My arm. Oh my god my arm. Crap, this hurts. This really, really hurts. It’s bright in here… why is it so bright? I was camping last night, and those woods were the darkest place I had ever seen.


Everything is white. White and blue. The pain in my arm is getting unbearable. I cry out in pain. There are faces moving towards me. I can see their bodies now. One of them has a needle. Why does he have a needle?


The needle is in my neck. I fall onto the ground. The edges of my vision are going black, while the centers are white with adrenaline. What’s going on?


“Code maroon in lab 3047!” one of the people shouts.








            “You horrible bastard.”


            A man just slapped me across the face. He’s standing over me.


            “W-w-who are you?” I stammered.


            “Do you need to know? No. All I’ll tell you about me is that you have just ruined both of our lives, and if they wouldn’t kill me for it, I’d have killed you by now,” He says.


            “Could you please just tell me what’s happening?” I ask desperately. “I have to find out why this is all going on. Please.”


            “Fine. Settle down though, this is a long and complicated story.” He begins. “It all started about a year ago. We were facing a water shortage. It all began with that 10-year-long drought in California. While it seemed like not much of a problem, we were hiding a lot. Our top researchers predicted that mankind would be completely out of water within a few years. We were facing the most real threat of a water shortage we’d ever known. The United Nations held a meeting, and the global leaders decided that we had to keep the public from knowing this. They would only panic, and it would cause more problems than it would solve. After months of brainstorms, think tanks, and lab expansions, we realized that our only hope was a dream of a madman. They called it project Blue Ivory. The idea was that we’d use our existing VR technology, and take it a step further. A step further that no one, and I mean no one, could possibly consider safe. We would find test subjects, like yourself, we’d take them to our labs, and put them into our fancy new machines. These machines would simulate an earthlike environment, and the subjects would be prompted with stimuli through the machine to do what we wanted them to do. The premise was simple then, although still quite radical. Their mission was to gather resources. They would retrieve water, wood, ores, fuels, etcetera. Everything the earth was running out of. Once we believed they had an adequate amount of materials, we’d bring them out of the virtual reality. Theoretically, these resources would be brought out into the real world, they’d become real. They were pretty much attempting alchemy. Turning nothing into matter. The scary part was that it actually looked like it was going to work. So after a year, we were finally ready. We looked for people who we thought could survive. It looked like you were one of the few people who could. So we took you without asking. Everything was set, we were about to put you in the machine, and then some clumsy idiot managing to stab you with a scalp in your arm, and you woke up. You weren’t supposed to wake up, you weren’t supposed to remember anything, but you woke up, and now you’ll remember everything. But anyway, so you woke up, and we needed to keep you under control. I got a syringe with sedative, and plunged it into your neck. Buuuut it wasn’t sedative. Again, some idiot swapped the serums. What was in the tube was a formula we decided against using after it was developed. What the formula does is, it allows whoever it touches to go inside the other person’s virtual reality. We decided not to use it though, since we decided people would get things done faster if it was only them in the reality. Nonetheless, I injected it into your neck, then you fell, you knocked me down with you, the syringe broke, and the fluid got in through a cut caused by the glass. So yeah, you and I are linked, and now the government wants me dead, because we can’t have two people in one reality. I can’t leave without their consent, and if you die in the virtual reality, you die in real life, so I’m pretty much screwed. But, maybe you can make it out of here alive if you just retrieve the materials, so I think we’d better get started, huh?”


            I tell him I agree, and we begin walking towards a forest. He tells me that there should be a river around there, and the creators of this reality put some water collection items there for our own use. Everything seems fine until….







            “I mean, the water’s gone. Once it was here, and now it isn’t.” He says.


