Venustoise
Getting sticky.
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Which, considering what he was like before #201, he probably has coming.
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Ruby Haze [Archie Sonic SI]
- Thread starter weredrago2
- Start date
Ruby Haze ORIGINS Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
New
weredrago2
"KABOOM!"
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2023
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- 464
NOTE - Rather than a new chapter, the following is an extensive rewrite of the first chapter of the fic. My reasonings for this rewrite (and why I made it as a new threadmark instead of just replacing the first one already) are included at the end of this post.
The chapter notes also contain an update on a new Friend Insert I've been working on with over 10,000 words in the bank, so please take a look for that as well.
---
Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
♦ 100
For the first time in my life, it seemed as though I'd finally achieved some measure of greater perspective of my place in the universe. Not by deeply diving through my issues, reaching a significant breakthrough needed to better myself as a person. That would've been a long-term project. No, this was accomplished by gazing down at an alien planet, and being unable to reconcile how small I felt in comparison to it. That was before factoring in the dozens upon dozens of little moons that rotated around the sphere, each one a different size or shape moving along at its own pace. They may have been only dwarf moons, but I was left speechless at how they dwarfed me.
They called this sense of wonder the overview effect, and I had to admit: This was the most beautiful, terrifying photograph of the Earth from space that I had ever seen. Even if it got the finer points wrong. Europe was scrunched-up. Africa was set askew until it poked South America and India. Australia was a rough, circular patch of terra firma set in the Pacific. Most bafflingly, it seemed as though somebody missed the memo about Southeast Asia having many islands and haphazardly glued them to the Eurasian landmass.
It was an unusual circumstance, dreaming of an oxygen-starved void far beyond any atmosphere. Taking in all of the little, tiny details of a world that resembled my own in the same way that a chicken resembled a turkey. I hadn't been facing the right way to see what the New World looked like, but I imagined it would've been as screwy as the old one.
Regardless of whether air was abundant out here or not, I felt my chest rising and falling. The heart beating in my chest as fast as ever. Not really things associated with dreaming.
Am I dreaming?
I didn't dream often. Well, I figured I dreamt as much as your average person, and only sometimes remembered them. I didn't lucid dream very often, so much as I had the infrequent dream where I was aware enough to be helpless as the action unfolded in front of me. It was a good night when I was too exhausted to have any dreams, and a decent night when any nightmares wouldn't bother me any further than the rest of the morning.
The more I thought about the little things, the clouds and what few pinpricks of light I could make out on the night side of this Not-Quite-Earth, the more I couldn't ignore that what I was seeing was too consistent. There weren't any sudden fits or starts, no flights of fancy that would shift it into something new that would mark it as a dream. There was no way this could be real, but I was a bit too awake for this to be my imagination.
It couldn't be a dream, but it had to be.
Right?
♦ 99
I felt a sudden rush of heat and a heavy sense of dread, the weight of both focused on my left hand. Turning in that direction, I saw that my left had been pierced with a glass or crystal stud. It almost looked like an accessory attached to a black glove, but it felt like a piece of silicon wedged between sensitive nerves and tissues. Belatedly acknowledging the presence of the black glove, I then saw that the clothes I'd fallen asleep in the night before had been replaced by a black bodysuit with magenta highlights.
"What?"
It was the first thing I'd ever said in space. Hardly the most eloquent thing I could've said, but it got the idea across. My mind flooded with questions. Besides the obvious answer of being in orbit, where was I? How did I get here? Who took my glasses?
What was that crystal, and who put it there?
♦ 98
Deep in my bones, I felt it. Like a grain of sand falling down in an hourglass, or a timer ticking down. The crystal on my hand became almost imperceptibly cooler than it was seconds ago, and it was cooling off while I was floating around in space without a helmet.
Oh.
…
That isn't good.
I was working on very little information, but I could put two and two together. People weren't supposed to survive in space, so, assuming I wasn't having my first lucid dream, this crystal was the only thing keeping me alive.
My heart rate quickened, trying to figure out how I'd get out of this situation. If the gemstone was a battery, then what was it powered by? What was actively draining the charge? My life support, for one. It was also anchoring me in place. Radiation shielding?
I thought I felt the sun on my back. Without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's rays, I reckon I'm taking it full-blast.
Another mystery solved. What else?
♦ 97
This is too much.
I brought my hands to my head to massage my temples, inadvertently bringing the foreign object closer to my face than I strictly wanted it to be. My thoughts were, for reasons that should've been rather evident, in complete disarray.
"Is there somewhere I can land?" I said aloud, not caring how far my words carried. Or if they ever reached past my lips and ears at all. I just talked aloud sometimes to get my head back on straight. "Europe, I guess?"
It was a bit silly to quibble over landing zones, when anywhere with oxygen beat my current predicament. For some reason, my mind rationalized that I should prioritize an English-speaking nation, or one that was on decent terms with the United States. The human brain liked its routines, but those didn't always react well to stress.
In this case, the delay caused me to waste time I didn't have to lose. During my deliberations, a large shadow passed over my body.
"Huh?"
Shadows getting between me and the sun during the day were never a good sign. I thrust my arm around, to force my body to flip, when I realized that shouldn't work. Nevertheless, I had the thought of turning around, and my whole body swiveled to face the ceaseless expanse of the stars dancing across the blue planet's horizon.
It was breathtaking..
Then I kept turning, to face a massive hunk of rock threatening to bowl me over!
It couldn't be a meteor, because it looked way too big to burn up in the atmosphere. The khaki-colored, craggy sphere was too small to be Luna, and what were the odds that I'd be stranded out here at the same time as a solar eclipse?
Why not? Nothing makes sense anyways.
I hissed out a swear of alarm, and tried to 'swim' away from the oncoming planetoid, but it merely drifted away, making me realize that it was in a stable orbit. Not a threat to me at all, save that it was a reminder that I was completely out of my depth.
I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the reflective fragment of a solar panel whizzed past my nose like a bullet.
♦ 96
Taking a hurried glance to the left, I could see the rest of a broken satellite the size of a bus making its way towards me.
My mind jumped to a particular phrase that described what that satellite would do to me.
Kessler syndrome.
