Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  The way the grandmotherly old cheetah said “players” made James’s ears flatten. It wasn’t just the hatred in her voice. It was the emotion that word drew from the crowd. All around him, jubatus were flexing their clawed hands and flashing their sharp teeth. Even the children looked murderous, snarling around their baby fangs. Suddenly, it didn’t matter if this was a delusion. The crowded square was now somewhere James very much did not want to be. But as he started to push his way through the mob, a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the air.

  “Player!”

  He, and everyone else, whirled around to see a tall old jubatus at the back of the square, pointing a shaking claw at James. “I see you! You’re not one of us! You’re a player! Player!”

  The jubatus around him scurried away, leaving James standing alone in a widening circle. The entire crowd was looking at him now, hundreds of slitted cat eyes tightening in rage. Then as if answering an unheard signal, the angry mob surged toward him, their clawed hands grabbing his clothes, his fur, his skin—every part they could.

  “Monster!” they screamed. “Slaver!”

  “I’m not!” James cried, putting his hands up. “I didn’t—”

  A rock smashed into his head. James staggered back, blinking as hot blood began to trickle through his fur. As it dripped into his eyes, he noticed that the strange glowing streamers that had haunted his vision since this madness had started were getting brighter, their curling lengths twitching above him like a rope tossed to a drowning man.

  Desperate and terrified, James reached up to grab the closest one—a gray-white tendril that glowed like the inside of a cloud. His fingers passed right through it—no surprise there since this whole thing was a hallucination—but what was surprising was that the moment he touched it, James knew what the glowing ribbon was. Lightning. He couldn’t explain how even to himself, but something deep inside him was certain the floating light was lightning. Air magic in lightning form to be specific, and he knew how to use it.

  Clutching a hand to his chest, James pulled up the deep-blue mana from inside himself. It was the same motion he’d used to cast spells in the game, but unlike every other command he’d tried, this one worked. When he felt his own magic rising, he reached up to grab the ribbon of lightning again. This time, with his hands filled with his power, the white light stuck fast to his fingers, letting him yank it down into his fists. It was the same motion he used to cast lightning spells in FFO, a motion he’d done a thousand times. Bright-white electricity arced from his fingers as James brought the power together, and the attacking crowd began to back away.

  James smiled as they retreated. He was wreathed in lightning now, and the power was glorious but also comfortingly familiar. He’d never been this close to it, but he’d played long enough to recognize the shape of the electricity arcing between his hands. It was chain lightning, the Naturalist class’s staple attack spell.

  His smile turned into a triumphant grin. As he was a level eighty in the low-level Windy Lake, one spell would be enough to kill anyone in the crowd. Even better, chain lightning jumped between targets, and the jubatus were nicely clumped together. With this kind of target density, the magic that was already in his hands could devastate the entire square, leaving him free to run. If he could get to the lake, maybe this horrible hallucination would finally end, then he could apologize for whatever the hell had actually happened here.

  The finished spell was throbbing in his hands, and James decided that the warrior holding the rock that was red with his blood would be a fine opening target. But as he began the motion to let the spell go, people turned and started to flee.

  An old jubatus lady scrambled backward on all fours, tears streaking down her dusty face. Beside her, a man grabbed his young son and turned around, shielding the boy from James with his body. Others simply ran, crashing into the people behind them in their rush to escape. Even though he knew it was a dream, the fear on display in front of him was so real, James felt it echoing in his body, making him wonder for the first time if maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t a hallucination at all.

  Sweat drenched his fur as he clutched the magic tight, fighting the spell as he scrambled to think things through. This couldn’t actually be the game. He could smell his blood and the hot hate of the mob in the dusty air. Feel the intense, throbbing pain from the rock that had struck his head. None of that was possible in FFO or in life as he knew it. Pain was common enough, but the wild lashing of his tail and the instinct that kept his catlike ears flat against his skull were utterly alien. Even with Leylia’s, it didn’t seem possible that he could dream entirely new sensations. No theory he’d come up with could properly explain what was happening, and if he couldn’t explain it, then James needed to make a decision fast. The lightning in his hands had to go somewhere soon, but if he released it without knowing the consequences, there was a chance that “target density” might translate into real lives. Because if this wasn’t the game and it wasn’t a lucid dream, the only explanation left was that this was real, which meant he was about to become a mass murderer.

  That was a risk he couldn’t stomach, so James thrust his hands into the air, loosing the lightning he’d built into the clear blue sky. The tree-trunk-sized bolt left his hands with a thunderclap that flattened the crowd. Then there was complete stillness. No one moved. No one shouted. Everyone, James included, stared fearfully at each other, waiting to see what came next. The standoff was still going when weakness crashed into James like a wall.

  He staggered, clutching his chest as his head began to spin. He was worried he’d damaged something inside him with the lightning when he remembered that he’d taken off all his gear before he’d logged out last time and hadn’t yet tried to reequip anything. Chain lightning didn’t normally take much of his mana, but without his magical armor and staff, one casting was enough to drain him nearly dry.

