Work Text:
As far as I’m concerned, the past twenty-four hours could not have been much worse.
To begin with, eight AM classes are already the bane of my existence. Honestly, they were the bane of college students everywhere. With that said, having a late class and then an eight AM back to back so I actually have to stay in my dorm instead of commuting from home has to be a circle of hell on its own.
Second, the water was out in the bathrooms. Hall bathrooms were bad enough but I seriously paid thousands of dollars in tuition and that was what I got out of it?
And then the final cherry on top was me getting a splitting migraine when I sat down at my desk to try and get some studying done.
So, overall, not the best day in the life of Milo Calhoun, college freshman.
With a yawn, I sat down in my seat as my computer booted up and ran my fingers through my hair as I glanced at the mirror on my desk. I had round glasses, long black hair, and I was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, because apparently Delaware weather could not get to summer fast enough.
As my computer booted up, I clicked through the start up screen and pulled up my next class’s reading. It wasn’t due until after the weekend but at least I could salvage something from today if I got it done.
I was just on the opening lines of The Tempest (A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard, yadda yadda) when Discord blooped a new notification. From Ethan, because of course it was, in the usual group chat.
Alright, alright, new fic idea, the message said. Worm, but we isekai in instead of the Travelers. Like, group isekai.
Immediately, reactions flooded in from the rest of the group, and they didn’t exactly flatter his “genius”.
Ethan, you whore, Nico immediately shot back. You know that you and Milo are the only people here who have read Worm.
How would that even work? was Nat’s contribution.
And then there was Tobi, as irreverent as ever. Is there chicken in Worm? he asked.
Hey, wait, I’ve read Worm too! Lu said. Mostly Worm fics though.
From there, it devolved into a bit of a scuffle about who’s read Worm and who hasn’t, complete with Ava and Charlie lurking, but eventually I had enough and chimed in.
You know you can’t start another fic without finishing one of your other ones, right?
…Shut up, Milo, Ethan shot back.
A grin split my face and I kept typing.
At this point we could probably set our clocks by how many new ideas you come up with, I added.
And a few of them are even good! Nico added. Only a few. Update your Persona fic.
Ethan’s response back was quick. Hey, wait, I don’t write all of my ideas! he said. Just… most of them.
And that’s more than enough, Nat added.
I started to type another response when a sudden spike of pain hit me and I rubbed my head, already cursing out my stupid body for doing this to me. Wonderful work, body. Keep it up.
Honestly, Migraines were a lot more common for me when I was younger, but goddamn if they didn’t hurt even now. And without the option of a cold shower available to me, because my fucking water was out, the only thing I could really do to get it to pass was lie down in the dark and pray I had stopped it from getting worse.
So I fired off a quick goodbye to the group chat, peeled off my glasses, climbed onto the top of my bunk bed and promptly fell fast asleep.
I woke up when my room shuddered.
Well, first it shuddered, like it was in an earthquake, and my eyes snapped open. Then, a weird feeling of motion overcame me, like my room was being lifted up by a giant, and I wondered if I was still dreaming.
And then my room fell into free fall and I choked out a scream as my body left my bed.
“What the fuck!” I shouted.
As I fell, I curled up into a ball, trying to protect my head. That was what you were supposed to do in a tornado, I think. I wasn’t sure, because I lived in fucking Delaware. We weren’t supposed to have tornados here.
My room slammed into the ground, wall first, and I hit what was now my floor before redoubling my efforts to curl into a ball as furniture followed me. I felt furniture crash around me, slamming into the ground, and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t get hit.
And then, finally, it was over. I uncurled myself and reached for the hill of my nose to adjust my glasses, only to remember that I took them off when I tried to take a nap. Goddammit.
Without my glasses, all I could see around me were blurry objects that used to be the furniture of my room. Slowly, I climbed to my feet, trying to just breathe.
What the hell just happened?
A part of me expected to hear shouting, or screaming, or something, but it was eerily silent. Just a ringing in my ears, the kind you get when you walk into an empty room. The kind that you want to cover up by playing your favorite music at full blast.
With a shaky hand, I patted the ground around me, reaching for my glasses. They were somewhere around here, I knew that, I always left them next to my bed. The fact that my bed was now on the wall and my wall was now the floor meant nothing.
After a few seconds of searching, I found the frames and crammed them onto my face. Somehow, my lenses had survived all of that, and with my glasses on I was able to find my phone, the charger yanked out of the wall along with it. I turned the flashlight on and pointed it upwards, looking for… something. Anything.
With the light on, piercing through the haze of plaster dust and probably asbestos (or whatever crappy insulator they used in college dormitories from the 1980), I got a better picture of what was going on. Somehow, my dorm room had been thrown onto its side and slammed into the ground, blocking up my window with what looked like asphalt and leaving my door, which was now on the ceiling, as my only means of leaving.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, though. Luckily for me, cheap college dorms meant furniture built to last another two decades, so there was at least a precarious path up to the door.
Beyond that door, though, was something else, and I could barely tell what it was. It was another room, just a little more illuminated than mine, but I couldn’t see sunlight at the top of it, which probably meant there was more to this twisted Jenga tower, because of course there was. Why wouldn’t there be? This was fine.
Oh, and besides the problem with not knowing where I was, I had no guarantee that whoever was in the next room was friendly. Or if there even was someone in there. Was it worse if there was someone in there or if there wasn’t?
