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An Otherworldly Scholar - 1
🕑 Added 2023-05-21 17:28:35 +0000 UTCHackberry Creek, Connecticut, was a remote town of less than a thousand inhabitants, lost among the Appalachians. If anything, it was a picturesque place and a sufficiently good enough hunting spot. Not the place I’d choose to visit in my free time, and yet, I was supposed to be there four hours ago. But again, I was the kind of fool who drove over 120 miles fantasizing about dragons and magic spells before realizing the navigation app on my smartphone was taking me in the wrong direction.
My stomach growled. The last gas station alluringly waved its colorful sign by the side of the road more than an hour ago but I wasn’t in time to eat a greasy burger with a nice and expensive side of fries. I steeled my resolve, knowing in the back of my head the law firm wasn’t going to cover all of my fuel expenses for those extra miles. It was another harsh blow to my already scrawny wallet but I deserved it for not triple checking the address my baboon of a boss sent me.
One couldn’t just glance at the lush vegetation of the mountains and not think of epic deeds and perilous travels.
The engine of my old car revved weakly as I pressed the gas pedal. I took the next exit and got onto a solitary rural highway, getting further and further away from civilization. The green signage flew over my head. Hackberry Creek. I prayed the address was the tight one this time.
Over the passenger’s seat, my phone buzzed for the eighth time that hour. The detestable sack of flesh masquerading as a human being that was my boss didn’t seem to understand my car wasn’t the USS Enterprise, and it absolutely couldn’t cover two hundred miles in a matter of nanoseconds. I silenced my phone and threw it back on the passenger’s seat.
Better not to pick it up while driving.
My boss wasn’t particularly good with directions, but he was right about one thing. I fucking needed this job. Between my student loans, always growing rent, and health insurance piling over my shoulders, I was uncomfortably close to bankruptcy. In the end, I had to suck it up and pick up my phone.
“Hey, boss,” I said, trying to maintain a calm voice even knowing an ass chewing of extreme proportions was nigh. “Sorry for not answering earlier, the signal here is awful.”
“What’s taking you so long?” my boss barked through the phone. He had seemed to forget what I had told him not half an hour earlier. “I need to close this proceeding today. You better not mess up.”
“I’m doing my best, sir,” I tried not to let my frustration show. “But the direction you…”
“Just figure it out,” my boss snapped back. I knew he had one more thing before ending the call, he always did. “Just figure it out or find another job.”
Figure things out.
My knuckles turned white as I clenched my hand around the wheel. I sighed, wondering how my life had come to this. Shitty apartment, shitty job, shitty salary, shitty boss. To think there was a time where I had things figured out seemed inconceivable for my current self.
I pressed the gas pedal all the way down and my car sped across the highway far above the speed limit. The trees at the side of the road became furious blurs of green and despite the fact I wasn’t on a roll, a hint of a smile drew on my face. It had been years since the last time I drove out of the city, since I went hunting with my father for the last time.
Work at the firm left me little time to partake in activities far from the central office and I never was an outdoor enthusiast myself but I liked nature nonetheless. There was something soothing about it. If I was somewhat savvy with camping gear it was because my father liked to go hunting and my mother insisted I had to tag along. And in our house, my mother’s word was law.
Me and my father didn’t have a lot in common except for those times we passed together camping out in the forest. He was a baseball guy, I was a soccer guy, he liked to be alone in the woods, I liked to be alone with my books. In hindsight I came to understand my mother’s insistence because now they were gone I was left with a lot of great memories.
My phone buzzed again.
What I couldn’t understand was why my boss was so eager to finish the proceeding. I could understand there was a shitload of money on the table, but Mr. Byrne was dead and his money wasn’t going to go anywhere. Not unless a powerful necromancer reanimated him. But luckily for my boss, there were no necromancers on planet Earth.
Mr. Byrne, one of our biggest clients, has been missing for years now. No known address, no new driver’s license, no movements in his bank account. And most importantly, no heirs. Only a dubious will that would leave a generous portion of his fortune to the firm. So, like the leech he was, my boss wanted to declare Mr. Byrne legally dead to liquidate his assets and take a generous cut from his estate.
To my knowledge, my boss had tried the same stunt years before but Mr. Byrne was still alive, living peacefully in one of his multiple properties near the Appalachians, covering his expenses only with ‘mattress money’. The old man was beyond loaded.
