Reality Heist - Geordi Riker (ready player one ebook TXT) 📗

be awake by now? She's been unconscious for hours.” His voice ricochets off the walls of my skull.
“What was she even doing out there, anyways?” Chase. It has to be. No one else can fit that many accents into one sentence. The thought makes my mouth twitch in a small smile.
“Oh, good, she's awake. Hey, Brandee, how you feeling?” Chase asks.
Slowly, I open my eyes, and blink rapidly as Chase's face comes into focus. He grins at me, “Busted.”
I rub a hand against my face as I take in my surroundings. We're in a room, and I'm lying on a bed. That's about as much information as my brain can handle at the moment. I close my eyes again, trying to remember what had caused me to go into the Kan Kaku thing. Something knocked me out, was that right? Yeah, it was something like that, at least close enough to count. “What happened?”
“You blacked out. Someone clubbed you across the back of the head. Which brings me to my next problem: why were you out there anyways?”
I steal a glance at Jesse, who looks away. The sight gives me a little satisfaction. Good. He should feel guilty, the prick. “I just needed some air.” Chase's eyebrows shoot up, so I elaborate, “Too much stuff at once. I mean, you guys have had collectively years to get used to this. I'm an essentials student. You can't just expect me to swallow all of this stuff with one chew.”
Chase nods, considering, “Yeah, I guess that's true. But you had to run out then? We were almost ready to eat, and then Ky asks 'where's Brandee?' So then we all had to get up and start looking for you...” He breaks off as he glances up, towards a door, I'm guessing. “... Okay, I've got to go.” he glances at Jesse and murmurs quietly, as if he doesn't want me to hear, “Make sure you ask...”
Jesse nods and Chase ducks outside, leaving us alone. I pull myself up so that I'm sitting, and pull my legs so that they dangle over the edge of the bed. My head spins from the movement and I feel really light-headed. If I lose a lot of blood in that Kan Kaku state thing, do I feel the effects here? My muscles ache from the strain of what... I know her name. I blink as I try to remember. The time she attacked me with the sword during a slide, she had said something. Her name. Hannah? No, that was way to cute. But her name did start with an “H”, that's for sure.
“How you feeling?” Jesse asks, his hands shoved in his pockets.
I shrug, and wince as the movement causes flashes of pain to shoot down my back, “Sore. As if I had been at the park all yesterday at some tournament. And dizzy. That too.”
“Not so good if you're using a lot of short sentences to get your point across,” Jesse sighs.
“Who clubbed me?”
“The gardener. Thought you were some sort of intruder. He's the only guy on standard employ, and even then he never sees anybody else out here. Chase and the others are talking to him now, trying to find out some stuff.”
“Like how to get home?”
Jesse's face pales, and I regret asking. I don't need to rub it in his face that we're all stuck here. He's probably just gotten used to the idea that he's going to be here the rest of his life, stuck traveling who knows where. And then here I come along, ripping open old wounds, and probably making a couple even deeper than they originally were. “They probably are. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure?” I have no idea what he might be getting at.
“This might sound a little odd, but you've got to be honest with me. Do you remember anything from the period where you blacked out? Did anything happen? Did you have one of your weird... experiences... like when you asked me about the sliding?”
My eyes widen as I realize what he's asking. But Hiyori said not to tell any one. That was her name, Hiyori. It still sounds weird. He's talking about when she attacked me, slit my throat, and we came to in the middle of a road. She said not to tell them, maybe I should listen to her, at least until we get a chance to talk again. “No...” I start slowly, trying to think up something, “Can't remember anything. I was walking back, thought I heard something, and then wham, wake up here with a huge head ache.”
His eyebrows crease, “You sure? Because when we were looking for you, it was suddenly almost impossible to try to find you when I was looking for your customary black. And you're not leaking any more of it now, either.”
“Weird. Maybe my Pressure was a late starter or something?” I suggest lamely.
He doesn't look convinced, “Maybe. We're not exactly experts on this whole thing still, still learning as we're going along. So, I guess that could be the case. It would explain some other things.”
“Other things?” I ask.
He shrugs, “I don't know. I wasn't actually paying attention to pressure on that 'frequency,'” he starts, air quoting, “But Ky and Amaar and Dutch all said that all of a sudden they could feel another person's pressure, and they're pretty sure it's you, because now they can sense you too. It's kind of a rainbow, all sorts of colours, the primary one always changing. It's kind of weird that you black out for a couple hours, and come to as one of us. Apparently, the gardener didn't even hit you too hard.”
