The Invitation

It had started, as many of these things do, innocuously enough, with Kaydence Roberts returning home from a Friday night outing.

The downtime between Kobber seasons was fast becoming something she appreciated. The months between frantic battles, mystery solving and punching bad guys had become her 'me time', as she'd put it. Do some shopping, catch up on her socials, do extra streams for additional income. And, on the odd night, she'd make a beeline for the town and do what she loved best - drinking and dancing. The perfect way to not worry about villains or reality twisting itself into a knot.

And this had been a productive one, too. Cheap drinks thanks to a special offer at her favourite dive bar. The local club had played all the old dance standards when she'd arrived. And an encounter with a very handsome young man which, without going into details, had ended with swapped numbers and a promise to look each other up again. 

So she was in a very good mood indeed as she reached her front door and, after fumbling with the keys for a moment, unlocked the door and threw it open. Flushed and grinning, she sauntered straight to her bedroom and immediately began to undress. Alcohol still buzzing away in her system made her careless, elated and unworried by any expectations of decorum. She was all too ready to immediately slide into bed, without even showering or putting on pyjamas, and drop right off to sleep, knowing that the weekend was coming up and she didn't have to do squat the next day.

Then she saw the envelope on her bedside table.

It caught her attention initially because the whiteness of it stood out so sharply against the black wood finish of said table. But when she stopped and actually looked at it, she realised why. Because it was a level of white that was... well, unnatural. Even for paper. It was so pristine and pale that it looked as though it had been dipped in bleach.

"The fuck?"

She picked it up, noting how light it was even for something made of paper, and turned it over. There was nothing on the front. No name, no address, just a completely blank white sheet. And that was even weirder than the fact that it had just... appeared.

She stood there in her bedroom, fighting against the mild drunkenness fogging her brain as she went down the list of options. Did she lock her door before going out? Stupid question, she was fumbling with the keys not more than a minute ago. Did she shut her bedroom window? A quick glance over at the pane confirmed that no, she had indeed closed it - the curtains did not rustle with the chilly March breeze. Had there been some other method by which somebody had snuck in? She wasn't sure, but then again, she was drunk...

Deciding not to dwell on that idea, she ripped the envelope open.

If she'd been confused by the presence of the blank envelope, she was utterly bewildered by what she found inside it. A piece of material that might have been plastic, but shimmered a bit too much for that to be true, no bigger than a birthday card. The entirety was plain white, almost the same shade as the unnatural whiteness of the envelope, with the exception of a golden border around the edges.

No, not plain. When she turned it over, she saw words, seemingly engraved into the material.

CONGRATULATIONS

Kaydence Roberts of Earth ZF-001,
You have been cordially invited to participate in the
16th PARALLEL GAMES

To confirm your acceptance to participate, speak aloud before
APRIL 30 2026
(according to your dimension's timescale)
and further details will follow.

If you have further questions, speak them aloud.

Her drunk mind, already not putting in much effort when it came to rational reasoning, threw up its metaphorical hands altogether.

"...am I being punk'd?" she asked aloud. "Because if I'm being punk'd-"

And then, suddenly, she wasn't there.

---

It took a moment for Kaydence's eyes to adjust and her stomach to stop doing terrified cartwheels. And then a few moments longer to grasp where she was.

Because it wasn't her bedroom.

 

Everything around her was shockingly pristine. The tiled floor, the ceiling, the few walls that weren't made of crystal-clear glass - it all shone with a glossiness that was either untouched or sterilised with the ruthlessness of a paranoiac germophobe. What wasn't white was bubblegum blue or grass green, and sometimes the latter was light refracting through the trees planted at almost mathematically-spaced locations. Bubbles rose slowly and lazily through the clear support columns, suggesting the presence of a thick liquid within them. Strange, ambient sounds that might have been music danced through the completely still air and brushed against her ears.

Still blinking furiously, she breathed in, and almost reeled at how crisp and clean the air tasted. And then she reeled again as she realised that she wasn't drunk anymore. All of her senses were pin-sharp and laser-focused, as if some cosmic hand had reached into her brain and yanked the fuzzy blanket of alcohol off of it. And with sobriety at the reins once more, she could feel her technopathy fizzing and bubbling, like flies throwing a pool party in a puddle of soda, as digital routines she'd never heard before worked quietly away.

