Chapter 1: Have You Ever Heard of Planet Earth?
In which you wake up in Linked Universe (4886 words)
(ao3 link)
(part 2)
(masterpost)
The beginning of this story is one familiar to many. There is someone sleeping that must wake up. There is someone watching as a light steadily approaches. There is someone unburdened by adventure that must step into that light from the shadows for the first time. There is someone that won’t be able to grasp what a journey truly is until they venture forth onto one and meet all of the faces that come with that journey, faces that have appeared before and faces that make their first introduction. People that fall into patterns that fall into myth that fall into pixels on a screen determined by calculated on-off switches, ones and zeroes.
The sprawling randomness and infinite possibility that comes with a universe, or maybe a multiverse (It’s difficult to interrogate infinities on their size) is hard to comprehend. People of a mortal existence naturally want to compartmentalize. They attempt to sort things like chemical reactions or momentum or simply energy into stars or planets or blood or life or stories. They want to create structure out of concepts as much as they once did out of wood and leaves when the rain came. Just as the rain would have them die from exposure, so would the empty, uncaring nature of the universe that they were jumbled into via cause and effect. It’s harsh and it’s scary, and it would be cruel to call these concepts fake or childish. They’re as real as they are believed to be. They protect a fragile mind from the insanity that is sprawling nothingness.
The most important thing to know is that everything has already happened, and nothing has happened yet. Everything is old and everything is new. Nothing that is imaginary is original. Probability is an ouroboros.
And, it is time for this someone to wake up.
-
You have to wake up.
You have to wake up you have to wake up RIGHT now.
Unfortunately, you don’t have anyone to that for you. No one’s gently urging you or urgently tugging you. It’s just you, dragging yourself out of unconsciousness.
There’s still a pressure on your sternum. You feel grass tickling your hands and your feet. You are well acquainted with this sensation. Anyone that ran around in grass, whether it be at a park or at school or in someone’s yard knows the sensation. It’s weird, though— you could have sworn there was… blanket? Here before. There was blanket. There was definitely blanket, and there was a mild chill.
If there was blanket before, you were probably in bed before. And you’re not in bed now. Which is really weird. Ohh, shit, did you sleepwalk or something? Did you go out on a bender? Wait, you’re still in highschool. You shouldn’t be going out on a bender. But there are highschoolers that go out on benders all the time, so maybe you did go out on a bender. That would be pretty bad. What would your parents think of that, oh god. What did you do? How would that have even happened? You probably wouldn’t even remember. On account of the bender.
Or maybe there was an emergency like a fire or something and you had to evacuate your house but you wouldn’t wake up so they had to carry you out, and the safest place just so happened to be a grassy field. Or maybe, you got kidnapped and the kidnappers are discussing what to do with you as you’re sitting there in the grass. You don’t know what’s worse, the sleepwalking or the bender or the emergency or the kidnappers. Well they’re technically all emergencies. ‘Emergency’ is kind of vague. You don’t like being vague. Being vague makes you feel trapped in your own head with your own thoughts, like how you are right now.
Wait.
You’re jumping to conclusions.
You haven’t even opened your eyes yet. Shit, how’d you not realize that? God, you hate the post-dream brain haze. It’s like you’re stumbling through a fog and trying to round up your thoughts, which are all running away from you by the way. Unruly toddlers in your head mashing the keyboard that makes your mouth say words.
You open your eyes.
…
!!!
Holy fucking ow, that is the sun right in your delicate retinas hurting your entire brain.
There is nothing to provide you relief from the brightest ball of burning hot plasma you can see from Earth. So you’re forced to squeeze your eyes shut again. You know, that kind of makes you think, it’s been the same brightest ball of burning hot plasma throughout all of human history and even before that. If there’s one thing that every person has seen or felt, it is that sun.
Why are you thinking about that right now. The unruly toddlers are at it yet again.
The pressure on your sternum returns— no. Pain. That’s surely more pain. There’s Even More Pain rolling across bone now like knuckles that are too sharp because the universe loves you so so much.
Your head hurts. And lord, so does the rest of your entire body. It all hurts. The tingling of the grass from before morphs into a blunt, slamming pain, like the frog in the water that slowly warms up until it’s boiling. This sucks. This sucks so bad.
It’s not that you couldn’t feel your arms before, more so that just now, you suddenly remembered you had them as the ability to move slowly seeped back into your nerves. Certainly not the first time you’ve experienced this. You can’t even count on your hand the number of times you’ve woken up, completely paralyzed, facing terrifying horrors beyond your imagination, or something. You can’t believe that these episodes only last for, like, thirty seconds. Time dilates between each of those seconds, marinating in a moment you’d much rather let pass. Maybe time is more fickle than anyone else thinks it is. It stutters and it trips and it bounds when excited, it drags its feet when it chooses.
