EMMA

  Emma was trapped, sweat-soaked and baking in a scratchy cocoon with a dry mouth, but her eyes refused to open. At least, until her fitful turning shoved hair up her nose and past her lips. That was an interruption worth more tossing, and some spluttering.

  After that, sitting up was inevitable, especially with the sensation of damp denim digging into her waistline.

  Pulling strands of her own hair from her mouth and watching it drop unceremoniously to rest on her sweatshirt woke her up the rest of the way. Emma tried not to scream as she took in the unfamiliar space, with gray light now streaming past the slats in the closed shutters, flickering candlelight illuminating the other half of the room, and occasional splatters of rusty brown staining the floorboards.

  Her hair was falling out, they were trapped in some stranger's bloodstained hunting lodge with no food and water, and the world had ended.

  The nightmare had been real.

  "Hey, you're finally awake."

  Calen's nonchalant drone drifted over from the brighter side of the room, dragging Emma out of her horrified stupor.

  "Welcome back to the land of the living, sleeping beauty. I was almost out of patience."

  At least one thing hadn't changed.

  "Patience for what?" Emma asked, and felt a scowl creep across her face. "If you woke me up just to test whether—"

  Calen waggled his fingers while he waved her off.

  "I can see my own. I know it's real. But this door is—"

  Calen's shoulder thudded against the wood, which clacked back and forth in the frame once, when he impacted it.

  "—still stuck tight," Calen grunted. "Even if I'm willing to make noise about it, apparently. It's not latched though, something is holding it in place."

  A few more thuds echoed, but the slab of oak rebounded each time, and the little idiot came away rubbing his shoulder.

  Emma tossed the borrowed blanket off herself, and indulged in a yawn as she rolled off the scratchy mattress. Her entire body ached in a way that screamed of sickness, rather than a workout, but her limbs functioned, and she wasn't actually sweating. Her clothes were just still a little damp from last night, despite the heat of the room.

  Emma ran her fingers up over her forehead, the nervous gesture stripping away more of her hair follicles. She clenched her jaw on a sob. Emma didn't have access to a mirror, but her scalp was feeling a little too breezy, and she had apparently left a mess on the borrowed pillow behind her.

  "Should you really be fighting a building right now?" She asked, pulling her hood up. "There has to be something better to do first thing in the morning."

  Like eating breakfast. Dying was hungry work.

  "Em the sun has been up for hours, it's just cloudy out and I left the shutters closed," Calen chattered, seemingly immune to the criticism and oblivious to the signs for now. "Really cloudy, I think it's raining already. Oh, and I already did all the interesting stuff. Except search the rafters, they've got stuff stored up there I can't reach. Wanna see what I did find though?"

  "More interesting than your newly 'magical' fingers?" Emma asked, using her own fingers to put air quotes around the question. "Is it food? Where's Mr. Isaacson?"

  Calen's expression soured at the mention of their neighbor, for some reason.

  "He's asleep in a chair downstairs, I left him to it. I found more maybe-magic. And also evidence of either time travel, or space travel. Time travel takes space travel anyway, right? I dunno." Calen shrugged. "Come see, that's what I actually wanted to show you when you woke up."

  Emma pushed her sleeves back past her elbows as she stood up.

  "We know space travel exists you dork, we did it. Badly. Too much orbital debris was half the problem by the end." Emma said.

  Addressing the idea of time travel being real would just give him wiggle room to say the word magic. Unless the dork could produce a UFO or an alien species, she was staying skeptical on the 'space travel.'

  And if he had some kind of weird animal stashed under a blanket, she wanted to know about it before it tried to escape, or eat them.

  Calen scowled, and picked up a tall, thin stick he had leaned against the wall in the bright side of the room.

  "I meant evidence we might have traveled through space to get here. I just didn't want to say aliens until I had a little green man to show you," Calen said. "No more lectures. Less yap, more looking at the funny tools people would totally leave laying around on Earth."

  He rapped the wooden shaft on the floor lightly and pointed at the shining bronze spearpoint at the top of the stick.

  Emma's comment about which one of them really liked to yap more died in her throat.

  Nicks and scratches marred the beaten surface of the bladed weapon, but nothing about it screamed 'space travel' to Emma. Unless he meant—

  "You really think this is another planet because you got glowy stuff on your hands turning the heat up too high, and found a medieval weapon," Emma scowled. "A spear that aliens capable of abducting us would totally still use, if they had the technology to solve all the problems with galaxy-hopping."

  "Glowy stuff on my hands and eyeballs, but only when you squint at me and look for magic, thank you very much," Calen sassed right back. "And bronze isn't even medieval era. If this is bronze and not some ridiculous super-alloy. Oh, and there's an axe, and more runes, and the—"

  Calen dumped a series of objects on the bed he had clearly slept in while he listed them. He had clearly spent the entire morning gathering evidence and planning his sales pitch, so Emma let him get it out of his system.

  Even if his eyes weren't glowing or fuzzing at all when she squinted at him. His hands still had a little orange to them, but it was harder to see in the light.

