It was 12:06, according to the bright red numbers that shone in the dark room. It was a perfectly ordinary bedroom by any account; neat, but still lived in, the hamper slightly overstuffed with dirty clothes, a few band posters on the walls. In the bed, a girl of about sixteen or seventeen mumbled in her sleep, her wavy dark hair plastered to her face with sweat.
"Dad!" she shouted in horror, as a horrific creature loomed over her father. She wanted to help him, but she didn't know what that thing was, how dangerous it might have been… then again, if she waited too long, it would be too late.
This chain of thought was interrupted by the familiar voice of her history teacher. "Vivian…" The tall woman pulled a small white device out of the pocket of her slacks-it was about the size of a cell phone, with some kind of switch on the side. "Do you want the power to help him?"
"I…" Vivian bit her lip. It wasn't that she didn't trust her teacher-she was intelligent and engaging, there for her students when they needed help with their work or with anything at all. But what was she talking about? Vivian didn't want to agree to something when she didn't know exactly what she was getting herself into…
Then her father cried out in fear. Her eyes narrowed and she held out her hand. "What do I do?"
A few miles away, on the third floor of an apartment building, moonlight poured through an open window and glinted off the golden paint of plastic trophies-a carefully arranged line of them, proclaiming proficiency in a number of sports. There were two beds in the room, and in one of them a young man whose long limbs barely fit in the bed groaned quietly.
He stood between a giant creature and his trembling little brother, arms spread wide. "Just walk away," he told the creature, trying as best he could to sound threatening.
The creature's response was to swat him aside with one massive claw. He hit the ground, coughing up blood as his vision spun. Gasping for air, he realized he was lying at the feet of a man in cleats and shorts.
"Stephen," said his soccer coach, reaching down a hand to help him up. In his other hand the man held a small green box. "Do you want the power to help him?"
Stephen took his coach's hand. "Of course," he said.
On the other side of town, in a small one-story house, a door creaked quietly as a middle aged woman peeked into a bedroom; sighed at the disarray, the books and worksheets scattered on the floor, then smiled fondly at the teenaged boy in the bed as he tangled his fingers in the sheets.
He was running towards a monster that was advancing on his aunt. He had no plans, beyond perhaps distracting the creature long enough for her to get away. But before he could throw himself at the creature, a strong hand took hold of his arm. He turned to face a man who looked very much like himself, if a few years older and dressed more formally.
"Teddy," said his brother, holding up a small blue machine, perhaps the size of a pack of cigarettes. "Do you want the power to help her?"
Teddy glanced at his terrified aunt for a moment, then turned back to his brother and held out his hand without a word.
In the next town over, there was a clatter as the flailing arm of a girl in bed knocked over a handful of action figures-row after row of them cluttered the cramped room in the tiny house. Tangled in her sheets, she struggled in her sleep to get free and fell off the bed without waking.
"Do you speak our language? Are you lost?" For all that the creature looming over her friend appeared horrific and dangerous, she wasn't entirely certain its intentions were hostile until it turned and slashed at her. She tried to jump away but it was quick; even though its blow only nicked her head, she saw stars for a moment. Dazed, she reached up to touch the spot where it had hit her. Her hair was matting with blood.
"Isabelle." It was her father, standing next to her. He squatted down and offered her a small black contraption. "Do you want the power to help her?"
"Cool!" Isabelle eagerly reached for the device. "How does it work?"
A few blocks away, in a pristine, spartan room, the wall shook slightly as a fist pounded against it and a bit of dust sprinkled down from the one decoration in the room-a display case, mounted against the wall, containing an assortment of practice weapons and a belt of thick brown cloth. The boy in the bed dropped his hand, muttering.
He didn't like his sister, he really didn't, she was annoying as anything. But now she was screaming, and he could see why-that monster scared him as well. So he ran towards the beast and the child. There was a man standing in his way, wearing a tank top and shorts with a black obi tied around his waist, who held up a small red box. "Ryan… do you-"
Ryan pushed past his former teacher and continued his charge at the creature.
With a loud gasp Ryan opened his eyes. He shook his head from side to side, before throwing his covers off and sitting up. As his heavy panting began to normalize, he ran a hand through his sweat-drenched hair.
Only half awake, he managed to put together a somewhat coherent thought. "Nightmare," he muttered, before letting himself fall back into bed.
Isabelle blinked and looked around her. She'd been in the bathroom, washing her hands. Then she'd opened the door to leave, there had been a roar like plunging her face into running water, and everything had gone dark.
Well, not dark. The room was not lit, conventionally speaking, but it was not dark either. Various monitors glowed with complex displays, control panels flashed with inscrutable symbols. A small mechanical figure stood at one of the panels. A symbol in its chest glowed dimly, lights flickered across its face, and it could almost be considered a light source itself.
"Please wait a moment," the robot said in a high, tinny voice. "We need all five before we can proceed."
Isabelle took a step forward. "Proceed with what?" She flinched at a loud pop, and the electrical crackling noise that followed it, as a young black man with sunglasses appeared beside her with a bewildered look.