I shook my head at the idea and looked around my room for anything useful I could grab. My laptop was smashed to bits, the desk slammed into the bed and then into the wall, but I found my backpack and filled it with whatever snacks and water I could find. A couple of changes of clothes, including a winter jacket that I left here a couple months ago, and I was set.
After a moment’s consideration, I threw my phone and phone charger in there too. Better safe than sorry.
With that filled, I heaved a sigh and started to scale my bed so I could actually reach the door at the top of my room. If there were monsters around here, the safest thing for me to do was to figure out what else was around me. I wasn’t going to figure out anything by just sitting here until I died.
The next room up was another bedroom, I could see, but it was hard to tell much else. There were what looked like posters of soccer players on what was now the ceiling, probably about fifteen feet from me, and the walls were painted a dark blue. Oh, and the floor was now a wall and aligned with my own. Other than that, the room was dark, and I carefully balanced on the edge of my bedframe and prayed that I wasn’t about to fall down.
“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone up there?”
There was a shifting from inside the room and my fight or flight decided to land on freeze.
My heart beat in my chest as I waited, straining my ears for anything I could hear in the darkness, but all that I could hear was that horrible ringing. Fuck, this was how every single horror movie started. Even though I knew that I was making up stuff, I couldn’t help but feel like a giant-ass spider was about to lunge out of the darkness.
I hated spiders.
But it wasn’t a spider, thank god. After a tense few seconds, instead, I heard the sound of someone else clearing their throat. “Who’s asking?” they called back.
My brain froze. I blinked. Now that was a familiar voice. One that I recognized from ages of Discord calls. But what the fuck was I supposed to say here?
Instead of saying anything helpful, or clever, I just stood there like an idiot.
“Nico?” I finally bit out.
Thankfully, whoever was on the other end of our exchange had the exact same brain freeze and it took a second before they stuck their head through the doorframe and stared at me. “Wait, Milo?” they asked. “What the hell?”
In real life, apparently, Nico was a tall guy, and I once again cursed god for my height. He was easily at least a foot taller than I was and he was white, with kind of long brown hair and some sort of orange soccer jersey on. He stared at me, taking me in, and I had just the presence of mind to realize how precarious my footing was when my bed shifted under me.
“A bit of help?” I asked, dryly.
Nico blinked and shook his head. “Oh, yeah, shit,” he said, holding his hands out. I tucked my phone into my pocket, leaving the flashlight on, and grabbed onto him. It took a little bit of effort, but given our height gap, Nico was able to pull me off of the bed and up through the doorframe.
Like I saw from my room, his bedroom was painted dark blue and with posters of soccer players on the wall turned ceiling. And, luckily for us, that was also where his door was. More climbing, yay.
The rest of his room was a mess, just like mine. Whatever had caused gravity to flip had obviously hit Nico, too, throwing all of the decorations in his room to the ground, so there was a thin carpeting of broken glass and papers on the wall that we were laying on along with smashed furniture that had clearly fallen from the other side of the room.
We took a second to catch our breaths and then Nico looked over at me. “So,” he said. “Small world, huh?”
I shrugged like I wasn’t freaking all the way out on the inside. “I guess so.”
He smirked. “What brings you to Ottawa?” he asked, leaning against the wall of his room.
“Funny you say that,” I said with a grimace. “Last I checked, we were still in Delaware.”
Nico blinked. “Ah,” he said. “Great.”
I gave him a second to digest that before I shook my head. “Let’s compare notes at least. What happened to you?”
He snorted. “Fuck if I know,” he said. “One moment, I was calling Ethan a whore, the next gravity was flipping and then I hit the wall and my desk almost took my damn head off.”
He gestured towards the smashed desk and I winced. It had slammed into the wall pretty harshly, cracking the plaster, and I didn’t even want to picture what it would have been like to watch it fly at his face.
“Ouch,” I said.
Nico shrugged. “I was trying to figure out what was going on and then I heard you calling from what should’ve been my bathroom and, well, you know the rest.”
“Great. So, do we try to get out of here?” I asked, before pausing as something occurred to me. “Where are we, anyway?”
Nico jerked a thumb towards one of his windows. “See for yourself.”
Unlike my shitty college dorm room, Nico’s room had normal sized windows, and I climbed over the desk to get to them and see what he meant.
Wherever we were, it wasn’t pretty. It was a city, or what used to be a city, but there was wreckage strewn all over the place. I spotted overturned cars, chunks of apartment complexes that were just ripped out of the main building; whatever had happened here, it was bad.
“There’s some street signs in English down there, which is why I thought we were in Ottawa, but we might be in the U.S. instead,” Nico said, walking over to the window and looking out with me. “Other than that, I’ve got fuck all.”
And then someone coughed and my heart leapt into my throat.
“Well, I’ve got a rope,” they continued, poking their head into the room, and sure enough, the end of a rope was slowly being lowered down from the door at the top of the room. “Who wants to get out of here?”
The man on the other end of the rope was shorter than Nico by a couple inches, but still taller than me. They had bright blue eyes, short brown hair, needed to shave, and the smile on their face was entirely incongruous with our current situation.
We stared at him before Nico finally broke the silence.
“Ethan,” he said, “what the fuck? Why the hell do you have a rope?”
Ethan grinned, his eyes twinkling in the dim light. “A better question,” he said, “is why don’t you have a rope?”
He wiggled the rope around a little, letting it writhe in the air like a snake.
“Betcha feel real dumb right now!” he added.
I stared at him, feeling far too tired for this.
