Undermind

Who’d have thought a day could be so complicated?

Not the things she did throughout the day. Those were simple. Saskia walked. And then she walked some more. Occasionally she stopped to answer the call of nature, or drink from a stream, or sample the various edibles she happened across—or which happened across her. As it turned out, trolls could eat pretty much anything.

Best to avoid the tawny mushrooms from now on, though. For about an hour after swallowing one of those suckers, she’d seen tentacles. Tentacles everywhere.

What was complicated was the actual day itself. The day-night cycle, if it could be called that. Here, it was less of a cycle than a meander. When the world was actually a planet-sized tree, simple concepts like planets orbiting the sun lost all meaning. Because this wasn’t a planet. And as far as Saskia could tell, this world’s sun was a drunken donkhole, wobbling lazily through the sky, occasionally stopping to pee on the celestial mosaic.

Whenever the sun wandered behind the trunk of the world tree (as she’d begun to think of it), or a branch, it was kinda like night time. Not as dark as a true night though; more like an eclipse back on Earth. Some of these branch eclipses only lasted a few minutes. Some went on for almost an hour. Only when the sun passed underneath the continent-sized branch beneath her feet did Saskia get to experience something resembling a night on Earth.

That had happened three times since she arrived on this world. The length of those days and nights, even ignoring all the eclipses, seemed to vary a lot, but overall, they seemed a bit longer than a day on Earth. Her gut told her that about three and a half days had passed on Earth. But she was pretty sure her gut had just pushed this number out of her butt, because her sleep schedule was completely messed up.

Three and a half days would make it Saturday morning back home. Saskia’s mum would be doing yoga. Raji, Ferg and Dave would be trickling into the studio, ready to start the weekend grind. Her old climbing buddies Ivan and Reiko would be halfway up Silberhorn. Assuming everyone wasn’t out desperately searching for Saskia, or attending her funeral.

Meanwhile she’d slogged through endless stretches of dense, swampy woods, catching only occasional glimpses of the sky through gaps in the canopy, or when she climbed a hill or tree to get her bearings. So she couldn’t be precisely sure what the sun was doing up there most of the time. She just knew it wasn’t following the sane, predictable arc that the sun would follow on a sane, predictable world.

Early on, she’d decided to head in the direction of the trunk of the world tree. In that direction were snow covered peaks and a lake. On Earth, such lakes almost always had towns or cities around them. But it was taking much longer to reach these landmarks than she initially thought it would. Distances were deceptive, especially when looking lengthwise down the branch, where there was no well-defined horizon.

And the terrain was rough. Whenever she’d gone hiking or climbing on Earth, she’d been following well-marked tracks, or scaling rocky or snow-covered peaks out in the open, where she could see for miles. Here, she hadn’t found anything more than animal trails. She couldn’t see crap, and she couldn’t take five steps without getting her legs or arms stuck in mud or snagging on roots or branches. These woods were thicker than a strawberry smoothie.

Her stomach rumbled.

Dogramit! she thought. Thinking about food again!

She stopped by a river to munch on a—well, she didn’t know what it was, exactly—a cat-sized furry eight-legged thing that was absolutely not a spider. While she was doing that, something long and slithery emerged from the water to munch on her.

Saskia looked at the sinuous shape sliding across the slick stones, and let out a sigh. Grabbing the beast around its slippery neck, she watched as it thrashed about in her hand, struggling to free itself. She squeezed. Not enough to kill it. Just enough to make it think twice about making a meal out of her. Then she sighed again and hurled it back into the water.

One thing she’d learned over the past few days was that the smaller creatures of this world were suicidally ambitious. They’d come at her with the temerity of a chihuahua biting the wheel of a speeding semi. Maybe they just hadn’t met a troll before.

Not that Saskia was complaining. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the food served itself to her. But at times like this, when she already had another meal, she’d let the misguided creatures live. She wasn’t a monst—

She wasn’t wasteful.

