more screens away and stopped on what looked like some kind of modern classroom, a relatively mundane shot of several kids sitting in front of a middle-aged woman pointing at a blackboard John couldn’t quite read. It seemed fairly typical – until the scene changed to a shot of a gymnasium where all the same children were seemingly training with what John could only assume was either magic or superpowers. He didn’t get a long look at the brief video, but in the seconds before it swapped to a scene of four friends eating ice cream, he saw one boy on fire leaping through rings, a girl lifting weights that could have crushed a small car over her head, and a wafer-thin boy shooting purple blasts of energy at moving targets.

“High Times at Hero High. Sound good for a starter?”

“Yeah, that could be fun. Very anime style… but I’m still not exactly sure what we’re doing. That voice mentioned an adventure, but you mentioned this place being kind of like a theater. Is it a movie, or a video game, or…?”

“This is kind of like if you took a movie and made it into a video game, powered by magic,” Layla replied, tapping twice on the display with her bare hand. The displays all disappeared from the air, and on the surface of the table itself one appeared in front of each of them. “Just watch. I think you’ll love this.”

”Welcome to Hero High! Select your character.”

Even before the voice announced it, John recognized a character selection screen when he saw it. There were ten students and even a couple of what he assumed were teachers, and as John tapped eagerly on each of their pictures, he noted that they all had different amounts of a few shared stats. Social, Grades, Power, and Wit seemed to be the big four, with a more detailed section for unique traits each of them had.

But what was really amazing was that when John selected his character – a young boy whose skill mentioned being able to summon and bind ghosts to enhance his abilities or fight for him – the character materialized on the table in front of him, a fully colored miniature boy actually showing up on the table. A moment later, Layla selected hers – a prim and proper looking girl in a school uniform colored similarly to his character’s, with a blue bow tied in her hair. John remembered her abilities being based around reflections and being able to disappear and reappear in mirrored surfaces, but not the finer details.

”Welcome to Hero High! Can you survive the first week of classes without failing out? Can you impress your classmates, your rivals, maybe even your crush? Get ready to find out. Homeroom starts right now!”

The pillar of light flickered out, and from the sigil of the table rose walls so real they seemed tangible. John fought the urge to reach out and slap one, not wanting to risk disrupting the magic as his chosen character walked off toward the center of the table where a classroom was forming. His character and Layla’s took their seats.

“This… this is pretty awesome,” John breathed. Despite the simplicity of the scenario that was happening right now, getting to see it in three dimensions and with such lifelike detail was pretty amazing.

“This is actually one of the lower-end varieties of these places,” Layla mused, smiling as their characters busied themselves with classwork. “If you go to a more populated Abyssal city, you can find this sort of facility run by Fateweavers that can make Barriers that let you watch the story from inside it at life size, or place you directly into the story yourself, even give you the appearance and abilities of a character you choose – illusions, of course, but still much more immersive. Springfield is lucky to have this, though.”

“Yeah, this is still pretty awesome,” John said, finally working up the courage to reach up and tap on one of the projected walls. His finger phased through it, unsurprisingly, but he could actually feel a bit of resistance from the mana in the display. “So how do we control them? And what can we do?”

“We can do almost anything. Within the boundaries of the settings, that is – we can’t tell them to run downtown and expect to find a fully fleshed out city. But maybe I could, for instance…”

Layla leaned in and whispered something to her character, too quietly for John to hear. Her character reached into her pocket and pulled out a mirror, then shoved her entire arm into the mirror. On the teacher’s desk, where they had left their phone, the girl’s arm popped right out of the screen – and quickly grabbed a handful of candy from the bowl sitting on the teacher’s desk. The girl retracted her arm and quickly stuffed the ill-gotten goods into her backpack, saving just one to quickly stuff into her mouth after unwrapping it. As she did so, a number flashed above the young girl’s head, and another above the teacher’s – a thirteen for Layla, versus an eleven for the professor.

“Well, glad I got away with it. You don’t want to find out what detention is like at a supernatural high school,” Layla teased, winking at John.

“Wow, so we just tell them what to do? There’s no set actions to take?”

“Think of it as… letting magic be your dungeon master,” Layla said softly. “I figured an open-ended interactive story like this would be a great way to talk and share more of ourselves, and have a little fun messing with each other too.”

“Heck yeah! I can’t believe there are so many of these. I never knew a place like this existed,” John breathed.

“Well, you’re always so busy training and fighting…” Layla murmured, eyes traveling down the table. “I thought that if you were going to spend some of the precious time you allow yourself to have fun and relax with me… I wanted to make it as special for you as possible, and show you something I knew you’d love. Something only the Abyss could give you to make up for all the times it only takes. And something that we could share together, just… you and me. A way for us to make an experience totally unique to us, one you’ll never forget.”

Even John’s Charisma left him speechless for a moment, long enough for Layla to seemingly recover herself. A thick blush still painted her cheeks as she looked back at him, eyes glistening in the magical glow of the table with a passion John couldn’t believe he’d missed earlier.

“Now, come on. Let’s finish up the first day, then we can order some food. Just wait until you see music class, it’s an unbelievably trippy experience.”