“No,” I said, slowly, just to make sure that Ethan understood, “we don’t feel dumb, because we don’t randomly have a fucking rope in our room!”
Ethan had the gall to fucking shrug. “I have a lot of weird things in my room that I’m too lazy to take to the garage, to be honest,” he admitted. “Like my battery box. The one that almost took my head off when my room flipped.”
“Why,” I said.
“You have a box of batteries?” Nico agreed , before shaking his head. “Wait, that’s not important. Why do you even have a rope that you need to take to the garage in the first place?”
“My grandpa was a bit of a hoarder,” Ethan admitted, “hence the battery box. Few other tools, too. When he passed away, my grandma gave me and my cousins full reign of the garage and I grabbed some stuff, including the rope. I figured that I might need it at some point, so I asked to have it, and, well, here we are.”
I considered that for a moment before deciding to give up. “You know what? I’m not even going to argue with that, given that it actually is useful. Is it secure up there?”
Ethan nodded. “Got it tied to my desk,” he said. “It’s got a hole for wires in it, looped it through there and it seems pretty secure. I’ve already pulled Nat and Ava up with it.”
I blinked at him, searching his face for any sign of deceit, before just giving up. “You know what, not going to question that either,” I said.
Ethan grinned. “Probably for the best!” he agreed. “Grab some clothes and whatever you think is going to be useful, then let’s get out of here.”
Nico nodded, filling a backpack with the same stuff that I grabbed, and then he scaled the rope on his own. I followed after him, only needing just a little bit of help at the end, and then I straightened up and looked around Ethan’s room.
It was a surprisingly large bedroom, with a curved wall of windows on the right side of the room, the door connecting to Nico’s room, and then a third door, leading to a bedroom to the right. The walls were a light grey and the floor was carpeted with just as much shit, including a fuckton of Legos.
And sitting on the floor, their backs to the wall, were who I assumed were Ava and Nat.
“Hello!” Ava said, giving us a wave. They were just a touch taller than me and they were Asian, with long black hair and brown eyes. They had on a denim jacket and black pants, both of which were scraped up and had small cuts showing underneath.
Beside her, Nat was a lot more out of it, a shirt tied around her head that was soaked with a concerning amount of red. As I climbed up, she opened her eyes and held up a hand, giving me and Nico a weak grin. “Hey,” she said, before closing her eyes again.
She looked like shit. I did my best to hide my reaction to her, but it was pretty obvious that she was injured and she needed to visit a hospital as soon as we could get her there. I wasn’t that familiar with head wounds, but I had to do some basic first aid training when I signed up to coach the soccer team and that was definitely something that we would call EMTs for.
Nico seemed to have the same reaction. “Ethan,” he said, like it was a warning.
Ethan nodded, pursing his lips. “I know, I know, we need to get her some proper medical attention,” he said. “And that means we need to get the hell out of here.”
“So?” I asked. “What’s the plan?”
Ethan grinned as he pulled the rope back up from Nico’s room. The end of the rope was tied around his desk, securing it to something big and heavy, and I nodded to see that. At least he was being mostly safe.
“Well, Ava’s room is the one right above us, and it dead ends up there,” he said, tossing the end of the rope into the other exit to his bedroom.
I didn’t hear the end hit the ground.
“And I’m not sure if you noticed, but, uh, we’re well above street level. So, the current plan is to head back down into Nat’s room and into whatever room’s just below that. Hopefully that can get us somewhere that we can get out of here from.”
“Any idea what’s below us?” I asked.
Ethan shook his head. “No clue!” he said, a bright smile on his face. “But it’s better than just waiting up here, especially if we don’t know how stable this place is. So! Let’s get moving.”
With that same smile on his face, he grabbed some sort of headband with a camera on the front out of his pocket and strapped it to his head. “I’ll go first,” he said, pushing a button, and then the camera lit up because it was actually a flashlight.
“Ethan?” I asked. “Why the fuck do you have a headlamp?”
He turned to me and I flinched back, raising my hands to ward off the light before it could blind me the rest of the way. “Fuck, that’s bright!” I cursed.
“Whoops, sorry,” Ethan said, flicking off the light. “I’ve got it because I used to do a lot of running, and when it was winter I had to run at night,” he explained. “Just never got rid of it afterwards.”
He reached for the headlamp again and flicked it on.
“Anyways, if that’s all, I’ll see you guys on the other side.”
And with that, he slowly descended into the darkness.
Unlike Nico’s bedroom, Nat’s was pretty empty; at least, as far as I could tell through the light shining in from Ethan’s bedroom and the slices of the room that Ethan’s headlamp illuminated. The room was smaller than Ethan’s, maybe two thirds of the size, and all of the furniture had fallen to one side. Including, apparently, the desk. Unlike the other rooms, though, we weren’t lucky enough to have a full wall as the floor; half of the room was taken up by a big somehow still intact window.
“Thank god Nat didn’t fall through that,” I muttered.
I watched with bated breath as Ethan’s headlamp slowly descended into the darkness, illuminating the shadows of the room at a regular pace until I heard a muffled curse and a crash as Ethan fell to the ground.
“Oi! Are you okay?” Nico shouted, leaning over the edge of the hole.
Ethan yelled something back up, something a little bit muffled, and I shook my head. “What?” I called back.
I wanted nothing more than for this fucking ringing to stop.
“All good down here!” Ethan called back, a little bit louder. “Nobody in here or anything and I managed to miss the window. Should be safe to get you guys down here!”
Nico nodded. “We’ll start sending the others down,” he called.