Back to your arms. They rise toward whatever is digging into your muscles and bones. Try to push it away. They don’t make it, because your lungs decide to suck in a big helping of air.
You’re coughing soon enough. Well, you weren’t breathing before, that’s probably why. Why are you so slow on the uptake, here?
After all of this time, all of what is probably like one minute, the sun is finally obscured by a dark silhouette. Far too close to be a cloud. That’s probably a person.
Oh shit, it’s a person!
Your vision, wide pupils now unhampered by the overload of light, coalesces into something coherent.
You don’t remember ‘coherent’ meaning ‘blond-haired-blue-eyed white guy of an elvish beauty’. You guess that’s what it means now.
He is dressed in some kind of ren faire garb. He has those pointy-ear prosthetics and a scarf of bright blue, under which is an old-fashioned white tunic. And on his shoulder is a giant metal plate, by the way. Wow, what a costume. That’s cool as hell. It’s more realistic than anything you’re used to seeing. You see a lot of cosplay. Cosplay is very cool.
You really like video games. And comics. And shows. And movies. You think about them all the time. You think about them right now, even. They just make so much more sense than the real world. And what’s happening right now. You wish you could take a step outside of your life for a moment and observe it as though it were a piece of media rather than live it. Maybe then it would make sense to you. It’s much too confusing to make out what’s happening while you’re in it. It’s like trying to see the shape of a storm from inside the storm, it doesn’t work. You have to send a rocket into space with a satellite. They should send you into space, instead. Often you will think to yourself, surely this is not how humans were meant to live. And then other times you will think, there is something deeply wrong with you.
Maybe you really did get high or drunk or something and end up at the… ren faire. A convention. Somehow. You don’t know if there even was one happening near where you live. Good lord, that makes it even worse.
Ah, this is truly a shitty situation. This is type three fun, wherein it’s not fun at all until you laugh about it with other people afterwards. At least his fit is cool.
“Can you hear me?”
Well, now you can. There is your hearing back. You didn’t even realize that was gone either. It breaks the surface of the water back into focused, clear sound. You wonder how many other things you’ve missed that won’t return until you remember them.
“Ow…”
And there’s your voice. It kind of hurts to use. Like you have a sore throat. Actually, you were just busy hacking up a lung, so that’s not all that surprising.
“They’ve returned to us.”
What is he on about?
“What..?” Your voice is a hoarse, tired approximation of your thoughts. Talking feels like your thoughts are slipping through sand, and only a fraction of what once was makes it out of your mouth. It’s no wonder that your friends, your teachers, your family will say that you live entirely too much in your own head. But they don’t understand that there are moments where you want to step outside your brain, and you just can’t. You’re overjoyed every time you manage to simply communicate your thoughts with someone.
You turn your head to the— what is that, is that a crowd? Sounds like a crowd. You turn your head toward the small crowd of voices that are next to you, apparently. Maybe you really did pass out at the ren faire in front of a group of LARPers. Those poor LARPers. At least you’ll make for a good story, you’d hope.
You observe… eight pairs of boots, varying in flamboyance. Surely there are people attached to those boots, because they’re all talking all at once.
You find it hard focusing on the different sounds running past each other, like those videos of bees trying to enter a hive in slow motion. They run into each other all the time. Can you imagine living like that, making head-on collisions at full speed and just walking off like it’s fine? Then again, maybe there’s some higher, more eldritch entity observing how humans live and is recoiling in disgust, or cringing in sympathy, or watching in fascination, as one would witness a train derailing. A spectacle that is great and terrible. Or maybe there is no story, and no one cares at all.
You remember how to sit up.
“Ah!”
You yelp. You don’t remember it being this dizzying. Your body’s telling you that you’ve been lying down and you haven’t had to do anything for a thousand years. Yet another time your body is grossly incorrect. Your mind is always at odds with it, it seems. You forget that they are one in the same.
…well, now all of them are looking at you. Good job, you.
“Uuah.” You say automatically. Whenever your nerves get twisted in such a way, your brain reverts to Caveman Mode.
There is an awkward silence afterward. These guys in front of you look vaguely familiar. Do you have a concussion? Did you get high and pass out? Did they kidnap you?
Your brain really doesn’t want to let that one go, does it.
