by Eddie Patin
"We're low on meat," Jason said at one point, looking through the freezer and fridge. It seemed like there was always a lot less than Jason had anticipated. Damn, Gliath ate a lot of meat. He snacked on it all the time!
"Gliath can catch some game from the mountains tomorrow when we go into town," Riley said.
The leopardwere's yellowish-green eyes rose at them for a moment, then went back to his food.
"Yes, Ranaja," the Krulax rumbled.
After a quick follow-up non-meat meal among just the humans, Jason and Morgana cleaned up the kitchen.
Then, they split up the gold—or, at least Jason, Riley, and Gliath did. Riley had put together three neat piles of those little rectangular gold tabs that Zayden Skinner paid with, totaling two-hundred and sixty-eight ounces in all. Riley had given Jason the odd tab, which left Jason with a whopping ninety ounces of pure gold!
It was beautiful.
Jason picked up his pile and let the gold pieces slip through his fingers. They were heavy, all together like that. It was a lot of gold. Doing some quick math in his head, assuming that an ounce was worth about twelve-hundred dollars, Jason figured that he had just broken into a six-figure income for the year.
"That's a lot of gold!" Jason exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear. It hurt to smile so big. The cuts on his face split and stung like a bitch, but Jason couldn't stop smiling. "What a freaking crazy ... it's just ... I can't believe how profitable this is!"
Riley smirked. "Gold and glory, Jason," he said. "With great risk comes great reward."
Jason scoffed and laughed. "Yeah. Great risk, alright!"
He'd been monster hunting for either a couple of weeks or a month—depending on how he wanted to look at his personal perception of time from universe to universe—and he'd already made over a hundred thousand dollars!
Jason felt amazing. He felt hurt and sore, but full of life and riches. He felt rich with friends. He looked at Morgana—who sat with a meager smile watching the Reality Rifters consider their earnings—and felt rich with desire.
Life was good.
"Now, let's check out that magic shet," Riley said.
Jason beamed. "Good plan!"
They all stashed their gold. Jason had no idea where Riley and Gliath were putting theirs—in his parents' old room—and he didn't care, but he had a hard time himself settling on a hiding spot for his. He already had some gold in his old boot up in the closet, some in his sock drawer, some in his gun safe, and some in his computer room stashed with his electronics parts. For a moment, Jason was thinking of putting all ninety ounces in his gun safe, but then he remembered that when the police came for Jason 1241—his poor second self that had committed suicide the other day—they'd totally looted his safe back on universe 1241. The cops had taken his gold. Eventually, Jason loaded his stash into an old book-bag and buried it under crates of computer parts, tangled Ethernet cables, keyboards, and all kinds of other crap in the closet of his crafting room.
To kill two birds with one stone, the Reality Rifters decided to just bring the magic stuff with them to the Wilderlands and look at it there. Riley had suggested the idea. It was pretty obvious to everyone that Jason had some healing up to do. They loaded up all of the magic gear into Jason's backpack—except for the flying disc, which Riley carried after figuring out how to make it shrink down to the size of a Frisbee—then changed, geared up, and met in the garage to go to u312.
"Jason, do you have a snack to bring along?" Riley asked, checking the chamber of his Marlin 1895sbl .45-70 lever action rifle. Gliath stood silently behind him filling the bandoleer across his armor harness's broad chest plate with shotgun shells from a box, manipulating them very agilely with his big, furry black fingers.
"I have water in my CamelBak, but ... why?" Jason made sure that he had a round chambered in his AK, then clicked it onto safe.
"It's the Vitality Element," Riley replied. "You'll regenerate a lot faster if you're eating."
"Really?"
That was an interesting idea. Jason thought back to when Riley was there, healing up from being gored by the alpha minotaur. Gliath had been feeding him constantly. Jason recalled his own time in the Wilderlands. Back when he'd been trying to survive, he was healing slowly while starving without realizing it. But he healed up the most and felt the best when he finally killed that Ornithomimus and ate a fair amount of dinosaur meat, then again when he spent a day eating urchins next to the lake before confronting the wyvern.
