Orange Vested Traffic Workers Direct the Cars. Badged Preceptors shake hands and welcome new students to the residence Halls.

One such new student approaches his door. Almost six foot in height and with short black-brown hair, he grabs the handle and tries to turn it.

“Okay, it is locked. I wonder where the keys are handed out.”

The door then swings open. Standing in the doorway is a six foot plus man with long blonde hair held back into a pony tail.

“Ryan? Welcome! Come on In.” Eirik moves aside, gesturing into the room. Ryan moves in, with family in tow, carrying boxes. He sets his stuff down on the empty bed (the left one) and starts into setting up his side of the room…

“Alright Chuck, we’ll see you next time you visit us. Bye Mom! Take Care!”

Eirik waves as his mother and younger brother head out of the room that night. He closes the dorm room door and walks past Ryan, busily working away at his computer.

“So what’re you working on there?”

“Oh, nothing too important, just some random stories and stuff.”

“Not anything like the Outsider stories are they?” Eirik turns to the audience “Copyright 2000-2001 Ryan Watt Productions!”

“Oh, these?” he replies, stretching out. “No. Those were all based off of the events of our lives in High School. It’s only been about seven hours since we got here, there isn’t much to really write about yet!”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Eirik says, flopping out onto his bed. “So what do you think? Definitely not high school!”

“No, it certainly isn’t. I think we’re going to like it here. We’ve got a great building, potentially great classes…”

“…Thanks again for helping me get that form by the way. So what do you think of our neighbors?”

Before Ryan can respond, two of them walk in. One is a tall girl with long hair tied back in a ponytail. The other has let her long curly blonde hair stay down.

“Ah! Buffy!”

Leslie jumps a little at the sight of a nearly life sized cardboard cut out of Sarah Michelle Gellar catches her attention out of the corner of her eye. Eirik laughs

“Hey, welcome, uh, Gina and Leslie, right?”

“Yep,” Gina answered. “Hey, you guys want to go hang out and go for a walk? A bunch of us who were hanging around upstairs earlier wanted to just go around the campus and see what else is kicking.”

“Yeah, our house seems to be the only one here who realizes it’s the first night! We had, what, twenty some people up on that third floor balcony and no one else was even out?” Ryan asks, looking around.

“I know… well, except for that mom inspecting her kids room at ten o’clock at night.” Everyone laughs along with Eirik before they all grab up some stuff and leave.

“Now that’s a hat!! Hi, I’m Benjamin.”

“Thanks,” Ryan puts a hand on the straw cowboy hat he had last really worn on gradnight while subduing the Shasky-Robot. “I’m Ryan.”

“Cowboy Ryan, check!” He laughs, Ryan rolling his eyes.

“So who is leading this little excursion?”

“Um, no idea,” Gina announces. “I guess we just start walking.”

Everyone shrugs and they start walking along. As they proceed out of the lower quad and past the fountain, a few more people join their group. One odd fellow walks up to Ryan looking excited. He decides to be cordial.

“Hey, I’m Ryan,” he says, extended his hand in friendship.

A cold hand grips Ryan’s tightly. “Adam. Can we talk?”

“Sure. So, uh, we’re you living? I’m in Beard.”

“Uh, Beard too, I guess.”

“Cool,” Ryan turns and sees that the rest of the group is getting ahead of him. “Lets hurry up before we loose these guys in the fog. After all, we don’t know where they’re going, none of us do!”

“Actually I was hoping-” Adam cuts off his sentence as Ryan has already turned away and quickened his pace to catch up with the others. With a worried look, Adam looks back at Beard for a minute before shaking his head and rushing ahead.

“Merrill,” Ryan answers, looking at the architecture.

“So, uh, what should we do now?” Eirik asks.

Suddenly, Gina tilts her head to the side, her ears picking something up.

“Wait, I hear music! Quick! I think they’re dance is actually something to be seen!”

“Aparently Gina has party sense,” Eirik laughs. “That knowledge may actually be important one of these days!”

“Woah!” Leslie gasped. “Check out this place! It’s kickin!”

“Unlike our dance! Eh Adam?” Ryan laughs at his sickly looking companion before following the group down the stairs to the dance.

At the base of the wooden flight of steps, the group discovers a jumping and jiving party with people dancing madly in a cluster around a deejay’s booth in one of the many lots on the Merrill grounds.

Many members of the group disperse into the crowd at the urging of a particularly odd fellow near them. A few others cluster together into small groups to talk and get to know each other better.

“Hey, I’m Eirik.”

“Hi. Adam. Listen, I need to talk to you.”

“What was that?”

“I said I need to talk to you!!”

“I’m sorry, I still can’t hear you over this music! Can you speak up?”

“I Said: I Need To Talk To You!!!!”

