Chapter 49: The Hard Sell

Thomas gestured over to Jo, who was still sleeping on the daybed across the room. “Let’s wait until she’s up. I don’t want to go over this twice.”

Zach grunted in agreement and levered himself into a sitting position. Then he paused, gaze turning inward. “Uh, what’s with my mana? It feels… travelly?”

“You couldn’t absorb it unconscious, so you got the IV mana treatment,” Thomas said and pointed. Apparently, Zach was still out of it enough to not clock that he was hooked up to an IV line. Only a little remained in the double bottles. “They added Teleportation mana to your mix.”

Zach’s face lit up. “Dude, that is sick. Should I try it out now?”

“No! Absolutely not,” Thomas said, alarmed, half-rising from his seat.

“What about a tiny teleport? Like, to the other end of the room?”

“Are you out of your mind?! You…! You’re screwing with me, aren’t you?”

Zach grinned, and Thomas sat back down.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said with a roll of his eyes.

Zach’s grin faded into a half-smile. “Yeah, Mana Man. Me too.”

Their conversation woke Jo, who sat up, looking around. “How long was I out?”

“Only a couple of hours,” Thomas assured her.

She nodded, stood, and without another word came over to hug Zach.

Zach went very still as his usual easy charm fled. After an awkward second’s delay, he patted her on the back. It looked like he was very much not used to being mothered.

Thankfully, she pulled back and looked at him. “I’m glad you’re okay. I thought that we lost you. Don’t do that again.”

“Or at least, maybe a shorter teleport?” Thomas suggested. He had thought about reading Zach the riot act, but the man’s sacrifice had gotten them away from the witches.

Zach laughed and ran a hand back through his hair, still a little awkward. “I knew I’d only have one teleport in me, and I wasn’t totally sure Jo’s truck was far enough away from the coven. It felt like Reno was the same distance. I mean, I know it’s not, but the skill was telling me Reno would take the same amount of energy. This teleport skill has huge range. So… go big or go home, right?”

“I should have taken the skill,” Jo said. “You are going to be ridiculous with it.”

Zach’s sunny smile absolutely promised he would be.

“Sorry I didn’t catch you had a fever,” Thomas told Jo, “or the poisoning, apparently.”

“I accidentally nicked myself with the sword when I was going after that wizard guy,” Jo said, “and it wasn’t your fault. You were busy triaging this one.” She cast Zach another look, and Zach at least pretended to seem sheepish. Then Jo turned back to Thomas. “What happened after I fell asleep?”

“Funny thing,” Thomas started, then quickly recounted the deal he’d made to heal Zach and what exactly their new hosts were and why they seemed so creepy while in human disguise. He kept most of the healer revelations to himself, though. That was something he was still sorting through.

Tellingly, Zach didn’t bat an eye at the elf details. Jo’s reaction was much more normal, as she gasped and asked, “Are you sure?” a couple of times.

“Most fantasy races you hear about are part of the System,” Zach confirmed to her, matter-of-factly, as if this wasn’t some great revelation. “Knowledge about them has been seeded into our society to prepare us for the System. It started even before the first dungeons appeared.”

Thomas looked at him. “So, what do you know about Dark elves?”

“Not a ton, honestly. I’ve met some Light elves at dinner parties when I was a kid. They’re not great people,” he said with a shrug. “If they’d been the ones following us, that would have definitely been a hit squad. I always got the impression that Dark elves were sort of their dumb servants. But that was all from the Light elves.” He looked thoughtful, as if he’d just convinced himself. “Huh. Maybe we should hear what these guys have to say.”

Naturally, Jo was still fixated on the ‘we’re among aliens’ bit. “So you’re saying dwarves and… dragons are real? All that stuff?”

“Yeah,” he said simply. “Some of them may come to Earth, too, after the countdown’s up. But… probably not a whole ton? I’m pretty sure early integration planets like ours are backwaters for the first few thousand years.”

She scrubbed a hand over her face. “I feel like I’ve fallen asleep and woken up in a Dungeons and Dragons game.”

“I’ve felt like that ever since I went into a dungeon for the first time,” Thomas muttered. He wasn’t that old in his opinion, but… he felt too old for this shit. His nephews would inherit this weird world and would acclimatize a lot better. His parents, probably not at all. His mom still had problems telling the difference between Wi-Fi and cellular data.

Well, that was a problem for another day. Zach’s IV had run dry, so Thomas went and removed it, then pressed a level three healing crystal on him. The vast majority went to waste as Zach couldn’t retain healing mana, but he looked a lot perkier than before.

“What time is it?” Zach asked, jumping down off the gurney.

That was a good question. Thomas thought about pulling out his pocket watch, but wouldn’t know at this point if it was AM or PM. That chouk had completely reset his circadian rhythm.

