Solipsism: Chapter 3 (Patreon)

“You’re insane.”

I’d been rebuked by all sorts of women for all sorts of reasons, but that was a new one. Still, I grinned. It might have been the adrenaline talking, but everything felt absolutely incredible, I was impossible to hurt or kill, and anything I did would turn out great. 

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “That’s the problem with being told you don’t exist, isn’t it? I can’t exactly prove it to you. Then again, if I’m right, there’d be no point in proving it to you anyway since you wouldn’t even be conscious the way I am. Whatever you think is just whatever I think you think.”

She stared at me for a good long while at that, then turned on her heel and sprinted down to her town. I studied the world around me, having the necessary chance on my hands for the first time since I’d been dropped into this unreality. 

I walked at a leisurely pace, or as close to one as I could manage with my body still twitching in the after-effects of my flight. The way down to the settlement was steep and sloped at an incline from my direction; serving to both ease my walk and reinforce my awe with the cyclopes’ which had scaled it so fast. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of a fantasy world if all the creatures were limited to things that real animals of their size could easily manage. 

Up close, the village was a shade less spectacular than it had seemed from far away. And that was saying something. The place was trashed for one thing, and the people barely looked better. They were spilling out of the nooks and crannies now, slowly and cautiously as was probably wise. Plenty of looks were shot my way. 

That much made sense, at least. I was wearing a set of pyjamas made with modern textiles and covered in moaning anime women, not a common sight among the periods of history I could imagine producing settlements like this. Still, there was something else to their stares. It took me almost running into a gathering of them to realise what it was.

“There he is.” One of them called out, and a moment later I was being swarmed. 

“You’re the one.” Someone gasped.

“Our saviour!” Exclaimed another. 

Dozens of faces, all crowding around me, all grinning and staring with the kind of veneration I normally saw…Well, nowhere actually. A few looked unhappy still, namely those far at the back and not bothering to approach- the young woman I first met upon arrival was among them- but for the most part it was…Kind of overwhelming. 

“Who are you?” Someone asked, and that question actually sank in. I found myself answering without realising what I was even saying. 

“My name is Gordon Smith.” I replied. “And I’m…” What, exactly? 

Telling them I was an unemployed shut-in who didn’t wear pants was, obviously, out of the question, but the notion of which specific lie to respond with had me thinking hard. 

“A traveller.” I said at last. True. “And a…Fighter of monsters.” True, as long as one counted imaginary monsters in video games. Given that these were imaginary people, being attacked by imaginary monsters, I didn’t feel bad about fudging that much. “Really, I was just passing through and happy to help out.”

As I said that last part, my eyes were affixed heavily on the young woman who’d first been waiting for me when I landed. It might’ve been my imagination, but I thought I saw a flicker of relief run across her features as she heard me finish talking. 

Which confirmed, to me, a couple of things. She was responsible for bringing me here- at least within the logic of this world- and she didn’t want anyone else to know it. 

The people around me kept on heaping their praises onto the pile, and I wasn’t actually sure how long I spent receiving it. It was hardly unpleasant of course, but after a while even the feeling of my ego being stroked grew old. Fortunately, it ended eventually. 

I slipped from the crowd as its people started turning their focus onto one another, comforting each other and asking about damages. That proved important enough that I went relatively unnoticed as I moved through the crowd and made my way for the first face I’d seen in this world.

As I might have expected, she wasn’t pleased to see me. 

“What do you want?” She snapped, hurrying away even as she asked. That was odd. I thought so, at least, until I realised she was keeping me talking while luring me away from anywhere we might be overheard. 

“I wanted to ask you a few questions.” I replied, deciding to play along. This one was a total bitch, and as satisfying as it would be to spoil her attempts at subtlety…It wouldn’t help much. I had no idea what rules this world played by, for all I knew originating elsewhere was a big no-no. This was someone who knew that I did, as a fact, and considered themselves complicit in my showing up, which meant I had a vested interest in maintaining her vested interest to not expose me…

Huh. What was I doing? Thinking along at a hundred miles per hour as if any of this mattered, I was working awfully hard just to out-scheme my own synapses. Well, I’d thought harder about beating RPGs before so nothing had changed there at least. 

“Then ask.” The woman shot back, and she was, if anything, even icier now. What was with this bitch? You might’ve thought I’d un-killed the damned cyclopes with how she was treating me. 

“What is this place?” I decided to start with names, if only out of curiosity for what kind my subconscious would regurgitate. Would I be treated to a compilation of best-hits from all the fantasy media I’d consumed over the years? 

“This town you mean?” She asked, irritation and hostility displaced, temporarily, by confusion. “Or…No, you mean this world right?”

Quick on the uptake at least. 

“Yes.” I confirmed. “I’d never been here or heard of it until you dropped me out of the sky.”

Mentioning that again reminded me of my miraculous deceleration, and gave me the chance to wonder again how I’d slowed myself. Had I pushed against the air? No, sending trolls and rocks flying hadn’t done anything to move me before. Whatever it was that let me propel things, Newton had no part in it. 

“Alright.” She paused a moment, ordering her thoughts, I suspected. I guessed living in mud huts probably bred the kind of person who didn’t even know where to begin naming something as big as their planet. 

