Summoning (updated)

If I was asked to describe myself, I would say that I like reading.

“Yeah, hobbies are great and all, but what about your personality? Friends? Life story?”

I like reading.

Outside of that, I don’t think there is much to the person that is Chris Mansfield. Sometimes I wish there were more, and sometimes I think there might be more. Ultimately though, just “liking reading” is what feels most comfortable and right to me. When someone tries to start problems, ask invasive questions, or bully me, simply “liking reading” is the blade that I use to defend myself.

“Oh, is that all?”

Liking reading is possibly the most boring and unoffensive trait that a person can possess. For someone to be offended by someone on the basis of them “liking reading” would be tantamount to professing a hatred of civilization itself.

“You hate reading?”

The crowd would turn to them and say. Any attempts to probe deeper into such a shallow statement would be met with suspicion and outrage. For someone to pose a socially acceptable challenge to someone who likes reading, they would have to like reading themselves. And if people who like reading are anything like me, they would never do that. They can’t do that. Well, I can’t at least.

There are lots of good parts about reading, but the best part is not being bothered! An open book is a nearly universally understood, bright neon sign that loudly shouts don’t bother me! At first it was just something I did at home. If I knew that reading a book was a good way to get adults to stop arguing with each other, then I would have started reading novels way before the second grade. People talk about fiction like it’s an escape from your real life, but I did it to make my real life better!

I would sometimes read two or three paperback novels in a day, not because I cared about the characters or world, or anything silly like that. Video games would have “ruined my future”, but reading books gave my family the opposite impression. Someone who reads lots of books is sure to be a good student, and a good student is someone who will succeed at life! Jocks are out, and nerds are in! Quietly, other people’s words began to write over me.

Three years was all it took for my image at school to completely transform from class troublemaker to quiet bookworm. It probably could have happened sooner, but it was hard to completely block out my friends at first. I was no longer the type of kid who started fights. I was now someone who “probably knew the answer” to whatever trivia question someone held. This made my family proud! I had become a good role model for my new little brother, and the standard that would be used to judge him as he grew up!

What does a bookworm grow into, I wondered. A caterpillar secludes itself and emerges as a butterfly. A silkworm turns into a moth. Books should hold some knowledge, so maybe they have some wisdom that I can turn to. What am I turning into, I asked the books, turning through page after page. I figured the books themselves might be flawed, because I found no part of myself in any of the books that I read.

Maybe my parents were right though. Work that other students saw as tedious or difficult felt like things I could do with my eyes closed. They kept on talking about things like feelings, or talent, or even their schedule. All they had to do was simply fill the role of good student. It’s not about liking a subject or caring about it, it is about simply doing the work that is given to you. Somewhere along the way, the boy named Chris Mansfield had disappeared. In his place was a quiet worm which ravenously ate books.

I think everyone liked the worm better than they liked me.

I can’t imagine that anyone noticed when I was summoned to this world. They didn’t notice my absence before anyway. Since I had already disappeared emotionally years ago, my physical body following suit only made sense. To be summoned away from Earth on the last night before my first year of college finals struck me as quite ironic. All that time I spent studying and being a good student on this planet went to waste. Well, I guess it’s not “this planet” anymore. Earth is now “that planet” to me now.

---

I was studying in my room, having planned to stay up until midnight and no later. I knew that studying at this point wouldn’t make any difference, but a “good student” does all sorts of pointless things within reasonable bounds. The discipline and focus that it takes to consistently study was more important than any one study session. Probably.

I had trained myself to not look at my phone until midnight or nearly midnight. My phone had an alarm set to 11:55 PM, and I was expecting it to go off at any minute. I felt like it should have gone off already, but maybe I had forgotten to set my alarm. After a few minutes of anxiously wondering if it was the looming tests causing me to feel so nervous, I decided to finally check my phone. Weirdly, the clock widget on my phone’s home screen did not load.

