1. Drifter

Hi there, I'm Evan, and welcome to my city. Take in those tall towers, the floaty parts that slowly spin, with the artillery in them. Powered by the finest mana crystals. Walls are sturdy, reinforced with powdered mana crystals of silver and gold tier. I'm working on getting in a stock of diamond tier mana crystals, which is going to make the sort of weapons that could vaporize an enemy battalion in the blink of an eye.

Get a load of the central spire over there, with more floating crystals. Those are the shields. The blue crystals anyway. The red, yellow and orange ones are all… not shields. Heh. Excuse me if I don't give away the entire civil defense strategy to someone I just met.

And over here, behind me, you'll note the construction. Right, it's nestled in the town square, not directly in the middle, but tucked away a bit. That's where my shop used to be… I'm changing its name to the Eldritch Emporium, because Evan's Pawn & Curiosities Shop was a mouthful. It was just too much.

Also I absolutely adore alliteration. The women here find it endearing.

"Evan!"

"Is that him?"

Oh jeez. The ladies. Excuse me a moment.

"Hiiiiii Evan!"

"

Master

Evan."

"Are you going to

master

me later?"

"Thank you, ladies! I believe I'll see

you

later."

Love those giggles, am I right?

It wasn't always like this… I didn't own literally everything you can see before you. And hell, I mean I'm strong, but not the strongest person in the city. I've got good endurance, but I'm definitely not the hardiest person living here. Good looking, but not the most chiseled adonis around. I'm powerful, but… well, okay, I'm probably the most powerful person in the city currently. My ass goes in the throne, after all, but it's complicated because magic and the society here are both byzantine. But once upon a time I was nothing more than your average trucker. I stuck around my home state of Michigan when I could, but did some work down into most of the midwest.

So of course, the question becomes: how the hell did I end up in charge of this city surrounded by magic, body molded to perfection by the vast mystical energies of this world?

You'd have to start at the beginning… you'd have to know how I became a Drifter.

***

I was working hard, like overtime hard, and for truckers that's saying something. You roll seven days a week for three straight months and complain to me about your desk job. Near the end, before I plopped into a different world entirely and began the slow process of complete ownership, I was starting to fade out of consciousness. I'd tie my head to the air horn, so if I started to nod off, I'd get blasted back awake. I was running with the windows down in minus ten degree weather to stay conscious.

It got to the point where I was seeing things. I was literally hallucinating in blobs of color dancing before my eyes. I'd pull over, rip my pants down and dip my balls in a snowdrift in order to stay sharp.

Only that one time. The wet ass was uncomfortable, to be sure, but I will say this: it was easy to keep your eyes open sitting on that for several hours.

It was also only a week before I left earth.

I was somewhere off I-75 and headed west towards Traverse City, Gaylord I think (maybe Grayling), when I started drifting again. Not skidding my tires in a souped up race car, but drifting off to sleep. Only this wasn't like your ordinary, average sleep; I was seeing green grasses and big puffy cloud banks rising up into a sky I'd never properly seen, not in Michigan. Michigan is almost a hundred percent trees by the side of the road.

Exhausted, hungry, and now delirious, this is what ended me up in another world.

I'd spent another short break rubbing snow into my face, scrubbing it raw so I could stay awake, and I was maybe sixty miles outside Traverse City when that hallucination sprang back into being: a line of tall trees like you'd see in Africa in the distance, miles and miles of waving grasses, great big boulders floating

(floating!)

near the ground, with some of them much higher up. And the sky so huge, so fundamentally massive it made me think about going to church for the first time in years. It honestly looked like heaven.

I stared at it, driving my Mack, and stared at it, and continued staring at it. I was certain it was going to disappear at any moment, and I didn't want to lose this. I didn't know where it had come from, or how racked my body needed to be to imagine a full-on fantasy landscape, but I wanted to memorize every detail of it.

It turned out I didn't need to. That world invited me in.

It wasn't a subtle invitation either. The colors of the Mack's interior went apeshit, with gleaming rainbow like bands peeling off the chrome, drifting a weird, smoky lightshow towards me. My hands were going all multicolor also, with the steering wheel melting like Superman ice cream in my hands.

Whatever was happening was over in a burst of weird color, and I was left staring out at that wondrous landscape for real. The Mack jounced, hard, and I laid on the brake. Superman ice cream steering wheel snapped back to its usual faded black self.

I was probably dying, I thought, I'd careened off the road and plowed into a sturdy tree doing ten over the speed limit, and this was the everlasting moment you experience before being snuffed out. That had to be it.

I put her in park (this felt real, between the feel of the stick shift and the grinding resistance of the gears) and stepped out. Again, the door squeaked on opening, the steps were still there, and when my foot hit the ground, it wasn't oblivion I found, but waist high grasses waving with the light breeze.

I peered back at my haul. Mack was fully here, surrounded by grass, but had the full trailer load still hitched. She wasn't on a road any longer.

