Unfortunately, I did pass out, so I am back to work
Have fun, I guess
There is still an open door for suggestions
[suggestions box]
.......................
The sun went down faster than Patrick expected.
One minute the sky over the hills was a pleasant orange, the kind of sunset you would put on a postcard. The next, it had turned the color of a bruise, and somewhere beyond the cave mouth the grass began to groan.
Patrick stopped walking.
"Okay. Don't panic."
"You're the only one who sounds like he's panicking," Fury said without looking at him.
"I'm not panicking. I'm giving myself an instruction. It's a coping mechanism." He pointed down the slope, where a green, shuffling figure had pulled itself out of the dark. Then another. "Those are zombies."
"I can see that."
"Then you can also see why we need to be inside."
Fury looked toward the crooked wooden box they had built a few hundred yards away. It had never looked so beautiful, and it had never looked so far.
Patrick glanced down at his boots. The Hermes Boots hummed faintly with the promise of speed, and he knew exactly how it would go: ten seconds of sprinting, and he would be safe behind a wall. Fury, in wooden armor and ordinary shoes, would have to fight his way there alone.
'You could do it. Nobody would blame you.'
He sighed and drew his sword instead.
"Stay close. If I get ahead of you, shout."
Fury gave him a sideways look that lasted a second longer than it needed to, and said nothing.
They moved down the hill together. The first zombie came at them with its arms out and its jaw hanging open, and Fury cut it down in two strokes. The second took three. By the fifth, Patrick had stopped counting, mostly because the number kept going up.
"There are more of them!" he shouted.
"Thank you, I hadn't noticed!"
"Use the flare gun! We need to see how many!"
Fury pulled the Flare Gun out of his book with an irritated flick of his wrist and fired it into the field. The flare arced over the grass, landed, and burned a violent red, lighting up a hillside crawling with at least twenty zombies.
"That was helpful," Fury said flatly.
"It was informative."
"It was a mistake."
"Informative mistakes are the best kind."
Something wet and fluttering went past Patrick's ear. He turned, and a bloodshot eyeball the size of a basketball drifted out of the red glow, a ragged strip of nerve trailing behind it like a tail. It bobbed toward him with the calm, purposeful stare of something that had never once been told no.
"Oh, come on."
The Demon Eye slammed into his chest, bounced off, and came back for more. He stabbed it, and it burst. Two more took its place. Behind him a zombie finally got a hand on his arm and dragged its nails through the wooden sleeve and the skin beneath it. Patrick yelled, kicked it away, and Fury ran it through before it could try again.
His hands were shaking when he flipped open his book. The health page showed one number.
41 / 100.
'Forty-one. Great. Fantastic. Very normal number.'
"Run!" Fury barked.
The boots were practically begging him. Patrick ignored them, matched Fury's pace stride for stride, and the two of them tore down the slope with a growing crowd of groaning shapes at their backs. They hit the shelter at a dead sprint. Fury shoved Patrick through the opening, spun around, and planted himself in the gap with his sword raised.
"Door!" he shouted. "Where's the door?"
Patrick looked at the wall. Then at the hole in it. Then at Fury.
"We don't have a door."
"What?"
"We built a wall with a hole in it!"
"You said you knew how to build a room!"
"I know how to build a room! I forgot rooms need doors!"
Fury made a noise that Patrick had not heard a human being make before. Then he swung at the first zombie to reach the opening, and the second, and the third, while Patrick dropped to his knees and pulled the workbench he had used to craft their armor out of his book. A door needed a workbench. He already had one, which was the only thing that had gone right all night.
He slapped down the workbench, crafted the door with trembling fingers, and slammed it into the gap just as a zombie's face pressed into the opening. The door clicked into place with the same strange thump as every other block they had set.
A fist hit it from the other side. Then another. The door held.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. They stood side by side in the dark, breathing hard, and listened to the sound of twenty bodies leaning against the wood.
Fury was the first to look at Patrick's arm.
"What's your number?"
"Forty-one."
"What happens at zero?"
"You get thrown out and locked out until tomorrow."
"And what happens to me if you get thrown out?"
Patrick opened his mouth, then closed it.
"I have no idea."
Fury absorbed that in silence.