I tried swiping to get to my phone unlock screen, but the graphic barely nudged. I figured that some dust or smudge was probably interfering with my touchscreen, so I wiped the phone with the edge of my shirt and tried again. My screen still shuddered as if something else was on the screen fighting for control, but with four swipes I was able to finally scroll the screen enough to trigger the password screen. The moment the password prompt and pop-up keyboard appeared, letters and numbers started filling the box.

My phone vibrated as it inputted one, two, and three wrong passwords while I watched in surprise. Worried that my phone would be locked out by whatever went wrong with my touchscreen, I decided to turn off my phone screen. My mind immediately went into damage control mode, estimating how bad it would be if my phone was completely broken. I didn’t necessarily need to make any outgoing calls, and all my social media and games can be accessed through my PC…

I had already preset my phone alarm for the rest of finals week so I didn’t have to worry there. It would be easy to turn off an alarm even with a messed-up touchscreen since there was no need to unlock it. Despite life throwing a curveball at me, I was still in good condition for my finals! Often my meticulousness feels pointless, but it was hard to deny the bit of pride I had felt in my own resilience. With that little ego boost, I went to get ready for bed.

My mirror rattling from the party upstairs normally would annoy me, but by then I was pretty used to my neighbors making noise all through the night. Late night parties and fire alarms going off were such a regular occurrence in this dorm, I wondered if one day I would be nostalgic for it. It would really be a pain if a fire alarm were to go off the night before my Calc II or Physics exam, but honestly I thought it would be more funny than not if one went off tonight while I sat on the toilet listening to the clattering of my mirror.

But it was weird, I realized. I was pretty good at tuning out the sound of the upstairs parties, but honestly I hadn’t heard them partying for a while now. I know they were partying before, but past some point I don’t remember hearing any more of them… So why was that mirror rumbling louder and louder? It wasn’t uncommon for doors and similarly fixed objects to rattle slightly from the vibrations of far-off objects, but still…

As I went to wash my hands, I stared with confusion at the mirror. It just was slightly off. It didn’t make sense. The more I tried to come up with a reason, some theory to explain the mirror, the louder it seemed to grow. My face twisted into a scowl as I failed to make sense of the phenomenon. I grabbed hold of the mirror by its top and bottom edges, a span of about three feet. I could feel the edges of the mirror pulse at my fingertips, and I could not stop the thing from moving.

If it kept vibrating that strongly, it might have fallen off and shattered. Was it an earthquake? Construction? Something? Objects don’t suddenly start shaking without cause! It just doesn’t make sense! I closed my eyes and pulled against the mirror, trying to do anything to get it to stop, even if I had to pull it off the wall to do it. Yet the mirror did not yield. The mirror was flimsily mounted on the wall in the first place. The whole reason that it rattled was its own shoddiness and instability, yet I could not remove it with the force of all my bodyweight? Even more frustrated, I opened my eyes—

And in the mirror, I saw hands. Hands reaching towards me, towards my neck, towards my shoulder, and my arms. I was surrounded by hands.

I flinched and turned around, finding… nothing. The hands I had seen reaching towards me in the mirror were nowhere to be seen. Of course they weren’t. I was alone in a locked dorm room without a roommate. There was no way for there to be someone else trying to grab me, especially not the number of hands I saw…

Yet, they were back when I looked in the mirror. Dark shadowy hands cupping my face and holding my shoulders. Many, many hands. The sight made every hair on my body stand upright. Goosebumps ran up and down my arms as I stared at a sight which made absolutely no sense. I reflexively reached up towards my own fearful face, watching the me in the mirror reflect the same actions…

And then, the mirror shattered. It took the span of a single breath for the mirror to burst and shadowy hands to spill from the mirror. They engulfed me in an instant, roughly grabbing my hair, face, shoulders—everywhere. I was grabbed everywhere with incredible force. In the same instant the hands grabbed me, they began to crumple me. Like an aluminum can, my body bent inwards, my arms and legs folding inwards. The hands grabbed me, crushed me, and pulled me into the mirror.