"Just wait," the robot said. Then it cringed as a harsh voice cut it off, speaking in growls and hisses. The robot replied, apparently in the same tongue. It sounded apologetic. Then there was another pop, another crackle, and a dark-eyed girl stumbled forward. Isabelle wondered if maybe she had been taken in mid-step. She wondered if she should be afraid, but she wasn't.
"And sir." Isabelle wondered who the robot was addressing; it wasn't looking at any of the teenagers. "You might want to load your interface, you'll be needing it in a second." The robot pressed something. With another pop and crackle, another boy appeared, very average but also somewhat familiar, drinking water from a bottle. He dropped it when he saw where he was.
Something caught Isabelle's eye-a mote of pale blue light, drifting in the air. It split in two; Isabelle immediately flashed back to biology class, cell division. The specks of light continued to split, dancing about each other as they began to amass into a distinctive shape. "Just a bit longer…"
The robot tapped its panel sharply, and with another pop a massive boy appeared in the room, glancing around wide-eyed. The robot walked away from the panel and tottered towards the five humans, whirring quietly with each step. Its motions were surprisingly clumsy. "Hello," it said. "Sorry to have to bring you all here. I'm afraid it's a bit of an emergency-"
There was a strange, metallic groan, coming from the mass of light at the center of the room. After a second or so it flowed smoothly into words. "Eeeeeeenough pleasantries." There was a slight synthetic edge to the voice, which was otherwise that of a weary old man. In fact Isabelle could swear she had heard the voice, it seemed so familiar, but she just couldn't place it. The light was still shifting, but it looked almost human in form.
The robot turned a little to face the light. "If I may, sir. Pleasantries become necessities in a strange situation, and this must be very strange for these children. Potentially frightening, I imagine."
Isabelle looked at the other four. None of them seemed as excited by all this as she was, but if they were afraid they weren't showing it. She might have said they looked wary… She looked back at the robot, then over its shoulder at the light.
It was a human man, though he still glowed, and the colors of his skin, hair, and clothes were very faded and tinged with blue. The moment she saw his face, she knew where she knew his voice. He was an actor, pretty famous, she'd seen him in a bunch of movies. She couldn't quite place his name, probably because he never played a lead role. He was always the teacher, the mentor, the quiet supporter.
"Then if my assistant has… allayed your fears, let us get right to the point." The glowing man walked forward, passing through the robot like a ghost. "I need you five to save the world."
Vivian frowned as she glanced around. Save the world? That sounds… ridiculous. Of course this whole thing was pretty unbelievable. Her first impulse was that this was some sort of elaborate prank. The room, the robot, they would have been expensive and difficult to create, but not impossible. She was less sure about the glowing man who could walk through things-she wasn't aware of any sort of projector that could pull that off. But maybe there was a way. What she couldn't explain, at all, was the fact that she had been walking through an empty hallway one second, and then everything had gone black and there had been a roaring noise, and she had been here. It might have been that someone had managed to knock her out with a sharp blow to the head-unlikely, but wasn't any explanation at this point? But her head didn't hurt and she had carried her momentum, so that probably wasn't it.
That left hallucination, or reality. Hallucination was more likely, of course. But playing along with a hallucination would, at worst, result in her being taken in for appropriate psychiatric treatment. If she treated this like a delusion, and it turned out to be real, it would be a problem.
Vivian looked around at the others. None of them seemed to know what to say, how to react to the strange man's claim. So she stepped forward. "Save the world from what?"
The man crossed his arms. "First and foremost I need to know, would you save your planet if you had the means to do so?"
Your planet… implying it's not his. An alien, then? "First and foremost I need to know what I would be committing to."
The man's face clouded, and he opened his mouth to reply when the robot interjected.
"It's a wizard," the robot said. "Or whatever you want to call someone who uses magic; we don't know too much about them. They've gained access to the flux grid and using it to build an army."
"Wait, hold on." One of the boys-he was enormous, around six feet tall with bulk to match, but judging by his face Vivian didn't think he was any older than her-took a step forward. She wondered if it was accidental, the way the seemingly casual step put him a little to the right so that the other girl among them was partially behind him. "Flux grid? And that is…?"
The man waved his hand dismissively. "Irrelevant to the matter at hand. If you're not willing to fight for your world, tell me immediately so I can go about finding someone to fill your spot."
"So there's fighting involved." One of the other boys lowered his sunglasses a little to show his grey eyes. It was so dark, though, Vivian wondered why he hadn't made such a move sooner. "Then I definitely need to know more before I can promise anything."
The old man sighed. "We don't have time." He pressed a hand to his head. For a supposed alien, he seemed well versed in human body language. "Fine. Glitch, answer their questions." He waved a hand at the robot.
"Right. Stephen." The robot turned to face the largest of the teens. "The flux grid is an extradimensional energy source. All studies so far suggest that it is unlimited, though the technology-or in some cases, magic-we use to draw its power are finite. It is the only power source we know which provides enough energy for any sort of faster-than-light travel. It is used to travel the galaxies, and it is how we arrived at your world. But the wizard in question is not using it for that. Instead they are creating monstrous creatures, with which they intend to conquer this planet. If they succeed, there's no telling where they'll turn next."
