Summoned! To Grimworld

Chapter 1: Welcome to Grimworld

'This feels very real. It is real, isn't it?' Marcus breathed in deeply and felt... youthful. There was a faint scent of something sweet in the air but better still was the energy that coursed through his body. For the first time in decades he felt like leaping about: performing cartwheels even, if he could remember how. For now though such cavorting would have to wait, he was in a bulky spacesuit and strapped to a seat in front of a large display that was glowing yellow and orange. There was another figure in the seat beside him but the fact that their face-screen was darkened prevented Marcus from seeing them properly.

If this was really happening – and he had major doubts that it was ­­– then what did he feel? Anger at being taken from his home? Not at all, it was a relief to find himself somewhere other than his squalid cottage. Fear of death? At ninety-two Marcus had long prepared himself for death. And as an adherent of Epicurus he understood that one might reasonably fear pain, but not death. Did he feel shock? Certainly, he was shocked. But he was excited too: stimulated. There was art here, in this experience of translocation, providing he could survive to express it.

In fact, that was a very intriguing thought. How could you communicate to the viewer of a sculpture, say, what it was like to be alive in this intense moment? How to give the viewer insight into the extraordinary sensations of a mind that had been plucked like a pearl from an oyster and brought out of dark depths to a bright world above the waves. The sculpture would have to simultaneously convey a fundamental, violent rupture and a continuity of thought by a person who had lived over ninety years on another planet.

'I'm sorry. You have been mind-swapped without permission.' There was a soft-spoken voice in his ears, breaking into his thoughts.

'Mind swap?' The person beside Marcus who asked that question was a woman. Young. Annoyed. 'Well swap me back.'

'Again, I must apologise. We are falling through the atmosphere of a planet called Grimworld and there is far too much interference to...'

'It's hot!' the woman exclaimed. 'How do I get up? My seat is burning.'

'Please remain seated. It is uncomfortable but in a hundred and sixty-two seconds I will eject you from the craft. After which, you will land safely but... I anticipate my own destruction.'

'Are you the spacecraft?' asked Marcus. An erratic, shuddering vibration was becoming stronger, spoiling his appreciation of the simple pleasure of sitting and breathing while free from pain.

'I'm a personality housed in this craft. My name is Cortness Malkine.'

'Pleased to meet you, I'm Marcus.'

'Hello Cortness Malkine, hello Marcus. Pleased to meet you. I'm Sina Koskina. Princess Sina Koskina, but I suppose that a title won't mean much here.'

'Please,' said the spaceship, 'while I appreciate good manners, we are losing valuable seconds, which would be better spent if I brief you about the planet you are about to land upon.'

'Go ahead Cortness Malkine,' the woman waved her left hand, a gesture that, now he came to reflect on it, seemed to Marcus to indeed be rather regal.

'Grimworld is a system planet. Do you know what that means?'

Several red lights were blinking around the small cabin and an alarm began an undulating wail.

'I do not,' said Marcus.

'No,' said the woman, Sina.

'System worlds are artificial and were created in the distant past, for unknown reasons, to provide inhabitants with an interface similar to a base-building game. You will be able to construct a shelter for your survival and everything else you need by using this interface.'