It had never occurred to him. How could it?
Jason put his rifle on the stainless steel table and went back to the kitchen. He grabbed some random disposable food: a can of kipper snacks, some slices of cheese, some chips. He petted his little cat, Zelda, when she jumped up onto the counter to greet him with her tiny, high-pitched voice.
Once he'd collected a few snacks, Jason met the others in the garage again. Morgana was the only one of them without armor. She was wearing sweatpants. They'd need to get her some clothes of her own. Maybe tomorrow would be a good day to go shopping.
Jason rifted them into the wyvern's cave.
Chapter 3
They stepped through the roaring portal into the hot, humid cavern. It stunk like snake shit and dead bodies, but it wasn't completely ghastly like it used to be back before Riley and Gliath had spent several hours removing most of the rotten remains. Morgana passed into the Wilderlands as shocked and awestruck as ever. Jason immediately turned his AK-47 onto the area at the front of the cave where cannibals tended to gather when they were away.
He released the rift, casting them all into quiet darkness when it collapsed with a pop. Jason turned his night vision on. All was still, and he could hear the drone of buzzing insects coming from outside.
No cannibals.
"All clear," Riley announced. "Looks like daytime outside."
Jason couldn't tell that it was light out. There was a good length of a dark tunnel between them and the outside. Riley's cybernetic senses could do amazing things.
They headed outside. Jason offered Morgana his flashlight after leading her a few stumbling steps through the darkness, but she opted instead to draw Dawnbringer from the hidden dimension inside her Smuggler's ring. The magical Soloster family blade filled the cavern with a golden light. Jason turned his image intensifier off.
When they stepped out into the hot sunshine, Jason took a deep breath of fresh air and stared around the valley. He watched the huge herd of duckbill dinosaurs grazing to the south near the eastern tree line. Ceratopsians the size of ambulances slowly ambled around the tall grasses in the middle of the expansive space. They weren't Triceratops—they were something with a weird name that Jason hadn't seen before and couldn't remember now. The single horn on each huge herbivores' beak was long and curved forward instead of pointing straight ahead.
Jason could have pulled up his OCS to check on their proper names again, but when he felt Morgana walk up next to him—gaping in wonder at the valley full of dinosaurs—he decided to slip his arm around her waist instead. She settled into his one-armed embrace, flashing him a quick smile before urgently taking in all of the primordial sights.
Warmth bloomed in Jason's heart.
The mini-rexes—huge carnivores that he now knew were actually Albertosaurs—were nowhere to be seen. That was good.
At the bottom of the slope outside of the wyvern's cavern was 'the slab', a rock formation still covered in dried blood from the dinosaur carcass offerings the cannibals used to give to the wyvern. Now, the flat rock also held the dense, bony remains of the dead minotaurs that Jason had dumped there. To the north of the slab was the monstrous corpse of the Tyrannosaurus Rex—Jason's Dreadwraith from his deepest childhood memories—now just huge bones and sheets of dried hide covered in tattered black feathers. Nearby was also the body of the dreaded wyvern itself, mostly picked clean of meat by scavengers. All that remained was the serpentine beast was its skeleton and natural armor, as well as a good bit of scaly, dried-out h
ide and parts of its wings' shriveled membranes.
The T-Rex was missing one of its monstrous leg-bones. Jason remembered watching Nargog pull the bone out of socket, holding it like a huge club, before disappearing into the eastern woods. The alpha minotaur he'd spared and brought here to live out the rest of his life hunting dinosaurs must be around here somewhere...
"It's all amazing!" Morgana said, smiling up at Jason. Her hair was on his shoulder. He felt himself buzzing inside, pulling her against him like he was. He was wearing his gloves, but he could feel the young woman's side under his fingers through the t-shirt.
"The predators come out at night," Jason said. "The raptors. Except for the Albertosaurs; they come out any time. We've gotta watch for those three, but otherwise, it's pretty safe here ... oh, aside from the cannibals."
"Cannibals?" she asked.
