Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  The decor wasn’t all that had changed, either. The yurt was now easily twice as large as it had been when James had logged in. Before, it had looked like a single tent for a scout. Now, it looked like a home for an entire family. There were even some straw cat-people dolls tucked away in the corner next to a rack containing bundles of dried herbs. Now that his nose was calming down, James discovered he could smell them strongly, which was how he learned that Plains Rose smelled a lot like rosemary.

  Breathing the familiar scent in deeply, James rose to his feet to take stock of his situation. He still had no idea what was going on—if he’d been the victim of a hack or if a new art patch had just gone horribly awry—but now that he had control of his sight and limbs again, it was time to log out and go to the hospital. There was no way that much sensory nerve pain didn’t have serious consequences. At the very least, he wanted a doctor to tell him he didn’t have brain damage for his own peace of mind. But when he made the motion to bring up the system menu, all he saw was his own hand moving through the air.

  Scowling, James made the motion again. Slowly this time, to be sure he was doing it right. Again, though, nothing happened. The menus must still be busted. He was wondering what to do about that when he realized with a start that none of the user interface was present.

  Normally in the game, critical information like his health, mana, level, mini-map, status effect, the time, and so on were all discreetly visible at the corners of his vision. Now that his eyes were working again, he was able to look all around, but no matter how far he craned his head or moved his eyes around his field of vision, it stayed empty. There was no user interface, no floating text, not even an internet connection icon, and the more James stared at the blank places where all those things should have been, the bigger the lump in his stomach grew.

  “Command,” he said, voice trembling. “Message player Tina Anderson.”

  Nothing.

  “Message character Roxxy.”

  Still nothing.

  “Command, join general chat.”

  Continued nothing.

  Each voice command was met with deafening silence. He didn’t even hear an error beep, leaving James feeling like he was talking to empty air.

  Shaking harder than ever, he rubbed his character’s clawed hands together, marveling at the rough and now incredibly realistic-feeling catlike pads on his otherwise human fingers. He couldn’t comprehend how much work it must have taken to put this new level of detail and sense-mapped information into the game. James hated the legendary recklessness of the FFO developers, but surely even they wouldn’t push through a change like this while the servers were live. That was the only explanation he could think of, though. Unless…

  James went still. He still didn’t know what to make of this situation, but he had to consider the possibility that maybe this wasn’t a hack or a patch. When he mentally tallied the development time and server resources needed to achieve the level of realism his five senses were currently showing him, it didn’t seem technically possible. There was just no way the game could have changed this drastically without a massive hardware upgrade. He, on the other hand, had been playing a lot lately. Other than his jobs, FFO was the only thing James did. If the game itself hadn’t changed, then there was another, much more likely explanation for what had just happened—lucid dreaming.

  The more James thought about it, the more sense it made. Lucid dreams were a pretty common issue for FFO players. At the game’s height a few years ago, the FCC had actually commissioned an entire guild to play fourteen hours a day so they could study the phenomenon. He’d played almost that much this weekend, so it made sense he was having the same problem, especially since his shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. Given all the rolling around he’d just done on the floor, the joint should have been throbbing, but it felt fine.

  James breathed a sigh of relief. That proved he couldn’t actually be in the game. He must have fallen asleep with his helmet on. He’d pay for that with a splitting headache in the morning, but that was far better than actually being trapped in some kind of catastrophic virtual-reality system failure. Hell, if he was lucky, maybe the fight with Tina had been part of the dream, too.

  Smiling at the hope, James wobbled across the yurt on his character’s too-long legs toward the long wooden bench set against one side. There was only one surefire way out of a lucid dream, so he positioned himself right in front of the low wooden seat and took careful aim as he pulled his leg back then slammed his shin straight into the bench’s sharp corner.

  Pain exploded through his limb, and James snatched it back with a hiss. The tail he wasn’t used to lashed at the same time. He was standing on only one foot, so the unaccustomed movement threw off his balance, and James toppled to the ground, smacking his head against the central support pole on the way down.

  Well, he thought, reaching up to rub his throbbing skull, that should have been enough to wake anyone. He just hoped he hadn’t broken his helmet when he’d fallen off his bed. But when James opened his eyes, he wasn’t on his floor at home. He was still on the hide rug, staring up at the yurt’s sun-drenched painted walls.

  A cold sweat prickled under his fur. He was still here. He hadn’t woken up. There was only one explanation for a lucid dream you couldn’t wake up from. It was the most terrible possibility, too. Even worse than his helmet going haywire and giving him a lobotomy.

  He might have Leylia’s Disease.

  Like most FFO players, James had heard plenty of horror stories about the VR-induced mental disorder. People with Leylia’s suffered from random involuntary waking lucid dreams. The smoking gun was when they couldn’t wake themselves up during an episode. No matter what they did, they were trapped in the delusion, moving in reality just as they did in the dream. Like sleepwalking but a thousand times more dangerous, because people with Leylia’s had no way of knowing what was real and what was a hallucination.

  “Oh no,” James moaned, covering his face with a clawed, padded hand. “No, no, no.”