“Oh, yeah, I’m really enjoying it here! How about you?” Eirik smiles at the guy, glad that he was possibly making a new acquaintance. But, seeing that he was not getting anywhere with either Ryan or Eirik, Adam frowns and hurries off back up the stairs and disappears.

“What’s with him?” Ryan asks his roommate and friend.

“No idea, I asked him a simple question and he ran off. He must hate simple formalities! Weird”

“Hey, don’t be so mean,” said Ryan, glaring at Eirik. “For all we know his mother may have been run over by small-talk!” Eirik stared at Ryan for a moment before the two of them burst into laughter.

“So, do you know him?”

“No. I only just met him as we we’re leaving. He hadn’t seemed to keen on coming all this way with us though…”

Eirik laughs. “I can’t believe you just said keen!”

“I can’t believe that rotund little white guy is still dancing!”

The two rejoin the other groups laughing and hang around for another twenty minutes before heading back for Cowell grounds.

“I know, and those chairs were so uncomfortable!” Ryan says, yawning and stretching.

“Being half asleep didn’t help much either!”

“Yeah, but it was required… Paper god I thought it would go on for ever.”

“Hmph, and now we have to go over to the dining hall for another assembly!!”

“Are they trying to bore us to death?” Ryan asks rhetorically, though he does get an answer.

“At least that would be a physically painless way to die. Other people won’t be so lucky if you two don’t help me!”

Eirik and Ryan pivot around to see a rather peeved looking Adam standing behind them. His short cropped blonde hair looked matted, and there was dirt smudged across his incredibly well defined cheekbones. His gray eyes seemed duller. The plain gray shirt he was wearing last night now had a few elongated cuts in it, and his darker gray slacks were splattered with mud around the bottom.

“Woah Adam, what happened to you man?” Eirik asked, wide eyed. “Looks like you just lost the fight with one of those banana slugs from last night’s skits!”

“My appearance is both of your faults. If you guys had listened to me last night, we could have avoided the deaths of four individuals last night!”

Eirik’s jaw falls open; Ryan is just barely able to speak.

“Fff- four people… all dead?” Ryan swallows hard. “What happened?”

“Come on, I will show you!”

He clasps a strong hand on a shoulder of each of them and pulls them off towards the Page Smith library building.

“But- we have to- go- to the- dining hall now!!”

“That can wait! The fate of thousands may well rest in the hands of the two of you!”

For an instant, Ryan thought he saw a reddish outline of a doorway in front of them, in the middle of the walkway, but it is a fleeting glance.

But as they pass the point where the light had almost appeared to be, the three of them faded away out of that existence.

It was still the college campus, and everything was there, but everything was also different.

There was still a fence in front of them… but now it was higher and covered in barbed wires. Thick gray clouds choked the sky. The ground looked all beat up, with huge cracks and raised up chunks of concrete.

“Hell it isn’t, but this is as close as you’ll get in your lifetime,” was all Adam would say as he began walking back the way we came. He pulled out a cylindrical object out of his pocket, fiddled with it a moment, and put it away.

“Where are we going? And WHERE are we?” Ryan asked, racing up beside him.

“I’ll tell you once we get there, if we linger, we run the risk of them finding us, even without tracers.”

“Tracers?” Eirik’s face contorted in confusion. “Will you at least tell us where we are going?”

“To my place, where I live.”

“Wait, didn’t you say you lived in Beard last night?”

“Yes Ryan, I did say that, and I do…. Or what is left of it here.”

“Wait, Ryan, check this place out! It totally looks like Cowell, but it’s not!!” Eirik gestured around towards where the fountain had just been. The outer ring of concrete was still there, but instead of water and an art structure, there was a large semi-clear semi-sphere in its place.

“And down there too!” Ryan added as they ran down the flight of stairs into the lower quad. No longer was there a large lawn in between the four residence halls. Instead, there was a sloped ramp of concrete with sporadically placed squares of a dark gray… almost black substance neither of the roommates could identify.

The three quickly ran, stooping down, towards the Beard building. But it too was different. The whole top floor and part of the right third floor were missing, and the outside had no plants or balconies and only very small windows that were covered in bars. In fact, all of the buildings in the quad had that design, though their tops were intact, unlike Beard who looked like some explosion had destroyed that top part of it.

When they entered the building through the shattered glass door, Adam quickly led them to the right hallway. Eirik had just enough time to look up and notice that the top of the stairwell of his hall was now open, and a faint fog was wafting down through it. The whole building was unusually cold.

He caught up with Ryan and Adam right outside of Room 120, his and Ryan’s room. Adam held his palm in front of the door and the handle turned and the door swung open.

“AAAAHHHH!!!” The roommates and friends screamed as a frightful sight met their entrance. A larger than life sized Sarah Michelle Gellar armed with a machete came swooping down from the ceiling on a wire at the two of them. Adam ducked in before she hit him, and Eirik and Ryan jumped back as she swung through the doorway and…. vanished.

