The transition was seamless, feeling more like going from sweltering heat to a room with air conditioning than travelling through a portal. One moment he was on Earth, now he was… hopefully not on Earth. GPS didn’t work in rifts, so probably not. Either way, he was certainly no longer in the outpost.
The inside of the rift was… well, Kayden wouldn’t call it boring, but it was typical. Standard. Bog standard, even, but that would be dangerously close to a pun. It was a damp, dark cave with a ceiling just high enough to not feel claustrophobic and a floor of ankle deep mud, which he had on good word only got deeper. His sneakers, or rather the plastic bags he wrapped around them to keep them from being ruined, squelched against the black, foul smelling stuff in a way that made him grimace. There was a light source - there was almost always a light source in rifts, for some reason - in the form of some dim blueish-tinted glow coming from a number of small pools of water throughout the space. It was fairly small, even for a Rank One gate. Maybe the length of a football field in one direction and half as much in the other, plus or minus some irregular outcroppings.
A bug landed on his shoulder. It was the size of his thumb and had a face only a mother could love, which was probably an evolutionary tactic to keep her from cannibalizing her larvae. The database called these things Hate Locusts, which was apparently a “faithful but less vulgar version of what they were colloquially known as by those who dealt with them during reconstruction”. Lord only knows what they were called in those lawless times. He ignored it, and it flew off.
Every rift had a breaching mechanism - the thing that would rip open the opaque veil strung thin over them, letting all the monsters out into the world at large. Some, like ol’ swampy bug cave he was in, had it posted right out front. Overpopulation. Too many bugs, they look for some new scuttling grounds. It was a simple thing, one that was easy to prevent and difficult to encourage, at least in concept. No risk in keeping it honest with the public - you’d have to be a real freak to try breeding these things, and in the end another swarm of man-eating locusts isn’t going to do much to a newly burgeoning humanity. Others kept it more secret - apparently, the way to maintain the veil over Helios’ Pit of Fire literally burnt you alive if someone who didn’t already know heard you speak about it, but mostly it was just to prevent terrorism.
Either way, the job Kayden had was so well documented it was almost trivial. He walked towards one of the faintly glowing pools, bag-covered shoes schlorp-schlorping through the mud that slowly but steadily grew deeper. The sticky mixture of dust, wet bug guts and whatever fungus could live in this damp hell clung to his pants like tar oil, and it was only a few shades lighter. If he had more than a few more pairs to spare, he’d probably burn this whole outfit, but now he just supposed they’d just be his swamp-clearing uniform.
The bugs got more frequent as he approached the closest source of cold, delicate light. His first probing passenger returned with a friend, then three. Then six and ten. They crawled across his shirt and pants, underneath his sleeves, their tiny legs feeling like little pricking needles that just barely didn’t break the skin. He didn’t react to their presence.
“Ignore them,” he told himself, forcing his breathing to stay even. His resolute frown was firm as chalk and just as brittle. “If you ignore them, they won’t notice you. Panic is what feeds them.”
It was a completely childish notion. By all means, his unprotected face should have been chewed straight to the bone by now - these things would eagerly go through a cow in a few minutes. But miraculously, even as he grew so close to the water that the bugs were a veritable living, buzzing cloud, they didn’t even register him. He was another jutting stone for them to land on, to fornicate upon, to hide from their hungrier fellows within.
A locust walked over his eye, and he reflexively shut it closed, causing it to pause its casual stroll. He felt it turn one way, then the other, as if considering. It scuttled on down to his cheek, antennae inspecting every bit of flesh it could reach. Kayden saw a little profile on the bugs on the database before he came here. A lot of bitey bugs had more of a stabby straw than a proper mouth. Not these. For whatever reason, they had a proper jaw with a full sixteen razor-sharp teeth. Completely impractical for a bug, but then again these were monsters, and they weren’t exactly under Earth’s standard physics anymore. He couldn’t help but vividly recall the picture of those teeth in his mind when he felt the slow, cautious bite out of him.
