Venerable Chapter 1: Chapter 1: The White Room

Read chapter 1 of Venerable by Jade_White on NovelPedia.

Dustin lay still on his incredibly lumpy mattress. He stared at the familiar brown water stain on his ceiling. 'Three hours of absolute nothingness,' he thought to himself. The ceiling fan clicked rhythmically above his head. It wobbled precariously with every rotation. Fixing the fan would require finding a screwdriver and standing on a kitchen chair. Those were two physical actions that Dustin firmly refused to take on a Tuesday afternoon. His phone began vibrating furiously on the cluttered nightstand next to his bed. The harsh buzzing noise rattled against an empty pizza box and an unwashed coffee mug. Dustin simply closed his eyes. "Just give up," Dustin muttered to the empty room. "I am not answering that." It was probably his landlord demanding the rent that was already two weeks late. Or perhaps it was his mother calling to ask if he had finally secured a job interview. Both of those conversations required mental energy that he simply did not possess today. He believed strongly in a personal philosophy that he called efficient energy management. People loved to call him a jobless slacker. His few remaining friends called him a lazy bum who was wasting his youth. Dustin thought they were all completely delusional. 'Working forty hours a week just to pay for the fuel to drive to that exact same job is a terrible design flaw in human existence,' he reasoned internally. He preferred to minimize his expenses and maximize his horizontal resting time. His entire life was optimized for avoiding unnecessary movement. He ordered his groceries online. He paid his meager bills using his phone. He spent his waking hours dominating highly competitive online survival games. In the digital world he was a master tactician who could conquer entire empires. He commanded armies with the click of a mouse. He outsmarted thousands of rival players without ever breaking a sweat. He enjoyed those games specifically because his digital avatars did all the running and fighting while he sat comfortably in his deeply indented computer chair. The phone finally stopped buzzing. Silence returned to his messy apartment. "Finally," Dustin sighed loudly. He shifted his weight on the mattress and prepared to take a late afternoon nap. Suddenly everything changed. The hairs on his arms stood up. A low humming sound began to vibrate deep within the floorboards beneath his bed. Dustin opened his eyes and frowned at the ceiling. The wobbling fan was spinning rapidly but it was no longer making a clicking noise. The wooden blades were glowing with a faint white light. Before he could even sit up to investigate the glowing light exploded. It was a dense wave of pure white energy that completely swallowed the walls of his apartment. The dirty clothes piled in the corner vanished. The empty pizza boxes dissolved into nothingness. Dustin felt a terrifying sensation of absolute weightlessness. He was falling through a void of blinding brightness. He squeezed his eyes shut and threw his arms over his face to block out the harsh glare. The falling sensation stopped as abruptly as it had begun. His bare feet slammed into a hard surface. The sudden impact sent a sharp jolt of pain straight up his calves. He stumbled forward and barely managed to keep his balance. "You have got to be kidding me," Dustin groaned as he rubbed his aching legs. The familiar silence of his apartment was entirely gone. It had been replaced by a deafening wall of chaotic noise. Dustin slowly lowered his arms and opened his eyes. He blinked several times to clear the bright purple spots from his vision. His apartment was completely gone. He was standing in the middle of a massive and endless expanse of pure white. There were no walls in any direction. There was no sky and no sun above him. The floor beneath his feet felt like polished marble but it stretched out smoothly into an infinite horizon. He was definitely not alone. Thousands of people surrounded him in every direction. The sheer scal