Cale found himself awake with no recollection of the past few moments. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but when he came to, he had known that he was in a lobby. His eyes opened to a majestic view of mountains he had never seen before that surrounded a large green valley.

  The mountains had white snow peaks, that faded into a dark grey rock before the mountain met the valley below. He hadn’t seen anything like it since he arrived on this planet, and he soaked it in. He saw snow blown off from the mountains as the wind picked up outside the windows, a slight rattle could be heard as the wind battered against the glass.

  The sound startled him in its ferocity causing him to forget about the view and focus on his current environment, he briefly chastised himself mentally for becoming so distracted. He turned around and quickly took in his surroundings. Facing toward the windows there were a few rows of four legged wooden chairs next to a table with a few cups of something hot, he could see the steam escaping from the top.

  Farther back was a surprisingly standard-looking bar with some stools next to a counter and multicolored drinks on some shelves. Behind the bar, next to the bottles, there was a guy staring back at him. Cale had thought he was alone, now his nerves were on high alert. They made eye contact, but no words were spoken and nobody moved as time seemed to stop.

  After a solid minute, Cale decided to take a step forward, and to his surprise, the guy mirrored him perfectly. He tensed up and put his arms out to prep for a fight since the last time he was kidnapped he ended up on a whole new planet. He was surprised to notice that the guy behind the bar mirrored him his movements once again... almost too perfectly...

  It was then that Cale noticed that the chairs in front of him were also in front of his opponent. He couldn't help but note that the chairs were a lot smaller than he was used to, normally he had to climb into a chair, but these were only as tall as his knees. Realization finally dawned on his stressed-out brain as he watched the guy in the mirror... mirror him exactly. I’m in the mirror? How? My soul! It used the age from my interface! I’m a teenager! His inner voice quickly became his outer voice as he screamed.

  “AAAHHHHHH!!!!”

  He sprinted over to the bar, knocking the chairs out of his way in a hurry to check himself out in the mirror. He was wearing a sort of loose T-shirt with a logo that looked familiar, but he couldn’t recall why. He had on a pair of dark slack pants that ended in a surprisingly normal looking shoe for the size of his feet. He could see the muscles in his arms and flexed a little to see what his future self might look like.

  Teenage me has some muscle! he thought pridefully and a smile unknowingly crept up on his face. He noticed his hair was cut short, a lot like it was cut when he was smaller... Wait... Cale’s memories started to come back to him. He had activated his script and then… he had… passed out? But he was smaller then, not yet five... but now he was a teenager and overlooking a mountain in a lobby with a bar and no supervision?! WHAT IS GOING ON!

  He began to scour the room for information. He looked at all the walls and didn’t notice any doors. He went behind the bar and saw only glasses, some fruits, and a trashcan. Since nothing else was giving any clues, he took one of the bottles and popped it open, taking a small whiff.

  “Cough, cough, cough,” Cale wheezed at the smell of the alcohol. Strong! He thought to himself. He was now getting desperate, the glass in front of him looked like the only way out. He thought about taking a swig of the alcohol first but quickly dismissed it after re-smelling the bottle. It smelled like a cleaning agent, and he wasn’t in the habit of drinking unknown things in unknown places. So instead, he went after a bigger desire, his freedom. Grabbing a decent sized bottle from the shelf, he weighed it in his hand to make sure it seemed heavy enough and threw it at the window as hard as he could!

  He watched it sail over the chair, over the still steaming cups of something hot, and smash right into the glass, making a loud bang that reverberated across the mostly empty room. The sound made Cale smile, but he noticed that the window didn’t break and the bottle... The bottle was oddly – very oddly – just slowly sliding down the window. It landed on the floor without so much as a noise.