He ignored it. Didn’t even stop moving forward. He had to be slow now, so he didn’t startle any more of the bugs into noticing him.
Another bite. He felt warm wetness pour down his cheek. He clenched his teeth, closed his eyes properly and then slowly clenched them until they were tight enough to match the pain he was feeling. He made doubly sure nothing was crawling on his hands when he clenched them hard enough to whiten the knuckles.
Then, thankfully, the locust lost interest in what would have been the easiest, greatest meal in its short life and flew off. Kayden stopped bothering it, so it stopped bothering him. He reached into his pocket for a bandaid, which wouldn’t really help on its own but it’s not like he was going to do proper first aid knee deep in the middle of a swarm of bugs.
Finally, he reached the edge of the closest water pool. The shore was teeming with maggots - they were a perfect pearly white, wiggling and squirming and cannibalizing each other as they fought for a place in the mud next to the water and close enough to the surface for proper air. Kayden stepped carefully over it into the almost ethereally pure water - the only clean stuff in this hellhole, including him. The mud flaked off his plastic-encased shoes and pant legs and flowed effortlessly to shore as if repulsed by a magnet in the center. It felt… almost disconcertingly comfortable. Like standing in a cold pool of soda, but in a good way.
The light was far stronger here, so close to the source, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It was more like staring into a dim LED light than the sun - he could stare straight down at the bottom of the puddle without issue. That was good, since down at the bottom, clumped and nestled together.
Eggs. Oodles and oodles of them. Tiny translucent things, maybe the size of a drop of water each, covering nearly the entirety of the floor of the small pool. They did almost nothing to break up the strange blue light coming from beneath them, but they did give it a strange texture that shifted unsettlingly as the thin layer of nascent locusts wriggled about, shifting about as one or two occasionally hatched and the resultant tiny life wriggled its way out. A maggot floated to the surface of the water as Kayden watched and hurriedly swam to shore, burrowing into the mud without a second thought and joining the battle royale with the rest of its siblings.
Kayden reached down, scooped up a handful of eggs, shoved them in a plastic bag, and squeezed. He had to keep the population under control, and these things were by far the most valuable thing in the rift. Two birds with one stone. The feeling of the dozens of tiny wet eggs bursting through the thin plastic was one that was hard to forget. They had a bit of squish to them before they popped, like water balloons overfilled with jello. Some wriggled. Some bled blue, while others just oozed a transparent grossness.
One handful, then another, until Kayden had in his hands half a bag of mush. Most of it was, unfortunately, worthless - the stuff he needed was practically invisible among all the bug guts. Thankfully, in what was likely an attempt to encourage people to do the maintenance without the FWMS having to pay them extra, the method to sort it all out was listed clearly on the website. The bag of mush was dipped into the water and shaken about and, just like the mud that stuck to Kayden’s clothes, the bug guts were softly repelled from the center of the pool. What was left looked like a small pile of salt in the bottom of the bag.
Cores. Weird, energy dense rocks that were inside just about everything nowadays. If it had even a speck of the power from the rifts (everyone called it magic, but officially it was just ‘extra-worldly energy’), there was a little stone of power in them. In a person it formed in the gut, a little bit below the belly button. Kayden’s was maybe the size of an almond, and the ones at the bottom of his bag were like a small pile of gravel. Just as worthless, too, were it not for the fact that they were so young and underdeveloped that whatever energy was in there was almost completely unaspected. Maybe a few specks of water, given where they were incubating, but otherwise completely blank. A few had probably been caught by the passing grossness and sent to the shore, but that was fine. There were plenty more eggs left in the pond, and plenty more ponds around at that.
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The whole process took a good couple of hours, and by the time Kayden had cleared all but the most slippery and annoying to reach eggs he had a solid half bag of magic gravel. There were a few hiccups, like when an egg hatched as he held it, making him freeze until the maggot squirmed out of his hands, but generally it went as well as he could have hoped for. He was shivering from the cold water, his cheek hurt like hell, the bandaid was already coming off from the wetness of everything and he wanted to cry, but he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even seriously injured, probably. He knew this would be an awful experience. It was the reason this rift was so unpopular, and the reason why it was so perfect for his use.