  James closed his eyes with a wince. That had to be it. He wasn’t hurt. He was low on mana, yet another sign that things weren’t what he’d thought. Nervously, he looked around at the crowd he’d just spared, debating if he should run for the lake anyway. He was already edging toward the scent of the water when a yell broke the silence.

  “Enough!”

  The terrified crowd parted as the tall cat-warrior, Arbati, leaped off the drum platform. There was no hint of fear or hesitation as the jubatus marched toward him. James was opening his mouth to say… something. He wasn’t sure what, but before he could get a word out, the warrior decked him in the jaw with a gauntleted fist.

  The stinging blow smashed him straight into the dirt. He was trying to push back up when the warrior kicked him in the ribs.

  “Bring me rope and a sealing mask!” Arbati called, planting his boot on James’s neck to keep him down.

  Reeling from the attacks and still weakened from the spell, James didn’t even manage to get his hands up before someone brought Arbati what he’d asked for. The warrior rolled James onto his stomach and tied his hands behind his back with what felt like a strip of leather. The binding bit painfully into his wrists, but things got even worse when the elder jubatus, Gray Fang, shuffled down from the drum platform and began smearing James’s face with what felt like cold mud.

  It was so sudden, James didn’t even think to struggle as the old lady smashed the dirt into his fur. He’d never seen anything like this in the game before, but her rough claws painted his face with practiced ease, layering the mixture on until only his eyes, nose, and mouth were left uncovered. When she was finished, the old Naturalist reached up to snag a handful of the glowing magical lights James had been watching all morning.

  She wound the magic between her wrinkled fingers like a cat’s cradle then pressed the strands into the drying mud on James’s face. When she was finished, the mask hardened into something much stronger than clay, and the colorful floating lights faded from James’s vision. He was still blinking at the loss when Arbati hoisted him off the ground using only one arm.

/>   “Our revenge starts with this one!” the head warrior proclaimed, holding James up like a trophy. “How shall we kill it?”

  “Drawn and quartered!” a woman yelled.

  “Stake it out to dry!” cried another.

  “Skin him alive!” screamed an otherwise adorable little girl with big, poofy ears.

  James shook his head frantically, but the mask prevented him from fully opening his mouth, so he couldn’t speak loudly enough to be heard. He was frantically kicking at Arbati’s legs in a last-ditch effort to get free when Gray Fang straightened up.

  “We will not be killing this one,” she said, dusting the dried mud from her fingers. “At least not yet.”

  The crowd roared in fury at that, but Gray Fang silenced them with a hiss.

  “I hear your anger,” she said when they’d quieted. “I would also like nothing more than to see his blood on the ground. But we know nothing of why we were imprisoned, who the players are, or if it will happen again. I have eighty years of questions this one might be able answer. We must know more before we execute him, if only for our peace of mind.”

  The other villagers growled, but Gray Fang’s word must have been law, because no one spoke again as Arbati threw James over his shoulder and carried him toward the lodge.

  “That’s enough anger for now,” Gray Fang said as James was hauled away. “We are still free this day! Go back to your families and homes. Warriors, see if there are any other players hiding in the village and bring them to me.”

  The crowd lowered their heads and began to disperse. Once they were moving, Gray Fang turned and followed the warrior into the large wooden building at the village’s center, where Arbati had already hurled James as hard as he could onto the board floor.

  “This player greatly angers you, doesn’t he?” Gray Fang said as she closed the door flap.

  “More than I have the words for, Revered Grandmother.”

  The old woman placed her hand on the warrior’s shoulder. “The Nightmare is over, my child. That is what matters. We are finally free to deal with these monsters on our own terms. A path that was denied us all these years.”

  “For how long, though?” Arbati growled, never taking his eyes off James. “I’m as happy as any to no longer be stuck in place, reciting the same foolish words about gnolls and undead to every new ‘hero’ who walks into town. But seeing this one still here makes me worry our reprieve is only temporary. How many more players are hiding in our midst? Could they bring the Nightmare back?”

  Gray Fang nodded. “Those uncertainties are why we must use this one to get answers. You have more reason to hate the players than any other in our village, but you cannot take your revenge yet.”

  Arbati’s whole face ticced at that. James winced as well. He was pretty sure they were talking about the scripted event where Arbati was captured, tortured, and if no players arrived in time to save him, sacrificed. The event had run once a day in the game, resetting every morning with Arbati back in position to hand out quests whether he was saved or not. It was one of the repeating story scenarios FFO was famous for, but now that he was facing the warrior’s thousand-yard stare, James had to wonder what it would be like to be a helpless victim of some quest writer’s plot, forced to repeat the same mistakes over and over, to feel the pain of your own death every single day.

  It would certainly explain the mix of pain and fury on the warrior’s face. In fact, the more James watched the two jubatus interacting with each other, and reacting to him, the more certain he became that this had never been a dream at all. Now that the possibility of everything being real had been breached, it felt more and more like that was the only explanation. It sounded crazy even in his mind, but if he really was here and FFO was no longer just a game, then he needed to get serious about his situation before Gray Fang made good on her promise to kill him.

