Dream

by RW Krpoun

  “Yes. Those are their symbols, and an…unsummoning, so to speak. When all five have been defeated, the marks on your arms will send you back to your realm.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Jeff spoke up. “Five people from our world have entered this…realm, and we have to what, kill them in order to get home?’

  “Exactly.”

  “Why us?”

  “Aside from the justice of it, the five who came here have powers which make them very difficult for natives of this realm to defeat. Those powers are ineffective against those from their own realm.”

  “What powers?” Shad headed off Jeff’s next question.

  “Your…recent beliefs have imposed an order on the powers of our world. We adjusted, because it affected all equally, and generations have now lived under it. Your intruders…cheated, for lack of a better term. They came into our realm with powers that none of our kind have ever achieved. We ensured there would be no more, but that does nothing to stop those already here. So it was decided to bring in more outlanders, marking them so that they might depart when the deed is completed. Because we…repaired our own prison, those we bring in must conform to the new ways of our land, but they are still immune to the powers of the intruders.”

  “We’re not the first,” Fred announced with his usual abruptness.

  “No.” Yorrian’s smile was hard. “And some of the others have died. In truth, there were seven intruders who came here seven years ago, but only five now remain. If you wish to return home you will end the lives of those five. If you refuse, well, you are subject to the same powers as are we, and pose no threat to our realm. I chose you because unlike the others you were all warriors in your realm.”

  “How much time do we have?” Shad asked grimly.

  “The rest of your lives. If you do not eliminate them you will remain here. If you die here, you are dead.”

  “So I take it we’re on our own? No help from you?”

  “It is, as I said, a problem your realm created.”

  “No real point in our trying then.” Shad folded his arms. “We’ll have to hike all over this world, so by the time we get back home our lives will have been ruined.”

  “Not so. Time passes differently here-a lunar cycle here counts no more than an hour in your realm.”

  “Campaign hook,” Fred said a bit smugly.

  “Bite me,” Shad shook his head, trying to think. “So that was what we heard in the library before we were in the hut.”

  “Yes. None of you listened.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Derek abruptly announced. “If other gamer groups were suddenly going missing we would have heard about it. Where we are from news travels very fast.”

  Yorrian smiled, and not in a pretty way. “I doubt news travels sufficiently fast for you to have heard, but in any case an outlander’s body goes home if they die. Not right away, and I suspect it looks different than what actually happened to them here.” She rose and tossed a thin stack of folded parchment bound in a green silk ribbon on the ground at their feet. “There is what you will need to know. We will be watching you.” A sudden dazzling flash hid her, a single strobe-pulse of light, and when it faded she was gone.

  “What….the…hell,” Jeff said slowly.

  “A strip map, and five sealed notes,” Derek examined the packet. He pushed up his sleeve. “Yep. Each letter is sealed with a mark that matches a tattoo.”

  “Dossiers,” Shad sighed and walked over to the stump. “So: seven came through. Five are left. We have to kill them to get home. Good news is, we can spend a couple years doing it and still not miss work. Bad news is, we could easily get killed.”

  “I’m not sure about being somebody’s assassin,” Jeff observed. “Iraq was one thing, but this is different.”

  “Maybe,” Shad shrugged. “Let’s find out what they’re like. If we have five would-be Stalins, I’m OK with it.”

  “Fair point,” Jeff conceded. “I never lost any sleep over the Iraqi shooters we dropped.”

  “We have a problem,” Fred muttered.

  “You think? Just one?” Jeff shook his head.

  “Our world affected theirs. The rules changed,” Fred ignored the sarcasm. “Look at the library. The half-belief. Gaming affected this world. It reshaped itself to adhere to the laws of gaming, fantasy books, video games, MMOs...an entire genre.”

  “Crud.” Derek sighed.

  “So?” Jeff threw out his arms. “Big deal. We’re gamers-we understand the rules and conventions.”

  “But they fixed the loophole in the defenses,” Fred plugged on. “Guys…. we start at the bottom-that’s what she meant. We’re level one.”

