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Chapter One:

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Elaine stared out into the misty gray rain as she slowly started to remember what electric lights looked like —that and and illuminated signs and traffic signals and neon signs, all seen through a curtain of falling water. After living so long in a pre-industrial environment, Elaine had forgotten that night in her homeworld never got very dark in a city. Light pollution was a thing of ancient memory for her, but she hadn’t quite forgotten. 

She let her held breath escape her lungs in an extended, shaky sigh, “I’m back.”

A lot of people hypothesized that dying in Aldona would bring you back to Earth, but it was the sort of thing they’d told each other as a comforting lie when someone died. Killing yourself to get home wasn’t something that anyone who wasn’t already suicidal (or psychotic) was likely to try and the suicidal types pretty much all went in the first year or so, once they’d given up hope that the ‘game’ had an end in sight and they’d all gotten kicked out of the starter zone —the psychos lasted a lot longer.

Part of Elaine was still back in the Deathless Sands, staring up at the open jaws of a Pearl Dragon and waiting for the impact. The rest of her was trying to remember how life on Earth even worked. She’d been sixteen when she transmigrated and forty-seven when the dragon got her, which meant she’d spent longer in Aldona than she ever had at home. 

Elaine looked down at herself with skepticism. Her gear was more or less in place, at least. She’d lost the spear she’d had out when the dragon knocked her across the canyon with its tail and she dropped it, but she still had everything else she’d been wearing and all her bound gear.

Actually, now that she really thought about it, that wasn’t good. She was wearing a full set of harsh-environment gear, which would make her look like some crazy cosplayer or a TV serial killer to anyone who looked down this alley. Fortunately, it was raining and no one really walked in the United States, where she was originally from, if they could help it. 

On reflex, she called up her Interface to swap her load out and two things happened in rapid succession. One, she realized she probably didn’t have an interface anymore; that all her stored gear, supplies, and everything else she’d been painstakingly collecting over the years was just gone. Two, just as the nausea of being alone and totally unsupplied started to hit her in the gut, the Interface popped up in the air in front of her face as a frosty blue panel that read SYNCHRONIZING for a couple of seconds before displaying her usual home screen.

“Haaaaaaaa…” Elaine wheezed, stomach still wobbly from sudden terror, and she quickly tabbed over to her equipment panel. She had three sets of gear in her Quick Tabs. “Exchange gear, load-out one: Townie.”

Her hazard gear vanished to be replaced by an outfit that could probably pass muster on the street here; black leggings with a garnet colored tunic-top, black half boots, a crossbody black leather satchel, and a hooded red bell coat that repelled water. The townie load out also came with sedate makeup, a nice braided crown hairstyle, and palm gloves. 

Elaine examined herself in the reflective surface of a window that faced into the alley. The interior had a solid security grate so she couldn’t see it, but it made an OK mirror even in the dim light. The face that looked back at Elaine was the same one she’d had for the past thirty-one of her forty-seven years; a cat-shaped face with hazel-gray eyes, dark brown hair, and a little bit of acne scarring on the cheeks, forever frozen at age sixteen. None of the ‘players’ in Aldona aged so Elaine wasn’t special or anything, but she’d expected that time would catch up to her if she ever made it home. Nope, she was the same as she ever was.

‘Am I home?’ she wondered, suddenly. Was she home or had she just been transmigrated again to a different world that just happened to be just like the one she’d come from or, even worse, was this a mind-fucky psychic attack? She pulled a glove off to feel the surfaces around her; rough brick, smooth metal, and damp rain-misted glass. Illusory and psychic magic didn’t tend to support haptic components like texture or temperature so the odds were good that she wasn’t having an intense hallucination out in the desert while something got ready to eat her. Only time would tell for sure, though.

Turned out it was early in the morning, because the sun started to warm the sky through the clouds when Elaine left the alley. Her Interface helpfully told her it was cold out, but she’d bought the temperature immunity feat in order to visit Deathless Sands so she couldn’t actually tell in the absence of external clues like snow or seeing her breath condense on the air. 

The cars parked on the street had a strong resemblance to her vague recollections of What Cars Look Like. Like phones, she remembered cars being one of the biggest props that ‘date’ a TV show so the same should apply to her current situation. 

Unlike TV, there weren’t any handy newsstands or window displays full of TV screens showing the same channel for her to crib the date off. She spotted some people in the distance and, although she didn’t approach them, she spotted one of them with what looked like an iphone in one hand and a bright white airpod in one ear. Both those things were familiar enough to her that she decided she was in her original world and she got confirmation that’s what it was when she walked past a bus stop with a big ad insert on one wall shilling for the iphone 12.

