“I got you, sneak thief,” Tamsin said. Before Eriko could figure out where their rookie-player-turned-elven-mage was, a fireball lit up the battlefield, striking the first ogre with the sound of a gas grill lighting up. The air filled with the stench of what Eriko immediately identified as burnt bacon. The stink almost caused Eriko to gag.
“We have got to teach you some new spells,” Eriko said.
“You’re welcome,” Tamsin said, but before either woman could gloat, Eriko watched as the now half-cooked ogre stood up to his full height, ready to continue the fight.
“Oh, come on,” Eriko said.
And that was when Tobias started singing. In an almost pitch-perfect imitation of Joe Cocker, Tobias broke into “You Are So Beautiful,” immediately drawing the ire of the ogre, almost as if the otherwise non-verbal creature knew he was being mocked. They’d recently discovered that Tobias had some sort of bardic music-based magic that could manipulate minds in subtle ways, but Eriko wasn’t entirely convinced his music was magical this time. More likely, the barbecued ogre was as irritated with Tobias as almost everyone was at some point or another. The creature turned away from Eriko to charge the bard, who threw back his bright purple cloak and thrust forward his cutlass-style sword. With a fencer’s grace, Tobias ran the giant creature through, the blade piercing the ogre’s heart.
“Stop enjoying this so much,” Eriko shouted.
Tobias yanked the sword free of the ogre’s body just as the massive frame collapsed on the ground.
“I am having the time of my life,” Tobias said. “I don’t know why you’re all so…”
Before he could finish the thought, Tobias was batted into the air by a swaying, apelike arm. A third ogre roared at him, but whether in grief over his dead compatriot or just at Tobias’ general annoying behavior it was unclear.
“As… you… wish…” Tobias called out in his best Cary Elwes impression before landing with a pathetic thump in the brush fifteen feet away.
“Fireball! Tamsin, fireball now!” Eriko said.
“I… I think it’s recharging, hang on,” Tamsin said, muttering and fumbling the arcane words of the spell.
“You’re making the cleric hit things,” Morgan said, emerging from a nearby copse of trees, maul in hand, his armor creaking and clanking. “The cleric is not supposed to have to hit things.”
“You like hitting things,” Eriko said.
Morgan shot his million-dollar smile at her.
“Oh, I do love hitting things,” he said. Morgan uttered a few mystical words himself and the head of his maul began to glow with warm golden light. He swung it ferociously into the gut of the ogre like a baseball bat, then reared back to swing again. But before he could, a stream of blood began pouring down from the ogre’s greasy hairline, and with a horrible, wet noise, the creature fell forward, revealing a gore-covered Cordelia behind him.
“Thanks for your help with the other one, guys,” Cordelia said.
“You looked like you had the situation under control,” Morgan said.
Still hidden away in the vegetation, Tobias called out in a muffled, exaggeratedly weak voice.
“Hey cleric,” he said. “Can you come put your bard back together again?”
“You hurt?” Morgan yelled.
“My pride needs stitches. Also, I think I broke my ass,” Tobias said.
Morgan shrugged and walked calmly over to where Tobias had disappeared. Tamsin trotted down from an incline in the earth where she’d been casting like a sniper.
“Where’s my brother?” she asked.
“Morgan’s patching him up,” Eriko said.
Tamsin looked over her shoulder to where the two men were talking and shrugged.
“He sounds okay,” she said.
Eriko felt a swell of pride for her friend. When they’d first arrived a month ago, trapped in a very real version of the cursed fantasy board game they’d decided to play together, Tamsin had been a Level 20 worrier, about everything in general, but her twin brother’s safety especially. They’d spent the past four weeks doing odd, and usually violent, jobs, protecting the town of Moderate Expectations. The newly minted heroes took down bandits and chased off monsters, and through all of this, Tamsin seemed to have come to trust her brother’s competence during a fight. Or if not competence, at least his pure dumb luck, which Eriko had begun to suspect was some sort of class feat associated with his being a bard.
“So, it’s just the three of them then,” Tamsin said.
