by Hondo Jinx
“That’s easy for you to—”
“Have a look at this, tough guy,” Wulfgar interrupted.
A gigantic scroll appeared, hovering in the air five feet away, and unfurled like a window shade drawn by an invisible hand.
Dan was looking at a character sheet.
His character sheet.
Name: Dan the Barbarian
Strength: 18(92)
Intelligence: 9
Wisdom: 8
Dexterity: 17
Constitution: 17
Charisma: 16
Strength bonuses: + 2 attacking / +5 damage
Dexterity: +6 armor rating, unless bulky armor is worn; +3 initiative, reaction, and missile attacks
Constitution: +6 hit points per level
Dan grinned. These awesome stats had been taken straight from his character sheet for Wulfgar Skull-Smasher. He was stronger than an NFL fullback, super agile, crazy healthy, and way more charismatic than he had been in the real world.
He saw only one problem. “How am I supposed to handle college with an intelligence of 9 and a wisdom of 8?”
“Not my problem,” Wulfgar said. “Besides, don’t flatter yourself. You weren’t exactly the sharpest sword in the armory back in the real world.”
“Hey,” Dan said, “I was pretty smart. In third grade, my teacher said—”
“Save it, dummy,” Wulfgar said. “We’re almost out of time.”
Dan went back to reading the sheet.
Class: Barbarian
Level: 2
Hit points: 36
Experience: 6023
Alignment: Chaotic good
“Chaotic good, huh?” he said. “I’d always wondered about that.”
“Hurry up and read, or you’re going to run out of time,” Wulfgar’s voice said.
Dan kept reading.
Barbarian saving throw bonuses: +4 vs. poison; +3 vs. paralysis, death magic, petrification, and polymorph; +2 versus magical rods, staffs, or wands; +2 versus breath weapons.
Primary barbarian abilities:
Scale cliffs and climb trees
Hide in wooded settings
Surprise opponents
Prevent blind attacks
Jumping
Detect illusion
Detect magic
Leadership
Secondary barbarian abilities:
Wilderness craft and survival
Primitive first aid
Hunting and tracking
Tertiary barbarian abilities:
Long-distance running
Small boat building and use
Imitate animal sounds
Snare and trap building
Sexual stamina
Native territory: The Endless Mountains
Weapons of proficiency:
Hand axe
Spear
Knife
Two-handed sword
Battle Axe
Short bow
“Not bad,” Dan said, feeling pretty good about his new abilities.
“Yeah, don’t get too excited, dummy,” Wulfgar said. “You move your lips when you read now.”
“Really?” Dan said, trying to remember if he had actually done that or if Wulfgar was just messing with him. “Are you—”
But then the scroll disappeared with a pop, time came rushing back in, and Dan had just enough time to reposition himself before Holly was pulling his lips down to meet hers.
14
Old Memories of a New Past
Holly was right. The second time was better than the first. The third time was even better.
Around midnight, they finally left Holly’s apartment to get some food and meet her friend. “It’s a good thing we’re going,” Dan said. “I’m so hungry, I might eat you.”
“Don’t tease me,” Holly said, and stuck out her tongue.
Winding through the back streets, they held hands and talked about their lives.
Holly’s family lived in the forests just outside State College. She was excited to be here, living in town and experiencing college life, but she missed the woods and her family, especially her little sister, who was so crazy for the forest that she hadn’t even started druidic training yet.
“Lily is an absolute savage,” she said. “She’s out in the forest all the time. We won’t see her for days. Weeks, even.”
Holly laughed, and Dan could tell that she missed her sister. This realization made him like Holly even more.
“Lily disappears into the woods,” Holly said. “She can spend days scouting around, listening to the wind and the streams, studying the patterns in moss or the brindle of a stone outcropping. She speaks with faeries and tree folk and every animal she meets. Her hair is always such a wild tangle and jagged, too, from where I’ve had to cut out burs, and she always smells of flowers and honey and creek water.”
“Sounds a lot like my little sister,” Dan said. At eleven, Hannah still loved chasing butterflies more than chasing boys. Or at least old-world Hannah had. What would she be like now that she came from barbarian stock?
A rush of hope flooded him.
What about Kip? In this new world, could…
But something in him hardened. No. Even here, dead was dead. His brother was gone.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Holly asked.
“Northeast of here,” Dan said. “The Endless Mountains.”
“That’s wild country, right?”
As Dan talked, a rush of brilliant images flooded his head. In them, he recognized steep green hillsides, beautiful valleys dotted with farms, and the muddy Susquehanna, all of which were familiar from his old-world life. But new images, real as memories, showed him other sights, too.
He remembered a lakeside village in autumn. Clustered tents, smoking fires, and the good smell of freshly killed game roasting on the spit. Men, women, and children mingling, sharing food, and laughing, everyone well-fed and happy. His people, the Free.
In the next memory, a very young Dan moved slowly through a forest muffled in snow. His stomach growled, and his breath huffed out before him like the ghost of warmer, more bountiful days.
