The Return (Alternate Dimensions Book 5) Read online

  There had to be something more, right?

  That was a rhetorical question, of course. No one answered me. Not that I expected anyone to. I’d been through enough therapy as a kid to know not to talk to the voices. Granted, they had faded right around the time I had hit puberty.

  I hopped into my car and headed home, making sure to order some fast food that I could wolf down in shame in my cramped room for rent. Once I was inside, I peeled my pants off and collapsed on my beanbag, stuffing my face with some greasy thing or another. Today was one of my only days during the week without classes, and I kind of just wanted to be lazy instead of productive. I knew I should have gone to work out, but I wasn’t really feeling it.

  I wasn’t feeling much of anything lately, other than anxiety.

  I had periods of insomnia every now and then, and when I finally could sleep, my dreams were plagued with violent and stressful images. Granted, when I woke up, I could only remember faint echoes of discomfort. It didn’t help when your only respite from the world turned into another exercise in awful, and I was beginning to feel it fray at the edges of my psyche.

  The food did help, though. All that salt and lipids. I remember girls in high school, who had always looked at me in such horror when I horked down food that they would have been teased for consuming. Thankfully, no one wanted to mess with the chubby redhead who had once dunked a bully head first into a trash can.

  At least that hadn’t changed. Sure, it would be nice if I had the model waist and poise that all the magazines touted, but that wasn’t in the cards for me. I was quite tall, just over six feet, with wild, red hair that looked like lightning had just struck me. And I was solid. Not ripped like your average superhero, but that kind of stocky, hardworking body that you saw on farm boys and amazons. I was known among my friends for being just bizarrely strong enough for party tricks, but not enough for any competitions where it mattered.

  Thinking of my friends just made me feel more miserable. It seemed like food wasn’t going to cut it. Groaning, I forced myself up to grab a book from my messenger bag, then fell back into my squishy chair.

  It was a sci-fi thriller, very action oriented, and I had been following the series for a while. I didn’t know why, but something about it always felt comforting to me. It wasn’t like there was a same cast or running plot to get attached to; they were all just standalones in a connected universe. They were short, too, only a couple hundred pages, so I could finish them in a few hours. Not that I had ever had time to read anymore.

  The hours passed as I sank into the literary world between my fingers. This particular tale focused on a mooreerie that only had three arms going on to become a multi-world champion fighter. Or at least trying to. Like any good book, there were plenty of plot twists and pitfalls.

  When I finally finished the book, it was dark, and I realized I was pretty exhausted. But, there was a certain sense of satisfaction that I had reached the culmination of the fighter’s story. As much as I loved long series, it was sometimes nice to just get in and get out.

  I stretched and flipped over the back of the book, which was formatted a bit differently from all the previous novels. This one had an ‘About the Author’ paragraph, and then a picture of her.

  She was fairly different looking, with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and a very high forehead. She had large eyes that were complemented by a generous smattering of freckles that dotted her almost like camouflage.

  “Jenna Vellock,” I pondered to myself.

  For someone so unique looking, there was something vaguely familiar about her face. Like someone I had known once but hadn’t seen in several years. I stared at it for several long moments, sifting through memory after memory, but came up empty.

  Eventually, I shrugged and tossed the book back into my bag. Dragging my butt to the kitchen, I helped myself to a large glass of water, then went about the rest of my nighttime routine. When I finally laid down in bed, I let out a long sigh. Sure, I had my rest for now, but tomorrow was just another day of the same drudgery it always was.

  *

  A cloud–dark, malevolent, and churning–filled up a chrome hall. Its voice thundered and clawed at my ears.

  I looked around in confusion. Where was I? When was I? Everything was impossibly shiny and futuristic-looking, illuminated by highly filtered light.

  I was distracted by the voice of someone small next to me. Familiar. Vaguely amphibious.

  Gee-Gee!

  I reached toward her without question, pulling my childhood friend to my form. The strange force tried to pull her away, but I kept a hold on her. Something dangerous was happening here, and I didn’t want her to be any part of it.

  And then, suddenly, we were running down hallways that were much too bright, sliding under a door that slid down from the ceiling like a guillotine.

  Just as abruptly as it started, the world faded, and I slid into the desk of my statistics class. God, I hated statistics.

  *

  I woke up with a start, my heart beating hard enough to star in its own rhythm band. Gasping, I looked to my phone to see it was just five minutes before my alarm went off. Might as well get up and get going.

  “Geeze that was a blast from the past.” I hadn’t dreamed of my childhood imaginary friend in ages. Probably…high school, at the latest?

  Back when I was a kid, I visited her every day. She lived in a very cool world that had a literal butt-ton of water everywhere, and flying cars, and it was super high-tech. Basically, anything that I might have seen in a sci-fi movie got shoved into her existence. She was one of the reasons I was put in therapy by court order after the school counselor and then a social worker raised concerns about my mental health. Which was completely ridiculous, by the way. Kids are strange folk with wild imaginations. I lived a not-exactly cookie-cutter life, and I needed an escape from it all. So, I had an alien friend from the future to help me cope; that didn’t mean I was insane. Or, uh, ‘childhood psychosis bordering on early manifested schizophrenia,’ as the official term was.

