“Gorm,” Craig told him, “we really need you to wait for us in the forest.”
Gorm looked crestfallen. “My old friends dead…my new friends don’t want me…”
Wayne shook his head in annoyance. “Come on, Eeyore, deal with it.”
“Look,” Jake said, “we’ll bring you some booze if you stay outside and chill.”
“Booze? Gorm like booze.”
“What do you drink, Gorm?”
“Gorm prefer Dragon’s Blood, aged in oak, if available.”
“That’s a bit spendy, man,” Wayne said. “It’s like half-a-plat for a bottle.”
“No way,” Austin said.
Wayne shrugged. “Good stuff, though. I’m actually kind of curious if it tastes any different, now that…” He sniffed the air in the town. “Now that everything is so much more real.”
“Let’s all chip in on a keg of it,” Austin said. “Come on, though. Angie’s waiting.”
……….
She was. And she looked unbelievably hot.
When he had shown her how to create a character he had been pleased to see her gravitate toward the super-sexy human avatars. She’d said she would never actually play the game, but they had spent a fun hour working up a character for her anyway. “Whatever you think is hot,” she had told him. “You’re the one who’d have to look at me all the time. Not that I’m ever going to play that stupid game, though.”
But here she was, standing in front of the Flatulent Unicorn, a low-life bar the boys favored when they were in Freetown. She was human, a cleric and follower of the God of Love. Swirly blonde hair fell down to her waspish waist. Her little mouth formed a puckered moue. Her body was…well, Austin felt like a sexist pig just for ogling it. Curves that showed through her simple, sky blue cleric’s robe. As sexy as could be imagined.
Not that the real Angie wasn’t attractive. No, she certainly was, but in a lithe, athletic way. She had worked as a bike messenger all the way through college while getting her degree and didn’t have an ounce of spare weight on her. She wasn’t completely flat-chested but she was certainly lean. And a bit mean. Sometimes. This babe, though…
“What in God’s name is going on here?” she shrieked at him.
……….
She looked like she wanted to slap him. Again. The first one had smarted, her palm against his cheek. It still stung. He had backed away while Jake had restrained her.
“I finally play this stupid game and now, what, I’m trapped here?”
“Uh…for now…?” Austin said.
“I’m sure it’s just temporary,” Jake added.
“I’m not so sure about that, guys,” Craig said.
Austin gave him a look. “There’s some kind of glitch right now,” he said. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Look,” Jake said, “let’s get a drink and talk about things.”
……….
Wayne kept starting at the girl, even as he tried to ignore what she was saying. He was trying to ignore Austin, too, which was easier. The girl, though, was amazingly hot.
“The funny thing,” Austin said, “is that the day you join the game is the day I was going to quit.”
“Yeah,” Angie said, “funny. Ha ha.”
“Sort of…like an O. Henry story?” Austin ventured. “Kind of?”
They were all seated at a plank table in the Flatulent Unicorn, Austin and Angie on one side, the other three on the other side of the table, trying to give them a bit of privacy. Wayne kept sneaking glances, though. He imagined Jake and Craig were, too.
“Oh, look,” Craig said. “It’s Fred and Jenny.”
“Who the fuck – oww! – who the heck are Fred and Jenny?” Wayne made a face and quaffed more of his ale. “That punishment-for-cursing thing is really getting old.”
“Maybe you should quit cursing,” Craig told him.
“Maybe you should quit breathing.”
“Anyway, Fred and Jenny are in the leather tanning guild.”
“There’s a guild just for leather tanning?”
“Leather is a crucial part of the Morn’a Doon economy,” Craig said. “And its tanning and dyeing are fascinating procedures.”
“Oh yawn.” Wayne scowled at the two leather tanners. Both were middle-aged, round-faced and pleasant looking. “Who does role-playing to be a middle-aged craftsperson?”
“Hey guys, long time no see.”
Craig was on his feet heading toward the couple, who made room for him at their table.
“Different strokes for different folks, man,” Jake told him.
