Time grew long here. I did not know exactly how. But when a door hissed open and footsteps clanked into the corridor all the cells faced it had been hours, surely. A golden-skinned robot with a shiny face surveyed the cells studiously. It was dressed in a proper suit and doublet like a butler. I almost thought it wasn’t a robot, but it definitely was. It had ear-length brown hair and brown artificial eyes. One of them flickered a bit blue beneath the surface.

  It emitted a puff of steam, and dipped into a bow.

  “Welcome, esteemed guest. My master invites you to dinner. Do you accept?”

  “Um…Yes!”

  The robot moved on, and gave a similar ultimatum to Clorandine and Drajan. Then it began to leave, but turned back.

  “There’s one catch, though. You won’t be able to kill one another. I trust that won’t be a problem?”

  “I’m good if he is,” I said defensively.

  “We will have a truce for now Daniel. But don’t think I’ve forgotten the lost members of the Crab Crew.”

  The cell doors hissed open suddenly.

  “Come along, then,” the robot called.

  It tottered into the hall, where we followed it as it wandered. What else were we supposed to do? I guess I could just try to leave, but I at least wanted to rescue Clorandine at this point.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Dandelion 2.0,” the robot called back.

  Hm, I thought, lost in memory. Dandelion was a name my brother had called me…

  “Psst! Daniel. Wrong way!” Clorandine called.

  She had light purple hair and wore short flowing blue-indigo silks with jellyfish on them and leggings. At her side she carried a sheathed katana. Why hadn’t she been involved in that all-on-Brufo fight back at Stonestomach? I didn’t remember seeing her. I gulped, and decided to not ask that right now.

  The room Dandelion 2.0 brought us to was no dining room. More like a dressing room. There were closets and mirrors.

  “Not you,” he said to Clorandine. “There is a ladies’ section.”

  Leaving Drajan and I to get dressed awkwardly. I started looking through the selection which was mostly garish tuxedos and blazers.

  “Do you wear this kind of stuff?” I asked Drajan awkwardly.

  He immediately slithered over. I did not know he could move that fast or…dexterously but he slithered snakelike right under the clothes racks we were browsing through and pinned me against the wall. When he opened his mouth, poison dripped.

  “Just because we have a truce does not mean you are my friend, Daniel. You would do well to remember that.”

  I spent the rest of the time getting dressed in silence then stood in the hall in a silver tux waiting for the others. Drajan joined me soon in a classic tux, then Clorandine came in a pale yellow gown that was very striking. Dandelion 2.0 turned the corner and clapped his hands.

  “Very good! You didn’t take forever, or kill one another. Master will be very pleased. Come, come.”

  Not yet, I thought, glancing distrustfully at Drajan. But I went along and the only weapon I wielded at dinner was a knife.

  The dining room’s ceiling was lined with piping like the interior of a great engine. Gears set into the walls ticked and groaned here. It seemed performative, but was obviously just part of the rhythm of this great machine, and it was honestly really cool. A round table of polished brown wood awaited us, with twelve chairs set out. There were only three plates set.

  Well, three plates for us. At the far end of the table a golden throne hovered with an old man seated on it or encased in it. He had messy white hair and wore a gem-filled golden crown.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he called. “M’terribly sorry about the hassle. Protocols, you see. Chef! Chef! Are preparations nearly complete?!?”

  Dandelion 2.0 leaned in. “Reminder: this Chef version is not able to communicate at all. We disabled that feature since Chef 1.4.”

  “Ah yes, I recall,” the old man cackled. “The infamous [Cursed Cheese] Incident.”

  Dandelion 2.0 shuddered. “It was a terrible day.”

  The old man turned his eyes to us, looking at Drajan, Clorandine, then me. “Welcome, esteemed guests. I suppose the Chef 4.4 or whatever the aether will have the dinner out soon. Until then, tell what’s so special about any of you all? The driften’s following something you’ve got…ehhh…!?!”

  He seemed to have a spasm when he looked at me properly. He looked a little familiar to me, but I couldn’t really place it, and he seemed like he would have looked really out of place in Aeven. That’s the only place here I had a chance to see a lot of people…

  “Ehehhehhn. Excuse me. I’m Arthur, True King of the Kingdom of Avalos. And you are…?”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Daniel,” I supplied. “I’m from a faraway place nobody has heard of.”

  “Clorandine,” said Clorandine. “I’m from Bel Shimbar.”

  “Oh, enchanted,” said Arthur, hovering over and kissing her hand.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Clorandine said as he hovered back to his seat. “I’ve a fiance.”

  The food started to come out. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and steamed multicolored carrots. That Chef 1.5 or whatever was certainly efficient and blazing fast. He set down the gravy so quickly that a big spot of it spilled on the table. No matter. I tossed my napkin down when it was apparent he wouldn’t clean it.

  When Arthur noticed me trying to clean up the spill he wouldn’t have it. “Sylve!” he called. “Come clean this up at once!”

  Prompting another golden robot this one in a maid’s uniform and female styled to come and begin mopping the table. We were digging in pretty good. Even Drajan I noticed was enjoying it. Despite his surly attitude he wasn’t too good for fried chicken. He even consumed the bones.

  But when he finished he cleared his throat with a flare of acid and said, “King Arthur. This man that eats before you is part of the crew that destroyed Stonestomach.”