Beside him, silent as owls, stalked his father, uncle, and several neighbors. All of them were bearded, winter-drawn, and feral looking, dressed in animal hides and armed with spears, moving slowly through the forest, following a bright red blood trail turning pink atop a path of churned snow.
His father raised a fist, and the men stopped, spears at the ready. Then a tremendous roar shattered the silence, and in the memory, Dan raised his own spear and offered a barbaric battle cry in his high-pitched boy’s voice, as a massive black bear charged out of the briars, attacking the men.
In the final flash of new memory, Dan was a little older, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, drifting down the Susquehanna early one morning in a small canoe he had helped his father build. He could sense his father in the canoe behind him, paddling softly as they drifted through banks of heavy fog coming off the river.
Then Dan spotted the savage, a male, standing in the shallows thirty feet away at the river’s edge, still as a statue, holding a sharpened stick overhead, trying to spear fish.
A river Pict.
The Pict was short and barrel-chested with long, wiry arms and bowed, muscular legs, his flesh the reddish-brown of river clay. He was naked, save for a twisted rag of breechcloth and a necklace of colorful beads obviously obtained from the men of the White Fortress upriver, where wealthy gnolls gave such trinkets in trade for scalps of the Free.
The Pict’s face was primitive and brutish, the head blunt and squat, the hair a wild thatch of unruly black bristles, the eyes small and dark and narrowed in concentration, the nose small and pig-like, the mouth a long, wide slash drooping open like the mouth of a catfish.
In the memory, Dan’s father whispered to him, the canoe veered silently toward shore, and Dan rose to stand in the prow, a movement so smooth and practiced that the boat didn’t even wobble. He drew
back his spear, and…
“That was the first man I ever killed,” he said, realizing that he’d been talking for a long time, telling her all about these past events that he was only now discovering. “My father told me that this Pict was the one who had killed my brother, Kip.” He shrugged and laughed emptily. “My dad told me the same thing every time we saw a Pict after that. That’s the one who killed your brother.”
Holly gave his hand a squeeze. “Oh, Dan. I’m sorry. I know where you’re coming from, though. Sadly.” And she surprised him then, explaining that she, too, had lost a brother, her oldest sibling, Nettle, who’d been killed by slavers in the forest near her grove. Nettle’s death had turned her other brother, Briar, into a bloodthirsty killing machine who lived for revenge.
Dan comforted Holly, and in that quiet moment, he felt something strange, their shared tragedy drawing them even closer.
“How did you turn out to be such a great guy,” Holly asked, “growing up in such a brutal place?”
Dan laughed. “Brutal? Who said it was brutal?” And then he realized then that he missed his family and the Endless Mountains, violence and all. Just like that, he ached with homesickness for a place he’d never actually been.
Or have I?
What are all of those memories if I’ve never been there?
Am I still Dan? Or am I living now inside a different Dan?
But then he pushed these strange thoughts out of his head. They were heavy and blurred over with something like river fog. Besides, why should he bother thinking when he was walking beside the most beautiful girl in the world and about to fill his stomach with something good to eat?
Then, up ahead in the darkness, he spotted a lovely sight, glowing in the night like an altar.
“Hey,” Holly said, tugging him to the left, “the Diner is this way.”
“Later,” he said, eyes locked on the bright arches glowing golden in the darkness. “I’m getting a Big Mac first.”
Thank Crom, McDonald’s existed here, too!
Drunks packed the sidewalk outside, laughing and shouting, friends shoving friends, all of them stealing sideways glances, looking for action.
Some of the drunks started looking their way, grinning and whispering.
“Let’s just come back tomorrow,” Holly whispered as they drew closer. “This place isn’t worth the trouble this late at night.”
“We’ll just keep to ourselves,” Dan said, meaning it. “I really want a Big Mac and a Coke.”
Then a rakishly handsome, foppish warrior type with finely sculpted muscles and an expensive looking brass breastplate emblazoned with frat letters, stepped in front of them, leering at Holly. “Hey, sugar tits,” he said, “is it true that grey elves have the tightest—”
Whatever he’d meant to say, he never got it out. Getting knocked the fuck out tends to make finishing disrespectful sentences difficult.
Dan caught him with a two-punch combination: a blistering right hand that nailed him square in the nose, shattering it and putting him to sleep on his feet, and a sharp left hook that landed a fraction of a second later, snapping the asshole’s jaw before he could even drop to the sidewalk.
Dan opened the door for Holly.
Behind him, confusion burbled. Then he heard the sounds of several swords rasping free of their scabbards.
Dan turned and saw a semicircle of jumpy-looking frat boys eyeing him, swords in hand.
None of them were laughing now, none of them were saying shit to him or his girl, and none of them were stepping forward. They were privileged kids, sent here by wealthy parents to party and get laid and earn degrees that all boiled down to making money in towns and strongholds. Guys like them swaggered all over campus, barking and bluffing, feeling safe in their numbers, but they couldn’t piece together a set of balls between the lot of them.
With no expression on his face, Dan said, “I’m going inside to have a burger. If you guys are still here when I come back out, I’ll kill every last motherfucking one of you.”