Aldona had a lot of the same technology as Earth in the Renaissance; printing presses, telescopes, thermometers, and that sort of thing. It was just they all had different names, so while people in an alternate universe could potentially have iphones, it wasn’t likely that they’d have the same name or branding. 

She couldn’t remember what iphone was popular when she was originally taken, though. Whatever force that kidnapped her from her native reality spat her out in the Aldona starter village, Pikopi, wearing nothing but level 0 neophyte gear: i.e. a burlap sack, woven sandals, and a rusty iron dagger. So she didn’t have her old phone, but it had been a prepaid model from Walmart anyway. Elaine’s original life didn’t include luxuries like brand name phones.

The city continued to brighten and she wandered the pre-dawn until the Interface popped up to let her know that she’d mapped the new area well enough to generate passive geographical data. The map confirmed for her that she was back in Carrington, Kentucky, but did so right about the time when she’d already started to remember and recognize the local landmarks so that wasn’t as helpful as it could have been. 

Carrington wasn’t a large city, just as she remembered, and she seemed to have landed in the historic downtown area which contained some old government buildings, a big old bed and breakfast, and the quaint shopping district nearby with cobblestone streets that had never been replaced with asphalt because that would upset the area’s local charm, which made things like the Bluegrass Wine Walk and Quilt Crawl such a popular annual attraction.

Eventually, she found her way into Greenwood Park. That, she recognized more than the downtown shops where she could never afford to shop. Greenwood Park had been where she hung out a lot as a kid, whenever she was living with her mom. Elaine’s mother didn’t want her in the house during the day, if she was around, so Elaine had gone to the nearest park instead because there was a sitting area under the big central water feature there. Greenwood Park was in a pretty well policed area so there weren’t usually rough sorts of people loitering around.

That might have changed, though, because there were now barred and locked gates on the entrance to the sitting area when she arrived with a sign on them stating park hours. They looked kind of new, so they couldn’t have gone up very long ago and it had been a while since Elaine had been to the park, even before her transmigration. 

She had a spell called ‘Knock Knock’ that could undo simple locks without breaking them, but Elaine spotted a glowing blue dot in the dark interior of the seating area and abruptly remembered that security cameras were a thing here so she had to walk away. 

Lacking any other options, she wandered around the surrounding neighborhood until her foggy memories stirred further and she remembered the way to her mom’s house.

The house didn’t look all that different; a narrow half-timbered two-story building on a postage stamp yard with a narrow driveway on one side and a crabapple tree in the front yard. She circled around to the driveway to see if she could recognize the car, but got distracted when someone turned a light on inside the building. Elaine eased over to the kitchen window and went up on her tiptoes to peek inside. 

Sure enough, there was her mom looking exactly the way she remembered; medium height with ashy blonde hair, wearing fashionable leisure wear that made her ass look amazing, and—she was in the middle of shooting a ‘get ready with me’ video. Elaine even recognized the little drone camera following her around, which is what she used when Elaine was at her dad’s house or wasn’t in the mood to be her camera person. 

Her mom didn’t look upset, actually kind of serene, as went through the graceful motions of making a silent iced coffee. She still had her hair up in rollers and a silk wrap, with collagen patches on her cheeks, and peel off lipstain still setting on her mouth.

She did not look like someone whose daughter was missing.

Elaine remembered that she’d been taken from her room upstairs and, though her mom was not without flaws, she was the kind who knew the answer when someone asked ‘do you know where your children are?’

So, either Elaine hadn’t been gone long enough for her mom to do a room check or she’d been gone long enough for her mom to get back into a routine. 

‘I need to get upstairs,’ she decided. Her phone would (hopefully) still be up there and it’s condition would tell her more of what she needed to know.

Moving quietly, she slipped around to the other side yard that faced her bedroom window upstairs. She cast ‘float’ to lift herself off the ground and used window ledges and the timbered parts of the house’s exterior as handholds to guide herself to the window. She was lucky that this window wasn’t alarmed. All the ones downstairs were and any window that had something that could be used to hold a person’s weight, but Elaine’s window had no tree outside or a ledge underneath it and her bedroom got stuffy in the night sometimes because their house was old with weird ventilation, so her window made no sound when she cast a quiet ‘knock knock’ to lift the latch so she could slide inside.

