Friday, Day 1

Ashley was unlucky to have front row seats to the apocalypse. Most apocalypses happen on a Tuesday, but this one arrived on a Friday morning, of all things. On Tuesday, the worst day is over but Friday’s still far off. You could also, to try and stay optimistic about things, argue that an apocalypse Tuesday means you’re still relatively fresh off a fun weekend.

Friday, on the other hand, means you’ve trudged through the four workdays, picked up the things that needed picking up, put them down in the places they needed to be put down, nearly got clipped in the head by a forklift twice this week, had your boss curse at you for resting your head against the shelving unit because your girlfriend said some nasty shit to you by text, and the weekend was still a full day’s work away.

Meaning that, a hard week’s work and in anticipation of heading out for a good time, Ashley woke up to the world as he knew it ending.

Not awesome.

It was exactly 6:27 a.m. on that Friday. Ashley cracked an eye at the light show starting up outside, and sat up in bed. This involved detangling arms and legs from Ashley, his girlfriend.

Ashley (the boyfriend) had led a pretty unfortunate life up until the point where the world ended, firstly by being named a typically girl’s name. Ashley was in fact a guy. This had grown old near the end of elementary school and caused him to get into quite a lot of trouble in middle school, and by high school he was big enough that he joined the football team as a linebacker. Nobody was stupid enough to call him Ashley by then. They called him Ash at that point, because although he would get suspended for punching people, he would lose his temper pretty easily and then suffer the consequences. He found a character from a movie played by Bruce Campbell, and old movie, and he put on an Ash impression from Ash vs The Evil Dead. He liked Bruce Campbell’s square jaw and take-no-shit attitude. He took no shit, and was regarded as a brutish asshole by pretty much anyone not on the football team.

Oh and his teachers. They quickly got over the impression that he was a dim-witted lunk capable of growing a beard at fifteen years old when the first test came around. Because while comic books had established the hulking guy who was fifty percent trapezius muscles was also the dumbest member of the party, Ash was not stupid. He could pull off a B+ in basically all his subjects without overdoing the studying.

On the day the world ended, Ash got out of bed, stretched his whole body, and grimaced at the way his sternum popped like a knuckle. The light show outside couldn’t have been a fireworks display, as it was late September, and also wasn’t making the firefight and cannon blast noises. He stepped up to the window, yanked up the blinds, and then his jaw dropped at what he was seeing.

He was, in fact, a pretty hefty fella, standing at over six feet and pushing two forty because he couldn’t afford much more than Fresh N’Ready subs from Jiminy Jeepers, the sub place a good mile’s walk from his apartment. And while Fresh N’Ready subs were pretty big on the Ready part of Fresh N’Ready, they weren’t so much on the Fresh. They were also dripping with Italian dressing. Also he wasn’t playing football anymore, and his job lifting things and putting them back down again didn’t allow him much energy or time to hit the gym.

He had this fondness for beer and this girlfriend with expensive tastes, see?

Girlfriend Ashley, by the way, would survive for only another twenty-seven seconds. The end of the world was the end of Ashley, but not Ashley. He immediately yelled, sprinted out the door, and headed outside to where the the end of the world was starting.

So here was the issue: she worked for a law firm as a paralegal, and essentially enjoyed Ash’s endowment. Not his Pell Grant or his scholarship from the government. She had this slight issue of enjoying the most expensive drinks a bar or restaurant had on the menu, and mixing with a crowd that was well above Ash’s education level. He got backed into a lot of corners at these soirees listening to people mocking other people about their prevarication for pontificating. They’d also mock one another regarding this or that cello player they were shtooping, this or that poetry reading full of the most depressingly banal doggerel, this or that unflatteringly cliched and unoriginal gallery debut, this or that publishing contract for, get this, genre fiction.

In time and given reflection, their stiffness and pettiness had made him smile as soon as the earth he knew was shattered into a million unrecognizable pieces.

Then she would get miffed that he didn’t really want to head to the next soiree of bankers, lawyers, district attorneys and their paralegals, etc etc, and hate fuck him all over the house. She’d broken one of his favorite Funko Pops that way, kicking it aside so he could bend her over in the entryway and rail her like she needed to be railed.

While she cursed him out for being a useless, uncultured twit. It was not exactly role-play.

Ash knew what you’re thinking right now: why not just dump her and trudge on without a girlfriend? Surely he didn’t need one, and even if he did, he was a burly enough fella that he could land a random girl in a little corner bar some Saturday Night. Phoenix, Arizona had little corner bars, and thus it also had random girls.

For about the next three minutes, anyhow.

