I stood amidst the ruins of Chicago with an eight-year-old boy on a quest to find the Gem of Brilliance, whatever that was. The cold wind coming off the lake in a steady rush over the broken off skyscrapers and past La Salle University, what remained of it that is was my first clue to where I was.
"Chicago, the Windy City." I muttered shifting my heavy duffel bag on my shoulders for comfort. It carried my life in there so I wasn’t about to leave one of the heavy weapons, or tools, camping gear, or laptop behind. Because a verser just never knew if the next universe he landed in would have stores that sold computers. This one, if it had stores, probably sold two decade old cans of green beans with a no return policy if you caught salmonella.
That is, if they had salmonella in this world.
Curious, I hurried after the boy who was leading me toward the former site of the LSD Drive, and what had been called Lake Michigan in my original world. I think I’ve heard a dozen different names for it, most of them Native American tribal names but in one it was Lake Winchester, and another it was the Water, Large, Fresh #2, and in a third the guardians had called it the Serene Bathing Pool of the Mighty Celestial Dragon.
Upon catching up to the driven little boy dressed in rags and an electrical cord for a belt as he scampered up the side of some broken chunks of concrete that had been part of the Chrysler Building, I think, I began to question him about the history of his world.
He was a child who lived underground, but even for that he was exceptionally ignorant. He didn’t even know the world was a globe…which come to think of it, it might not be. Most worlds are, but one never knows in the Multiverse. In case you’re wondering, yes, it did make me nervous to look over the edge of a world. Gave my stomach the flip-flops.
Still, he seemed to have a plan for where he was going. So I followed even as he picked up the pace. Soon he was running down to the shoreline.
The water smelled clean, except for a faint ‘lakish’ smell. And no mutant crabs, or phosporecent fungi crawled up out of the waves to eat us. This was a plus. However, just in case, I had my plasma cannon unshipped from the backpack, and set to medium broil which meant it would stop a charging tiger dead in the beast’s tracks.
The higher levels of damage can finish off a main battle tank. The Jaxonians, with their orange skin, and four arms, and foul breath and just general freaky Otherness, may be disgusting on a visceral level to Humans, but they do make some very fine implements of destruction. And they are actually decent people if you can override your biologically driven reaction to pick up a stone, scream, and try to bash their elongated and rather thick skull in.
The boy looked at me, and his lower lip began to tremble. I walked over to him, keeping an eye out for trouble, and one eye for seeing what I could do to help. Really, he had been terrifically brave for one in his position.
"They said…" He blubbered. "The-th-they."
I patted him on the shoulder, and commanded him to breathe in and out three times. Then he could explain. It helped.
"They said you could get anywhere from the Big Water."
Ah. It clicked. The child had a magical view of the lake, and saw it as some sort of gateway to whereever. Which perhaps it was.
"How many people think like this?"
He gulped back some snot in his throat, and looking me in the eye assured me that everyone did, but where was the Gem? And oh, he started to cry again.
I waved him to silence, and wondered. The evidence supported a high-tech world. The bones of the skyscrapers were not rusted after decades which meant any one of a half-dozen rust proof alloys of steel, or possibly a titanium-aluminum-copper mix which had been very popular in the twenty-second century on Nuevos…the memory slipped away from me, and back into that hateful hole in my mind made by the partial amnesia.
High-tech worlds often had low magic, although there were dozens of exceptions to this. However, it seemed to me, and to a few other versers I’d talked to like Clarence and Marcoe that the belief of the people had some effect on how much magic was in the world.
I reached back into my backpack, and pulled out a very small saphire, a brilliant blue thing that warmed the soul even as it twitched the fingers of onlookers larcenously. I’d been given this, for services rendered by a certain Lady.
With a muttered prayer to the Most High, I tossed the saphire into the Big Water. And then I and the boy waited. A minute passed, and I was about to sigh, and try some other method when the water began to surge. The waves grew more boisterous. They kept coming closer and closer, but it felt like the right thing to do to stay where we were.
Still, I glanced over my shoulder to reaffirm my memory of the best path for retreat aka a full-out sprint with a tyke on my shoulder.
The water touched our toes, and suddenly I smelled roses in the water, and saw a shape hovering over the tallest of the waves which watery mass seemed frozen in place.
I could not see the Lady with her long hair, and silk gown, and the face that reminded me almost of my dearly beloved lost for now, only for now, on the other side of space and time. I could almost see her. Out of the corner of my eye, a flicker, and a shape, and a voice that one almost heard.
And then it was gone. The wave retreated leaving my sapphire behind.
And then I searched my memory wondering if I had heard something.
"Noble Knight, I come to aid you as promised for the Lady of the Lake is good to her word. But it is hard for me to reach into your world, so poor is it in magic that I must use a waking dream to reach you. Follow the pictures, and choose bravely."
I looked at the boy, and he seemed to have heard something as well, but I did not intrude. Instead, I looked, and saw a lady of iron, a statue, the only one, standing on the top of a lighthouse. Despite the lighthouse being almost completely demolished by whatever massive overpressure had wrecked Chicago, the statue still stood.
It was my sign. And I set out toward the north for that was where the statue pointed with outstretched arm.
