1 - Blinded by the Light

Today had been weird. I didn’t pay much attention to the news, because let’s face it, nothing going on in New York or even Springfield, our closest neighboring city, really had any effect on my life. I lived in the biggest of three small towns near the center of our county because the other two were too small to have even a single funeral home.

I worked at one of only three funeral homes in the area as a mortician. I was young and the newest hire, so I did most of the body preparation for our funerals and cremations. Which, honestly, suited me just fine. I didn’t become a mortician to deal with the living. Ew. I enjoyed my peace and quiet, the alone time, and that none of my customers could really complain.

I learned really early, working at various fast food franchises as a teen that I really did not enjoy dealing with most people. People are dumb, and petty, and just not that great in my opinion. Three out of ten. Do not recommend.

So, for the most part, nothing on the news affected me in any significant way. But when the weather went from sunny and hot, to cloudy and cold, to thunderstorms, to friggin’ snow in the middle of July…all in an afternoon, I was going to pay attention a little bit.

A storm system had popped up over the entirety of North America over a few hours. Satellites were having difficulty sending and receiving information, including images, so a lot of the information we had was out of date. Turns out a lot of weather shit gets measured from space. Who knew? Europe and half of Asia were experiencing spontaneous, unplanned rolling blackouts. Animals all over the world were acting strangely. And that was just the first ten minutes of the news cycle. It went on and on like that all over the world. Floods, fires, out of season swift moving hurricanes, the world was all but bucking in agony for some reason.

“Grace, you see this?” James, one of my coworkers turned and asked.

“Yep. We are in fact watching the same TV,” I tried not to roll my eyes. See what I mean about people? We were currently all huddled up in one of the viewing rooms streaming a news station on one of the large screens we use for the services. Well, mostly. They were all standing in the middle of the front of the room, hand wringing and whispering together. All three of the other people who worked in our funeral home. I was slouched down in a pew in the second row so I could throw my feet over the back of the front row. Why not be comfortable for the apparent end of the world?

Then the anchor came onscreen, interrupting someone else, to start shouting about UFOs and black smoke and I kind of stopped listening as I stared at the screen. It started populating with the same image from different cities all over the world, then switching to new ones. A large, pitch black cloud or smoke or something was growing on each of the clips no more than a few hundred feet above each city. Rolling red flashes of light strobed out of each one in no discernable pattern. As each cloud expanded it began to cover many of the tall buildings in the area. The majority of many skyscrapers began to be consumed by the cloud. People were seen running into the streets from out of the towers and buildings.

Darcy, my favorite coworker, because she left me alone for the most part, went tripping down the aisle of the room. A few moments later I heard the front door bang open as she raced outside. “I don’t see anything!” I could barely make out her words.

James and Lucy, the director, headed outside to look themselves. I kept my eyes on the TV and watched the roiling clouds grow big enough to determine that they were all perfect cubes. And they kept getting bigger, swallowing up more and more of the buildings around them. The streets in cities they showed were pure pandemonium. The anchor came back on to urge everyone to stay indoors and away from any strange clouds.

Eventually the cube clouds were several blocks wide in each direction and they held steady. They continued to flash deep red lights from within. After about thirty minutes of nothing else happening, I got up to head back to my actual work. No one else was going to prep Mrs. Davidson for her funeral Sunday, and I’d wasted enough time.

The rest of my day passed much like it always did. Thanks to my impromptu TV watching party I ended up having to stay an extra hour and a half to get everything done that I needed to. Not that it mattered. I didn’t have anyone waiting at home for me. My last girlfriend was six months ago. My last boyfriend before that was three years ago. Before they broke up with me, both complained that I was ‘emotionally unavailable.’ Whatever that meant.

The afternoon had turned to dusk because of the wall of clouds now back to dumping rain all over us. None of the radio stations were playing music. They were all still covering these giant black cubes all over the world. New ones had begun to pop up over some of the smaller cities now. They were going through the same cycles, and no one had any answers. Someone started talking about how the drones they’d flown into the cubes had just disappeared and I turned off the radio. If the world ended, the world ended. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, so why stress?

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When I got home I came in through the garage like usual and directly into the kitchen. I poured myself an extra large glass of wine before I headed into the living room. Sitting on my couch like she lived here was my best friend in the world, Mara.

She was relaxed with her eyes closed, head leaned onto the back of the couch, wine glass in her hand. Her deep brown hair hung loosely down her chest, a slight curliness to it from the bun it had been in all day. “What took you so long?” Mara moaned, cracking one eye open to glance in my direction.

“Everyone made me stop to watch the news when those cubes started showing up. I had to make up the time.”