  Arthur’s jaw dropped open mid-bite. “You? Are you s--serious Daniel?”

  “My crew did it, but it was in self defense. They’re raiders, they were trying to steal our ship and they wanted to take us captive!”

  “Well that’s that then.” Drajan began to protest but Arthur raised a finger to shush him. “That’s enough Drajan. So, are you all thinking you’re close to finding the driften?”

  “To be honest I don’t think any of us know about a driften. I know I don’t,” I lied. Better to not mention anything about being a Driften Waker.

  “Oh really?” the old king said. “It’s funny you say that Daniel. You don’t know this about me, but my first class is a [Reality Scientist]. With the [Stat Scan] skill I can see your stat block, and I know by reading it, here and now, that sitting before me is the answer to the question I am asking.”

  “Uhn…you mean that my class is named [Driften Waker]?”

  Clorandine and Drajan gasped.

  “Precisely! So what driften are you chasing, [Driften Waker]?”

  “Dude, I mean King Arthur, I’m gonna be one hundred percent real with you. I do Not. Know. what a driften is. I was basically born into this world a little over a week ago.”

  Clorandine gasped again softly at that admission, then poured herself more wine.

  “Fascinating,” Arthur said. “Not like I have been chasing this moment my whole life or anything, so yeah.”

  He snapped his fingers and gestured at the cups and circled. Dandelion 2.0 came with another carafe of red.

  “Please, friends, drink and be merry! I lied, by the way, haha. The driften coming back now makes absolute sense! since I see a bonafide [Driften Waker] among us, and Daniel to boot!”

  “The driften are ancient spirits,” Clorandine explained to me. “It is said there are eight driften, each one dwelling in a deep place of Weywyrd, such as the Great Abalone Sky.”

  “The driften of the Great Abalone is what we’re after,” Arthur murmured. “Or what’s after us.”

  “I take it you have intimate experience with this driften?” Clorandine asked sharply.

  “Intimate? Hell--I mean aether--no!”

  Drajan frowned at the foreign word. “Hell?”

  “Er.” Arthur coughed. “Anyway. I’m an old man, and so forth, so my wits no longer abide me. Ahah. Chef! Let’s have the chocolate lava cake!”

  I thought back to the thing Kola Junior had shown me in his telescope from Aeven’s harbor. “I saw a big creature back in Aeven. Out among the Great Abalone Sky. It swam up and made the stars look different. It looked like stars.”

  “I’m gonna be real with you Daniel,” King Arthur said. “The driften of the Great Abalone Sky must be looking for you. Do you wanna meet him or her?”

  “Honestly I really should just get back to my friends and crew.”

  “Yeah…”

  King Arthur smiled strangely at me. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Dandelion, Drajan--yeah you too Clorandine--just give us the room for a sec will you?”

  Everyone awkwardly got up and left. Clorandine gave me a sympathetic glance, Drajan a menacing one.

  “I’ve missed you…big bro,” Arthur said slyly.

  “Wait…what?”

  My mind whirled, but there was only one person who called me Big Bro. It was my little brother Arthur, from Earth. I looked again at the old man’s face and perceived him differently. The web of time disappeared. It was him, deep in there, though I barely recognized him now. One of his eyes was robotic.

  “Whoa, I feel like I’m about to pass out Arthur. Is that really you? Can I touch your face?”

  “It’s really me, heh, I just look a little worse for the wear. Time does that, you know how it is. Ah, maybe you don’t. So it’s just been like a week since you saw me last?”

  I nodded. “I remember being on the phone with you when--my car crashed…” I trailed off.

  Arthur explained eagerly, hovering his throne around to be close to me. It was a custom, metal, hovering golden throne with many compartments of unknown function.

  After I died, Arthur wasn’t satisfied with the official answers. Especially the fact that no trace of my body was ever produced. They said it can happen, if the fire burned hot enough, which apparently this one did. Still. The cell phone, though partially melted, had some oddities to it, but nothing he could put his finger on.

  Arthur poured himself into his schooling. He studied chemistry, branched to physics, and never gave up on studying the data he had from the crash scene. There was a cluster of data loaded in the cell phone that proved most curious to him, but officially they thought the data was mostly gone due to fire damage.

  Arthur pushed on, kept studying some field called differential equations, and linear algebra, and up the tree of math to some stuff that I could barely pronounce honestly.

  And all that stuff on its own was a dead end. An absolute, killer tree dead end. Where he hit the jackpot was temperature transitions. He worked out the melting temperature of my car. It turns out a cell phone when heated makes a special field, and the temperature it’s heated to affects the qualities of the field.

  “That is to say,” Arthur explained, “that when I recreated the results in a laboratory, heh, heating a circuit to the melting point of your car, I was able to actually create a [Harmony Gate] to cross into Weywyrd. I can’t go back, since I don’t have a quality lab on this side haha. Or access to some of the more arcane materials.”

  “What about back on Earth? What was it like 2090 or whatever?”

  “2100 actually. I made sure to erase my tracks. I knew exactly what I was doing big bro. I was looking for you!”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but honestly Arthur? It’s not really cool to abduct someone from their ship even if it a long lost family reunion!”

  Arthur’s face fell. “You’re right, I’ve become a little barbaric in this barbaric land. Will you forgive me? I will try to be a great king!”