“What the hell was that?!?!?!” Ryan screamed.

“Ssssshhhhh… security hologram. I got the idea from you guys, now get inside!”

The guys shot each other nervous glances and entered.

Ryan looked around the room that should have been his dormitory.

There were beds, but they were just a thin mattress on a steel platform bolted to the wall. There was only one desk made of metal. It looked pretty beat up and didn’t really fit the décor of the room. The dressers were not in the closets. In fact, there was only one closet, the right one, which had an odd makeshift door over it. The desk was pushed up against the wall beside it. There were no shelves and the floor was bare concrete. The whole place looked terribly rigid, cold, and lifeless.

“Yeah, I bet you’re right Eirik. That would explain a lot. Like why Adam here could say he was from Beard although we had never seen him.”

“And the totally screwed out layout of Cowell.” Eirik turned to their new acquaintance. “Adam, we are apparently here now, so tell us, where the tell ‘here’ is!”

“Alright. You two are correct in the assumption that you are in a parallel world. But you are still in Santa Cruz… just not at University of California Santa Cruz.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well Eirik. In this world, there are no UCs…. Instead we have PCs: Penitentiaries of California.”

“Penitentiary? You Mean….” Adam nods to Ryan. “We’re In Prison!!!”

“Yes, in this world, due to many of the differences in our two world’s histories, our youth are much more rebellious and criminal now a days. So the state of California established a series of prisons to try to reform the wayward youth of the nation. It works amazingly well!! Few revert back to their criminal ways.”

“Wait, since parallel worlds usually mean doppelgangers, do Ryan and I have doubles in this world and are they in prison here?”

“Very astute observation. I can see why you were so infamous,” Adam said smiling, turning to face them. He had sat down at the desk and was working typing into a keyboard built into the desktop. A holographic screen displayed his work just in front of his face. “Yes, Ryan Watt and Eirik Neilsen exist in this reality. Sadly however… they are both dead.”

“We’re DEAD?” Eirik yelled, amazed.

“Shhhh! Keep your voices down! They have sound sensitive equipment. And Blade patrols the quad’s almost non-stop!” Adam took a breath and continued. “Yes, you two are both dead. You were slated to come here after you graduated from High School, but you and the rest of the NonSensical Gang, what you called the Outsider group here, decided you would never be sent to PCSC, so you blew yourselves up!”

“We committed group suicide?” Eirik gasped.

“More like a massive psynuclear murder-suicide. Ground zero was your High School graduation!”

“We Blew up Our Graduation??” Ryan gasped.

“More Precisely, you blew up a five city area around your high school!” He smirked. “I hear the light show was quite brilliant from the Intermillitary Space Base.”

“Sounds like our style…” Ryan mumbled half under his breath. Eirik turned to him sickened by the joke.

“Everything there is still intact, but all life forms were completely destroyed. All living cells turned to dust.” He watched the stunned looks on their faces grow more pronounced. Their mouths hung open. “Although that was the most destructive, your gang had done many more notable things. About two months earlier you kidnapped President Bush and did unspeakable torturous acts on him that he is still recovering from because Ryan was bitter over not having giving him the bubonic plague when he visited your High School last year.”

“Damn him for not shaking my hand here too!”

“Well, actually, he probably would have, if you and the other NonSensicals had not been locked up in a high security van during his visit… You blew that van up later on, taking out the science wing.”

“Wow, sounds like we had just as many adventures here as in our own world, eh Ryan?”

“Seriously.” Ryan paused for a moment. “So then why are we here?”

“Well, I need your help. The lives of all of the inmates here are in serious jeopardy and I feel that only individuals such as yourselves who have experience in this area and who have doppelgangers like yours could handle this.”

“Experience in this area?” Eirik blinked a few times. “You had better not tell me that you’ve got some kind of infestation of giant mutant man-eating flan cakes you want us to beat up with yo-yo’s and cumquats.”

“No, no, no. This is Serious! Your world has a focal point of weirdness that brought such things to your school! Our world is much more linked to the supernatural! What we have here is an infestation of demons!”

“Demons? Great!” Ryan bellowed allowed. “We just barely move into College. As if term papers weren’t going to be bad enough, now we learn that we’ve got demons!”

“Yes, but I have the technological capabilities to defeat them. Sadly I am ill equipped to use them. I tried to last night when you two did not head my advice and I lost terribly, as you can tell by the state of my attire…. Which reminds me I should change.”

He stood up walked over to the closet and opened it. Inside was a host of flashy metal weapons systems and circuitry panels. There was also a large quantity of clothes identical to what he was now wearing. What was the strangest part of it all though, was what they saw when he removed his shirt. Right in the middle of his lower back, there was a spot where there was no skin, but a circuitry panel complete with a few exposed wires and flashing lights.