There was a window nearby with curtains drawn over it. Thomas crossed the room to see if it was at least daytime already. He pulled the curtains open… and stared.

Behind him, he heard Jo say, “Hey, is anybody else’s phone working? Mine says no service…”

“Guys, funny thing,” Thomas said, then just trailed off to stare outside again. He wanted to make a genuine “We’re not in Kansas anymore” joke, but it just wouldn’t come. He also couldn’t tear his eyes from the very alien landscape: the bizarrely spiraled branches of foliage that ended in weird diamond-shaped, purple-reddish leaves instead of green. The houses which were built in trees that were bigger than anything he had seen in his life. A few elves in their normal forms could be seen walking on a path lit by bioluminescent mushrooms in the distance. The Dark evening sky had a thick white stripe of stars that was brighter than he’d ever seen in the Milky Way… as if they were closer to the galactic core.

Earlier, he’d made a Home Tree joke because of the Na’vi resemblance. It turned out he wasn’t far off.

Jo and Zach came over and similarly stared out, struck dumb.

Thomas licked dry lips. “I don’t think it’s Pandora, exactly, but we’re definitely not on Earth.”

****

“This isn’t possible, this just isn’t possible.” Jo repeated, backing up from the window. She looked more freaked out than Thomas had seen her facing the gang members in the grizzly bear dungeon. Then again, she had left her hunting daggers and bloodthirst sword at her bedside. She looked at Thomas. “How could we have been taken to another planet? We were just in Reno!”

“This doesn’t look like an illusion,” Zach said, leaning close to the window to peer out. “It has, like, depth and stuff.” He seemed mostly intrigued. “And when I ask my skill about teleporting, I’m getting the feeling that Earth is a no-go.”

Thomas’s reaction fell between his two teammates. Plus Jo had a great point: he would have remembered if he’d been taken into a spaceship and blasted off.

At the same time, he didn’t feel like this was a dungeon. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but there was a subtle feeling in the air to dungeons that he was starting to identify. This didn’t have it.

He thought back to his journey through the convention center. Most of his concentration had been on maintaining the bridge to keep Zach alive, but one detail did stand out.

“Hey, remember when we were walking through the back offices in the convention center and we went through a doorway and one of the hallways suddenly changed?” he asked Jo. “They became that sort of wood-paneled?”

“Yes? Why?”

“I’m guessing that was a point where we walked from Earth to here, wherever here is.”

“You didn’t feel anything?” Zach asked, turning from the window to them.

“What, like a Stargate whooshing us across the universe? No.” He shook his head. “It was subtle.”

“So what does this mean?” Jo demanded. “I can’t call my daughter to let her know I’ll be home. She’ll be worried sick. Are we prisoners?”

Thomas suspected it was the fact that she couldn’t call her daughter that most upset her. Damn it. This was supposed to be only a moderately risky dungeon run. She had been dragged along on a wacky adventure anyway.

“I didn’t get that impression from Akilah, the healer who treated you and Zach,” he explained. “And I don’t think prisoners would be allowed to keep their weapons.” He nodded to her sword.

“We’re super low-leveled in the grand scheme of things,” Zach said. “I don’t think there’s a reason to keep us prisoner. They just want to… talk?” He looked at Thomas, who nodded back. “So let’s hear them out. Nobody said that we had to say yes to whatever they want. Or we can make going back home part of the deal.”

“What do the elves want?” Thomas asked. “You said that you met Light elves. What did they want from your family?”

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He tried not to badger Zach too much about his past, but this was an emergency situation.

Again Zach shook his head. “I was just a kid. They wanted… business connections, I think? Maybe to establish a colony on Earth?”

“They’re taking over Earth?” Jo asked, looking like she couldn’t handle many more surprises today.

“No,” Zach said, after a moment. “More like… an embassy? I’m sorry, I don’t know, guys. These were old memories and I was busy with other stuff. They mostly had us kids fight their kids while they made business deals.”

“Whoa, they what?” Thomas asked sharply. “They had children fighting each other?”

“You know, to see who had the stronger next generation or whatever. Everybody got healing afterward, but looking back, yeah, it was a little fucked up,” he admitted. “One of those things that you grow up with and you don’t realize until later, you know?”

“That sounds like one of my daughter’s Naruto shows,” Jo said.

“Yeah.” Zach snapped his fingers and pointed. “You get it.”

Jo and Thomas shared a mutual, “What the fuck?” look.

Thomas couldn’t wrap his mind around full-grown adults wanting to watch children fight each other. This would have been way before any of them had Gifts. What point would that prove, exactly?

“Well, we owe them a lot for the healing, but I ain’t fighting children in a gladiator tournament,” Thomas grumbled.