“How— what.” You feel your left eye blink, and your right follows. “Hi.”
You stare.
“Who…”
Who are these women? Your brain supplies, unhelpfully. It likes to do this with quotes.
The one with the blue scarf and the shoulder plate looks at you carefully, and also holds his hands out in the same position they were a moment ago just as carefully. All of the entire crowd of eight people behind him gather around to watch, almost like a gaggle of curious elementary schoolers. Even though some look to be your age. People your age and grown adults. Or wait, that one looks twelve.
“Do not strain yourself. That was… quite a fall you just had.”
Says the dude decked out as fuck in armor and also face paint. That’s a real metal chest plate. That’s a big fucking sword. You furrow your brow. What? What.
“What?”
The way he looks at you, it’s like you’ve grown a second head, as the saying goes. You’ve learned to identify the emotions behind the expression as confusion, or bafflement. You’re used to this. It isn’t the first time ever that a group of people has looked at you oddly for a thing you said, or the way you look, or the way you act, or your presence in general.
“It’s a miracle you’re alive,” Says a guy with dirty blond hair and more face paint or makeup or whatever it is on his forehead, and a giant pelt on his shoulders. That looks comfy.
“Could they be of your people?” Says a kid- a kid. No. What? Says a guy your age with just so much hair, it’s so fluffy dear god. He wears a green tunic that is worn with age.
“Maybe… but if we’re really before my time, I don’t know if we’d be able to walk around so freely,” Says the other guy he was talking to who also has dirty blond hair and a white embroidered scarf… cape. Whatever. A blue pattern you can’t discern is weaved into it.
“It’s not impossible to think that the land grew safer even before you descended. It had to become the way it was at some point, right?” Says the— woah. Woah. The dude with the headband that looks twelve does not sound twelve even a little bit at all.
“This is true. Though, they look very different…”
“Oh, come on,” There is a guy that has pink edges in his hair and he is very unhappy right now. “Even if they are one of your people, you’re telling me they survived that? Is this how you began your journey, Skyloftian?”
Guy with dirty blond hair grabs his cape. “...it wasn’t,”
“Yeah, exactly.” Guy with pink edges huffs. “This is clearly some kind of trick. It’s a ploy to- to strike us while we’re weak. Obviously.”
Guy with comfy fur pelt crosses his arms. “Come on, vet. They’re just a kid,”
“Yeah, and evil takes on unassuming forms! Do I have to remind you?”
Dude with fur pelt narrows his eyes at dude with pink edges. “No, you don’t.”
What on earth what are they talking about.
…
Wait, Skyloftian?
“Skyloftian?” You parrot. It’s the one thing they have said this entire time that’s made any sense to you at all. Skyloft? From fucking- from Skyward Sword? Surely not.
You see the boy with dirty blond hair and the white scarf cape thing perks up. The two of you make eye contact for a moment, which you immediately avoid. You will have no part in that.
“Do you hail from there as well?” Oh no. He speaks gently. His voice has rounded edges, painted like stained glass. His footsteps are light as he stands next to the guy that woke you up.
Guy with pink edges gestures animatedly. “What- don’t go up to them, what did I just say!”
Do you— he what. Do you what.
You know that change is important, logically, but you don’t like it. Which sure, you and every other human being on Earth. But for you it’s like dragging your entire skin and body across coarse sandpaper. A change to your schedule like a school assembly serves to mildly stress you out. A missing ingredient, when you’re hungry, irritates you. Anything bigger than that makes your chest hurt from the inside.
So they must be in cosplay. The first guy you saw, he was in cosplay. They are in character. They have to be. You are so familiar with them because you recognize their characters from The Legend of Zelda because you really like video games and comics and shows and movies. That’s why. They look so much like them. You don’t want to look too closely, actually. You aren’t going to look at them, actually. You don’t want to think that what you think is happening is what’s really happening.
“Do I hail from there?” Your voice comes out shakier and more appalled than you planned for, unfortunately. That sucks. You have a lot to say about this. Your chest is starting to hurt from the inside.
“Yeah,” He nods like it is all very simple.
“No I do not- I’m not from Skyloft,” Your voice stumbles over itself as a laugh ripples up from your lungs. “Haha. No. I’m from the planet Earth. Ever heard of planet Earth? Not the TV show,”
You pad your pockets. Shit, where’s your phone? Where is your phone at? You’ve heard jokes about teenagers like yourself being glued to the things, of course, but this is the one time that your frantic search is justified.
“I’m not… I’m unfamiliar with that kingdom,”
Guy with fluffy hair remarks, “What in the world is a ‘TV show?’”