As for larger predators, there were very few that could threaten a troll. Occasionally she’d glimpsed large creatures through the trees and lounging about in swampy pools, but they’d left her alone so far. There were the ones she’d dubbed upside-down-cats—brown furry beasts with long tails that always seemed to be hanging beneath branches. They were about the size of a St. Bernard, but they looked closer to housecats next to Saskia. In the wetlands lurked scaly crocodilian creatures with long serrated beaks. There was something that looked like a rhino with massively oversized forelegs. A rhino-troll? Once, she’d almost walked into a large bear with tiger stripes, but it had turned and bounded away. Then there was the giant tentacular horror she’d sighted wading through the swamp. She’d noped away from that one right quick.

Finishing her meal, Saskia drank deeply, then took a dip in a clear pool. No rivers were this clean back home. This body wasn’t built for swimming, but she managed well enough. Floating on her back, she blinked up at the clear sky, which was just beginning to darken as the sun passed behind another branch.

The river was one of the few places where there was a gap in the canopy, allowing her to easily get oriented. The great trunk of the world tree made a pretty reliable landmark. Far better than navigating using the sun. Especially this sun. Everything she wanted to see was toward the trunk, or trunkward. So she needed to go that way.

And there it was again. What was that thing?

It was like…a tiny circle of light in the corner of her eye. She could turn her gaze toward it. But whenever she turned her head, the light would move with it, remaining on the edge of her field of vision. This anomaly had showed up several times today. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. It just…appeared. And if she ignored it for long enough, it faded away.

Back on Earth, this kind of visual anomaly would be a serious cause for concern. It might mean there was something wrong with her eyes, or her brain. Or it might be a prelude to another seizure.

Here, it was just another oddity to add to the pile of weird. Yeah, she may be seeing things, but she was on a tree the size of a planet, in the body of a troll. Seeing things was the least of her worries. It was probably just some magical critter nesting in her eyeball. Nothing to…

Okay, that’s actually kinda terrifying.

Now she had to get to the bottom of this, or she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep tonight.

Saskia waded to the shore and quickly dressed, watching the circle of light bob about as she moved. She was pretty sure she already knew the answer, but what would happen when she closed her eyes?

Yup. Still there. That confirmed it then. Whatever it was, it was inside her.

Feasting on my tender, juicy eyeball, she thought with a shudder.

Inspecting the light closely, she realised that it wasn’t just a circle. There were finer details that she hadn’t noticed earlier. On one side was a slight bump, and there were darker and brighter areas across its surface.

And then she had her first epiphany. When she turned her body, the circle turned with it! How had she missed that before? It was so obvious, now that she was paying attention to the details. She did a three-sixty, and watched as the bulgy bit rotated all the way around the perimeter of the circle of light, returning to its original spot at the same time she did. She stood next to a stone on the grassy bank, then spun around again, several times, while looking down at her feet. The bump remained pointing at the stone.

This is a compass, she realised. A compass in my eye. How weird is that!

Weird and useful. So very useful.

On Earth, a compass pointed north. But this wasn’t Earth, so where was this one pointing? Looking up at the sky, she immediately got her answer. What was the central axis of a tree? Its trunk, of course! This compass pointed trunkward.

The more she focussed on the apparition, the more vivid and tangible it seemed to become. More details were becoming apparent on its surface. And colours. Most of the surface of the compass had a greenish hue, but there were specks of cream and salmon red and wood brown. And there was a ruddy blue crack snaking down the middle. Or perhaps not a crack. Fissures normally took the path of least resistance, but this line meandered about, in no hurry to go anywhere. It looked more like a…

More like a river. Like that river. Like the one she was standing right next to.

Not just a compass, she realised. It’s also a map.

This little circular map was beginning to feel eerily familiar to Saskia. It looked less like the kind of map you’d see on a smartphone or car dashboard, and more like a minimap in a…

In a video game.

And not just any game. A very specific map for a specific game; a map she was intimately familiar with, because she’d designed it.

As the realisation hit her, the object—the minimap—seemed to coalesce into a ghostly replica of the one she’d created for Threads of Nautilum.