It was a lot to take in, and I was still wrecked. My eyes felt like they were boiling out of their sockets, and I couldn't stop tonguing the fuzz on my teeth from all the energy drinks I'd been pounding. If I really was here, I didn't know anything about it, and therefore Mack was the safest place to be while I got some much-needed shuteye. If I was dead, well, that was all right. I wouldn't know it anyway. This surreal moment would be a nice end. If I was really here, I wanted to be refreshed and very ready for whatever was out there… I'd gone from rural sprawl to absolute wilderness, and that meant it was good I kept a shotgun, a handgun, and my trusty baseball bat in the cab.

Plus, the cab was equipped with one of those tiny apartments in back: bunkbeds, a hot plate, a mini-refrigerator stocked with caffeine and taurine, first aid kit, pictures of my ex I hadn't had the heart to throw away or burn. I was still in the numb with shock stage.

I ascended the stairs again, and climbed in. "Okay, facts. There's no way to haul cargo to a place you can't see. There's no sense in trying to keep going forward, since there's a big floating boulder about a hundred feet ahead of you. Even if they dock your pay, it's better than trying to steer through a hallucination."

I slapped my face lightly a couple of times. "You're going to wake up on the side of the road. Maybe she's overturned and it'll be an ambulance, or the firefighters coming to jaws of life you out of here. Maybe we pulled over in time and we're just on the shoulder, and all this will be a dream I'll forget about in a few hours." Patting the dashboard. "You don't seem broke… yeah I probably pulled over. You're okay, sweetpea."

People call their vehicles all kinds of weird shit. I don't judge.

I paused.

"And I'll stop talking to myself like a fucking lunatic."

Doors locked, I got in a quick brushing of the teeth, then thought it over for a bleary second. Peeing the bed wouldn't do. I hopped out once more to take a leak, and climbed back in to head to get some shuteye. I was asleep before I could wonder any more about this weird place.

***

I slept like the dead, but I wasn't.

The bathroom break convinced me it was all real. People don't pee on a place in their dreams, and I'd wager money people don't spend the last fleeting moments before death thinking, 'I need to drain the lizard'.

When I woke, certain it was all real, it was still the other world outside, only dusk was falling. The temperature I hadn't noticed before, but it was certainly cooler. Still, too hot for my parka, so I stripped it off and tossed it in the truck. I had an internal frame pack suitable for hiking and mountain climbing, but it wasn't hiking I was thinking about doing, so I dumped out everything unnecessary to my upcoming fact finding mission, and put the baseball bat in there. I tested out the quickdraw capability, and the results weren't great. Still, if I tilted one way, I could grab out the baseball bat and perform a wide haymaker if absolutely necessary.

Of course, if I needed to use it, especially against a wild animal, I was probably as good as dead.

A message popped up in front of my face.

So it begins…

Greetings, traveler! Now that you've begun to acclimate yourself to your new surroundings, it's time to begin your journey toward understanding the world around you, and your place in it. One of the factors at play here is your abilities.

You have seven attributes, and you've been awarded a free star in your Tough attribute for simply making the journey here. Your first ability, Drifter, has increased your Attuned and Tough attributes as well!

You are free to allocate an additional seven stars between these, though you can't go above three stars until leveling up.

I tapped at the words floating above me, and they disappeared. In their place, it now read

Evan Westfield, Drifter. Normal tier

. Under Base Attributes, it read:

Attuned— Normal*

Clever— Normal (no stars)

Charming— Normal (no stars)

Fierce— Normal (no stars)

Sly— Normal (no stars)

Quick— Normal (no stars)

Tough— Normal**

Okay, I was hallucinating myself into a video game. An RPG apparently. Turn-based combat would be way better than being ambushed.

"Shut up," I muttered to myself, and grinned.

Seven more stars sat off to one side, waiting to be allocated. I started by putting a single star into each of the ones that didn't have a star yet, just by dragging a star over near the attribute name, where the star snapped into one of the three depressions. It was a problem for me not to be Clever or Charming in the slightest.

That left me two more stars to place. I thought of myself as a pretty Clever person, generally, so I put another star there. Since I knew games in general always valued being fast and acting more often than your opponent, I put the last star in Quick.

It now looked like this, which was a little better:

Attuned— Normal*

Clever— Normal**

Charming— Normal*

Fierce— Normal*

Sly— Normal*

Quick— Normal**

Tough— Normal**

I made it go away by tapping the

Confirm

button. The bizarre game-style pop up windows didn't bother me again, so after a moment of waiting I continued to get ready for my first excursion.

"Better add the old first aid kit," I muttered, and stuffed it in as well. Ammo would also be an issue, and I only had a box of shotgun shells left. On the off chance this place had a reloading machine, I could probably remember what my dad had taught me back in scouts, but that info was buried under four years of being an adult. I had a cross bag specifically built to keep pickpockets from getting at your wallet while traveling abroad, and that served well enough to an extra eight shotgun shells. Again, if I needed all eight, I was definitely in serious trouble.