Consequently, I was driving across the state to check if Mr. Byrne wasn’t peacefully living in his property of Hackberry Creek. I was also in charge of finding any important documents that might come into conflict with the will the firm had. And it was kind of exciting. I felt like an astronaut visiting a long lost derelict filled to the brim with mysterious artifacts.
Surely, visiting an old cabin in the woods wasn’t as exciting as lost space derelicts but considering how predictable my life was, this was beyond exciting. Also, I would rather be anywhere than commuting to work, trapped in a sea of cars.
A mysterious cabin of a wealthy and eccentric man was a great place for something magical to happen. God, if Narnia needed me I was fucking ready to yeet myself through the wardrobe. Most likely, the cabin would be just a dusty old building with dusty old magazines and rotten shingles. But that wasn’t a reason to stop dreaming.
Or daydreaming.
Suddenly I returned to my senses and the panic got a hold of me. How long since I had zoned out? A sign just over my head warned me the next exit led to Hackberry Creek. I violently turned the wheel, almost tipping the car over. I was not going to drive another hour because I missed the exit.
“Safe,” I muttered to myself.
A tattered road led me to a small town, if a single street with shabby buildings in the middle of nowhere could be called a town. Except for a couple of rusty trucks parked on the street, the place was empty. I cruised through the street until I found an open store. ‘Sam’s Outdoors’.
Looked like a great place to get directions so I parked my car and entered the store.
Sam was the most rustic person I had ever seen. A bear of a man dressed like the caricature of a redneck with a bulbous nose and Brezhnev level of eyebrows. We greeted each other and I walked to the counter. Sam seemed surprised to see a new face.
“What can I do for you?” he sounded like he had smoked a pack a day for the last thirty years washed down with the strongest moonshine in the county.
If anything, he reminded me of the other hunters I had met with my father.
“I’m searching for this place. If you could point me in the right direction it would be great,” I asked, handing him a small piece of paper with the direction of the cabin. 1 Elk Road, Hackberry Creek.
Sam clicked his tongue and shook his head.
“You got the wrong Hackberry Creek, kid,” the man said with a sympathetic tone but, after seeing my face lose all its color, he quickly added. “Kidding, kidding. People usually confuse us with...”
“Hackberry Creek Township, yes. Was just there earlier today,” I gave him a tiresome smile.
Sam laughed without a hint of malice.
“May I ask what brought you here, son? You are not the cabin’s owner unless you are that weird old man’s kid. No offense,” Sam said. His straightforward character was a nice change of pace compared with the tortuous customs of my workplace. Until I started working in the firm, I didn’t know a smile could mean so many different things.
I handed him my business card. Robert Clarke, Administrative Assistant, Connor & Connor LLP.
“Administrative assistant?” Sam asked, arching one of his populated eyebrows.
“Sugar coated title for errand boy, but hey, the bills don’t pay themselves,” I replied and the man gave me a sympathetic smile. “We are in charge of managing Mr. Byrne’s real estate.”
Sam nodded and gave me the business card back.
“To get to the cabin, continue down the main road, make a left turn just after the end of the pavement and turn left again at the fork. Easy as it goes,” the man explained as he vaguely pointed down the road.
I thanked Sam and prepared to go but felt bad for not buying anything. I glanced at the showcase and saw a red Swiss Army knife. My father always carried one of those when he took me hunting or fishing, admittedly, he rarely used it but he carried it anyway.
After a moment of tension, my credit card was accepted.
“Would you like a bag?” Sam asked me.
“No, I’ll carry it in my pocket.”
“Good luck then, Robert Clarke, and remember, left and left again. Don’t let the fairies lead you down the wrong path,” the man laughed as I exited the store.
I thanked him one last time and returned to the car.
As I reached the edge of the town, the street suddenly turned into a rough dirt road. I took a left turn and a second one at the fork just as Sam told me to do. Regrettably, no fairies appeared to distract me. Elk Road was neglected and riddled with potholes. Branches overhanging prevented me from seeing where I was going and weeds had slowly colonized the tire tracks, making it difficult to distinguish the road from the surroundings.
Finally, when I was getting anxious that I had made a wrong turn somewhere, the cabin poked out from the forest. It looked like the place a hermit would live. The lush green ferns had invaded the surroundings and the lichen had conquered the northern face of the cabin, almost camouflaging it against the forest. It was quite the view but I didn’t stop for more than a second.
