She'd blacked out—kissed shale-covered, alien dirt. One second, she'd been scanning a large geode and crystal growth for traces of rare metals, reconning a new planet for the Fifth Exploration Fleet. The next—

Glaring light, that of a medical scanner.

Gwen Macarthur hauled in a breath as the last shadows of unconsciousness and troubled dreams burned away. Beyond the spacesuit-clad medic checking her eyes and related neurology, the fluoro orange dome of an emergency habitat rose, replacing what had been dark, rocky alien vistas and yellow, dust-hazed sky.

Unease knotted her gut. The tough fabric and polymer plates of her extravehicular activity—EVA—suit still enclosed her work-hardened body, but her helmet and backpack air supply had been removed, something that jolted every survival instinct. As a Frontier Scout for 'the Fifth', she knew the protocols for planetary exploration and resource surveys, and she knew the risks of the current alien world her team had been assigned to recon: boulder-strewn terrain and fields of unstable shale; no breathable atmosphere; and strong, fluctuating electromagnetic fields that could fritz sensors and electronics with inadequate EM shielding. Given the hab arching over her, she could only assume she was still at the location where she'd lost consciousness—over a hundred klicks from the safety of the landing-site base.

Not good.

Her pulse rate rose despite her efforts to keep her respiration even. She'd been on enough ground missions to understand the ramifications of the orange walls around her. Precious reserve respiratory gases had been used to inflate the temporary shelter. Her team's day recon mission would be restricted in scope or outright cancelled. The fleet, already desperate for mineral resources to keep its tech and food supply going, would have to wait another thirty-hour local day.

All because of her. All because she'd fainted like some delicate, weak-kneed princess.

Self-disgust twisted her lips, then mordant amusement. At close to two meters tall, with the build of a pugilist sports-mech, she didn't do delicate femineity—well, except in her off hours. With virtual reality the only escape in the overcrowded fleet, she'd taken on some fantastical personas, her VR avatars ranging from paladin knights to, yes, ethereal fairy princesses. Built for action as she was, she gravitated to the heroic, but she'd a soft spot for pretty, useless things—everything she'd never be. 

And she'd plug herself between the eyes with her ore sampler before she'd admit anything like that to her 'rock jock' teammates. Their ultimate duty beyond rock and ice foraging might be to chase the goldilocks fantasy of a viable colony planet, but after hundreds of cold, rocky worlds and too many deaths, the team had lost all respect for airheaded dreamers.

"Stop. Enough." She sat up, swatting the scanner from her face. "I'm fine." She had to be. It was a two-hour rover drive back to the landing site, all over unstable boulders and shifting dunes of shale, and the planet's unpredictable EM activity could easily blow out that travel time if navigation sensors got affected.

The medic crouching beside her lowered his med scanner. Within his EVA suit's work-worn helmet, his gaze held steady—cool grey under a dark, scarred brow.

Gwen smirked at the 'warm' welcome back to consciousness. Kam Lancer, the team's medic, couldn't be faulted for his dedication to his job, but as bedside manners went, the volcanic rock she'd been scanning had more give. Ex–fleet security, Lancer had seen overcrowded 'ship-canned' humanity at its worst. He'd lost his legs and right arm in a food-rationing riot, and had endured excruciating neuro-integration procedures to attach mech prosthetics. Rumour had it a person had to be missing whole organs and dancing with the Reaper to see any real sympathy from Lancer.

"You only regained consciousness a few moments ago." His tone matched the bionic tech hidden within his EVA suit: graceless, pragmatic, hard edged—a tragedy all round. Before his injuries, she'd have cast him as a dark elf or assassin in her VR fantasies. He'd been whip-lean and smoothly athletic. Now, the man whirred and clanked.

Suppressing sympathy she'd not be thanked for, she scraped back her hair, the brassy mop a sweaty mess past regulation length, unlike the scarred, no-nonsense buzzcut hidden inside the medic's helmet. "I just fainted, Lancer. It's no big deal. I feel fine, ready to go."

The medic's stare didn't relent. "You were unconscious for over an hour, Macarthur."

Her heartbeat stumbled. An hour? It felt like she'd been out only moments. But of course, the team would never have popped the emergency hab if that were true.

