Neither Here Nor There

  I was about to yell at Adam for whatever reckless thing he was doing, when the world began falling apart. The view of it was difficult to describe. Imagine if you realized that your entire field of view was a giant glass screen projecting whatever you see. Imagine the sensation of falling in two directions at once. Then imagine that screen growing black cracks and falling apart piece by piece as reality became a black expanse of nothing. Or, as we’d come to call it lately, Nothing. In the very same instant that the dungeon began disintegrating, I felt a rush of power that I knew should have killed me, but for the safeguards of the spellrod spell. That feeling too was difficult to describe. It was a manic, jittery feeling combined with a sensation of pins and needles all over my body, just this side of painful.

  I could infer a few things from the circumstances. I believed Adam had somehow hijacked the dungeon reset mechanic to transport us to the Nothing while, at the same time, consuming the magic that the dungeon was made out of and transferring it to me through my new spell. That was well and good in theory, but what did he want me to do with that information? I came back to the words he’d said, and decided to just trust him and do what he said.

  I intoned the words of the invisible barrier spell firmly, and focused it beneath our feet. Something was already going wrong- my friends and allies were rapidly moving away from me, as if the space between us was expanding, and I cast the barrier with the firm belief that this piece of magic would remain the same size, and could be stood on. These were facts I knew from the description, so it wasn’t too difficult. Even so, when I cast it it acted quite a bit unlike it did back in realspace. First, the glowing outlines of the square component parts of the spell were and remained visible. Second, I had a lot more to work with- almost as if the spell was using my rapidly dissipating mana to empower this simple invisible barrier spell to extend the range of the spell. I had just enough to create a wide standing space for us all with enough left over to create a circle of safety rails around it.

  “Yes, boundaries, excellent choice, friend Alex,” Adam said.

  “Where the fuck are we?” William said, walking over to us, just as the rest were joining, with Sarah limping in her stiff gait, slower than the rest.

  “We’re in the space between the walls. We’ve been calling it Nothing, it’s where I think our friends are,” I said.

  “How the hell did you pull this off?” Anna said, gesturing to our enclosure.

  “I’m not exactly sure. Adam?” I said.

  “I just can’t believe this place was here the whole time,” Will said.

  “I know and it is making it very difficult to tie it together to friend Alex’s will. Could you stop that?” Adam said.

  “Pardon?” Will said.

  “Could you please stop trying to disbelieve? It is quite important,” Adam said.

  “Oh! Uh, I’ll try,” Will said. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, opened them up and looked around at the platform we were standing on. And it did somehow feel more solid as soon as he did.

  “So what, we’re in clap-your-hands-if-you-believe land? That doesn’t track with what I’ve seen here before,” Anna said. She was looking over the edge of the railing.

  “No. Not at all. It is not that our wills shape this place. It is just that there is nothing shaping it at all, so, failing any other forces, magic conforms to our beliefs. If we didn’t have appropriate spells we would be, as you say, fucked,” Adam said.

  Through my HUD spell I could see my mana bar had gone glowing white from the overcharge. It was usually blue and depleted as I cast spells, but right now it was slowly, but perceptibly reducing in intensity.

  “Can we spare the lecture for later? We need to get our people and find a way out of here,” I said.

  “Exit will be challenging without excess mana. We should move fast,” Adam said.

  “So what do I do?” I said.

  “You will have to find a spell you believe can move the platform. Then, you will have to… Trust your instincts isn’t quite right. You have to know where we’re going. Your Knowledge should be high enough. Remember where you left the lounge and move us there,” Adam said.

  I shuddered. I could almost feel the non-being of this place. It was like at all times the magic around us threatened to stop existing, and I had a feeling that the more I thought about it the more danger we were in. And it didn’t help that we were all from Earth. Adam had had magic his whole life. For most of us, believing in magic was something we’d either never done or had grown out of by the age of ten. Or, fine, I’ll admit it, by sixteen, but anyways.

  “Boss, stop navelgazing. You’re thinking the magic away,” Chum said.

  “You know anything about this?” I said.

  “Pfft, hardly. Interplanar space is not for the sane to explore. Better get moving before we find a denizen,” Chum said. That made everyone start looking around in paranoid glances. But I already knew I had to steer this ship, and I found that I could kind of remember which direction the Hotel, and therefore the Halls and therefore the Lounge were. I was sure it wouldn’t be precise, but I doubted it would matter here.

  I cast the Mage Hand spell twice. That seemed obvious enough, and two hands as tall as myself materialized just outside of our improvised vessel, and I ordered them to push.

  We came to motion in a jarring jerk, which I thought was a nice touch. Time was strange here, despite what Adam had said about time working normally here when he was describing Nothing back by the Swinging Donkey. It neither dragged through the monotonous trip downwards, nor did it speed through due to our novel experiences and rising adrenaline each time we thought we heard something without the bounds of our ghostlight vessel. In other words, every second felt exactly a second long, which made me think that Adam’s theory about time being imposed from the outside- likely by Ygnarothrax Xem- held water.