Saskia felt her mind becoming frayed around the edges. After everything she’d experienced over the past few days, she’d become certain that this was all real. That she was really here. And that this world, no matter how strange it seemed, was a real place. She’d eaten, slept, breathed alien air, felt mud squishing between her toes. She’d even bled. She’d felt pain. What kind of game made its players feel physical pain? This couldn’t be a game, could it? There was just no way…

She sighed and looked back at the map. Really looked at it, now that it was looking almost as tangible as the world around her. On close inspection, it wasn’t quite the same as her design for Nautilum. But the differences stemmed from the fact that this looked like a three dimensional object hovering in the air in front of her, rather than an image on a flat screen. It resembled an antique compass or watch with a glass front, containing a map where the spinning hands would normally be. The compass bearing was shown with a little arrow on the outside. There was a dot in the centre of the map that marked her location. But there wasn’t much else to see on the map itself besides the river and the forest. The big landmarks were apparently too far away.

It was hard to estimate the scale of this map. Saskia had initially added distance markings to Nautilum’s minimap, but she’d later scrapped them, deciding that they looked too ‘techy’ for a high fantasy game. Now she wanted to punch her earlier self for making that choice. They would have come in handy right about now.

Then the sun fled behind a branch eclipse, and the light and shadow of the forest faded into the familiar flat, featureless gloom. She’d taken to calling this effect darksight. As soon as her darksight came into play, the minimap became blurry and indistinct.

This discovery led to another epiphany. Her darksight was an overlay, just like the map! As the light faded, this second sight took over, replacing the near-pitch darkness that her eyes perceived. The transition was near-seamless, so she hadn’t given it a second thought until now. It was as if she were simultaneously watching two different versions of the same scene overlaid on top of each other. Right now, her darksight dominated, but with a bit of conscious effort, she could distinguish the two…for want of a better word, she’d call them layers. Her map was a third layer, one that seemed to be competing with her darksight, and losing…

When true light began to filter down through the canopy a few minutes later, the map returned with it. She began to follow the river, keeping a close eye on the map as she walked. It was slow going, as usual. In places where the river was calm, she found it easier to wade through the water than to try to fight her way through the creeping vines and tangled branches along the riverbank.

Soon, she’d gotten a pretty good feel for the scale of the map. It was about a kilometre in diameter; quite a small area, but a damn sight better than groping blindly through the trees, not knowing what she might stumble upon next.

The spectral map seemed to respond directly to her thoughts. She could make it fade away and reappear just by wanting it to happen. The longer she focussed her attention on it, the sharper it became. And after long minutes of intense concentration she was able to change the colour of its border from silver to…a slightly bluer shade of silver.

Progress!

Unfortunately, that appeared to the limit of her control over it. In many games, including Nautilum, a player could zoom in and out, adjusting the scale of the minimap. There would also be a full-screen map that could be brought up with the press of a button.

Here, there were no obvious buttons, and she had no mouse or controller or touchscreen with which to press them anyhow. She tried focussing her gaze, blinking, voice commands, even reaching out and pressing the hovering object with her fingers (or at least the spot where it appeared to be). And of course she tried commanding it with her mind. After nearly an hour of this, she gave up in frustration.

Disappointing, but not unexpected. Maybe those ‘advanced features’ would come in time, once she’d further trained her mental muscles. It had taken more than two days for even the ghost of the object to appear before her.

Night fell early today. Or maybe it was just her confusion and excitement over this new interface making time pass quickly. Whatever the reason, she lay awake for hours, thinking over the implications of what had happened.

This was all so strange, so unexpected, she didn’t know how to process it. Was she inside a game? She’d discounted the notion pretty quickly that first night. Yes, that was before a minimap appeared in front of her, but still, it didn’t seem any more plausible now than it did then.

No modern virtual reality game came anywhere close to this level of realism. And they didn’t even try to simulate touch or temperature or taste or smell. Popular movies made it seem as if this kinda thing was just around the corner, but it really wasn’t. Saskia knew how much work went into making even simple games with crude graphics and audio. Something this immersive…wasn’t possible. Not now. Perhaps not even a hundred years from now.