“God I’ve always hated that expression,” Wayne said. “Only dumbasses use it.” He clenched up, waiting for the burst of pain through his body. Nothing. “Apparently ‘dumbass’ isn’t on the list of bad words.”
“Huh,” Jake said. “Dumbass.”
“You’re a dumbass.”
Angie glared at them like something that had crawled out from under the table. Like a piece of chewing gum somebody had stuck under there that suddenly animated and scuttled across the table like a cockroach. Something like that, Wayne decided. He gave her a grin. “Welcome to Morn’a Doon, by the way,” he said.
“Heh. Yeah. Right. God I want to go home.” She finished her flagon of ale. “That’s good, though, I must admit.”
“I’m sure the game’s tech crew will get it all straightened out soon,” Austin said.
“Speaking of which,” Jake said, “have you tried to communicate with tech support?”
Austin got a blank look on his face as he accessed his HUD. “Nothing,” he said at last. “Some of it seems disabled.”
“I know, right?” Jake said. “I tried to order a pizza and kept getting a ‘feature unavailable’ message.”
“Why would you want to order a pizza?” Wayne asked him. “You’re stuck here and wouldn’t even be able to go to the door.”
“Oh gee, I don’t know, like maybe to test the function, dumbass? Maybe to add a message to it, like contact an ambulance to come check on my body in the real world?”
Wayne was silent for a moment. “You’re the dumbass,” he finally said.
“Whoa. Impressive.”
Angie shook her head. “Do you play this game with middle schoolers?”
“I’ll have you know I’m thirty-eight years old, lady,” Wayne told her.
“Now that’s really embarrassing.”
Wayne was about to fire back a retort, then decided to just shut up and drink more.
“Anyway,” Austin said, “don’t get me wrong, babe, I’m really glad to see you, and touched that you wanted to do some game-play with me, but I wish you were out in the real world right now.” He moved toward her to kiss her. It looked like he was aiming for her lips, but the blond bombshell turned her head and he landed a glancing peck on her cheek.
“What’s really weird,” Angie said, “is that you’re even here. Like, I’m not even sure you’re really you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was just talking to you when I signed into the game. You were right in the room with me, helping me get set up with the plug-ins, you know, the electrodes and wires and stuff that makes all this seem real. You were right there.”
“I’ve been here for most of the day,” Austin said.
Angie shook her head. “You played a little bit, then you got booted off. Don’t you remember?”
“Uh, no. I’ve been here all day.”
She half-stood and grabbed him by the arm. She looked really annoyed, Wayne noticed. “How can you say that? When I told you that I was going to join you in the game you were so happy about it, we even –” She caught herself and looked around at the rest of them. “Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.” Austin’s voice rose in anger. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been stuck here most of the day.”
A flash of anger exploded across her face, her perfectly milky complexion glowing bright red. Wayne marveled at her beauty.
This world had gotten so much more real, just in the past few hours. “You asshole,” she sputtered, “we had amazing sex, then you hooked me into the machine.”
“I think I would remember that.”
“Now that’s quite interesting.” Craig had returned to their table. “We need to consider the possibility that both of you are correct.”
“Enlighten us, quilt-man,” Wayne said. He waved to get the attention of a waitress, but the little halflings who ran the inn were busy at the moment. The place was packed. The whole town was packed, actually, with every player in the game looking for a safe place to chill out and figure out what was going on.
And what was going on? Craig had a theory, apparently. Wayne decided he might as well skip the next flagon of ale and pay attention.
“Something has happened,” Craig said. “I don’t know what caused it, and I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but let’s call it Event X. Event X has simultaneously made this roleplaying game we all enjoy seem much more real, and we’re trapped inside it, at least for the moment.”
“Okay,” Austin said. “But Angie tells me I still exist in the real world.”
“Let’s assume Angie is correct. Come on, Austin. You’re smarter than anybody I know, you’re just too close to it because she’s your, I don’t know, fiancé or whatever.”
“Girlfriend,” both Austin and Angie quickly corrected.
