Tower Story -- Chapter 1

I finally got the planning done for my new series, or at least the majority of book 1. I estimate that this book will be around 120k words, which shouldn't take me more than 4-5 weeks to write, and then I'll be getting back to Healer book 6!

Chapter 1

“Hit 12 for me, would you?” Bax asked from he squished himself inside the front of the elevator, the people in it so packed that he was worried for a second that they had exceeded its maximum weight limit.  Fortunately, as the doors closed – nearly on his face – there didn’t seem to be any problem as it started to lift.

He didn’t see anyone hit the button for him, however.  As he looked to the one closest to the panel, he got a bored look from the heavyset man with access to it.  “Already lit.”

Someone else is heading to floor 12 with me?  Who—?

Bax realized who it was the moment he heard someone wetly cough to his left, feeling spit and who knew what else impact the side of his face.  Are you kidding me?

He couldn’t even raise his hands to wipe his face because they were squished to his sides, so all he could do was turn his head again and glare at the one who’d done it.

“Janet.  Didn’t you say you were going to stay home today?” he asked curtly, now thoroughly annoyed at the sick woman. 

“Oh, I’m doing cough much better,” she answered, her voice strained from all of the coughing she had subjected him to over the last few days in the office.  It was just the two of them in that corner of the floor, and even wearing headphones while he worked to block out the sound couldn’t quite cut it completely. 

“It certainly doesn’t seem like it.”  It might be possible that she was feeling better, but she certainly looked worse, if anything.

When the elevator stopped at the next floor, he had to move to let other people out, giving him an opportunity to wipe his face and access the pocket-sized bottle of antibacterial gel he’d been taking to keeping with him ever since his co-worker got sick with the flu but wouldn’t stay home because she needed the money this job was paying.  It was only a temporary data entry position, but it paid a lot for what they were doing – so he could understand the motivation, at least.  What he couldn’t understand was why she didn’t take at least a day off to rest up, as this whole “work every day for 12 hours” thing they were doing was only prolonging her sickness.  He thought that he had convinced her yesterday to finally take a day off, but it seemed as though he was wrong.

As he basically used the antibacterial goo that he squirt out of his little bottle as a face lotion, hoping to kill anything that had splashed onto him from her cough, he wondered if it even mattered.  He woke up that morning with a little itchiness in his throat, which wasn’t a good sign, and he fully expected that over the next few days that he would fall ill just like Janet was.  In his case, however, he wouldn’t be as stubborn and take as many days off as he needed to get better, because he didn’t want it to linger for weeks.

I guess the flu shot I have scheduled tomorrow won’t really do much good right now.

He’d tried getting it weeks ago, but something always seemed to come up that made him put it off.  Now, when he had likely contracted the flu from Janet, he regretted not pushing himself to get it earlier.

A few more stops saw his destination behind the elevator doors, and he did his best not to stare the coughing woman down who followed him out; instead, completely ignored her as he made his way toward the back offices, where their workstations were located. The rest of the floor was undergoing a remodel that was currently paused, so it was just the two of them in there; normally, the silence would’ve been nice, but with Janet coughing all the time, he would’ve preferred being in the middle of a construction zone with a jackhammer going at full speed.

Pushing open the glass doors, he made his way over to his desk, hanging his bag he brought his lunch in off the back of his chair.  He turned on both computers he was working with as he passed them by; the first one was a relic, something created in the 80s if he remembered correctly, and it only ran on MS-DOS.  The monitor was one of the old tube-based, chunky boxes that had faint permanent text burned into the curved glass screen, and it took a few seconds to fully power on after he hit the switch.  The dirty, beige-colored box that was the computer itself took about 5 minutes to boot up completely, which was why he always turned it on first, before getting to his other computer.

This one was modern and one of the best that could be purchased by commercial companies.  It only took seconds for it to boot up completely, and it unlike the text-based, command-line interface of the older computer, it used a system with actual graphics.  It was a proprietary system that Alltower Concepts, the company he was temporarily working for, had developed to handle all of the information necessary to run their projects successfully.  Unfortunately for Alltower Concepts, so much information was packed into the older machines that couldn’t be extracted except by manually entering in the data from the old computer to the newer one.

This was Bax and Janet’s job, and it was supposed to take around 6 months of work to complete it.  He wasn’t sure why it had taken so long for the company to finally convert to newer systems, but he supposed that they were successful enough without having to upgrade that they had put it off until it started to become more of a hassle not to do it.  Overhearing some of the gripes from others working in the building, which typically came from those of the younger generation, they had trouble learning the ancient systems because they were used to more modern technology. 

Bax was also in that younger generation, only being 24, but the difference was that he grew up using a command-line interface like MS-DOS on his family’s computer, as that was all they had at the time.  Others at school made fun of his family for being poor, which hurt at the time because it was relatively true; thankfully, they weren’t so poor that they ever went hungry, but luxuries like modern computers or even new, non-thrift store clothes, were largely unknown.  Now, though, his experience with older computers helped him land this temp job, which he was grateful to have.