"What happened?" She looked to the scanner in his hand. The device and her suit's diagnostic systems would be lighting up the heads-up display within his helmet, feeding him all sorts of bio and tech data. "Bad suit air mix? A pressurisation glitch?" Hypoxia would explain her blackout and—

Memory flickered: Lightning in whirling darkness. A tall silhouette, robes and hair swirling on black winds; a wooden staff in one gnarled hand, its branching shape echoing the forking electricity piercing the storm.

Gwen felt her pulse jolt. Ah, shit. She'd hallucinated before she'd blacked out. Hello, too little oxygen; meet too many hours of fantasy roleplay.

The flat line of Lancer's mouth didn't soften. "Your tech isn't what malfunctioned."

Gwen bared her teeth at the not-so-veiled accusation. "I was cleared for this mission, Lancer. If you expect me to waste more precious air and time apologising for unexpectedly falling on my face, get fracked. Cut to the shit already. Is it a brain tumour or stroke?" She meant the question facetiously, but distress had her fisting her hands.

Lancer eyed her, parsing her reaction, likely for medical evaluation purposes and the incident report he'd now have to submit. "Your symptoms aren't consistent with a stroke, and your pre-mission health assessment five days ago showed no evidence of tumours or malignancy."

She managed to take a full breath. "Then what caused me to faint?"

"I'm not convinced you did—technically." The hitch at the corner of Lancer's mouth was no real smile. "The bio-readings your suit recorded aren't consistent with syncope. Normal brain blood flow, blood pressure, respiration, and heart rate. And during your bout of unconsciousness, your brain activity matched that of REM sleep—rapid eye movements, heightened brain activity in the regions of the thalamus, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate corte."

Gwen did a double-take. "Wait. Are you saying I fell asleep?" She couldn't suppress her laugh, the explanation striking her as both way too prosaic and unnervingly weird—certainly not reassuring. "That's insane."

"It's consistent with your bio-readings." Within his helmet, Lancer's gaze grew distant, his focus shifting to whatever reports glowed on his HUD. "At the same time, sweat response, laboured respiration, and cortisol levels indicated a highly stressed emotional state."

"Meaning?"

Lancer's 'nonsmile' returned as he refocussed on her. "The likely explanation is you had a nightmare, an extended, hour-long one. Do you recall dreaming?"

Gwen started to shake her head, but the memory of her hallucination returned, along with other, far more unsettling images.

A rain of black daggers slicing down over a lightning-lit battlefield. Corpses in Old Earth armour, all torn and bloody. Her gore-stained hand reaching into the storm, groping for ... a sword hilt protruding from stone.

The terror of the dream killed her breath, but eye-rolling disgust struck next. Ah, frack, she remembered now. When she'd first seen the geode she'd scanned, the metallic crystals jutting up from it had reminded her of a blade's hilt. An Old Earth legend had come to mind, one involving a king's sword stuck in a rock, a bunch of knights, and, yes, a mysterious wizard like she'd imagined—some kind of shapeshifter if she remembered correctly. No wonder she'd dreamed of battle, blood, and magic; her imagination had been primed for it. She'd even privately dubbed the planet New Avalon, after the place the mythical blade had been forged.

But she'd not be sharing any of that with Lancer. She could just picture his and the rest of the team's reactions to learning she had primitive, sword-wielding hero fantasies.

"Macarthur." Lancer snapped his fingers in front of her. "You zoning on me?"

Gwen winced. "I was trying to remember if I dreamed, but who recalls that shit?" More dream fragments flashed back, their vividness making a liar of her. This time, under the rain of black blades, she saw the faces of the dead: Lancer's and those of her other teammates, Siri Brunor and Wes Pellinore. Her heart stuttered. Had she really dreamed that awful nonsense? Or was her brain filling in details, making more and more shit up—determined to unnerve her?

It was succeeding.

She cut her gaze to the hab's airlock exit, the sudden urge to leave—run—jolting her nervous system. The irrational panic, like a foreign signal hacking her brain, left no room for denial. "Lancer, what's wrong with me?" She didn't want the answer, but on mission, she could only deal in facts, not fantasy—for better or worse.

"That's still to be determined." Lancer rested his arms on his knees, the only acknowledgement of her spiking vitals a narrowing of his eyes. "What do you remember before you blacked out?"

