To Infinity

Instead of the hallway there was only the open expanse of space. Galaxies spun among the myriad of stars, passing comets and floating asteroids.

A cluster of asteroids floated in front of the doorway, forming a sort of path that led from the door and stretched out into space.

“Do you think that we should follow the path?” John asked hesitantly as he looked out the doorway with the Gorbachev girls.

“This whole thing feels like a setup. Do you think it is related to the earlier attack, Danielle?” Michelle asked as she scanned the empty space with the odd shaped pistol.

“No,” John interjected as Tricia began to open her mouth to speak, “that was because of an accident that I had before my coma.”

This statement caused both of the girls to look at him with incredulous looks upon their faces.

“You will explain later, after we escape from the barrier,” Tricia demanded, her tone still emotionless, but the **** of her words reminded him of Moira’s ultimatum to talk with her father and the Order of the Golden Rose.

’Just another thing that I have to do. I wonder how much of school I actually missed while I was in my coma?’ John idly wondered.

He flexed his wrist to feel the hidden blade pop out then slide back in with a satisfying slinck. With that done, John edged around Michelle and stepped out into the void, blindly believing that there was a path.

Only to fall a few feet and land roughly on an asteroid.

-3 HP

“Ouch,” John said before looking up at the doorway. “Hey, watch that first step, you two,” he said as he climbed to his feet.

“So it is old school platforming, eh?” John said aloud to himself without realising it, earning him stares from the two girls. It was a bad habit that he had developed before internet allowed him to play with other people from around the world. He would get embarrassed when people would call him out about it, but he still couldn’t break the habit when he was concentrating on a problem, like he was now.

“They seem to be close enough that we can jump to the next one, and with plenty of hand holds to climb up the sides if we need to,” Michelle commented as she stood next to him looking over the “path” of asteroids.

“True,” John commented, a faraway look in his eyes as if he wasn’t looking at what was in front of him. “I wonder if we can push this asteroid around and use it as a sort of ship?”

Michelle looked back at Tricia and nodded while in her head she thought, ’Good idea. You may be more than just a pretty face after all.’

Tricia directed some of her drones to the bottom of the asteroid they were on and had them attempt to push it upwards so that it would be level with the door. It took quite a bit of power for the little drones but they did manage to get it to slowly drift upwards.

Once they were level Tricia walked back into the office and grabbed the bag that her drones kept popping in and out of, while her tank like drone rolled onto the asteroid and deployed arms that grabbed onto the asteroid, turning into a kind of artillery/anti-air weapon. Tricia came back out with the bag and all the flying drones hovered around her, making happy computer chirps as they waited for the bag to be set down.

To John it wasn’t that similar to a pack of dogs circling their owner in expectation of food or treats, and it caused him to let out a muffled chuckle as he watched the scene.

When the bag was finally set down and opened, the drones lined up and one by one flew into the bag, only to appear moments later with some sort of enhanced engine system attached to them.

“Is she related to Mary Poppins?” John asked Michelle which earned him a harsh looking blank stare from Tricia and caused Michelle to grab her sides as she began laughing.

After all of the drones had been retrofitted with the upgraded new engines, and Michelle stopped laughing, the three of them braced themselves against the asteroid. The drones' enhanced engine allowed them to push the asteroid through space with relative ease.

There didn’t seem to be any sort of wind resistance as their guided asteroid flew through the illusion of space, which John felt was weird. So he voiced his concerns about this to his temporary companions.

“Do you two find it odd that there is no vacuum, as there should be, but there is the lack of wind resistance?” he asked. The two Gorbachevs looked at each other then looked back at him and shook their heads.

“It is the nature of the barriers, to the extent of my research, that a barrier will always be traversable in some fashion or another,” Tricia explained. “Take this barrier, trap as it may be, for example. If there was no oxygen, then even the person that trapped us in here wouldn’t be able to be in here. And barriers always form around the person who casts them, or wills them into existence as it were.”

John lapsed into silence as he thought about this while they moved. His eyes scanned around the vast, seemingly endless, expanse of the barrier that they were traversing when they alit upon an oddly moving comet.

“Danielle, can you steer us towards that comet?” John asked as he pointed it out to Tricia, who nodded and with an unheard command to her drones began pushing the asteroid towards the comet.

It only took the trio a couple of minutes to close in on the oddly moving comet, and as they approached John used his Observe.

’Wait a minute,’ John thought to himself before continuing out loud, again not realising it, “if that thing is materia like from Final Fantasy, does that mean that I will be able to get and use others?”

Tricia and Michelle both looked at him, then back to the comet, then to each other. Neither one of them had ever heard of this kind of thing being available, or even possible.

John reached out with his hand to try and catch the materia as they passed by, but the materia instead blasted away for a second before it zipped towards John. Just before it impacted into his chest, at a speed that none of them would have been able to stop, it glowed brightly and streaked into his hidden wrist blade.

John quickly looked at the device on his wrist when he noticed that there was now a very small green gem filling what he thought had just been one of a series of decorative indents. When he touched the green gem, it popped out into his hand. No longer a small green gem, instead it was a baseball sized hunk of lightly glowing green rock, looking like a solid round sphere of Chrome chalcedony.

John looked back at the other two and held the sphere up for them to see. Tricia approached and summoned one of her drones which hovered at her shoulder. Michelle joined them and bent over to look at the stone, giving it a poke or two.

“Do you mind if I take a scan of that?” Tricia asked, her voice rising slightly in excitement.

“I don’t mind,” John replied before the drone came over.

The drone bathed the stone in a light that was almost similar in color to the stone in his hand. Circling around the stone the drone let out a series of bleeps and bloops which caused John to smile thinking of R2-D2. Once the scan was complete, the light emitted from the drone changed to an angry red color and the drone repeated the process.

An actual frown passed across Tricia’s delicate face as she listened to the drone and stared at something that only she could see. Although, John thought he saw something flashing over her eyes on occasion, as if she had some kind of contact lens screens in her eyes.

Michelle looked on silently before poking the orb again after the second scan was done. “I wonder what it is?” she voiced aloud as she pulled upright and looked around. “We should probably continue on though. The sooner we get out of this barrier, the sooner we can get you out of this hospital.”