“What the hell is that?” Eirik screeched, pointing at the spot.

“Oh… hold on.” Adam put on the new shirt and slipped out of his pants and put a new pair on quickly. “I guess I forgot to mention it to you…. You see I’m a robot.”

“A robot?”

“Yes. I was the invention of the last warden of the Cowell Facility. Like your Santa Cruz, our Santa Cruz has a number of different sub sections. The population of each is split up depending on their sentence or their crime. Cowell is for most of your average criminal youngsters, your petty thugs, your thieves, and your muscular hoodlums… the like…

“But anyway… I digress. You see, unlike your world, our world is filled with demons, monsters, and mages. It is an accepted fact. However, it is accepted as existing in the back woods of third world countries and the wooded regions of Eastern Europe. Demons are not accepted into the minds of the American people, even though they are actually quite prevalent in some places. PC Santa Cruz is one of those locations. The last warden knew that, and so he tried to build up forces in order to fight off the demons. I was all he got accomplished before he was killed.”

“Poor guy,” Ryan joked sarcastically, “having you be his last legacy.”

“I!” Adam emphasized. “I was meant to be the ultimate weapon in his arsenal. I would look like a human to blend in with the masses, but would be able to don a powerful exo-armor that could have any number of weapon systems wired into it to fight with. Sadly, the exo-armor was never finished.”

“So why us then? Why not one of the students, er, prisoners?” Eirik interjected. “Certainly a gun crazed criminal would be better than an other worldly duo whose dead doubles destroyed whole populations.”

“Because…” Adam began before motioning them to look at the computer ‘screen.’ He opened up the schematics of some kind of a gun, with cross sections and blueprints, and building notes. “After the great Mage-Human wars about a century ago, humanity began to build up its technology much faster than in your world. But it is mostly defense and offense technology. We still have cars, and office buildings, and the like, but we also have energy weapons instead of projectiles, and so forth. However, these weapons are based on a core of magical energies from the world between worlds.

“The gap between worlds,” he continued, drawing out the cylindrical tube again, “is filled with energy. Mages tap this energy. And in the first great Mage-Human war, they opened the doorway and allowed the demons in. Most humans cannot tap this energy, but some can. These ones develop the technology and infuse a little energy into it to make them work. Low level equipment can be used by anyone, but only those who can draw this magical energy or certain others can use the really powerful stuff that my master, the late warden, built.”

“Thank you Mister Wizard for the science lesson,” Ryan said sarcastically. “But maybe next time you should go with the Magic School bus version because I still don’t understand what that had to do with me and Eirik!”

Adam sighed a little. “Sorry, sometimes I forget how stupid people from your world can be!”

“Stupid maybe, dumb no! Get on with the explanation already or we won’t help.”

The robot laughed at this. “Won’t Help? You don’t help you don’t go home!” He pressed a button on the side of the tube device and a short beam of purplish energy streamed out of the end. “This is a phase dagger, a device of my own design that allows the wielder to cut through the fabric of space time to reach another reality and by pass the energy plane I spoke of earlier. That is how I reached your world, though doing so taxed my energies since my power supply is rooted in this world’s physics. When I brought you here, you entered a world with a different phase balance than the one you came from. Thus, you were out of phase, and more intoned with the energy reality of magic. This sort of makes you dormant mages, and thus, you can use all the heavy weaponry systems.”

He opened a drawer of the desk and tossed one real life version of the gun from the screen to each of them.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really match my outfit.”

“Shut up, will you Ryan? This is serious,” Adam reprimanded him. “That is a Phase Blaster. It is the most basic of weapons. It should be a good way to test how effective you two are, and should be plenty good enough to deal with the demons we will be facing tonight.”

“Tonight? Why not now so we can get it over with?” Eirik put to their new acquaintance.

“The particular demons that are plaguing the school right now are nocturnal. They only attack prisoner transport marches at night. So unless you guys have something better to do… I suggest that you get some rest!” He waved the phase dagger in front of them before disengaging the energy blade and sheathing it.

The two guys head over to the bunks and flop down.

“Gah, these mattresses and really hard!”

“Oh, should I fire my interior decorator then? It’s A Prison! Get used to what you get!”

Ryan glared at the rude little robot and lay down, trying to get some sleep.

“Morning,” the robot said coldly without moving its head in Ryan’s direction.

“Thanks, I think… Hey, you have a television in here?”

The ex-Outsider got up off the bed and walked over to where his ‘closet’ would have been and found there was indeed a large flat monitor hung from the ceiling at just below eye-level.

“It’ used mostly for surveillance and stuff. It gets great reception, but only gets one channel until I can build myself a remote…”

“Some things remain the same in every reality!” Ryan crossed his arms and turned towards Adam. “So where did the name Adam come from? Is it because you were the first robot built?”

