Arcane Apocalypse

1 – An Apocalyptic Apocalypse Approaches

“Hey, hey, Miss could you help a friend out?”

Here they go again. These guys are getting more aggressive by the day. Mia didn’t glance at the rugged-looking teen falling in step beside her. The trick with these sorts was to keep walking and act somewhat polite in case they have something pointy in their pockets.

“I have a brother in Vienna, but I seem to have misplaced my wallet. You seem like a nice sort. Would you help me out? Just a few Euros?”

“I don’t have any money,” Mia murmured, putting some speed into her steps. 

“Aww, come on Miss,” the boy whined. “I can see how nicely you’re dressed. I just need five Euros. Already got the rest from a friend, so pretty please?”

This one is worse than most. Mia thought. “I don’t carry money on me.”

Her eyes brightened as the next block came into view. She was almost home, maybe a hundred meters, and she’d be inside the apartment block. The little cunt would have to sod off once she got there.

Everyone’s been going crazy this week. I guess the ‘apocalypse’ got them all panicking. Mia rolled her eyes at the thought. She was only 24, and she lived through at least three so called ‘apocalypses’. This one would be just the same. 

The fellow next to her had other thoughts though, and in her ruminations, Mia almost missed the sound of a knife snapping open. Without thinking, she bolted, her sneakers kicking off of the asphalt.

Only spite kept her from dropping her groceries and the still-warm burger she had bought just minutes ago. 

“GET HER!”

Mia barely heard the responding shouts. Her eyes fixed on the door to the apartment complex. Hundred meters. That was nothing. She ran every morning and while those were endurance runs; she doubted the twig-like teenagers would outrun her in a sprint. Her legs weren’t just for show.

Hundred meters turned into seventy, fifty and then twenty in just about ten seconds. Those ten seconds felt like eternity, but the shouts going the slightest bit distant calmed her racing heart just a bit.

Three more seconds and she almost ran headfirst into the door. She frantically entered the code into the entry system. Her hands shook, and she messed up once, and then again much to her mounting frustration and horror.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she gritted her teeth, hearing her would-be muggers closing it. Never in her life would she have thought her hands’ tendency to tremble like a newborn fawn when she was stressed would get her killed one day. “Stop fucking shaking!”

She grabbed one wrist with the other hand and held it to stop its trembles, then entered the code. Slowly. She expected a knife to pierce her back every millisecond she spent hitting those stupid buttons.

The door buzzed, signaling the lock opening. She lunged at it, tearing it open and slamming the door shut the moment she passed through. Her heart thundered in her chest. She felt it beating in her neck, each pulse sending a renewed surge of adrenaline through her veins.

Mia stumbled back, twirling around to stare at the blurry outline appearing through the semi-translucent glass of the door. Her chest rose and fell rapidly with each ragged breath she took, but as the group of boys — no, thugs, — didn’t come barreling through the door, she slowly calmed down.

“This is crazy,” Mia wheezed. She’d been approached by similar people, begging for money with a thousand and more made-up reasons. This was just a fact of life when one lived in a city as big as Gartz. When their stories were especially creative or when they were polite, she tended to even give them some money. 

The other sort, the lazy ones with barely believable stories and the personality of a garbage bin, usually went away once she told them she had no money. Maybe a bit of grumbling, that was expected. But to pull a knife on her? What the hell?

A fist landing on the reinforced glass door made her jump. She heard muffled yells, then saw the blurry outlines of the group of younger men disappear.

God bless automatically locking doors and that paranoid landlord who decided he needed reinforced doors to discourage burglars.

When she didn’t feel her heart beating in her neck anymore, she grabbed her dropped bag of groceries and the larger sack of fast food she’d dropped and got to climbing the hellish stairs.

The elevator was offline for the foreseeable future to ‘preserve energy’ or something. A moronic idea if you asked Mia.

She remembered the group of assholes who tried to relieve her of her wallet just minutes ago and reconsidered. Maybe the landlord’s paranoia had some merit to it after all.

By the time she reached the floor her apartment was on, she was wheezing. Daily runs did wonders for her physique, but the tenth floor was the tenth floor.

When she reached her apartment, she just kicked the door twice. When Mark, her lazy roommate, failed to open the door in the next ten seconds she rolled her eyes and leaned onto the doorbell.

It was an atrocious thing, sounding like a hundred pigs getting slaughtered. It also worked as intended and the door opened up a short few seconds later with a glaring Mark pushing his head through the gap.

“Knock that off,” he squinted at her, looking her up and down. “Why do you look so harried?”

“Almost got mugged,” Mia said distantly, still not quite believing it actually happened. She shook her head, pushed him aside, and walked in. She had a bath and a bed with her name on it.

“What?” the man stared at her, eyes wide. “Did you call the police? Are you alright?”

