“You managed to kill a werebeast,” she said, tapping her chin. “Interesting. Maybe you won’t be as hopeless as I hoped.”
“I mean I always play a mage in my games,” Mike said with a shrug.
“Which is information that would’ve been helpful before I chose you,” she said, looking him up and down again. A look that seemed far more appraising than it was appreciative. “Looking at you I figured you would’ve been the warrior type, but she’s already got her piece to grab the sword, as you heard.”
“Care to tell me any more about what the hell you’re talking about?” Mike asked.
“Spoilers,” she said, waving her finger from side to side. “A little bit of your player magnetism is working on me so I’ve already said a little too much, but I can’t go into too many details without breaking the rules.”
“What happens if you break the rules?” Mike asked, thinking about some of the times Doug had caught them fudging dice rolls and the unfortunate consequences that’d been visited on the characters when that happened.
“The earth will open underneath the playboard and fires will consume all,” she said, sounding as bored about the prospect of the university being swallowed in fire as she was at the prospect of hopping back into her goddess hot tub, or whatever the hell it was she was standing in now.
Mike licked his lips. “Seems like a good idea for you not to spoil the game too much then.”
She winked at him. “You’ve got that right. I will say this. I don’t like the mage. I always thought it was too weak. It could be that the mage was in the hands of the wrong sort of player though. I mean you’ve already killed a werecreature and you didn’t have the damned artifact for more than a few minutes…”
The portal into whatever world she resided in started to fade away on that considering thought.
Mike rolled his eyes. He could’ve done something dramatic like ask her to stick around and tell him more. He wasn’t sure if that whole bit about the play board being swallowed in fire was real or the attempt of a bored game master to keep players from asking too many questions.
The only thing that stopped him from asking more was he knew it wouldn’t matter. He’d read enough books like this and seen enough movies that he knew it would be useless to interrogate the bored goddess fucking with his life, so what was the point?
Besides, a loud crash from the front pulled his attention away from toga goddess. A loud crash followed by a snarl, a scream from Gwen, and a surprised shout from the drunk dude that was quickly replaced by what Mike was pretty sure was the sickening sound of some drunk asshole meat being sliced in two by a big black sword wielded by one of those werecreatures.
Just fucking great. As if his night couldn’t get any worse. Though as he thought about it the bit with Gwen in between all the shit hadn’t been half bad at all. Even if he was about to die at the hands of another one of those werewolves for his fleeting moment of pleasure with the hot chick from his English class.
13
Escape
Mike pulled his d20 out of his pocket. It’d worked as a weapon once, after all, and he figured it could work a second time. Especially after all the tantalizing hits he got from toga goddess.
When he burst through the door things were about as bad as he’d suspected based on the unpleasant noises. Gwen was backed against the wall staring at another sword-wielding werewolf that glared at her like it’d just seen a delicious treat.
Again he couldn’t be sure if it was the delicious kind of treat the werewolf wanted to eat, or if the thing was thinking some of the more Rule 34 oriented parts of the Internet. Assuming the thing had even heard of the Internet, or Rule 34.
“Hey, asshole!” Mike shouted.
The werewolf turned its attention to him, and he stood there with the stupid confidence of someone who doesn’t know how truly fucked he is. Sure he’d already been fucked once tonight, but he certainly didn’t want round two to be getting bent over the cookie display case by tall, dark, and furry here.
That was another corner of the Internet that’d never held any interest for him, thank you very much.
The werewolf grunted, then it saw the glowing die floating above his hand. Mike grinned.
“That’s right furry,” he said. “Come get some.”
The wolf moved faster than he would’ve thought possible. Maybe it was because he’d spent a lifetime expecting werewolves to be these slightly awkward things when they really got moving. His only experience seeing them was in cheesy movies where the good werewolves were still, ultimately, very realistic an expensive puppets that the movie makers didn’t want to damage too much.
This was the real thing though. Which meant the fucker was fast. Whatever. Unlike the poor bastards being terrorized by those puppets, he could fight back against this fucker.
He chucked the d20 at the wolf. Again it tumbled in the air until it came up with a twelve. Not the critical hit he’d been hoping for, but better than nothing since it seemed to be enough to hit the thing. His pocket pulsed as time slowed down, and he pulled out the glowing hit die and threw it at the wolf. Both flew forward, but this time it merely singed the thing’s fur. Its hit points went down by a few, but not nearly enough.
That was enough to send the werewolf into a fit trying to pat down the bits of its fur that had been set alight, at least. Clearly these things had never heard of stop, drop, and roll in whatever hellscape they’d come from. At least the distraction gave Mike an opportunity to get to Gwen.
“Come on,” he said, glancing out the front window as he grabbed her.
What he saw out there wasn’t pleasant. There were more hulking dark figures milling around on the other side of the window. As though looking through that window was enough to spur them into action, one of them raised a sword and smashed the glass that was the only flimsy protection separating them from certain doom.