Yeah yeah, she was being a bit presumptuous claiming to know what was possible, when none of this should be possible. Travelling to an alternate world and waking up in a new body wasn’t possible either. But the difference was that Saskia knew modern technology and art and game design. She didn’t know magic. Magic was unknowable. Magic made anything possible. But magically advanced technology, unless it was from the far future, or invented by aliens, was just…bad sci-fi.

Right now, she’d rather believe in magic.

Anyhow, it was what it was, however it came to be. And what it was…was really handy.

She wouldn’t have to worry about getting lost again! No more having to climb trees just to see where she was going. No more accidental backtracking, costing her hours of progress. Now she had a map and compass in her head! It was almost like having her smartphone again.

Well alright, maybe not that good. Smartphones had scalable maps and route planning and cameras and email and videos and music and silly little games.

Even something as simple as a clock. She’d give her left boob for a clock right now, in this strange new world, where she couldn’t even rely on the sun to move in the same direction at the same speed, from day to day.

Damn she missed her smartphone…

When the first light of dawn brushed her weary face, it was joined by a brighter light that hovered in the air before her as she blinked and yawned.

Another one? she thought blearily. What is it this time?

This…time.

Within a few hours, the new ghostly object resolved into something that looked a lot like the face of an old-school mechanical clock, but without any numerals, and with too many hours marked around its perimeter. Behind the slowly-rotating hands was a stylised depiction of the sun making slow loop de loops in the sky over a transparent silhouette of the world tree. There was a bright trail indicating where the sun would go over the course of the day. The little sun’s movements behind the branches of the tree coincided precisely with eclipses she experienced in the real world. Or whatever this world was, if not real.

As she inspected the new interface layer, Saskia wondered how a clock would handle this world’s variable-length days. Would the number of hours reset each morning, or was this number just an average? She wasn’t even certain the markings around the outside really were spaced at hourly intervals. Her gut told her they spanned close to the length of an hour on Earth, but it was hard to say for sure, as she had no Earth clock against which to measure them.

She could make this clock come and go at will, just like the minimap. And, like the minimap, it seemed to have been adapted from something she’d created for Threads of Nautilum’s user interface.

Nautilum’s camera was locked into a top-down isometric perspective, so players couldn’t just look up at the sky to tell the time. Instead she’d illustrated the time on a little panel using a sun and moon wheeling across the sky (above a layer of cartoon clouds if the weather was bad). Nautilum was set on a planet much like Earth, so she didn’t have to worry about branch eclipses or a wayward sun. This thing had the same visual style though. Just modified to fit a different world. And without a digital readout of the time, unfortunately.

She juggled back and forth between the map and the clock throughout the morning, as she was having trouble keeping them both up at the same time even though they didn’t occupy the same space.

The map began to show information that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday. Now, there were green and yellow dots that were clearly not part of the surrounding forest. Some of them remained in one spot, but others moved randomly across its surface. Could they be…?

Saskia walked until one of the green markers was positioned in the centre of the map, right on top of the dot showing her own location. She didn’t see anything at first, but a moment later, there came a hissing sound from above.

Her eyes jerked upward, and she saw an upside-down-cat hanging from a branch high in the canopy, eyeing her warily.

Fantastic, she thought, backing away from the watchful animal. This thing can track creatures!

There must be some size or weight or danger threshold to what was displayed, otherwise the entire map would be swarming with markers for the millions of tiny, harmless things that lived in trees and scurried or wriggled underfoot. If it was anything like a game (and clearly it was), the colour represented either the creature’s attitude toward her, or the threat it posed to her in a confrontation. Green might be something that wouldn’t attack her unless provoked, or which she could easily defeat if it did. Yellow…now those she might have to watch out for. And red…

Red meant dead.

Saskia continued on her journey trunkward, always keeping a watchful eye on the map. When she nearly fell into a pothole, it occurred to her that maybe she should also pay attention to where she was walking. The map was no substitute for eyes. It didn’t show tiny details like those annoying tripwire vines or bloody great holes in the ground. She was turning into one of those people. The ones who always walked with their faces buried in their phones, and didn’t watch where they were going.