Remembering my boss’ words, I quickly parked the car and ventured out to examine the place. The cabin was an old one story wooden structure, with rotten shutters and a ruined shed. There was no trace of recent inhabitants. I peeked through a hole in the ruined shed and I saw an old diesel generator half crushed by a wooden beam.
All shutters were closed although equally rotten. I asked myself if this wasn’t considered trespassing given that Mr. Byrne wasn’t legally dead yet but I didn't give it a second thought. My job depended on this.
I put the key into the keyhole and opened the rotten door.
Stupidly enough, the first thing I tried to do was to turn on the lights. Then I remembered the busted generator. Realizing my mistake, I stumbled across the darkened room and opened the shutters one by one until the interior of the cabin was illuminated by the dim rays of sun that managed to pass through the canopy.
The interior was a mess to the point it seemed someone had broken inside and ransacked the place. There were old pieces of paper with scrawled notes scattered over almost every available surface, worn out books with leather covers, some of them eerily similar to human flesh, and brass instruments that seemed taken from the laboratory of a Victorian mad scientist.
“Nice,” I muttered to myself as my eyes fell on the table.
The notes were written in an alphabet I couldn’t recognize, let alone read, but the diagrams and sigils were oddly familiar. If I had to guess, the owner of the cabin was either obsessed with the occult or with obscure JRPG games.
Normal amounts of madness so far.
As I examined the table, an eerie feeling suddenly got a hold on me. There were books over books filled with the strange language I had never seen before. Not only a few pages but full tomes of five hundred or more pages. Even for the most passionate roleplayer, this was no common foolishness of a bored mind, this was advanced madness.
Maybe I should let my boss know about this?
I grabbed my cell phone to call back at the office but I had no signal.
“Come on, Rob. These are just scribbles of an old man,” I said nervously. I didn’t want to get trapped in the shenanigans of a weird cult.
I decided to investigate the rest of the cabin. As much as the frantic handwriting unnerved me, the rest of the cabin was unremarkable. There was basic camping gear stored in a wardrobe and surprisingly mundane clothing in the main room. As much as I expected cultist robes and sacrificial knives, the only thing remotely mysterious, other than the notes, was an old character sheet from those pen and paper role playing games. Maybe all the paraphernalia was just a little bit of worldbuilding that got out of hand along the years.
“Okay, Rob, let’s wrap this up,” I psyched myself up.
There was no indication Mr. Byrne had visited the cabin in the last years, I just needed to search for any official documentation regarding ownership of the property or other legally binding documents and I was done.
I searched through every single crate and drawer to no avail. I found a hidden gun cabinet between the wardrobe and the bedside table, sealed with a see-through metallic door and a padlock, but other than that the house was clear of anything that could even hold important documents.
I returned to the main room and glanced at the table covered in old handwritten notes. They were written with a fountain pen as I could see the occasional smear of ink scattered across the pages. I rummaged through the notes searching for a trace of the English language to no avail. There was nothing near related to legal documentation nor anything I could actually read.
Mr. Byrne was a strange man and I was not surprised that he was also interested in the occult. A lonely and eccentric man with outlandish tastes and an almost endless fortune. If there was a real magician on Earth, that would be Mr. Byrne. Unfortunately for me, he was just a slightly crazy old man with a cabin far into the woods.
For some reason, I felt bad for him. Even if I only saw him once, from afar, I could tell he was a fool who dreamed with dragons and magic spells just like me. His fortune gave him the glamor I lacked though.
The task ended up being more banal than I expected, but it was my fault for expecting something remarkable to happen. I was only a small cog inside a cold, unfeeling legal machine. In a couple of hours I was going to be back in the office with only a moderately odd story to tell and nobody who cared enough to listen to it.
I closed the shutters, leaving the notes untouched, and closed the front door.
The car puttered to life and I was ready to go when I remembered about the basement. My boss had been insistent about it.
“Fuck,” I was glad I remembered, I didn’t trust my temper to endure two ass chewings the same day.
The entrance to the basement wasn’t around the perimeter.
“It might be inside,” I muttered to myself even if I hadn’t seen any trapdoor.
As I entered for the second time, the handwritten notes didn’t seem half sinister as before, now looking more like childish scribbles than magic spells. I ignored them and searched for the hatch. It wasn’t hard to find. It was under an old rug.
“So, no satanic circle or anything under the carpet,” I sighed, half relieved and half disappointed.
