Joe: A Sorcerer's Odyssey Book 3 the New World

By Barry Lee Jones

86,320 words. While exploring another realm, Joe discovers a planet, which dwarfs the Earth. They name it Other World. Over time, Joe explores Other World and many of its wonders. He finds trees as big as mountains and animals bigger than entire cities. After a while, vampires and demons make it to this world. Joe and the Society find themselves defending Other World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312867079

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Joe: A Sorcerer's Odyssey Book 3 the New World

Written By Barry Lee Jones

Copyright 2014 by Barry Lee Jones

ISBN: 978-1-312-86707-9

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs 2.0 Generic License.  To view a copy of this license, visit

Http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Chapter 58–The New World

Now the Society could get back to its various tasks.

Fortunately, a lot of the tasks of the Society no longer involved protecting people.  We now had a division that was involved solely in research.  I volunteered my services for that division.

My first assignment was to gather information on a realm that coexisted with our own. We wanted to find out about its people, or whatever the inhabitants were. The Society wanted to learn about its cultures and technology. The Leader wanted to learn the lay of the land on whatever planet we ended up on. He wanted to find out if it was possible to set up an outpost of some kind there.

Using a simple spell I knew, I opened up a portal to that other realm.  Once I established that I had solid ground to step on, I went through. On the other side, I saw purple hills covered with this strange plant-like substance. At first, I thought the hills were mountains way off in the distance because of their color.  Then I realized that they were close, just on the other side of the portal.  The plant-like substance made red and blue patches on the purple hills.  On the hills off in the distance, the red and blue blended in, giving them a surreal look.  I reached out to those plant-things with my feelings and could not detect the bitterness of poisons. That was a relief to me. Not only would they be edible, but I wouldn’t have to worry about not touching them.

I went up the hill, wading through the vegetation.  It had a very pleasant, almost narcotic smell.  The plants were very beautiful, but in an alien sort of way.  After a ways, I could vaguely see a dark shape through some vegetation.  Moving some of the vegetation aside, I found a hole. I poked my head inside and used a spell to light up the interior.

I squeezed through the entryway on my stomach. Beyond that, the cave opened up into a huge room. The ceiling rose up to a height of about thirty feet and was riddled with stalactites. The cavern widened to about ten yards and stretched out to a length of about one hundred yards. A stream of water ran right down the middle of it.

Down at the other end of the cave a passage went off to the right with the stream.  It must have cut this passage through the cave, I thought.  I waded in it a ways, because it took up the whole width of the floor.  At first, the water was just up to my ankles.  But before I got out of it, it rose up to my mid-chest.  Luckily, a shelf appeared on the side, just above the stream before it got much deeper. I hoisted myself up, onto that to walk for a ways.

I followed that passage down until it came to an end. It just stopped right there, up against the cave wall. At least it seemed to come to an end. I noticed that the water was not building up, like it would in a dam. There must be a passage for the water beneath the surface, I thought.

I put a protective bubble around myself and dived in. I constructed the bubble to be close-fitting, because I didn’t know how much room I would have to work with. I need not have worried. The hole that the water went through must have had a six-foot diameter.  The hole provided tremendous suction, pulling me straight through the opening, then downward.

I have nothing better to do, so I might as well follow the water downward, I thought. At first, it went down at a gradual rate, bumping me over and through various rapids. Then the angle steepened and my speed accelerated. It eventually became a waterfall and went down for what seemed to be hundreds of feet. I was sure glad I put up my protective bubble which, in addition to recirculating my air, also absorbed most of the punishment when I finally hit the bottom.

I finally ended up bobbing up and down in a subterranean lake at the base of a long waterfall.  Eventually, my bobbing stabilized and I got a better look at my surroundings. Using my will, I picked up my bubble and floated it through the air, over to solid ground. Before I undid my protective bubble, I stretched out with my senses and tested the air. I found that it was pretty good.  I figured, There must be some way that the air in this cave is being recirculated.  I stretched out farther with my feelings to find out what that way was. I found tiny holes in the rock walls of the cave.

The holes in these rocks were formed in such a way that when the wind blew over the mountain, some of the air went into these holes. That caused an increase in air pressure, which made air flow out through the holes, causing the cave to breath. That was how the air in the cave was replenished and recirculated.

Other tunnels led to other rooms. I found some of those rooms to be quite large and some not so large. I thought, This place might make a good base of operations until something better is constructed.

2.  So I opened up a portal back to my own world, or more specifically, back to the base.

I went to talk to the Leader. I told him, The world I found is habitable.  The atmosphere is breathable.

How’s the gravity, asked the Leader.

I replied, It’s a little more than Earth’s, but not too bad.