Ah, yes. It was about to Kessler me.
"No, no!"
Oh, come on! This isn't fair!
My mind awash with indignation, I extended my arms outwards to block the oncoming projectile. The gem on my left hand glowed with an intense magenta radiance, a colorful bolt of pink rocketing out of the extremity and shattering it on impact. In its wake, a harmless haze of glittering dust was all that remained.
I took a moment to examine my handiwork.
That was a laser. A genuine laser!
"Wow."
What else was I supposed to say?
♦ 91
That sense of wonder was brief, as I felt how much that attack took out of me. The running number in my head was an abstraction of some kind. An abstraction that was at a little over 90%. It sank in that, unless I found a way to recharge this thing, I didn't have a lot of power to burn. I didn't want to find out what happened when it went dry.
Once that thought had sunk it, it occurred to me that it wasn't the only thing sinking. Firing off that energy blast disrupted the careful balance of my own orbit, causing me to tumble downwards into the atmosphere.
♦ 90
"Ah! AH! Slow down, SLOW DOWN!"
I felt bile rise in my throat as I maintained a downward spiral towards the planet below. The sky was green, the grass was blue, and the malformed globe spun faster and faster; it was more accurate to say that I was the one that was spinning, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was on fire.
♦ 88
Friction. It was a killer. The only surprising part was that it hadn't killed me yet. My entire body was burning, surrounded by a bright corona of flame.
♦ 86
…Which, now that I had time to think about it, should have ended things then and there. Instead, I was still falling.
…
I had, years back, watched a video of a skydiver launching themselves off the stratosphere in a pressure suit. Some kind of promo for Red Bull. They got there in a helium balloon, and the jumper took a good ten minutes to land back to Earth. About five or six minutes of freefall, and the rest was done with the parachute.
♦ 84
At a guess? I was falling from a lot higher than that. As someone who wasn't a fan of heights, and neglected to bring a parachute with them into lower orbit, I was really hoping that this was a dream again. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Mostly because it felt like I was falling way faster than I should've been.
♦ 82
"Come on, come on! Fly! It isn't that hard!"
I was flailing around midair, trying to come up with something that would stop me from going splat. If this thing on my hand was supposed to let me fly, then I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. There wasn't a built-in instruction manual, either. Falling through the clouds and quickly reaching a terminal end point, the land below appeared to be rural woodland… when I had the chance to look down. I still hadn't stopped spinning, giving me the verdant view of an evergreen forest every other second.
♦ 80
"How about happy thoughts, eh?! Happy thoughts! Just think happy--!"
My head tilted down towards the ground again. Before I ever found the magic words to give myself wings, one side of my face made an earsplitting impact with a lake. The water might as well have been concrete, for all that the surface tension did to break my fall.
♦ 70
I felt my entire body reverberate. Bones snapping from the force of impact, and then unsnapping. The right side of my body was wracked with pain, and it felt like a jet of water sprayed up my nose to jab straight through my brainstem. I was somehow alive, but I wasn't going to go out on a limb and call it a miracle yet.
As if my morning couldn't possibly get any worse, I was starting to drown. Water was rapidly filling my lungs, and bright motes of light were flooding my vision.
♦ 80
I was far too deep in the water to grasp for the surface. My power might've let me breathe underwater if I was more composed, especially since I could breathe in a vacuum, but I was hardly in a state to do that.
Not… like… this!
Unable to reach for air or latch on to anything solid, the gemstone on my hand started glowing again, drawing in the light that had pooled at the bottom of the lake bed.
♦ 85
The stone illuminated the dark depths in a sea of red light, and I was launched straight through the top of the lake to freedom.
My flight plan was erratic. Less floating, and more flopping. There were multiple times where I risked hitting a tree or sheer cliff and breaking my neck. Focusing my jittery jumps into concentrated movement took effort, driven by desperation and adrenaline. Coming to a complete stop was even harder, but in that moment, I would have taken stable ground under my feet over bouncing around like a pinball.
♦ 84
Once I reoriented myself, regaining a sense of up and down, I dropped to the ground and vomited. I was utterly tapped out. Physically, mentally, and, for the record, existentially. Launched out of space, and nearly splattered. I needed time to unwind, decompress, and, ideally, wake up from this nightmare that I clearly wasn't going to wake up from.
At some point, I did lose consciousness before being dragged back to wakefulness. It could have been a rest for a few minutes. It could have been more. I wasn't keeping track, but I did know it was darker out when my eyes fluttered open a second time.
More than that, I could barely feel the texture of the dirt as my fingers dug into the soil, but that was because of the dark gloves that I'd been wearing since I'd awoken. What were they? Leather? Latex? I couldn't place the material.
"Stupid gloves," I muttered, between sputtering out copious amounts of fluid from my body.
When I spared the idle thought to wish them away, the gloves disappeared. I crawled back to the water's edge in an exhausted stupor, stumbling over gnarled greenery that nicked my exposed hands. It hurt a bit, but not enough to bleed. Besides, I didn't think I would be ready to stand for a while.
I was at the shore of a lake, in the clearing of a forest. A lake in a forest, in what might've been Europe, assuming that this might've been Earth. That was a tenuous leap in logic at best, but it was all I had to cling on to.
I carefully examined my reflection in the water. My eyes were dark, sunken pits, with red rings around black pinpricks for pupils. The light brown curls of my hair were a wet mop that crowned a gristly, disheveled expression. My nose was about the same as when I last checked it, but it was swollen with a bold streak of blood running down both nostrils.
Was that from using the gem, or the crash?
Does it matter?
Either way, I looked terrible. My body and the immediate area around it were bathed in an eerie, ethereal light. I washed my face in the clear lake, something to keep my hands busy while I thought over what the hell I was going to do next.
♦ 86
The awfully conspicuous icosahedron had cooled off somewhat from the dunking, though it still glowed faintly. I couldn't see all sides of the thing with it plugged into my hand, but I recognized a D20 anywhere. I tried to caress my left palm with my index finger, to feel the other end of the stone poking out; it felt like nothing was there. It was surreal, without the fabric covering where one end connected to the other.
"What the hell happened to me?"