"Then don't die," he said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
They lit torches and sat with their backs to opposite walls. The groaning outside never stopped, and neither did the soft, wet tap, tap, tap of Demon Eyes bumping against the planks, looking for a gap. A few found one. Through the cracks in the walls, Patrick could see dozens of pupils pressed against the wood, all of them staring in.
He let out a long breath.
"You know, this has to be a nightmare for you."
Fury looked up slowly.
"Surrounded by all those Fling eyes," Patrick said, "and you only have the one to look back with."
The silence that followed lasted long enough for him to regret everything.
"If we survive the night," Fury said, "I will explain to you exactly what I do to people who joke about the eye."
"Is that a threat or an invitation?"
"Go to sleep, Patrick."
"Aren't you going to sleep?"
"One of us has to keep watch. And one of us dont know how to fight."
Patrick had a comeback ready, and he would have used it, but he caught himself in the middle of a yawn that never came. He rolled his shoulder, flexed his injured arm, and frowned.
"That's weird. I'm not tired."
"You were at forty-one an hour ago."
"My health was at forty-one. I'm not tired. I'm not hungry, either, and the last thing I put in my body was far too much coffee, which did not end well." He flipped open his book and turned it so Fury could see the pages. "Look. There's no hunger meter and no sleep meter. Nothing here says we need either one."
Fury checked his own book. His jaw tightened.
"I've been awake for almost two days," he said slowly. "I should be on my knees."
"Maybe this place only asks for the minimum. A little sleep, a little food, and you're fine."
"That's convenient."
"For a dimension that wants to eat us, it's weirdly considerate."
Fury didn't look convinced, but he closed the book without arguing.
So they spent the night working instead. Patrick pulled everything they had gathered out of his book and laid it across the floor in piles: copper, iron ore, stone, gel, wood, and a small, horrifying heap of lenses. He had never once cleaned his desk in college, and now he sorted each pile with the focus of an accountant during tax season. Outside, the groaning rolled on. Inside, a Demon Eye tapped patiently at the wall, as if it were waiting to be let in.
Next came the furnace. It took stone, torches and a handful of wood, and Patrick built it in the corner while Fury watched, clearly waiting for someone to tell him it was a joke. When the last block clicked into place, the furnace lit itself, and the shelter glowed orange, and for the first time it felt like a place somebody might actually live. They fed the iron ore into it, and the book turned each stack into bars with a soft chime. Five of those bars became an anvil, which Patrick set beside the furnace with a satisfied nod.
Fury had been silent through all of it. Now he cleared his throat.
"You keep telling me what you're making. You haven't shown me how."
"You want me to teach you?"
"I'd like to be useful the next time you collapse after cutting down one tree."
"It was two trees."
"Show me."
Patrick grinned, counted out eight iron bars, and dropped them into Fury's hands.
"Okay. Put your terrabook on the anvil."
Fury stared at him. "My what?"
"Terraria book. Terrabook for short."
"That's not shorter. That's the same word with a syllable missing."
"Put it on the anvil."
Fury set the book on the anvil, opened it to the crafting page, and read the entry Patrick pointed to. The moment he touched it, the bars lifted out of his hands, dissolved into streams of pale light, and poured into the pages. A heartbeat later, an iron sword rose out of the book and settled on the anvil, gleaming.
Fury picked it up. It was balanced almost perfectly. It had never been heated, hammered or quenched, and as far as he could tell it had never even touched the metal it was lying on.
"That's not how metalworking works," he said. "There was no forging. No heat. No tempering. It's completely unscientific." He turned the blade in the torchlight. "Where's the logic in this?"
"Well," Patrick said, "it's Re-Logic."
Fury looked up. "What?"
"Never mind"
Fury studied him for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he looked at the sword, swapped it for the copper shortsword at his belt, and decided this was one question he could live without answering.
Dawn arrived the way the night had: all at once.
The groaning stopped one voice at a time, like someone working down a row of radios, and when Patrick looked up from the last pile of lenses, the light pouring through the cracks in the walls was golden. He checked his book before he did anything else.
78 / 100.
"Resting heals you faster," he said, mostly to himself. "Okay. That's good."
"I could have told you that," Fury said from the doorway, still turning the new iron sword over in his hands. "I read it somewhere between the furnace and the anvil."