Then the Leader said, Now we need to set up an outpost there, so that we have some place to work from.

I found a cave we can use for our first outpost on that planet. As we explore the planet, we can set up more outposts until we have a whole network, I said.

How soon can you start setting it up? the Leader asked.

We can start moving equipment immediately, I said.

The Leader said, It sounds good. We can get a grant, and then hire biologists in all fields of biology.  Then we can catalogue and study the different life forms we find. In fact, we’ll get scientists of every kind to send over there.

The Leader added as an afterthought, Show some of our other sorcerers how to open the portal. Then if you want, you can begin your own explorations.

So while they set up base at the cave, I explored the area around the cave. I hiked in different directions with a little notebook. In the notebook, I made sketches of the terrain that I traveled on and around. The evenings found me back at the cave, making maps from my notes. I put faint lines on the maps that circled in on themselves to indicate every twenty-five feet in elevation.  That helped to give a good three-dimensional representation of the land.  The area around the cave was really hilly and at the base of some mountains, so my maps were full of those lines, forming smaller and smaller circles as they went up in elevation. I found some creeks of water. I tried following a few of these to their source.  After a ways, they just ended, bubbling up out of the ground from springs.

One day, I went off hiking away from the mountains.  As I started off, I looked down on the hills that got smaller and smaller, then taller again in the direction that I traveled, so that I could see for a good distance, but my line of vision was blocked after a ways.  Between a couple of the taller hills off in the distance, I saw some slim rectangular formations rising up.  At first, I thought they looked like rock formations. At that distance, I couldn’t tell for sure what they were, so I continued on in that direction to find out.

When I got a better look at them, I found that those fingers of rock that I had seen sticking up in the distance were just the very tips of some extremely high buildings. They were just a few of the structures in a sprawling metropolis.  That city makes the largest Earth cities look like tiny villages, I thought. It sprawled out, into the horizon for as far as I could see in all directions, except for the one I just came from.

I supposed it might be possible and perhaps even probable, that I have chosen a cave in a city park, albeit a huge park in a humongous city, I thought. There isn’t much else to do, so I’ll go down and take a better look at the city.

I didn’t know what to expect of the inhabitants. There was a little bit of everything in that city. I saw normal humans, like myself. I saw lizard people with different colors of scaly skin palling around and doing business with hairy ape people. I saw beings that weren’t people at all. I couldn’t even tell if some of them were intelligent, until I saw them buying stuff. Some of them crawled on all fours.  Some flew through the air with wings, or glided from building to building with air-fins.

Someone had set up a section of the city for its aquatic inhabitants.  The whole aquatic section sat under a water-filled dome. Tunnels that an air-breather could use went all through the dome. They had the whole thing set up so that business could be conducted between the two types of entities.  They had places all over it where products came out of and went into.  I can’t describe here all the different kinds of intelligent species that I saw there.

When I made my appearance in the city, no one gave me a second look.  People and entities walked by me, but no one noticed me. This is something I didn’t expect, I thought. I expected just about everything from welcome, to persecution, to just being kicked out of town.  The one thing I did not expect was not to be noticed at all. I wanted to ask someone a question, partly to be noticed, and partly because I didn’t know what was going on.

Someone walked up to me and said in really good English, You look confused. Is there anything I can do to help you?

I held out my hand.  Hi.  My name is Joe.

She took my hand. I’m Beverly Wilson. We shook hands.

I told her, "I am confused.  Where do all these beings come from?"

She said, They come from different Earths throughout the cosmos. It just so happens that this world is located at a cosmic crossroads.  It is accessible to and from thousands of Earths.

She also went on to tell me, So far most of the beings coming to this world seem to be compatible with the environment.   But there were a few cases where that wasn’t so.  In most of those cases, they were able to get the beings back to their own Earths before this one killed them. In one case, they were late and the beings died.

I told her, I usually check things out on the other side by stretching out with my senses before I step through.  Then changing the subject, I asked her, How big is the city?

She said, By your Earth’s measurements, it is about ten thousand square miles, including the park in the center.

That brings up another question, I thought.  But first, I told her, "My organization and I are setting up a base in a cave in some mountains, over in that direction.  Is that your city park?"

She said, It is.

I asked, Should I move that base?

She said, "You really ought to. There are several buildings in the city that would suit your needs.  I can show you some of them."

I figured there should be. A city of this size should have some spare buildings for sale or rent, I thought. I asked, What is used for currency here and how does one obtain it?

She said, You can use your own money, or if you want, you can exchange it for the local currency at the bank.

I said, That seems easy enough.  Then I headed back to the cave.