The third boy, white with brown hair and remarkably unremarkable, cleared his throat. "Assuming that's the case, why would you come to us? Did you try calling the army?"
The robot shook its head. "You have to understand, Ryan-"
"And how do you know my name?" The boy crossed his arms.
"Ryan, please. I'll get to that." The robot shook its head as the man began to pace back and forth, walking through the equipment panels, his luminous form scattering and reforming each time. "It's vital that we prevent the armed forces from engaging the wizard's forces. The casualties would be disastrous."
The glowing man turned to face the teenagers. "My ship is a mobile lab, a research vessel, and with one or two slight modifications it's still quite capable of massacring all the armies of this Earth.
The robot flinched. "Sir, that's-"
The man continued. "We made just such modifications, in fact, in an attempt to defeat the sorcerer without involving humans. We failed miserably."
The robot nodded. "Yes. Zaphres was badly wounded in that engagement, which is why I'm manning the controls. Ordinarily he would do it himself, but…" The robot looked over at a small round platform, raised from the floor. There didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it, but before Vivian could give it any more thought the robot continued. "The wizard was not entirely unscathed; we project that we set their invasion back at least two months. Two months we've already used up, I'm afraid, which explains why Zaphres is… testy."
The man pounded on a control panel, his fists eerily silent against the surface. "I'm testy because we wasted three weeks on the previous recruits, and now you're wasting more time on recruits who haven't said if they'll even help us-"
"I'll help." The boy with the sunglasses put them back over his eyes. "That is, if you need to know right now. I'm in."
"I'm in too," chirped the other girl, standing on her toes-even like that, she was still a bit shorter than Vivian. "I'd like to know why you chose us, in particular, but it can wait a little while."
"Really, you don't need to worry about him," the robot held up its hands. "Time is short, but not that short. You don't have to leap in without knowing all the facts."
"I'm in," said the tall boy-Stephen, the robot had called him. "But go on with your explanation."
The robot looked at Vivian and the third boy (Ryan?) for a moment, before shaking its head. "We've built new equipment, weapon systems, specifically for combat. Specifically to fight this wizard. There are five sets; each depends on the other four to reach its full potential. Hence the five of you."
"Your boss mentioned previous recruits," said Vivian. "Did they die?"
"Oh! No no no. No, they're all fine, they just… we selected five men and women, soldiers from the military forces of your world, all elites with bright futures. People who already had military training would be more prepared for battle. We also thought it might help us to keep the rest of the armed forces out of the conflict-we might be able to get them recognized or sanctioned as a special task force, that was the plan. But they were too old." The robot hung its head. "The equipment we designed depends heavily on synchronization with the user's brain, but the more developed brain of an adult doesn't adapt well . They spent three weeks training to use that equipment, and every day their synchronization rate was going down. We tried to fix it, but we couldn't find anything…"
"Is that why you picked us? A bunch of high school kids?" She glanced at Stephen. "Or are you a bit older than that?"
"I'm sixteen," he replied. Vivian wondered if the tint of red on his cheeks was her imagination; it was dark after all.
"Honestly I'm not sure you're young enough either," the robot said. "You tested well initially but it might go downhill from here… but I don't think anyone younger could cope with this. You're all handling this situation remarkably well, I must say."
Vivian almost told the robot that she was strongly considering the possibility that this was a hallucination, but something else he said caught her ear. "What tests? We haven't tested anything yet…"
"It was a simulation projected into your unconscious. Each of you had a dream in the past few days, where a monster was attacking somebody you loved. And somebody you trusted offered you-"
"The power to save them!" The other girl pushed past Stephen, her eyes bright with excitement. "I remember that dream." Vivian closed her eyes; she didn't really remember a dream like that, but it did sound sort of familiar. "So, that was some sort of test, then?"
The robot nodded. "We projected the simulation as far as we could-about thirty miles from our current location. Everyone in that radius who was capable of synchronizing with the equipment had the dream. We set up a basic premise and let your subconscious fill in some of the details. Then we watched every dream, hundreds of children and teenagers and a handful of adults." The robot took a step forward, spreading its arms as if to welcome them-or was it pleading? "We chose the five of you."
"And two of you haven't said whether you're going to help or not, and if you wouldn't mind I'd like to know." Zaphres made a sweeping gesture with his arm. "We don't have much time to find replacements as it is-"
"I'll do it," Vivian said. If this doesn't turn out to be all in my head, anyway. And assuming it's not some sort of elaborate con. "This sounds like it's not going to be a simple conflict. This is going to be a war, isn't it?" She looked from robot to man, and both avoided her eyes. "And I assume it carries the risk of dying. But if we do nothing, it sounds like we'll die for sure."
The robot looked at the man, then back to Vivian. "Well, I suppose it's possible you may survive under the wizard's rule-"
"Under the rule of a tyrannical conqueror?" Vivian brushed some of her hair out of her face. "Never. I think I'd rather die fighting, thanks. Let's get started."
"I hate to be the one making delays now," said Zaphres. "But we can't proceed just yet. Ryan? Are you with us?"
The brown-haired boy looked around at the others, then back at Zaphres. "Do you even have to ask?" He hung his head. "Of course not. Find someone else."