Destiny Calls: 

At the outer edge, the raft began to pivot, and the boys were whirling around, it felt like they were trapped in a mind-numbing spiral, and whatever force was causing the sensation most certainly wasn't gravity although the effects were like those created by centrifugal force and one by one they were soon to pass out.

A huge team of scientists wielding electronic notepads were weaving around a series of transparent domes and clucking away to each other like a coup full of hens, discussing the specimens from Realm 42, there was one in each of the six domes. At first sight, you would think the specimens were being treated as if they were radioactive, anyone who entered a dome wore a hazmat suit and was rigorously decontaminated on their exit. Their precautions had resulted from an infection brought to their realm by the old man as a lad, the impact of which was still being felt some sixty years later, although an insignificant infection in his home realm, here in Realm 01 no one carried the antibodies that are required to develop immunity.

Alphonso awoke feeling no sense of time passing to find himself sitting crossed-legged in the aisle of a cathedral staring up at its ceiling. Moving his head from side to side he looked around anxiously for signs of his friends or the raft but disturbingly there were none, and just like the cathedral at home it was in pristine condition. Eventually, Alphonso's gaze returned to the ceiling and after further examination realised it was identical to the one he had stared at as a young choir boy, the same cathedral where the clerics had taught him and the other oblates, that if they were good boys and learned to do as they were told and prayed hard several times a day it would prove to be their salvation and would emit a beam of light which would guide them to heaven.

In this place, he'd normally have been holding and fumbling a crude wooden rosary, but on this occasion, he now held a computer mouse between his thumb and forefinger and to his surprise found he could drag the cursor across the ceiling's elaborate artwork as if it were the screen on a laptop. But instead of icons, these were scenes painted by ancient artists centuries before the development of computer-aided technology had entered the human imagination. Nevertheless, filled with fascination he began to play, and it wasn't long before he discovered that when the cursor passed over a scene it became animated, and the characters gestured, beckoning him to join them and pass through what could only be described as a portal into what could be heaven. As he scrolled from scene to scene the animation paused leaving the images frozen, but if he clicked on the mouse's left button with a twitch of his hovering index finger the scene would remain animated as he moved on to the next.

However, Alphonso didn't realise he was little more than a guinea pig in a cage, he was strapped in a chair at the centre of a highly sophisticated research lab. As the raft and the boys re-emerged from the mist, they splashed into another ocean adjacent to a naval ship. The ship was well prepared, and it didn't take them long to gather up the flotsam and jetsam, the remains of the old man and the clerics were left to feed the fish, which were splashing around on the surface like a shoal of piranha. Although unconscious the boys were drugged, to ensure they stayed that way and transported to a Deep-Sea naval base which was situated in the middle of what was known as the Occipital Ocean.

Before the arrival of a young boy some sixty years ago, all they ever found was the odd body part which occasionally escaped the attention of the ocean's voracious marine life, there were no records of anyone who had ever survived the journey. At this point, the origin of the bodies or the odd bits of flotsam and jetsam was a mystery and became the subject of much philosophical and scientific speculation over the centuries. As a result, exploration teams were sent into the Cycloidal Vapours, but none of the team members ever returned. Initially, the exploration teams were scientific but became progressively military as concern grew that the teams were being captured or killed, but whatever the team's nature military or scientific the outcome was the same.

Infrequently hardware was recovered but never anything technologically advanced until a deep-sea exploration crew at the naval base came across some echo-electrics, a crude set of headphones that were not of their world's design. Although not highly technical they were still functional and compatible with their own so under power could be used, their survival led the military scientists to believe that they could use mechanoids to navigate the mist. There was great public concern over mechanoid development, so the military launched a covert design, development and deployment program which was strictly confined to the Occipital Ocean's Deep-Sea Base.