“That’s what the writ from Miriam said, and that’s the number we killed,” Cordelia said, hefting one of the ogre’s weapons, an axe that the monster wielded one-handed but required two for Cordelia to lift. She turned it from side to side admiringly.
Cordelia had adjusted almost hilariously well to her role in the game, Eriko thought. Rather than being freaked out at living in a powerful half-orc body, bigger and stronger than she’d ever been in the real world—not to mention greener, and toothier—Cordelia appeared to revel in the physicality of it. She loved to fight in this world, relished in taking as many hits as she gave out, battling with an exaggerated barbarian rage that felt to Eriko more than a little bit like a therapeutic endeavor. Back home, Cordelia had been, maybe not quite a wallflower, but certainly unassuming. Here, she walked the line of being pure id.
“I think I just found my new weapon,” Cordelia said.
Eriko took a long, hard look at the axe. The blade looked like it was carved with the general idea of what an edge looked like, adorned with poorly treated animal parts, and topped with the yellowing tooth of a very large mammal.
“That is vile,” Tobias said, hobbling out of the woods to join them.
“Stop limping,” Morgan said. “I healed you fine. You’re being dramatic.”
“You just told the bard to not be dramatic,” Tobias said. “Which I think is an oxymoron. Are those teeth?”
“Teeth?” Tamsin repeated.
Cordelia turned the weapon side to side again.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I see it now.”
“Those are human teeth embedded in the hilt,” Eriko said. Her mouth went dry and her stomach twisted.
“The ogres literally jammed a person’s teeth into the handle as a decoration,” Tobias said. “That looks like a someone turned a gum infection into a melee weapon.”
“I’m literally going to be sick,” Morgan said.
“You don’t like teeth?” Tobias said.
“Toby,” Tamsin warned.
“I need to walk away for a minute. I can’t look at that thing,” Morgan said.
“Oh look,” Cordelia said. “They’re not all from the same person. See? They’re different sizes!”
“I’m walking away too,” Eriko said. “I didn’t survive fighting three ogres so you can make me toss up my breakfast.”
Eriko left the rest of the group to admire or gag at the ogre war art, heading over to where the creatures had built what might have been called a camp. Ogres weren’t known for their civility, at least not in this game world, but they had built a fire, and left piles of the spoils they’d collected terrorizing Moderate Expectation about, organized into what Eriko surmised were “weapons,” “food,” and “shiny things.”
She saw something in the food pile that immediately completed the stomach-churning process begun by Cordelia’s tooth-studded axe.
“I told you we could do this without Jack, didn’t? Oh—Oh!” Morgan said, walking up behind Eriko. “You okay?”
“I think I found Old Man Hobbins,” Eriko said, wiping her mouth. Eriko righted herself and felt a wave of sympathy as she watched Morgan turn a shade of sickly gray.
“That’s Old Man Hobbins,” he said.
“At least they hadn’t… started preparing him for dinner,” Eriko said. Steering clear of the “food” pile, Eriko began prodding at the “shiny things” pile, finding several gemstones that might have some value, a cracked mirror, a horseshoe with most of the horse�
�s lower leg still attached—she wondered briefly how the ogres decided if the leg should end up in the “shiny” pile or the “food” pile—a few sacks of coins she tucked into her belt automatically, and at the bottom of the pile, a leather-bound book.
Curious, she opened it up. The pages crawled with spidery symbols and letters she couldn’t understand, but she immediately recognized.
“Hey Tamsin,” Eriko said. “I got something for you.”
Tamsin meandered into the camp as well. Behind her, Eriko could see Tobias and Cordelia having a ridiculously intense conversation about the tooth-axe, which Eriko silently vowed to burn the minute Cordelia wasn’t looking.
“What’s up?” Tamsin said, her fingers absent-mindedly touching the tip of one pointed ear. It was a funny habit she’d picked up since they arrived here, as if even a month later the magician still couldn’t believe she had become an elf. “I—oh shit, is that Old Man Hobbins?”
“That’s Old Man Hobbins,” Morgan said, his voice tight with disgust.