“No,” Mia grumbled, putting the bought stuff on the kitchen table. “And … yes?”

“Why?” Mark frowned. “Was it close to the apartment? Maybe that dumb camera Jeff had us pay for would be useful for once.”

“Huh,” Mia chewed on her lip in thought. “Maybe? I don’t know. I doubt anything would come out of its since all it would show is me running and then a group of assholes running after me. Now leave me alone. I have to fit all this stuff into a fridge, then get a bath.”

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“If you say so?” Mark squinted at her for a few more seconds, then shrugged. 

“ … Since the beginning of this week, the bizarre weather events we've been monitoring are intensifying with each passing hour. Regions along tectonic plate boundaries are experiencing earthquakes reaching magnitudes of up to 7.0. Concurrently, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis are striking with increasing frequency. The exact number of fatalities remains unclear, but estimates indicate that thousands are perishing every hour as this crisis continues to unfold."

“Didn’t we cancel cable TV last year?” Mia asked as she listened in.

“We did,” Mark said with a roll of his eyes. “This is just a video.”

Mia shrugged. It was his money; she wasn’t going to waste hers on pricey cable TV. “You should probably go shopping tomorrow. You have a car, you could buy much more stuff than me. People are going crazy. I’ve seen a bunch of teenagers run out of a shop with as much toilet paper as they could carry.”

“Breaking news from the world of astronomy: just minutes ago, experts detected a colossal solar flare heading directly towards Earth. More details on this topic will follow in just a moment.”

When Mark ignored her in favour of staring at the TV, she chucked the sack of buns he asked her to buy at him. Her throw struck true and smacked into the side of his face.

“Hey!” He scrambled to catch the plastic bag.

“I said I’m not going shopping again, especially not on foot. It’s just asking to get mugged at this point.”

“I guess so,” he mumbled, getting up to throw his buns in the cupboard. “Not like they would think twice about mugging me if you couldn’t glare them away.”

Mia glared at him, and her lazy roommate had the gall to grin back. He was partly right; he was built like a beanstalk and looked punchable, even to her sub-six-feet self.

“Mhmm, that’s the one,” Mark nodded sagely. “If I didn’t know you, I’d think you want to murder me.”

Mia grumbled. So what if her neutral expression was what others would call a ‘resting bitch face’? It wasn’t that bad. Surely.

Mark turned and winked at her, which only made her glare double in intensity. “Don’t you worry, Mia. I’m sure you’ll find a cute girl who’ll melt from that glare.” 

She sighed and shook her head. If only it worked like that. 

“Ah shit,” Mark said, gaping at the TV. Then he jumped up and rushed off to his room.

“What are you doing?” Mia shouted after him, just finishing up with storing the groceries in the fridge. An exercise which put her Tetris skills to the test with their tiny shared refrigerator.

“WATCH THE DAMNED TV.”

More confused than anything, Mia did so.

"Urgent update: The solar flare detected earlier is approaching much faster than initially predicted, and is expected to reach Earth in just half an hour. Scientists warn that it possesses enough force to penetrate the planet's magnetic field. As a precaution, it is strongly recommended to turn off all electrical devices and disconnect from the main power grid. This measure could help protect against potential damage from electromagnetic disruptions when the flare makes impact."

Mia stared at the screen, then at the countdown next to it. Five minutes. “Ah shit.”

“That’s what I said,” Mark quipped as he rushed back into the living room cum kitchen. “Do you remember where the hell our electrical panel is?”

“Isn’t it out in the hallways somewhere?” 

“Right, be right back.” 

Mia just stood still, cursing up a storm inwardly. Today was her day off. She was planning to grind that new roguelike game to death … alas; it seemed the apocalypse wouldn’t wait for her.

She slumped down onto the couch and fished out her phone from her pocket. She quickly shot off a barrage of messages, to her mom, to her boss, and even to Sarah, her obnoxious sister.

If the newscaster wasn’t pulling some prank on them, the internet and just about everything else was just about to go to shit in less than an hour. 

Her phone buzzed, flashing red, as a nationwide alert notification popped up and closed all the other apps. She gulped. It reiterated what the newscaster had been talking about, just with the weight of the government behind it. It was real.

Mark rushed back in, with the lights still suspiciously working and the newscaster babbling on about some giant dark storm spreading over Europe. 

“Help me if you would?!” Mark shouted, causing Mia to jump. “Water. If we turn off the electricity, there is no way in hell we are getting water. Fill up the tub.”

Mia did just that, Mark’s frenzied rush turning out to be infectious. Plus, she might as well do something useful instead of lamenting her carefully planned out evening crumbling to ash.

With the tub on its way to filling up with freezing cold water, she made her way back to the kitchen. If the power was going out for the foreseeable future, what else should she do to make that time less hellish? 