“Son of a bitch,” Mike said, yanking Gwen towards the back so hard that she let out a surprised yelp.
He pulled her just in time. A sword came down where Gwen had been. He looked up to see that the wolf he’d singed had regained some of its composure. Not that it helped the thing since the literal two-legged dogpile that smashed into it prevented the thing from getting off another hit.
Mike would thank whatever higher power was listening, but he’d recently learned that there actually were higher powers listening in on his life and he wasn’t sure he had anything nice to say to them right about now.
“I’m starting to think our little break in the back was a bad idea,” Gwen yelped as they moved back into the back room.
Just before the swinging door swung shut Mike was pretty sure he saw the queasy sight of a bunch of werewolf creatures attacking the remains of the unfortunate dude who’d only wanted to have a little caffeine and food to help his case of the munchies. Poor bastard.
Then again if what was going down on campus tonight was real then Mike was pretty sure a lot of people were going to meet unfortunate ends before this was all done. He wasn’t sure if he should be happy or terrified that he seemed to have been given the role of player character in this bullshit.
“Come on,” he said, looking around the back room for anything that might save their asses. Nothing. He also realized he hadn’t grabbed his dice when he tossed them which was…
He looked to his pocket which was pulsing faintly again. “That’s trippy.”
“What?” she asked.
“Don’t you see the pulsing in my pants?”
She fixed him with a look that could be charitably described as “unamused.”
“Seriously? This doesn’t seem like a good time to…”
“I’m talking about the dice in my pocket,” he said, reaching down and pulling his d20 out. Like the thing had magicked its way back into his pocket as soon as it was done singing that werewolf.
“Damn,” he whispered. “That’s useful.”
“I don’t see anything,” she said. “I mean that hunk o
f plastic is glowing when you pull it out and…”
“Dragonbone,” Mike said absentmindedly as he looked at their surroundings. That glowing in his pocket gave him an idea.
“What?” she asked.
“Dragonbone,” he said, listening to the wolves snarling and fighting each other out there. They might be preoccupied with fighting each other right now, but he knew it was only a matter of moments before they got tired of dining on stoner entrails and came after them instead.
That swinging door wasn’t going to do much to stop those things. He was about to give up and pull Gwen out the back door, another flimsy bit of construction that wouldn’t do a damn thing to save them, when he saw something glowing on the other side of the room.
The back room had a big oven on one side that was cold now. Racks of cookies were set up and ready to go for when the late night crowds hit, but he was more interested in that oven.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The oven?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got that,” he said, wondering why he’d even bothered to ask such a stupid question. “Thanks.”
He stared at the thing. Why was it glowing? If he didn’t know any better he’d say it was glowing like something he could interact with in a game, and the designers wanted him to know he could interact with it.
Only this was the real world. Sure it was the real world with a sudden gaming overlay that he was still getting used to, but it was still the real fucking world.
Only what if that glow meant this oven was something he could interact with in the fucked up real world game he’d been thrust into?
There was only one way to find out. He moved closer, and saw that the dials on the front were glowing even brighter than the rest of the massive oven, and it hit him exactly what the universe was trying to tell him with this real world tooltip.
“Fuck me,” Mike breathed.
“Already did tonight,” Gwen said. “And it was good, but I keep telling you this isn’t the time or place to…”
“Is this a gas oven?” he asked.
“Well yeah, why?” she asked.
“Because it’s time to see if a massive overpressure wave and a bit of fire kills werewolves as good as silver,” he said.
“What are you… Oh no. No you don’t. I’ll get fired!”
There was more growling followed by some nasty howling in the front room. He thought he heard the sound of a bone snapping. Normally that would’ve been enough to make his balls retreat up into his body as he was pissing himself in terror, but he was too in the moment now to care. It was like he was having an out of body experience where he was the game character, and that disconnect helped him contemplate the stupidity he was about to pull.
“Yes way,” Mike said. “We need to kill a lot of those things at once, and unless you want to become a werewolf milkbone like that stoner in there I think you want to go along with this plan.”
“Fine,” Gwen said. “I’m going to go stand by the door and hold it open. You’ll want to get the hell out of here as fast as you can.”
“Not exactly,” Mike said, turning all the gas knobs to full power without hitting the igniter.
It felt very wrong to be doing this. If there was one thing that had scarred him more than anything else when he was a kid, it was the obsession his parents had with not allowing their children to play with the gas oven in their house. They’d filled his head with tales of terror that all ended with houses getting blown up real good, and that had made him terrified of even touching the thing for most of his young life.
Needless to say, learning how to cook had been a traumatic experience once they deemed him old enough to turn on the gas oven without accidentally leaving it on and suffocating them or blowing them up.
“Are you crazy?” Gwen shouted.
“You bet your ass I’m crazy,” Mike shouted back.
