Chapter 05: The Arrival

For a few seconds I couldn't quite get my eyes to focus, and I felt slightly nauseous. Once it cleared, I looked around with great interest, but felt slightly disappointed at the sight of a plain white room. The floor looked like concrete but felt slightly flexible, the way a well constructed wooden floor does. There was one door to the room and Roger ushered us towards it and out into a corridor.

He led us down the corridor, past a number of closed doors and then stopped in front of one that was indistinguishable, to me, from any of the others we had passed. I thought that all the unrelieved white could get depressingly old very fast.

After a pause of a couple of seconds, the door opened and Roger entered. I was directly behind him and followed him docilely into the room.

This room was identical to the one that we had arrived in except for ten ranks of institutional looking chairs all facing one blank wall. Roger instructed us all to sit, moved to the front of the room and waited patiently until John, Steven, Desrae and I had taken seats. With a glance at Roger, Ben, Gill and Rob turned and left the room.

"OK," Roger started, "You have arrived. Very briefly, what is going to happen now is that you are going to start you in-processing immediately. I just wanted to say a brief goodbye and wish you well. I hope to see at least some of you when you graduate from here." He then sketched a vague salute and exited the room.

I felt this was a little abrupt, but for some reason it didn't worry me too much. The four of us sat and waited passively for a while. I had no idea how much time passed, as I had no watch and there was nothing in the room to indicate the passage of time.

We were all startled by the sound of the door opening. I had almost drowsed off in my chair. I watched as two people entered the room. They were both extremely tall, at least a foot taller than me, and they moved with an unnatural seeming grace. Almost as if they were dancing or ice-skating instead of walking. They moved to the front of the room, stopped there and looked at us. The man checked something in his hand, which looked as if it could be an oversize PDA of some sort, then looked up at us again. The woman next to him kept her head down with her eyes on whatever it was that she held in her hand, and didn't look at us at all.

"Good Morning." It was the man. "Welcome to War World. I am known as Marek and this is Shiyla."

His voice was fluid and melodious. The closest I could come to describing the accent was that of someone who was a native Mandarin speaker, but not quite. As he spoke, I noticed that his ears had a slight peak to them.

"I am not of your race. We are known as the Sidhe. We are the facilitators and managers of War World."

That clicked for me. Elves.

"We know that there are a lot of legends and myths about us on the world you come from. There is probably the odd kernal of truth in what you have heard, but I suggest that you forget that and pay attention to the facts as they are revealed to you here, as this is the only reality that you have to concern yourselves with.