"Stand and deliver, varlet!" a voice from behind me declared in the most jarringly Shakespearean English accent I could possibly imagine.
The sudden noise had me spooked, then strongly bewildered. Who was that? What were they saying? Was I going crazy? Crazier? Fingers through my hair, hands trembling as I addressed what might've been one part of a greater stress-induced episode.
"Hey. Hey. Shut up. I need a minute here."
My voice was hollow and shaky. I didn't even have the strength to turn around.
The hallucination, which spoke like a British teen LARPer, sounded flabbergasted at my irreverent response. He faltered slightly as he pressed onward.
"I shall grant ye no moment of respite, sirrah! As the guardian of Deerwood Forest and rightful steward of yon sacred waters, I command ye to make thine intentions known or face the consequences!"
Exasperated, I turned with a long swing of my arm.
"Alright, alright! What're you…?"
I turned around, and felt my heart plunge in shock.
Straight ahead of me, perched on a stump atop a short hill, was a rodent of unusual size. Standing at about a meter tall, I almost thought he was a child, but his head was way too big. Made up too much of his build and mass. The humanoid's Lincoln green head and body were concealed in a brown cowl and tunic, leaving big green eyes and a stern scowl peering back at me from the shadows.
"What are you?" I asked, dumbfounded by the odd being in front of me.
The creature--
I struck the line of thought, because he was very clearly talking to me. Calling the guy a creature was rude at best. If he was civilized enough to wear hiking boots, he was civilized enough for me not to call him a 'creature'.
The, erm, fellow was pointing a wooden bow at me, an arrow nocked in the direction of my heart. A recurve bow, by the shape of it? The bow stood as tall as he was, giving it a strong pull if he chose to fire. However, as someone who wasn't in a rush to be shot, even after all of that up in space, I was sobering up to the fact that I hadn't made the best first--
--The fact that his mouth started moving a few seconds ago.
Wait wait, what's he saying?
"…trespasser. For what being of Walkers' make could stand there and question mine own nature, whilst acting unperturbed by the sting of a broadhead's point?"
"A broadhead?"
Wasn't that an arrow shape?
I looked down, trying to focus on the narrow spike of an arrow nocked on his bow. Unexpectedly, looking down also caused me to notice the long shaft ending in colorful feather fletching that was already sticking out of my chest.
♦ 85
Then came the pain of being shot in the chest.
"You shot me!" I seethed in accusation. That was somehow the least extreme thing to happen to me thus far, but still. It hurt! "Why did you shoot me with an arrow?!"
The short mammal took a step back, looking only slightly less confused about the whole affair than I was. He took a step off the stump, nearly falling on his rear in the process, but his hardy bow was able to hold his weight and spring him back to his feet.
"Lackaday, spellbinder!" he exclaimed defensively. "That was merely meant to be a warning shot!"
"What was the warning? Wear armor?!"
My first instinct was to yank it out, but it hurt to pull at, and my attempt to jostle it loose only made it hurt more!
"I merely meant to query thee in order to determine thine alignment! Whether thou were friend or foe, when ye turned swiftly without nary a warning of intent!"
I pointed to the offending projectile with a gloved index finger. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding, but that might've just been my black suit covering it up.
"You know, I don't think friends do this to each other! I've had a real long day, and I don't see a great friendship foundation going on here!"
My eyes were, last I checked, awfully red. I hoped my anger got across loud and clear. If that didn't, then the renewed glow the gemstone on my left hand was making certainly did.
He put his bow back up, for whatever amount of good that'd do for him. I still had the gem, and I felt I could defend with it. Modulate the output and go for a non-lethal blow, if I could.
I… didn't appreciate being shot, but maybe I was the one in the wrong here?
"You descended from the sky as a fiery, baleful phantasm unto the bed of Never Lake! Am I not to assume you sought to violate and despoil its serene beauty to fuel your dark magicks, Overland warlock most foul and unseeming?"
He called me what now?
At that moment, my logical brain stopped proofreading the words coming out of my mouth.
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm not going to be talked down to by a funny animal that doesn't wear pants!"
The rodent drew closer, standing atop his bow so he could get up in my face. He could only get so close to me without poking the arrow he put there.
"Sheathe thine sharp tongue, you plague-marked mage of ill repute!"
If that was the game we were going to play, I knew just the way to escalate.
I bit my thumb at him.
His furious scowl widened.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he asked angrily.
"I do bite my thumb, sir."
They called Shakespeare's works the classics for a reason, and the reason was applicability. I appreciated my psychotic episode for going along with the bit.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he repeated, angrier still.
Gregory wasn't here, so we had to skip his lines.
"No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir--!"
"HALT!"
Neither of us were able to get another word in. The prior atmosphere was utterly disrupted by the arrival of three steel goliaths from out of the woodwork. They were all nearly twice my height and fairly uniform in construction, seeming right at home on the budget of a shoestring sci-fi production. Built with a minimum of moving parts, the giants were covered in heavy plates of armor that bowled over pine, stone, and shrub. Each was armed with thick bars of metal that functioned as crude clubs in their weighty hands.
A trio of blood red, cyclopean visors glared down at us, followed by a litany of the local equivalents of the Miranda Rights projected through cheap voice synthesizers. If they had accents like the shrew, then they were mangled by the modulator.
"ROB O' THE HEDGE AND UNIDENTIFIED COLLABORATOR. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO NOT RESIST THE WILL OF THE HIGH SHERIFF. I REPEAT. DO NOT RESIST."
"Are those robots?" I squealed out in incredulous, barely-restrained indignation.
Not at all drones. Robots.
This whole day that had been panic, terror, screaming, and agony. One crisis after the other. Now? Even more confusion. All questions, no answers. I was so fed up with all of this, so lacking in context that I couldn't even begin to compartmentalize all of these mental stress fractures in my head. It was a dam about to burst, and I didn't know where the water was going next.
The teal humanoid -- Rob was what they called him -- lept away from me and stood in a combat position atop a tall stone. I couldn't tell which part of those things would be vulnerable to a humble arrow, at a glance. The eye, perhaps?
