Dmitri opened the door, and Richard walked inside, thanking him. The mess hall was a sturdy brick building with ten large wooden tables inside. The serving area was at the front, and the kitchen was in the back through a swinging door. Already a group of people were bustling about with bowls and platters, preparing for dinner. Richard noticed three people sitting at a table with food already.

  “Ah, yes. I’ll introduce you to the other newbies, but let’s get you dinner first,” Dmitri said.

  Richard nodded as Dmitri set a plate in his hands. Someone scooped from a large pot, then slopped on a portion of dark sludge that was the identical color of the fertilizer. He stared at it, moving forward as someone gave him a side of corn, and someone else placed mashed potatoes and a white gravy.

  “Uh, thank you.” Richard tried to smile, but it faded away. If Dmitri wasn’t leading him through it, Richard probably would have stared at the plate of food for a while. Dmitri led him over to the other newbies.

  “Hello, everyone. This is our final member, Richard.” Dmitri pointed at him, and Richard got a distinct feeling of being a child meeting new friends. “The four of you will get to know each other a lot better in the next few days, so why don’t you sit down and introduce yourselves. After dinner, we’ll start our welcome ceremony by showing you your planet before you receive the system.”

  Dmitri smiled at them as Richard eased into his seat next to another man. The others muttered their okays to Dmitri before he left. Richard picked up his fork, glancing around at everyone as he dug into some mashed potatoes and gravy.

  The four of them were silent. Richard knew the others were studying him just as much as he was studying them. He didn’t know if they’d been conversing before. All of them no doubt felt like they’d been thrust into something they knew very little about.

  The silence stretched as Richard studied the three people at the table. The man he was sitting next to looked human enough, even if he had exaggerated blonde sideburns to go with his tussled blonde hair. His yellow eyes definitely gave him a moment or two of pause before he forced himself to look at the others. There were two girls across from him. One had shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. She was pushing around the fertilizer-colored slop on her plate. The girl next to her had strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. She was also short. So short that he wondered if she was another dwarf or short race. But after a moment’s pause, he realized she was simply a short human girl.

  “So, um… my name is Richard. Hello.” Someone might as well break the silence. If the memory of Dmitri and Lucy’s faces when he revealed his last name wasn’t so fresh in his memory, he would have let that slip again, but he kept it to himself.

  The brown-haired girl next to him glanced up at him. “Amber.”

  “Laylah,” said the short girl.

  “Fang,” the man next to him said.

  Everyone turned to glance at the man with the yellow eyes. That movement alone made Richard wonder if he had really broken the silence for everyone. No one else knew this guy’s name was Fang. Richard himself was glancing at his mouth, wondering if he missed the fact that there were fangs in his teeth or something.

  “Fang?” Laylah asked.

  Fang hesitated long enough that Richard wondered if he was going to say anything at all. He opened his mouth, and Richard glimpsed perfectly normal teeth.

  “I don’t know.” Fang stared at his plate. “I get the feeling that in my old life I could change into other animals. I feel the power in me right now. But for whatever reason, I can’t do it. Dmitri thinks that’ll change once I get my special gift from Order once I’ve leveled up. It’s happened for other people from the Shrouded Domain. People from there already know the magical gift Order will give them.”

  “So that’s where you’re from?” Richard asked.

  Dmitri said everyone who wasn’t a human meant they’re from the Shrouded Domain, but he still felt the need to get the conversation going.

  “Yeah.” Fang swirled his mashed potatoes. “You?”

  “Earth.”

  “I’m from Callro,” Laylah said.

  “Shudesh,” Amber said.

  “Shudesh is the same one Dmitri came from, right?” Richard again said this simply to keep the conversation going. He had met so many people he needed to make connections, or else he would forget.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Amber tucked some hair behind her ear. “Same as him. I sometimes wonder if we’d met in our past life, but maybe not. Who knows how many people are on these worlds?”

  Everyone else gave courteous smiles. Richard didn’t want the silence to trickle back in. He was afraid that if it would, he would have to be alone with his thoughts, and there was something terrifying about being alone with his thoughts among a group of people.

  “Does… anyone remember who they were before?” Richard tried not to tap the table nervously as everyone shook their heads.

  “I guess we’re just supposed to accept that we were transported to a different world because we died on our old one?” Laylah asked.

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  “If this is a very elaborate trick, I give everyone here credit for pulling it off.” Fang’s eyes darted toward the door when it opened.

  “It seems so mystical, but Dmitri also said that people from Earth are a bit on the skeptical side when it comes to magic,” Richard said.

  “I think we all have our own kind of skepticism,” Lylah said, her eyes flickering toward Fang. Her eyes widened as though realizing what she had done and dropped her gaze.

  Fang smiled. “I promise I don’t bite.”

  Perhaps if the situation were different, Richard would have laughed. But after everything he experienced, the best he could do was a short upturn of the lips. Fang, noticing he got everyone to smile, made his own mood brighten considerably.

  The dreaded silence returned. Richard picked up his fork, focusing on eating, but the silence made his chest constrict. There was something more to this, something his instincts screamed about. Don’t let the silence come back. Don’t sit alone with your thoughts. Talk to someone. Be with someone. Being alone is dangerous.

  He died alone. His repressed memories lifted enough for him to know that he had experienced his worst fear.

  “Okay, I have to ask,” Amber said. Richard didn’t know what she was going to say, but he was grateful someone else had kept the conversation going. Amber pointed at the slop with her fork. “We have a few different worlds represented here at the table. Is this familiar to anyone?”