  “We’re screwed,” Shad sat down on the stump.

  “OK, OK,” Shad raised his voice to drown out the deep discussion over the implications of a level-based learning system in a medieval fantasy world; all three of the others were occasional GMs and the debate had been enthusiastic. “That’s at least an hour we won’t get back. End result is this: we’re first level in useful classes. Great. We’re here to kill five Earth-types who broke the rules and are now boss-level. Worse, other gamer groups have tried and failed. Or even worse, succeeded enough to really get the Five’s attention. We have to consider that we have five powerful baddies interested in finding and killing us before we get to level two.”

  He had their attention. “We need to get organized, get gone, and blend. We need to find out what’s what around here, how things work, and how tough the enemy is. Jeff mentioned having moral reservations about being an assassin, well, that’s a valid point, but its moot if it turns out we’ve got five baddies homing in with hostile intent. I’m not really interested in killing any more people than I have already, but I will make an exception for anyone trying to kill me. My point is we need to take stock, ruck up, and get moving. After that, we need information. When we have information, then we can sort out a real plan. Everybody on board?”

  Everyone was.

  “All right, first thing is, who are we now? The basic soldier skills Uncle Sam taught us are useless without the goodies that go with them. My ability to manage a security systems company isn’t any use, either, any more than any of your jobs. But it turns out that now we have new skills. Me, I’m a Jinxman, level one. I’m not very good with a sword, but I’m better than I was back home. My main gig is I can make charms out of junk, and these charms will do useful stuff like healing, protection, all sorts of stuff. Think of them as on-call spells. Later on, I can do stuff with runes, but I’m not sure what. I also know a lot more about primitive medicine and medical stuff than I used to. Derek?”

  “OK,” he frowned, concentrating. “I’m a Shadowmancer. I can’t fight for squat, although like Shad I know more than I used to about hand-to-hand stuff. Quarterstaff and dagger. I can cast spells, but as you can guess, just low-level stuff. I get my title from how I gather power: I harvest darkness into magical energy. Night is best, but even shadows will work. Once I’ve harvested power, I use it to make spells. As I go up, I can store more power, harvest it more efficiently, and get access to more spells. Right now I can do a couple magic bolts and that’s about it.”

  “OK, good. No more light spells,” Shad gestured towards the ball of light that was still hovering over Derek. “Fred?”

  “I’m a Bear-warder, it’s a barbarian warrior type. Basic fighter with the ability to channel the Bear spirit for extra power. Looks like I’ve got tracking and outdoors skills, a lot more than I used to, anyway.”

  “Jeff?”

  “Night-grifter. Looks like a combatant thief type. I feel comfortable with my weapons, seem to know a lot about traps and locks. No pocket-picking or wall-climbing, some advanced stealth so far as I can tell, but pretty good palm object skill and apparently I can use poisons at higher levels. Say light combatant with entry skills.”

  “OK, now we’re cooking,” Shad nodded. “We seem to have all the bases covered, skill-wise, as much as low-levels can
. Main thing we lack is knowledge about what is here and what we are facing. Still, we’ll do that as we go along, I guess. OK, get your packs, and let’s get an inventory of resources.”

  “Looks like we got the tools of our trades,” Shad observed. “OK, we’ve got basic field gear, a total of about six man-days of food between us, and everyone but Derek has a canteen or waterskin. Derek, why are you always a shit-bird?”

  “Hey, I remembered to buy rope and spikes.”

  “Whatever. What we don’t have is much missile fire or money,” Shad gestured to the small pile of coins on the stump. “One gold coin, seven silver coins, and nine brass coins. Marks, shillings, pence. Twenty shillings to the Mark, twenty pence to the shilling, so we’ve got less than one and a half Marks. Anyone remember what the price list looked like? That might tell us what this is worth.”

  No one did.

  “OK. Derek, you hold on to the dossiers. Fred, divide up the food-that’s a day and a half per man, so make it count. Everyone take two pennies for pocket money, and Derek you hold the rest. Put it someplace very safe.”