"Verily!" he replied, switching out the broadhead for one with a round, threaded head from his quiver. "These mechanical miscreants are the shock-troopers of the Sheriff! I know not your intentions, pilgrim, but surely you can recognize the need for--"
I growled, and the gemstone projected a conical ray of light. The ray coalesced into a large, translucent left hand, which wrapped itself around the body of the robot nearest to me. With a thought, I clenched the giant fist, crushing everything encased beneath it into scrap metal and glitter dust. The robot's head spun straight up into the air before landing on the refuse pile.
"…Cooperation."
♦ 82
The two that remained started blankly at their very destroyed comrade, before raising their metal clubs and slowly ambling towards me.
"UNIDENTIFIED MISCREANT IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ENGAGING WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."
What did that guy call me? A warlock?
I didn't know if what I was doing was some kind of magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, but whatever it was, it was working. For my next trick, I focused on a rough circle around the two robots, and set it ablaze with iridescent flame. Pillars of fire rose above the robots, freezing in place and solidifying as a jagged crystal cage that surrounded them on all sides.
♦ 80
"Now that's what I'm talking about!"
The rest of this trouble, I could do without, but the power? No complaints thus far. Since he recognized them, I looked around for where Rob went, to see if he might be able to explain more about where these things came from. For better or worse, they may have been able to point me in the direction of civilization.
My celebration was short-lived. There was a loud clatter like shattering glass, and the two robots used their iron clubs to smash free from their sparkling prison. I'd clearly underestimated their speed, because they closed the gap into melee range in under two strides. Their sudden blitz threw me on the backfoot, but I had enough time to raise a barrier of pink light between me and the wrecking force of their blows.
♦ 78
Fragments of that interposing wall scattered over the ground, as I was tossed reeling into a sheer stone wall. It felt like they'd knocked something loose with that heavy blow, and it wasn't a stronger tolerance for pain.
"Would you cut that out?!" I called out to them, nearly breathless, but with enough air left to loudly complain.
There was a pause in their combat routine. A stall, as the two robots neared closer. If one blast worth five 'points' was enough to take out a satellite, then I should be able to beat them, but what if I wasted too much power doing it? On the other hand, could I afford to wait until they called for reinforcements from that Sheriff guy? Could I afford to risk being tagged by someone who might like enforcing high taxes with killer robots?
Eventually, the robots formulated a response.
"REQUEST DENIED."
They readied their blunt instruments, to pick up where they left off, when the path of the farthest one was intercepted by an arrow striking its foot from the trees. It was the round arrow from before. Instead of piercing armor, it exploded into a bundle of twine that got caught between the giant's lumbering limbs and caused it to tumble to the ground with a heavy clunk. Another arrow with a red tip flew out from the forest and detonated on impact, scattering the robot's head and shoulders across the clearing.
Well. I took back what I said about the arrows being ineffective.
With that robot down, I was forced into close combat with the last one. It swung its rebar beatstick left, then right, causing me to flinch and propel myself away with long, unbalanced jumps. Being yanked around on invisible wires was the closest thing I could do to flying while under duress.
I hadn't been in a fight in well over a decade. Not a real one. For that, I was grateful. Nevertheless, there were moments where you were glad that the human body was always ready to make cortisol. For moments where keeping your blood pumping was the priority, and common decency went out the window.
For what it was worth, I lost that fight. This time, I wouldn't.
Kicking off against a rocky spire, I rocketed off towards my next victim with a left hook that exploded into a shotgun blast of pressurized pink mist. The wave of vibrant energy bowled the machine over, a spiky layer of magenta crystal forming over the head and trunk in the shape of a frozen splash.
"Ha! Try breaking out of that, you tin-plated git!"
♦ 76
The robot's thick fingers dragged coarsely across the surface of the crystal shell, too stiff to hold on as it futilly attempted to scrape free. Not wanting to risk whether it could actually accomplish the deed, I conjured a broad cylinder of solid light and drove it straight down on the robot's head. The result was a total flattening and a satisfying crush where a mechanical brain might've been. Brain or not, the body stopped functioning when its head was squashed into a solid disk.
♦ 75
"Aha! I got 'em all!" I pumped a first out in the air, but once the deed was done, all that remained in the forest was an eerie silence. "Hello? Anyone still out there?"
With nothing else to fight, and everything seeming to calm down, the adrenaline started to bleed out of my body. The gemstone still had most of its power left to burn, but I sure as hell had run dry. I fell to my knees, exhaustion returning to wreck its vengeance once I'd run out of targets. Worried about falling on top of it, I yanked the broadhead out of my chest with all of the force I still had to muster.
It was a drastic act of delirium, which caused me to pass out from shock. The last thing I saw was the ruby-red glaze of the arrow, smeared across my hazy vision. After I collapsed, the last thing I heard was a distant voice murmuring poetic in my ear.
"At ease, overlander. Any foe of the Sheriff is a friend of mine."
---
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: CaptNameless, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
The chapter notes also contain an update on a new Friend Insert I've been working on with over 10,000 words in the bank, so please take a look for that as well.
---
Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
♦ 100
For the first time in my life, it seemed as though I'd finally achieved some measure of greater perspective of my place in the universe. Not by deeply diving through my issues, reaching a significant breakthrough needed to better myself as a person. That would've been a long-term project. No, this was accomplished by gazing down at an alien planet, and being unable to reconcile how small I felt in comparison to it. That was before factoring in the dozens upon dozens of little moons that rotated around the sphere, each one a different size or shape moving along at its own pace. They may have been only dwarf moons, but I was left speechless at how they dwarfed me.
They called this sense of wonder the overview effect, and I had to admit: This was the most beautiful, terrifying photograph of the Earth from space that I had ever seen. Even if it got the finer points wrong. Europe was scrunched-up. Africa was set askew until it poked South America and India. Australia was a rough, circular patch of terra firma set in the Pacific. Most bafflingly, it seemed as though somebody missed the memo about Southeast Asia having many islands and haphazardly glued them to the Eurasian landmass.
It was an unusual circumstance, dreaming of an oxygen-starved void far beyond any atmosphere. Taking in all of the little, tiny details of a world that resembled my own in the same way that a chicken resembled a turkey. I hadn't been facing the right way to see what the New World looked like, but I imagined it would've been as screwy as the old one.