Alas, Ash was presently falling prey to Sunk Cost Fallacy, and also the laziness conundrum. They both were, truth be told. Although he could expend effort to go out and find a girl, there was already one in his bed. And although she was awful to him on the regular, she did also pay half the rent and give him some sexual stimulation he really needed. She might’ve been thinking something similar, along the lines of ‘this man is a useless barbarian who doesn’t know his Tolstoy from his Kandinsky, but he does get the job done in bed. Also he has a job moving things from one place to another, and that gives him both muscles and the dollars necessary to pay his half of the rent.’

The laziness conundrum is where the party in question already has a life full of difficulties and stress, and it’s easier to be miserable than to break up and be alone. There’s far more effort involved in dating, and a whole lot of uncertainty. The bitchy, snobbish overspender you know is better than the ___ you don’t.

Well, now nothing was the thing you know, and everything was the __ you don’t.

Ashley beheld a dazzling display of magic roughly two hundred meters across, hanging a good hundred meters in the air, like a sphere of roiling energies between blue on one side and red orange on the other. Where they met, sparks and explosions sent streamers of falling white hot light that should have started fires. They didn’t.

Where the streamers touched down, things grew or transformed. He watched a car touched by one of the things, turn into a lizard the same size as the same car. It was lizard adjacent, since it had six legs and tusks protruding up a good half a meter from its lower jaw. Another streamer hit the house near the edge of his apartment complex, which blossomed into a mushroom a good three meters higher than the house had been.

These both happened near simultaneously. The last one went right into his window on the second floor, which exploded outwards in a ball of purply-reddish flame. Some of those flames transformed into magenta and maroon butterflies twinkling in the dawn gloom.

Faster than Ash could process, the apartment ballooned outwards and swelled into a hillside, complete with tufts of grass, clusters of shrubberies, and soon towering trees. Outcroppings and huge half-submerged boulders shoved their way out of the grassy exterior all at once.

The hill kept growing, until it ripped free of the ground and started to float away into the sky. It rained some dust and clods of dirt, but then those too hung in a no gravity field.

Ash wanted to reach out and grab onto it, but refrained. It seemed as though everything touched by the magic bubble was being transformed or violently destroyed and that was not how he wanted to go out. As much as floating up int the sky seemed like a fun idea, he knew that in a no gravity zone, you needed something to push off, or else you just hung there, possibly flipping end over end until something moved you.

The type of thing that would move you would probably kill you.

One of the butterflies fluttered up and landed on his arm, and this was followed by a hot flash of agony. He cried out loudly and started swatting at it, but only succeeded in burning his hand. The butterfly dug its way in, under his skin, flapping less and less of its wings until all that was left was a bit of twinkling fairy dust. He would soon find a series of blisters and a scar in the shape of a butterfly. It would serve as a reminder.

Instead of running or being one of only a few dozen humans to try out zero gravity, he turned back toward the bubble of surging, competing color. Not Hollywood special effects, not a flash mob situation. The loss of his apartment building had only just registered as a fact so far and nothing else. Ashley’s likely death wasn’t even a blip on that radar.

His shout had caught the attention… of one of the silhouetted figures inside the tempestuous bubble of magic.

Ash counted some eight of them, seven arrayed on the red pink side, and one on the blue side. Although they were humanoid, he got the distinct impression they weren’t human, and it was because the voice coming out of one of them was like no human he’d ever heard, like it was produced by different mouth parts, and Ash wouldn’t be able to reproduce it.

He also couldn’t understand the language.

A tiny object flew out of the bubble and toward him, streaking with yet more magic, and Ash raised his hand to block it out, only to find himself encased in a blue dome of force similar to the one occupied by only a single figure. The other object crashed into the force dome and sprayed out what looked like a deck of cards.

They were. Ash found himself looking through the bubble at a number of cards for a collectable card game. Picture on top, along with a little title above that, and a box on the bottom half describing the card’s effect. He was too far away to read any of them, but some had pictures of coins on them.

After a shocked moment of silence, the other seven figures laughed. Several more of them joined in, and what followed were a host of cards tossed in all directions. The single figure in the blue side of the magic bubble threw out cards of his own. Some intercepted the cards from the seven, while some weren’t fast enough.

More magical explosions followed where the cards connected midair, along with more showers of cards. The ones that didn’t smash into one another instead cascaded down to earth and blew the whole world apart.