  “Pouch around my neck,” Derek shoveled the coins into a small velvet drawstring pouch. “Found it in my pack- for a second I thought it was a dice bag.”

  “Good. Now, this is just a strip map, but it looks like we are in the Direwoods-naturally we couldn’t come through in the Happy Sunny Meadows. We head south-southwest and we should hit the South Way, which is a road. Follow it north and we come to a city-state.” Shad passed the map to Fred. “Lacking any other options, I figure we head to the city-state and see what we can see. Hopefully Yorrian is a good example and we can speak to the locals. Any objections? OK, Fred, you’re the wilderness guy, so lead us out of here.”

  “You know, this could turn out to be pretty cool,” Derek ventured.

  “That’s what you said about that bar in Dubai,” Jeff reminded him. “And we ended up having to fight our way out in order to retain our rectal virginity.”

  “I thought we agreed never to talk about that?” Shad snapped.

  “I still don’t think that guy you hit with the chair died,” Derek reassured the Jinxman.

  “For the hundredth time, his survival wasn’t what I am concerned with, but rather getting charged with murder in that freaking armpit.”

  “They don’t have an extradition treaty with us, and in any case they were foreign workers-the city leaders care less about them than they do about litter in the street,” Jeff shrugged. “And besides, the whole thing was Derek’s fault.”

  “Why are we still talking about it? Ruck up and let’s get some distance behind us.” Shad shook his head disgustedly.

  Chapter Two

  Fred held up a hand and the group froze; after listening carefully, he swept a finger in a circle and held up all five fingers: take a break.

  Sitting on his pack, Shad took a drink and passed his canteen to Derek. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” The slender Radio Shack Assistant Manager turned Shadowmancer took a long drink. “That hit it.” He handed the canteen back. “I took the robes because they always look cool in fantasy art, but first money I get I’m spending on real clothes. The robes suck.”

  “Heh,” Shad stowed his canteen and raked his foot across the ground, bending to pick up two lengths of branch. After examining both critically, he discarded one and stowed the other in his pack..

  “Last break you were picking up junk. You take a level in pack rat?” Derek kept his voice low.

  “Jinxman. I make charms out of ordinary stuff. Only thing I have to buy is ribbon, thread, and twine, and I started with a lot of those.” He drew a charm from a drawstring bag. “I got some to start with.”

  Derek examined the charm, which was three pieces of twig each two inches long fastened in a triangle, with a wisp of red ribbon attached to one twig. Frowning, he leaned in to study it closely. “Wait-there’s nothing holding it together. The ribbon…is it glued on?”

  “No, apparently I use the bits and pieces to trap a little knot of magic, a specific knot. Say the word and touch the target and the knot unties into the effect, which also consumes the physical material. See all the tiny nicks on the twigs? Those aren’t accidental-I’ve got a bunch of little picks, knives that look like scalpels, all sorts of tools. If I mark with twigs right they trap the magic, and the magic holds the pieces together like iron filings to a magnet.” He carefully stowed the charm in the bag. “Different shapes, different nicks, different combinations of twig, twine, ribbon, and string, and you get different effects. Not as aggressive as your stuff, but the only limit on how many I can have is how many I’ve made.”

  “Cool. Damn, that sky is blue.”

  “Yeah, I think we’re at a much more northern latitude than Texas. From the looks of things its early summer here, but it can’t be much more than seventy degrees, seventy-five tops. You recognize any of the trees?”

  “Sure. Pines, a few cedar, some white oak.”

  “Normal stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.”

  “We’re really here, aren’t we?”

  “You mean in an alternate dimension or world or place where all the beasties and bad boys of Earth got bumped? Yeah. I don’t like to think about it, but we are.”

  “This shouldn’t happen to a good Baptist.”

  “This is exactly what should happen to Baptists; why a pretty good Catholic got dragged in is what perplexes me.”

  The two sat in companionable silence for a while, Derek staring at the trees while Shad chose bits of forest litter.