Of course I could have easily teleported myself to the cave, but I thought I would enjoy the walk. I did not count on some of the wild beasts that I would encounter on the way. One came at me from out of seeming nowhere. I did not sense being stalked in any way. But out of pure reflex, I waved my hands, putting up a protective bubble at the last possible instant.  That thing, whatever it was, bounced off the bubble harmlessly.

I had never seen anything like that thing before. It had a round head with two pointed ears. Sharp horns came out of both sides of its forehead. Its nose consisted of two nostrils flush with the face. It had a mouth like a human’s, but full of razor-sharp, pointed teeth.  It was primarily black with fur all over.  It had no neck and a round body with eight legs coming out of it. The feet each had three talons, two forward and one back.  Each of the talons had a claw of varying lengths on the end.  It had two leathery, bat-like wings coming out of its back, making it capable of flight.  When I saw the wings, I wondered, Did it attack me from the ground like I thought, or the air instead.

I thought, It’s odd for a city park to have creatures that dangerous in it.  This is something I will have to investigate at a later date.  Due to that recent development, I decided to teleport myself the rest of the way back to the cave.

3.  When the main room of the cave appeared around me, I could see that the setting up of Outpost #1 was well under way.

Lights were set up and the place was well lit wherever people were working.  There were people going in and out of caverns, carrying various items, people assembling equipment, and going into and coming out of the portal.  I didn’t mince words.  I told everyone, I have some bad news for everyone.  This cave is in the middle of a city park.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and the room got really silent.  Josh said, "There aren’t any buildings anywhere near the cave."

Keith asked, "Where is this so-called city?"

I said, It is all around us. As far as I know, the closest point of the city is several miles away. But if we walk far enough in any direction, we’ll reach some point in the city. As far as I know, we’re allowed to spend as much time as we want in the park.  We’re just not allowed to take up residence here. There are a lot of vacant buildings in town.  We can purchase or rent one of those and use it as a base. I will get into obtaining one of them right away. Meanwhile, we have to start moving out, or at least make it look like we’re moving out.

4.  So I went back to my own realm and base and told the Leader what was going on.

The Leader said, "This whole thing is fascinating.  I want to find out more about this Other World. He scrawled a note on a pad of paper, ripped the sheet out of the pad, and handed it to me. Here, give this to the treasurer. It’s to give you three hundred thousand dollars to buy a building for the outpost."

I told the Leader, I don’t know if three hundred thousand dollars is going to cover it.

The Leader said, Go and find out, then get back to me.

5.  So I opened up a dimensional portal that went to a point right in front of the real estate agent I had spoken with earlier.

I could see her looking right at the portal. Behind her I could see a square of the white bricks of the building she was standing in front of.

I told her, I am ready to look at some buildings.

She said, I have an hour or two to spare before my next appointment, if you would like to look at some nearby buildings.  So she showed me a few of the buildings that were up for sale. They ranged from five to twenty stories high. Some took up half a block and some took up the whole block.  Some stood by themselves and some stood against other buildings.  Some were a lot like some of the older brownstone buildings on Earth, except that this brownstone had a purplish tinge to it.  The insides were pretty much indistinguishable from each other. They were just masses of rooms and hallways stacked on top of each other, all connected with stairs and sometimes elevators.

I really liked the third one she showed me. It was the largest of the whole bunch.  Purplish-brownstones that had been carved into rough bricks covered the outside of it.  It stood ten stories high and took up a whole block.  It has plenty of rooms to be our first outpost on this world and in this realm, I thought.

I asked her, How much do you want for it?

She said, Sixty thousand of your American dollars.  But I’ll accept any kind of currency.

I asked, Is there any particular reason this building is going so cheaply?

She said, I’m not supposed to volunteer that particular bit of information. But since you asked, I suppose it would be all right if I told you.  The building is occupied by an entity.

By entity, do you mean it’s haunted? I asked.

You can put it that way if it pleases you, she said. As for me, since I came to this world, it has really opened my eyes and mind to different things. So I prefer to think of it as being occupied by an entity that isn’t paying for it. So far, there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.

I said, I’ll need to clear it with my boss, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to buy it.

The Leader approved and I bought the building. What’s one more entity among friends, he said.  So we got two worm holes going.  One ran directly from the cave to the building.  The other ran from the base to the building.  We were able to get Outpost #1 set up really quickly.  In a few days we had a workable base and were ready to start exploring the planet.

6.  Over the days and weeks that followed, we discovered that this planet was much larger than Earth.

It was close to the size of the planet, Jupiter.  But for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, the gravity was close to Earth’s.  That planet had the geographical and climate diversity of Earth. It had huge polar ice caps that would cover the surface of Earth several time over.  It had forests and deserts that were equally large.  Its oceans covered about half of its surface area.