Regardless of whether air was abundant out here or not, I felt my chest rising and falling. The heart beating in my chest as fast as ever. Not really things associated with dreaming.
Am I dreaming?
I didn't dream often. Well, I figured I dreamt as much as your average person, and only sometimes remembered them. I didn't lucid dream very often, so much as I had the infrequent dream where I was aware enough to be helpless as the action unfolded in front of me. It was a good night when I was too exhausted to have any dreams, and a decent night when any nightmares wouldn't bother me any further than the rest of the morning.
The more I thought about the little things, the clouds and what few pinpricks of light I could make out on the night side of this Not-Quite-Earth, the more I couldn't ignore that what I was seeing was too consistent. There weren't any sudden fits or starts, no flights of fancy that would shift it into something new that would mark it as a dream. There was no way this could be real, but I was a bit too awake for this to be my imagination.
It couldn't be a dream, but it had to be.
Right?
♦ 99
I felt a sudden rush of heat and a heavy sense of dread, the weight of both focused on my left hand. Turning in that direction, I saw that my left had been pierced with a glass or crystal stud. It almost looked like an accessory attached to a black glove, but it felt like a piece of silicon wedged between sensitive nerves and tissues. Belatedly acknowledging the presence of the black glove, I then saw that the clothes I'd fallen asleep in the night before had been replaced by a black bodysuit with magenta highlights.
"What?"
It was the first thing I'd ever said in space. Hardly the most eloquent thing I could've said, but it got the idea across. My mind flooded with questions. Besides the obvious answer of being in orbit, where was I? How did I get here? Who took my glasses?
What was that crystal, and who put it there?
♦ 98
Deep in my bones, I felt it. Like a grain of sand falling down in an hourglass, or a timer ticking down. The crystal on my hand became almost imperceptibly cooler than it was seconds ago, and it was cooling off while I was floating around in space without a helmet.
Oh.
…
That isn't good.
I was working on very little information, but I could put two and two together. People weren't supposed to survive in space, so, assuming I wasn't having my first lucid dream, this crystal was the only thing keeping me alive.
My heart rate quickened, trying to figure out how I'd get out of this situation. If the gemstone was a battery, then what was it powered by? What was actively draining the charge? My life support, for one. It was also anchoring me in place. Radiation shielding?
I thought I felt the sun on my back. Without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's rays, I reckon I'm taking it full-blast.
Another mystery solved. What else?
♦ 97
This is too much.
I brought my hands to my head to massage my temples, inadvertently bringing the foreign object closer to my face than I strictly wanted it to be. My thoughts were, for reasons that should've been rather evident, in complete disarray.
"Is there somewhere I can land?" I said aloud, not caring how far my words carried. Or if they ever reached past my lips and ears at all. I just talked aloud sometimes to get my head back on straight. "Europe, I guess?"
It was a bit silly to quibble over landing zones, when anywhere with oxygen beat my current predicament. For some reason, my mind rationalized that I should prioritize an English-speaking nation, or one that was on decent terms with the United States. The human brain liked its routines, but those didn't always react well to stress.
In this case, the delay caused me to waste time I didn't have to lose. During my deliberations, a large shadow passed over my body.
"Huh?"
Shadows getting between me and the sun during the day were never a good sign. I thrust my arm around, to force my body to flip, when I realized that shouldn't work. Nevertheless, I had the thought of turning around, and my whole body swiveled to face the ceaseless expanse of the stars dancing across the blue planet's horizon.
It was breathtaking..
Then I kept turning, to face a massive hunk of rock threatening to bowl me over!
It couldn't be a meteor, because it looked way too big to burn up in the atmosphere. The khaki-colored, craggy sphere was too small to be Luna, and what were the odds that I'd be stranded out here at the same time as a solar eclipse?
Why not? Nothing makes sense anyways.
I hissed out a swear of alarm, and tried to 'swim' away from the oncoming planetoid, but it merely drifted away, making me realize that it was in a stable orbit. Not a threat to me at all, save that it was a reminder that I was completely out of my depth.
I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the reflective fragment of a solar panel whizzed past my nose like a bullet.
♦ 96
Taking a hurried glance to the left, I could see the rest of a broken satellite the size of a bus making its way towards me.
My mind jumped to a particular phrase that described what that satellite would do to me.
Kessler syndrome.
Ah, yes. It was about to Kessler me.
"No, no!"
Oh, come on! This isn't fair!
My mind awash with indignation, I extended my arms outwards to block the oncoming projectile. The gem on my left hand glowed with an intense magenta radiance, a colorful bolt of pink rocketing out of the extremity and shattering it on impact. In its wake, a harmless haze of glittering dust was all that remained.
I took a moment to examine my handiwork.
That was a laser. A genuine laser!
"Wow."
What else was I supposed to say?
♦ 91
That sense of wonder was brief, as I felt how much that attack took out of me. The running number in my head was an abstraction of some kind. An abstraction that was at a little over 90%. It sank in that, unless I found a way to recharge this thing, I didn't have a lot of power to burn. I didn't want to find out what happened when it went dry.
Once that thought had sunk it, it occurred to me that it wasn't the only thing sinking. Firing off that energy blast disrupted the careful balance of my own orbit, causing me to tumble downwards into the atmosphere.
♦ 90
"Ah! AH! Slow down, SLOW DOWN!"
I felt bile rise in my throat as I maintained a downward spiral towards the planet below. The sky was green, the grass was blue, and the malformed globe spun faster and faster; it was more accurate to say that I was the one that was spinning, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was on fire.
♦ 88
Friction. It was a killer. The only surprising part was that it hadn't killed me yet. My entire body was burning, surrounded by a bright corona of flame.
♦ 86
…Which, now that I had time to think about it, should have ended things then and there. Instead, I was still falling.
…
I had, years back, watched a video of a skydiver launching themselves off the stratosphere in a pressure suit. Some kind of promo for Red Bull. They got there in a helium balloon, and the jumper took a good ten minutes to land back to Earth. About five or six minutes of freefall, and the rest was done with the parachute.
