WAR PLANET: The Phantom

Chapter 3.2

The Telly hummed loudly, slipping out of Ronan's hands and slamming into the floor. White lines crawled across the sphere as it cracked open, leaking a blinding white light that engulfed the floor. He tried to flee, but the liquid light grabbed his feet, preventing him from moving. Cobalt was all he heard before the light sucked him down into the floor and felt like he was riding a short circuiting roller coaster, spinning out of control through a rainbow tube of light and losing all sense of direction.

He managed to get a clear view as the tunnel ended, floating into a gravity-free clearing filled with hundreds of swirling rainbow tubes. The scene was breathtaking, but also extremely worrisome to Ronan, who was still trying to process what was happening.

Red slid out of the same tunnel, carrying Jeremy and Ragdoll with him. Ronan tried to speak to him, but nothing came out of his mouth as he strained to talk in the numbing silence. Red dropped the two cats, pointing to a large hole filled with the same blinding light that sucked Ronan into the floor. He shielded his eyes from its intensity, feeling gravity return as he rested on solid ground once more.

Ronan shook the nausea from his head, his entire body tingling as he moved. The ground beneath his feet was soft, like grass. He waited until he could process his thoughts once again. There wasn't any grass in his house, and it wasn't so awfully bright.

The smell of fresh rain lingered in the air, and he opened his eyes. They were at the bottom of a hill, in a valley of tall wild grass. Jeremy trotted over to Ronan, rubbing against his leg, but he was too frozen to stroke his companion.

Red kicked a widget of grass into the air. "Great! Stupid Telly! Why did it put us here?!"

Ronan slowly drew his phone and turned it on, no bars. He shoved it back in his pocket and shakily turned to Red. "What was that?"

"Just a dimension between realities, times, places... I don't know, it doesn't really have a name." Red replied, trudging up the steep hill. "Also, I get tired of questions real fast. So don't ask too many."

"Oh..." Ronan whimpered, following Red up the hill as he watched the tall grass dance in the wind, all the while pondering the mess he'd found himself in.

An avalanche of possibilities swarmed his head. That ball could have been filled with weird hallucinogenic knock-out gas, Red could be a key player in an elaborate kidnapping, and those Chirops could have been his dressed up lackeys. Now he was in a field, and Red was leading him to his secret base to send ransom notes to his rich uncle. The thought of his uncle being a violent gang leader had crossed his mind more than once, but it still didn't add up. Ronan couldn't figure out how Red had instantly fixed his overcoat, or how the creatures were able to transform before their very eyes. And he hadn't eaten something weird lately. He stroked the red gouge on his arm, maybe he'd been seriously drugged, but the syringe was after the ludicrous events.

His heart sank to the pit of his stomach, there was another explanation, but it needed some serious confirmation. Red looked human, the grass and air was... Earthly. He continued to scour his surroundings, freezing when he discovered the giant ball in the sky, a planet. It was a beautiful variety of blues and greys colouring it in a pattern of long brush strokes.

That wasn't right.

He cranked his head up to look further, spotting not one, but two, burning balls of fire. Stars. One was a stunning white with light blue edges, while the other was pure red and way bigger than its partner. The final touch to the sky was a long streak of soft colours like green and yellow, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.

Either something was really wrong with the sky, or Ronan's final theory had been confirmed. His uncle always told him not to socialise with strange people, and now he was wishing he'd listened. Red, the Russian exchange student, was an alien, and he'd been abducted.

Red was already at the top of the hill, inaudibly whispering to his cat, when Ronan stopped. "You're an alien?"

He dropped his conversation and gave Ronan a confused look. "Alien?"

"Y'know, they come from outer space with flying saucers and lasers and abduct people."

Red paused, thinking up an answer to the crazy question with a passive tone. "No... I haven't been to outer space, and technically, you abducted yourself when you activated the Telly." He knelt down, pulling something out of his sock. "I do have a laser though."

Ronan didn't know why, but he wasn't panicking anymore. Maybe it was because he didn't wake up strapped to a table with lights in his face, or the reason could have been he lacked anything to look forward to back home. It was a boring town. Sonya had tons of other friends, and Iridis never felt like a home to him. He craved to escape it and go on some sort of adventure, and Red had stopped a band of chirops from tearing them to pieces, which, in a way, was a nice thing to do. He watched a small purple bird flap by.

Or the shock hadn't worn out.

He climbed the rest of the hill, stopping beside Red as awe overtook him. They weren't standing on a hill, they were at the edge of a steep cliff dipping down into a broad and beautiful valley. It looked like a spread out map, filled with vast forests, pristine lakes, and biomes the likes of which Ronan had never seen before. Far off into the distance the diverse painting of scenery withered away into a barren grouping of mountains, with bottomless cracks and massive crystals jutting out of them. The only limit to the extraordinary scene seemed to be the distance at which he could make out an object, else it would have stretched to endless boundaries.

Red raised his eyebrows at Ronan, grinning at his awe. "Welcome to Lumi." He walked precariously close to the edge, pulling Ronan beside him. "Lesson one, transportation."

"Wait, are we going down there?" The cliff wasn't too tall, but no one in their right mind would ever jump it.

Unfortunately, Red wasn't portraying the look of someone in their right mind.

"Aww, come on, it's easy. Just stand facing the cliff." He started, turning Ronan into the proper position. "Then imagine not splatting against the ground and dying, while saying lufeste."

Ronan's face twisted with concern. "How the hell is that supposed to he-"

Red planted his foot in Ronan's rear, sending him flying off the cliff. He didn't even have the time to yelp in surprise as the wind pounded all around him, the pull of gravity dragging him from his roost like a baby bird to his impending date with death. He flailed around in the air, trying to find a solution to his dilemma, but there wasn't a logical way out of it. The ground came closer at a frightening speed, and all Ronan could do was take Red's advice and hope he didn't become a human pancake, repeatedly screaming lufeste at the top of his lungs.

Everything slowed down as Ronan approached the ground, his life flashed before his eyes; short and boring. The fall was taking it's sweet old time to end, but Ronan didn't dare to peek at his demise. Maybe he was dead already, the wind had stopped howling in his ears, and he couldn't feel the grassy ground he was supposed to be splattered all over by now.

"Close enough!" Red yelled.

Ronan hoped he hadn't died, the prospect of hearing Red's obnoxious voice beyond the grave was a level of hell he certainly didn't belong in. He cracked open his eyes, the ground was inches from his face, but he wasn't touching any of it. The entire situation took Ronan some time to process, he was frozen in mid air. He didn't know how, but it being the only thing stopping him from becoming a pile of mush, made him more relieved than shocked at the odd turn of events.

The mystical force holding him up shrank away, dropping him gently on the ground. Ronan got to his feet with a weak stumble, just in time to see Red dive off the cliff. However, the blonde didn't stop mid air, he kept falling, impacting a giant stone and tumbling into a patch of thorny bushes.

Ronan's heart skipped a beat. A fall like that could kill someone, and if Red died he'd be left with two cats to fend for himself on an alien planet, with no hopes of getting home. He ran up to the impact site, jumping back in nearly disgusted shock as Ragdoll ran out, followed by Red who peeked out of the bush and flicked the thorns off his uniform. He shielded his eyes to get a look at how far he'd fallen, turning to Ronan with a smile.

"Whoops, didn't notice the boulder." He quickly brushed the stray dirt and sticks out of the folds of his pants, checking a bracelet on his wrist and locking onto a thick brush of trees peeking over the horison. "Alrighty then, follow me."