“They were going to eat Old Man Hobbins?” Tamsin said, her voice rising.
“Looks like it,” Eriko said.
“Why does everything we fight here eat people?” Tamsin said, her voice swelling with what in any less violent a circumstance have been a humorous amount of empathy and annoyance.
“Not everything,” Morgan said.
“The bogeyman,” Tamsin said.
“Well, yeah,” Morgan said.
“The rat-thing in the graveyard.”
“Technically, those were corpses it ate,” Morgan corrected.
“That dire bear,” Tamsin said.
“To be fair, that bear ate everything it laid eyes on,” Eriko said.
“Including two villagers!” Tamsin said. “This world is horrible. It’s horrible and it’s full of people-eaters!”
“Here,” Eriko said, handing Tamsin the tome. “This’ll take your mind off it.”
“Why are you handing me your diary,” Tamsin said.
“It’s a spell book,” Eriko said. “Take it. Maybe you can learn something other than fireball and that lantern spell you use at night.”
“I do know that mystical shield spell too, you know,” Tamsin said.
“You say you know that spell, but we’ve never seen proof of it,” Tobias said as he and Cordelia joined them. “For all we know you just pretend to cast a magical protective shield on yourself.”
“The same could be said about your ‘magic’ songs,” Tamsin said.
Tobias shrugged insolently.
“True,” he said. “Find anything else inter—oh shit, is that Old Man Hobbins?”
“Yes,” Morgan said, his tone exhausted. “Yes, it is Old Man Hobbins.”
“I guess we should carry him back to Moderate Expectations,” Cordelia said. “Maybe Jack’ll be back by the time we return.”
“Considering we have no idea where he is, I wouldn’t bet on it,” Eriko said.
“On the bright said, he doesn’t get a cut of the ogre bounty,” Tobias said. “More money for us, right?”
The rest of the group stared at him in silence.
“I’m remembering this the next time I ask to stay behind to play a gig while you’re out fighting bandits,” Tobias said.
Chapter 2: Tracking the past
Whatever this world is, Jack thought, however real it feels, it definitely has glitches.
He’d left his friends behind to deal with the latest quest the mayor of Moderate Expectations asked of them so he could continue what the group had begun calling Jack’s side job: searching the surrounding areas for signs of whoever had taken Bennett. Bennett, another person from the “real” world, disappeared their first night here, stolen away by strangers in a violent assault before he could tell them anything more about this alternate reality.
They’d asked around town, put Eriko’s snooping skills and Tobias’ charm to work, and come up with nothing. And so, they sent Jack out ranging, as rangers are supposed to, to track the kidnappers. Whether he found a living Bennett or a body, they wanted an answer.
But you don’t always get what you wish for, Jack thought, crouching to scratch the wolf at his side behind the ear. The black and gray canine—wolf by name, but exaggerated, almost a caricature, like a wolf you’d dream up in a storybook rather than in nature—was his silent shadow, always at his side or near enough to come running if Jack needed him. He’d taken to calling the animal Silence for obvious, literal, if uncreative reasons.
As his friends gelled into a cohesive fighting team, Jack found they didn’t need him as much. He certainly didn’t benefit from them stomping loudly behind him as he went on his hunting patrols, so they started split up. At first it spiked Jack’s anxiety levels, but they’d all found that if they trusted themselves, the skills that belonged to their character classes—Morgan’s healing magic, Cordelia’s combat prowess, Jack’s woodland knowledge—all flowed naturally, like they’d “downloaded” the skills from the Matrix or something.
Jack had a hard time with this. He was a city boy through and through, and had never spent much time with outdoorsman activities. Suddenly being able to spot barely visible animal tracks or knowing instinctually what plants were safe or poisonous was strange. Feeling safer and more competent out under an open sky was even stranger.
But, he thought, the glitches make it more bearable. Like bugs. Part of his aversion to the outdoors back in the real world: bugs. He was a mosquito magnet. He’d never met an insect that didn’t want to bite him. But out here, it was as though all the wonderful things about nature—the soft wind in the trees, the gentle warmth of golden sunlight, the smell of earth and life—were almost overwhelmingly pleasant, as if this world had forgotten the little inconveniences and discomforts of traversing unspoiled wilderness.