The inside of her room looked the same as she remembered it; a small, comfortable room with a knotted rug, framed posters on the walls, and a twin bed piled high with blankets and throw pillows. The furniture was on the old side, but it was stuff that she and her mom had refinished shortly after the divorce and before her mom started getting brand deals and PR boxes. 

Elaine sat carefully down on the bed and it squeaked just as she’d half-remembered it would. Her phone was sitting on the night stand, charging, where she’d left it on the night she was taken into the game. It took her a second to remember how to unlock it, but after a moment the screen lit up with a snapshot of her interrupted life.

She had texts already from Brooke, her childhood best friend, who was venting about something her sister had done already at 5:30 AM. There were some unread app notifications, but not that many, and Elaine was forced to acknowledge the truth; she hadn’t been gone long enough for anyone to notice. It had been a few hours, overnight at worst.

She sat there, staring into the middle distance for an unknown period of time, until an Interface window bloomed in front of her face. It wasn’t her usual HUD, just a plain screen that lit up with scrolling text. 

[ Welcome home. You have 7 days until Phase 2. Make them count.]

“What the f…” Elaine bit off her swear when she heard footsteps start up the stairs. 

She did not appear on her mom’s channel partially because her dad was looking for an excuse to bring the lawyers in again, but mostly because her mom was concerned about people getting weird about her teen daughter when Elaine couldn’t profit from the attention. So, the most Elaine ever showed up on the channel was when her mom came to the door to see if she was getting up and the camera stayed in the hallway. 

Elaine jumped under the covers and rolled to face away from the door just as it cracked open and her mom leaned in.

“Mooorning, sleepy,” she called, quietly inside. 

Elaine feigned shifting awake. “Already?” she asked. Part of her wanted to turn around and look at her mom’s face, but her throat was starting to tighten up and her eyes were burning like she was gonna cry any minute. 

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “I’ll be done shooting in fifteen minutes or so.”

“Okay,” Elaine said and clenched a fist under the quilt. “I’ll be down soon.”

‘Soon’ was an overstatement, but she managed to change into some pajamas and remember what all she was supposed to be doing before her mom came to call her down a second time. 

Fortunately for her, it was summer break so she didn’t have to try and remember anything about school. It was doubly fortunate because she spent the school year at her dad’s place because he lived in a better school district and Elaine no longer trusted herself not to knock his new wife’s teeth out. 

Sometimes growing up meant looking back at some of the people who’d wronged you and understanding them better from the context of greater maturity, and sometimes growing up meant you looked back at other people who’d wronged you and understood that they were malicious assholes. Natasha was a malicious asshole. 

She was one of those weirdos who felt like she had to compete with her man’s children for his attention. They weren’t that far apart in age, either, so she was always inciting petty arguments that she could frame Elaine for having started. Matters were not helped at all when Elaine’s mom’s channel blew up and she became lowkey famous; not famous enough to quit her job, but famous enough that companies started sending her free luxury athleisure and stuff. 

Natasha was the reason that Elaine didn’t bother with nice electronics, skincare, or clothes, even when her mom had stuff she could share because she wouldn’t be able to use it for most of the year. Natasha wasn’t the kind to steal. She made good money on her own, but she would ‘accidentally’ break anything she thought Elaine liked too much or didn’t fit with the ‘troubled ugly teen’ narrative she was spinning at home.

Elaine always wanted to punch her in the face and, now that she could do it by accident, it would be for the best if she did not cross paths with that bitch again.

She was downstairs, trying not to cry into the matcha latte and chia seed pudding she’d found waiting at her spot on the kitchen table, when her mom showed up in her work clothes with smooth, flawless waves in her hair and chunky tortoiseshell glasses on, to drop a kiss on the top of Elaine’s head. Normally, she would have breezed by on her way to grab her work bag with an aesthetic lunch box she’d packed herself the night before, but this time she paused. 

“Are you okay, sweetie?” she asked, cocking her head as she looked Elaine over. “Your eyes are puffy.” She put her wrist on Elaine’s forehead. “You also feel kind of cold.”

“I woke up mad at people who aren’t here,” Elaine said. Partial truths were for the best when she had to hide something.

“Ooh,” Elaine’s mom pursed her lips. “Do you need me to pick up pads on my way home?” she asked, scrunching her nose, and—yeah, okay. That was fair.

“I’ll go,” Elaine said, rather than explain that she’d once spent 20,000 gold on a tattoo that permanently stopped her menstrual cycle after the fourth time she’d had to stop to boil fresh sanitary napkins in a dungeon because her period snuck up on her or showed up early because of stress. 

“I’ll put some money on your card,” her mom said, by way of agreement, and gave her a sideways hug. “Plus some extra for allowance.”

