Hello World

I woke from a dream of a lifetime with a gasp to a world devoid of saturation as my bleary eyes took in my surroundings. My body felt stiff and numb as I blinked my vision back into focus; the groan I let out when I moved to sit up sounded distant and muted. The sweat that drenched me made my white shirt stick to me uncomfortably.

The insane dream still weighed heavily on my mind, making it difficult to focus my thoughts on anything beyond the sensations. I was only further disoriented to find myself lying on a hard stone floor, smooth but not cold. I tried my best to remember what happened before the dream, where I was, and who I was, but nothing came to mind about what preceded it.

I sat with my head clutched in my hands, my elbows resting on my raised knees as I tuned everything out and focused on my thoughts. I could remember a surprising amount of my dream, far more than usual, even though that usual stems purely from my experiences within my dream.

Twenty-odd years I lived in that dream, if I were to count the long-forgotten toddler years and fragments of my childhood. I could only recall what the dream-me could remember at the end, which was an anticlimactic finish of simply returning home from yet another stressful job interview.

Screw those parents. Good riddance.

I would almost be inclined to call the entire experience a nightmare if it were not for my social life and close friends. I felt somewhat bittersweet about the dream ending, especially since it had not reached its conclusion. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so I was inclined to think of it as a positive one.

The most insane part of it was the realism and consistency. I can't remember anything that would only be possible in a dream. How long was I even asleep?

This thought prompted me to finally figure out what was actually happening around me. Casting my gaze around, the stone surface I was lying on was circular and surrounded by battlements, with nothing rising above them from my current vantage point. A set of double doors stood open to my left, leading to a circular staircase downward. The whole aesthetic and architecture screamed medieval castle, but unblemished by time. As I turned to look behind me, a few paces away stood a woman in a long, brown coat covered in large pockets, with red, wavy hair that fell to the middle of her back. She faced away from me, her arms outstretched to... something in the sky.

Towering above us was what I could only discern as a massive glowing circular shape, but my eyes refused to focus on it. Even as I squinted and alternated closing an eye, all I saw was the sky behind whatever it was, even though I knew there should be something else I was looking at. The closest thing I could liken it to was an optical illusion of two distinct objects, but no matter how hard you tried, you just could not get your eyes and brain to see the other one.

My efforts were not in vain, however, as I discovered something I could focus on. Thin rainbow strings of light were dancing at the edges of the anomaly, their other end dissipating near the woman's outstretched hands. As I watched in fascination, every so often she would pull them taut, and the edges of the thing in the sky would shrink by a fraction, before they began weaving again.

I did not want to disturb whatever was going on, but in the silence, she heard me standing up as my dress shoes scuffed the stonework, turning her head around as I got to my feet without a hitch in her work.

She had a stern look to her, broken only for a moment with a flash of worry as her verdant green eyes scanned me over briefly. Then she said something to me in a language that I could not even guess which one it might have been.

"Uh, English? Do you speak English?" I asked tentatively, a brief worry rising, but it was thankfully quickly dispelled.

"Right, right. Of course it would be." Her face contorted in apparent displeasure, and she muttered something under her breath, which I would have bet was a swear in whatever language she had spoken earlier, before letting out a defeated sigh. "Come lend me your hands so I don't have to stand here for the next few hours. I need this thing at my hip refilled."

I inspected the item in question, which was hanging on her left hip from a leather shoulder strap, as I approached. It was like an oversized hip flask, but with an absurd number of arts and crafts projects stuck to it in lumps, featuring drawings, markings, liveries, engravings, and a mishmash of materials used in its assembly. As I gingerly raised it, I found the metal screw-on top along with a narrow glass window marking in a measurement system I did not recognize.

"Unscrew the top and fill it with two of the blue liquids on the left-hand side of the rack," she indicated with her gaze the line of glass tubes by her feet, held in a wooden rack of two rows. Sixteen bottles in total, clustered in groups of four, with blue, purple, red, and blue again, from left to right. "Use the funnel and try not to get any on your skin."

I followed her instructions, grabbing the small glass funnel that was lying beside the rack, along with two of the unlabeled, blue, corked tubes. As soon as I was done filling up the flask and screwed the top back on, I felt it heating up in my hands and let it go. The liquid had begun to glow slightly within the glass slit of the flask, and I could visibly see the tension in her body leaving as her posture became more relaxed.

"Much appreciated," she said as she yanked and tugged much harder at the prismatic threads than before. "This won't take much longer now. How are you feeling?"

"Somewhat lightheaded and very disoriented," I answered honestly. "What the hell is that?"

It took her a moment to respond, staring up in silence, keeping her gaze away from me. "It was meant to be a portal, but turned into a rip between realities. I'll admit it's wholly my bad, and I'll do what I can to make things right."

Portal? Realities?

Just as I processed her words, my thoughts turned to the dream that was still heavily on my mind, and I was about to respond when she turned to me with an awkward-looking smile.

"Try to think of this as a sudden, unplanned trip to an alternate reality with magic you get to enjoy for a few..." She paused, the smile replaced with contemplation and worry before continuing. "For some time. Definitely fixable, though. Welcome to Aeteria?"

I had the sinking feeling that something was very wrong with my memory. If that dream had been my life until now, the reality I had come from, the question of who I was seemed far more important than where I was right now.

"I'm Eloise Snow, by the way. I'd offer you a hand, but I am currently elbow deep in the bowels of reality."

The ridiculousness of that statement being potentially true left me stunned for a moment, all I could respond with was the only name I knew, "Elliot. Elliot Decker."