Idealized, Jack thought. That’s the world. It’s an idealized forest. A fairy tale woods.
These woods were not without their terrors, but those were also storybook-styled. Monsters or traps, dramatic storms or land formations that didn’t make sense. Once, on one of his solitary hunts, he came across a tiny house in the forest, no paths leading to or from it, a thin swirl of smoke uncoiling from its perfect little chimney. He knew, in the deepest parts of his guts, that if he knocked on that door an old crone would open it, and nothing but trouble would follow. He gave the house wide berth and moved on.
There was unreal beauty here, too. He woke one night to find himself face-to-face with a pixie, illuminating the dark forest with warm golden light. The doll-sized woman looked at him curiously as he opened his eyes, laughed, and darted off into the night sky, never to return. It felt like a profoundly private moment. Unlike almost everything else he encountered when he went on these walkabouts, he never told his friends about the pixie. It felt too personal.
Several weeks investigating, and he’d still come up with nothing about Bennett’s whereabouts. The side benefit to these excursions was that he now had a remarkably clear map in his head of the surrounding area, miles in every direction outside Moderate Expectations: he knew places where goblin villages had taken up residence; a spot where a solitary giant led a lonely, but peaceful, existence with a small herd of enormous cattle; a river that dropped off into a magnificent waterfall, where beautiful, disembodied voices sang to themselves from the water below.
I think I’m falling in love with this world, Jack thought. The feeling made his stomach churn. It went contrary to the feeling of guilt he’d carried since they first arrived. He had been the one to suggest a game night, and he’d bought the cursed game that trapped them here. Sure, no one knew this would happen, but in the end, Jack could find none but himself to blame for their predicament. This was the reason he’d been viciously determined to find Bennett and figure out a way home since the start.
But this world grows on you, he realized. It is scary and violent and confusing, but it is also full of magic and beauty. It’s so many things we wish for back home and know can nev
er be real. Here, in this strange world, a place he still didn’t know the name of, all their dreams and nightmares were made flesh and blood.
I’ve got to start bringing at least one of the others with me on these trips, Jack thought. I’m starting to get melancholy and stupid. Too much time alone. Maybe Eriko or Cordelia would want to come along. Morgan could keep the other two out of trouble.
He’d become so lost in thought that he couldn’t stop himself from crying out when he turned to his left to see a man sitting on a rock watching him.
“Holy shit!” Jack said.
“Lost in your thoughts?” the man said. He was older, with receding gray hair and a full, if somewhat unkempt, gray beard. Dressed in green robes, he had a long, ornately carved staff resting casually against his shoulder.
“Look, I’m just going to cut to the chase. Are we going to fight?” Jack said.
“Only if you want to,” the man said. “I’d rather not.”
“Me neither,” Jack said.
“Good,” the man said. “I’ve been observing you. I felt the need to step in, because I’ve begun to feel bad for you and you seem extraordinarily persistent. You’re not going to find him out here.”
“You know the man I’m looking for?” Jack said.
“I know most everyone who makes their way into this world by accident,” the man said. “I’m Malcolm, by the way.”
“Jack,” Jack said automatically.
“That’s your… home name, isn’t it? Not your ‘here’ name,” Malcolm said, framing the air-quotes with his fingers.
“Yeah. I’ve been going by Raven here. Which feels stupid,” Jack said. “Does it matter if we use our real names? You’re one of us then? Not from here?”
“I’ve been here so long I’ve gone native,” Malcolm said. “But yes. I’m from Toronto originally.”
“Boston,” Jack said. “How long is long enough to go native?”
Malcolm shrugged.
“Time moves differently here,” he said. “But it feels like a lifetime.”
“And you never found a way home,” Jack said.
Malcolm stood up and stretched his back. There was a surreal calmness to him. This was his home, Jack realized. He was looking at man who had no intention of ever going back.
Lost in Revery Page 9