"Did you sleep?"
"Twenty minutes."
"That's it?"
"Apparently, that's all this place wants." Fury looked down at the sword. "I don't like how well it works."
They stepped outside into a world that looked as if nothing had happened. The grass was churned and scattered with bloodshot lenses, and that was the only sign of the night before. Patrick scooped a few of them up and showed them to Fury.
"Demon Eye drops. They're useful for crafting."
"Of course they are."
Before they went anywhere, Fury held up a hand.
"Teach me."
"Teach you what?"
"Everything else. I'm not going to stand in a room again while a college student reads a manual in the dark."
So Patrick taught him.
Fury had already learned the crafting stations at the anvil, so Patrick skipped ahead. He walked Fury through the defense number printed beside each piece of armor, the accessory slots, and the way the book automatically sorted everything they picked up. He showed him the buffs that appeared when they rested near a torch, a small bonus to regeneration that Fury read three times before he muttered, "That's not magic. That's bookkeeping."
"It's magic bookkeeping."
Fury didn't answer, but he kept reading. Patrick watched him work through the recipes, quick and methodical, filing each rule away the way he did everything. By the end of an hour, the man who had never played a video game in his life understood the crafting tree better than Patrick had on his first night.
"It's a tech tree," Fury said at last.
"It's a tech tree with extra stabbing."
"It's organized." He sounded vaguely offended by how much he liked it.
Patrick wanted a better view of the area, so they climbed the nearest hill. At the top, he stopped to catch his breath and Fury kept walking a few steps before he stopped too.
The world spread out below them: green hills, scattered trees, a river glittering in the distance, and the cave they had explored, small and dark against the rock. The sky was so blue it almost hurt.
And above all of it, far to the east, something was hanging in the clouds.
It was a chunk of land, rough underneath and green on top, with a few thin trees growing on it. A small lake sat on its surface, and a thread of water spilled over the edge and dissolved into mist before it could reach the ground.
"That," Fury said slowly, "is a floating island."
"Yep."
"It's floating."
"That's what they're called."
"I know what they're called; I'm asking why it's there."
"Because it's Terraria."
Fury stared at it for a long time, and Patrick noticed that the hand on his sword had relaxed.
"I've seen alien ships," Fury said. "I've seen labs that don't officially exist. I've stood in rooms with weapons that could erase a city, and I've never once looked at something and not wanted to take it apart." He shook his head. "It's tried to kill me four times since last night. I should hate this place."
"You do hate it."
"I do." He didn't look away from the island. "I just can't stop looking at that."
Patrick smiled before he could stop himself.
"Sentimental, Director?"
"Don't."
"Can we get up there?"
"Eventually. We need a way to fly or climb, and I don't have one yet."
"Then find one."
Patrick looked at the island too. For a moment, neither of them said anything, and the wind moved quietly through the grass.
'It's still a pocket dimension,' he thought. 'It's still going to try to kill us. But it really is beautiful.'
By the time the sun's position suggested the sixty hours were nearly up, they had a routine.
They had survived two nights in a shelter that now had four reinforced walls and a proper door. They had collected copper, iron, gel, lenses, and enough wood to build a second house. Patrick had finally hit a target with his bow, though only once and mostly by accident. Fury had kept a running count of how many times he had been attacked by something that looked like a toy, and had stopped saying the number out loud.
Now the sun was sinking toward the hills again, and they sat outside the shelter beside a small fire with the last of their gel torches burning in the grass. Patrick had squinted at the sun twice, and both times he had landed on the same guess: about thirty minutes left.
"Let's go over it again," he said.
Fury sighed. "We've been over it three times."
"One more."
"A company. Legitimate identification. Cover, documentation, and a quiet way to move the resources you bring out of here." He recited it like a man reading a grocery list. "S.H.I.E.L.D. is a buyer. We don't own it, and we don't get unrestricted access."
"And?"
"And you work with me."
"And you keep your end."
"I keep my end," Fury said, looking him in the eye. "Which part are you worried about?"
Patrick poked at the fire.
"Nobody in S.H.I.E.L.D. finds out about this place."
"I've already agreed to keep it restricted."