Was this real? 

She reached out, slowly, and tapped the nearest of the columns. It went tink under her fingernail.

Yep. It was real. 

"Alright," she said, slowly. "Guess I'm not being punk'd." 

Not that it meant much. Because she was growing acutely aware of how absolutely out of place she felt the longer she stood here. And not in the way she usually stood out, either, as the walking CYMK rave in a horde of private school uniforms. It was closer to the "out of place" that comes creeping up on you in a dream, where familiar places turn strange and you're not sure which way to go or what you even came in for.

She glanced out through one of the capacious glass panes that served as a window-cum-wall. Beyond, rolling hills stretched away into a seemingly endless horizon, covered with a grass so green that it might have sprung out of a child's drawing. Up above, the sky was a near-perfect blue, dotted with only a few clouds that moved with a slow, deliberate grace. Amongst them, the sun shimmered in the sky, a brilliant white ball that, paradoxically, didn't hurt the eyes when Kaydence squinted at it.

And there were other things, in the distance. Glassy geodesic domes rose like lumps from the turf. Vertical turbines with their corkscrew blades span in easy circles. In the very, very far distance, a city glimmered like expensive jewellery on the shelf under the show-light, alternating between polished chrome and the same chunky pastel of the building she was in. 

It suddenly struck her that she used to have a desktop wallpaper on her laptop almost exactly like this. Almost note-for-note the same - same sky, same grass, same city in the distance. No fish swimming in the air, though, and she didn't know if she should be disappointed by that omission or not.

"Where is this?" she asked, half-aloud and half to herself.

"Hello, Kaydence Roberts!" 

Kaydence squealed and span as though she'd been jabbed with a poker.

 

"Oh, sorry!" said the woman standing in the middle of the room where nobody had been before. "Didn't mean to startle you!"

"N-no, that's fine," said Kaydence, blinking even faster than before. "I didn't hear you come in."

But truth be told, she wasn't sure how she hadn't heard her. She hadn't heard any footsteps, even though there was only one point of entry - the doorway on the far end of the room. And besides that, looking upon her, she could feel her technopathic sense spiking in the same way it had when she'd first seen Dawn. The woman wasn't human - as if the cyan glow to her eyes and the silver-white, half-plastic half-metallic sheen of her entire form weren't dead giveaways. Kaydence should definitely have heard something...

"I'm Lindy," the artificial woman trilled, holding out a hand - and baring the winning smile of a car salesperson. "Welcome to Earth FA-2008! And I understand that is the first time you've received an invite to the Parallel Games?"

"Yeah." Kaydence took the proffered hand and, as she shook it, noted the texture. Smooth, yet with an odd sort of graininess that she couldn't quite place. "And, as you've guessed, I've got a lot of questions."

"Oh, of course!" Lindy's voice somehow became even more chipper. "And I'll be more than happy to answer those questions for you!"

She indicated one of the nearby lounge sofas with one hand. Unsure of what to expect, Kaydence cautiously approached it, then did indeed sit down, noting the smooth texture of the material underneath her and realising that it wasn't any material she knew of. The stranger sat down nest to her with a white table between them, fixing her intently with her glowing eyes - eyes that seemed shockingly alive despite the metallic sheen of the face that bore them.

"Alright," Kaydence said, "let's start from the bottom. What are the Parallel Games?"

"Quite simple!" Lindy's smile never wavered off of her artificial face. "The Parallel Games are a contest held between the different parallel realities. The hosts for these games randomly select various promising candidates from among the worlds and send out invitations. Those who accept these invitations will face the chance to test their relative skills against each other in a series of contests. And those contests are broadcast across all over the worlds as entertainment."

"What... kind of contests?" was Kaydence's second question.

"That's the fun part!" was Lindy's reply. "It's all different! The terms are usually agreed on by the contestants, but there always has to be a reasonable chance for each person to win. And they can't be lethal - there's no killing or gore allowed, and any injury is immediately repaired. But they're free to decide what contest they're going to compete in - everything from battles to races to card games!"