Outside, the light was dimming quickly so I grabbed my cell phone flashlight and pulled the handle up. At first it didn’t budge, the hinges were rusty and despite the woody appearance, the thing had the weight of a metal door. With my pride a bit wounded, I anchored my feet firmly on the floor and pulled up the lid, revealing a narrow gap on the floor.
“The things I do for a paycheck,” I muttered as I aimed the light into the dark hole revealing a staircase.
I stepped down into the darkness with my cellphone pointing at the wooden steps.
Suddenly, the wooden step collapsed under my weight and as my body passed through the hole my head violently slammed against the edge of the wooden planks. My whole world went black.
I woke up lying on a warm wooden floor with a throbbing pain on my forehead. Slowly, the world regained shape around me. The sun projected a weak pale gleam through the windows of the cabin.
I counted up to ten before sitting on the floor, my head was killing me and I had to blink repeatedly to focus on what was in front of me.
A closed trap door.
“What?” I mumbled. Objects, and people in particular, usually fell downwards.
I looked around, searching for whomever had dragged me upstairs but I was alone. There was nearly zero possibility that my boss had sent someone to check on me. Sam from Sam’s Outdoors then? It was a possibility within reason. He seemed like a decent man.
I gave up any attempt to stand up for the foreseeable future and laid on my back. The mere effort of rolling around made me want to vomit. My head pulsated with pain. This time I counted to one hundred before trying to stand again.
I let out the longest ‘fuck’ of my life and sat down.
The morning rays streamed through the windows and the crisp aroma of clean air filled my lungs. I panicked. I was supposed to come back with news about Mr. Byrne more than twelve hours ago. I had been knocked out for far too long.
Pulling myself together, I went back to my car. First thing I had to do was to return to civilization and call the office. Maybe visit a hospital. But that had to wait. I was rehearsing an apology in my mind when another wave of panic washed over me.
My car was nowhere to be found. I felt my pockets. The keys were still there. If someone stole it it might have needed a tow, and it was even more unlikely for a tow truck to drive down Elk Road.
“What the hell?”
Something else was out of place and it wasn’t just my car. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong but it suddenly came to me. The canopy of the forest, lush and green mere hours before, was adorned by dry autumn leaves.
My heart rushed as I counted the months of the year with my fingers. Before I could come to the conclusion that fall was still months away, a feral roar boomed through the forest. It sounded like a bear but not quite a bear.
My eyes darted towards the direction of the sound, searching for any signs of movement. Whatever was stalking me, it was dangerously close.
What was I even doing trying to locate the animal?
I regained my sense of judgment and bolted back into the cabin, slamming the door shut behind me. Hastily, I secured the shutters and stood still, listening, but the forest remained ominously silent.
The rustle of leaves and crunching gravel made my heart race even faster. Whatever had roared, it was getting closer. I held my breath and waited in silence for it to lose interest and leave. But it didn’t. The animal circled the cabin and, to my horror, it started scratching at the rotten door.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
I should’ve paid more attention to what my father tried to teach me during the hunting trips instead of looking for Wonderland among the rabbit holes. Sure, I knew how to shoot but I never actually did it on a living animal. With trembling hands, I grabbed the key ring and crossed the room towards the gun locker. Luckily for me, Mr. Byrne had left a copy of the locker’s keys in our possession. I opened the thing, almost slamming the metallic door to the side of the locker.
Inside the locker there was a dusty double barrel shotgun and a single ammo box. Without hesitation, I loaded two shells into the gun and returned to the main room. I could only hope the shotgun worked after who knew how many years of abandonment.
Regretting my words, I realized I wasn’t ready to fling myself through Narnia’s wardrobe.
The banging on the door intensified. The hinges screeched and rotten wood was slowly ripped apart. A set of long claws emerged through the gap in the doorway, gaining hold on the door. I raised the shotgun. It wasn’t going to hold. The wood creaked as the beast tore the corner of the door, creating enough space to introduce both paws. Another big piece splintered off amidst deafening growls, revealing the face of the beast.
It wasn’t any creature I had ever seen.
A thick, black mane framed an elongated, almost wolf-like mouth full of vicious teeth emerged from the gap. The beast’s eyes were an electric blue and they shone with an unnatural hue, both focused squarely on me. The creature’s jaws opened with an unmistakable hunger.