  Richard swallowed his mashed potatoes, then glanced at his own slop. He had been noticeably eating everything else around it.

  Fang shook his head. “Not in my world.”

  Richard shook his head as well.

  Leylah began stirring it around. “If it were in my world and if I experienced it, I probably blocked it out for a reason.”

  Amber leaned down, sniffing it. She crinkled her nose.

  “How does it smell?” Richard asked. He was glad someone else did that, because he wasn’t interested in sacrificing his nose for that.

  “I don’t know. Fang, do you smell anything?” Amber asked.

  “I may change into an animal, but that doesn’t mean I have animal smelling.” He said this while still leaning over and sniffing it. “I smell nothing.”

  Amber and Leylah exchanged glances, then Leylah picked up her fork. “You know what? If the people here claim to have mythical health potions that heal you of bad ailments, I’ll try it.”

  Before anyone could say anything, Leylah scooped up the slop and shoved it in her mouth. She chewed, which surprised Richard because he didn’t think that slop needed to be chewed. She swallowed, her eyebrows raising. “It’s actually… not bad.”

  Richard shrugged, then grabbed his spoon. Amber glanced at him as though horrified. Richard shrugged. “It sounds like a glowing review.”

  “‘Not bad’ is a glowing review?” Amber asked.

  “In an apocalyptic world, it is.” Richard scooped up a bite, then placed it in his mouth. It had an almost rubbery quality to it, and he understood why Leylah was chewing so much. The rubber gave way to a thick, soupy texture. It had a strange flavor, almost like steak, but his mind told him this couldn’t be steak because it was soup. He swallowed it anyway, gave himself a moment to agree that it wasn’t bad, and scooped another bite. It was then that he noticed Amber was staring at him wide-eyed.

  “What?” Richard wondered if there was something on his face.

  “You don’t think that maybe… maybe this is…” Amber started to say.

  Richard kept chewing, waiting for her to say something, but the more he ate, the more horrified she seemed to be. Richard eventually swallowed, then smiled. Next to him, Fang took a small bite, then started shoveling into his mouth.

  “Hazing. Is that a word you understand?” Amber asked.

  “Uh… yeah. The translator is probably working overtime with the four of us, since we’re not in the system yet, but I understand the word.”

  Amber stared at him, her brows furrowing. “Translator?”

  Richard’s heart pounded in his ears before remembering he hadn’t accidentally shared something wrong. He used his spoon to gesture in a circle.

  “Translator. System. We’re all from different worlds, but we’re all speaking a language we can understand. Dmitri must not have mentioned it during your tour.”

  Amber shook her head. “No, he didn’t.”

  Her attention was drawn toward Fang, who had picked up his plate to better shovel the slop into his mouth.

  Come to think of it, Dmitri hadn’t really told him. It was more of an explanation of why he couldn’t read the note and to spare him from Lucy’s wrath. He realized, sitting here, how different these three individuals were compared with the other members of base two. There was a harder edge to those who had experienced the apocalypse. But Richard and the three of them hadn’t experienced it. True, Richard got attacked by a leopard, but that was probably a small taste of what they would experience.

  “I doubt it’s hazing,” Richard said to Amber’s question, getting another spoonful of slop. “I saw the pot where they scooped it. This is for everyone. They wouldn’t go through the trouble of setting that huge bucket full of ‘not bad’ slop for us newbies.”

  Amber studied him, then gave the slop on her plate another careful review. Richard watched the anticipation on her face. His smile remained on his face, though he had a worrying thought. In a week, what would their conversations be like? When they’ve chosen their classes in two weeks, would he still sit with these people? In a month, when they’ve experienced more of the apocalypse, would they still be friends? What about a year? Would they change? Become bitter and broken? Hopeful? Weary?

  Richard blinked, trying to shove those thoughts away. He didn’t want to worry about the future. That wouldn’t get him anywhere. He had to focus on the now, and the now meant he had three people here who he could see himself becoming friends with. He wanted friends. It surprised Richard how strong that need was.

  Leylah brushed Amber’s arm with her own as she ate another bite. “Come on, Amber. I’m not dead yet.”

  Amber shook her head, pursing her lips as the door opened and more people trickled in. “Should we joke about something like that during an apocalypse?”

  Leylah shrugged. “Are you suggesting once we stop the apocalypse, then we can joke about it?”

  “Do you really think there’s a way to stop it?” Richard asked. Since someone else brought up the idea, he felt like he could pounce on it. But the looks he got from the other three made him think that maybe he should have waited a few seconds before he did.

  “I can’t say I’m the most intelligent person, but logic would dictate that if something started, there should be a way to stop it. Right?” Leylah asked.

  “It sounds like this Order person wants it stopped. Whatever higher being she is, she’s certainly doing everything she can to help,” Amber said.

  “Yeah. And it’s taking her thirty years.” Fang pushed his empty plate aside. “Don’t know what we could do if these hardened people can’t get it to stop yet.”

  There was now quite a crowd in the mess hall. Richard was prepared to squeeze in tight, but a sobering thought hit him. He was pretty sure most of the people from base two were here in the mess hall now, and he was certain the mess hall could sit all of them with a few tables left empty. There used to be a lot more people here. Fresh from his tour of the camp, he realized that the entire place could have fit double the number of people he saw.

  “Is it just me, or… are we losing the apocalypse?” Richard asked.