“That is part of it. But my name is also an anagram for Armored Defense and Artillery Mechanism.”

“But that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it got shortened, right.”

“Yes.” Adam stood up and walked over to Eirik on his bunk. The robot pressed the side of his forearm and a blaring noise resounded through the room. Ryan clasped his hands over his ears. Eirik bolted upright, and fell right off the bunk, causing Ryan to burst into a fit of laughter. Adam cut off the sound.

“Owww!” Eirik shot back, struggling to stand up. “Didn’t you say they could detect loud noises?”

“Yes I did, but that was a lie.” Adam walked back to the closet and pulled out two black jackets of an unknown material. “I just didn’t want to hear your whiny voices at such a high pitch. Here, put these on.”

The jackets flew through the room into the arms of the two otherworlders. Their faces contorted at they looked at the odd jackets with plum colored highlights.

“You guys are unphased with this reality, which is good for magic, but bad for your cellular structures. These jackets have materials in their weave to help stabalize you. It is also supposed to be really cold and foggy out there tonight, so they’ll keep you warm.

Ryan and Eirik shrug, and put them on, then put on the gun holsters for the weapons they were given earlier.

“Great, now lets get a move on…”

Adam opens the door and leads the two of them out of the room, out of the prison block, and into the woods outside…

“Hey Look, McHenry Library! Wow, why does a prison need such a large library?”

“Because it’s not a library Eirik.”

“Well, it sure looks like a library, they got tons of books on shelves that I can see through the windows!”

“Well, according to this sign over here…” Ryan said, calling attention to the long stone panel engraved with words. “This would be the McHenry Hard Copy depository… Does that mean this is everyone’s criminal records?”

“Yes, or at least, the physical copies of them… They have computer back ups of all of them too that they use more often… But they keep a Hard Copy facility here, and in one other place in case the kids from Prison Nine up on the hill get ahold of an internet terminal and hack in.”

“Prison Nine?”

“Our cybercrime facility. It’s totally state of the art without having any computer equipment. My creator helped lead to its creation…”

“Cool.”

“So then, why are we here now?” Ryan asked their comrade.

“Oh, because I thought I’d give you a tour!! Duh! Why did I bring you guys here in the first place?”

“To… fight… demons?”

“Very good Ryan! Remind me to make you a medal! Now then… there is a prisoner transport coming through here from Prison Eight to Stevenson in a moment, it is likely the demon swarm’s next target, as they seem to be hitting each college in turn…”

“My, these demons sound really well organized!” Eirik said, eyes wide.

“Yeah, I bet they have a union and everything!”

“Oh will you two just shut up and get behind these bushes, the prison transport is almost here.”

The two guys shrug at each other and follow the robot behind a bush, crouching down low.

In a moment, the headlights of an approaching vehicle could be seen from down the road from McHenry. As it made the turn, the vehicle turned out to be fairly familiar…

“Look, Eirik, its one of the Shuttle buses! Only, the driver area is cut off from the passenger area, and the passenger area is a large cage!!”

“Your right! With guards riding along the sides!”

“Wow, all those kids are our age Eirik… and they’re all in jail!”

“I know. That is so weird! Just think, we could very well have been on one of those transports.”

“Well, not us, but the others us-es… the ones from here. Ya know?”

“Yeah, right, right.”

“Will you two please shut up,” Adam loudly whispered. “Here they come!!”

The synthetic warrior pointed off towards the dark bushes by the roadside. A number of glowing red eyes had now appeared throughout it, and a fell stench had entered the air. The guards on the slow moving transport noticed it too, and were at the alert with their energy rifles.

“Gwwaargggghhh-nnnyeeeahhh!”

A mass of shapes shot out as bright yellow blurs from the bushes at the transport wagon.

“Woah! Speed Demons!”

“Impressive considering that they are slugs!”

“What?” Ryan and Eirik announce in unison, turning towards Adam.

He points back at the truck, where the shapes do indeed prove to be giant yellow banana slugs, with arms, long clawed hands, and mouths full of frighteningly sharp teeth.

“Dude! They’re banana slugs! What the hell is up with that?!?”

“Not now! Now we attack!”

Adam leapt out from behind his bush brandishing a long barreled weapon similar to the phase blaster he had given the guys earlier. He aimed and fired at one of the slugs. It screamed with a nearly deafening noise before falling from the truck, a large smoking hole in its backside.

“Well?”

“Oh, right.” Eirik shook out of his shock and stood up, pulling out his weapon.

Ryan did the same, wishing he had realized he didn’t know how to fire this thing before right then. But they both took aim at the nearest demons and pulled the trigger anyway.

Two searing hot bursts of purple-red energy shot from the barrels as they shot. The kick-back nearly knocked the two of them down as they watched their shots take out a second demon.

“Quick!! Your guns are designed for heavy volleys of fire!! Unload those clips already!”