“Thanks,” Elaine said, honestly. “Do you want to hang out this weekend?”

“Oh?” her mom said with a smile. “You want to hang out with me? You’re not going to ditch me at the last second for Brooke?”

“Brooke texted me with stupid drama at 5:30 in the morning,” Elaine countered. She was starting to feel a little better and stuck a spoon into her pudding. They didn’t have anything like chia in the parts of Aldona where she hung out. They ate a lot of grain porridge there with sweet or savory toppings, depending on the meal, so the pudding was actually kind of familiar. “She’s lucky I didn’t send her to jail.”

Her mom snorted an inelegant laugh and smoothed Elaine’s bangs out of her face. “Let me know if you change your mind about the store. I’ll check my phone before I leave the office. Somebody sent me a reishi protein powder that’s supposed to be good for that. If you decide to try it, let me know if it did anything and I’ll pretend I drank it.”

“Are they paying you to say nice things?” Elaine asked.

“No, they just sent the powder without asking and it didn’t look like they were too pseudo-sciency, so I thought I might try it at some point,” her mom replied as she moved on to load her work bag with her Stanley, a glass meal prep container full of pesto pasta, and a second insulated cup of hot coffee this time. “If it sucks, we just don’t say anything.”

“Understood,” Elaine saluted with her spoon and waited until her mom had left and the car had pulled out of the drive to reach into her inventory for a stamina potion. She could have gone back upstairs to sleep a little, but the Interface said she had ‘seven days until Phase 2’ and she had no clue what that even meant. 

The Interface had made announcements before, mostly tutorial-level advice in the beginning when everyone was running around Pikopi village wearing burlap sacks and losing their shit, but it had never mentioned anything about there being a ‘Phase 1.’ That meant that she’d be working blind unless it made a follow-up announcement later.

First off, though, she had something else that needed doing. 

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Chapter Two:

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Elaine’s first stop was to teleport herself to Brooke’s place, just to make sure it existed. She still hadn’t ruled out the idea that she was caught in a psychic trap, but illusion worlds could only contain so much imagined ‘space’ and while it was possible that the spell was using her mind to fill in the blanks about the places she was ‘going’, the truth was that she didn’t remember a whole lot about Brooke or Brooke’s family.

There were different kinds of best friends when you were a sixteen year old girl; full-time besties and seasonal besties. Even when Elaine really was sixteen, she knew that Brooke had slowly been downgraded to a seasonal bestie. They’d been really close in middle school, but fell out of regular touch when Elaine started high school in a different city. They’d hang out a bit during the summers and long breaks when Elaine was with her mom and Brooke’s other friends were occupied with their families, but otherwise they weren’t close anymore

What that meant was that Elaine didn’t have clear memories with emotional ties of Brooke’s house and the people who lived there the way she did of her mom’s. If she was caught in an illusion, then spending a little time in the area would make the spell start to fray and ‘reality’ would start to warp.

That said, she didn’t actually want to hang out with Brooke. For one thing, she wasn’t really a teenage girl anymore. For another, she wasn’t ready to fully resume her life as she’d left it—especially if she had to accomplish something big in the next seven days and she didn’t even know what it was.

Several hours of observation later, Elaine had witnessed Brooke have three screaming arguments with her older sister about someone using someone else’s toner without asking, Brooke’s mom sneaking out the back to smoke a single cigarette, Brooke’s dad falling asleep in a lounge chair on the deck with their dog, and nothing else. No one showed up in two places at once, no one suddenly grew extra fingers, or started speaking with the wrong voice and she was forced to admit that she really was back home. 

Elaine had to teleport back into her house (which she could do now that the memory of it was fresh enough to use) to go do some deep breathing exercises and definitely did not cry into the pillows stuffed animals on her old childhood bed for a solid hour. Then she spent another hour or so magically tagging her personal belongings so she could withdraw them all into her inventory at a moment’s notice or summon them from a distance. Having started there, she couldn’t stop herself from pulling a beefy set of wardstones out of her inventory.

The wardstones were a set of four luminous double-terminated crystals with a flat cap fitted on one end so they could be easily stamped into soft earth like a peg. The glow from the crystals would be muffled by the ground unless something activated the wards, which could be anything from a monster attack to a sudden natural disaster. Explorers used wardstones like these ones around their camps, but Elaine had seen villagers use them to protect their houses from flash floods. 

She breathed a little easier, knowing there were wards now, but was saved from further paranoid spiralling when her mom’s car pulled into the drive.