Normally he wasn’t one for raising his voice at a lady, but this seemed like a night for shouting. After all, he could hear a bunch of werewolves that were on the verge of busting in here and turning him into a snack. He figured he could be forgiven for raising his voice just a little.
Also? He was getting a little lightheaded. Probably from all the carbon monoxide that was being pumped into the room along with the gas and that sickly sweet smell that was added to the stuff to let people know shit was about to go down if they didn’t get the gas company out there to fix things asap.
He turned to Gwen and pointed to the door.
“Get out!”
He held his breath, which was just a touch difficult because he didn’t have time to take a deep breath. With the way the room was filling with gas he figured that deep breath would be his last.
He really didn’t want to avoid death at the hands of a bunch of werewolves only to find himself dead on the floor from gas inhalation.
He ran to follow Gwen out that door, his lungs and body burning since the last breath he’d taken really wasn’t doing it for him.
It also didn’t help that he had to duck under a clawed furry hand that burst through the swinging doors to the front like something out of a video game. That actually worked in his favor, in a way. Sure it wasn’t good to have a werewolf trying to rip his lungs out, but that werewolf got its arm stuck in the door instead of bursting through the thing and blocking him with its whole body.
He dove under the furry arm and came out in a roll, something he never would’ve thought himself capable of pulling off. Maybe things were different now that he was a PC in an NPC world. He pulled himself up and pushed Gwen out.
“What the hell?” she asked.
“You want to be in here when the whole thing goes up?” he asked.
“Good point,” she muttered.
He pulled out his trusty d20. The motion was getting to feel downright normal for all that it was nuts that he was wielding fucking magic using a die of all things. He looked at the oven which was still glowing, only now it was outshone by a diffuse glow rapidly filling the back room.
He grinned. The gas, of course. He figured the fact that this weird new real life magical game he’d been thrust into was highlighting that gas for him meant it was something he could interact with. Hopefully it would be an explosive interaction.
He tossed the die, imagining a fireball streaking out towards that gas cloud. Meanwhile the door into the back room splintered open as the werewolf that’d got its arm stuck was pushed through by the crowd of armed and armored werewolves behind it.
They all turned to him just in time to see the die fly through the air. They growled. The die landed on seventeen and time slowed down trapping the werewolves in the pocket of gaseous death he’d just created for them.
He did his thing. Tossed his hit die out. Both dice streaked through the air and slammed into the gas cloud, but he didn’t stick around to see the results.
The only problem was time was still moving in slow motion. Which meant he was treated to a slow motion front row seat as the gas ignited and he was confronted with a childhood fear that’d been drilled into him time and again by paranoid parents.
It was actually kind of pretty watching the flames spread, even as he found himself thinking, in very real time, that it was going to hurt like a motherfucker when the resulting blast hit him. He could see the snarls and looks of terror and surprise on the wolves’ faces as they looked into that expanding fireball and realized they were fucked.
Then time sped back to normal and he was yanking the door shut. He knew there wouldn’t be time to run from the blast, so he grabbed Gwen and threw her to the ground as the door blew out behind them with a fireball that lit up the alley and sent dust and bricks raining down.
Well shit. The universe just kept throwing things at him. Like he was the subject of some asshole god’s idea of a fun game or something, but he was learning just how not fun it was to be stuck in one of those games instead of being the one watching it play out giving orders from on high.
14
&n
bsp; Explosive Aftermath
Thankfully none of those bricks hit him. That would’ve really fucking hurt. Though when Gwen turned over beneath him, a position that was surprisingly similar to something they’d been doing just a few minutes ago, it looked like she’d taken some damage from hitting the deck.
He figured she’d be furious, but instead she smiled and leaned up to kiss him. It was the sort of move that might’ve turned into something far more interesting were it not for the unfortunate fact that they were in a grimy alley filled with charred werewolf corpses and a burning bakery behind them.
The whole alley smelled like burnt dog, which honestly wasn’t something he ever thought he would experience firsthand.
He pulled himself up off of Gwen, but he didn’t exactly like it. She was the kind of girl he didn’t mind being on top of, but all good things must come to an end and all that. And it seemed that once he got off of her she was back to being more practical.
“So I know you just saved my life and all, but what the hell were you thinking?” she asked.
“I was thinking we had a bunch of armed werewolves coming for us, and so it might be a good idea to figure out a way to kill all of them at once,” he said.
“And your big idea was to use a gas explosion to take them out?”
“Worked in a movie I saw once,” he said, though admittedly in that movie it’d been very impressive puppets that were getting blown up and not real werewolves. Although the jury was still out in his mind as to whether or not this was real or simply some elaborate fantasy his mind was making up after he’d fallen and hit his head on the curb or something that morning on his way to the gym.
Which was good for a stray thought for Lisa. Though honestly there were a lot of times during the day when he had stray thoughts for Lisa. Particularly when he was home alone thinking about how she’d looked earlier in the gym with a nice sheen of sweat and…
Dice Mage: A GameLit Adventure Page 10