Oh hey, what’s this?

There was something new on the edge of her map. A little icon in the shape of a house. More houses popped into view as she got closer. She approached cautiously, taking note of the yellow and orange markers moving about them.

Peeking through the foliage, Saskia saw that the actual houses looked nothing like their icons. They were also quite unlike the elegant stone spires and spiralling causeways of the town she’d fled on that first night. Most of the buildings seemed to have been grown rather than constructed, with uneven, bark-covered walls at all sorts of odd angles, and leafy branches sticking out.

How…elfy of them. But not very practical. What would happen when there was a forest fire? Or maybe they had other ways of dealing with that. Magical ways.

Slender figures in wispy gowns and billowing cloaks glided between the houses and trees. Briefly, she considered the notion of simply walking up to the elves and introducing herself. Then she remembered she couldn’t speak their language, and the last time elves had seen her, they’d turned her into a pincushion. She was in no hurry to repeat that experience. Best not stick around.

As she backed up through the undergrowth, she heard a thwack. And now there was an arrow in her shoulder!

Two of the elves had circled around and were stalking toward her. She hadn’t been watching those ones through the trees, but they’d clearly been watching her.

Pincushion time, she thought miserably as she bounded away, feeling the punch of another arrow sinking into her back. Shoulda known they’d be able to spot me at that range. I’m as stealthy as a charging rhino.

Saskia watched the orange markers fall further and further behind her. When she changed course, they kept going straight, apparently losing her trail. Only then did she breathe a sigh of relief, and spare a moment to pluck the arrows out.

Disheartened, she continued on her journey. Everyone she’d met so far had a kill-on-sight policy toward trolls. Was this going to be her fate from now on? To be chased out of every village, her every movement hounded, until eventually her luck ran out and her head ended up as a trophy adorning some hunter’s wall?

Later that day, Saskia became aware of a tingling sensation creeping over her. Wondering what it could be, she scanned her surroundings and checked her map. And that was when she noticed something strange.

Whenever she tried to look at certain parts of the map, she felt her eyes sliding away from them without really seeing what was there. They were like magical blind spots, except after some experimentation, she found it was more of a single meandering line than a bunch of spots. The line cut a roughly diagonal path down through the map from northwest to southeast.

It had been deflecting more than just her eyes, she realised. She’d been unconsciously avoiding that region for some time, drifting slowly northwest, instead of heading directly north as she’d intended.

Bog that! Saskia wasn’t about to let some mystical hoodoo mess with her head!

She changed course, pushing directly toward a landmark on the opposite side of the repelling line; a large rock formation shown to the northeast of her map. As she pressed on, she kept her eyes glued to the rocks to make sure she wasn’t being turned away.

It felt like a great weight was pressing down on her, suffocating her. The feeling steadily increased, until it became hard to think straight. Her ears were ringing, and she knew if she were back in her old body, she’d be having another seizure right now. The undergrowth seemed to grow thicker too, and more treacherous. She could have sworn she saw a vine reach out and trip her. But still she kept walking, slowly and methodically, toward her destination.

And then, blessedly, the pressure was gone. In fact, it now felt almost like there was a tailwind. She’d passed through…whatever it was, and out the other side.

Saskia let out a whoop of joy. “Take that, troll-repelling forcefield! You can’t keep me—”

She froze, suddenly aware of a rustle through the trees. Something was coming toward her, and fast; making a rushing, crackling sound that set her teeth on edge. Looking at her map, she cursed inwardly. The source of the noise was travelling down the line that her eyes refused to look at. So she couldn’t see it either.

There was no time to move out of the way. Desperately, she did the only thing she could think of. She shimmied up a nearby tree, praying that its slender branches could hold her weight. It wasn’t an especially large tree, but there weren’t any better options.

Saskia hugged the tree tightly, hoping whatever approached wouldn’t think to look up. It was a forlorn hope, she knew.