She breathed deep, fighting to slow her pulse. "I was analysing the largest geode at the centre of the cluster we found, the one with the cross-shaped crystal formation. EM was erratic. The wind was whipping up dust, generating charge differentials." Recall of her hallucination flashed back: a dark figure, lashing wind, and lightning. "Could I have been zapped by rogue electrostatics? I thought I saw a flash before I lost consciousness. And before you point out there's EM shielding in these old EV-X2s, the circuitry in these suits is frakking antique."

"Your suit's diagnostic logs show no internal surge in voltage or current." Lancer retrieved her helmet to manually inspect it, before handing it back to her. "There's no sign your suit took a high-voltage strike."

Gwen grimaced. Her suit might not have, but illogical or not, it felt like something had fried her neurons. Not only was her brain serving up fanciful visions of archaic weapons, death, and darkness, her sympathetic nervous system seemed hellbent on delivering a full-blown panic attack. Safe as she was in the hab, knots strangled her gut. Right that second, despite being insulated from the alien world outside, she felt every hair on her body shiver upright, as if reacting to a temperature or weather shift.

"Macarthur." Lancer startled her out of her breathless introspection. "You experiencing acute stress?"

She wanted to make a snide quip, dissipate the tension knotting her gut, but she couldn't drag her focus from the hab's orange walls and the patter of windblown grit against them. The day's forecast was for rising winds, but nothing major. So, why did that sound—rock particulates striking toughened polymer—make her blood run cold? Even if the weather kicked off, surpassed the hab's safety rating, the team's bulky, six-wheeled rover was reliable hard cover.

And even knowing that—"Where's Brunor and Pellinore?"

"Mapping a series of smaller geodes." Lancer shook his head, looking less than happy. "There are multiple rings of them around this location, too regular for a natural formation. Pellinore's convinced some other scout party beat us to this site and is pranking us, but there's no other sign of prior exploration or—" He broke off, holding up a finger to indicate incoming coms. "Brunor's reporting increasing EM interference and windborne particulates." He stood with a hiss of mech hydraulics, dragging her up with him. "Suit up. We're to double-time it back to base before we lose connectivity with orbital nav."

Cursing the tremor in her hands, Gwen jammed on her helmet and reattached her air tanks. She tried to calm her respiration and mirror Lancer's nonchalance as she joined him in the airlock, but she couldn't get outside fast enough.

The planet's jaundice sky, dark shale, and boulders greeted her. Her breath caught as she tracked the effects of the deteriorating weather. Coarse black sand swirled up from the bleak landscape, reminding her of smoke pluming from carbonised embers. In the planet's dust-obscured sunlight, the survey site's vast rock field glinted, silver-grey metallic crystals scattered amongst brittle, mineral rubble. The three-meter-round geode and crystal growth she'd scanned earlier lay nearby, semi-buried and growing more so as lightweight shale clicked and clattered against it, disturbed by erratic gusts.

One of the squalls hit her square on, knocking her back a step. As grit spat across her face shield, her intestines turned to water. Fear she couldn't rationalise killed her breath.

She swung about to locate Brunor and Pellinore; spotted them gathering up equipment amongst wind-scored boulders some distance away. With an urgency she didn't understand, she made to go to them—and had lightning lance across her vision.

A familiar image seared her retinas: her wizard hallucination, his robes and hair dancing on the gritty air, his branch-like staff in one hand, the other pointing to—

"Macarthur?" Lancer's bionic grip on her shoulder jolted her back to buffeting wind and clattering shale. "Your bio-readings just jumped into the red again. What's your status?"

Pulse a drum, Gwen blinked to clear her vision; found herself staring at the geode amidst the thickening whirl of dust. Particulate electrostatics and erratic EM lit up her helmet's HUD sensor reports. "Lancer, did you see a high-voltage static discharge just now?"

"No." His hold tightened. "Did you?"

Another dazzling bolt arced across her vision, appearing to fork up from the cross-like crystals atop the geode. This time, she didn't see an imaginary wizard; she saw herself in silver armour and white cloak: her paladin VR avatar.

"I don't know what I'm seeing." She heard the panic in her voice; wanted to reject what felt like madness, but the next phantom flash left an afterimage of devastation: shredded tech and bodies; the hab in tatters, its torn orange ribbons streaming and twisting in the centre of a storm.