The light down below bobbed up and down as Ethan nodded back, finally remembering not to shine the light directly at us. “You got it!” he said, before freezing. “Be careful, though, we don’t want anyone to land on the glass.”
“Understood!” I called back.
Nat was first down, lowered down by me and Nico, and then Ava right after her. I followed after them, and then finally Nico brought up the rear, and before too long all five of us were standing on the ground of Nat’s bedroom.
By the time I reached the bottom, my arms were killing me. Thankfully, the twinges of pain faded as I landed on the ground and stretched them back and forth, trying to get rid of the cramps, but there was another problem: the rope.
Experimentally, Nico tugged on it and it held fast. Ethan did a good job at anchoring it initially; great for us when we were using it but it really fucked us over now. And it wasn’t like the rope was short, either, it was like twenty feet long. It just wasn’t long enough to stretch through two rooms.
“Well, we didn’t exactly think this one through,” Ethan said, putting his hands on his hips and studying where the rope came from.
There weren’t any convenient footholds like in my room, either, so we couldn’t send someone up to retrieve the rope and then safely make it back down. We’d just have to go on without it.
Nico scoffed. “Do you ever think anything through?” he asked.
“Most of the time!” Ethan grinned.
I cleared my throat before they could really start bickering. “We’re on a clock here, remember?” I asked, nodding to Nat.
“Right, right, sorry,” Ethan said, holding up his hands. “Let’s check out the exits.”
There were two more doors out of Nat’s room, besides the one in the new ceiling. They probably used to belong to a bathroom or a closet or something. Now, they both led straight into a brick wall.
“That’s a different building,” Ethan said, pointing out the obvious. “We’re smushed up against something else. An apartment building, maybe?”
Nico groaned. “So we’re trapped here?” he asked, crossing his arms. “Great.”
“No, no, we’re not trapped here,” Ethan said, pacing back and forth. “Gotta be another way out.”
Nat cracked open her eyes and said something that I struggled to hear over the continued ringing in my ears.
“What?”
“The window,” she repeated, a little bit louder. “Break the window.”
Nico grinned. “Oh, I can get behind that,” he said, grabbing Nat’s desk chair. With a shout, he lifted it over his head and slammed it into the window, instantly shattering the glass and leaving a desk chair sized hole behind.
“There,” he said. “Done.”
Ethan used his feet to kick the last few shards of glass out of the frame and down below. “Louder than I would have liked, but sure, that works,” he said.
“Ah, fuck you,” Nico said. Somehow the two of them never ran out of banter. Honestly, it was nice to have something to keep my mind off of everything.
Ethan didn’t rise to the bait this time. Instead, he stepped forward and carefully leaned into the hole, trying to see what was down there.
As with all of the other rooms so far, it was a bedroom, but this one was painted dark blue and had only small windows on the walls of it. There were a handful of posters on it for different anime (I really only recognized Chainsaw Man and JJK) and a few bookshelves, all of which were smashed into the new floor, which used to be a wall. That wall had a door way in it, actually, and I flinched back when I realized the doorway was open and that there was a person in it.
“Hello?” the person called, shielding their eyes from the light. They were maybe half a foot taller than me and a couple of years younger, with light brown hair and pale skin, and there was an expression of grim determination on their face as they looked up at us. “Who’s there?” they called, their voice trembling just a little.
Internally, I groaned. Five of us knowing each other was a stupid coincidence, but I guess there was nothing against making it six.
I guess it was time for Tobi to join the party.
“Heya, Tobi!” Ethan called, holding a hand up to block the headlamp so Tobi could see our faces. “How’ve you been?”
Tobi stared up at us, his face the picture of confusion, before he sighed and then shrugged. “I guess I should’ve seen this coming,” he said, shaking his head. “Hi, Ethan! I already found Charlie and Lu.”
“Oh, really?” Ethan asked. “How are they doing?”
Tobi grimaced. “Charlie’s doing okay, just a little banged up, but Lu’s doing pretty rough,” he said. “I think he broke his foot, actually.”
I winced at that. I hadn’t ever broken any of my limbs but I had teammates that had and I knew the healing process wasn’t going to be fun. It would take a few months and until then, well, that limb was going to be useless. That wouldn’t be great.
Ethan seemed to have the same idea, given how he sucked in a breath of air. “Not good,” he said. “Especially given that we have no idea where we are.”
“Some sort of city, I think,” Tobi said. “Lu’s bedroom leads straight to the outside world. We were just waiting a sec before we went in and then we heard you guys in here.”
I sighed in relief at the idea of finally getting out of this place. Sure, the outside world was going to have its own dangers, but at least we wouldn’t be trapped in whatever the hell this labyrinth of rooms was.
Ethan grinned. “Well! Convenient timing, then,” he said. “Mind if we come all down?”
Tobi stepped aside, gesturing to the room. “Go for it.”
Carefully, we climbed down the furniture in Tobi’s room. From there, it was a quick trip to Lu’s room (which was a bigger bedroom with a queen bed pinned against the wall) and then we climbed up into Charlie’s room where we met the last two members of our group that was stranded here.
Charlie and Lu were just a couple of inches shorter than Nico, which meant they towered over me. Immediately, I could tell which was which; Charlie was the one with a friendly smile and Lu was the one with a pained smile and a leg in a makeshift splint. As I pulled myself through the floor-door that led to Charlie’s room, they gave me a wave and Lu gave me a pained smile, doing his absolute best to remain still on the ground.