  Leylia’s was as bad as it could get. He didn’t even know when the episode had started. For all he knew, he’d started dreaming the moment he got home and only imagined logging in. Maybe the sensory overload he’d experienced earlier had just been him freaking out on his apartment floor. If that was true, he didn’t dare move from this spot. Anywhere he went in this place, his body would also go in real life. If he started walking, he might walk right out his window and not notice until he hit the ground.

  Panting, James looked around the yurt, trying to estimate if its new larger size matched his bedroom. Perhaps those beautifully carved wooden shelves were actually his Goodwill bookshelves. The bed was definitely in the wrong place, but the bench he’d banged his leg on sort of matched his desk.

  He was tilting his head to see if he could make things line up better when he heard someone cheering outside. A lot of someones. The noise got louder by the second, rising up until it sounded like his yurt was in the middle of a stadium.

  James flicked his eyes toward the closed tent flap, a tantalizing few feet away. Moving was a terrible idea. He still had no idea where his body was in real life. If he left this spot, he could walk straight into a wall or fall down his apartment stairs. But those dangers were being crushed by a growing desperation to escape the prison of the yurt and his fear. He had no idea how much of the real world bled into Leylia’s waking dreams, but if there were people out there, he might be able to get help.

  It was a risky gamble, but being trapped here felt even worse, so James cautiously pushed himself to his feet. Standing up again, he was surprised to discover that not only was the dizziness from earlier completely gone, but he actually felt better than he had in years. Nothing hurt, and he wasn’t exhausted for once. A cruel mockery considering he was trapped in a mental delusion, but at least he felt ready to roll with whatever was waiting as he eased his way across the tent and pushed aside the hide flap that served as a door.

  James
’s jaw dropped. Up till now, he’d assumed his hallucination would line up with reality, at least a little bit, but this was like nothing he’d ever seen. The dirt street outside the yurt was flooded with jubatus. Like his character, the cat-people were as lithe and muscular as the cheetahs they’d been modeled after, complete with unique spotted patterns on their sand-colored fur. They all had whiskers, tails, claws, and other animal features, but they walked on two legs and had five-fingered hands, just like humans. Their catlike faces had human expressions, too, and right now, every one of them looked overwhelmed by emotion. Some were weeping. Others were shouting with joy, the sound he’d heard. Still more just looked stunned, staring at the village as though they’d never seen it before.

  It certainly didn’t look how James remembered. The village of Windy Lake was the main town for the mid-level savanna zone. It was a small town with a few quest-givers, some trainers, and just enough yurts to make it look lived in. Now, though, the village looked more like a city. The tents were still laid out in the same orderly grid he remembered from the game, but there were ten times more than there had been. Likewise, the lake he could see glittering in the distance between the tent lines was huge, far bigger than the blue pond it had been before. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the land itself. It was still completely flat, a problem since he lived in a third-floor apartment. The stairwell could be right in front of him, and he wouldn’t know until he took a step on what looked like flat dirt road and fell to his death.

  Swallowing, James looked again, scouring the street for any match to the real world. The more he looked, though, the weirder things got. The sun blazing down on the dirt road and the dry yellow grassland beyond was augmented by lights he had no explanation for. Bright-green glowing ribbons—the same ones he’d seen earlier behind his closed eyelids—drifted up from the ground to mix with sharp white streamers in the sky. If he hadn’t been so concerned for his sanity, they would have been beautiful, but James had no time for more weirdness right now, so he put the dancing lights out of his mind and focused on moving without killing himself.

  Assuming he was still near his bed, he thought the stairs should have been outside the tent and to the left. Clenching his jaw, James took a cautious step into the road, sliding his bare foot along the ground, but all he felt was hard, warm dirt, which didn’t make any sense. Even if he couldn’t see it, there should have been a drop. He must have gotten turned around somehow, but there was no correcting it. The neat grid of tents didn’t translate to his apartment in any way, and he didn’t see anything that might represent objects in the real world. No blocks that could have been a door or their apartment couch. It made an infuriating lack of sense even for a dream, and the continued strangeness of the cat-people’s behavior was starting to annoy him as well.

  The crowd he’d heard earlier was all around him now. Across the street, an old feline man was sitting on the ground, laughing and crying at the same time. Farther down the road, a pair of warriors had fallen over and were singing enthusiastically at the sky, their yellow eyes shining with wild, reckless joy. There were just as many people weeping as rejoicing, and more were appearing all the time. Watching them stumble out of their tents into the street, James had to wonder if this wasn’t Leylia’s after all. Maybe he’d just gone plain old crazy.

  Hands shaking, he reached up to poke the tall, catlike ears on top of his head. In game, they were normal for his character model to have, but he’d never felt them before since FFO’s Human Analogue Translation System didn’t convey sensation from nonhuman features. The same went for his tail, which had always been more of an accessory than an actual part of his body. Now, though, James could feel the weight of the long, furred appendage behind him, helping him balance. Moving his tongue around, he found an entire mouthful of sharp, predatory teeth, none of which had been there before, and the wind that made his whiskers twitch was the freaky icing on the freaky sensory cake.