Seeing that everything was booting up perfectly fine, and with a dirty look at Janet as she fell into another coughing fit, he sat down in his chair—

—only for his rear end to land on something hard and cold, which definitely didn’t match the plush cushion of his chair.  Bax’s vision seemed to skip a beat as it had frozen for a moment on the computer monitors in front of him, before it was suddenly replaced in a flash by a dimly lit, spacious, stone-walled room that surrounded him.  He looked around for his workstation, his mind still trying to comprehend what had happened, and he began to wonder if the flu that he'd most likely caught from Janet was already giving him fever dreams.

Without moving anything but his head, Bax glanced around and noted a few things right off the back.  First, he was sitting in what appeared to be a stone block attached to the stone floor, which was nestled in front of a circular stone table in front of him.  The table was a bit lower than he felt was comfortable, as it was just barely above his knees, but he supposed that it wasn’t the strangest thing in the room.

Along the right side of the space was what appeared to be a bed, but its frame was also made of stone and built into the wall and floor; thankfully, if it really was a bed, it had a thick mattress and dull grey blankets covering it, sharply arranged like what could be found in a hotel after housekeeping had visited.  Along the opposite side of the room was a doorway, and while it was relatively dark inside, he thought it appeared to be some sort of bathroom, though unlike any that he’d ever seen before.  There wasn’t a toilet, but was instead a hole in the floor; it was obscured by a stone door that was partly ajar, but he thought that there was also what appeared to be a tiled space that looked like it was for a some sort of shower – or something like similar.  There was no bathtub or sink to wash hands, unless they were out of his view.

Directly behind him, which stretched his ability to see it without moving his whole body, was an odd, crystalline box the size of a microwave that glowed with an inner light and had an open side to it.  As there was nothing other than the relatively clear material to see, he couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be, and while it was attached to the wall, there was nothing around it that explained what it was for.

Finally, across from where he was sitting was a larger doorway filled with a big stone-looking door on metal hinges, which was closed shut.  Everything he could see was lit by a dim sphere above his head attached to the middle of the 12-foot-tall ceiling, but he instinctively knew that this light wasn’t even remotely similar to a light bulb.  There was just something about it that resonated an energy that he’d never felt before, but a part of him knew that it wasn’t powered by electricity.

As his rear end began to feel the hardness and coolness of the stone stool – or whatever it was he was sitting on – he began to believe that this wasn’t a fever dream.  However, he couldn’t explain how he got there, nor why he was there.  With his heart beating double-time at this realization, he felt himself starting to hyperventilate, which wasn’t something that he’d ever experienced before.  Ever since his parents had passed away when he was 12 and was in and out of foster homes until he was 18, he had prided himself for being able to adapt to just about any situation and keeping a level head when things went wrong.

But this situation shot so far past the scale of “things going wrong” that he was having trouble comprehending how he should even react or what to do. 

After a few minutes of mentally panicking, he forced himself to take deep breaths and assess his situation.  He couldn’t help but think that there was a possibility that someone was playing a trick on him, and that he had been drugged and brought somewhere – but he didn’t have any idea who would do something like that.  He didn’t really have any close friends, more acquaintances than anything, and none of them would do something like this.  The same went for enemies, as he’d deliberately tried to not make any throughout his life; he wasn’t exactly a people pleaser, but he would go out of his way to avoid the situations where a negative outcome might occur.  He also wasn’t a coward, as he could stand up for himself – and had, even physically, as his experience in the foster system had been rough – but he found that conflict was simply a waste of time and energy if it could be avoided entirely with just a little effort on his part.

Eventually, he calmed enough to stand up on wobbly legs, sliding them out from underneath the low table.  It was only when his shoes scraped against the rough stone floor that he realized that it was almost entirely silent in the room, though with the break in the silence, he noticed that there was a faint-but-persistent hum that emanated from the environment, almost like a very smooth A/C system was running somewhere out of sight – but there was no moving air or vents anywhere.

While he wanted to explore a little to see what everything was, especially the crystalline box, the most important thing was to see if he was trapped in this room.  Moving to the door, he tried to find some sort of handle to push it open, but found that it was simply a door-shaped slab of stone on hinges without any way to open it.  He pushed the door itself, but it didn’t budge even a little bit, and he couldn’t find a way to try and pull it, as there was only the tiniest crack in between the door and the stone around it.  In other words, he was stuck.

Walking quietly, he then explored the rest of the things he’d noticed earlier, but other than looking interesting, the crystalline box didn’t seem to do anything even when he touched it.  The other room was indeed a bathroom, though how exactly it worked was beyond him, as the hole in the floor hummed with an unknown energy just below the surface, and what he thought was a shower space didn’t seem to have any faucets or showerheads visible.  It was also dark, as the light from the main room didn’t extend too far inside, but he was able to see enough to know that it was confusing.