♦ 84
At a guess? I was falling from a lot higher than that. As someone who wasn't a fan of heights, and neglected to bring a parachute with them into lower orbit, I was really hoping that this was a dream again. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Mostly because it felt like I was falling way faster than I should've been.
♦ 82
"Come on, come on! Fly! It isn't that hard!"
I was flailing around midair, trying to come up with something that would stop me from going splat. If this thing on my hand was supposed to let me fly, then I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. There wasn't a built-in instruction manual, either. Falling through the clouds and quickly reaching a terminal end point, the land below appeared to be rural woodland… when I had the chance to look down. I still hadn't stopped spinning, giving me the verdant view of an evergreen forest every other second.
♦ 80
"How about happy thoughts, eh?! Happy thoughts! Just think happy--!"
My head tilted down towards the ground again. Before I ever found the magic words to give myself wings, one side of my face made an earsplitting impact with a lake. The water might as well have been concrete, for all that the surface tension did to break my fall.
♦ 70
I felt my entire body reverberate. Bones snapping from the force of impact, and then unsnapping. The right side of my body was wracked with pain, and it felt like a jet of water sprayed up my nose to jab straight through my brainstem. I was somehow alive, but I wasn't going to go out on a limb and call it a miracle yet.
As if my morning couldn't possibly get any worse, I was starting to drown. Water was rapidly filling my lungs, and bright motes of light were flooding my vision.
♦ 80
I was far too deep in the water to grasp for the surface. My power might've let me breathe underwater if I was more composed, especially since I could breathe in a vacuum, but I was hardly in a state to do that.
Not… like… this!
Unable to reach for air or latch on to anything solid, the gemstone on my hand started glowing again, drawing in the light that had pooled at the bottom of the lake bed.
♦ 85
The stone illuminated the dark depths in a sea of red light, and I was launched straight through the top of the lake to freedom.
My flight plan was erratic. Less floating, and more flopping. There were multiple times where I risked hitting a tree or sheer cliff and breaking my neck. Focusing my jittery jumps into concentrated movement took effort, driven by desperation and adrenaline. Coming to a complete stop was even harder, but in that moment, I would have taken stable ground under my feet over bouncing around like a pinball.
♦ 84
Once I reoriented myself, regaining a sense of up and down, I dropped to the ground and vomited. I was utterly tapped out. Physically, mentally, and, for the record, existentially. Launched out of space, and nearly splattered. I needed time to unwind, decompress, and, ideally, wake up from this nightmare that I clearly wasn't going to wake up from.
At some point, I did lose consciousness before being dragged back to wakefulness. It could have been a rest for a few minutes. It could have been more. I wasn't keeping track, but I did know it was darker out when my eyes fluttered open a second time.
More than that, I could barely feel the texture of the dirt as my fingers dug into the soil, but that was because of the dark gloves that I'd been wearing since I'd awoken. What were they? Leather? Latex? I couldn't place the material.
"Stupid gloves," I muttered, between sputtering out copious amounts of fluid from my body.
When I spared the idle thought to wish them away, the gloves disappeared. I crawled back to the water's edge in an exhausted stupor, stumbling over gnarled greenery that nicked my exposed hands. It hurt a bit, but not enough to bleed. Besides, I didn't think I would be ready to stand for a while.
I was at the shore of a lake, in the clearing of a forest. A lake in a forest, in what might've been Europe, assuming that this might've been Earth. That was a tenuous leap in logic at best, but it was all I had to cling on to.
I carefully examined my reflection in the water. My eyes were dark, sunken pits, with red rings around black pinpricks for pupils. The light brown curls of my hair were a wet mop that crowned a gristly, disheveled expression. My nose was about the same as when I last checked it, but it was swollen with a bold streak of blood running down both nostrils.
Was that from using the gem, or the crash?
Does it matter?
Either way, I looked terrible. My body and the immediate area around it were bathed in an eerie, ethereal light. I washed my face in the clear lake, something to keep my hands busy while I thought over what the hell I was going to do next.
♦ 86
The awfully conspicuous icosahedron had cooled off somewhat from the dunking, though it still glowed faintly. I couldn't see all sides of the thing with it plugged into my hand, but I recognized a D20 anywhere. I tried to caress my left palm with my index finger, to feel the other end of the stone poking out; it felt like nothing was there. It was surreal, without the fabric covering where one end connected to the other.
"What the hell happened to me?"
"Stand and deliver, varlet!" a voice from behind me declared in the most jarringly Shakespearean English accent I could possibly imagine.
The sudden noise had me spooked, then strongly bewildered. Who was that? What were they saying? Was I going crazy? Crazier? Fingers through my hair, hands trembling as I addressed what might've been one part of a greater stress-induced episode.
"Hey. Hey. Shut up. I need a minute here."
My voice was hollow and shaky. I didn't even have the strength to turn around.
The hallucination, which spoke like a British teen LARPer, sounded flabbergasted at my irreverent response. He faltered slightly as he pressed onward.
"I shall grant ye no moment of respite, sirrah! As the guardian of Deerwood Forest and rightful steward of yon sacred waters, I command ye to make thine intentions known or face the consequences!"
Exasperated, I turned with a long swing of my arm.
"Alright, alright! What're you…?"
I turned around, and felt my heart plunge in shock.
Straight ahead of me, perched on a stump atop a short hill, was a rodent of unusual size. Standing at about a meter tall, I almost thought he was a child, but his head was way too big. Made up too much of his build and mass. The humanoid's Lincoln green head and body were concealed in a brown cowl and tunic, leaving big green eyes and a stern scowl peering back at me from the shadows.
"What are you?" I asked, dumbfounded by the odd being in front of me.
The creature--
I struck the line of thought, because he was very clearly talking to me. Calling the guy a creature was rude at best. If he was civilized enough to wear hiking boots, he was civilized enough for me not to call him a 'creature'.
The, erm, fellow was pointing a wooden bow at me, an arrow nocked in the direction of my heart. A recurve bow, by the shape of it? The bow stood as tall as he was, giving it a strong pull if he chose to fire. However, as someone who wasn't in a rush to be shot, even after all of that up in space, I was sobering up to the fact that I hadn't made the best first--
--The fact that his mouth started moving a few seconds ago.