  “We’re stuck in a fantasy game,” Derek observed somberly.

  “Yeah, for all intents and purposes.”

  “I’m close to freaking out.”

  “This is just like Iraq: one day we’re living the garrison life in Kuwait, the next we’re in Iraq rolling fast, locked and loaded, and having a literal license to kill and destroy. Same-same, GI.”

  “That freaked me out at times, too.”

  “That’s why you’re still here, alive I mean: we were sufficiently freaked out to take it seriously. The dipshits who kept thinking they weren’t really going to kill anyone or that bad things wouldn’t happen to them are the ones who bought it, or clipped themselves when they got home. We knew it was going to suck, prepared for it to suck, and functioned well when the suck really got deep. It’s the same thing here: this is going to suck out loud. Its going to be the worst thing ever, and we are going to have to kill stuff and get hurt before we see home again. Maybe we’ll have to kill more people, too, I can’t really say. What we have to do is to think, stay cool, keep it together, and be willing to do what it takes to get through, same as Iraq. Any local who gets between me and going home isn’t going to live to tell the tale, I can assure you.”

  “Same as Iraq.”

  “There it is.”

  “Iraq wasn’t all bad.”

  “Nothing ever is. And this little outing into insanity might turn out to be not as bad as Iraq, but I wouldn’t put money on it.”

  “I’m hoping to see a dragon.”

  Shad shook his head. “At a far, far distance, I hope.”

  “Road up ahead,” Fred hissed to the others. “Break.”

  “How far have we come?” Derek asked Jeff, keeping his voice low.

  “Three miles, give or take a little. Hour and a half.”

  Shad glanced at the sun. “Close to noon. If that map is to scale, ten miles by road to the city. Four hours or less. Not a big margin if they button up at night, but doable. Jeff, when do you figure sundown is?”

  Jeff reflexively glanced as his wrist and swore. “No earlier than eight. If this is summer, figure nine or so. It all depends on how far north we are-this definitely is quite a few degrees up the curve from Texas. Nebraska, maybe into the Dakotas is my guess, given the color of the sky.”

  “Yeah, that’s how I figure it. We need to nail down out what time of year it is.”
<
br />   “Shouldn’t be hard if we get into farmland.”

  “True. Listen, everyone play it cool when we run into locals. Don’t volunteer anything, and keep the tats covered.” Shad examined the contents of his food bag. “Jerky, hardtack, and dried fruit. Man, I miss MREs already.”

  “What’s our cover story?” Jeff asked. “Derek?”

  “Outlanders,” the Shadowmancer dragged a twig from within his hood. “Man, these robes suck. We’re mercenaries heading to the big city to look for work and excitement. First time here.”

  The four ate in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. “We’ll need money,” Derek finally broke the silence. “We need a lot of gear.”

  “We should try to find work of some sort,” Jeff nodded. “Although what, I dunno. Depends on how stable this place is. Given that we’re headed for a city-state, I’m guessing that things aren’t all that centralized.”

  “Especially with five intruders screwing things up,” Fred pointed out.

  “Shad, what you doing?” Jeff asked.

  Shad looked up from the black drawstring bag he was digging in. “I got some completed charms as part of the class gear. I’m trying to get a feel for them, and to figure out a way to carry them so I can get to them easily. There were some Jinxman belts and harnesses in the price list, but apparently my starting money roll was low.”

  “What can you do with them?”

  “Right now, a couple variations of heal, bug repellant, and cure poison.”

  “I never saw you as a medic,” Jeff grinned.

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” Shad positioned the charm bag behind his dagger. “Not the best. Like Derek said, we need to raise some cash.”

  “Speaking of that, maybe we should get some names,” Derek observed. “If we’re going to be worried about being watched for, we might want names that blend.”

  “Point,” Jeff conceded. “Until we know better, why not just old English ‘em up? Joffre, Frederick, Chadwick…what does Derek work as?”

  “Devon,” Fred stood and heaved his pack into place. “And call me Frostmere. A barbarian wouldn’t be a Frederick.”