"Like the trogs of your world. They live over there," Jason said, pointing at where he remembered their main camp being, deep in the woods across the valley to the northeast.
The four Reality Rifters stayed at the mouth of the wyvern's cave for a few hours. Jason forced himself to eat. He wasn't hungry at all.
They looked over the loot that they'd taken from the necromancer's tower.
There were the weapons, of course: the lightning gun and its extra mags and accessories, and the strange and evil looking black knife that Malydamus had used to cut people open for his ritual. There was also the fancy AR-15 that they'd taken for Morgana, but it wasn't magical. It was just a nice rifle. Riley called the lightning gun an electron particle beam pistol, but when Jason shot it out toward the slab—sending a sizzling and jumping arc of electricity out at the rock formation with surprising range and accuracy—he decided that he'd always think of it as a lightning gun.
Riley looked over the high-tech weapon and described to Jason that it utilized an automatically-recharging power cell. After some crackling and snapping experimentation, the lightning gun seemed good for ten shots before needing to recharge for a while. There were also two extra power cells in their own specialized mag pouch and a nice leather holster with good retention.
"This is a really nice weapon," Riley said. "The level of tech is higher than what's available on my world. We don't have particle projection weapons."
"Do you want it?" Jason asked.
"Nah," the cyborg replied. "I'll stick with my blaster." He smirked, patting the pistol slung below his right hip. "You should keep that one, Jason. It'll be your first energy weapon. It's not complicated like a Gauss rifle or good rail gun. Shet—you don't even have to adjust the power or anything like you would have to with a laser rifle. It's pretty simple. Aim, shoot, then let it recharge or swap power cells if you need more shots in a hurry."
"Okay."
No one was very excited about the dark, wicked blade. The necromancer's knife was curved and serrated but almost gaudy; maybe more ritualistic than practical. That said, its balance was epic, and the metal was cold. It had to be magical. There was no telling what sort of evil magic the weapon held; what random dark shit it could do if any of them tried to use it in battle. Hell, for all Jason knew, it might be imbued with some evil intelligence and might warp its wielder's mind or something. They decided to store it for now. Maybe the evil knife would sell well.
Then there were the small things: two rings and two strange gemstones that radiated oddly with a kind of power that Jason couldn't quite explain. One ring was a plain, silver band with a gold stripe running through its middle. The other had a basic finish of brushed steel set with a single, tiny ruby. Riley was certain that all four things were magical.
"They're giving off a strange emanation in the UV spectrum," he said.
"That's not normal?"
"No," Riley said. "Rings and rocks don't do that."
"Does that mean they're magical? For sure?"
"Sometimes."
Jason knew what to do. If they were magical rings, they'd resize themselves to fit his fingers just like they did in DnD; just like Morgana's Smuggler's ring had when Jason put it on before they rescued her. He tore off the glove of his left hand and immediately started sliding one ring onto a finger—
"Hold it!" Riley snapped. Jason looked up. "You shouldn't do that. We need to figure out what they do first."
Jason paused. He considered waiting. Riley was usually pretty canny about things, though he wasn't always right. Then again, Jason was assuming that this was all like in a roleplaying game. What was real magic really like? For all he knew, these rings could do crazy, brain-bending stuff to him. Who knows where their power came from? Did it come from the Weave; that massive, cosmic entity in u936 that Jason 113 had briefly touched on in the OCS? That incomprehensible figure in that other universe was so powerful that it created magic-like manifestations, according to Jason 113's notes.
He put the rings and strange stones away. One stone was a gleaming, deep violet color. The other was bright 'safety' orange. They'd have to look more at those items later.
Riley was dead-set on keeping the flying disc and its matching cleats. With his superior reflexes and combat ability, it made perfect sense for him to do so. Jason didn't argue. After all, with Jason's rifting powers, he had his own way of getting around quickly. In fact, it wasn't long after looking at the weapons, rings, and stones when Riley figured out how to work the flying device. He promptly attached the high-tech cleats to his boots, then took the disc for a spin.