The terrible sound grew louder and louder, and the trees around her began to shudder and sway alarmingly. A whispering of countless voices rose on the air. She could feel a tingling sensation on her skin, like a gathering storm.

Below, the undergrowth parted, shifting and flattening and stretching to clear a path for whoever or whatever was pursuing her.

Through the gap opened up beneath the trees leapt a large creature with dark fur and big teeth. It bounded forward, snout low to the ground. The beast wasn’t as massive as the sound and swaying trees had suggested, but an intimidating size all the same; almost as long as she was tall, and powerfully muscled. It looked like a larger, toothier cousin of the upside-down-cats, except this one, of course, was not upside down. So…just cat. This beast probably wasn’t responsible for the plant-bending magic, although she couldn’t be certain of that.

More likely, the one or ones responsible were the pair of slender cloaked figures accompanying the beast. One of them sat astride its back, just like she'd tried to do to her neighbour's cat when she was two. That had earned her a swipe across the ear from the cat, followed by a verbal swipe across the ear from her mother.

Through the leafy canopy, she glimpsed gold-and-green skin, tapered ears, pale faces and long blonde hair.

Great, she thought. Just what I need. More elves.

These guys looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Lord of the Rings movie or a Dungeons & Dragons manual. They had that classic nimble but slightly effeminate look; quite unlike the rugged, scruffy elves Saskia had created for Threads of Nautilum.

Oh well, she thought. Maybe the clichés exist for a reason…

As they drew near, the cat began to sniff the air. Its rider spoke excitedly. The beast growled and turned its head from side to side, before finally locking eyes with Saskia. It gave a short, sharp hiss.

Oh crap.

Immediately, the elves followed the cat’s gaze to Saskia’s large and not particularly well-camouflaged form.

There was a flurry of action and a rapid-fire exchange of voices and hand signals and…laughter? Oh she did not like this one bit. The rider drew a bow.

Cursing, Saskia scrambled around the other side of the tree. But not quite fast enough. She felt the thump of an arrow striking her upper arm.

For frock’s sake, not this again! she fumed. Why don’t I ever get to face the usual mooks from TV and movies, who can’t hit the broad side of a barn?

Of course, she was almost as big as the broad side of a barn. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Saskia’s mind raced, trying to think of some solution to her dilemma. There was no handy beehive with which to drop on their heads, so she couldn’t Katniss her way out of this. She had her spear, but she lacked both the will and the skill to hurl it like a javelin. She doubted she could just run away from these guys. This was going to end in blood, she just knew it. Dogramit! She didn’t want to fight elves. Elves were supposed to be the good guys.

Again, a low sound filled the air, seeming to come from all around her, like the murmur of a thousand voices.

Peeking out from behind the tree, she saw an elf standing with his legs splayed, holding aloft a gnarled branch with a faintly-glowing amber-coloured stone set atop it. Not just a branch then. A staff.

His hair and cloak billowed around him, even though the air everywhere else was quite still. As if there were someone just off-screen pointing a giant air-blower at him. Except there was no screen. A globule of swirling amber liquid appeared in the air above his head, growing larger and larger with each passing moment. He looked for all the world like a wizard channelling a spell.

Actually, that’s exactly what he is, she realised. This guy’s a wizard!

The eerie murmur ceased, and in that moment, the wizard released his spell, and the blob of liquid launched itself at her.

She threw herself out of the tree.

With a squawk, she plummeted to the ground, landing hard on her hands and feet, her spear clattering across the leaf-strewn forest floor. Pain shot through her arm as the impact further opened the wound created by the arrow. A moment later, leaves and branches and charred wood and a spray of fine droplets rained down on her. Wherever the droplets struck the exposed skin of her head and limbs and back, she felt a sharp sting, and heard the hiss of scorching flesh. Glancing up, she saw that the top of the tree was…gone. What remained of its trunk was streaked with goo that even now scoured away bark and wood, and billowed smoke high into the sky.

That would have been me, she thought dazedly.

Saskia spun to face her attackers.