I flew all over the planet in my astral form. I saw the highest peaks, which were so high; they stuck up out of the atmosphere. I saw oceans with trenches that were hundreds of miles deep.  There were animals in those oceans which would dwarf our own blue whale.  Heck, there were insects on that planet that would dwarf the blue whale.

There were also villages, cities, and mega-cities scattered all over the surface of the planet.  These were occupied by various types of beings. Some were all of one type of being and some were mixed. As far as government, these cities were all states of their own and answerable only to themselves. Since the average distance between neighboring cities was in the tens of thousands of miles and in many cases over one hundred thousand miles, wars were almost unheard of.

Then there were the farms. These were usually just on the outskirts of cities. Usually, these farms and ranches were in the millions of acres.  They were usually associated with businesses that operated in the cities.  They were one of the major food sources. And of course there were always wild animals wandering around the country side.  Many of these were edible and used for food. There was food in the oceans for all the coastal towns and cities.

Naturally, we had problems with the entity occupying our building.  Apparently, that thing really didn’t mind us moving in, because it didn’t interfere with us moving in.  I think that it might have been lonely to have someone around. But after we got moved in, little things started happening. Sometimes someone would do something that would irritate it or pronounce a word in such a way that it would irritate it. Then a pipe would burst and that person would get all wet, or a section of the ceiling plaster would fall in on that person.  It was never anything really dangerous or life-threatening, just a nuisance. It seemed that that thing was easy to set off. Consequently, everyone had to watch their behavior and speech while in the building.

As soon as we got used to that, it was business as usual. For the time being, our main concern was to explore that world.  The best way to do that, that I could see, was to take journeys into the various wildernesses of that new world.  So I teleported a crew of ten people and myself to a wilderness that was cut off from the rest of the world.

7.  The area that was cut off was about the size of the North American continent.

It was cut off because it was surrounded by mountains that were so huge they stuck up, out of the atmosphere. Even the passes, if you could call them that, were too high to cross. So that left a lost world, cut off from the rest of the planet.

The place we had teleported to was next to a fair-sized lake.  A forest of green and purple pine trees mixed with red and blue leafy trees surrounded the lake. The other side of the lake was so far away that it disappeared in the distance, where faint mountains rose up. The plants around that area had more of a green tinge to them. They were still mostly purplish, but more spots of green showed up here and there on them.  Behind us, the Eastern Barrier Mountains, as we came to call them, rose up and blocked our view of everything else.  It’s like being next to a wall, even though they’re about one hundred miles away, I thought.

We set up camp and stayed there for the night.

8.  The next morning, I got up and helped get the fire started and get breakfast.

During breakfast, I said, The first thing I want to do is head toward the Eastern Barrier Mountains, climb them a ways, and have a look around.

Why don’t we just teleport there, said Johnny.

That wouldn’t really be exploring, I said. "Jumping around from point to point can cause a person to miss a lot of scenery."

So we started walking. We had packs loaded down with food and all the things we needed for overnight camping. When we got ourselves all loaded up, we looked like ants carrying our own weight in supplies. (But the packs weren’t nearly as heavy as they looked, because all of our stuff was light weight).

Wouldn’t it be easier to store our stuff back at the base and just teleport it to us when we need it? asked Curtis.

I don’t want to rely too heavily on having a direct portal leading back to base, I said. I feel that ruins the experience of exploring new terrain.  But other than that, there really are no practical reasons.

9.  We got in about fifteen miles of hiking before we stopped for the night.

We stopped in a clearing near a small stream. It was a roughly circular area where no trees or brush grew for about a hundred feet or so.  It was open to the stream, so we were able to fill our canteens from it.  We set up our tents there and prepared to spend the night.  With all our tents set up and the fire going, it looked like a little village. During the night, we heard creatures wandering around.  The place sounded like Grand Central Station.  The moon was out, so we were able to see shadows of little people moving around, especially when they wandered near to our tents. I thought it best to stay in the tents and got the message out to all of the tents, using telepathy.

None of the group had slept very well that night. We heard all manner of unearthly sounds made by the creatures of that area.  We heard them moving around and I could swear that I heard some talking. Anyway, that was the right place for unearthly noises.  When we got up in the morning and looked outside, there were no tracks around.  We gathered some of the surrounding dead wood and put it on the fire to get it going strong again.  Then Johnny cooked some oatmeal and pancakes, which we ate with some of our dried meat. Then we put out our fire with water from the stream, packed up our supplies, and left. We would be far away from that place by nightfall.

10.  We continued our journey to the Eastern Barrier Mountains.

We averaged