  "—I'm pretty sure these are throwing knives, I found a few of them downstairs, and the points kind of fit into those marks on the closet door. Like someone used it for target practice," He jabbered on. "I didn't figure out what the leather patches were for, but like half the boxes had them. There's some sort of shiny letter into them, hand-stitched, and they've all got rocks with a little bit of lacquer over them like, embedded through the center between the layers."

  Emma took the little leather square and turned it over, but other than the metallic-looking stitched symbol, and the painted rock, there was nothing remarkable about it.

  Except how weird it was, but whoever had built this place was weird, and clearly had some fascination with weird objects and strange architecture. Almost like—

  "Movie set. We're on an old movie set, Calen," Emma realized. "These are props. We just need to find the road and—"

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  "Bullshit."

  Calen grabbed at the weird square thing and chattered on before she could reprimand him for the cursing.

  "Watch this," He said. "With your eyes... do the thing. See how those lines almost kind of fill, if I shove mana through it?"

  Emma managed to avoid rolling her eyes when Calen said 'mana', like this was one of his games. She was too busy trying not to freak out at the way his eyes glowed now, when they were both looking at the little leather patch he had touched.

  "How are you doing that?" She demanded.

  The threads had lit up, and the stone in the middle fuzzed like tv static when Emma squinted, but she was more worried about whatever was happening to his face. The static over his eyes had intensified drastically when she squinted to look at the leather patch.

  Calen's eyes shouldn't look like TV static at all.

  "Same way you are," Calen shrugged. "Looking like I wanted to find something. When I did it with the heat, I got my fingers to turn orange, and it like, took the power more efficiently, but this thing, my fingers go numb way before it fills up at all. So I think it needs a different kind of power, and maybe that's why—"

  "Stop. Stop. Stop. Your fingers went numb and you kept doing it?" Emma asked. "Calen what if it gives you like... super cancer, or something? You're doing it with your face."

  Calen's eyes didn't fall out or melt or slough down his face when he rolled them.

  "Then I've got a lot of super-cancer in my eyes, because I've spent the entire morning checking what else in here is magic. But you believe me now, since you're so worried?" Calen demanded, missing the point.

  "No!" Emma scowled, starting to believe him a little bit as she snatched the stitched leather back to examine. "I'm just saying... be careful, because I don't not believe you that there's something going on. But I want to know what, before you play with it for fun, in case it's dangerous."

  Emma leaned a little closer to the candlelit side of the room to examine the object in the light. She didn't want to have to tell Mr. Isaacson that they were checking on the 'magic' box under the stairs before she knew more about what was going on.

  Calen put one hand over his heart, and the other rested on her shoulder gently while Emma frowned down at the object.

  "That was a lot of words for 'Sorry I was a jerk', but I forgive you, Em." He mocked, pitching his voice higher in a mimicry that sounded nothing like how she would apologize for something.

  Emma debated punching him. Just a little. But her hands were busy opening the shutter for better light.

  He was being way too casual about things to let him be the only source of information about whatever weird technology was making both of their heads look fuzzy, and maybe keeping Emma's organs from melting.

  The combination of the spear he was now distracted playing with and 'magic' might make him assume things worked like one of his games, in a really dangerous way, and she wouldn't be able to stop him if she had no idea what was going on.

  The little lacquered bead of metal sewn into the middle of the patch stayed dull when Emma poked it from either side, and the copper-colored threads making up the weird symbol had a slight green patina, which might mean they were actual copper.

  Taking her eyes off the strange object left Emma looking out the window, down the hill they had climbed, and brought home the idea that they might be somewhere truly alien more than any of the random objects Calen had collected.

  "Calen... if we say you're right, do you think the— do you think mom and dad are here?" Emma heard herself ask.

  Actually saying aliens would be silly, until they saw aliens.

  Even if those pine trees with the rounded, puffy tops definitely didn't grow anywhere in North America naturally.

  Calen stayed quiet while rain pinged off the clay tiles above their heads.

  "Not like, here-here, but somewhere?" Emma prodded. "Even if... even if you're wrong, and the world biggest chicken is somewhere in those woods?"

  Making the joke was easier than asking the real question. Asking whether they were alive, out loud. Calen would understand.

  She turned around, and he was back over on the bed, poking at the bandolier of weirdly shaped knives when he answered.

  "Even if we end up catching a ride to a bunker and find out it's just brain damage, you mean," He scowled a little at first, but went back to talking through it. "There'll be refugee lists on Earth. If there's still... I guess checking is on the agenda no matter what, huh?"

  The optimistic note in his voice at the end rang hollow as he caught up with her implication.

  They were refugee lists Calen and Emma wouldn't be on, if Calen was right, but mom and dad were still on Earth checking. And since Emma was their ticket to a bunker, if they had been split up—

  "Checking is on the agenda." Emma repeated, controlling her breathing.

  The wind rattled the shutters, and she turned back around for the fresh air, keeping her count until her pulse stopped hammering in her ears.

  They still had to survive whatever amount of radiation poisoning they had, first. And get out of the forest before someone came to check on the fighting.

