The Gaming Outpost

The energy of the Gate swirled around me in fractal whorls; I smelled blue, and saw the scent of chocolate; my body felt as if I were stretched from chest to back the width of a football field, while my head and feet felt as compressed as golfballs. Endless possibility, not bound to form, joy, life, and more than I can say, but enough to make me long for that endless moment in my dreams for years to come, and it all spun just beyond my desperately grasping reach.

And then the Gate collapsed, and I was elsewhere.

Crisp, crackling leaves underfoot, with color drenched tree branches overhead. Air with the faint scent of woodsmoke drifting in the cool breeze that spoke of winter and log fires made me smile.

I took a step.

The Gate had not finished with me I realized when my right foot came down in muck. Green rooty tendrils, the very living plant rotting as it grew tried to confine my foot in the mire of foot deep water. A heavy fog invaded my lungs, made my body work simply to stay alive. The heat and humidity almost drove me to my knees after the last oh so pleasant world.

I looked up, and hillocks of trees covered by drapes of viny rot closed me in, and so it was with gladness, I took another step.

Searing sun bedimned my eye, and tears made me out to be a coward. Sand, white, crystalline, and hot enough to scorch caked to the outside of my mire caked foot. And I saw, still purple and beautiful, one leaf, dried, yet still speaking of hope and joy from worlds back.

The sand got into my socks, lashed my ankles. A gust of wind, with no moisture, scooped up a bit, and tossed it in my face.

I did not take another step so much as slide into it as I went down a sand dune.

Shivering quiet attended my echoing footfall. Here in the dark, I could hear the sound of water droplets…plunk, plunk, a long way off. The smell of cold earth was about me, and I could taste the weak acid presence of limestone on my tongue.

I listened and waited, wondering if something invisible to me, something that could see me clearly by my body heat, or…some other means was about to attack me. But at the same time, I needed to recover.

You could not just run from one world to another without stopping to rest. A whisper of air, moving, and without thinking, an din strong fear, I stepped.

Floated, drifted, dropping gently, almost impercepticbly toward the hard metallikc squares of the Observation Dome floor.

Throught comes and I squint. Those are not my stars through the glassine dome.

Finally, I had arrived, and so I let the vibration of the Gate trail away, leaving me grounded in this reality.