[attr="class","wesleft2"]

[attr="class","westitle"]Dance in the Dark

Wes hated airports. There were too many people, everything was too loud, and no matter how recently they were cleaned, they always felt so gross. If there was any other reasonable way to travel abroad, he would have done so in heartbeat. But instead, he was standing in DCA, waiting for his turn to pass through security.

"Come’on" a disinterested voice called over.

When Wes didn’t immediately move, the security guard yelled once more, this time with a bit of force. Wes stumbled up to the wood podium and slid his ID and boarding pass through the plastic screen. The security guard waved his ID over the scanner and barely gave Wes a glance before he ushered him forward.

Wes shoved his ID and boarding pass back into his wallet. "Uh… thanks."

"Next!"

Wes rolled his eyes and made his way through the rest of security. He hated kicking off his shoes for the metal detector, but other than that, the rest of his experience was uneventful. Once through, he worked his way to his terminal, a full two hours ahead of time.

Made it! Was worried I wouldn’t he texted a couple of friends. He genuinely had been concerned that leaving for the airport a full three hours before his arrival time placed him at risk for missing his flight.

As he waited, Wes scrolled aimlessly through his phone. He was watching an absurd tik tok of a tattooed man chopping a block of wood when his phone stopped loading. He tried switching wifi, opening other apps, toggling airplane mode, but nothing worked. He took a headphone out and glanced around.

Others at his terminal seemed to be similarly struggling with their phones.

"Excuse me," an elderly woman’s voice croaked across the terminal. Wes turned to see her flagging down the same security guard he had the fortune to interact with earlier. Her hair was a frizzled gray mess and the aggression in her voice was equally distressing.

The man tried to ignore her, but she persisted after him. She reached out and tugged on his arm, "My phone isn’t working, somethings wrong with your internets."

"I can’t help you--" the man’s voice trailed off and his eyes seemed to unfix from her and onto something else. He reached up as if he was about to touch the woman on the face, but instead he poked the air. Not a second after he made the seemingly-random movement, he disappeared in what Wes could only describe as a flurry of pixels. The woman let out a screech and waved her hands through the air in front of her, trying to bat something away. Her scream cut out when she too vanished.

Bewildered, Wes stared wide-eyed at the now empty space before him. There was silent pause, either because he was so engrossed or because the whole terminal froze, Wes didn’t know. But it was ended by a cacophony of yelling and screaming all around him. Others were disappearing, and others were witnessing the sudden departures.

Everyone was vanishing. Frantically, he swiveled in place, looking for someone who might understand what was going on. He spotted young woman nearby who looked to be in similar state of shock with her mouth agape and her eyes welling with tears. Wes started to move toward her when a message appeared before him:




Choose a class, what? Wes instinctively raised a hand to select one of the options. The motion made him realize that this must have been what the others had seen before they vanished. He recoiled, physically pulling his hand away with his other and clutching it against his chest.

He couldn’t disappear like them. He was not going to select an option.

A second messaged popped up:



The emoticon was in stark contrast to the content. Die? DIE? Die from what? Is that what happened to the others? Did they not decide in time, so they died? Or did they make a decision and were killed by those pixels?
Wes didn’t know what to do.

Something told him it was safe to choose, that he would be much worse off if he failed to make a selection, but there was no way he could be sure. There was no answer, there was no certainty, there was just a leap of faith. He took a deep breath and slowly reached out once more. He tapped the first option, Chronomancer.

The moment he did, his vision began to blur, the world disappearing around him in a flurry of hues of blue and green and pink.

Or maybe it was he who was disappearing.

Gone was the airport, and now he was outside. He found himself in a small clearing, no more than a couple dozen yards in diameter, and encircled by some of the densest trees and foliage that Wes had ever seen. There were others in the clearing, about 30. But none of the faces were familiar.

Uh… hello?" he waived to a nearby group. They were too invested in themselves to pay any attention to him. One woman was handling a sword, she waived it through the air with an awkwardness that told Wes she was unfamiliar with the weapon—not that he would be able to do any better. Another man held what looked like a giant stick. When he moved it, a flicker of flame erupted from the tip. At the eruption, the group screamed and dispersed.

All at once, a series of chimes resounded across the clearing, and with each sound a window appeared before a person:



What is going on? He looked to others once more. He guessed that his face mirrored the same confusion that dressed others.