  Huh, he thought. Odd… He took another bottle and decided to repeat the process. Sure enough that bottle also slowly slid to the ground. Seeing that he couldn’t seem to break the glass windows, he decided to see if he could break anything! He took his fist and pounded on the seemingly wooden counter that made up the bar to test how solid it felt. The wooden counter felt exactly how he expected it to, hard, cool to the touch, and made a solid “thumping” sound when his fist hit.

  Taking another bottle, without hesitation he grabbed it by the neck and smashed it down onto the counter like he was about to enter a brawl in a western saloon. However, his environment had other plans, the previously solid looking wood, gave way like stretchy foam and absorbed the force. Keeping the bottle from breaking but causing Cale to become unbalanced as his momentum careened him in the other direction and he found himself about to fall over.

  He instinctively put his other hand out and grabbed the wooden counter to balance himself and was intrigued to find that his hand didn’t compress the counter like the bottle did. With his balance regained, he let go of the bottle and stood up, curious as to what this strange environment would do next. Like a curious cat seeing a bird in a tree, he watched the counter slowly decompress. To his delight he watched as the reforming counter lifted the bottle up with it as it re-formed itself and somehow was able to set the bottle in the upright position on top of the counter. It was like Cale’s outburst had never happened.

  “Why is it that young ones always want to destroy this place?” said a calm, though mildly exasperated, steady male voice from seemingly everywhere.

  The voice sighed, almost judgingly, and paused for a long moment before continuing. “It seems you may be having some trouble. Say ‘I need assistance’ if you need help.”

  Cale froze when he heard the voice. His body didn’t move but his mind raced at breakneck speeds trying to figure out what was happening. That voice had sounded very natural, like it had a personality, but the voice prompt sounding line at the end was unexpected. Why a prompt? Why couldn’t he say something like “Help,” or “where am I?” The thought lingered in Cale’s brain as he pondered that question.

  His eyes scanned the room with a new outlook on what this place might be. He focused on the chairs and noticed that he couldn’t seem to trace any individual threads and when you looked closely, it just looked like a mesh. He observed his clothes, and he didn’t see any wrinkles in the cloth, they looked perfect, too perfect.

  The hot drinks on the tables were still steaming and as he watched, he noticed that the steam seemed to make the same movement over and over again. The final confirmation was when he looked at the mountains again. The longer he looked the more he saw that details were missing. Yes, the view up close looked great, but when he looked farther out, he noticed that the side of the mountain became one color and had sharper angles than one would expect.

  With his suspicion basically confirmed he wanted to do one more test. He went behind the bar and put as many glasses on the counter as he could, he counted over a hundred in total. Then he grabbed a bottle from the shelf and started to fill the cups. At first, he thought he felt the bottle getting lighter and he feared his theory may have been incorrect. But after filling up the tenth cup he was confident he was on the right track, he used a single bottle to fill up all one hundred cups before stopping. A giant smile pressed into his face since there was no way there was that much liquid in that bottle. It was either a miracle or…

  “I’m in a simulation,” he said out loud to himself as he scanned the room he was in with a new perspective.

  “Command not recognized. Say, ‘I need assistance’ if you need help.” Said a voice, rudely interrupting his thoughts. Ugh, I really hope this isn’t going to be frustrating, he thought after hearing the same prompt again.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Phil

  Phil ran through the woods carrying his only son in his arms. He was doing his best to remain calm as Xavier thrashed around in his arms, drool coming from his mouth while his little hands twisted back and forth sporadically and his limbs jerkily contorted in violent spasms. He wasn’t sure what was happening to his boy, but he had never seen this happen to someone after activating a script.

  As he gazed upon his suffering little boy, he felt guilty for blindly trusting these random scripts that his son was using, and he was upset at his wife for what was happening to Xavier. He knew she wouldn’t do something like this on purpose, but after seeing what this script did to his son, he couldn’t help but be upset and he felt his anger rise, further fueling his footsteps.