"On motorcycles?"

"It's been known." 

"...and are you the host?" asked Kaydence. Not the most intelligent of questions, she knew, and she therefore wasn't surprised when the metal woman responded with a genial laugh.

"Oh, if only!" said Lindy, shaking her head. "No, I'm afraid my people are merely the ambassadors and organisers. We select a host dimension that will comfortably hold as many contestants as possible. We send out the invitations, arrange the brackets and schedules and keep tabs on all contestant activity. Between the Hosts, the contestants and the viewing public, there's us."

"So who are the hosts?" was the next - and most pressing - question from the Speroian's mouth.

"They have no names. We simply call Them 'The Hosts' for simplicity's sake. And in all honesty not even we've seen what They look like. And we can't. They don't ever show Their faces in public, and their home dimension doesn't allow anything living aside from themselves to reside in it."

The Speroian couldn't help but snort - she hadn't missed the capitalisation of 'Them'. "Yeah. Reminds me of some bastards I knew from back home. Mustn't walk on the same ground as the peasants, am I right?"

"Oh, no, that's quite common, actually!"

Kaydence blinked, checked in her rising irritation towards the 'superior classes'. "Huh?"

By way of explanation, Lindy made a gesture over the surface of the table, and a cyan light suddenly blossomed from the centre of the tabletop, forming a series of circles. The light blossomed outwards from the top of the table like some miniature rafflesia of disembodied colour, eventually coalescing and taking shape. And that shape was, in fact, a diagram - and one that Kaydence was familiar with. A series of spheres, all of them bobbing amidst a hazy cloud that might have been a liquid and might have been a gas. A diagram of the multiverse.

"Travel between dimensions isn't as easy as going from Point A to Point B," Lindy explained as she flicked and twirled one set of fingers. "You've been lucky enough so far that all the realities you've been visiting have been so similar. Of course, plenty of them are similar enough that there won't be any adverse side effects to travelling. But..."

A greenish dot appeared, superimposed on one of the spheres, then was dragged down over another, adjacent sphere. As Kaydence watched it, it began to pulsate, slowly turning from green to an almost inflamed-looking red. 

"A lot of the time," Lindy went on, "beings from one reality can't exist in another. The different physical laws are practically poison to them. So just as you can't come into Their Exolayer, They can't come into yours. If They try..."

The dot swelled, and then burst with a bright flash.

"...They'd pop like balloons."

Kaydence's brain, unbidden, tried to conjure images of what that would look like. She dismissed them with a shudder.

"But if that's the case," she asked quickly, "then how the hell there can be a tournament at all?"

Lindy's smile grew wider. "That's where we come in."

"And who's 'we', when they're at home?"

"My people. We call ourselves the Rafkah, or the Race Formerly Known as Humanity."

It took too long for Kaydence's brain to parse the words. And when she did, the part of her that always latched onto the most cringe-inducing interpretation did exactly as expected. It took all of her energy to not immediately shrink into herself and die out of exasperation.

"...is that a motherfucking Prince reference?" she asked in the most deadpan tone she could muster.

"Our first Prime Administrator was a big fan." Lindy grinned. "But Rafkah's just an umbrella term for my kind. See, in this dimension, humanity abandoned flesh bodies to become self-sustaining digital intelligences, and we put all of our processing power into solving all the big issues facing our planet. Climate change, hunger, inequality, energy - none of those are a problem anymore. We finally achieved that eco-tech utopia. Hence the classic Frutiger Aero look."

"So there aren't any humans here at all?" Kaydence asked. "No flesh-and-blood ones, I mean?"

"None that aren't visitors from other dimensions. Those who live here are now all electrical thought-forms, connected by planet-spanning networks. In fact, my name isn't really my name. It's an acronym for my specific branch of Rafkah - LND, or Living Neural Digitality. My body is nothing more than a mimetic polyalloy shell that I'm using to speak to you - if I wanted, I could change shape completely, or abandon it and jump into some other device or network."

"I dunno, I think this shape's pretty good." Kaydence permitted herself a smirk as she let her eyes flick across Lindy's body.