I bite my lip, trying to throw him off, “Could have been that I blacked out because my body couldn't stand the strain of trans-dimensional forces at its current level and so kicked it up a notch?”
He thinks about it for a second, and I almost think that he saw through it until he suddenly laughs, “You've been talking to Skip, haven't you? Nobody else can blow my mind that fast by stringing together a couple random words that are all in a language I understand.”
“What? You think I can't make my own theories about stuff?” I ask, teasingly, trying to get him even further away from the topic.
“No, it's just that Skip's a bit of a relative physicist and loves to prattle on and on about this stuff. I don't think even Chase can keep up with him, let alone Ky.” Jesse sighs, “Life was so much easier before you came. Show up, steal the stuff, slide. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The same old cycle day-in day-out. You threw all of that out of sync. I was more crabby this week than even when I started sliding, and I had a lot to be crabby about.”
“What was your life like?” I ask, steering us further away from dangerous waters, “Before the whole sliding fiasco, I mean.”
“Fiasco,” he muses, “Nice way of putting it. I used to train Drifters and other elite troops in combat, normally in small sessions. As a son of the Derke's head, the position of instructor was inherent. I was being trained before I could walk, so I don't know what was all natural and what was ingrained into me by years of constant training. As the third son, I'm basically in exile with my older brother who passed on his claim to the leadership of our clan in favour of training students full time. I was sent to live with him, and he took every opportunity to teach me. It got to the point where every time we saw each other, we dropped everything and immediately engaged in combat. No matter what was going on. Even at the most dignified at functions.”
“So... I guess you didn't see much of your dad then, huh?” I wonder out loud.
He shrugs as he plops beside me on the bed, “Not really. But that's the way it goes. The first in line gets all the attention, the rest of us actually have it pretty easy. Sure, Sora, my brother and future head of the clan, got to see a lot more of my dad, but he also was severely limited in what he was allowed to do. His sole career is to take over when my dad decides he's ready to step down.
“The rest of us kids don't see much of wither of them, but we get to choose what we want to do. Me, I'm an instructor of Drifters mainly, but that's not just because I have to, it's actually fun. Plus, I get to actually go on missions, since it's not just all theoretical stuff I teach, I teach practical applications of everything, so I get to go outside the city a lot more often than even Hei, the brother I live... used to live with. No, I don't get to see much of my dad, but I'm a lot more free than most others. I can go wherever I want without a permit as a son of the head. Because on the off chance that Sora is for some reason assassinated or at death's door, or incapacitated in any way, I assume the responsibilities of being the head of the house, so people still have to be respectful to me, even if I don't need to be on my best behaviour.”
“Sounds crazy.”
He laughs, “Yeah, but that's my life. Or was. In a way, this whole sliding 'fiasco', as you called it, it actually opened my eyes. I used to think that everywhere there was a class system. This whole 'choosing your own career' idea was completely new to me. I think I might have thrown Dutch for a couple loops and roller coaster rides with the questions I asked him. I'm pretty sure you'll be just as lost when you get to see one of my dimensions.”
Ky saunters into the room, flashing me a grin with her filed teeth, “How you doing? It's weird, all of a sudden, I can sense exactly where you are, but still can't get in your head through the Link. How'd you manage that?”
I shrug, avoiding eye contact, “I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine, probably better.” Something flutters in the corner of my vision and I turn my head slightly to stare in amazement at the red Motes swirling around Ky. Hiyori explained that Motes are what make up a person's Pressure. The more Motes a person has near them, the stronger they are. But I can't see my own, same with the rest of the guys, I guess. “Your pressure's red?” I blurt out without thinking.
Ky grins, “Yep. Red like blood. That's me. That's why my ability is Chimamire no Butsu- bloodied boots.” She points at her boots, “These are my kinetics. With them, I can kill anyone with my kicks, or knock you out if I'm feeling gracious.”
“They make her, already some ninja skills, ten times faster. You'd never see it coming if she didn't want you to,” Jesse cuts in.
“Yeah, well at least mine's combat oriented. Remind us again why you ended up with climate change?”
“Somebody has to be responsible for global warming.” He shrugs, “I just figured I'd take the rap for it, instead of the government.”
“Yeah, because you want to protect their precious areas 51 and up from the public. Did they brainwash you or something to make you forget what happened when they caught you? The whole 'Gah! He's an alien invader! We must study them, since they've no doubt been abducting our own in preparation of this attack' problem we had when you first discovered your power?” Ky tilts her head to shoot