Eirik and Ryan followed Adam’s finger to the slugs, whose antennae had all turned towards the pair, the eyes in the stalks glowing red. Growls emerged from the creatures as a few of them hopped down from the transport to go after the guys.

“Oh shit!” Eirik yelled before he began a rapid-fire spray.

“Ditto!” Ryan said, following suit.

Adam sighed and shook his head before raising the rifle’s barrel up again and continuing to fire…

Ryan dodged to the left as a slug-demon rushed him. However, by sheer dumb luck, he managed to turn and fire into the creature’s stomach as it passed by him, felling the demon.

“Frelling paper god!”

“You do enjoy saying that, don’t you!”

“Not now Eirik!” Ryan said, lying on his side on the ground. He raised his phase blaster, aimed and fired. The shot went right past Eirik’s left ear, exploding inside the demon that was about to kill Eirik.

“Damn Ryan! How did you get to be such a good shot?”

“Practice?” Ryan smirked…. “Okay, maybe not… I guess being the author has some perks! Like having mad weaponry skills if I want to! WOAH!”

Ryan jumped and spun as an explosion rocked him from behind. Lying on the ground was another slug dead with a giant shotgun hole smoking in it.

“Uh, thanks Adam.”

“Keep your senses alert! If you can.”

Adam turns, raises the shotgun and fires at another demon, leaving the two friends to fend for themselves.

“Ryan, I think we need to get to the transport and clear it of demons as fast as we can!”

“I totally agree with you! But I think we should deal with the mass of reinforcements that just popped out of the woods and have surrounded us first!”

The two were standing back-to-back, weapons brandished. They nodded in unison and began firing off massive rounds of purple-red energy, while slowing walking around in a circle. Their shots exploded in many slugs, others went through the first line and into the second. And the whole time, the two yelled at the top of their lungs, trying to look as intimidating as possible.

And then the rounds slowed down until the guns stopped firing bullets at all. As nervous expressions arose on their faces, Ryan and Eirik checked their weapons… The small screen on the side showed the carriages were both empty.

“Not good!” Eirik gulped.

“Definitely in the bad things category!” Ryan said, stuttering nervously.

The remaining creatures moved in and let out a frightening roar. And then they rushed towards the friends.

“RUN AWAY!!”

The two turned and shot off towards the one area of the circle that had fewer demon slugs coming at them. Eirik grabbed up a stick from the ground and began hitting all of the slugs that reached them, while Ryan began smashing things with his gun.

“Hey, careful with that gun there! It’s not easy to repair!” Adam yelled as the two stumbled out of the frenzy right in front of him.

The demons turned at once to face them. Adam stared them right in the many moving eyes and lifted his rifle barrel once more.

“Boom!” He yelled, firing the weapon right at the center of the pack. It detonated, exploding outward in a white ball of light, with bursts of red and purple streaming around it.

Many slugs fell right there and then, but the majority of the demons were only scorched a little. These ones gave another deep gutteral growl and began moving off, back into the brush, all in different directions.

“Did we…. Win?”

“No Ryan, we didn’t. Look, the guards are all dead, and the prisoners are all gone…”

The guys followed Adam to the transport, where they saw his words were true. Some kind of slime had eaten through all of the bars, and they could see where the prisoners had been dragged back. Their heels had removed two lines of slime from the trails left behind by the demons that took them prisoner… again.

“Come on, we have to follow them before the killing begins…”

Adam tossed extra carriages of energy bullets to the former Outsiders as he turned and walked off to a different path.

“I guess he knows where he’s going!” Eirik said, following after him. Ryan picked up his pace and hurried until he caught up with Adam.

“Just one question.” He paused as Adam turned his head, looking him in the eye. “Boom?”

“What? Its just something I say!”

“Yeah. But ‘Boom!’? That is sure to strike fear into the hearts of demon-slugs everywhere ain’t it!”

“Okay, just shut up alright mister ‘frelling paper god!’ ”

“Hey! That is just an expression! Not like your failed attempt to make demons wet themselves!”

Eirik laughed until his sides hurt as he watched the two’s battle of words unfold and they headed back towards Cowell, in the general direction of the slime trails…

“So this is the upper quarry in this world. My I love what they did with the place,” Ryan mused sarcastically.

“I know… but it could use a few good throw pillows, or maybe drapes.”

“Really? Drapes? I was thinking shutters or blinds maybe…”

“Please be quiet!! I am so glad you to killed yourselves in this world so I wouldn’t have to see you on a daily basis!” Adam said, clenching his fists.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, sorry man.” Eirik added.

“Fine. Now listen! I still don’t know what they are doing down there. But it can’t be good. As far as I can tell from what they did last night. They like to kill people ritualistically… but they don’t do anything with the bodies afterwards that I can see… course, I killed quite a few of them in the process of my, uh, investigation last night.”