If he was lucky, there was a good couple hundred bucks in that plastic ‘thank you’ bag, and the bugs were already busy trying to refill those weird glowy pools of water as he watched. Were they even water? Could he drink it? Probably not, it’d just do what it did to bug guts to his guts. Oh well. He had to get back out of here and do some first aid. He probably should have done it hours ago - his cheek was definitely infected, and he got a few small cuts from the occasional stalagmite poking up through the mud, but Kayden knew that he wouldn’t have been able to work up the nerve to go back inside if he left earlier.
And so he carefully trudged back towards the cave’s entrance, where the jagged bruise-colored rift hung still in the air. The dim lighting didn’t affect it in the slightest. Kayden wouldn’t be surprised if he could see it perfectly well in pitch blackness. It wasn’t light that he was seeing - or at least, that’s what his base intuition told him. It was another sense being plastered onto his eyesight, warning him in the way it best knew how of the hole in the world. An awkward step through, trying not to touch the edges, and he was back in the concrete box. The bugs still crawling about his person vanished to who knows where, the disappearing act making the veil ripple unsettlingly. It stabilized in less than a second, thankfully. Larger things could… tear it, for a bit. Not a proper breach - it would fix itself - but still very, very bad.
Before anything else, he dropped and tended to himself. Antibiotics, a proper bandage - there was nothing that could be done for alien viruses, but apparently those were completely useless when it came to infecting humans because they’d never had to try before. That one-in-a-trillion chance was bothersome, yes, but it could be avoided with proper cleanliness. Which he couldn’t afford just yet. But one-in-a-trillion, come on!
Whatever. Stop worrying about it, Kayden. Worst case scenario, he’d die instantly and it wouldn’t spread beyond his sorry ass. Besides, there were more important things to worry about. Like finishing the whole damn plan he came here with.
He knocked on the steel door twice, and the security guard opened it up without fuss. Kayden didn’t step out, though. Not yet.
“Hey, um.” His throat was dry from stress, and his voice was kind of hoarse and scratchy, but he just coughed and continued on. “Listen. When does your shift end?”
“It doesn’t,” replied the guard, who eyed Kayden curiously. “I don’t need rest. I’m here ‘till the weekend.”
Fuck, Kayden was jealous. He wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place if he didn’t need a place to sleep. Didn’t explain the super strength the old man displayed earlier, talents were usually specialized in some way, but it was still convenient.
“Okay. Okay.” He cupped his face in his hands for a moment, psyching himself up. He had the whole speech memorized. Just had to get the right information first, just had to make sure some cosmic accident hadn’t completely screwed him over. “And when’s the next reservation here?”
“Next week. They usually get the same big rank four asshole to clear everything out in five minutes so the gate doesn’t breach,” came the confused reply. The older man’s brows were furrowing, now, trying to connect the disparate dots that Kayden was laying out. Before he could realize fully, though, Kayden continued.
“Alright, good. Perfect. Because under the Rift acts, there’s this subsection in article- five or six, I think? I don’t know.” Kayden huffed, exasperated at himself. He was fumbling it! It was so smooth in his head. “Doesn’t matter. You can look it up, it’s there. Anyways, it says that, um. If the leader of an expedition team - and a one person team counts! If the leader decides that they need to extend their expedition into a rift further than their timeslot, and it’s either an emergency or they’re not interfering with anyone else’s reservation, they’re allowed to stay as long as they need.”
Kayden was red in the face from embarrassment and nervousness, now. His legs were literally trembling. He really, really hated how much depended on this working out. He had been up for nearly two days, he was out of money. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“So, um. What I’m saying is. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Then he walked away from the doorframe, remembering only after a few awkward backwards steps that he wasn’t the one holding the door and that the security guard was staring at him with an expression of abject shock and pity.
“Kid,” he started, and Kayden made to dart towards the rift. “Jesus Christ- KID!”