First things first. She powered her phone down and made sure neither her charger nor her PC were plugged in. She could charge her phone with a tiny solar powered charger once it wasn’t in danger of being fried to shit by the solar flare. 

“What else?” She whispered. The freezer would probably melt out … most of the food would also be a goner in a few days with the April heat quickly spoiling them. “I should have bought more canned food.”

Mia gave a brief glance to the retreating sun she could see through the window. Just a month ago she wouldn’t have had the slightest worry about strolling the streets at night, but the impending ‘apocalypse’ made people go bonkers.

Now with this on top of it? She doubted she would reach the corner before getting shanked by a looter. She didn’t know what use paying tax had when the police was so useless when they were needed.

“Alright!” Mark exclaimed, stumbling back into the room while looking slightly dishevelled. Nothing new there, that was his regular look. “Should be good! Well, not good, but we might survive the first week of a zombie apocalypse as we are now!”

Mia couldn’t help but quirk her lips at that. 

"We have just received a critical update: The Trans-Atlantic and Red Sea Cables have been severed due to increased seismic activity along the seafloor. As a result, communication be expected to be completely severed once the solar flare dismantles the orbital satellites currently in use."

“Shit,” Mark whispered. “Is this really happening?”

Mia shuddered. Just minutes ago, she thought all this talk about the approaching apocalypse was just people being stupid. Sure, the earthquakes were bad and so were the tornadoes and whatnot. But she lived in Austria. Europe has escaped most of the natural disasters until now.

"Dark storm clouds are rapidly spreading across Europe, causing disruptions to radio signals. Authorities indicate that these severe weather conditions are expected to reach Austria within minutes. Residents are advised to prepare for communication challenges and wide-scale power outages."

The reporter took a deep, shuddering breath on screen as the satellite image of a murky mass flowing over continental Europe winked out. Static took its place.

“May God save us all-“

The screen glitched, then went dark. The light of the sun seeping through the window followed just seconds later.

Almost mechanically, Mia stood and shuffled over to the window while Mark stared at the black screen. It was dark outside. The street lamps were off, as they should be when it was only noon. The only source of light came from other apartment windows throughout the city.

Mia glanced up. There were no stars to be seen, nor did the moon peek through the clouds anywhere. The entire sky was covered in a depthless darkness her eyes had no hope of piercing.

People were already stumbling out onto the streets below to stare up at the sky. Others leaned out through their windows or rushed to balconies to make sure their eyes weren’t just playing tricks on them.

Most of them had phones in their hands, cameras pointed either at the dark city or up at the sky. 

“No signal,” Mark mumbled behind her. “Mobile data is fucked. Cable net still seems to work.”

“When does that flare thing arrive?” Mia asked. A part of her was terrified, a large part. Electricity would be gone in just minutes, darkness covered the continent, everyone would be cut off from the rest of the world. Another part of her though, just stared and took everything in with a morbid curiosity. 

It was going to be pandemonium. The days before, with looters and overeager teenagers acting like common thugs, merely a prelude to what was to come. 

That is, if the solar flare would really just fry the tech and not everything on the surface. A nihilistic part of her even hoped it would. She didn’t like her chances in a lawless post-apocalyptic world as a petite girl.

“Should have taken more jujitsu lessons,” she mumbled, even though she knew it wouldn’t make a difference. What was she going to do against a man twice her size? Tickle him to death? Even those teenagers could have beaten her to death if they caught her.

“ … should be fifteen minutes or so.”

Mia hummed, tearing her gaze away from the outside world. She made her way over to the fridge and took out one of the last two Czech craft beers and cracked it open. 

Then she slumped down on the couch and decided to ignore everything from then on. If she died in fifteen minutes, so be it. It beat slaving away as a blue collar drone of some multi-billion dollar company.

“I was really looking forward to playing that game.”

“What?” Mark asked.

“That game, you know, the new roguelike with the Greek underworld?”

“Fuck that,” he hissed. “We are going to die.”

He was fidgeting, glancing at the window as if the dark above could reach down any moment to crush him to death. In between glances, he glared at her.

Mia shrugged, taking a large gulp from her precious beer. 12% alcohol and strawberry flavouring was truly a match made in heaven. If only it didn’t cost a kidney and a half to buy and deliver just a box of the stuff.

Mark released a sound halfway between a groan and a growl next to her. She might have found it threatening if she hadn’t seen the man practise his HEMA forms with a lightsaber at last week’s party. In a boxer. 

“It is what it is,” she mumbled, only sipping on her beer now. She only had two. They had to last until either the flare hit or she kicked the bucket.

She found herself oddly calm. Detached even. Like she was watching everything happening as an outside observer, unconcerned with the outcome.

It was slightly worrying, but it beat the rabid pacing and hair tearing Mark was doing. She took another sip, then released a content sigh.