High-EM alerts pinged, wrenching her back to reality. Dust blackened her sight. Windborne rocks—not just particulates—started to batter her calves, then her thighs. Shale whirled into the air to collide and ping in all directions.

She suddenly understood the fear searing her nervous system. "Oh, God." She grabbed Lancer; triggered team coms as she broke into a sprint. "Get to the rover! The magnetic ores... This isn't a normal dust storm!"

It was as if the ground fell away, except it wasn't the planet's base of dirt sinking; it was its blanket of shale rising. Jagged rock pummelled her helmet to boots as she ran. She barely heard Lancer's curse as coms turned to static. Her HUD blinded her with warning alerts, local electromagnetics and electrostatics an intensifying storm within flying rock and grit.

A blur sliced past her face shield—something moving faster and counter to the wind.

She flinched back, only to have another bullet-like projectile score a line right across the plex protecting her eyes. Her dream flashed before her: black blades, a brutal rain over a corpse-strewn battlefield.

Head light with panic, she tackled Lancer, tumbling them both down to dirt—just as airborne shale started to shoot about like mad, agitated wasps.

Alien rock, dynamically accelerated by unseen forces, darted through windblown grit, shooting upward, sideways, down—hail of black shards.

The shock of their impact—a wave of stabbing blades—stole her breath. Emergency alerts rang inside her helmet and blazed on her HUD: damage to her back-mounted air supply and her suit—punctures through fabric and flesh. The next instant, green lights washed across her vision, confirmation auto-deployed sealant had plugged most punctures, but—

Another barrage of blade-like rock struck. More emergency alerts and suit-pressure alarms shrieked. She heard Lancer's grunt of pain, but couldn't see him in the fury of rock and grit. Amongst coms static, sounds of panic broke through, unintelligible but their source horrifyingly clear: Brunor and Pellinore lost deeper in the storm. As another fusillade of shale sliced down, the brutal truth hit: no one was going to make it to the rover. All her insane imaginings—her teammates bloody and dead—were coming true. And that was insane. How could she have known?

A bolt of electric light burned across her vision. Again, she saw bright steel gleam in violent darkness—a knight's blade anchored in stone. Again, her wizard hallucination stood tall in the whirl. With one hand, he beckoned her.

Reality returned with shrieking pressure alarms and—

The glint of metal in the maelstrom. The geode and its odd crystal growth, just metres away.

Desperation drove her beyond reason. Ignoring her injuries and plunging oxygen stats, she pushed herself up. Blades of shale slammed into her, rapid-fire jolts that threatened to send her back down. Gasping in pain, head spinning, she lunged forward, deeper into the nightmare, toward a flickering vision of a knight's sword. Part of her mind screamed it was madness—suicide. Another, stronger voice sang it was fate—her path to glory.

"Macarthur!" Lancer's hoarse shout stuttered through static, telling her exactly how bad her med stats were as they dissolved into a blur on her HUD.

Deafened by whooping alerts and battering rock, she fell to the ground; tasted blood. The voice urging her forward sang more urgently. She struggled to crawl; reached out a bloody hand to— 

Her fingers wrapped around crystalised metal. In her mind's eye, she saw herself lifting a sword from alien rock, but what she felt—

An electric jolt up her arm. Then a click—the sensation of a mechanism locking into place.

Blue-white plasma burst up from the crystals. Arcing through the storm, lightning forked like an infinitely growing tree, rising higher and higher.

No illusion. 

Her whole body vibrated with the power being released. She groped for reason and found a revelation: Pellinore had been right about the team not being the first to visit the planet, but wrong about who'd created the geode rings.

The technology she'd just triggered was beyond anything human.

A surreal sense of awe gripped her. The fleet had explored alien worlds for over twenty generations, looking for resources and the miracle of complex life. No one had ever found evidence of anything beyond the most primitive of lifeforms. Until now.

Shale hammered down in a thundering rain, no longer propelled by wild forces. In seconds, she was buried. Emergency alerts filled the sudden, suffocating dark: terminal blood loss; critical oxygen. Her vision blurred then tunnelled, and she recognised the shrieking black for what it was: her grave.

Then she was somewhere else.