Charlie was a tall person, with black floofy hair and bright green eyes. They were wearing a grey hoodie with a beige logo on it (some English soccer team, I didn’t recognize it specifically) and bright blue jeans.
Lu, on the other hand, was looking a lot rougher. They were wearing long cargo pants and a red plaid jacket, a white undershirt underneath, but the cargo pants were stained with some blood and they had a makeshift splint duct taped around their leg.
As I climbed up, I gave them a nod and got out of the way for Nico. “Milo,” I said to introduce myself. “Nice to see you guys in person.”
“Charlie,” Charlie said, in a surprisingly deep voice.
Lu waved. “You know who I am,” he said, in a surprisingly high voice.
They both looked exactly as I thought they would, if I was being honest.
As we introduced ourselves, Nico pulled himself up, taking a second to orient himself before nodding. “Good to see you fuckers,” he said to the group as a whole.
“That’s all the rooms around here, right?” I asked. “If this leads to the outside world, I mean. It’s just the eight of us?”
Nico snorted. “What, did you want the entire damn server?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure eight is plenty.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m just making sure,” I told him. It wasn’t like I talked to too many other people around the server, anyway.
Ethan, ever the peacemaker, stepped in. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Eight seems right, too. Oh, is everyone doing okay, by the way? No major injuries besides the obvious?”
I shrugged. “Mostly fine,” I said, deciding not to mention the ringing in my ears. “You?”
“Bumped my head when I landed,” Ethan admitted. “Other than that, I’m doing fine.”
Everyone said the same thing (minus the obvious injuries, of course) but it was Charlie who actually spoke up with something. “I got a bit bumped and bruised,” they said, “but I’m more worried about this ringing in my ear. Anyone know how to get rid of it?” they asked, tapping their head like they were trying to get water out of it.
Ethan stopped dead in his tracks. “Ringing?” he asked. “You have it too?”
“I think we all do,” Nico said. “We were in a tornado or some shit and we bumped our heads. Keep up, you idiot.”
Ethan stared at Nico before shaking his head. “No, that’s- I thought that was just my tinnitus. It should have gone away for most of us by now…”
As Ethan started to panic, pacing back and forth, I sighed. “Let’s just get to the surface and deal with it later,” I said, waving my hand.
Ethan blinked, shook his head, and nodded. “Right,” he said, his voice just a touch breathy. “Yeah. Good plan.”
And with that, we started out of Charlie’s room.
All things considered, it wasn’t too bad. There was a bit of a climb over furniture, of course, and it was a challenge to help Lu get through, but we helped him get out before the rest of us climbed to the top.
And then, when we got out of the building, I froze. Now I understood why Ethan was scared of the ringing.
The basic stuff I spotted first. Our bedrooms had been plopped down in the middle of a city during the late afternoon. I didn’t really recognize where we were, but later, Ethan would point out the Welcome to Madison sign for me. Right now, I was less concerned with that and more worried about the goddamn monster attacking the city.
See, hovering in the air, maybe half a mile away, was a fifteen foot tall woman. She was stark white, with long hair that reached down to her heels, and she wasn’t wearing anything. That wasn’t her most notable feature, though; no, her most notable feature were the countless wings that surrounded her, constantly shifting back and forth as she hung there.
Beside me, Lu sucked in a deep breath, and I knew he was recognizing it at the same time as me. That was the fucking Simurgh. You know, from Worm.
“Ah, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Ethan said. “Seriously?”
Tobi nudged him. “What?” he asked.
Ethan held his hands out wide. “Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin, on Earth Bet!” he said. “Welcome to the world of motherfucking Worm!”
As he said that, for a second, the Simurgh froze. Just a momentary pause.
She didn’t do pauses.
And then she reared back and started screaming even louder, so loud that I fell to the ground, clutched my hands around my ear before my head burst like an overripe watermelon.
There was nothing that I wouldn’t give to make the scream stop. Nothing at all.
“We have to get out of here!” Ethan shouted, grabbing my arm and pulling me to my feet. Through the fog of pain and confusion, I dimly registered that he had headphones on, now, the big bulky kind, but his left arm was still wrapped around his head to pull them even tighter as he helped us to our feet. “Before we get turned into Ziz Bombs!”
And then, suddenly, the screaming stopped.
The Simurgh straightened as a silence fell over the ruined city, the lack of noise almost deafening. She paused, for just a moment, before her head turned and she looked straight at us. Straight at me.
And then she rocketed into the sky at a speed that I couldn’t track and in an instant she was gone.
Charlie pointed upwards. “You guys saw her look at us, right?” they asked. “That- that can’t be good. Right?”
Ethan shook his head. “Problem for future us,” he decided. “Right now, we’re getting the hell out of dodge.”
He started to step towards the fire escape, and then he stopped and he slapped his cheeks. “No, no, we can’t leave yet,” he said, shaking his head. “The vials. We’re in Madison. We replaced the Travelers, which means we need a way to survive. Power in a bottle. We need powers. The Cauldron vials… where did they get the vials?”
He shot a pleading glance at me and Lu. Right, we were the only other people who had read Worm. Worry about the Simurgh later, focus on this now.
“Trickster got them, right?” I asked. “He brought them back to the other Travelers.”
Lu snapped his fingers. His face was still paler than usual and Charlie was supporting him, but he had a look of determination on his face. “It was after the fight,” he recalled. “They ran into those Case 53s and that wizard guy sent him into another dimension.”