  After a few minutes of running, Xavier stopped thrashing and went limp in his arms while his eyes went completely white and rolled into the back of his head. Phil stopped and checked to see if Xavier was still alive. To his immense relief, he could feel Xavier breathing, albeit barely. He needed to get Xavier to a doctor, and he needed to get him to one immediately. Even then it wasn’t a guarantee the doctors could do more than just make him feel comfortable, he hoped they had an idea of what was going on.

  As he ran toward home, he came across a distance marker the rangers had set up all around the surrounding areas they scouted, and he quickly did the math in his head. At his current rate he wouldn’t be able to get Xavier back to the base for another hour, and he didn’t think that his son would survive if it took that long to get help.

  He thought about his options and when he went through them all, he really only had one. He had to do something reckless, dangerous, and he knew it was going to hurt; it always did. But at that moment Phil wasn’t thinking of himself, he wasn’t thinking of his wife, he wasn’t thinking about his commitment as a Ranger; he had one thought and one thought alone. I must save my son.

  With his mind set on his plan, he stopped running at a distance pace and started accelerating until he reached the maximum speed he could with his kinetic enhanced steps. With grim determination, he jumped into the air, creating steps as he went up. He needed height if he was going to have any chance of pulling this off. He hadn’t used this move at this size in years, and the last few times he used it extensively, it would take him an entire day, sometimes multiple, to recover; but he needed to get his son back to their bases doctor for help. Otherwise...

  His thoughts paused as he looked down and saw the eyes of his boy rolled backward into his head as drool and foam continued to slowly come out of his mouth and land on the constantly changing steps below. Phil had his head turned so he wouldn’t choke, but that did not stop whatever was happening to him. His heart clenched at the thought of his son suffering like this!

  He checked his height and decided he was far enough above the trees for this to work. He could sense he had enough energy to do this move probably twice, maybe a third time if the gods were with him. He used his kinetic script to create a platform of hardened air to lay on that faced the direction they needed to go in order to reach their base. His first script fully activated, and it immediately started to dissipate as Phil lay back against it and held on to Xavier while he focused on the second script activation.

  He hoped he had made the first script thick enough so that it wouldn’t disappear until the right moment. The timing of this move was difficult, and he was doing it in a highly stressful condition, which increased the likelihood that things would go awry. The amount of effort required to forcefully bring the second script into existence was immense and he clenched his teeth as he poured everything he had into his will.

  His effort was not in vain as he felt himself and Xavier get launched by the script, causing them to go flying through the air like a self-propelled rocket, a large BOOM followed in their wake, shaking trees and causing leaves to follow behind them. For a few seconds before he could block the wind with a small, pointed script, it screamed into his eyes, and he could feel his cheeks flapping from the wind as they flew through the air. When the pressure subsided, he checked on Xavier and fortunately things hadn’t turned any worse as far as he could tell.

  He had learned this script combo a few years ago while running for his life on a mission. He had been out scouting one of the mountains when a torrential downpour of rain came out of nowhere and doused the mountain side he was exploring. He thought he was safe in the little nook he had found and had decided to set up camp since the rain wasn’t stopping anytime soon.

  He had only just started to cook some food when he heard rumbling and the ground beneath him started to shake. With haste he ran out of his nook, trying to see through the thick rain only to have a giant boulder fly over his head as it tumbled down the mountain tearing up trees and devastating the mountain side every time it bounced and crashed back to the ground.

  He turned to see where the boulder went but after a few seconds the rain hid it from his view. Moments later another boulder came crashing down, and then another, as they seemed to fly past his camp. He didn’t want to move out of his nook, but he felt the ground beneath him shift and water started to pour out of a crack in the stone near him. His curiosity almost killed him as he watched the crack start to expand, and more water started to pour out from higher up. In moments the crack had expanded to a few inches wide, and Phil felt the ground beneath him shift again as the rumbling around him intensified.