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  And so I knew that it was almost exactly an hour later when we saw something in the Nothing ahead. The amount of mana that I’d gained from the dungeon collapse must have been truly prodigal, since I was still in the overcharge mode, even after an hour. Which was good, because as we saw the Lounge in Nowhere, we could see too that its doors were open.

  The existence of the Lounge itself seemed strange. It was a brick-shaped hole in reality. Or, rather, everything but a brick-shaped room was a hole in reality, with the Lounge being the only real part of the space here. The front of the Lounge looked like it always had- a maroon painted cement wall with a door in it, but the other planes of it were plain, white plastic-like substance. The door was open, and light was shining from it, there were ghostly bricks in front of it, and two people were standing on them, back to back, with shining, obsidian black swords in their hands. One of them was Clarence, the other a woman I remembered but didn’t recognize from the first challenge. And when they saw us they raised their blades in a battle stance.

  I ordered the hands to dock us with the bricks, and we approached rapidly. When they saw us approaching, the look on Clarence’s face became first a smile, then a suspicious frown. He didn’t lower his blades- two smallswords of the pitch black material. He spoke, but we couldn’t hear him. Sound didn’t seem to travel much between the two realspaces. I raised my hands above my head and cast the telepathy spell, even as my mana bar was now distinctly blue, if still much brighter than before.

  It is me. We can explain everything. I am docking, I sent him through the link.

  Don’t trust my eyes. You shouldn’t either if you are what you say you are. Show me the Journal, he sent back.

  I pulled out my Journal, and he did the same. It didn’t seem to calm him, but then, I supposed, some trickster nightmare could have conjured a copy of this thing pretty easily. But at least he allowed us to dock, which we did with a strange, glassy ‘ting’ of the two spell platforms hitting each other. He showed my the opened Journal. It was just as illegible as other people’s Journals always were, so I frowned in confusion and showed him mine.

  At this, finally he dropped his guard, smiled and exhaled, and finally grabbed me in a hug.

  “Words cannot properly express how grateful I am to see you. Do you have a way out?” he said. His lexicon was still stiff and proper as always, but there was a tired desperation in his voice now.

  “Adam, I hope we do?” I said.

  “We will have to move quickly, but we can do it. Shall we get the rest?” Adam said.

  “What the fuck is that?” the woman next to Clarence said.

  “That’s Adam. He’s weird,” Anna said. The woman laughed a tired laugh.

  “Can we go inside,” I said. I caught a strange reaction from Clarence, almost a disgusted shiver, but he put on a professional smile quickly enough.

  “Of course. Everyone will be ever so excited,” he said.

  We left our platform, and I dismissed the spells- something I couldn’t normally do, but in Nothing I could do it if I didn’t think about it- and entered the Lounge. It was the first real thing in an hour, and the smell hit us first. The Lounge wasn’t small, but two hundred people in one room for over a week was going to get stuffy fast. There was the faint ozone smell of Nothing air, and clearly, some of the air recycling must have still been working, but the press of unwashed bodies- many for three days of the first challenge in addition to the eight days in the second challenge and the place, frankly, stank.

  The people were almost all quiet, and as many as possible were trying to sleep. I looked around and I saw places of resigned frustration, many were clearly angry with one another, and more were injured in some way. This could all be explained with the simple fact that hundreds of people were forced to share a space not big enough for the number for days. What was harder to explain was the pile of black metal weapons, tools and pieces of equipment piled up on the counter by the fridge and kitchenette. Clarence noticed me looking.

  “About four days into this… experience, one of us decided to end it. I didn’t have it in me to stop him at the time. However, that is when we noticed that magical abilities have increased effects here. He could take several steps out, and when he did, he took off running," Clarence said.

  He paused strangely. He was hiding something, but I thought it was from pain, not from malice, "We heard the screams, and I along with a few others followed. We didn’t get there in time, but we did kill the monster. After that, the seal was broken, so to say, and those of us who couldn’t bear another moment inside went out to bait the monsters."

  He seemed to recall that I'd first met him outside. I thought he might have been ashamed for not being able to endure being inside. "After the first six days, it became a privilege to venture out and fight. It has been rather challenging to maintain morale, you see,”

  “Well, everyone, get up! The nightmare’s over. We’re getting you out of here,” Will called to the room. People looked up first, groggily. Realizing that we’d come from outside, some stirred more, some even with a hope in their eyes. In the end I doubt it was the hope for escape, but rather the will to do something, anything to offset the boredom that made everyone get up, and walk towards the exit. I cast my spell again. Then, I realized I’d need to cast it twice. There were a lot of people, but at least weight didn’t matter. I set the platforms a little apart, and moved both of them with the mage hands.

  “What now?” I said to Adam.

  “We go straight up,” Adam said. He sounded confident, and so I shrugged and made it so.

  It was about twenty minutes until I thought I saw something. A light, or perhaps a patch of darkness that wasn’t simply no light hitting my ocular nerves.

  And then the howling of silence, loud enough to stun me.