Already the landscape surrounding Ash’s neighborhood was radically different. Patches of grass were growing bulbous forms straight out of the ground, which hardened into cocoons that soon burst open to reveal beasts and monsters of legend and imagination. One pack of them burst open to reveal a troupe of giggling hyena-faced people already in armor made of scraps of clothing, wielding clubs, daggers, slings and one of them with a large woodsman’s axe. They laughed the hyena laugh maniacally, cast one appraising glance Ash’s way, then loped off at surprising speed. Another of the cocoons burst open and out climbed a dog-shaped figure made entirely out of constantly cascading mud. Like the type you’d see at a bubbling mud pit, only walking around like a doggo.

“What the—”

The moment the hyena-faced men had locked eyes with Ash, a pair of cards popped to life over the leader’s head and drifted down to the ground. Another card appeared over his own head inside the bubble, and fell to the ground while whatever was happening inside the magic bubble kept on happening.

It was growing.

Several other cards streaked toward his magic bubble and bounced off, or just sizzled to death against it. It was great, as shields went, so he bent to have a look at the card.

 

Ten of Staves

This card grants experience points towards the Staves skill. Consumable.

Holofoil Uncommon

 

On the card, two monks faced off against one another with a staff held like a weapon, as though they were about to start fighting one another any moment now. Eight more fighting sticks hovered in the air behind them in a pattern, forming two sort of diamonds. When he tilted the card, it did indeed have a holographic foil effect, making the two monks seem to stand out away from the background, and the background to slide back behind them just a bit as he tilted it this way and that.

“Ohhhkay.”

A window appeared before him, as in a video game. Consume this card? Y/N. Two buttons sat below the question, with a large, bold Yes and No inside. Ash chose Yes, and was confused to see the card dissolve into nothingness in his hand, and a tingle travel through the back of his mind. It wasn’t unlike the time he’d gotten high with his buddy Travis from work. A little concerning but not exactly unpleasant.

He hadn’t anticipated this could be some kind of drug, or that the whole area was saturated in hallucinogens. He could be having a really bad trip off something he’d eaten, something he’d drunk, or something someone had given him and he merely didn’t remember.

On the other hand, the pain had felt incredibly real. That tingle inside his mind told him he needed to stop speculating and learn as much as possible as fast as possible, or else he would be in serious trouble, so he looked about.

Other cards lay scattered around. He picked up the next one nearest him, with a photo of a chip of purple crystal on it.

 

Naturally Occurring (Uncut) Amethyst

This card represents one small chip of amethyst as found in a mine or quarry. It glitters with the potential of knowledge, both freely allowed and forbidden.

It is worth approximately 15 coins.

Common

 

He wasn’t certain what to do with this, so he turned his attention back toward the… magic battle. Whatever was happening inside the bubble was nearly at an end; the reddish orangey side was nearly finished enveloping the blue side, and several chains or tendrils of blurry stuff now held the single figure who had saved Ash’s life with the blue shield dome of pure magic power.

As soon as the red orange power of the magic closed out all the bluish, the single figure, with his wrists and ankles ensnared by something Ash couldn’t see clearly, screamed. That scream reverberated through blue magic shield, and shook trees. The mud dog splashed briefly into a puddle, then rose up to its regular shape and cast a quivering glance over at the ball of magic.

Something called Even the Odds had been cast. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, or how the mage had cast it, but there was another thing he knew. The figure who had started off the fight in a blue dome of magic was indeed a mage, and a powerful one. Too powerful to guess his level.

Apparently mages had levels. This with another thing Ash knew instinctively. Acid trip or not (though he wasn’t sure where he’d have gotten acid or done it, since he refused to do it in the first place) this was one hell of a sight to behold. Because the bubble of magic in which they’d been battling disappeared and everything got far clearer. Clearer in a way Ash didn’t like.

The seven other mages had been somehow reduced to one, but the mage who had saved Ash’s life was still bound at the wrists, ankles, and the neck. They’d cast several spells of binding he didn’t know the names of, which included a silence effect the blue mage was currently resisting, and mana drain to kill his ability to cast more cards.

Ash was astonished to realize he not only recognized those words, but understood their meaning. Binding was literal, and here meant to keep the mage from fleeing, while silence was trying to stop him from casting magic through the cards. Mana drain sought to empty the mage’s reservoir of available power and return it to the red mages. A slight blue glow was being sucked from the one mage into the other.

“You’re going to regret this,” the red mage, “for a long, long time.”

The blue mage began screaming, and Ash was astonished to discover the mage was a woman.

Ash didn’t like bullies, and seven on one was clearly that, even if the blue mage had thinned out their numbers. She was clearly still going to lose this fight, which pissed off Ash even more. He gathered up all the cards inside the blue magic shield, and flipped through them in rapid order. He got a good twenty before a huge computer window enveloped and overcame everything in his vision.

<Welcome, New Player!>