Regardless of the possibility of meeting my doom out here, I was feeling refreshed. Sure I was hungry, but the floating boulders and floating rocks in the distance, and that wide expanse of just insanely huge sky all perked me up. I felt pretty great.

I was as ready as I could get. Then, with an added energy drink and a packet of beef jerky, I grabbed the twelve gauge and headed out.

***

The idea was to get to where I could only barely see Mack, check what lay beyond in this direction, and head back. I'd head out in the four cardinal directions: where Mack was pointed, directly to the left of Mack, directly to her right, and then straight out from the loading door. Of course, it being near dark, I could only manage one of these runs now, so I decided left was the way to go.

The setting sun lay off to my right, so the truck was still pointed west, the direction I'd been going on earth. Also, not far off, one of those floating boulders waited for me to inspect it. I was getting, for the first time since being a teenager, butterflies in my stomach over it. You only saw this kind of stuff in video games and animated movies, not something you could touch with your bare hands.

It was at least a mile off, and only grew in size as I approached. I had figured it was the size of a suburban two floor house, but it was at least three of those side by side by side.

"Holy shitballs," I muttered to myself, craning my neck to get a look at it.

It was floating only about four feet off the ground, meaning I could lay a hand on it. I did so, and got a thrumming feeling out of it, like someone was playing a song with real heavy bass through a surround sound system, maybe on top where I couldn't see.

It wouldn't… suddenly fall on me if I went beneath it… would it?

That was a bit of a terrifying thought. Hmm, how about not now? Maybe there were people on this world. If so, they would know whether or not this giant rock would suddenly get an angry face and try to squash me to death.

I don't know why that thought occurred to me, but it came. Still, the thrum vibrated through my body and turned my knees a bit jellylike. It was honestly awesome, in the purest sense of the word.

It wasn't going to be easy to climb the thing, and another thought occurred to me: I was average weight, and this thing was tons and tons of rock, but if I tried to climb it, would it suddenly begin to rotate in the air, and dump me off on the grass? Honestly, I couldn't see what was holding it there, so maybe it was just an anti-gravity rock.

That was something I could try and test out. I grabbed onto a handhold with both hands and reefed on that sucker as hard as possible.

Nothing.

"Fascinating," I said, doing a bad impression of Spock.

Okay, my mission had been to scout beyond, so I needed to get beyond. Daylight was a-wasting, so it was necessary (but a bit sad) to leave the floating boulder behind, and see what was going on out this way… south, if the sun was setting directly to the west.

In that direction, I noted the barest hint of a mountain range amid the deepening indigo. Big rocks, big enough to see tens of miles distant, floated near the peaks, and above the peaks. Rocks that you could say were more like floating islands, almost floating mountains.

I also spotted two things of interest: one, big shaggy grazing animals, far bigger than buffalo, almost the size of houses themselves, and two, a big cat silently slink in to pounce.

Cat… is stretching the term. It had six legs, was black striped with wheat gold like a tiger, and had a mouth that opened sideways. A mouth like a shark's, but without lips, so all the teeth just stuck out there, like a horror movie. It also had several whiplike tails ending in what looked like feathers, but it was also getting dark, so they could've been little spines.

"Fuuuuuucccckkk,"I breathed.

Mistake. The thing (far bigger than any cat on earth, too big to fit on Mack's twin size bed) turned its head and sighted me in. The grazing animals lowed in a weird way, and also began glowing softly with blue white magic.

Running wouldn't help, I told myself, even as my body began to turn to soup and my instincts screamed to get away. Instead I slowly lifted the twelve gauge and settled the butt against my shoulder.

I kept repeating my curse over and over, willing my body to stay standing.

The cat thing disappeared into the grass and began stalking toward me. I could hear a bit of displaced grass, but otherwise just the gently blowing wind.

The moment that thing sprang up, I blasted it in the face with my twelve gauge. This was certainly one of those times. The buckshot hit it square in the face, splattering shark teeth all over the place, and glowing purply blood, and it flinched back. But not before raking me down my leg with two of its claws. It ended up landing just shy of me, where I was convincing my body to do the thing before I got disemboweled and eaten. First thing: step carefully backwards and don't fall over.

The noise of the blast had done something to the big shaggy grazers though. They shot blue white energy out away from them with mooing calls, which buffeted the cat and knocked it off balance.

That did it. I racked the other cartridge into the chamber and blasted it another good one in the face.

The cat stayed down after that, and it was a good thing it did, because a bright yellow exclamation point appeared in front of my face. Sort of in the periphery, but my blood was up and I swatted at them like they were evil alien insects. Several more of them followed, pushing the original one down, until there were four exclamation points.

The grazing animals roar-mooed again, charging with more bluish whitish magic, and this convinced me it was better to limp back to Mack, sort through everything I'd learned, apply some first aid, and get. These. Stupid. Exclamation. Points. Out. Of. My. Face.