Star Trek: Foothold - To Relieve Paine

Throne of the Garm

Having regained control of the scene, she looked around at which of the many transitions she'd endured that the program had opted to lead with, and mulled her options. She was standing in an urban area, a city street strewn with debris and bodies and lit by fires; a number of paces ahead, a pack of strange creatures were struggling with one another over something that was now only meat, and as the ambient filters began scaling up, she found that the scents, tastes, and sensations of the area were slowly rising to prominence as she adjusted to the end of the cutscene. The creatures were a twisted mix of humanoid and bestial features, as if someone had taken a Targ and forced a Klingon skeleton into its skin without all the meat: they were wiry, leathery, coarse and dark, with bleak skin like old black rawhide, and faces like someone stuffed a handful of crabs into a balloon and popped it. Overall, viscerally repugnant in the extreme.

Not for the first time, she scowled at the waste of time and energy which she felt that this exercise represented, but she had promised the medical team who had been convened for her treatment that she would try this novel form of therapy. She had promised in good faith to commit the effort to reach the third floor, which was commonly agreed to be the end of the program's tutorial. It was unconventional by Federation standards, involving aggression and bloodshed and violence, and other foreign concepts like barter, trade, and currency systems, but none of that was unfamiliar to Paine, or anyone else on the Vellouwyn. The weird fantasy skin on the program, however, was definitely a different take, and she wasn't sure what to make of it quite yet.

Before she could take her first step forward, a console window burst into existence a half meter in front of her, and a glyph appeared on the back of either of her hands. This was another thing that she didn't commonly find in these programs, as most holo-novels did tend to try and lean into the realism of the experience, and did not break the fourth wall so overtly as to have command interfaces appear as part of the experience.

The window read: "Welcome to the Ten Thousand Step Journey: Ascent of the Tower of Trials. Would you like instruction on using this interface? (You can change your mind later!)" and a simple yes and no set of prompts followed the ornate text. Gesturing dismissively, her hand passed through the 'no' prompt, and the window closed, leaving behind the fading light of a response message: "To open the console, say 'Key Arch'."

According to the briefing she'd read of the tutorial level, she was on Earth, in a city called Seoul. In the novel the program was inspired by this had been the location of a number of global incursions from another dimension, heralded by Towers which defied planar math. Players like her were special characters who had for whatever reason been selected by the invaders to play the part of the resistance faction to their own invasion, needing to build out their skills and experience, ascending the abstract realms inside the Tower to defeat its masters before their time—or their forces—ran out. Either Humanity, and whatever allies they found within the Towers, rallied to resist, or the dark forces within would spill out and consume everything, leaving scorched remains behind.

The tutorial was considered a 'flashback', an instance within the story which players would not get to revisit without re-starting their profile, which represented the first days after the Towers had arrived and wreaked havoc on Earth. In her role, she was meant to represent one of the first heroes to enter the fray, but in reality, after she cleared the episode, she would join the communal play experience shared by others on the ship.

A waft of gritty dust blew through the space where the window had been moments before, and beyond it, dark, malevolent eyes glowed with inner light. The beasts had now seen her, and she began to make her way into their midst as she felt the slightly euphoric sensation as her senses synchronized with the holographic setting. Her eyelids dropped slightly as she scanned the area, counting four hostiles, before she tilted her head to look skyward at the scene beyond the ruined intersection in which she stood. While the creatures moved to split and flank her, she admired the details of the huge and ominous black Tower that loomed over the ruined city of the setting, back lit by black, red, and orange clouds of hellish smoke and ash.