Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 1 – What the Hell?

So, as I intended them to, this weekend let me play around a little with an idea I've had. I've been on a bit of a manga, anime, isekai kick for a while, and thought it might be fun to try my hand at writing something like a light novel, or a few chapters of one at any rate. So, I wrote a couple chapters and it was, in fact, fun. I'm posting the results here for your entertainment. ~Eric

***

“Hey, James!” shouted a familiar woman’s voice

James turned to look and did nothing to suppress his sigh. Maggie was jogging up to him, blue eyes bright and smile wide in that way that told him what was coming. They’d been neighbors all through high school and, if not exactly friends, then at least they’d been in adjacent social circles. Close enough that neither of them suffered for being friendly-ish acquaintances. Besides, it would have been a lot of work to ignore someone he saw almost every single day. They’re parents were friends. They walked the exact same streets to school or, when the usual mild weather was truly crappy, rode the same bus or guilted one of their parents into given them a ride. For all that, though, there was only so much of Maggie that James that could take in a given day, or week, or month.

She was nice and, he could admit it to himself on very honest days, pretty. But she was also just a bit off. Not in the I-need-professional-mental-health-services sort of way but in the liking super niche things that he didn’t really understand way. She was always going on about this anime she’d seen or that manga she’d read. Despite her fervent efforts to convert him to the cult, he’d never really wrapped his brain around the differences between things like shonen, shojo, seinen, and josei. That was all before the madness of the seemingly thousands of subgenres of isekai, whatever the hell that was. Okay, he knew what it was, but he didn’t want to spend precious brain power actually dredging up the information.

He’d thought that going off to college would be something of an escape from their mismatched sets of personal interests. If he only had to hear about the latest episodes of…he did consult his memory at that point. What was that show called? One Pirate? No, that wasn’t it. It was about pirates, but pirate wasn’t in the title. Whatever, he decided. If he only had to hear about new episodes of One Pirate and new volumes of Angry Dungeon Advancement Hero Grows Iron Ore While Becoming a Chef and Wooing the Third Princess during his visits home on break, he could have feigned enough interest to keep from hurting Maggie’s feelings. And he did want to avoid doing that. Just because he didn’t get excited about all that stuff, she loved it with a depth that was almost scary. There was no good reason to intentionally shit all over that, but it was hard to pretend to care.

“Hi, Maggie,” he said putting on a somewhat strained smile.

She slowed and then stopped near him, a little out of breath.

“You need more cardio,” he gently chided.

“When was the last time you got cardio?” she demanded in a huff.

James looked at his phone to check the time.

“About six hours ago. I mean, there’s a gym on campus. A free gym, at that.”

She planted a small fist onto a cocked hip and declared, “Well, maybe if you told me when you were going, I’d go too. I don’t want to go there by myself and have a bunch of guys looking at me.”

James opened his mouth, and then he closed it. She had a point. He didn’t ever tell her when he was going. It was a guaranteed part of the day where he didn’t have to worry about not hurting her feelings. It did also act as a pretty effective deterrent to her going to the gym. He’d met her friends. There were definitely not gym people. If she was going to go, it would have to be with him. If he wasn’t willing to take that hit, he shouldn’t give her a hard time.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” he said to keep the silence from dragging out to long.

He’d been a little angry with Maggie when he found out she was coming to the same college as him. Part of him assumed that she’d picked it solely because he was going there, but that turned out not to be true. At least, that wasn’t the whole of it. Maggie wanted to be a manga artist because, of course, she wanted to be a manga artist. This college had a good art program that, with some creative tweaking, could possibly help her find her footing in a profession that was wholly opaque to him. James was of the opinion that she was already good enough to do the work, having at least looked at a small mountain of both professional manga and her work. Since she was determinately pursuing a degree, though, maybe there was something missing he didn’t know about.

“So, where are we going?” she asked, slipping her arm into his.

“I need to get something to eat,” he said as he started walking. “Weren’t you talking about some amazing ramen place you discovered?”