For a while, Jason, Gliath, and Morgana sat at the mouth of the wyvern's cave watching as Riley whooped and howled with glee, swooping around through the air on the manhole-sized disc like the freaking Green Goblin from Spider Man comics. All he needed were little pumpkin grenades.
Jason sat and ate the food that he'd brought with him. He told Morgana stories about his time in the Wilderlands. He pointed out the approximate area of his 'spider cave'—where he took shelter for a while—across the valley, past the woods, and partway up the ridge.
When Jason opened up his kipper snacks, Gliath suddenly became his best friend, purring and seemingly barely able to hold himself back from rubbing against Jason's shoulder. The leopardwere with his big panther head eyed the fish snacks like a man-beast obsessed, sniffing the air and licking his frightening fanged mouth with his huge, pink tongue. Jason ended up taking a few bites then giving Gliath the rest. The leopardwere promptly devoured the smoky fish and spent quite a while licking the inside of the can with his tongue.
Jason and Morgana couldn't keep from laughing.
Shortly after, Jason found himself holding her hand. His heart buzzed and floated in his chest, making him feel like a total dork. Jason felt like a super-goofball, but he loved the feeling.
Later, the team rifted back home. The cuts on Jason's face were mostly closed, and the slice on his leg and hole in his side were well on the mend. Jason could have benefited from staying longer, but he knew that they'd be back soon. Jason had to teach Morgana how to shoot. What better shooting range was there than a wild world with zero other humans around them?
The Reality Rifters ate some more and watched TV. Jason had no appetite eating so much in the Wilderlands. They made plans to go shopping the next day to get more ammo and find Morgana some clothes and gear. They still needed to get her some Merc armor of her own. The three humans had beers. Jason hung up his armor, but Riley stayed in his. Jason wondered whether or not Riley would ever be interested in wearing normal Earth clothes. Maybe he could convince him to buy some.
Eventually, the sun went down.
Jason tucked Morgana in once more, kneeling by her side once again in the dark after Riley and Gliath had retired into their room.
"What a day, huh?" he asked. Now, he couldn't keep himself from grinning. Jason gazed into Morgana's face as she smiled back up at him. He touched her cheek and trailed his fingers up and down her skin. He felt dazzling, pleasant sensations as he did.
"Yes," she replied. "Thank you for showing me so much. I'm glad to be here with you. I
can't wait to see your world." Her family necklace had emerged from under the t-shirt's collar and the blue sapphire caught Jason's eye before he looked back to Morgana's face, admiring the symmetry and smoothness. He loved her green eyes. He adored her smile. He never really saw her smile back on the other world where she came from, except for when she accepted the invitation to join them.
"Me too," Jason said. "I mean—glad you're here with me. I ... uh ... really like you."
She seemed to blush. "I like you too, Jason."
Both of them stared at each other for a long while. Jason thought about standing up and heading back to his room, but Morgana held his gaze and his smile. She stayed with him. They remained in the moment together. The room was cool and quiet. Jason could hear the clock in the kitchen quietly ticking.
They each sighed when the experience grew long.
Jason was acutely aware of Morgana's body laid out beside him. He wanted nothing more than to take it in; to touch her skin all over. Instead, he moved his right hand down to rest on her side just under her left breast. When he felt her take a breath under his touch, he felt his loins stir powerfully.
He didn't look away from her eyes. They were such beautiful eyes—they'd captivated him ever since he first saw her on that cross. Back then, Morgana was staring at the cobblestone street, her eyes furious and defiant and full of green fire. Those eyes sparkled in the darkness of his living room now as vividly as the sapphire pendant resting on the smooth skin below her neck.
Jason leaned in and gently kissed Morgana's lips. She closed her eyes as he moved in. He did too. The instant Jason's lips touched hers, he felt fire flash through his entire body from his lips to his heart then to everywhere else.
Morgana sighed and Jason felt her breath against his face. He felt a powerful rush rise up inside him—a desire to burn up and consume Morgana as if he was a living bonfire—and he took a deep breath, turning his head a little and kissing her more deeply.