Some stupid instinct in Kayden’s head that made him listen to people who probably knew better made him stop and turn around. His lips were pressed into a thin line and faintly trembling, his fists clenched the straps of his backpack hard enough to hurt. He was never good at giving people mean looks, but apparently he managed it this time because the guard flinched slightly before facepalming and sighing.
“Listen. I live nearby. You can stay-”
“For a few days? For a week?” Kayden interrupted. “I’m going to live for a lot longer than that, sir! I need to- I can’t just live off-” He growled in frustration, hiding his face with his hands. He didn’t like the way his face felt. It was probably making an expression he didn’t want to show. “I don’t want to do that again. I’m going to be in charge of myself.”
A pause, before he heard an “Oh,” like the guard just had to put something in the space where the conversation used to be. That was usually the reaction. At least, given by the fact that he’d stopped talking, the security guard understood somewhat.
“You can just sleep in the box-”
“Illegal. Trespassing, squatting, whatever. But in the rift, it’s fine.”
Another sigh, this one longer, almost despairing.
“Just… fucking… God, I don’t know,” came more mumbling words, along with a few along the lines of “What if- no, that wouldn’t…” and “Why can’t he just…” that Kayden was more than used to hearing. He didn’t mind that so much. He wasn’t going to leave - it was his legal right to stay in that rift as long as he felt he needed. Then, though, he heard words he didn’t usually get to hear. “Fine. Whatever. It’s your life.”
Kayden looked up from his hands, newly red eyes staring incredulously up at the security guard. He looked at him properly, now - as a person, rather than just an obstacle to getting a place to sleep for the night. The older - elderly, he realized - man was resting his forehead against the doorframe in clear exasperation. The stubble on his chin was more grey than black, and what little of his hair was visible under his uniformed cap was wispy and faint. Still, he was built stout and steady and had a look like he could punch a hole through a brick wall. He probably could.
“Alright,” he said, taking a deep breath and standing straight. He pointed at Kayden, giving him as an authoritative a look as he could manage despite his obvious frustrated confusion. “Alright. Here’s what we’re gonna do. What’s your name, kid?”
“Kayden,” he replied, and now it was his turn to be confused. This wasn’t how these sorts of conversations were supposed to go. “Kayden Miller.”
“Alright, Kayden. I’m Frank Sycamore.” Frank shifted away from the doorframe, his posture growing more purposeful. “I’ll have breakfast for you tomorrow. Bacon egg and cheese on a plain bagel. You allergic to any of that?”
“I-I’m just allergic to food dyes, sir. That sounds fine.” Kayden stood as well, rubbing his eyes. This was… good. It was a good outcome. He didn’t actually want to run straight through the rift again - that would be a horrible idea. He had some preparations he needed to make or else he wouldn’t get any rest at all.
“Don’t call me sir, I work for a living.” Frank clapped his hands together and smiled with teeth that were far too well proportioned and pristine to look like they belonged in his mouth - probably dentures. “If you’re not here in the box to get your food by seven, I’m reporting you as missing and your little stunt is gonna blow sky high. Got it? Got it. Goodnight.”
Then he slammed the door shut with a deafening clang, and Kayden was alone.
“...goodnight, Frank,” he mumbled belatedly.
He stood there for a moment, processing, before he caught himself and rummaged through his bag again. Damn thing was covered in mud, but whatever. Everything would be, soon enough.
New bags around his shoes, mosquito net and sleeping bag moved to the top for easy access. He stepped back through the rift, trudging through the mud to a good spot he saw while he was working - a little hole in the craggy wall towards the far end, maybe eight feet across and three feet deep. Slightly elevated above the mud, just big enough for him and his belongings to fit, though it was probably a tight squeeze.
The bugs swarmed him again, but Kayden didn’t even have to put effort into ignoring them. He was so, so exhausted. He shoved all his stuff inside his new sorry excuse of a bed, decided it was warm enough that he didn’t care about the sleeping bag, draped the mosquito net over himself as a blanket and laid on the cold stone using his bunched up hood as a pillow. He fell asleep near instantly.