Wait wait, what's he saying?
"…trespasser. For what being of Walkers' make could stand there and question mine own nature, whilst acting unperturbed by the sting of a broadhead's point?"
"A broadhead?"
Wasn't that an arrow shape?
I looked down, trying to focus on the narrow spike of an arrow nocked on his bow. Unexpectedly, looking down also caused me to notice the long shaft ending in colorful feather fletching that was already sticking out of my chest.
♦ 85
Then came the pain of being shot in the chest.
"You shot me!" I seethed in accusation. That was somehow the least extreme thing to happen to me thus far, but still. It hurt! "Why did you shoot me with an arrow?!"
The short mammal took a step back, looking only slightly less confused about the whole affair than I was. He took a step off the stump, nearly falling on his rear in the process, but his hardy bow was able to hold his weight and spring him back to his feet.
"Lackaday, spellbinder!" he exclaimed defensively. "That was merely meant to be a warning shot!"
"What was the warning? Wear armor?!"
My first instinct was to yank it out, but it hurt to pull at, and my attempt to jostle it loose only made it hurt more!
"I merely meant to query thee in order to determine thine alignment! Whether thou were friend or foe, when ye turned swiftly without nary a warning of intent!"
I pointed to the offending projectile with a gloved index finger. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding, but that might've just been my black suit covering it up.
"You know, I don't think friends do this to each other! I've had a real long day, and I don't see a great friendship foundation going on here!"
My eyes were, last I checked, awfully red. I hoped my anger got across loud and clear. If that didn't, then the renewed glow the gemstone on my left hand was making certainly did.
He put his bow back up, for whatever amount of good that'd do for him. I still had the gem, and I felt I could defend with it. Modulate the output and go for a non-lethal blow, if I could.
I… didn't appreciate being shot, but maybe I was the one in the wrong here?
"You descended from the sky as a fiery, baleful phantasm unto the bed of Never Lake! Am I not to assume you sought to violate and despoil its serene beauty to fuel your dark magicks, Overland warlock most foul and unseeming?"
He called me what now?
At that moment, my logical brain stopped proofreading the words coming out of my mouth.
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm not going to be talked down to by a funny animal that doesn't wear pants!"
The rodent drew closer, standing atop his bow so he could get up in my face. He could only get so close to me without poking the arrow he put there.
"Sheathe thine sharp tongue, you plague-marked mage of ill repute!"
If that was the game we were going to play, I knew just the way to escalate.
I bit my thumb at him.
His furious scowl widened.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he asked angrily.
"I do bite my thumb, sir."
They called Shakespeare's works the classics for a reason, and the reason was applicability. I appreciated my psychotic episode for going along with the bit.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he repeated, angrier still.
Gregory wasn't here, so we had to skip his lines.
"No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir--!"
"HALT!"
Neither of us were able to get another word in. The prior atmosphere was utterly disrupted by the arrival of three steel goliaths from out of the woodwork. They were all nearly twice my height and fairly uniform in construction, seeming right at home on the budget of a shoestring sci-fi production. Built with a minimum of moving parts, the giants were covered in heavy plates of armor that bowled over pine, stone, and shrub. Each was armed with thick bars of metal that functioned as crude clubs in their weighty hands.
A trio of blood red, cyclopean visors glared down at us, followed by a litany of the local equivalents of the Miranda Rights projected through cheap voice synthesizers. If they had accents like the shrew, then they were mangled by the modulator.
"ROB O' THE HEDGE AND UNIDENTIFIED COLLABORATOR. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO NOT RESIST THE WILL OF THE HIGH SHERIFF. I REPEAT. DO NOT RESIST."
"Are those robots?" I squealed out in incredulous, barely-restrained indignation.
Not at all drones. Robots.
This whole day that had been panic, terror, screaming, and agony. One crisis after the other. Now? Even more confusion. All questions, no answers. I was so fed up with all of this, so lacking in context that I couldn't even begin to compartmentalize all of these mental stress fractures in my head. It was a dam about to burst, and I didn't know where the water was going next.
The teal humanoid -- Rob was what they called him -- lept away from me and stood in a combat position atop a tall stone. I couldn't tell which part of those things would be vulnerable to a humble arrow, at a glance. The eye, perhaps?
"Verily!" he replied, switching out the broadhead for one with a round, threaded head from his quiver. "These mechanical miscreants are the shock-troopers of the Sheriff! I know not your intentions, pilgrim, but surely you can recognize the need for--"
I growled, and the gemstone projected a conical ray of light. The ray coalesced into a large, translucent left hand, which wrapped itself around the body of the robot nearest to me. With a thought, I clenched the giant fist, crushing everything encased beneath it into scrap metal and glitter dust. The robot's head spun straight up into the air before landing on the refuse pile.
"…Cooperation."
♦ 82
The two that remained started blankly at their very destroyed comrade, before raising their metal clubs and slowly ambling towards me.
"UNIDENTIFIED MISCREANT IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ENGAGING WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."
What did that guy call me? A warlock?
I didn't know if what I was doing was some kind of magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, but whatever it was, it was working. For my next trick, I focused on a rough circle around the two robots, and set it ablaze with iridescent flame. Pillars of fire rose above the robots, freezing in place and solidifying as a jagged crystal cage that surrounded them on all sides.
♦ 80
"Now that's what I'm talking about!"
The rest of this trouble, I could do without, but the power? No complaints thus far. Since he recognized them, I looked around for where Rob went, to see if he might be able to explain more about where these things came from. For better or worse, they may have been able to point me in the direction of civilization.
My celebration was short-lived. There was a loud clatter like shattering glass, and the two robots used their iron clubs to smash free from their sparkling prison. I'd clearly underestimated their speed, because they closed the gap into melee range in under two strides. Their sudden blitz threw me on the backfoot, but I had enough time to raise a barrier of pink light between me and the wrecking force of their blows.
♦ 78
Fragments of that interposing wall scattered over the ground, as I was tossed reeling into a sheer stone wall. It felt like they'd knocked something loose with that heavy blow, and it wasn't a stronger tolerance for pain.