“Well, our world is called Eltaris.” She said at last. “The, uh, the land upon which we live, at least.”

“The continent?” I asked, then sighed at the blank look on her face. “The big…Land that…Nevermind, continue.”

She did, looking more annoyed with each word as if it were somehow my fault that her people hadn’t gotten a camera into space yet. 

“This village is called Guran, we live in the land of Aethiq. Our current King is Ahaccui.”

The bombardment of speech was, more or less, my brain’s exact limit of proper-nouns-per-second. I raised a hand to gesture that she stop while I soaked it all in, turning the information over in my head. I certainly didn’t recognise anything she’d said, but then I could come up with words I didn’t recognise as well just by wanting to. Besides-

No, hang on, why did that even matter? I wasn’t trying to verify this was all fake, I already knew it was for a fact. I was wasting time. 

“Alright.” I managed, picking through my thoughts and finding them suddenly thicker. It was like trying to trudge through swampland all of a sudden. “Okay, hang on…” I glanced around us, noting that the woman had led us to one of the more secluded areas in the village. Good. “Tell me everything then, as much as possible.”

She eyed me. “Why should I do that?” The woman countered, on edge in an instant. I resisted the urge to actually yell out my answer.

“Because you want me gone, obviously.” I told her, patiently as I could. “And I’m not leaving until I know enough to not get killed the moment I do.”

There was a ridiculous amount to tell, and I didn’t hear even half of it- even a hundredth of it- in the few hours we had. But I got a lot. 

Aethiq, as far as I could tell, was a country rather than a continent, but the lands around it were similar in structure. Dominated by Gods. The way it was told, these were more in line with the old-school style of Gods. Not necessarily omnipotent or all-knowing, but a damn sight greater than puny humans and more vindictive than just about anyone you were likely to meet. These local ones, in particular, were called the Irethani Pantheon. And they had a fondness for human sacrifices.

Evidently, the local humans in Guran had taken exception to that. Enough that they’d refused the call of a High Priest, and incurred the cyclopes I’d helped kill.

Those were interesting, too. Monsters straight from Ancient Greek mythology. How they’d ended up here was lost on me, and not terribly relevant. What mattered was the bottom line. 

There was something out there that was both very very powerful, and very very pissed with this village. Several somethings, in fact. Which meant that skidaddling would be the better part of valour. 

Of course I had more pressing concerns before I could do that. Namely hunger.

Having recently killed several superhuman monsters, it might have been expected that I would have an easy time getting food and accommodation from the grateful villagers. I did. Within ten minutes of my asking, the leaders- the eldest few in the settlement’s one or two hundred person populace- had arranged for me to be seated, housed and fed. The food wasn’t exactly gourmet, but it was filling. Lots of beans and squash, mostly, but there was a bit of meat when I asked for some. I actually felt kind of bad after doing so though, the people were clearly struggling to deal with repairs to their homes. 

Once my belly was full, I moved onto my secondary concern. As it happened that was something that meshed nicely with the surrounding issue of housing for the unfortunate, if imaginary, locals. What exactly could I do? 

Well, I couldn’t just want things to happen and have it work. There was a very particular feeling that came whenever I actually used my…Whatever it was, a sort of mental resistance as if my mind were taking part in a shoving contest and winning. That implied the possibility of a failed shoving contest, but for now my main concern was learning to recapture the sensation and see what it could accomplish. 

My early attempts were unimaginative, but modestly effective. I managed to confirm that my previous suspicions were right, by concentrating on the intent to do so I was able to increase the speed of an object through physical contact. The speed in question seemed higher if it was a smaller thing, which, come to think of it, implied I might just have been affecting momentum or kinetic energy. 

I followed that with an examination of how I might have slowed my fall, trying to stop falling objects up to and including myself. The distances I dropped down from were never more than a foot or two, which was fortunate because trying to reduce my own velocity the way I increased that of others was a completely futile effort. Unless one counts irritating me as worthwhile, I supposed. 

A lengthy period of sulking followed that, where my growing annoyance was fed by the pricks of almost-fear at my situation. The villagers were speaking of retribution from their Gods, now that the cyclopes had been killed. That was, I figured, why I’d gotten a few dirty looks before, or part of it at least. If something else was sent- something presumably sent with the confidence that it could kill a cyclops-killer- then I didn’t want to be anywhere near when it arrived.

Learning how to use magic powers wasn’t enough, of course. I had to do it on a time-limit, life would just be too fair otherwi-

“Would you stop whining for one second?”

I froze, turned, and became painfully conscious of my jaw dropping as I beheld the woman leaning on a wall behind me. She was tall, slim, had the sort of body you’d usually only get with photoshop and had dressed it all in black and leather, like she was cosplaying something my parents would’ve watched during their goth phase. 

Her face was the highlight, it was the kind that just sort of…Reached some part of me. Unfortunately, the part that controlled higher brain functions. 

“Uhm.” I said, which was actually one of the more articulate pick-up lines I’ve managed to spit out over the course of my life. She rolled her eyes.

“Alright genius, sit still and shut up. We don’t have much time.”