Vertigo and disorientation hit. She found herself standing, no longer face down in airless darkness. Rock still surrounded her, but it was neatly cut: mortared walls, those of what looked to be an Old Earth castle. Sunlight and a warm breeze drifted in through ornate, wooden-framed windows more fanciful than historically accurate. More surreal yet, her bloodied EVA suit was gone, replaced by medieval armour. Her hair, always cut short for practicality, fell in a golden braid over one shoulder.

She sucked in a breath, abruptly recognising her attire and the longsword at her hip—gear she'd designed; had spent thousands of in-game coin to craft: her paladin avatar.

She was in VR, in one of the fantasy roleplay forums. She had to be. In reality, she was bleeding out and sucking in the last of her air.

But it felt real: the armour, its weight; the breeze drifting through the windows, teasing the fine strands of hair that'd escaped her braid, bringing with it the scent of vegetation and brine.

She turned to take in more of the room, some kind of medieval-inspired dining hall—and found Lancer standing a few metres away in dark, flowing robes. His hair cascaded to his waist, silky black and trimmed with braids and beads, his scarred buzzcut gone. His expression seemed caught between shock and horror as he inspected his right arm, long and lean—now flesh and bone, not bionic tech. Likewise, his hosiery-clad legs looked to be human or—frack—make that elf. His ears...

Their gazes met, wide and disbelieving. Gwen could only stare at the changes to his features: his eyes luminous silver, not grey; his brow and cheeks sharper—just as she'd always pictured when imagining him as a dark mage in VR.

Brunor came running in from a side door, armour clanking, her once short hair a mass of red curls. "Anyone know what the frack is going on? Am I dead? Is this some whacked-out Valhalla shit? Or do I have a major head injury?"

"Neither." Pellinore stumbled in from what appeared to be a small balcony, his attire and, heaven help him, his heavy-set features those of a warrior orc. "I think we experienced some kind of long-range matter relocation—one that rebuilt us at the atomic level in transit. Our gear, our bodies... I had a frakking punctured femoral artery a minute ago." He spun about, red orc eyes wide. "I don't know where we are, but it's not the same planet that tried to kill us. We've got a breathable atmosphere, a mass of vegetation, and a large body of water outside."

Brunor's jaw dropped. "This is real? We can breathe this planet's air?"

Gwen shared her fellow scout's disbelief. Pellinore had just described the fleet's holy grail: a planet that might sustain human life.

"Something transported us to a safe location," Lancer surmised. "Given I've all my limbs, I'm assuming some kind of DNA-based reconstruction. But what the hell is with the metal suits and tights, and why does Pellinore have green skin and an underbite?"

"Check out your ears," Pellinore countered. "They're straight from my daughter's favourite fairytale. Same goes for this building and—" He cut off, his orc eyes rounding.

Gwen swung about, following his gaze. A group of strangers in fanciful costumes entered the dining hall, many with potion belts and leafy staffs. Her heart bound in her chest as she recognised them: the witch and wizard avatars of online friends who'd accompanied her on countless VR quests—magical allies.

Hysteria bubbled up her throat as she understood the message of reassurance being sent by those costumes but also the origin of the world around her, one constructed by unfathomable, advanced technology. "Oh, shit, guys ... I think the overbite and ears are my bad." Her mind spun as her gaze met that of a certain mythical wizard, fully corporeal now. "We all spend so much time in VR, and I... Shit. Looks like 'enhanced reality' is a hazard of first contact with altruistic, psychic lifeforms with matter-altering technology. There's been a slight misunderstanding about the kind of world we've been looking for."

Lancer wrenched his gaze from the incoming aliens to send her a disbelieving look. "Your blackout was first contact?" His wing-like elven brows shot up. "Your VR preferences are responsible for this world?"

Responsible? Despite the viable atmosphere, she struggled to breathe. In all her time roleplaying heroes, she'd never contemplated the weight of being the person chosen to determine the fate of others—a whole new world. "Shit, Lancer, it could've been worse. My other VR interests include gothic horror and werewolf speed dating."

A rare glint of humour blunted the shock in Lancer's gaze as a flight of alien fairies whirled into the room. "Then better you than me, Macarthur. My entertainment choices trend toward apocalyptic survival and radioactive, mutant zombies."

This short story was written to meet the following story prompt: Humans make first contact with aliens for the first time: fantasy wizards.

Thanks to William J. Jackson for the mad story idea. 😊

Graphics: Generated with the help of Microsoft Bing Image Generator.