“If she just saw you, then you still exist in the real world.”
“But there can’t be two of me,” Austin said, “so one of me must be a copy.”
“Exactly.” Craig usually loved being right about something, but in this case he didn’t look too thrilled. “And which one do you think is most likely the copy? The flesh-and-blood Austin that Angie just saw in the real world?”
“No,” Austin said. “Of course not.” He ran his hands up over his arms, encased in the dark leather of the ranger. “The likely assumption is that this…digital version of me is the copy.”
Craig looked morosely at all of them, one to the next. “My guess is we were all kicked out of the game, and our real selves are out there in the world right now, oblivious to what’s going on in here.”
“Whoa.” Austin fell back on the bench and would have toppled over if Angie hadn’t caught him. “It’s so obvious. Babe, I’m sorry I doubted you. And I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this mess.”
“What is it?” she asked him.
“If Craig’s right…then you were right, I really am out in the real world. All of us are.” He looked from Craig to Wayne to Jake. “Somehow copies of our personalities have been generated in this game, and now we’re stuck here playing it.”
“No,” Angie said, “that’s impossible.”
“Try to log out,” he told her.
Angie’s eyes rolled up into her head for a long minute. Wayne considered ordering more ale as he admired her good looks. H wondered if sex would feel real here now, too. The better angels of his nature got hold of him and told him to not ogle Angie, at least, while he thought such thoughts. He looked around the inn. Plenty of other fish in the sea, he thought. Humans were the norm in Freetown, a spawn point for players who chose to play as a human, and plenty of them were female. There were also more than a few elves, high and wood elves, mostly. Not too many dark elves, like him. Maybe they would consider him exotic. Once you go elf, you can’t help yourself…
“I can’t log out,” Angie said.
“None of us can.” He put his arm around her. “We might be copies, but we feel real. I feel real, and your arm feels real to me.” He bent toward her to try to kiss her again. This time she didn’t turn away from him. Their lips brushed, then locked in passion.
“Jeez,” Wayne said. “Get a room.”
“We think we’re real,” Austin said, pulling away from her, “therefore we are.”
“Like that expression,” Wayne said, “I fish, therefore I am.”
Austin gave him a look. “The cogito, you mean.”
“The what-a-ho?”
“From Descartes.”
“I mean the sign my grandpa used to have in his bathroom. ‘I fish, therefore I am.’ Haven’t you heard that before?”
“It’s from Rene Descartes.”
“Was she a fisherman?”
Jake chimed in for the first time in a while. “This is all just idle speculation, dudes. We don’t know for sure what’s going on. I just know I’m me. I’m real, and I want to figure out how to get home. Nothing against you guys, but I have a bartending shift tonight and I can’t miss work.”
“Whatever,” Austin said. “It’ll be what it’ll be.”
“That’s another thing my grandpa used to say,” Wayne said.
“Was it on a sign in –”
The sound of a loud gong interrupted their conversation, sort of a cross between a church bell and something you might hear outside a palace in a martial arts movie. It gonged again, then a third time. A voice, powerful and godly, burst through the sudden stillness of the inn: “YOUR GOD WOULD SPEAK TO YOU!” The voice rumbled like the Harley Davidson engines of a biker gang from hell. But louder. Wayne put his hands over his ears, briefly worried that he looked like a candy-ass, then saw that most everybody else was doing likewise. “COME AND HEAR THE COMMANDS OF YOUR LORD!”
“Weird,” Craig said.
Jake got up. “I guess we should go outside.”
……….
Austin clutched at Angie protectively as they made their way outside along with the throng of patrons in the inn. He told himself it was to protect her, but the human contact comforted himself, to be honest. This was all getting a bit overwhelming, and now with her presence here, he had more than just himself to worry about.
The large central square of Freetown was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the denizens of this world. Most were human, but a fair number of elves, dwarves, and gnomes stared up at the spectacle floating in the sky above them: a baby, maybe six months old. It floated on a cloud and was surrounded by a nimbus of light.