All of my thinking, my temperance, my years of cautious living and studious activity—were all crushed in an instant by a wave of otherworldly hands. I felt some pain, like the pain of a needle, but it vanished so quickly I could not even say that I felt any agony. In these hands, I was just an object. My subjective experience simply stopped.

That is how I remember my last moments on the planet I called Earth.

---

When I came to, I was standing and facing a sight unlike any I had seen on Earth. I was the right size and shape, and my body felt no signs of the violent abduction. In front of me were several burning blue flames reaching over six feet tall. The flames were arranged in a partial circle around me. Three, six, eight… I quickly counted off the flames, finding that the circle of equally distant flames was broken up by a few men with long beards and dark cloaks.

One of the men screamed, throwing his arms wide as blue flames emerged from his fingertips. The flames quickly moved down his arms as more blue flames now spewed from his mouth. In only a few seconds, his whole body was covered in blue flame. In a few more, neither his robes nor even his bones were visible through the flame. The remaining three men in the circle showed no reaction, each sweating with tightly closed eyes and mouths turned in desperation.

Behind them, and all around, men bearing spears looked on with grim expressions. None of this matched with my understanding of how Earth worked. From that conclusion alone, it was pretty easy for me to accept that this world was something completely unlike the one I came from. The faster I accepted that, the faster I could work on understanding the rules of the world that I was currently in. And that brings me to the present—

I stand in what appears to be the midst of a ritual of some sort. There are 6 blue flames and 3 men making a roughly 15 foot circle circle of 9 points. Clearly my appearance in this circle, was brought on by whatever ritual is… still going on? It seems quite likely that the ritual will be complete when all nine robed men finish combusting, but I don’t know how long it was between the previous combustion and the one I just witnessed. If I did, then maybe I could make an estimate of how much time I have to figure things out…

Trying to survey my surroundings, the most important thing after the flame ritual seemed to be that we were in a throne room. In an elevated position, a man wearing a ridiculous amount of gold and a giant crown sat on a throne. Assuming that this man is a king or equivalent leader could let me make some assumptions based on my knowledge of fantasy stories. The circumstances of why and how someone is summoned to another world can tell a lot about what their experience in that world might be!

People’s wild imaginations of travelling to other worlds might not be able to be based on any observable facts, but they still come from human thoughts, feelings and parallels to actual history. There are a few different kinds of ways that characters travel to different worlds; some intentionally, some by accident, and some on purpose. Everything about this situation makes me think that my arrival in this world is very intentional on the part of the residents of this world.

The chances that my appearance in this world and this ring of people dressed like a nerd’s idea of a wizard are unrelated coincidence are nearly zero. The fact that these men seem to be performing a deadly ritual in front of a king in a throne room communicates that the intended results of this ritual are something very important and desired by the political authority here. If I am the product of this ritual, and the goal was to summon me, then that means that there are expectations that my presence has more value than the time of the king and the lives of these 12 men…

That’s really heavy!

The only scenario that I can think of where such a bloody ritual would make any sense is if this country is desperate for, no, it needs something that could never be gained through any smaller sacrifice! If they wanted something from this ritual that could be obtained through hard work, then they would have done it. No one would trade away their life for something that they could accomplish while still living—that’s just how people work, whether you’re talking reality or fantasy.

If there was really no choice, then that paints a pretty desperate situation for this country. If I’m assuming that some kind of magic is real in this world, and I am after seeing that blue flame, then these old men are probably pretty knowledgeable about it. In a world with magic, old men with lots of experience are probably the last people that anyone would want to sacrifice for anything that they didn’t need! So I guess that makes me wonder, what could I provide to the people of this world that they need more than the lives of 12 mages?

One trope that I’ve seen catching on recently is modern humans ending up in a world with less developed technology, and helping it develop through their advanced technological and social ideas. Instead of this type of protagonist being powerful for their ability to inflict violence, they were strong through their knowledge and skills alone. The pen is mightier than the sword—is a pretty common ethos in such stories. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a kind enough world that such an ethos would apply here. What wisdom seeking country burns its eldest sources of wisdom for the uncertain potential of wisdom from another world?