“Myrddin,” Ethan absent-mindedly corrected. “Right, right, and then Krouse found a chunk of a Cauldron facility.”
I nodded. “So if we find that, we find the vials.”
“Six vials,” Lu fired back. “For eight of us. Sundancer, Trickster, Noelle, Genesis, that one dude who threw objects fast, and Oliver.”
Ethan shook his head. “Six, yeah, but Noelle and Oliver shared a vial. You forgot Perdition.”
Lu blinked. “Fucking who?” he asked.
“That one member with the rewind powers?” Ethan tried. When he got a blank look, he shook his head. “Unimportant. Point is, six powers and eight of us.”
I looked around, at the eight of us, and I shook my head. “I’ll pass,” I said. “I don’t want to have an alien parasite in my head.”
The idea of having something wriggling in my head like that caused my body to instinctively shrivel up in disgust. And I wasn’t positive but I was pretty sure that I remembered something about the powers influencing their hosts, too, so that just made me even less enthused to get it.
I’d spent nineteen years with no powers. I could add however long it took us to get home.
Nico scoffed. “Me too,” he said. “No way am I touching those.”
“Then that leaves just enough for the rest of us,” Ethan said. “Perf. Everyone, split up, see if we can spot any other chunks from another dimension. We’re looking for a sterile white facility, more like a stereotypical office than anything else.”
It took a few minutes, but Ethan managed to find it. “Wait, there’s something—right there!” he said.
“Isn’t it over there?” Tobi asked, pointing to the opposite side.
They glanced at each other and frowned. After a moment, Ethan walked forward, shading his eyes as he looked in the direction that Tobi pointed. “Where…?”
“Underneath that billboard,” Tobi said, pointing. “See it?”
The frown on Ethan’s face deepened before he shook his head. “There’s definitely something there but I’m not sure what,” he admitted. “And there’s definitely something in my direction, too.”
“Should we split up?” Ava asked. “Head towards both?”
Ethan considered the idea before shaking his head. “We’ll need some people to stay back with Nat and Lu first,” he pointed out. “Tobi, Milo, Ava, you’re with me. Nico, Nat, Charlie, Lu, you guys wait here and get some rest.”
Everyone nodded to that and so, carefully, we bid farewell to our friends before descending the fire escape into the ruins of Madison, Wisconsin.
Even on the ground, it wasn’t too hard to track down the wreckage of the Cauldron facility. All we had to do was follow the wreckage.
Pretty soon, we came across it, in the middle of what used to be an intersection. Just like our bedrooms, it was another section of a building, thrown from the sky and slammed into the street like someone spiking a ball. There had been one man inside when the building was ripped apart by the Simurgh.
I hadn’t seen a dead body before.
The man was wearing a white labcoat and his body shattered by the impact. Before we even got close, I could tell that he was dead; limbs weren’t supposed to bend that way and I didn’t even know that there was that much blood in the human body.
His surroundings helped keep me from being nauseous. The room looked like an ordinary office building. White tile walls, white tile ceilings with that gross popcorn pattern, manilla folders and files strewn all over the place. There was a single desk, shattered from impact with the ground and more splinters than anything else, and I saw the twisted wreckage of what used to be a rolling desk chair.
On second thought, this wasn’t helping my nausea either.
Ethan was either less affected by the body than I was or he was just ignoring it better, but either way, he strode over to the corpse and grabbed a metal case from right next to it. Carefully, he stepped around the body and maneuvered to a mostly clear patch of rubble before setting the case down.
The case was deceptively ordinary. That was my only thought as we gathered around it.
It was small, maybe two feet long and a foot tall, and it opened with a quick heave from Ethan. Inside, tucked against black foam, were six vials, each about half a foot long. Carefully, Ethan pulled one free and held it up to the sunlight.
It looked absolutely disgusting. The vial was filled with a chalky grey liquid, up to an inch or so below the lid, and when Ethan swirled it around it moved like there was something inside the mixture. Like it wasn’t quite water, but it wasn’t solid, either. It made my stomach turn to watch it.
I looked away from the bottle and back to the case, searching for something that wouldn’t make me sick, when my eyes caught on something white. The bottom half of the case was black foam, like I saw earlier, but tucked into a pocket on the top of the case was what looked like paperwork.
Immediately, my eyes caught on one phrase just underneath the header of the top sheet. ‘Congratulations on your newly purchased superpowers.’
Carefully, I reached out and grabbed the papers, thumbing through them. Most of it was boring stuff, like instructions for how to use the vials and stuff.
And then I stumbled onto the page that I was looking for.
Canister A: F-1-6-1-1, ‘Deus’, 85% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 15% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 1
Canister B: R-0-9-3-6, ‘Jaunt’, 70% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 30% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 2
Canister C: C-2-0-6-2, ‘Prince’, 55% mixture.
Added: O-0-1-2-1, ‘Aegis’, 30% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 15% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 3
Canister D: M-0-0-4-2, ‘Vestige’, 75% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 25% mixture
To be consumed by Client 4
Canister E: X-0-7-9-6, ‘Division’, 80% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 20% mixture
To be consumed by Client 5
Canister F: E-0-7-1-2, ‘Robin’, 60% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 40% mixture
To be consumed by Client 6
There had to be clues in that for how to find which vial corresponded to which Traveler’s powers. I knew that there was. Trickster, Sundancer, Echidna, Genesis, Ballistic, and Perdition; each of them drank one of these vials. We could figure this out.
I stared at the papers until I distantly became aware of someone calling my name.