Then, the door exploded into a thousand splinters and the wolf-bear hybrid from hell fell into the cabin. Adrenaline pumped through my body. As if the world moved in slow motion I aimed and fired. Pellets shredded the monster’s shoulder, turning it into an amalgamation of bloody fur and viscera. The stopping power of the first volley gave me enough time to correct my aim before the creature could lunge forward. I shot again and the wolf-bear fell heavily to the floor with its skull splattered into thousands of small splinters.
My shoulder hurt and my ears rang but that was the least of my concerns.
With my heart hammering against my chest, I loaded two more shots before approaching the monster. I don't know how my knees managed to keep me up straight, or how my bladder managed to keep its contents inside my body.
I touched the monster’s black fur with the tip of my shoe. It wasn't bear nor wolf. Even that comparison fell short, there was something strangely humanoid to it. Then it hit me. Due to the position of the front legs, I realized the creature was most certainly bipedal.
A sudden nausea took over me but I didn’t even have time to puke.
Suddenly, the mangled corpse emitted a ghastly glow and a blue radiance emerged from it. The blue mist raised like a haunting spirit and surrounded me. Panicking, I shot again to no effect other than intensifying the ringing in my ears and destroying a lamp in the corner of the room. The blue mist twirled around me, sticking to my skin. I painfully felt it enter each and every pore of my body.
A second of pain and then nothing. No. It wasn’t nothing. It felt great, greater than anything I had felt before. My head no longer hurt. Even my chronic back pain disappeared. Then a message appeared in front of me.
Greetings, Robert Clarke.
You have acquired Magic.
To receive the blessing of the Fractalis reach for the mana inside you.
“What in the everloving fuck,” I muttered.
I swatted the air, trying to get rid of the floating message but my hand cut cleanly through it. A hologram? My mind raced searching for answers. I had read somewhere about a treatment for people in coma with direct brain stimulation. Was I trapped inside some sort of medical Matrix?
There were two possibilities. The hit on my head had left me in a coma or I was going crazy. Either way was equally troubling. And either way it seemed I had to follow the instructions in front of me.
How in the seven hells was I going to ‘reach the mana’ inside me?
“Oh… that’s how.”
There it was. Mana. I could feel it like a foreign body where my heart was, waiting for me to tap into it. Maybe even calling me. It was a soothing sensation and probably the only thing that kept me from having a panic attack.
“Where am I?” I asked, looking at the ceiling. For some reason I assumed the being that was communicating with me was up in the sky.
You are far from home, Robert Clarke.
To return, you have to open the trap door and cross the portal.
Once crossed there is no way back.
My throat was suddenly dry. Madness or not, this was what I always yearned for. A second chance, an adventure, an enchanted wardrobe, a letter of acceptance to a prestigious magical academy, or whatever this was.
There was nothing much going for me back at home but at least there I wasn’t going to die mauled by a rabid chimera. I glanced at the mangled body of the monster and tried to swallow but my throat was still dry.
I slapped my face, my brain trying to make sense of all this freakshow. Dying a violent death was only marginally worse than withering away sitting in a cubicle. Suddenly my boss’ words echoed in my mind. Just figure things out or find another job.
For better or worse, this decision was going to haunt me from the rest of my life.
I reached for the mana inside my chest.
Fractalis system initializing…
Checking the contents of the foreign soul…
Checking past experiences…
My life flashed in front of my eyes. The happy early years, my parent’s death, the long study sessions to get my degree, the boys laughing at the club after fencing lessons, my highschool sweetheart dumping me after an eight year relationship, the idealistic first years of my career as a school teacher. Then, slowly, everything getting more and more crooked. Finally, just an instant before the visions receded, a blue tesseract floating in the void.
Initialization complete.
Foreign Soul Robert Clarke is now a subject to the Fractalis System.
You have obtained Scholar’s unique skill [Identify]
This time I got on my knees and violently emptied my already empty gut over Mr. Byrne’s old carpet. When I thought everything was over, another prompt appeared between my face and the puddle of vomit.
One last bit of advice.
Don’t tell anybody where you came from.
To find civilization head south.
Good luck, Rob.
“Thanks… I guess,” was the only thing my mangled brain managed to articulate before one last prompt appeared in front of me.
Name: Robert Clarke, Human.
Class: Scholar Lv.1
Titles: Lonely Boy.
Passive: Lv.5 Swordsmanship, Mana Manipulation.
Skills: Identify.