“Remind me not to hire him for any reconnaissance, kay?” Ryan whispered to Eirik.

Eirik nodded, then gave the scene below a closer look. His eyes widened suddenly, and he grabbed Ryan’s arm.

“Ryan! Look. Do you notice any similarity to what we’re seeing down there, and stuff we’ve seen before!”

Ryan scrunched up the eyes and more carefully looked at the demons. There was a large platform of rocks on which the lead demon, dressed up in a crown and scepter stood before the people who were about to be killed, with a mess of lesser-decorated slugs behind them. There were torches placed all around. And the leader was speaking in the demon tongue to all its underlings.

“No! It can’t be- it’s an altar! They aren’t killing these people! They’re sacrificing them to something!”

“How do you know that? You just got to this world? How do you think you can know what a totally new race of demons will do?”

“Trust us Adam, we know altars,” Eirik answered. “I’ve been sacrificed on one before.”

Adam looked at Eirik with disbelief.

“Long story. Lets just say I got better.”

Adam looked back down and frowned. “I guess your right, it does sort of look ritualistic down there.” He paused. “But that still begs the question, what are they sacrificing to!”

“Um, just a hunch, but probably whatever that big ugly critter is painted up there on the quarry wall!”

Ryan nodded in the direction of the rock face, where the image of an even uglier looking demon had appeared. It looked roughly human, but was deformed. With firey hair, a long forked tongue, four arms, and an object of power in each one. Its eyes began to glow as the torches flickered and the demons became more riled up.

“That didn’t happen last night!” Adam said nervously. “Somehow, this time is different. Maybe they did it wrong last time, and all the other times! And now they are doing it right!”

“Well, whatever their goal is… we stop it, right?”

“Right Ryan, but how do we kill all of those demon slugs?”

“Easy, just as Ben our R.A. taught us,” Ryan said, loading his new cartridge. It clicked into place. “Go for the fucker’s eyes!”

He lowered the gun into the ravine, aimed, and shot off three rounds, that all went straight into the lead demon’s eyestalks.

Screams of pain erupted from the ordained leader, and screams of terror fell from the rough, ugly mouths of the demon hordes, who all looked up at the Cliffside, noticing the three enemies at the top.

One of the armored warriors pointed up at the trio and roared out with a battle cry, and the masses began to move towards the rock face, and up it.

Meanwhile, the lead demon covered its burning eyestalks with its hands and began stumbling about the altar, howling with a sickening noise that cut down to your bones.

(Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?)

“Oh good work Ryan!” Adam hollered, pulling out a phase blaster of his own. “Now you’ve gone and angered them!”

“Yes! But better angry demons than ones that are making human sacrifices to deom gods!”

“Yes, I concede to you on that point but-”

“Okay, can we postpone this debate until after we kick these demons’ asses?”

“Oh, right, right!” the robot and friend reply together.

The trio turns in unison towards the cliff side where the first of the demons have just climbed up. They lift up their guns and begin firing.

Slug after slug fell from the cliff, falling onto their brethren, knocking them down back into the ravine.

“Okay, killing loads of demons is all well and good, but I say that we make a break for the bottom of the quarry so that we can free the prisoners!”

“Wow, I actually don’t disagree with you Ryan.”

“Oh, Adam, you’re such the flatterer! Now lets move!!”

The three break from their positions and run off to the sides and around the demons, still firing at them. They find a few places where they could easily climb there way down and make good use of them. Within two minutes, they have reconvened at the base of the tower of climbing slugs.

Adam pulled the phase rifle from behind his back, cocked it, and aimed it up at the cliff face.

“Hey uglies! Surprise!!”

The rifle went off, four shots in quick succession, all impacting and bursting at different places across the cliff face. As most of the demons fell from the rock face, Eirik and Ryan picked off the rest with their guns.

“Gwwwwarggghhhh!”

They turned around as the last of the slugs hit the ground to see the lead demon, still cluthing the burned eye stalks with one hand, sliding down from the altar towards them.

“You have… ruined… the sacrifice of summoning.” It spoke in a thick voice, as if its throat were stuffed with rocks. “Do you… have… ugh… any idea… how hard it is… to get… thirty three athletic people… in their late teens with marijuana… in their systems in one place… at one time?”

“Not so hard. Usually you just say ‘Party Friday Night, my Dorm” somewhere around East Campus.”

“I have no clue… what you just said… but I shall kill you now anyway!!”

With great speed and agility, the slug rushed at them, a blade emerging from his right wrist.

Eirik, Ryan, and Adam all aimed their weapons, but the creature put out his left hand, palm out, and the guns flew away from them. And when Adam drew the rifle, he was hit hard across the chest by the slug-blade. Adam flew through the air, and landed in a pile of dead slug bodies.