“Hm?” I said, looking up and rubbing my eyes underneath my glasses. “What’s up?”
“We’re getting ready to move out,” Ethan said, tucking the vial back into the case and snapping it shut. “It’s going to be night sooner rather than later and we want to get some place less, well… corpsey.”
Tobi gave a big grin. “We’re going to go break and enter!” he said, giving me a thumbs up.
“What he said,” Ethan repeated. “Plus we’re going to hopefully find some first aid for Nat and Lu. See if we can change those bandages, get some stuff in them to get them back up. Though I guess these vials should also be able to heal them up…”
I nodded, folding up most of the papers and tucking them into my pocket. All except for the list of powers, anyway. I gave that to Ethan.
“I found this in the packet,” I said. “It has which vial is which. Sort of.”
Ethan frowned, scanning the paper, before shrugging and handing it back to me. “Let’s talk with Lu when we get back, see what he says,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve got the time to decipher it right now, and besides, he’s the superpowers nerd.”
Tobi posed on top of a pile of rubble, looking around before frowning. “Hey, uh, you guys remember where the building is, right?” Tobi asked. “Because I may be a little bit lost.”
Ava nodded. “I remember,” they said, pointing in the direction that we came from. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s scootch and boogie, then,” Ethan grinned. “Onwards and upwards.”
As we climbed back up the fire escape to the top of the building, our four remaining friends gave us tired grins.
“What took you so long?” Lu asked, his tone teasing. I could tell that he was relieved to have us back.
He looked paler than he usually did. So did Nat.
Since we had left, Charlie and Nico had taken the shirt off of her head and wrapped a new one instead. It had already bled through some but it looked like the flow of blood was slowing down. Still, if it was that bad, it needed stitches. Something that we didn’t have.
We needed to find some medical attention for them.
While Ethan filled the other four in on our plan, I found my attention wandering, drawn back to the vials. Six vials with six powers in them, huh? And if Nico and I already decided not to take one… the math checked out. Someone was going to get Noelle’s power.
The thought scared me more than I wanted to admit. It was a strong power, sure, but it was dangerous. A potential ticking time bomb in our midst. A part of me wanted to throw it as far away as possible and never let it be used.
But what choice did we have?
We were in Worm. We needed every advantage we could get.
As we climbed down the fire escape and headed out of the city, those thoughts kept churning in my mind.
It didn’t take too long before we found a good looking house to hide in. It was a townhouse that was maybe a twenty minute walk from where we touched down; far enough from the Simurgh’s area of effect, but not so far that we had hit the edges of the quarantine zone. Perfect.
It was a pretty house. A brick front wall, a well-kept lawn, everything that you could imagine. The roof was a pleasant slate and every part of the house screamed that it was the picture of America, except for one bit: the front door. It was hanging ajar and we entered with trepidation, carefully checking every single room of the two stories.
There was nobody home.
“Probably evacuated before Ziz hit,” Ethan said, looking around the upstairs bedroom. “Left the door open and bolted.”
I nodded, checking under the bed just in case. Nothing. “Think they’ll come back?”
Ethan shrugged. “Only if they didn’t make it out in time.”
With that, we headed back downstairs, meeting up with our friends in the foyer.
“The house looks fine to me,” Ethan announced. “I don’t think anyone will mind if we borrow it. So! Lu, Nat, you guys get on the couch, get some rest. As for the rest of us… can anyone here cook?”
Nico and Charlie both raised their hands.
Ethan grinned. “See what you guys can whip up. Tobi, Ava, you guys start looking around for anything useful you can find. Spare change, first aid supply, weapons, all of that. Watch each other’s backs and yell if you find anything or anyone we need to know about.”
The two of them nodded.
“And Milo, Lu, you guys are also going to be with me,” Ethan said, gesturing to the three of us. “We’re going to be having ourselves a strategy meeting.”
The living room of the townhouse was smaller than I thought it would be.
The owners had a peach colored L-shaped couch with a foot rest in the center, all facing fireplace with a flatscreen TV hung overhead. Most of the living room was painted grey, but the fireplace was surrounded by rocks and recessed into the wall.
Carefully, we set Lu and Nat down so they were reclining on the couch before Ethan and I sat facing them.
“So,” Ethan said. “We’re in Worm.”
I stared at him like he was crazy and he threw his hands out.
“It was a conversation starter, Milo!” he protested.
Nat smirked. “It was a pretty bad conversation starter,” she said.
She was still looking paler than usual, her face white at the edges, but even sitting for just these few moments was starting to return some color to her. If we could get her some medical attention soon, that would help even more, but for now at least she looked like was out of the danger zone.
Ethan pointed at her. “Don’t you start.”
Nat glared at Ethan.
“We’re in Worm,” Lu prompted. Right, that elephant in the room. For a second, I forgot that we had to deal with… well, all of that.
It was a nice second.
Ethan nodded. “We’re in Worm,” he said. “And we have six powers and a plan to make.”
“Didn’t the powers come with a conflict drive, or something like that?” Lu asked. “Should we be worried?”
Ethan shook his head. “Those were only the living shards,” he said. “Cauldron vials should be fine to use, but the trade off is that we won’t have an instinctual use of our powers.”
“I’ll take that trade any day,” Nat smiled.
I took that as the segue to introduce my information and I took the piece of paper out of my pocket. “Speaking of Cauldron, I found this in the briefcase,” I said, passing it over to Lu. He took a look before passing it to Nat, and she took her own look before passing it to Ethan.
