Forty-One Levels Away

by The Exile

A thick mist obscured the peaks of the Hydlide Mountains, a majestic grey-blue mountain range that stretched up, smooth and straight, as far as the eye could see. The silvery moon glinted off the rock, giving it an almost ghostly blue hue.

Two dark eyes watched the people milling around the mountain valley like ants.

Some were guards. They wore leather armour and the brown cloaks that marked them as members of the Department of Emergency Player Characters. There were also haughty, black-robed individuals who the watcher immediately recognised as priests of Capel Datei. The priests and guards were bickering incessantly. The watcher could just about hear what they were saying.

"We're here to investigate complaints about a faulty save point!"

"Oh yeah. Got any ID on you?" demanded the guard, blocking the passage of a priest, who clutched his book and tapped his foot impatiently.

The priest muttered something unpleasant under his breath and reached into his robes for a slip of paper, which he handed to the guard.

"If one save point is faulty, it could take down the entire area." said the priest, "Thousands of people could lose data."

"What kind of moron saves in a flatlined area?" muttered the guard. However, he moved out of the priest's way.

The watcher shifted slightly, hoping that the noise wouldn't carry. She was cramped and uncomfortable wedged behind a rock. Her faded black jeans and white T-Shirt, decorated with the name of an epic metal band, were soaked. More people were moving in. It would soon become too difficult to remain hidden. There was only one thing for it.

She reached into his jeans pocket and retrieved a small black ball-point pen and a notepad. The sigil she drew on the paper was poorly drawn but, hopefully, good enough. A focussed will and a sanity of iron was more important when casting this kind of magic anyway. She licked the back of the paper and stuck it to the rock. Then she grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged herself forwards, towards the rock. As she lost her balance and fell, she did not slam into the rock but instead passed through it with a sound like a wet rip. It was like falling through slick black oil, except that a static shock crackled through her whole body. The smell of cloying, oily taint was overwhelming.

Five seconds later, she emerged on the floor in a blue cavern underneath the mountain pass. She spat and shook herself dry. Silently, she prayed to whatever nameless, gibbering elder gods watched over her that she would never, ever have to forcibly teleport herself anywhere again. She looked down at her hands, imagining that a sooty sheen still lay on them. It wasn't likely.

Following the blazing torches in braziers that lined the wall, she ran down the corridor. Mentally, she counted the doors, stopping at the fourth door on the right and rapping on the gargoyle door knocker. It slid open with a grate that set her teeth on edge.

She stepped into a room that could have contained an entire cathedral. She could not see the ceiling or the other walls, only an endless stone floor, tiled in a checkered pattern of slightly lighter and darker hues of grey-blue. The room was cool and dark in a way that soothed her, a slight breeze making the dank subterranean air more breathable. Music played in the background from a church organ. The acoustics in the room were such that, though it had to be loud indeed to fill the entire room, it sounded soft, ambient, but still powerful. She stood and waited, lowering her bag to the floor.

"I'm home!" she announced.

A few minutes passed before she heard a voice so soft and deep that it was barely recognisable as a voice, sounding more like the yawning of a great beast. A figure stepped out of the darkness. It was twenty feet tall with black scaly skin, bat wings, goat horns and a long, thick lizard-like tail. Its eyes glowed white.

"Hi, dad." she said.

She was lifted from the floor and given a rather scaly hug. Even though the creature was being gentle, she still couldn't breathe.

"Welcome home." boomed the creature.

"Don't say that to an exile, dad. Its bad luck."

"I heard you had returned from exile for good."

"Its more complicated than that, dad."

"This calls for a family reunion." said her father, his pseudo-draconic brain completely missing the fearful tone in his daughter's voice, "I'll send a messenger dragon to your mother and Auntie Warderer and Uncle Tuvajzar and Regina and all your cousins."

"That'll be nice."

"You look like you haven't eaten for a week." said her father, tutting, "Rest and save. I'll find you some cave mushrooms."

She shrugged and walked off to her room, a tiny bedroom in the back of the cave that was covered from floor to ceiling with antique books. She had read most of the collection over her lifetime. It was full of famous level guardian philosophers such as Kaizack. Pulling her soaked boots off, she threw herself down onto the bed.

Welcome home, her father had said. Yeah, right. Here in the caves under South Hydlide, maybe. In the outside world...

Its more complicated than that...

Complications. Administrative complications. Only a few. That was like saying her father's favourite dragon was quite a big newt. She looked back down at her hands, then at her pen, then at the door. The urge to run was a voice that still screamed to her. The longer she stayed here, the more inevitable it was that she would have to explain to her parents - her relatively innocent parents - exactly what had happened. That or lie. She didn't like lying.

Save. Saving was always a sensible thing to do. She opened the door again, wandering out of the room and down the corridor. The third door on the left - that was where the save booth was. She pushed the door open. There was a happy beep from the machine and the door slid shut behind her, leaving her in a small chamber with a stool and a touch screen, not unlike a photo booth. She pressed the 'save' button and was rewarded with an ugly system alert noise. The screen turned red and a sign saying 'Save Point Out Of Order' flashed up. The lights went out.

She swore, more at herself than the machine. She should have remembered the priest's words. She turned around and pressed the release button on the door. Nothing. Oh great, she thought, now I'm stuck in a save booth. She imagined her cousins' faces as they teased her relentlessly about it. She needed to get out before anyone found out. Banging on the door never worked; it would just jam the mechanism even more. A teleport spell? A little too drastic...

DELETING ALL SAVES said a flashing sign on the screen that had suddenly sprung to life again.

"HEY! DON'T YOU DARE! YOU BASTARD!" she screamed, throwing herself at the machine and beating it with her fists. After a few seconds, her rage subsided, replaced with a sudden, cold, all-consuming primordial terror at another noise he heard.

It was the crack of burst pipes.

She stopped and sniffed. The rusty tang of deletory-grade magnetic coolant hung in the dusty air. She was locked in a room that was slowly transforming from a public save booth into a bulk deletion chamber.

Her pen came out of her pocket and a slip of paper slammed onto the screen. She scrawled a rune and focussed all her fear, all her rage, into one stream of dark energy directed at the rune. Wrenching her own arm behind her back, she screamed a word of power and kicked the stool out from underneath his legs.

This time, the crackle was like a surge of lightning that flung him through an endless spiralling void and then down forty feet into a raging black maelstrom. She thrashed her arms and legs, desperately trying to control her descent. Her stomach lurched. She could see where she was heading. Reflected in the tempestuous water, she saw the enormous glass walls and the millions of little twinkling orange lights. This wasn't where she was supposed to go...
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