Therefore, I must conclude the opposite. This is a country that needs power and violence more than it needs knowledge. In this pattern of story, the character intentionally summoned to another world usually has some unique or transcendent power. They are usually some flavor of “chosen one”, a person selected as the only person who can do what’s necessary. If this world really is a world where people can use magic, then I should hopefully have some great magical powers. That must be what they’re hoping for.

Now, the problem with that is, I don’t know about myself having any powers. It is logically possible that even if all that theorizing were true about the intentions of the ritual, then a human from Earth who doesn’t know magic would not be the type of “chosen one” that they were expecting! If I suppose that there were many different universes containing all sorts of possibilities, not just this one and the one that contains Earth, and this one contains magic—it might be hasty to think that this universe would be the only one with magic. If their goal was to directly summon someone with great magical abilities from another world, then it could be a mistake in the ritual that I was chosen…

There are scenarios where the summoning process itself is what grants powers to the summoned characters. If that is not the case here, then I have to worry about failing to meet the expectations of the people here. If they expect a chosen hero, and I don’t have the qualifications, I can’t imagine that they’ll just send me back to Earth or let me lead a normal life here. Of course, I don’t know if the former is an option or not. It usually isn’t, but even if it were, they absolutely would not do it if it had a similar human cost.

As I thought that, another human burst into flames. The circle was now more than two-thirds made up of blue fire. The time between this combustion and the previous was two minutes, meaning that the maximum reasonable time I could expect to be able to think for was less than five minutes. My brain chugged as I considered what would happen if I was not the ideal that they wanted to summon. Would my life end as quickly as that man’s? If I could not prove my worth, I might not even receive a swift death.

No, I decided, focusing on the worst outcome here is not going to help me. If I get too focused on the possible interpretations, then I’ll miss chances for things that I can use now to improve my situation. Is escaping an option? No, I can rule out strategy given how surrounded the circle is by all these soldiers. An average college student not actively involved in any sports is not going to stand a chance in a physical confrontation with over 30 armed men…

Were the men maybe saying something that I could hear and take advantage of? Trying to focus on the sounds around me felt surprisingly challenging. Like trying to poke my way through a tunnel of cotton, everything sounded strangely muffled and distant. My head felt clouded and disconnected from the world, but as I closed my eyes and tried to focus, I started to hear the sounds more clearly. The second to last man screamed, and its sudden loudness pierced my head.

My head hurt as a sharp ringing bounced through it. The pain almost brought me to my knees, but a murmur drew my attention as it passed underneath the almost deafening sound. Focusing on the murmur caused the ringing to change in tone. As if I were tuning an overly loud synthesizer, sounds became more distinct as the tone softened.

“The boy—Solidifying—still not—failure—”

A few words were said in a worried tone. Nothing clear enough to go on, and I could not even tell the direction of the source of those words. The word failure worried me, but I needed to gather more data before making conclusions. Opening my eyes, everything seemed a bit more solid and clear. A bit more defined. The blue fires began to die down and I could see the bright blue eyes of the king boring into me. His face was surprisingly youthful, with well-kept facial hair which contrasted greatly with the long beards of the older, robe-wearing men.

“The ceremony seems to be complete.”

The man said with a look of amusement, resting head upon a closed fist. While I could not be sure, it did not sound like the voice that I had just heard. He—

Wait. Since when was that next to me? My heart stopped for a moment, sheer fear and confusion as I noticed another presence just next to me. Only one step away, another presence was inside the circle with me. Without even looking at them, it felt like I had a giant standing next to me. A 7-foot monstrosity that made the air around them heavy with the threat of their sheer physicality. When I tried to think back to when I was looking around, my head felt once again like it had been stuffed with cotton. The harder I focused, the less clear things felt.

