When the darkness faded, Tage found herself standing in the middle of a town square, the ears and eyes of her virtual avatar filled with a buzz of activity. She blinked for several seconds, scanning her surroundings, before she was finally forced to acknowledge… she didn’t know where she was. This certainly wasn’t where she’d logged out a week ago, and none of the buildings struck her as familiar. All the same, Tage couldn’t bring herself to muster up any indignation at the discrepancy. After all, when she’d last logged out, she’d been in a blind panic, and if she’d still been there... Well, she might have given up before she had even begun.
This would give her time. That was good. But she’d first have to figure out where exactly she was.
However, before Tage could activate the map in her inventory to check where exactly in the world she was, her vision was suddenly dominated by what seemed to be hundreds of contact alerts. All of them were from the same person.
Halperion:
omg
OMG
OMG!!!!
Tage Tage! Ur back! Where hav you been? What happened? I thought you were going to be gone forever.
You didn’t even say goodbye... D:
Before her best friend could drown her in any more notification, Tage quickly connected the two of them via a live-speak channel.
“Halp, relax!” she said, before her friend could even start speaking. The statement seemed to do less than nothing to stem the tide of words that followed.
“Tage! Holy crap, I missed you so much! Where on earth have you been? Six days, not a single log-in. I was worried that your parents finally acted on their threat to confiscate your TITAN, and that you were never going to log in, ever, ever again. You missed the festival. It was amazing! My village had this dancer, this gorgeous day-fire-sun djinni. You should have seen her. Oh, but don’t worry. I got you all the exclusive stuff. Although you are going to have to pay me back for it. Some of this stuff was so damn expensive.... Oh, and you missed a massive event. This twenty foot demon appeared out of nowhere and attacked Port City, and all the newbies were like AAAAAAHHHH!”
Tage winced as her friend screamed into her ear, but was able to use the moment while Halp regained his breath from the scream to actually get a word in edgewise.
“Halp. Halp! You can tell me all about it later, but right now I’ve got to.... find out where I am and get something taken care of.”
“Find out where you are? What do you mean?”
“There’s some sort of bug in my account. I’m not where I logged out.”
“Oh. My. God. There’s a bug in your account? That’s sooooo awful. Is that why you haven’t been able to log in? There’s been something blocking your account. Oh, all the tech people must have been so utterly useless, and I’m sure you tried to be patient but they’re just so...”
“Stop getting ahead of yourself!” Tage reprimanded. Normally, her friend’s mental leaps would have earned a laugh from her. Right now, though, she only found them frustrating. “Anyways, I’ve got to go now...”
“I’m just so glad you are back! It just wasn’t the same without you. I tried to go on a raid, but the guild that was sponsoring it was just so uncool about...”
“I’m disconnecting now,” Tage said over him, before acting on her promise. Of course, Halp spoke right until the last second, when a faint beep cut him off as Tage left the live-speak channel. It would not have surprised her in the least to learn that he had kept speaking long after they had disconnected, not realizing he was talking to nobody but the empty air. The thought of the look on his face when he realized she’d hung up on him was almost enough to make her smile, before she was suddenly reminded of why she was here.
Before her friend could realize his mistake and start blasting her again, she put him (temporarily, of course) on ignore. She loved Halperion, and he had been a great friend to her since they had met about a month ago. At the time, they’d been on the same ship that had brought them from the New Continent to Port City, and the two had quickly clicked and decided to team up for the beginning quests. But right now, Tage couldn’t deal with him. She needed to focus.
Her map spread across her vision, and Tage took a quick, sharp breath as she suddenly realized where exactly she was. She closed her map again almost immediately, before taking a closer look at the village around her. God, how could she have forgotten. Now that she was taking a better look, Tage suddenly realized she knew exactly where she was. The little, familiar things about the village began to leap out at her.
This was where the whole nightmare had begun. That quest. A quest that, up until it had happened to her, she would have thought impossible. Worst of all, the fact that she was in the village meant the cave where she should have logged back in was less than a five minute walk to the north.