It’s gone. Was he saying something? Where—
That is your bag. That is your bag who’s home is on your back and on the floor in your room and your house next to the Link from Hyrule Warriors.
Nope. Your bag is next to the guy that is dressed up as Link from Hyrule Warriors, because these kindly LARPers have woken you up from your concussion or your bender or whatever the fuck happened, you will not think about it, and they’re just acting a bit oddly. They’re just still in character. That’s all that’s happening.
“We just collected it, we weren’t—”
You crawl forward frantically before he can finish his sentence. You wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie. This is your least favorite horror movie, what is happening to you right now. It just can’t be. It’s like a bad isekai. Not even, it’s like a bad isekai fanfic. You’ve read your fair share of these. Everyone wants an escape from their daily life. Everyone wants to be the special main character that has all the things happen to them. It’s cool, looking in from the outside. You live it now.
No you don’t. Everything’s normal and fine and cool and normal. Maybe in another world and another time, you would find the face he makes as you snatch your bag away with a tight, unrelenting grip to be funny. You dig around in your pack, equally frantic-- among your various items and trinkets and papers for school is your nintendo switch? No, not that, you don’t need that, you discard it next to your bag. Then, your hands make contact with the cool, smooth familiarity. It fits right in your hand.
The screen lights up. There is no signal in the corner. There is straight up nothing in the corner. There is not even SOS. You have no notifications at all. Your display’s gotta be broken. You open your phone.
“Is that a-
-Sheikah Slate?”
“-pirate’s charm?”
A boy clad in a deep blue and a younger boy clad in light blue both share a look. The younger one actually sounds like he’s twelve, this time. Now that’s someone that you can reasonably call a kid. But nevermind all that, you’re still getting no signal. God damn it.
Sheikah Slate? Pirate’s charm?
Secret stone? Demon king?
…
Sheikah Slate?!?
“No,” They are really dedicated to this character that they are playing and that’s what’s happening and nothing else is going on. You tap the screen rapidly. “It’s not a Sheikah Slate. And it’s not a pirate’s charm. And you aren’t— no.” You shake your head. “That would be crazy. Actually, literally, crazy, impossible. You can’t gaslight me into anything. I’m too cool and knowledgeable. And ungaslightable. To be gaslit. And it’s a phone which is something that’s real and exists, thank you. And I don’t have any ffffreaking signal, so, so-...”
You just want the truth. All you want is the truth. All you want is to know. It’s rare that you are sure of the world, of reality.
And this can’t be reality. This only happens in your head. You wander into another world in your reading or in your dreams. It makes sense because you know what happens, and it makes sense because you can re-do a misstep or a fumble or a wavering dialogue as many times as you want to. You don’t have shit here.
No internet connection. Refresh. Please try again. No internet connection. Please try again. You’re offline, retry later. Try again. Nothing. No one. You’re alone. You’re all alone.
“I’m sure you have questions you would like answered.” That’s a steady, sure voice, that’s a guy that knows what he’s talking about. “We have questions we would like answered as well. There is no reason that we all can’t just settle this in a civilized fashion and figure out where to go from there. It will be easier that way,”
You slowly look up from your phone.
The one speaking wears the fierce deity armor makeup from Majora’s Mask, you would recognize it anywhere. It’s not just facepaint.
Or well, it’s half of it. Oh, and the face it’s painted on belongs to the decked out as fuck guy who has a big scar over his right eye, by the way. That rhymed. Whatever. The decked out as fuck guy with a big scar over his right eye who is standing on the same ground that you’re sitting on, in the same way that a real person made of solid matter would. You know who he is, you know exactly who he is, even if he’s a little older than you’re used to seeing him. Maybe if you ignore it a little longer, it will go away.
‘Settle this in a civilized fashion’. Oh, you would love to do that. It would be so cool to do that. You have read fanfiction where the protagonist flips the fuck out and you imagined yourself doing the opposite and being really cool and impressive to the fictional characters, someone that is calm in the face of uncertainty and someone that knows enough to put the right amount of distance from everyone else so that they don’t get the upper hand and catch you looking stupid or weird or cringey. This happens in real life and each time it does you are stuck thinking about it forever. Unfortunately you can’t be cool or funny or introspective or impressive or anything other than afraid because you are feeling a lot of emotions that are weird im your body, which is really inconvenient when you’re trying to be logical.
So when you slowly look up from your phone, the absolutely appalled look on your face is cartoonish, you quickly stand up on your own two legs. This is a mistake because you have the balance of someone who just became alive yesterday. You stumble backward. Wait that’s good actually, you wanted to put some distance between you and this… this guy. Good.
