After all of them stepped through the portal they experienced a flash of white light, which was not unusual. It was unusual however, that it was taking much longer than usual. None of them thought anything of this until the teleportation was over and the light began to die down.
When the light cleared Yin and the others noticed that they were not standing in the usually well decorated mud room of Yin's house, but in a rather dilapidated looking log cabin. There was nothing in the cabin other than some windows, and a door. They looked around completely confused.
Yin was the first to notice that all of their pets must have been unsummoned in the teleportation error. Before she could speak up about this they all notice that slightly above each of their heads is a message.
The message read:
-Error: player has left expected world through unexpected means.-
- please proceed through this world until problem can be fixed, any and all respawning may result in unintended changes, proceed with caution -
Error code: 335275
Then, another appeared.
Error: player has unintentionally started the challenges. Worlds may change due to this, please proceed with caution, and do not do anything drastic until problem is overlooked and fixed.
Both of these messages showed up one after the other. They were in white letters with a slightly glowing frame. The inside of the frame was gray, and slightly transparent.
After a moment's pause, Ren asked "Are we all seeing the same message?"
"Yeah error code: 335275?" zoe confirmed
"Yeah… this seems pretty bad." Ren said.
"I honestly thought that the challenges were fake. Like a legend you know?"
"Yeah I mean I knew that something like must exist, since theres a hub, and a bunch of different worlds, but I never thought that you could leave through any way other than the official way! Ive never left -world name-, I don't know what to do!" Yin exclaimed, in the tone she got whenever she was on the verge of tears.
"And it says that respawning may result in unintended changes… did any of you know that we could respawn in the first place?" she managed to say before her eyes welled up with water.
"What does respawn mean?" Zoe piped up, a bit confused
"Like when you die you can get revived and then you just like continue on." Ren explained, on behalf of Yin who was taking a moment to calm down. "Usually it's not much of an issue in our world, but who knows about this one."
"Ohh, no I never knew that… respawning… huh." Zoe said, finally understanding what that part of the message meant.
"Yeah this is completely new to me." muttered Ren, a little quieter now, clearly thinking about how they could get out of this situation.
There was a moment of silence as everyone was deep in thought
"Uhh guys?" Esther finally spoke up.
"Yeah?" Zoe questioned, glancing at Esther.
"I cant open my inventory" she continued.
After she said this they all frantically tried to open their own inventories with no success. Each of them becoming increasingly panicked.
"Oh my god, what are we going to do??" Yin sobs, tears leaking down her cheeks.
"Does this mean we can't summon our pets anymore??" Esther questions.
"did the error cause us to lose access to our inventories? That's a part of the system it should be consistent across all worlds.." Zoe follows up, providing yet another question for the already long list.
"I'm honestly not sure, it could just be a part of the challenge…" said Esther absentmindedly, seeming to be thinking more out loud than answering the question.
"Everyone calm down, I'm sure it will be fine." Ren said, always the voice of reason.
"Yeah, we're just in some random cabin on some random world and not in Yin's house in our world where we're supposed to be, and we can't even access any food or water or anything! This is a problem " Zoe spoke, her voice tinged with a hint of panic.
"Well I don't know about the rest of you but I'm not super hungry or thirsty right now, so I think we'll cross that bridge when we get there." Yin said, with a pause, taking a breath to calm down, she then continued, "For now let's look around and see if there's a way out of here."
"You know this might be slightly unrelated but was the door glitching out for you guys too?" Esther asked, before noticing a sudden moment of stunned silence.
"What do you mean?" ren inquired, feeling that this was important information.
Esther furrowed her brows, trying to come up with how to describe it, "Like you know… after yin walked in it went Into the ground for a moment, and then when you two went in it got really fuzzy around the edges and there was like red and green and blue."
"Oh my god" Zoe said under her breath. Her eyes widening in realization.
"I don't think that's slightly related, I think that's very related." Ren said with a slight tone of annoyance.
"Yeah, like seriously!" Yin chimed in.
"Why didn't you mention this when we were walking through the door??" Zoe questioned, slightly panicked, now pacing around the room.
"Well I thought that's just how doors be sometimes , you know?" Esther shrugged, like this wasn't a very huge deal.
"No I don't know- do you not know how doors work??" Ren said exasperatedly, barely being able to conceal the fact that she was clearly very annoyed.
It was at this moment that they all heard a ding, coming from just above them, looking up all of them saw a message similar to the first.
It read: - Welcome! Please select a map.-
Zoe had stopped pacing now, and after a minute she spoke, "W-what does that mean? Please select a map?"
"But there's nothing inside this cabin" Yin spoke up, stating the obvious.
"I think we have to leave the cabin," responded Ren, again stating the obvious.
And so each of them one after another cautiously approached the cabin door.
First Yin, then Ren, then Zoe and finally esther. The door was wooden like the rest of the cabin and swung open easily. It had been left unlocked.
Outside of the cabin they were greeted with a rather small area. They were surrounded by tall mountains on all sides, keeping them in an enclosed space, next to the cabin there was a very small river stemming from a waterfall on the mountainside.
The river was dotted with rocks that looked a little bit like stepping stones. Further down, the river opened up into a small pond, sparse with flowers and other plants, outlined in small round stones. In the center there were a few lily pads.
Other than the river the rest of the area was rather flat and monotone. There were a few trees scattered about, but not enough to call it a forest.
The thing that caught everyone's attention however, was not the surroundings but rather, the giant board in the center.
The board was made out of wood, and was about 2 times the height of an average person. And rather wide. On its surface there was a screen divided into 3 parts. Each part had a picture, a title, and a big green button that said 'VOTE'.
The first section's title was 'The Forest'. The picture was that of an average forest, there was a slight fog covering the ground, and the surroundings were very dark. No light was coming through the canopy and the only thing that illuminated the surrounding woods was a small campfire farther back in the picture, there were a couple logs around it for sitting, and they could faintly see the outlines of tents around the fire.
The second section's title was 'The Farmhouse'. The picture was of a farm, again, at night. In the center there was a large barn, a silo off to the right and massive stacks of hay on the left. In the distance there was a farmhouse, but it looked rather small. On the other side in the distance there seemed to be another small forest.
Yin looked closer and noticed that there seemed to be a pair of glowing eyes and a slightly darker outline of a creature in the trees. She immediately crossed the farmhouse off the list.
The final section was titled 'The Mall'. The picture was different from the others, instead of being in an outside area, it was in a rather dim building. The picture depicted two large spiral staircases on either side of a large room. In the center there was a set of double doors that seemed to lead deeper into the mall.
"Ok so which one do we choose?"