15
The Diner
Inside, Holly rolled her eyes. “Barbarian.”
“I didn’t want any trouble,” he said, “but nobody talks to my girl like that.”
“Oh?” Holly said with a playful look in her purple eyes. “Is that what I am, your girl?”
“Yup,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders, “and you love it.”
Holly laughed and slipped her arm around his waist. “Works for me–especially if that means you’ll buy me a six piece chicken McNugget and a small order of fries.”
“Done,” he said, “but let’s just share a large fry.”
For a silver piece and two coppers, he got their food and a couple of 32-ounce beers, which came in familiar McDonald’s soft drink cups.
They laughed and flirted through the meal. Holly’s small foot kept running up the inside of Dan’s leg.
“Keep fooling around like that,” he said, gathering their trash, “and I’ll throw you over my shoulder, take you home, and give you the barbarian special.”
“Big talker,” she laughed. “We’ll see who ends up on top after I get you back to my lair.”
They tossed their trash and started out the door. Dan scanned the street through the glass. No surprise. The punks had cleared out. He held the door for Holly.
“Thanks,” she said. “Before we head home and I take advantage of you, come with me to the Diner. My friend is going to be bummed.”
“Why?” he asked, taking her hand and heading west down College Ave.
“Remember that guy who bailed when those jerks tried to kidnap me?”
Dan nodded.
“He was on our Campus Quest team,” she said. “He was supposed to be our fighter, if you can believe it.”
Dan snorted. “Some fighter. Guess he didn’t want to scratch his fancy armor. What’s Campus Quest?”
“Ha ha, very funny,” Holly said sarcastically. Then she did a double take. “Wait, you’re serious? I mean, I know you’re a barbarian, but everybody knows about Campus Quest.”
Now it was Dan’s turn to roll his eyes. “Enough already. Just tell me what it is.”
“It’s the biggest event of the year,” she said. Then a sly smile came onto her face. “I assumed that you were already on a Campus Quest team.”
Dan shook his head.
Holly’s smile grew wider. “Well then, my big, strong barbarian, are you up for an adventure?”
As they strolled, she told him all about Campus Quest.
On opening day, hundreds of four-person teams competed in adventure challenges on the HUB Lawn. Only the best teams qualified and stayed in the competition.
There were four stages in all, each stage harder than the last. The finals were a really big deal, held at Beaver Stadium, with 80,000 screaming fans in attendance and the whole thing televised on national TV.
“All right,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”
Holly gave him a serious look. “It’s dangerous,” she said. “Especially if you make it past day one. People die.”
Dan shrugged. “I’m in.”
Part of him was aware that this was all pretty coincidental, Holly happening to need a fighter right when he entered her life. The timing of it all was straight out of T&T, where most adventures started with incredibly ham-fisted coincidences.
Honestly, though, Dan didn’t give a shit. He was up for an adventure and definitely up for hanging with Holly.
“Cool,” she said, smiled brightly, and pulled his head down to give him a long, slow, sweet kiss.
Then they reached State College’s iconic, all-night hang-out spot, Ye Olde College Diner, famous far and wide for its delicious sticky buns or “stickies.”
Dan’s mouth watered, just thinking of stickies. He’d only come to the Diner once before.
Whenever Dan’s friends invited him, he begged off, making excuses, too embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t afford stickies, with or without ice cr
eam. As a dishwasher, he scarfed down free food at the Nittany Lion Inn. Beyond that, he had a meagerly funded dining hall meal card and enough money for ramen noodles. That was about it.
He hoped that his remaining silver piece and handful of coppers would cover the bill. With that thought, he suppressed a growl.
Here he was, transported to a fantasy world, and he was still worried about money. He hated being poor. Hated not being able to get a sticky or go to the Creamery or buy one of the nice Penn State sweatshirts that everybody wore around campus.
Well, he told himself as they entered the Diner, you don’t have to be poor here. In a T&T world, you can do something about it.
The Diner was way different in this new world.
Beyond the expected glass display case and lunch counter, the place was normal enough, stretching away in familiar fashion, a narrow establishment with booths lining both walls and the smells of sweet sticky buns and percolating coffee filling the air.
But everything else was completely different.
The lights were turned down low, and a haze of multicolored smoke hung above the booths, many of which had hookahs in plain view atop their tables. A mix of humans, elves, half-orcs, and dwarves filled the booths, most of them hunched forward in dark cloaks, whispering conspiratorially. Dan saw the Diner’s signatures stickies, most of them paired with scoops of vanilla ice cream and tall glasses of dark beer.
“Looking for your friend?” a smiling hostess asked Holly.
Holly said that she was, and the hostess told them to follow her. As they walked down the narrow, smoky aisle between the booths, eyes flicked up, quick as daggers, to study them. Cagey, suspicious eyes.
“There she is,” the hostess said, pointing. “Back booth, as usual.”
Holly thanked her, and they kept walking.
A young woman sat in the last booth, wearing a dark cloak. The hood covered her face, but she was definitely female. That much was obvious, based on her shapely figure, which was clad in a low-cut, skintight black leather bodysuit.