God bless the Czech and their beers.

“The electricity,” Mark said, his panicked expression melting away with his newfound purpose. “Be right back.”

Then he was off, leaving Mia behind with the door ajar. She sighed. Then drained the rest of her beer and got up. She would have to be more careful with the other for it to last.

She kicked the door closed and slumped back into the couch with her last ice cold drink. 

Some shouting echoed through the door, one voice she could easily make out as Mark’s and another she suspected was their landlord Jeff. Other voices soon joined the shouting match, probably those of the other tenants on the floor.

Mia ignored them. She was not going to spend what were likely her last minutes alive yelling at strangers. Her PC and phone were safe either way from the planet wide EMP that was the approaching solar flare.

She hummed to herself, slowly making her way through her drink. Soon, the shouting grew distant. Then the lights went out.

Mia sighed, glancing out through the window. She could see other buildings turning their grid off, but the majority of them did not. It seemed Mark somehow won the shouting match.

“He probably got backed up by the others,” she hummed. Jeff never really liked Mark. Probably a side effect of how annoying he was about the net being worse than advertised.

The guy was willing to go to war over that twenty ping difference.

Her hair stood on end, fuzzing up like she had rubbed it with a balloon. A shiver ran down her spine. All the lights in the city went out. It was dark, a primaeval darkness where not a single ray of light could be found. 

Mia quickly drained the rest of her beer, even as goosebumps covered her entire body. Wasting good beer was a cardinal sin.

The door crashed open, and she almost spilled the last of it all over her shirt. 

“Mark?” She asked, both annoyed and more than a little scared. She couldn’t see anything in the dark.

“Yeah?”

Mia slumped in relief. She half expected some monster of the apocalypse or a zombie to have crashed into the apartment.

“Close the door?” She asked. “Please?”

Before her roommate could answer, light bloomed in the darkness. Ribbons of multi coloured light streaked through the dark sky, much like polar lights.

Mia stumbled over to the window, again, mouth agape and eyes wide. Unlike polar lights, these weird ribbons weren’t parallel to each other, but weaved all around the sky in an intricate web of colour.

“What the fuck.” Mark said, giving voice to her thoughts.

The web of alien light rippled, and Mia felt her hands shake. There was something wrong with these lights, something very, very wrong.

Some primal part of her screamed in alarm, but her body refused to obey. She stood frozen as the lights seeped into the dark clouds.

Lightning flashed, hidden partly behind the clouds. Red, yellow, blue, white, sliver, gold and a dozen more colours flashed as the storm began.

There was no rain, only thunder and lightning.

The first bolt struck without further warning, a single flash of white light blasting off in the distance. Mia faintly remembered there being a village just about where it struck.

Only a split second later it struck again, and again and again. Red, yellow and blue flashes. All of these in the city.

Unlike regular lightning, these bolts didn’t dissipate. The streaks of light stayed in place, like pillars of light holding up the heavens.

The fourth bolt struck close, right in the middle of the road in front of their block. Where the group of gawkers stood.

Horrified, Mia finally tore her gaze away from the clouds and glanced down. Now, dozens of people were scampering away while most of them stared at the stuck lightning.

Then another bolt struck, this time in a light green colour and Mia caught the fraction of a second it impacted its target: a younger woman on the sidewalk.

Mia tried to force herself to move. It wasn’t that hard dammnit! She’s been moving her entire life. Just a few steps back to get away from the window. That’s all she wanted. Was it too much to ask?

It seemed it was. She barely managed to twitch her pinky finger by the time the next bolt arrived. It was a beautiful light pink, vibrant and brimming with power.

It bent mid air, arcing away from the ground. Its speed was probably incomprehensible, yet Mia watched it as if it moved in slow motion towards its target: her.

It could have been Mark, maybe. But something told her it was not. That lightning was hers.

She had a faint moment to be amused by the fact that she would die to a pink lightning.

Why did it have to be pink of all things? She wondered.

Then light devoured her vision and she felt herself floating. What she thought was lightning flooded into her body like a raging river. It flowed and flowed, rampaging through her body, seeping into every inch of her skin, into every muscle and into every bone.

Mia felt … full. Like she overate, but with her whole body. Even her hair felt this strange fullness, her nails too and every single cell in her body.

She felt it grow worse and worse with every passing moment; she felt like she was about to burst. No, she was going to burst-

It stopped.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and couldn’t see. The fullness remained, just on the precipice of it overwhelming her fragile body.

Mia lost track of time as she remained like that, trying to hold herself together. It was instinctual, like someone trying to keep themselves from vomiting. She didn’t know how she was doing it, but she clamped down on this strange energy with a vice-like grip and didn’t let go.

Minutes, hours, or maybe even days passed before something changed.

[Mana saturation reached marginal levels required for establishing System contact.]