Moving back to the middle of the main room, he stopped right below the dim light above his head and looked around at the dark corners of the room.  He thought there might be cameras hidden somewhere watching him, as if he was in some sort of serial killer’s sick game, but he couldn’t see anything.  Instead, the only things he saw were what he’d already observed, which wasn’t a whole lot.

“Hello?  Where am I?” he asked out loud, his voice remarkably steady but with the volume low, as if he wasn’t exactly sure he wanted an answer.

A few seconds passed as he tried to see or hear if his words had any reaction, but nothing happened.  Suddenly, a spike of pain to his head made him collapse to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, as he lost all control of his body.  The pain seemed to last for hours, but it was only about 10 seconds before the pain faded away completely, and he quickly regained all his normal functions; he was on his feet a second later in a defensive stance, his head whipping around in different directions looking for what had seemingly attacked him, but he didn’t see anything.

“Whoever just attacked me, come out!  I ain’t playin’ around—” he began to say, but he stopped as he heard something happening with the closed doorway.  Out of nowhere, as if it was hidden by some sort of hi-tech hologram, a recessed handle appeared on the side of the door; before he could move to open it, he saw it turn, and the door suddenly started to swing toward him.  He was far enough away that it wouldn’t hit him, so he didn’t move, but he put his hands up to defend himself from whatever serial killer was coming in to finish the job.

What walked through the door was so far beyond Bax’s expectations that his body and mind locked up, unable to process the 8-foot-tall, red-skinned, cloven-footed, curl-horned devil with a spiked prehensile tail stomping through the door. It was wearing a tight, black leather outfit that looked right out of some sort of twisted S&M scenario, and he expected there to be a whip somewhere on their person, but he didn’t see one visible.  Besides, the burning flames that seemed to illuminate their eyes was more than enough of a weapon that a whip wasn’t exactly necessary.

I… died?  This is hell, isn’t it?  I can only assume that the flaming pits of lava are through that door, and this devil is here to take me to them, where I can burn for eternity.

He’d never really been a religious or spiritual person, but having the idea of hell becoming a reality made him regret not pursuing such activities while he was alive.  Just the thought of what awaited him started to crack his sanity, and he could feel his mind starting to slip away.

“Hello there!  Sorry I’m late, but we were just now informed that a brand-new world had been inducted into the—whoa!  Hold on, what’s happening?”

The devil moved faster than he could follow, crossing the distance from the doorway to just in front of him in a literal blink of an eye, and he felt the heat from its hand on his upper arm keeping him from collapsing.  Before unconsciousness could creep in, a sudden and powerful slap that felt like it cracked his jaw woke him back up from the pain, and he stumbled backwards as the powerful hand released him.

Torture already?

“There.  Are you feeling better?  I have to admit, the transition is always a bit disorienting for new arrivals, but with you being from a new world, I’m sure it’s even worse.  Anyway, come along now, we’re short on time and we need to get you to the new Keeper orientation.  All of your questions will be answered in time, but we have to hurry.”

As he focused on the pain in his jaw, he found his mind clearing, with the disorientation being replaced with anger.  He attempted to speak, but he couldn’t move his jaw enough to get his mouth to work, as a spike of intense pain let him know that it had likely been dislocated.  He winced and moaned as waves of agony spread through his face, which seemed to catch the attention of the devil.

“Oh, no – how did that happen?  Your Endurance must be utter crap – worse than a Gnome’s, most likely.  Hold still; let me fix that for you.”

He was barely able to concentrate on the words coming out of the devil who had dislocated his jaw, but that all changed when he saw it raise a hand toward him and a glow enveloped it, and then he felt a soothing sensation flow through his face where the pain had been.  Within a few seconds, his jaw shifted back into position with a pop, and all the agony he’d been experiencing faded away as if it had never been there.  Even better, the itchiness in his throat that had been there since he woke up that morning had disappeared along with the pain.

What was that?  Some sort of healing energy?

“There you go.  That’s about the best I can do at the moment, but if you’re still feeling it after the orientation, we’ll make sure a real Healer fixes you up.”  The devil was suddenly at the doorway and beckoned to him.  “Come on, we’ll catch hell if we’re late.”

That turn of phrase didn’t inspire much confidence in him, but the fact that his pain was gone cleared his head enough for him to come to a decision as his mind to recall what the devil had said.  While he wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, he had a suspicion that it had to do with whatever this “Keeper” thing was that was mentioned.  Granted, he might still be tortured for eternity in hell, but he figured he might as well go to his fate on his own terms instead of being dragged into it.

Therefore, without another word – because he thought that if he spoke, his words might just come out squeaky and pathetic-sounding – he followed the devil out of the door.

Whether it was the smartest idea or not was still to be seen.