"Restricted isn't enough. Nobody. Not your deputy, not your oversight, not your best agent."
Fury's eye narrowed.
"That's a big ask."
"I know."
"I run that organization. If I can't trust the people inside it, there's no point to any of this."
"I believe you run a tight ship," Patrick said carefully. "But an organization that size always has someone on it who's reporting to someone else. Always. I don't know who they are, and I don't think you do either."
"You say that like you know something."
"I know that every large organization has a mole."
The fire popped. Fury was quiet for a while, and Patrick could almost hear the gears turning behind that single, unreadable eye.
'Please don't ask how I know,' he thought. 'Please don't ask how I know there's a snake in your house.'
Fury didn't ask.
"The ability stays between us," he said at last. "For now."
"For now is fine."
"What else?"
"The minder."
"You want a say in who I send."
"I want someone you would trust with your life," Patrick said. "Not someone who trusts your file on me, and not someone who reports to anyone but you. If you're going to keep an eye on me"—he caught himself and winced—"a figurative eye, then it better be someone who'll protect me, not someone who'll sell me out."
Fury gave him a long, flat look.
"Nice recovery."
"Thank you. And if possible, I'd really prefer—"
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say it."
"You were absolutely going to say it."
Patrick grinned. Then the grin faded, and he looked at the fire for a moment.
"Someone you trust with your life. That list is short, isn't it?"
"It's very short."
"Good. Short means fewer mistakes."
Fury grunted, which Patrick had learned to interpret as agreement.
The wind changed. The air around them seemed to tighten, and the fire flickered sideways. Patrick felt it before he saw it: that same sickening twist behind his ribs, the one he had felt when he first arrived.
"That's our time," he said.
Fury rose to his feet, and the world around him began to blur at the edges.
"If you ever try something like this again, I swear I'm going to..." He stopped, and frowned at the ground. "We waited sixty hours. Does that mean we couldn't leave until now?"
Patrick looked up at him with the most innocent expression he could manage.
"Oh, you could have gone back any time you wanted."
Fury went completely still.
"What?"
"Anyone can leave voluntarily. You just have to want to. We didn't have to wait the full sixty hours."
"Then why—"
"Because if we'd left right after you got here, you would have missed the adventure." Patrick smiled. "You're welcome."
Fury's mouth opened. A string of words came out of it that Patrick suspected were the most creative of his career, and he heard exactly three of them before the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. dissolved into light and vanished mid-curse.
Patrick looked at the empty patch of grass where Fury had been standing.
"You're welcome," he said again, to nobody.
Nick Fury woke up already cursing.
He finished the sentence he had started in Terraria, and then he started a second one. He sat bolt upright in his bed, one hand clenched around a sword that wasn't there, and stared at the ceiling of his quarters for several seconds before his heart rate dropped.
The clock on the nightstand said 1:14 a.m.
He checked the date on his phone. It was the same day.
He had been gone for one hour and six minutes.
Fury stared at the screen, doing the arithmetic he already knew by heart. Two and a half days of his life, compressed into an hour on the clock. His arm still ached where a zombie had grabbed it. His legs still felt like he had been running for miles.
A message was waiting on the screen from the duty officer at the black site: Subject in Cell 4 asleep. Vitals stable. Has not moved since 11:58.
'So the body stays,' Fury thought. 'And the kid really is just sleeping.'
He thought about the floating island for a moment. Then he made himself stop.
He dialed a number he had memorized years ago and held the phone to his ear. It rang four times before someone answered, and the voice that came through was thick with sleep and nowhere near happy.
"Fury. Can't this wait until tomorrow?"
"I've got a mission for you."
"Even if you want me to assassinate the president, it can wait until tomorrow."
"It's not that kind of mission. This time, you'll be spying on someone while protecting him."
There was a long pause.
"I'd prefer the assassination to babysitting."
"Be at my office at six," Fury said. "You'll get the details then. And this one is classified."
The silence on the line stretched for several seconds. Then the voice said, "Six," in a tone that suggested a very long list of complaints would follow later, and the call ended.
Fury lowered the phone and stared at the ceiling.
He did not go back to sleep. Every time he closed his eye, he saw a chunk of green land floating in a blue sky, with a thin thread of water falling from its edge into the clouds.