“Huh,” Wayne said. “Wasn’t it a fetus last time we saw it? Like the one in that science fiction movie?”
“It looked like any old fetus,” Craig said.
“No, 2001, that movie. It looks just like that fetus.”
“Dude,” Jake said, “all fetuses look alike.”
“Let it go,” Austin told them. “That’s just the context Wayne has for fetus references.”
“Whatever,” Wayne said. “Anyway, they grow up fast.”
“SILENCE!” the baby god bellowed. “THERE WILL BE A Q&A AT THE END OF MY SPEECH!” About a third of the square’s occupants fell to the ground, their hands over their ears.
Wayne raised his hand. “Could you turn the volume down just a bit?”
The infantile god glared at him. Austin wondered if Wayne was about to get burned to a crisp, or his digital data disincorporated, or something.
“FINE,” the baby said. Its voice was still loud, but manageable. “Fine. I am the new god of Morn’a Doon. LOOK UPON ME AND TREMBLE.”
Austin heard Wayne giggle, then heard Wayne stifling a giggle. “I mean, it’s just a baby,” he heard Wayne whisper.
“It’s a baby that fries your butt every time you say the F word,” Jake told him.
“True that, I guess.”
“I shall be the principal God of all my people,” the baby continued, “though you may continue to honor your other gods as your race and class demand of you…in a secondary fashion.”
There was a single ogre in the crowd, Austin noticed. He was easy enough to notice because he stood a good two feet taller than anybody else. Very few ogres came to Freetown, partly because their own mud villages were half a world away, but mostly because their faction rating with humans sucked. Most players who chose to be an ogre did so knowing they would rarely get to travel to human towns, as the guards would kill them on sight. It was true in reverse, too, that few human could travel to an ogre vi
llage, but there was little reason to want to visit the mud-and-wattle collection of lice-infested shacks that was an ogre village. The dude playing the ogre, though, must have done some major faction improvement to get into Freetown. He probably completed a major quest, rescuing some human princess or something. At the moment, the ogre caught Austin’s eye because he was waving his sword over his head and shouting at the god:
“Never!” he shouted. “Never will I honor any above the great war god Kray-Kun! I call upon all of his followers to join me in doing battle against this upstart god…one that looks like he still sucks at his mother’s teat!”
The baby god was slowly turning bright red in the face. “This is not going to be good,” Craig muttered.
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “As a warrior, I follow the war god Kray-Kun. Maybe this is what the new patch is all about. Some big cosmic struggle between the war god and this new upstart god.” He shrugged. “Could be kind of fun, actually.”
“I don’t think so,” Craig muttered. As he muttered the words, a lightning bolt burst from the floating image of the baby god in the sky. It burst against the ground like a Tomahawk missile, an explosion of light, heat and dirt that knocked Austin to his knees. He fell on Angie, trying to protect her.
“Get off,” she mumbled, spitting dirt out of her mouth. Austin pushed himself away and to his feet, looking over at the scorched gash of earth where the ogre had once stood shouting his defiance. He heard voices from the vicinity: “He’s dead…” “Blown to bits…” “Didn’t get a chance to defend himself at all…”
“I WILL TAKE QUESTIONS NOW!”
The god’s voice was back to being ridiculously loud again. Austin covered his ears and grimaced. Angie did likewise, pressing against him.
Wayne raised a hand. “Uh, do you have a name?”
“MY TRUE NAME WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU HUMANS TO COMPREHEND, MUCH LESS PRONOUNCE.”
“We really need to call you something,” Wayne said. “You know, when we’re saying our prayers to you and sh… – and stuff.”
“THE COMPLEXITY THAT IS MY APELLATION CAN BEST BE SUMMARIZED IN A SINGLE WORD BY THE SOUND UNIT…JERRY. YOU MAY CALL ME JERRY.”
The name rippled through the crowd like a wave along the seashore. “Jerry…” “Hail Jerry…” “All hail Lord Jerry…”
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