27. Blind Teleporting

The roof was flat and empty. They stepped out of the elevator and Murphy wedged the door open with the chest plating of a dismantled Makina. The hot world was gloomy and dark. Windowless gray rectangular buildings spread out into an endless skyline dotted by energy receiver towers. The thin atmosphere outside was scented with a sulfury industrial stench somewhere between rotten eggs and iron smelting. 

Tykö stood up on his own seeming to recover some by being outside. He shook the slime off his mechanical arm. 

"I still can't remember anything," he said.

Melock desperately looked at his digital spellbook but his expression told the others it was hopeless. Five Makina gunships sounded in the distance. Murphy stood between the wizards holding her hammer at the ready. Grimble stood to their side and Sebastian appeared beside him. The ships surrounded the rooftop and flooded it with bright light. 

Binary warnings thundered down on them. 

"Monsieur Grimble, get out of your suit," said de Martín in a slow calm manner. 

The front panel opened and Melock allowed him to jump into his hand and crawl into his pack. They stepped away from the Makina suit. Murphy pulled off her armor and dropped it. The ones and zeros language continued to berate them.

"They say go back into the elevator or be disintegrated," said Sabastian as he raised his arms in a sign of surrender.

"We must teleport," shouted Tykö over the gunship roar. 

"There is no way to know where we'll end up!?" Melock shouted back. 

"Anywhere is better than here," said Sabastian. 

Melock closed his eyes. 

Antiaintiqal Fawriin was the original owner of Melock's portable tower and he was the last person to ever see the great master of teleportation alive. She dressed in colorful flowing silk that swirled around her body with a mind of its own and wrapped her in ways most women her age wouldn't dare. Only her weather-worn feet, hands, and face peaked out in earthen tones from under her rainbow of fabric. She smiled with chiseled ivory teeth and radiant sapphire eyes. Fawriin had but two rules to impart on her protégés: know where you're going and know where you're coming from. 

"To jump into the unknown," she taught, "was to toy with the very fabric of the universe itself. Teleportation can send us to any place in the known and unknown universe, and for that matter, universes beyond our own. To jump to a place you don't know is to run the risk of becoming lost on the grandest of scales. To say nothing of appearing inside solid rock, under a sea of ice, floating in the void of deep space, or in the heart of a star. Many a wizard," she warned, "has gone missing in the learning of teleportation techniques. Instant death awaits the foolhardy and only the most disciplined may master the skill. One must always know precisely where they are headed and the exact point they are leaving from. That is if they ever hope to return." 

Fawriin hopped about from world to world from galaxy to galaxy in search of unlocking the secret to accessing the multiverse. Melock liked to think she was still out there, somewhere. 

He opened his eyes. 

"I see no safe path forward."

"Teleport us, Melock! Unless you want your brain scrambled as bad as mine!" Tykö threatened.

"We need to do something!" yelled Murphy. 

"Teleport! Now! Do it! Or I will!" screamed Tykö.

Melock reached out and touched Tykö and Sister Murphy. Sabastian put a hand on his shoulder and looked up into the gun turrets as they began to glow with electricity. 

"Now!!!!" 

In a flash, they were gone, much against the schemes of the robotic species. They were no longer on the roof, no longer on FeRRum, no longer in Makina space, nor even in the same galaxy. They had left three-dimensional space altogether.

Scans of FeRRum 26 showed no life signs. The troublesome organic prisoner had escaped again.

As luck would have it, they all arrived together and when they did, Melock felt everyone hold onto him a little tighter. The four humans (three of Abraxas and one a very distant Earth descendant) and an Ursa Minor gnome riding along in a satchel found themselves floating in an unstable myriad of fluid colors and shapes. Melock and Tykö, in particular, found the removal of the Makina mental disruptor to be such a relief that for the moment they didn't really care where they were. 

Space and time, as they attempted to comprehend it, were somehow moving around them. The colorful kaleidoscopic reality they watched in silent wonderment gradually slowed down or more accurately put, they sped up to the relative speed, movement, and shape of the eleven-dimensional space they were now trapped inside. 

"W—h—e—r—e—???????????????????????????????????????????????????????"

Murphy's attempt at a question floated away from her lips and down a gravity-defying waterslide of psychedelic twists and turns until it returned some moments later to her and the ears of the others in the form of a distorted, "W—h—o—m?" 

Melock telepathically spoke with Tykö:

"We aren't alone in here."

"Agreed. I think this is some kind of Calabi–Yau space. Like a pocket dimension, an alternative universe, or a closed spatial anomaly. Or, I hate to think it, a temporal prison?"

"My spellbook is worthless here as well." Melock shook the mobile as if it would help. 

"I still can't come up with any destination coordinates."

"Me either. Could this be a Makina deterrent?"

"Doubtful," thought Tykö.

They continued to float in the fluxing colors of the bizarrely shaped void. 

The distorted voice again sounded in their ears saying, "We? Not alone? Doubtful." 

Melock's mental faculties being far more freed in this space, though still oddly not remembering even his most memorized teleportation sites, came up with an excellent idea. He summoned his Trunk of Necessity and opened it. Inside was the teleportation manual of Antiaintiqal Fawriin, a loose sheet of paper, ink, and a quill. He closed the trunk and everyone held onto it as they drifted through the curved spaces of their new reality.

Melock opened the book to the last page and there on the inside of the back cover was a teleportation location symbol. Melock began drawing the symbol exactly as it appeared, one line at a time. It didn't take long until he had a perfect duplicate. He tossed the book back in the trunk and dispelled it. 

Melock held out the sheet of paper and waved his friends to each touch the symbol. He touched it last with a knowing grin and they were gone. 

The edges of the page singed but didn't ignite in the strange plasma-like fluidic atmosphere. The black ink turned a murky green and the paper began to dissolve. A long-fingered bony hand gripped the image with pointed nails and the symbol lifted off the page before the paper disintegrated. The image of the location symbol floated in the void momentarily before it too faded into swirling color.

A distorted cry of exultation sounded through all eleven planes of the unfathomable space before the enclosed void returned to its silent ever fluxing state. 

~

On FeRRum 26, the Makina scans were processed by the central intelligence network. An image of an Ursa Minor gnome was added to their list of suspected spies, as well as two unknown humans. A suspicious craft with an Uz robot pilot was confirmed destroyed in connection with a prison break that resulted in the abduction of a classified enemy combatant. It was noted in their most secured database that their teleportation research would suffer a major setback as a result. 

The Ibi-Ero memory was quite vast. In archived memory banks not specifically accessed in well over two thousand years, they found an entry that matched an elderly human involved in the planetary break-in. The entry was updated and copied to an active file.

Melock the Wise, Master of Divination and Conjuration:
- Human variant, a species apart from the Earth descendants though similar in structure. 
- Possesses advanced scientific knowledge. 
- Able to predict causality in situations far advance of the moment.
- Teleportation ability.
- Can alter matter and control elements.
- Hardy species, able to survive harsh environments and the vacuum of space.
- Curious about mechanical and artificial lifeforms.
- Extremely intelligent.
- Potential to be manipulated into an alliance.

Update: Dangerous, involved in freeing Abraxain TechnoWizard. Suspected Abraxas species. Apprehend immediately upon sighting, return alive for interrogation and study. 

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