“Well it has to be somewhere, right? Wait, I think I see something in the empty riverbed.” I walk over to the dried out river, to discover a stiff piece of yellowing paper. It reads:


 


“Dear Mr. Steve,


It has come to our attention that you and your comrade, Mr. Calum Johnson, have become trapped in this reality. Considering that your comrade has violated protocol in a fashion that endangers others, we have no choice but to terminate him. We assume that he’s explained your situation to you, and thus you know your objective. Nonetheless, we assume you found this note after attempting to retrieve water. Well, we’ve decided that the termination of Mr. Johnson would be murder, and we don’t exactly want to have blood on our hands. Thus, we’ve taken the water, and we’ve put it somewhere else. Somewhere more… challenging for you to retrieve. We’ve put it in a dimension that was experimental, designed to make resource retrieval easier. Unfortunately, the code was corrupted, and it became... dangerous. There are dangerous creatures there. Creatures that we think will kill Mr. Johnson, but may have a harder time killing you. However, we are not heartless people. If you and Mr. Johnson manage to retrieve the water from the end, and both of you survive, we will pardon Mr. Johnson’s crimes, and he will be used as a retrieval asset. Below the empty creek bed, approximately 3 meters below the ground, you will find a portal to this dimension. Next to the portal will be chests with gear. Since this mission is technically a failure, if you fail to complete your task within one day, we pull the plug – killing you. Good luck.


 


-The Blue Ivory Team”


 


            I show him, Calum, the letter.


            “Crud.” He says blatantly.


            “What do you say we do?” I inquired. “I mean, it’s not like I want to just go on a mission that will likely cost me my life.”


            “Well, if we don’t do it, they’ll kill us anyway. So we actually have a better chance of survival if we take the mission.”





The portal to this new dimension is horrible. I’m plummeting through darkness. I can barely make out Calum. He’s saying something, but I can’t figure out what. The heavy iron armor I’m wearing doesn’t exactly slow down my plummet, neither does the bow and quiver strapped to my back, or the 15 pound sword in my hand.


            And now, we’re hitting the ground. I look around. We’re on some kind of floating sand island, floating in a ton of blackness. I notice a note. It reads:


 


“Dear Mr. Steve. There’s a dragon here. Kill it. There’s a fountain of water. Use it.


 


-The Blue Ivory Team”


 


I notice towers, too. Towers that are shooting beams at a moving object. A moving object moving towards us, moving towards us very fast.


            “DRAGON!” Calum shouts as he tackles me.


            A piercing screech fills the air, it makes my head pound. Fire shoots down into the sand near us, a small explosion ensues.


            “I need to take out the towers,” Calum states. “They replenish the dragon’s health. All you need to do is keep applying damage to the dragon.”


            I nod as he bolts off to one of the towers. I draw my bow, and I start firing shots. Most of them miss, but I hit one in the dragon’s head, and I send it reeling.


            I see Calum standing on one of the towers, he shoots an arrow at another tower, the crystal on top of it explodes. I look away, the dragon is coming towards me. Fire comes shooting down and lands in front of my feet. I leap backwards as the ground in front of me explodes. More crystals shatter on towers. The dragon is coming towards me right now, I leap towards it with my sword, and my hands clench across its jaw. It screeches, and shoots upward. I climb down his back, and rip one of his wings with my sword.


            The dragon screeches, and throws me off. I land on the ground, but I turn my head as I hear a scream.


            “Steve! Help!” Calum yells.


            I’m too late. A burst of fire comes shooting at Calum just as he destroys the last crystal. He ruptures in a ball of fire.


            I scream as I leap towards the dragon. I sink my sword into its back, pull through, and watch as the dragon lurches in its levitation, and falls to the ground.


            The dragon evaporated into colored dots, and in its place takes a fountain. In the fountain is a floating note. It reads:


 


“Dear Mr. Steve,


 


So you successfully killed the dragon. We are very impressed. It seems that you are a more useful asset than we imagined. Thus, we aren’t exactly ready to let you go. It seems there is more work for you to do yet, so I think you’ll be staying here a while longer. If you bathe yourself in the water of the fountain, you’ll find yourself in the world that you found yourself in before. There’s a house waiting for you.


 


Cheers,


-The Blue Ivory Team.”


 


It looks like I’ll be here for a while.