  Taking a deep breath, James pulled his eyes off his captors and started looking for an exit. Like the tent he’d woken up in, the Naturalists’ Lodge was much bigger and far more ornate than he remembered. The large, open wooden building was lavishly decorated with paintings, masks, hides, and antlers. The layout was also different from how it had been in game. Before, the lodge had just been a big room where the Naturalist trainers stood waiting for players. Now, it looked like a place where people might actually live. There were sleeping rooms off to the sides for the elder and her apprentices as well as a kitchen and a small common area. He even spotted an outhouse through one of the building’s rear windows, which almost made him laugh. All those times he’d joked about there being no proper bathrooms in FFO, and there they were. He was still reconciling all the changes when Arbati grabbed him again.

  There was no throwing over the shoulder this time. The warrior simply tossed him onto the rug in the middle of the ring of pillows at the lodge’s center. Gray Fang took a seat on one of them, arranging her graying tail across her lap while Arbati took the pillow directly in front of James. He expected them to get right to his interrogation, but surprisingly, neither the elder nor her warrior grandson said a word. They both just sat on their pillows, staring into space as though they were searching for something he couldn’t see.

  “I guess the others aren’t coming back,” Arbati said at last. “I’d hoped that when the land returned to normal, they’d reappear, but…”

  “We’ve been free for less than an hour,” Gray Fang reminded him, pulling a long-stemmed pipe from inside her robes. “It’s too soon to give up on our vanished families yet. Perhaps they’ve respawned somewhere in the world and are still making their way here.”

  “‘Respawned,’” the warrior repeated, lips curling in a sneer. “I wish you would not use the players’ words, Grandmother.”

  “There’s no other way to say it,” Gray Fang said, lighting her pipe with an ember from the nearby brazier. “Our language has no words for what they did to us, so we must use theirs. It’s the only way we’ll get answers.”

  “But we know so little!” Arbati cried. “Lilac is among the missing! The questl—” James thought he heard “questline,” but Arbati struggled for another way. “The situation with the gnolls that started with the Nightmare might still be happening. If that’s true, then my sister is trapped in the middle of it.”

  “We can know nothing until we have more information,” the elder said, her gentle features growing savage as her yellow eyes slid to James. “We’ll start with this one. The mask seals its magic, but I saw this player in our village many times during the Nightmare. It was level eighty then, as powerful as they get.” She smiled. “It will know things.”

  James’s ears pressed flat against his head. He certainly didn’t feel powerful with no weapon, no armor, and the mask binding his spells, which he couldn’t cast anyway since he was still desperately low on mana. All he had was his white linen undershirt and the leather pants that all jubatus characters started with by default. He didn’t even have his backpack. He didn’t even have shoes.

  Growling, Arbati rose from his pillow and prowled forward, drawing a long knife from his belt as he leaned down to peer into James’s face. “Can it speak through the mask?”

  Gray Fang nodded, the bone beads of her headdress clacking together, and Arbati frowned. “Perhaps it doesn’t understand us anymore?”

  “Try English,” Gray Fang suggested, causing both James’s and Arbati’s eyebrows to shoot up.

  “How did you know I can speak the players’ language?” the warrior demanded.

  “Because no family of mine would be stupid enough to stand surrounded by the enemy for eighty years and not learn something useful,” the elder replied matter-of-factly.

  Arbati made a huffing noise and turned back to James. Given all the talk of talking, James was pretty hopeful about finding a diplomatic way out of this. Or at least, he was until the cat-warrior casually stabbed him in the leg with his knife.

  “Ow!” James cried, wiggling away. “Stop, dude! I understand you!”

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nbsp; A look of supreme disappointment crossed Arbati’s face, but at least he pulled the knife back. “What is your name, player?”

  “James Anderson,” James said automatically, struggling into a sitting position.

  “Lies!” Arbati hissed. “I know you! You are the Naturalist known as ‘Heal-a-hoop,’ and you have squatted in our village for the last eighty years!”

  “I’m not lying!” James said frantically. “James is my real name. ‘Heal-a-hoop’ is just the name of this character. It was supposed to be a joke!”

  Arbati’s scowl deepened. “A joke?” When James nodded, the warrior crossed his arms over his chest. “Explain.”

  James looked down at the rug, scrambling to think of how to explain a pun involving a toy that didn’t even exist in this world to a giant, angry cat-man. But while most of him was now convinced this was all real, the hope that it wasn’t hadn’t fully died yet. There was still a chance he had Leylia’s and this wasn’t some bizarre real version of FFO at all. For all he knew, Angry Cat there was actually a police officer trying to restrain a crazy person in a park, which meant James still had a shot.

  “Look, dude,” he said, trying to sound calm. “I’m hallucinating real bad.” His voice choked. “If I’m making any sense to you, can you please take me to the hospital? Or call 911? Because I need serious help.”

  He finished with a pitiful look, but Arbati seemed angrier than ever.

  “More lies!” the cat-warrior roared, grabbing James by his shirt. “You seek to deceive us so transparently, demon? You claim madness, yet you plainly speak the language of Wind and Grass. Now tell us who and what you are before I make you bleed!”

  He brandished his knife to finish the threat, but James could only gape at him.

  “Wait,” he said at last. “You mean I’m not speaking English right now?”