  I can’t really remember what happened, but all I knew was that, suddenly, my visits to her stopped. One day, I could swing by her world whenever, and then…nothing. A lot of my memories from that time were just faint echoes and swirls of color, however. Severe head trauma tended to do that.

  However, I really didn’t have time to get lost in nostalgia. I shoved myself out of bed and headed to the communal bathroom to try to force energy into my body via a hot shower. As long as I didn’t procrastinate, I would have enough time to eat a slice of breakfast pizza I had in the fridge and a banana before I headed to my public speaking class. For once, I had finished my homework, so I wouldn’t be frantically filling out some questionnaire in the hall, and hopefully today would go easily.

  But, as I went through the motions of getting ready, I couldn’t help but feel a faint sort of melancholy lapping at the edge of my mind. Thinking about ye ol’ days was not putting me into the best of moods. Perhaps, after work, I would stop by the game store and see if I could treat myself. According to my math, I still had twenty-three dollars in my fun budget.

  Grabbing my messenger bag, I nodded to myself.

  Maybe a little escape was exactly what I needed right now.

  Chapter 2

  I whistled happily to myself as I crossed the parking lot to my favorite video game store. Normally, I just purchased my stuff online, but there was something particularly therapeutic about browsing physical shelves, picking up cases, and flipping them over to see their backs.

  Plus, the employees knew me at this one, and I didn’t have to listen to any of the stereotypical comments about girls into video games, or other girls complain about comments about girls into video games. Not that the other girls were wrong to be upset, but sometimes, I just wasn’t up for a debate on equality, when I just wanted to blow stuff up.

  The bell chimed as I walked in, and I debated between hitting up the console or computer sections first
. There was no doubt that I could find better deals and more selection for my gaming desktop online, but I still couldn’t help but be drawn to that section first.

  I had finally been able to save up for the parts to build my rig just a few months prior, and my beautiful, little, technological child was still new and shiny to me. After lusting after graphic cards and custom cases for years, I didn’t know if I would ever get over the surreal-ness of finally owning my own legitimate gaming computer.

  The rows were in alphabetical order, which I always found to be the least helpful. In my opinion–because I had an opinion about everything–it should go by genre, and then be organized alphabetically within the genres, themselves. That way, if I came in wanting a shooter, I could just go to the shooter section. And if I wanted an RPG, I could skip puzzling through a thousand different games and just look only at RPGs.

  Despite my internal griping, my eyes flicked through the titles out of habit. Nothing was really catching my attention until I noticed a familiar font at the edge of my field of vision.

  “Oh, my god, you have gotta be kidding me.” I held my breath and reached out, unable to believe it as I pulled a case off that had the same title of the sci-fi series I had just read the night before. Rushing to the desk, I waved over one of the workers.

  “Hey, I haven’t read anything about this. Is this a new release?”

  He glanced at it, then shrugged slightly. “I think so? It’s not a super huge seller as far I as I know. Kind of a niche based on a series of books. We only got it as part of a bundle deal with a distributor.”

  I’m not going to lie, I had not been expecting much of an answer beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ “Huh, you know all that?”

  “I eavesdrop on our shop manager’s calls a lot. She’s got three kids at home and does impressions for them when they call her on her breaks. It’s cute.”

  “Really? Stacy? She looks like she’s sixteen.”

  “Yeah, she gets that a lot.”

  We continued our friendly talk, as was polite, but my mind was fully on the game. Normally, book-to-screen adaptions were terrible, and book-to-video game even more so, but I couldn’t help but have hope. It kinda seemed like a sign from the universe. New book dropping one day, finding the game the next. I knew it was just good marketing, but still. It felt special.

  It was hard not to speed as I drove home, and I was vibrating as the game downloaded all the necessary drivers and went about instillation. I tried to distract myself by making a salad with giant chunks of avocado–an expensive treat, but one of my favorites–but I was still bouncing around as I prepped it.

  Finally, I heard the alert from my computer, and I shot to it, bowls still in hand. Donning my headphones, I jumped mind-first into the universe the developers had created.

  It was everything I wanted and more. Chills went up my arms as I built my custom playable character, and I was just beginning to realize how much this series meant to me. After all, I had been reading it since my freshman year of high school. It had followed me through graduating early, finding a job, learning to drive, going to college. For all the struggles I had been through, I had been able to read and immerse myself in incredible stories that made my life seem not quite so bad. It was fairly magical.

  I chose to make myself human, but there were seven races to choose from in total.

  The mooreerie were a four-armed species known for their strength and utter adorableness. Their eyes were large, and they definitely all had baby-face syndrome. Most of them had large horns and three fingers. The interesting thing about these cutesy bodybuilders was that they had four different sexes, and only one–the lodee–was able to carry children. It was a fascinating power dynamic that one of the standalones had explored, and I had loved it.

