The Great Game

If you’re new to the Great Game, please have a quick look at the blurb to your left, where you’ll find a short catch-up introduction!

The hallway ends in a big, ugly steel door, stained and streaked and pitted like a survivor from a nuclear power plant catastrophe. If I squint at it, I’m almost certain I can see things swimming in it.

“Knock,” Echo says.

I hesitate, paralyzed by the ghosts in the steel. Ghosts? I swallow, and turn to Echo and say “You knock on the ghost-infested door.”

Echo smiles nastily at me, the first expression I’ve seen on her face. It doesn’t make her any prettier. She steps forward, raises her hand, and raps right through the metal. Her forearm sinks in to the door, up to midway along. Then she steps back, flexing her fingers showily, and punches straight through my head. I can’t feel a thing where her arm is sticking into me, not even a tickle or a faint chill. I automatically reach up to grab her arm, but it just isn’t there.

“Tulpa,” says Echo, as if it explains everything. She withdraws her hand, face calm again.

“She means she’s a thought form,” says Alice. “Not physical.”

“So she’s — you’re — a ghost?”

“No,” chorus Alice and Echo.

“Ghosts are soul-shells,” says Echo. “I’m imagination, imbued with will and sentience.” There’s not much I can say to that. Echo gestures at the door again. “Knock.”

Oh well. I resist the temptation to pull my sleeve down over my hand, and knock on the door firmly. It feels squirmy somehow, but I don’t appear to be sucked in or anything. I start breathing again, and rap a second time. Something whirs deep within the door, and then it splits down the middle and slowly swings inwards, onto a brightly lit room.

“Goodbye,” says Echo, and walks off back the way we came. I share a look with Alice, and then walk into the light.

Almost immediately, I find myself in a sunny meadow, ringed by tall, forbidding trees. It feels like springtime, and the tall grasses are peppered with bright wild flowers. A pair of standing stones loom directly behind us, and there are some lower stones up ahead.

I look over at Alice, wide-eyed. “Are you seeing this?”

“Pretty summer field? Standing stones? Menacing forest?”

I nod.

“Guess so then,” she says.

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Today’s picture is Standing Stone, Guernsey by lostajy

Sorry for the late delivery today — I’m really not very well at the moment.