  Phil’s senses remained on high alert as the rumbling took on a new urgency and more rocks went flying over his nook. At that moment, Phil decided that he wanted to get off that mountain and that he wanted nothing to do with whatever was happening. Phil skyrocketed out of his nook and zig zagged as he sprinted down the mountain, dodging trees. He had to keep a lookout for boulders and occasionally had to dodge as rocks that were tumbling down the mountain would occasionally overtake him.

  Thanks to his force script, he was able to find footing in his steps even though the ground was rumbling and heaving all around him. When he started to get close to the bottom hope arose in him since it meant he could be off this mountain and away from the madness. He looked behind him and his hope disappeared as his heart sank deep into his chest. Above him he could see the entire mountain side moving and it was moving right toward him! He was nowhere near safe!

  Before he could think of a plan, the ground gave way underneath him, completely eradicating his force scripts that were giving his feet grip, and he found himself sliding along with the hill. As he slid, he activated his script to angle himself toward a tree that was somehow still standing up, even though it was moving along with him. As if he was swimming in water, he continued using his scripts to keep himself upright and was able to get himself out of the muck that was trying to suck his body under by pulling himself up onto one of the tree's branches.

  His reprieve from the madness wasn’t over though. Large pieces of debris rained down around him as the very ground bubbled underneath him like boiling water. Soon he felt the tree he was holding on to start to tip and he knew if he stayed there, he was dead. Phil tried to stay calm as the deadliness of his situation was becoming increasingly transparent. The tree started to lean downward as its roots could no longer keep it up straight, its branches and leaves cracked and threw dangerous pieces of wood around as they were slammed against boulders and other trees.

  Phil did all he could to stay out of the mud. He blocked debris with his kinetic script and used whatever strength he could muster as he started to run up the falling tree to stay away from the encroaching torrent of muddy madness below him. He knew he could use his force script to stay above the debris, but he didn’t think he had enough power to hold out long enough to stay above the chaos around him. But it wasn’t like he was given a choice.

  Soon he arrived at the top of the tree, and he did the only thing left available to him, with all the speed he could muster, he jumped! Throwing himself forward as the tree below him was taken under into the mud. If this had happened on flatter ground, he would already be dead, but the mountain was steep enough that he was able to remain in the air for a few extra seconds. Those precious seconds were the buffer between life and death for him as he desperately activated his force script underneath his feet, the panic in his chest grew at the idea of his imminent death.

  His script activated and a small platform for him to land on materialized underneath him before he became one with the furious landscape below. However, the platform wasn’t perfect since his will was weak during activation and he felt his script quickly begin to dissipate below him, he couldn’t recover it. Not wanting to give up, not wanting to admit defeat, Phil activated a second script in the same location as his first script in hopes it would keep him from falling.

  When it activated Phil felt a weird pressure build under his feet and it pushed heavily against his will power, a pressure that threatened to stop his script from even activating fully! Not giving up, with a loud scream he closed his eyes and poured his willpower into his script and forced his intent into his creation.

  He felt his script snap into place, and he was immediately brought to his knees as he felt his stomach drop. Seemingly from nowhere, he was forcefully slammed to his stomach by an unknown force. He felt his arm snap as he tried to catch his face from smashing onto the platform.

  With his face and body pressed firmly to the transparent script below him, it was quickly apparent to him, though very confusingly, that he was flying through the air at an absurd speed. He couldn’t ponder this fact long as the pressure asserted against his body by his script below finally faded away. Without the platform propelling him, Phil’s flight started to slow down, and he was able to finally get a look at where he was.

  At first all he could see was fog, but as he continued his journey, the fog soon cleared, and he ended up above the rainy clouds that were causing the mayhem below. He was given witness to a view not seen in hundreds of years. The top of the rain clouds rolled and buffered about between various mountain peaks like a flock of sheep. The mountains poked through the clouds in all directions as far as his eyes could see. Far above him, the sun shone unhindered, and as his climb slowly came to a stop, he felt like he had traveled to another world.