“You,” You point at him, keeping your phone safely tucked against your side. “You. You stay away, you fuckin’… anime hair, elf… man. Don’t come near me with all that mystical bullshit,”
His face is blank.
“Look, I’ll tell you-”
He inches closer, raising a hand like he’s pushing back your intense flurry of emotions, calm down. You wave your pointing hand wildly in response.
“WHAT did I just say.” You are the victor of the battle of gestures because he stops trying to get closer to you after that. Though, you are getting the sense he could fold you with like, one hit. He’s got that old man, well worn strength. “You aren’t listening to me. Listen to me. With your big ears.”
He lets out a quick, bemused breath from his nose. The guy with blue cape snorts.
“My what?” His voice is a bit airy.
“Your big ears,” You tap your own. Double down, might as well. You feel like you can say anything and your words won’t be instantly soured by worry, unable to be taken back. There’s fire in your veins and also arteries. “Listen to me with them. My personal space bubble starts here-” You swing your free arm in a wide arc around you. “-after which point none shall enter. No one shall pass. All must respect the sanctity of the bubble.”
Wait no, it was ‘you shall not pass’. Whatever.
After a moment of staring at you like you had grown a third head this time, he raises his eyebrows, nodding. “Just as well. We can all speak to each other from a distance, if you wish.”
You blink.
Not what you wanted. Not what you wanted at all. You have to get away from those weird… these weird guys. You won’t think about it too hard. Not right now. You have to get away from those weird guys until everything stops being so random and disconnected and separated from the natural chain of cause and effect. Clarity can only be found in solitude.
“…nuh-uh.”
He squints at you. “What do you mean, ‘nuh-uh’?”
“I mean, nuh uh- hey!”
In the corner of your eye, you spot the boy with the long hair and the deep blue tunic picking up your switch. Just picking it up, like it belongs to him and always has. What the hell! “Don’t touch that!”
You march over to him and you pry it from his hand (“Ah-” he says). Or you snatch it. And you step back from him. You still see him eyeing it. You have the feeling that he just let you take it back and you aren’t super strong all of a sudden. You also swoop down and hoist your backpack over your shoulder, just for good measure.
“Look, I dunno what kinda weird ass LARP, improv class, theatre shit you guys got going on. And you know what, keep doing it man. Good for you. Is it a class I can take? Don’t listen to that. No. But leave me out of it. I have to go call, fuckin-… I gotta go. I gotta go.” You have to go to a hospital. Something is fucking wrong with how It All Hurts and You’re So Dizzy and Nothing Makes Sense and Where Are You.
“But it’s so similar to the…” Link— NO. The boy in a blue tunic has not yet gotten over the sudden absence of your nintendo switch that belongs to You from His hands. His hands which are now hovering over the. No. What’s probably a prop of a Sheikah Slate. At least it’s accurate to the game. Maybe you know too much about the game if you can recognize that.
“‘Theatre. Do you think we are performers?” Says the short one wearing the headband with a tilted head and a hand on his chin and a raised eyebrow. His iris catches the light of the sun, you see purple.
Guy with blue cape has something to say about that, with how quickly he perks up. Quicker than you can respond. “We are not performers, I can assure you,” He says. Is he really freaking ‘No, And’-ing you right now. “I am knighted. Several of us are. And we’re true heroes. All of us.” He gestures to the small crowd.
Everyone nods their head, saying all their different words of agreement, save for the dude with the pink edges but it’s not like he disagrees with his gaggle. The bumblebees come to mind again.
“Indeed. There is no need to panic. We are not the enemy.”
In the decked-out-as-fuck dude’s eyes you see sincerity that while guarded, is still sincerity. Honesty. The very serious, very grounded very… very condescending (if you were to try and put a word to it) kind that adults give you a lot and it always makes you wanna crawl out of your skin and run for the hills.
You point at nothing in particular.
“What is that?”
Maybe they are all very gullible, or maybe it’s the genuine fear seeping into your words out of your mouth, but all of the heroes turn around. Guy with pink edges, guy with blue cape, guy with white cape, guy with deep blue tunic, decked out as fuck guy and fur pelt guy. They all reach for the hold of their swords that they have. Swords that are probably surely fake. Surely. They reach for their swords. Even the kid and the not-kid. And the short one. His eyes glint blue.
But there’s nothing behind them because you made it up because you’re evil. By the time they all turn around (you can hear them calling after you), you’re already running for the hills.