"Glad you noticed." The artificial woman chuckled. "But that's why They reached out to us. We Rafkah aren't as bothered by the differences in physical laws, because we're not really alive, in a sense. And though they can communicate across vast dimensional distances, we're the first  - and, so far, only race - to have been able to translate their language and organise the Games. Speaking of which..."

She dismissed the hologram with a wave of her hand, then leaned back slightly, the sunlight through the roof casting a rainbow sheen on her silvery skin. "Of course, you're under no obligation to accept the invitation. But should you choose to accept, you will be competing with many other candidates from across the parallel worlds. And the contestant who overcomes all challenges in the Parallel Games with receive a grand prize."

She fixed Kaydence with a look. "Defeat only brings as much dishonour as you allow it. And the Hosts don't abide by cheating. Anyone who breaks the rules of the games is immediately ejected and barred from ever competing again. And trust me, there's plenty of names on that list - it would stretch from one side of your reality to another. So try not to get added to that list, okay?"

But even as the metal woman spoke. Kaydence could recognise what was happening. She could feel the fizzing excitement, mixed with an almost defiant determination, building in her stomach. And she knew what this was immediately.

She was seeing this as a challenge.

Kaydence knew what her worst habit was: punching above her weight. And she knew why she did it. She'd spent years living in a corporate dictatorship designed to prevent upward momentum, ruled by sneering bluebloods who demanded she shut up and roleplay in their model trainset. And the resentment of being bossed around by people who claimed to be better, but obviously weren't, had festered into a kind of spiteful determination. So now, in her eyes, anything that presented itself against her, intentionally or otherwise, was a challenge to be beaten or an obstacle to overcome, just to prove she could do it.

Now, in all fairness, it had carried her pretty far. She'd punched a planet-killing threat right in the face. She'd tangled with blind flesh aberrations on a spaceship. She'd gunned her way through a mansion of weird cowboys. There was a lot that spite for one's betters could take you through. And she had gotten better at it, tempering down the worst of her impulses to try and fight or tackle something just to prove it could be fought or tackled.

But...

She smacked her lips and looked around. Sunlight continued to stream into the building and reflect off of the glossy everything in the building. The liquid in the support tubes bubbled slowly, the trees rustled in the minute breeze of the climate control fans.

"...do I have a deadline?" she asked, after a moment's hesitation.

"Of course. The deadline for accepting invitations is, according to your dimension's timescale, April the 30th. If you do not respond to the invitation by then, we'll assume that you have declined to participate."

This was... too big. Not big as in 'Fuck you, I wanna punch Godzilla in the face, I don't care'. Big as in... too much. Too many moving parts. Too many chances for things to go wrong, or to not. And never mind the fact that she was literally. just now, on a Friday night, learning about an interdimensional contest. This wasn't just something she could immediately just leap into, trying to beat it simply because she thought she could and screw anyone who doubted her.

And why, if this thing was so huge and prestigious, had this never even graced the ears of this universe until now?

She looked over at Lindy, and she realised that the smile was starting to unnerve her. It had wavered now and again, but it had never left. And for some reason, she was starting to not like that.

"...I'm gonna need some time to think about this," she said. "This is a hell of a lot that you've just dumped on me, especially since I've come home drunk, and... I need to talk with some people about it. Mostly my boss. Just so that I'm prepared for what I'm getting into."

Lindy nodded. "Of course. Remember, you have until April 30th on your timescale. When you're ready, be sure to hold your invitation card and speak aloud your acceptance to participate. Or your declination, if you've decided you're not interested. There are plenty of other contestants across the multiverse - you don't need to feel guilty over missing out."

She stood, her silver-white form shimmering in the sunlight above. Her cyan eyes glittered with whatever energy was powering her metallic shell.

"Hope to see you at the games!"

She snapped her fingers. And Kaydence gave a yelp as- 

---

-she was back in her room again.

She blinked several times as her body adjusted. Her lungs protested as the air they took in was now stale and full of various contaminants. Her eyes watered at no longer being exposed to natural light. Her ears relaxed slightly at feeling the familiar buzz of the modern technology she knew.

And then her brain remembered how much she'd drunk that night.

"It can wait until the morning," she slurred, and collapsed across her bed.

TO BE CONTINUED...