The canyon did not give a damn.
That was the first thing I understood about this dusty planet. Not hostility just indifference. The wind blew dust across rocks. The sun came down like an ozone layer is optional. The sky was the pale, washed-out blue of something that had given up on looking impressive. There were wisps clouds. No silence. Just heat and wind and the steady, grinding noise of a world that exists.
I tripped from a soft patch of sand causing me to fall down luckily avoiding a faceplant with my hands.
"Right," I said aloud to nobody. "So that happened."
Dead via blender malfunction. Respawned if that word even applied in a canyon on a death world. by something with either a very specific sense of humor or very poor taste in candidates. The note I had found in my pocket had described it as 'selection through pity and amusement,' which was at least honest.
Standing up, I brushed sand off my palms and took stock. Canyon check. Rocks check. Heat? Too much. I have no idea what time it is. No idea where exactly I have landed and so I chose the best option.
I walked in a random direction.
A cavern was found in the late afternoon it seemed, yawning out of the canyon wall behind a cluster of jagged rock like it had been waiting. The temperature dropped the moment I stepped inside. a sharp cold that carried the faint smell of water and old. Moss glowed faintly on the walls. Stalactites dripped. The tunnels split in three directions.
I considered them. "Left looks cursed, Right looks tight. Straight looks too easy." so I went left.
The left tunnel tilts downward, narrowing and then opening again, the floor running with a thin sheet of water that has carved a small channel for itself. Symbols had been carved into the stone at irregular intervals so it wasn't vandalism nor graffiti, but old work could be ancient.
A hum started around an hour in. It wasn't loud. It was the kind of sound that bypassed the ears and settled directly behind the sternum with a deep resonance that made my teeth itch. I stopped walking, hand already moving to the revolver before I decided to reach for it.
Shadows moved at the edge of my vision.
a figure stepped into the low light — tall, cloaked, limbs just slightly too long for a human frame. Its eyes were luminous with something that looked like intelligence rather than threat. It didn't speak. It simply gestured toward a pedestal set into the cavern wall.
On the pedestal: a bag, a revolver, and a USB drive.
I approached, because at this point, what else was there to do.
I read the note inside the bag. My selection was confirmed: pity and amusement. My powers were outlined in practical terms. Survival instructions followed and vague ones laced with a dry humor, the kind that assumed the reader was smart enough to fill in the gaps. I flipped it over twice, looking for a postscript. There wasn't one.
I plugged the USB into the reader embedded in a weird box thingy.
Cortana materialized.
Similar to how she looked in the games but more detailed, composed, radiantly blue. She flickered into existence with the quality of someone who had been elsewhere, doing something difficult, and had not yet finished deciding how to feel about being here instead. Her expression settled quickly into something Controlled. But the transition had been visible at least to me.
"I" She stopped. Processed. "My systems are functional. Environment is... significantly different from last known context." Her eyes moved across the cavern, cataloguing. "I'll do what I can."
"That's more than I had thirty seconds ago," I said.
She looked at him directly. "You don't seem surprised to see me."
"I had some context."
"That sentence has a great deal of weight in it."
"Yeah." I pocketed the note and picked up the revolver — the Jakobs, burst-fire, already annoying him — and tested the weight. "We'll get to it. For now: I'm Jay, I have abilities I barely understand, I'm on a planet I've never been to but have studied extensively through a secondhand medium, and I need to not die. In that order."
Cortana was quiet for a moment. "Then let's make sure the last item doesn't become the first."
I practiced (messed around) in the cavern for what felt like an hour.
The Ruin Engine responds to intent more than gesture, I can absorb a chunk of stone, feel it disassemble in itsbinternal space, and push it back out reshaped. A spike. A flat disc. A rough cylinder. Nothing precise, but the process was easy to get down.
Blink deposited him directly into the far wall, shoulder-first.
I filed that under 'working on it.'
"The trajectory calculation is off," Cortana observed, from a safe distance.
"I noticed."
"You're targeting via moving there, not relocating. Your brain is used to estimating movement through space using a body that moves. Blink doesn't move instead it relocates. The spatial maths are different."
I sat on the cavern floor and rolled my shoulder. "Is there a way to learn that faster or do I just keep walking into walls?"
"Walls," she said. "Mostly."
"Fantastic."
I emerged from the cavern as the sun touched the horizon. The light had gone amber and long-shadowed, the canyon floor glowing in shades of rust and ochre. The cave mouth had disappeared entirely by the time I turned to look back but it was gone, as if it had decided its business with him was concluded.
I stood in the open air with my bag, my revolver, a semi-cooperative AI, and a set of powers I had spent the last hour proving were functional but unpredictable.
The wind carried dust and something that smelled faintly of ash and iron.
"Cortana," I said.
"Yes."
"How do you feel about all of this?"
She considered the question with the kind of seriousness it probably deserved. "I feel present," she said finally. "And I intend to stay that way."
I nodded. "Good enough." So I started walking. "Let's find somewhere to sleep that isn't in the open."