Eirik and Ryan rushed over to him and helped the robot stand. There was a long gash across his chest, and the circuitry beneath was exposed. Once Ryan and Eirik had released their grips, he fell back into the mess of bodies, unable to move.

“Ugh, can’t go on… we have to stop them though. Must persevere. For the sake of… justice.”

“Oh… be quiet… and die like good little… humans!”

The lead demon was almost upon them. Ryan and Eirik turned towards it. It lifted its blade arm high above for a final strike against the two of them.

“I… shall… enjoy this… humans.”

But something caught Ryan’s eye, a cylindrical object, a few feet from his left foot. Her jerked his head, and noticed what a mistake that was. The motion caught the demon’s senses and it acted, bringing the blade down towards Ryan.

He leapt to the side, dropping to the ground, just under the blade’s arc, and grabbed up the tube. Suddenly, the phase dagger sprung to life in his hand, and Ryan’s arm jerked out in an arc across the demons arm, severing it completely.

“Ugh! Demon Blood!!” Ryan said, covered with a disgusting yellow fluid. “I bet this is gonna be a bitch to clean off!”

“DIE!” The creature roared, extending a blade from his remaining arm. Ryan got up and started running, but the demon was still faster. It leapt and landed atop Ryan, sending him to the ground on his back. The towering creature lifted the blade above Ryan, aiming for his heart. Pinned, Ryan could do nothing. The phase dagger had fallen out of his hand. “Die” it repeated before heaving the blade just a little higher for more force.

But the blade never came down, but instead, the entire demon flashed in a bright light and dissolved away into a thick pile of ash, dust, and a couple smoldering embers. A few feet behind were it had been a second ago, Eirik stood, holding a smoking phase blaster in his hands.

“Bravo, bravo boys! I knew I was not mistaken in recruiting you two!” Adam cheered from his position. He was standing now, using the rifle as a crutch while his internal systems tried to fix his still broken left leg.

“Thank the paper god that is over with,” Ryan said, standing up and trying to knock as much dust off as he could. He looked at Adam, and noticed that all the demon corpses were now turning into that dust compound.

“All these demons came from that lead one, sort of like amoebas. Kill the main one, kill them all.”

A few of the Stevenson prisoners began climbing out of the whole spooked and shaken.

“Are they… really gone? Really?”

“Yes fine prisoners, your troubles are over! You may now return to the comforts of your cells without fear of more demon kidnappings!”

All the prisoners cheer and begin dancing… well, until they realize that they are still prisoners in one of the worst Penitentiaries in the country. Then their heads all slumped forward and they marched back off towards Stevenson.

“Not very bright, they could have tried to escape,” Eirik laughed as he watched them go.

“Well, they are all drug convicts, most of them don’t have many brain cells left! And if they cross over the borders of the campus, their legs explode, part of the security tracer chips they all have implanted in them.”

“Fun. Remind me not to get one of those.” Ryan laughed, picking up the phase dagger that was still active on the ground. “Adam, how come it didn’t cut through reality when I attacked its arm?”

“Oh, the demons aren’t from this reality normally, remember, so they, like you two, are out of phase with reality. So while the dagger can’t cut things from this reality, it can cut them. You have to make enough cuts in the air to form a box, or triangle or square in order to make an opening in reality…”

“So then, are we done here? Can we go back to our Santa Cruz now?”

“I guess so then. It was great working with you two.” Adam grabbed up the phase dagger from Ryan’s hand and began moving his arms in wide arcs. One across, one down, one back to the left along the ground, and one back up the start. Ryan just barely could see a vague red outline of the doorway, but he could not be sure it was there.

“Is that it?”

“That is it Eirik. Bon Voyage. I’m sure you know how to get back to Cowell from here. I’d show you but, I need to repair.”

The two friends looked at each other.

“I don’t think we’ve ever actually had the option of returning to ‘normal lives’ in such an easy manner,” Eirik mused.

“Lets not look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?” They nodded in agreement and walked through the opening.

Adam turned off the dagger, the gateway vanished, and he headed back off to Cowell.

“Uh, sure Courtney,” Eirik said to the shorter girl in the doorway with long dirty blonde hair and running shorts.

“Man, you guys look beat, what did you two do last night?”

“Trust us, you don’t want to know! You really don’t want to know.”

“Gee, what is that smell in you guys’ room?” Jesse, a tall guy with tan skin and slick black hair asks, as he walks past the room.

Ryan looks over at his laundry bag, where the demon blood covered shirt now resides.

“I think it’s Eirik’s sandwich from a few days ago… we haven’t taken the trash out in a while,” Ryan says, smiling.

“Okay, well, lets go then.” Jesse prompts.

Eirik and Ryan nod and walk through the door. It closes behind them.

In the room though, still hanging on the back of Ryan’s chair, is one of the jacket of unknown material, another reminder of the previous night’s events…

End Episode 1…