  If the additions hadn’t been so clearly part of him, it would have felt alien. People with Leylia’s always described their episodes as highly realistic, but James was certain he’d never, ever felt something like this before. This wasn’t like dreaming you had long hair or were eight feet tall. This was entirely new sensory input, like seeing a new color. James didn’t even know if he could effectively communicate his problem to a stranger right now. What he needed was to wake up, which meant it was time for the nuclear option, personal safety be damned.

  Though much bigger, the dream town still resembled Windy Lake village. The park near his apartment also had a lake, and James was willing to bet that its lake and the Windy Lake lined up. It was late April in Seattle, so the water would still be frigid, definitely cold enough to snap him out of whatever was going on. If nothing else, throwing himself into a lake might result in rescue and a trip to the emergency room, where he could get professional help.

  That sounded like a win-win to James, so he swallowed his fear and started striding down the road, walking past the weeping and laughing cat-people without a word. Now that he was moving, he saw again just how much larger this town was than the one in the game, giving him hope that what he saw might line up with reality. The park was at least half a mile from his apartment, and so seemed to be the Windy Lake.

  Encouraged, he picked up the pace, keeping to the side of the road in the hope of avoiding the cars he couldn’t see. He was trying to figure out if the acacia trees he could see in the distance matched the large oaks by the lake path he sometimes jogged down when the air was split by the enormous booming of a drum.

  All around him, the frantic cat-people went silent, their large ears flicking in the direction of the drum. Then as if that had been a signal, they all stopped what they’d been doing and started walking toward the center of town. Since he had to go that way to get to the lake anyway, James joined them, hoping that following other ‘people’ might protect him from getting hit by a bus.

  A minute later, he reached the edge of the plaza at the middle of the village. The open square looked identical to the one he remembered from the game, complete with the iconic giant war drum at the center. Behind that was the two-story Naturalists’ lodge, the only all-wood structure in the village. The crowd stopped when they hit the square, but the lake was still a good distance away. Sniffing, James smelled water on the wind. He was about to leave the crowd and follow it to the shore when someone started hammering on the war drum like they were trying to break it.

  He looked up in alarm. The five-foot-wide wood-and-hide drum was elevated above the crowd of swishing tails and flicking cat ears by a large wood platform. Standing on it, pounding the drum with heavy mallets, was a muscular jubatus decked in feathers, fangs, and a painted suit of plate armor that, to his enormous surprise, James recognized. It was the village’s head warrior, Arbati.

  The sight made James rub a hand over his face. Here he was, going as mad as a hatter, and the first person he “knew” was the most obnoxious non-player character in all of FFO. Every new jubatus character had to spend hours here, completing quests that mostly involved repeatedly rescuing Arbati from his own impatience and poor judgment. If James thought Tina had a temper, Arbati could take anger management lessons from the Hulk. He was so famously annoying, he even had his own internet meme called Angry Cat.

  James didn’t know what Arbati the Angry Cat’s appearance in his dream meant, but he’d already decided he didn’t care. He turned back toward the lake and tried to push through the crowd only to discover that he was trapped. In the few moments he’d been gawking at Arbati, so many jubatus had arrived in the square that what had been the edge of the crowd was now its center, and James was in the middle of it.

  Cursing under his breath, James rocked back on his heels to consider his options. He could try pushing his way through, but he didn’t want to accidentally hurt anyone who might be real. He definitely didn’t want to risk starting a fight. Of course, for all he knew, these “people” were just bushes, but James didn�
�t want to risk hurting others unless he absolutely had to. Looking up at the warrior, who was still banging the drum, James decided to bide his time. If they moved on their own, he’d continue to the lake. If he stayed here, maybe someone would notice him acting crazy and call the cops, saving him from potentially drowning.

  That was as good a plan as any, especially since he didn’t have a choice. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait much longer. The square was already nearly full. When the crowd was packed all the way to the tents, the person James’s delusional vision saw as Arbati stopped drumming and turned around to assist a gray-furred old cat-lady in a feathered headdress onto the war drum’s platform. When she reached the top, James realized with a shock that he knew her, too. It was Gray Fang, the stern old battle-ax of a grandma who served as the spiritual leader of Windy Lake.

  Seeing her sent James’s worry into overdrive. Arbati was the subject of a famous meme, which made him easy to remember, but Gray Fang was just a normal NPC. James only recognized her because his character was a Naturalist, and Gray Fang was the Naturalist class trainer. But seeing Non-Player Characters was a textbook symptom of Leylia’s. He was working himself into a panic again when Gray Fang—or the poor person he’d hallucinated was Gray Fang—swept her hand over the crowd.

  “It has happened at last,” she said when they fell silent. “The Nightmare has finally broken.” She lifted her clawed hands in blessing. “We are free!”

  The crowd roared in reply. Even now that his hearing was more or less back to normal, the noise was deafening. James was rubbing his ears when a potbellied cat-man grabbed his shoulder and started crying on him in joy. James was desperately trying to wiggle free when the elder motioned for silence again.

  “Our world returns to normal, and we are able to move once more,” she said. “But we know not how or why we were imprisoned these last eighty years. We know not where the ‘players’ of the Nightmare came from, where they went, or if they’ll return.”