Ethan nodded, taking the paper and tapping the sheet. “We should be able to reverse-engineer which powers were which with this,” he said. “Of course, the power expression might change, but this should give us the basics.”
“Well, there’s a few that’re obvious,” Lu said. “Jaunt is definitely Trickster, right?”
Ethan snapped his fingers. “He picked his vial first,” he remembered. “And then he said something about taking a trip to Earth Bet. Yeah, that’s Trickster. And Robin has to be Ballistic.”
“Robin?” Nat asked.
I nodded. “He has the power to launch objects super fast,” I said. “Robin Hood. Robin.”
“Ah.”
Ethan stroked his chin. “Division was… Noelle. That’s the only one that fits Echidna’s powerset, right?”
“Vestige?” Lu said, before shaking his head. “No, that’s not right. It’s Division.”
I counted on my fingers. “That’s Robin, Division, and Jaunt, then,” I said. “So we’re missing Vestige, Prince, and Deus, and we’re missing Sundancer, Genesis, and that Purgatory guy.”
“Perdition,” Ethan corrected. “Perdition could be Prince? His power’s similar to Grey Boy, isn’t it, and there was that King dude with the Slaughterhouse Nine. Could be similar?”
Lu shook his head. “They wouldn’t name the vials like that, though,” he said. “Maybe Perdition’s Vestige?”
“Could Genesis be Deus?” Nat asked. “That means the same thing, right?”
Ethan nodded, warming up to the theory. “Could be,” he said. “So that’s just Prince and Vestige.”
I stared at the paper, trying to remember. I didn’t pay much attention when I read the Traveler’s arc because they weren’t my favorite characters, so it was like trying to find a book in a library when you barely know what you’re looking for.
“I don’t remember,” I admitted. “But I think… Prince is Sundancer and Vestige is Perdition. That’s my hunch.”
I just hoped that it was right.
Ethan nodded. “We’ll warn folks that they might not be accurate when we divide up powers,” he said. “For now, let’s get everyone back together.”
“Not until after dinner!” Nico shouted from the kitchen. “Which is almost done, actually.”
Ethan grinned. “Then first, we feast! After… to war.”
“To war,” Lu echoed.
I really hoped that wasn’t literal.
After dinner, we gathered around the kitchen table in the dark.
We kept the lights in the house off, just in case some Simurgh bomb or Case 53 was passing by, but Ava and Tobi had managed to find a couple of candles around the house that we had set in the middle of the table before lighting. It gave us a very cultish vibe, to be honest.
Carefully, Ethan hoisted the briefcase into the middle of the table and popped open the tabs.
“There’s six vials in here,” he said. “They might not be accurate, but here’s what we’re guessing. Drink at your own risk.”
Everyone nodded.
“First up: Sundancer’s power. You can create a miniature sun and are immune to the heat from it, but nobody else is. Lots of destructive potential, so be careful.”
Charlie raised their hand. “I’ll take it,” they said, crossing their arms and smiling. “Getting to make a sun? Heck yeah.”
Ethan nodded. “Next up: Ballistic’s power. Launch objects at bullet speeds, but no toning it down.”
Tobi grinned. “Mine,” he said. He had a mischievous grin to his face and he cracked his knuckles. “I’ve already got ideas.”
“Trickster’s power. Swap two objects of equal mass with each other, take in air to adjust any mass difference.”
Nat raised her hand. “I’ve got that one,” she said, her face still a touch pale but her head properly bandaged with the first aid kit Tobi and Ava found. “I could do some fun stuff with that.”
“Genesis’s power. Create creatures when you sleep and project your mind into them. The more realistic the monster, the better.”
Lu rubbed his hands together. “Oh, I’ve so got that one,” he said. He was sitting in a chair, his broken foot propped up on another, but his eyes lit up at the idea. “Give me a few days and I’ll have something for any situation.”
“Perdition’s power. Rewind objects and people back a few seconds at a time, restoring them to their previous location and state.”
Ava nodded. “I’ll take it,” they said. Of the eight of us, they were the one that I knew the least, but they had a slight smile on their face and they put their hands on their hips as they spoke.
“And that leaves the last power for me!” Ethan said, with a grin on his face. “Which is the one I was gunning for anyways, actually, so works out for me.”
I counted the powers in my head and my blood went cold. “Ethan…” I started.
He shook his head at me. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me.”
“But-”
“Trust me,” he stressed.
I looked at him, looked him in the eyes, and against my better judgement I did. Even if he was an idiot a lot of the time (or all of the time), when it came to getting serious… he knew what he was doing.
At least I hoped he did.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Nat said. It sounded like she was trying to joke, but there was a waver to her voice that usually wasn’t there. “My head’s killing me.”
Ethan nodded. “Last chance to back out,” he said, taking the first vial out of the case and holding it out to Lu.
Lu took it with a firm expression on his face.
One by one, Ethan handed the rest of the vials out to us. To everyone but me and Nico.
Once they all had a vial clasped in their hands, Ethan grinned, looking around at all of us. “Everyone ready?” he asked, uncorking his vial with a pop.
The vials looked even less appealing now then they did half an hour ago. All grey sludge and watery liquid. And yet there was something iridescent in it, like an oil slick in the water. Something that drew the eye. I wasn’t sure if it was because I knew what was in the vial or because of the substance itself, but I just couldn’t look away.
One by one, the other five held their vials up. I just watched.
“Down the hatch,” Lu said.
And then, all together, they drank.
"This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full and descend."