As much as Gabriel wished to, it was getting harder by the day to hold onto the belief that it was all a dream. His imagination was not this visual. He could never have come up with such a vivid place. And if this were part of his subconscious, he would have made himself a far sexier companion than the one that he had.
Sam was not a bad person to spend time with. Despite her atrocious personal
hygiene habits, she was actually quite likable. Though his jailbait alarm was running in overdrive in the back of his mind, he was beginning to develop some sort of feelings for her. Beyond the spectacular rack, and admittedly attractive rest of her body, he loved her personality. It was like someone had taken the brain of a dirty old man and transplanted it into the body of a teenaged girl. Of all the senses of humor Gabriel had come into contact with, hers was the dirtiest. She had very little tact when it came to speaking of bodily functions, and anatomical differences between men and women.
With zero concern whatsoever about feminine modesty, Sam would drop her
pants just about anywhere to take a piss, without caring that he could see, and made fun of him for going off alone to do his business. She scratched herself without a care who saw, belched loudly, and he didn’t think she’d bathed once in the entire time he’d known her. She was the one and only girl he'd ever seen scratch at her crotch in public. It was like being on a college road trip with another frat boy . . . that just happened to have a pair of D cups. He didn’t have it in him to dream up a girl so twisted.
Standing, Gabriel stretched. If he didn’t get at least a little sleep during half night he was going to be hurting badly before real night, but he’d never dealt well with changes to his sleep schedule. Besides, he had to piss, and his mouth felt cottony and tasted like a kitten had curled up and died in it. They’d camped near a stream, so he might as well rinse the foul taste away.
Relieving himself a ways from the camp, Gabriel sighed in whatever the opposite of contentment was. At least Sam was asleep. She kept trying to catch him while he was draining the tank. He didn’t know if she was simply perverted, or just liked to see him blush. In his experience, women didn’t normally care to look at male naughty bits the way men liked to look at women. But then, Sam broke just about every other rule he knew about women.
Back in his Boy Scout days, before he’d discovered girls and quit to follow more pleasurable pursuits, Gabriel had learnt that if a stream was moving fast enough to see white in it, it was safe enough to drink from. Though it should have been frozen solid in the cold, Gabriel saw white, so he cupped his hands together and brought some of the freezing water up to his mouth.
“No,” Sam shrieked wildly from their camp, running toward him as fast as she could with arms outstretched. “Stop! It’s poison!”
Gabriel looked at the water in his hands and let it splash to the ground. How could the whole stream be poisoned? How did she even know?
“Idiot,” Sam screamed when she reached him, staring with utter disbelief on her face. “That water’s flowing right out of the Quarantine Zone! Never even touch water that doesn’t have ice in it! The Celestial Mother help me, even a child would know better! Where could you possibly have come from that you don’t know not to drink water you haven’t tested and boiled first? There’s nowhere far enough away from here that you never had to test your water. So tell me, Lawman, explain to me so I can understand why you’re such a complete moron!”
Shrugging uncomfortably under her harsh glare, Gabriel was slightly unnerved by the way her metallic, golden eyes shone brightly in the dim light. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Hell, I don’t believe it myself.”
“We’ll decide what we believe,” Mister Mittens said, padding around Sam.
Gabriel still got a chuckle out of the mutant cat’s name.
“What would you say if I told you I’m from a different world,” Gabriel asked,
looking up at Sam.
“I would ask you if you had hit your head recently,” Sam folded her arms tightly beneath her breasts.
Gabriel sighed. That was the universal sign that a woman was not going to listen to a single word you said to her, no matter how much she demanded you explain yourself.
“Explain,” Mister Mittens said. He sat up and pointed a black furred paw to a cluster of moons in the sky. “You mean one of them? The old ones built scientific outposts on some of the moons before the Neverwinter.”
“Look,” Gabriel said. “All I know is that one minute I was walking across the street, the next I was dead. But then I wasn’t, and there was this Sage that told me I had to prove myself and he had a job for me, and then I was here with the transgender Marlboro Man telling me to go to the Spires of Infinity.”
“And what, exactly, are you supposed to do once you get there,” Sam asked.
“Hell if I know,” Gabriel sighed. “Meet some girl named Allie, and maybe fix
them, I guess.”
Staring at him with horror, disbelief and betrayal, Sam dropped to her knees.
“No! The Spires of Infinity will finish killing our world if you do that! Please tell me you’re not planning to activate them again! I won’t take you any further if that’s what you’re here to do!”
Gabriel blinked at her in confusion. “Wait. What are you talking about? I don’t even know what the Spires of Infinity are.”
“The Spires of Infinity started the Great War,” Mister Mittens explained. “And the Great War brought the radiation.”
“You really don’t know,” Sam asked, staring at him as if he was some strange
new animal she’d never seen before.
Gabriel shook his head.
“I just don’t see how anyone could grow up and not know a single thing about the Old Ones and the Spires of Infinity,” Sam said slowly. “Fine. If you’re going to insist on playing this game with me. Not funny, by the way.
“The Old Ones built the Spires of Infinity to generate electricity for the entire world. They somehow took energy from the sun without any pollution, which was a major problem with other sources of power back then. The whole world helped to pay for it, even though it was built here in the Empire. But the Spires did something to the sun. They must have realized that they made a mistake because they switched it off. The entire world was without power and people began to panic. There were riots everywhere.
“The rest of the world thought that the Empire was cheating them and taking all of the power for themselves, not believing the sun was in danger. Then people started dropping radiation bombs and the whole world burned. Winter lasted thirty years after that. My teachers called it the Neverwinter.
“After the Neverwinter ended, the sun started to change. It grew bigger, colder and darker. Someday soon, it’ll probably go out completely. If you turn the Spires of Infinity back on, the sun will go out, and this world will die. You can’t ever reactivate them. You’d kill everyone in the entire world if you did.”
Nodding as he took in the story, Gabriel shifted to a more comfortable position and crossed his legs. Turning the Spires of Infinity back on sure wasn’t going to score many points with the almighty, that was for sure. So why was he supposed to go there?
To destroy them or something?
“Is there anything else you can tell me about the Spires,” he asked.
“Well,” Sam said, absently scratching beneath one of her breasts. “I’m not sure really. There’s stupid kiddy stories about the Spires being a sort of doorway.”