Mara sat up straighter on the couch. “Oh my­­–”

“No. Nope. I had to watch that shit for over an hour today, and the radio talking about it on the way home. If I die, I die. I just want to drink this wine,” I held my glass up, “and watch mindless TV. I’m done.”

“Come on,” she whined. “Don’t treat this like it’s nothing. This shit is whack!”

“First of all, never say that again. Second of all, I just want to ignore it all for a little longer. Please?” I busted out my best puppy dog eyes.

“No.” My puppy dog eyes never worked on Mara. “Grace, sweetie. This is a big fucking deal. Nothing has ever happened like this. It snowed today! And these cube things. I need to talk to someone about all this. Tag you’re it,” she pointed her glass at me.

“Ugh,” my turn to whine. “Fine. But–”

Mara turned on my TV and flipped it to the local news station with the volume on low. “Look at that. It’s like, so pretty and alien at the same time. What do you think it’s doing?”

“How am I supposed to know?” I shrug.

“You are really bad at this. You’ve been hiding with your dead people for too long and forgotten how to socialize my dear,” Mara quipped.

I blew out a breath, “I don’t know. Aliens? I mean we can’t even see through all this with satellites. Maybe the cubes are a distraction while they deploy their troops out away from the cities.”

“Oooh. I like it,” Mara grinned at me. “Very X Files. What about if it’s a game system set to initialize everyone into its system and assign us all like classes and stuff so we can fight in dungeons?” She was bouncing in her seat, wine sloshing around her glass.

I reached out and took her glass from her before she spilled it…again. There is already a red stain on the rug. I had had to rotate the rug to hide it to under the couch to stop seeing it and forgive her. I put her glass on the coffee table in front of us, “You’ve been reading way too many of those books again. That doesn’t even make sense. Like how does a system come in and quantify every little thing? Why would cubes be forming?”

“I don’t know. Math is hard, that’s why the system does it all for you.” She grinned over at me.

I smiled back, “What would you even do if that happened?”

“Oh,” her eyes got big, “I would find the hack and become the most powerful being this system has ever seen.”

I laughed, “Ok, and how would you do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she scratched her head. “Every system is different. You just have to figure out a loophole to exploit. And then min/max the fuck out of it.”

“Ugh,” I groaned. “This is why I don’t play D&D with you anymore.”

“No, you don’t play anymore because you’re a reclusive hermit.”

“Well that too,” I nodded. “But also because all your min/max characters kind of sucked the fun out of it.”

“Whatever, I win don’t I?” she asked.

“That’s not…you know what, nevermind. What class would you pick?” I shifted the conversation away from the inevitable argument brewing.

Mara thought quietly for several minutes, sipping on her wine. “I’m not sure exactly, but probably something to do with magic. Like, if I can throw fireballs, why would I want to swing a sword instead?” She turned toward me a grin on her face, “What would you be?”

“Something I can solo with.” Mara nodded her head along with me. She got me. “So, either something with good defense or something with minions or familiars or whatever.”

“Wow, not even going to let me tag along with you?”

I slumped over defeated, “I guess.” In all fairness, Mara was probably the only one I would be willing to go ‘dungeoning’ with, but she was much more social than I was and would probably end up with an actual party which I did not want. At all.

Even in MMOs I would play solo until it became too difficult and then start a new character. I didn’t actually hate people, I just didn’t understand them most of the time. They always seemed to suck my energy just trying to get along with everyone too. Mara was one of my only exceptions. I didn’t really know why she didn’t leave me feeling drained after social interactions with her, but I clung to it and her as soon as I figured out it was happening. Despite all attempts, even I am a social creature it turns out.

We discussed other weirder and weirder ideas for what the cubes could be while we ate food Mara ordered until even the news began to get bored with nothing new happening. The TV went back to playing whatever was supposed to be on the air at this time. Turns out our collective attention span isn’t that terribly long either.

Eventually Mara went home and I got ready for bed. Despite alien cube clouds or whatever was going on out there, I still needed to go to work tomorrow. I crawled into bed and picked up my eReader. I opened up my sapphic vampire romance from where I left off last night and settled into my pillows.

About a chapter later, right in the middle of a very spicy scene where the vampire love interest was exploring some light kink with our MC, a bright flash of red light went off. Not just outside. Inside. Everywhere at once.

I was nearly blinded by the light. I tried to blink the spots out of my eyes, but they didn’t seem to be going away. It took me a moment to realize that those weren’t spots in front of my eyes, they were message windows.

[Welcome to the Mana Plane. Your [planet] [Earth] has been integrated from the [Physical Plane] to the Mana Plane. Mana saturation has reached levels capable of initializing the System. Wait one moment while the System initializes.]