Solidifying, that was the word that I had heard them use before. Turning towards my side, I saw a dark cloud of particles swirling, and I thought of that word. It felt terrifying and unworldly on a level beyond what my rational brain could comprehend. I looked at that swirling shadowy shape and felt the same fear I imagined that a mouse would feel if cornered by a lion. No, maybe the fear was deeper than a primal, animalistic fear. There was something fundamentally wrong about its presence—a hole in space. Nothing where there must always be something.

And then I blinked.

And the swirling darkness was gone. It had not vanished, or moved, or done anything. It was there, and then it wasn’t when I next opened my eyes. Looking above at the space, I was dumbfounded at the sudden absence of that gigantic presence. There was just air in the space where its shadow had covered… and a small person’s head sticking up from the bottom of my field of view. A tiny woman had appeared from the darkness.

She had long black hair, and a similarly colored hoodie. The sight of a casual sweatshirt in the middle of a highly decorated throne room surrounded by magical circles and fire was enough to almost make me forget the terror that had just been running through my body. Almost. The woman also wore pastel blue pajama pants underneath the hoodie, a fact that made me question the seriousness of this person. She got summoned in a hoodie and pajamas? Are you kidding me? Can just anyone be summoned as a hero these days?

Okay, even I felt a twinge of self-awareness and shame saying something like that. I was wearing a comfy t-shirt and sweatpants since I was getting ready to go to sleep, and if I put aside my own preconceptions, it looks like she might have been too! The fact that she’s wearing sweatpants and pajamas gives me a pretty strong feeling that she is probably someone like me from Earth, or at least someplace very similar! And if that assumption is true, then she probably has very similar starting capabilities as I do! The idea that the summoning would happen to grab two people from a place like Earth was pretty comforting, because it made it feel less likely that there was some unintended mistake in the summoning process.

It was still surprising that there were two of us…

“Bring forward the orbs.”

My ears perked up as I heard the king give a command. One robed person stepped across the line of the circle holding an open box. Already, other guards also began stepping forward with large cloths that seemed to quickly smother the blue fires on the circle’s periphery. Wordlessly, the man holding the box kneeled in front of us. Raising the open box above his head, I could see that it held an opaque, pale blue ball inside its velvet interior.

It seemed obvious to me that this orb was some kind of test, likely of some kind of magical power. This should pretty quickly resolve my fears regarding whether or not I received any kind of special ability from the summoning process… though I assume that the girl will also be tested. Hopefully she does well. She looks a bit out of it…

Now that I look at her face, she is probably around my age. Her eyes were large and pretty, with long eyelashes. In those eyes, she has a really distant and unfocused look, as if she were half asleep. Is that how I looked before, when I felt strangely disconnected from what was happening? Is there maybe some gap between the moment the physical body arrives in this world and the full mental contents of a person? I hope she wakes up soon, but I can’t let that distract me from what I have to do.

With one hand I begin to reach towards the orb. Hopefully whatever test it has is simple, and has a desirable result. I wonder if it will say I have some special magical attribute… if it does, I call getting the dark element! Being a bit of an anti-hero would be pretty cool I think. Holding feelings like that I reached—

But before I could, another hand reached out. The moment her hand stretched above the orb, the orb began to shoot out light. It glowed brighter and brighter for a second, and then it shattered. It sounded like a thundercrack, and the chest fell from the hands of the man holding it. The box fell open, and the cracked remains of the orb rolled out.

I look to my side, seeing the girl’s face again. She looks down at her own hand, seeing the impact of it. A tiny smile appears on her face, but it looks somewhat sad. Her eyes behind those big eyelashes seemed to carry sorrow and feeling beyond her apparent age. When her gaze finally did meet mine, it showed a sense of amusement.

“Oh sorry, I didn’t realize you were there. Did you want to go first?”

This was my first meeting with Lena, the woman I would later know as the dark mage, and my introduction to the world of Verdia. I still wonder what thoughts went through that girl's head when she was summoned.