While manga and anime didn’t really capture his interest, James did like food. It was a secondhand way to let her indulge in her fascinations. Plus, there was food. Food made everything better. Maggie immediately started talking about the place and summoning an Uber to take them there. While they waited for the rideshare to appear, James noticed Maggie shiver a little. It felt fine to him, but he guessed the fall weather was getting cooler. He wordlessly handed her the hoodie he perpetually carried. Now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure he’d started doing that because Maggie was constantly cold. She snatched the hoodie from him and put it on, letting out a contented sigh.

“They always make guys clothes from better material,” she said, voicing a complaint she’d made at least a thousand times before.

“Take it up with God,” he told her. “Or the gods of fashion anyway.”

“Ha. Ha.”

There stood there bantering for a few more minutes before James got impatient.

“How much long til that Uber gets here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Let me check,” said Maggie, pulling out her phone. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“My phone isn’t updating. In fact, I don’t have any signal at all,” she said, holding the phone up over her head and moving it in several different directions. “Nothing.”

“That is weird,” said James, checking his own phone and finding it similarly disconnected from the digital lifeline of wireless broadband. “I don’t think I’ve ever not gotten a signal here before.”

He uselessly repeated the process of moving his phone around to try to get a signal.

“Must be something going on with the service provider,” he guessed.

“We don’t use the same company,” objected Maggie, still glaring at her phone like that would somehow make it better.

Something that had been niggling at the back of his mind suddenly snapped to front of James’s attention.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?” asked Maggie, still focused on her phone.

“Quiet.”

“You be quiet!” she snapped.

“No. Listen. It’s quiet. In fact, it’s silent.”

Maggie stopped fiddling with her inoperable phone to look at him. Her face scrunched up before she got a worried look on her face.

“What is it?” asked James.

“Where is everyone?”

James looked around and his heart skipped a beat. There wasn’t another living soul in sight. Not on the sidewalk, or in a building window, or in the cars and trucks that were no longer moving. It was beyond creepy. Like a vision of some post-apocalyptic nightmare.

“What the hell?” said James.

No sooner had those words left his lips than something opened up right in front of him and Maggie. James didn’t have a word for that mass of swirling darkness and colors that didn’t exist in nature. Maggie lurched forward as though she’d been seized by something and dragged toward that otherworldly thing. Almost its own volition, James’s hand shot out and seized her arm. The invisible force acting on Maggie was far more powerful than he’d anticipated, and James took a couple staggering steps before he managed to blindly grab something sturdy with his other hand.

“James!” shouted Maggie.

He could see the blind terror in her eyes as the dragging pressure increased. James was in good shape, better than good, but it was all he could do to keep his hand wrapped around Maggie’s arm. He felt that grip start to slip as her feet came off the ground. He felt like he was holding her above some terrible fall and wasn’t going to be able to save her. Panic seized him then. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and the strain in his arms. Maggie slipped even more until he managed to clamp down on her wrist. He was squeezing so hard that he worried he might break the bones in her arm. She didn’t seem to notice or care.

“Oh my god! Don’t let me go! Don’t let me fall!”

He’d known her long enough to hear it in her voice that she was sobbing. A vagrant, oddly-calm thought passed through James’s mind right then. Who wouldn’t be sobbing in her situation? He was still more or less anchored, but the whole thing was so surreal and terrifying that he wanted to cry. There was another surge in pressure from that otherworldly opening that James was convinced could only lead to hell. His feet came out from under him and there was a terrible wrenching in his shoulder as the only thing keeping them in place was the strength in his hand. He tried to tell himself that he just needed to hang on a little longer. This couldn’t last forever, right? Someone would come. Right?!

As the seconds ticked away, the truth became clear. No one was going to come. Even so, he kept struggling to hang on. He could feel wetness creeping over his hand. He forced his head up to look at the hand wrapped around a sign post and realized that his fingers were bleeding. There was a final upswelling of pressure, and his fingers slipped free of the signpost. Maggie’s scream was the last thing James heard as they fell into darkness.