  Unless waiting for someone to find them was a better idea. Maybe there was food somewhere in the building, and river water wasn't exactly sanitary, but they could probably find a way to boil some, and—

  "So, simulation, afterlife, or aliens?" Calen interrupted Emma's thought process. "How do we test this without a particle collider?"

  The question was ridiculous enough to jolt her out of the spiral.

  "Find people and ask them if we're on Earth, dummy," Emma said. "Or let them find us. We'll find out really quickly either way once we do."

  "That sounds way easier than my idea. If they speak English. Or like, Spanish."

  She briefly turned her head at a metallic pinging, and watched Calen catch something metal. He had found a coin of some type to flip somewhere, about the size of a quarter, but thicker, and brass instead of the familiar silvery sheen of nickel.

  He must be having trouble with the balance, if he was using two hands to catch it.

  "Your job if they do." She told him.

  "You're still a huge nerd for taking Latin."

  Emma rolled her eyes and turned back to the window, leaning out into the breeze to remind herself that the walls weren't closing in on her.

  The pattering rain drove her back inside almost immediately, the sensation of a fat raindrop on a mostly-bare patch of her scalp too jarring for her to risk a second time on purpose.

  "Easy language credit. Half of it was just reading the same myths we covered in English too," Emma said. "And there were... other factors."

  Calen got a lightly lecherous grin beside her.

  "Riiight." Calen leaned on the spear with his arm up high near the point as he stretched the word. "Like having another class with your favorite homework budd— ack."

  Emma elbowed him in the armpit. Lightly. He was just being a baby about it.

  "How did you do it?" She asked, before he could keep prodding at that, and she had to actually think about the moon. "With the heating box downstairs? I want to figure this one out, and you said you can't get it to work. We need a bigger sample size than one, if we're going to actually understand magic."

  Calen swallowed the bait immediately when Emma pulled out the weird leather patch and called it magic. He puffed his chest up proudly and started talking, backing away from her elbows and gesturing to the pile of trash he had assembled.

  "So I spent the other part of the morning tracing the pipes in the floor. Half the heat is getting wasted in the tower we can't get into, but the box first. I thought it was a touch screen when I saw the symbols, like one of those glass ones on a stove, but they were carved into it, not stitched—"

  Emma couldn't help herself, watching him start to strut a little during his explanation.

  She snorted.

  "It had a touch screen? You poked it and it turned on? That's it?" She asked. "This thing isn't working when I do that. And there's no numbers, just the symbol and a rock."

  She giggled a little more as he gawped at her, as if suddenly realizing how silly he sounded.

  "I poked it a few times! There was effort!" He said defensively. "It took me a little while to figure out the numbering system, but that got easier once I could see it consistently. Practice with the eyes thing, I think. Try pushing energy from your fingers into the symbol and thinking about what you want it to do, that's how I got my fingers to change."

  Emma looked down at where her fingers were touching the stitched leather. Nothing special was happening, to it, or her fingers.

  And 'push energy' sounded weird. Was she trying to use her body heat, or friction with the object, or her body's electrostatic field, or slapping it to transfer kinetic energy? What was this weird piece of leather even supposed to do?

  But he had gotten it to partially work, so he was still a step ahead of her.

  "Anything like, specific? Or did you just squint at it a lot and kept poking it until something happened?" Emma asked, before she could get too lost in her own head.

  "Snake."

  Emma's eyes were halfway through tracing the lines on the patch again when Calen interrupted her with a weird tone. She must have pushed the teasing too far, if he was insulting her.

  She had baited him a little bit. But he had been doing the same thing since she woke up. A little teasing back was only fair.

  "Rude," She chided him for taking it too far. "And I didn't mean it like that. But fine, what made it actually—"

  Calen's voice, now panicked, interrupted her.

  "Em, snake!"

  The wooden spear shaft swung down dangerously close to Emma's face as she turned.

  She screamed, but not at the weapon.

  At the vertically set pupils in silver irises, and the flickering forked tongue that almost touched her face.

  A white-scaled viper thicker than her calves was dangling by its tail from the rafters, curling its neck behind a triangular head to strike.

  Calen smashed it sidelong with the weapon, dragging it to the floor.

  Emma stumbled away from the window just in time, losing her balance as she went.

  As she fell to the ground, so too did the rest of the snake.

  Its back half dragged nearly a dozen, more 'normally' sized vipers to thud to the floor in a shower of dust and scales, scattered around the room.

  Emma froze again, levering her head off the ground.

  There was a second massive pale viper slithering out of the rafters.

  And it had two triangular heads, forked from each other by just a few feet of neck.

  Both of them had their eerie silver eyes leveled at Calen.

  mana to mean 'magical power' or 'magical reserves' in western fiction was popularized by author Larry Niven, most famous for publishing the hard sci-fi novel 'Ringworld'. He used the term in his fantasy series, 'The Magic Goes Away', where it was described as an exhaustible resource. The term was then gradually adopted by tabletop and video games, and color-coded blue for visual contrast with generally red health bars in an era where RGB displays were common.