Tage shuddered, causing a strand of long, golden hair to fall in front of her eyes. She tucked it back away with the rest of its fellows somewhat impatiently. It really was about time for her to change her avatar’s hairstyle. Long hair had been fun for a time, but now it was just getting obnoxious. For a moment, Tage considered going and taking care of that right now, before forcing herself to admit that she was only stalling. It was time to go. Tage turned north
To add to her list of new experiences, Tage was fairly sure she’d just broken the world record for “times someone wanted to turn around on a single walk”. At every step, she was only ever one stray thought away from calling the whole thing off. She couldn’t stop the thoughts that ran on loop through her head. She didn’t need to be doing this. Not really. She could go back to town, contact Halp again, find a signpost and travel to wherever he was, and let his incessant chatter drive away all thoughts of the quest and the cave. She didn’t need to be doing this.
But, deep down inside, Tage knew those were all just excuses. She had to do this. Not just because both cave and quest had been an utter anomaly within the TITAN universe, nor because she wanted evidence for the rejected claim she’d submitted to the Djinni support staff, the quest they claimed didn’t exist. She also had to do it because, if she didn’t, she was absolutely certain that the memory of it would haunt her for the rest of her life. If she didn’t go back to it, face it, she would never get over it. And if that happened, she might end up like her mom, fearing all new technology, untrusting of what it might bring. That thought, more than any other, drove her onwards. She’d never allow herself to become that kind of person.
For all her mounting anxiety, the approach to the cave was remarkably anticlimactic. The whole walk she’d had her eyes peeled, taking cautious steps, waiting for the beasts that had attacked her that night to appear again. Those spectral demons had risen silently from the ground and attacked without warning, giving her no relief as she battled her way towards the cave, desperately racing the clock to reach the child there. An image flashed through her mind of a young day-blood-crystal djinni, a bright smile spread across her face as she all but dangled from Tage’s hand, giggling as Tage tries to get her to stand upright by herself. She’d protected that child for days worth of gaming time, devoted herself entirely to the care and happiness of that smiling sprite who’d already suffered so much. And then, right before her eyes, that child had been ripped from her grasp, spirited away to a dark cave where she would be sacrificed at midnight if Tage couldn’t make it in time.
But now... now there was nothing. The forest was peaceful, quiet except for the faint sound of the wind through the branches and the occasional melodic note of birdsong. It seemed like a completely different place, and were it not for the marker guiding her towards the cave Tage would have been certain that she was on the wrong path. How could this postcard of a forest be the same place that haunted her memories?
The cave was different, too. All the items that had surrounded it, the candles and bones and remnants of demonic ritual, were gone. Undoubtedly they had been removed as soon as her quest was over. The cave looked like a peaceful place now, somewhere she would have been happy to stumble across on a journey to somewhere else. Tage felt herself start trembling again, but the fear seemed almost abstract when confronted with the bright forest around her. Slowly, she approached the mouth of the cave and stepped inside. Even as she scanned the half-smooth rock of the entrance, her mind was lost to memories of that night, of the chanting, the flame, the light of the moon streaming through the hole in the roof, the sound of a little girl’s desperate crying, the taste of panic filling her mouth, and then the world as it had gone dark, so utterly dark, as all of her magic failed.
There was no darkness now, no sounds of an obscure, demonic ritual, and no giant, hate-filled eye filling that hole in the ceiling, blocking off the light of the moon before everything went dark. Gentle sunlight streamed through it now, catching on swirling dust motes in a showering cascade of golden light.
Tage felt her knees quivering. She wanted to collapse on the floor, to sob, to finally let out all that painful emotion that had been trapped in her for so long. The same emotion that had caused her to wake up in the middle of the night gasping, desperately biting her lip to keep from screaming lest her parents understand exactly how wrong things were with their daughter. At that moment, Tage wanted to do those things more than she had ever wanted to do anything. But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t do it because there was another person in the cave, and he was watching her.
Oooohhh the creeps...