"Would you cut that out?!" I called out to them, nearly breathless, but with enough air left to loudly complain.
There was a pause in their combat routine. A stall, as the two robots neared closer. If one blast worth five 'points' was enough to take out a satellite, then I should be able to beat them, but what if I wasted too much power doing it? On the other hand, could I afford to wait until they called for reinforcements from that Sheriff guy? Could I afford to risk being tagged by someone who might like enforcing high taxes with killer robots?
Eventually, the robots formulated a response.
"REQUEST DENIED."
They readied their blunt instruments, to pick up where they left off, when the path of the farthest one was intercepted by an arrow striking its foot from the trees. It was the round arrow from before. Instead of piercing armor, it exploded into a bundle of twine that got caught between the giant's lumbering limbs and caused it to tumble to the ground with a heavy clunk. Another arrow with a red tip flew out from the forest and detonated on impact, scattering the robot's head and shoulders across the clearing.
Well. I took back what I said about the arrows being ineffective.
With that robot down, I was forced into close combat with the last one. It swung its rebar beatstick left, then right, causing me to flinch and propel myself away with long, unbalanced jumps. Being yanked around on invisible wires was the closest thing I could do to flying while under duress.
I hadn't been in a fight in well over a decade. Not a real one. For that, I was grateful. Nevertheless, there were moments where you were glad that the human body was always ready to make cortisol. For moments where keeping your blood pumping was the priority, and common decency went out the window.
For what it was worth, I lost that fight. This time, I wouldn't.
Kicking off against a rocky spire, I rocketed off towards my next victim with a left hook that exploded into a shotgun blast of pressurized pink mist. The wave of vibrant energy bowled the machine over, a spiky layer of magenta crystal forming over the head and trunk in the shape of a frozen splash.
"Ha! Try breaking out of that, you tin-plated git!"
♦ 76
The robot's thick fingers dragged coarsely across the surface of the crystal shell, too stiff to hold on as it futilly attempted to scrape free. Not wanting to risk whether it could actually accomplish the deed, I conjured a broad cylinder of solid light and drove it straight down on the robot's head. The result was a total flattening and a satisfying crush where a mechanical brain might've been. Brain or not, the body stopped functioning when its head was squashed into a solid disk.
♦ 75
"Aha! I got 'em all!" I pumped a first out in the air, but once the deed was done, all that remained in the forest was an eerie silence. "Hello? Anyone still out there?"
With nothing else to fight, and everything seeming to calm down, the adrenaline started to bleed out of my body. The gemstone still had most of its power left to burn, but I sure as hell had run dry. I fell to my knees, exhaustion returning to wreck its vengeance once I'd run out of targets. Worried about falling on top of it, I yanked the broadhead out of my chest with all of the force I still had to muster.
It was a drastic act of delirium, which caused me to pass out from shock. The last thing I saw was the ruby-red glaze of the arrow, smeared across my hazy vision. After I collapsed, the last thing I heard was a distant voice murmuring poetic in my ear.
"At ease, overlander. Any foe of the Sheriff is a friend of mine."
---
I've been at this for a while, huh?
The first chapter of Ruby Haze was put online in 2020. Which, geez, was years back! I was much less seasoned as a writer, and it showed. It's kinda difficult for me to go back and read my old stuff… which is why I kept putting off the inevitable rewrites for later.
You see, due to me often being split between other obligations over the past couple years (mostly work, but also other writing projects that demanded my attention more than Ruby Haze did), my writing skill has greatly outpaced my ability to actually, well, write this. As such, the quality of the earlier chapters and those that came later can get pretty jarring. Talking to my friends about how rough the beginning was compared to my later output was enough to convince me that I'd put off doing rewrites for the earlier chapters for long enough. It was an uphill battle to read my old work and get this new Chapter 1 out, but I can easily say I'm proud of it as a refurbishment of Ruby Haze's opening.
I put this up as a new threadmark so people could judge the quality for themselves before I did a full-on replacement of the original first chapter. If there's approval, then I can do the switch-up and leave a link to the old one in the author notes.
My game plan is to do one rewrite for every new chapter of Ruby Haze, until the quality of the older chapters reaches parity with the rest. Which might take a couple for me to be satisfied, but the good news is that you get touched-up versions of the start.
Additionally, my friend and I started work on a collaborative Friend Insert in which he is inserted into Archie Sonic as a Metal Sonic. Please keep an eye out for Dead Metal in the future, because we'll start posting when the backlog is further along.
The first chapter of Ruby Haze was put online in 2020. Which, geez, was years back! I was much less seasoned as a writer, and it showed. It's kinda difficult for me to go back and read my old stuff… which is why I kept putting off the inevitable rewrites for later.
You see, due to me often being split between other obligations over the past couple years (mostly work, but also other writing projects that demanded my attention more than Ruby Haze did), my writing skill has greatly outpaced my ability to actually, well, write this. As such, the quality of the earlier chapters and those that came later can get pretty jarring. Talking to my friends about how rough the beginning was compared to my later output was enough to convince me that I'd put off doing rewrites for the earlier chapters for long enough. It was an uphill battle to read my old work and get this new Chapter 1 out, but I can easily say I'm proud of it as a refurbishment of Ruby Haze's opening.
I put this up as a new threadmark so people could judge the quality for themselves before I did a full-on replacement of the original first chapter. If there's approval, then I can do the switch-up and leave a link to the old one in the author notes.
My game plan is to do one rewrite for every new chapter of Ruby Haze, until the quality of the older chapters reaches parity with the rest. Which might take a couple for me to be satisfied, but the good news is that you get touched-up versions of the start.
Additionally, my friend and I started work on a collaborative Friend Insert in which he is inserted into Archie Sonic as a Metal Sonic. Please keep an eye out for Dead Metal in the future, because we'll start posting when the backlog is further along.
♦ Want to support my work? ♦
PATREON | KO-FI
♦ Join the W2 Workshop Zone for previews and updates! ♦
W2 Workshop Zone Discord
PATREON | KO-FI
♦ Join the W2 Workshop Zone for previews and updates! ♦
W2 Workshop Zone Discord
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: CaptNameless, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
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