  Then there were the krelach, which were essentially giant desert rat people. They were usually the shortest of the species behind the four-foot mooreerie and nesr-roona, and covered in thick layers of fur with four eyes and very sharp teeth and claws. Unlike the mooreerie, they only had one sex. It was never really explained how they reproduce or what their sex rituals were like, but I didn’t feel like the story was lacking for that.

  Then there were the kodadt, who were basically on the complete other side of the spectrum. They were massive–bordering on giant–feline-like people. Big ears. Big tails. The works. Thankfully, though, they were peaceful, otherwise they were powerful enough to take out whole stations on their own.

  The nesr-roona were the most alien out of the bunch of them and, according to the myths, the oldest existing species in the Alliance of Six. Although they were small, they were an incredibly hardy people, with armor plating along parts of their body. Females often had more horns, and this was apparently an evolutionary trait for defending their young. Which, by the way, were carried in pouches like a kangaroo.

  After that was the sierr and half-kin. The sierr were an amphibian race with three different sexes and a complex dynamic within those three. But, of all the races, they were the only ones that could interbreed with humans, which lead to the creation of the half-kin. There were about four different books in the series set in different eras that really focused on these mixed-species creatures’ struggle to get the same rights as everyone else in the Alliance of Six, and I remembered all of them being enthralling but heartbreaking.

  I figured I could try out one of these on my second play through. According to the game cover, there was branching dialogue and multiple endings, so I was definitely going to get my money’s worth on the replay value.

  It took me a solid hour to get my character how I wanted her and put in her name. I won’t admit how long I fiddled with the facial sliders until I was finally satisfied, but the important thing was that it happened. I nodded with satisfaction to myself, then clicked to begin my story.

  The opening was dramatic, of course, featuring a Council raid on a black-market junker. I was sucked into the plot almost immediately, and the immersive score and fairly decent graphics certainly helped. Time ticked by as I shot, hid, and talked my way through the tutorials, which cleverly presented choices that shaped what my origin story would be. I loved stuff like that.

  It wasn’t until I realized that I had to go, and badly, did I realize how much time had passed. It was dark outside, and I had morning classes tomorrow, followed by an eight-hour shift at work. I really needed to get some sleep.

  But sleep isn’t what I got. At least, not right away. I rushed to the bathroom, and grabbed myself a drink on the way back, then sat myself right back in front of the computer. Hitting the pause button once more, I let myself fall right back into the action.

  Man, I had wanted an escape and, well, now I had one. And a damn good one at that.

  *

  “Andi…Andi!”

  I blinked, unsure of where I was for a moment. It took a couple of seconds to realize that I was in my room, still sitting at my computer desk.

  “Andi, hello!”

  I followed the sound of the voice to realize it was coming from my computer screen that was glowing a blinding white.

  “Um…hello,” I said slowly.

  “I’ve missed you! Have you been busy?”

  “I…uh…you’re a computer. This isn’t real.”

  The voice chuckled, and it was a light, childish sound. “You’re being silly, Andi. It’s me! Don’t you see me?” As if in response, the blinding light projected itself onto my desk, solidifying in form until I saw a holographic version of Gee-Gee. “There, is that better?”

  “Much,” I said, but my confusion was still first and foremost in my mind. “A bit concerned that I’m suddenly manifesting visual hallucinations after years of clarity, though.”

  She laughed again. “I remember how mad my parents used to get when I mentioned you. It was great.”

  “Yeah, a real riot.”

  “What happened to you, by the way? You left so suddenly. I didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye.”

  Guilt p
ricked at my stomach, and I shrugged. “I don’t really remember. Sorry, Gee.” Then I realized that I was talking to a holographic projection–a technology that didn’t exist–to an alien girl, who also didn’t exist. “So, uh, any reason you’re visiting me through my computer?”

  “She needs to warn you of something, but you’re getting distracted.” The light of my screen warped again, shining down next to my mouse until the author appeared in tiny, holographic form.

  Now that…that was weird.

  “All right, I think we crossed the line into really not making sense here.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we make sense, we’re just projections of your damaged psyche trying to force you to hear the warnings you shut out.”

  My eyebrows shot up at her matter-of-fact tone. “Who are you calling damaged?”

  “Not you, your psyche. Your…otherness. That thing that you feel at the back of your mind but shut out because everyone told you that what you know is impossible.

  “And, also, that you had your head bashed in, too. That didn’t help.”

  “Geeze, you make it sound so dramatic.”

  “You were hospitalized for a month and had to relearn how to walk.”

  “Semantics.”

  “Now you’re the one distracting us. Listen, Verdandi. You need to be prepared. Everything that you’ve been suppressing for all these years is about to drop kick you into a new century. You need to be prepared.”

  Just what I needed. More responsibility.

  “And if I’m not?”

  “Then you die. We all die.”

  *

  My mouth tasted terrible.