The Giants of Shattered Swamp

by Eddie Patin

  The idea of Ben being laser-focused on an 'infinity charger business' gave Jason a twinge of regret. Maybe Riley had been right. Maybe he never should have mixed planeswalking with normal life. What if Ben was reckless with the technology? What if the government became involved? What would happen to Jason's life if the FBI or something started interfering with his monster hunting?

  Jason ran his hands through his hair and rubbed his face. The cuts from Ghrag's damned claws stung like hell. Maybe he could spend part of the day relaxing outside the wyvern's cave so that the cuts could close at least and wouldn't get infected.

  His quads and calves were sore; probably from hiking up Mount Ellis in u936 toward the necromancer's tower. His pecs were sore deep inside his chest; likely from that crazy, frantic swimming in the beer ocean while that Nothrix fucker was trying to pull him down.

  Jason raised his shirt and looked at his injury on the left side of his stomach, where Ghrag had found the hole in his armor back from when that minotaur had gored him on Maze World; where the Nothrix scumbag had stabbed him through it with one chitinous finger.

  It hurt. It was weeping red stuff.

  "Yep," Jason said with a frown. "Definitely need to regenerate. Need that Vitality Element."

  Jason climbed to his feet, scanning his room's walls for a clock. It had been so long since he'd needed one. He saw a clock over the door that he'd put up on the wall maybe ten years ago. Its battery was dead, stopped a little after seven o'clock.

  It felt like somewhere around noon in Jason's head, but with the time differences from world to world, he really had no idea.

  Grimacing at the soreness in his body and stinging in his face, Jason crossed the little room and opened his door, stepping out into the hallway on bare feet. Riley's room was open. He heard the TV on, playing a show of some kind.

  Walking past the bathroom—he'd definitely have to go back there—Jason leaned into the living room. Morgana and Riley were sitting on the sofa. Gliath was curled up on the couch cushion where he always sat in his black leopard 'primal' form. The cyborg's boots were up on the coffee table and he was kicked back watching the TV with his hands behind his head. Riley was wearing his Merc armor. He always wore his Merc armor.

  Jason's eyes flickered over all three of them and he stopped at Morgana. She was sitting on the cushion where her head had been the night before, legs crossed and half-wrapped-up in a fleece throw. Dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants, she looked like a really cute and really normal young woman. Wearing Jason's clothes and watching the TV with her green eyes and face serene and relaxed, her dark hair pulled back behind her shoulders, Jason couldn't imagine this 20-something chick being the same woman that had just been through all of that horrific, tragic shit back in New Bozeman. This wasn't a traumatized, hard-edged warrior woman from the dark ages. She was a nice girl.

  Morgana and Riley both smiled up at Jason.

  "Morning," Riley said.

  "Hello, Jason!" Morgana exclaimed brightly. "We're watching the Netflix! It's amazing!"

  Jason laughed. "Hey," he said to them. "What time is it? I don't have my phone."

  "Daytime," Riley replied. "My CamComm is not synchronized to your planet's time cycle."

  "You've been sleeping for a while," Morgana said. "I explored your street some. This is a very interesting world. The 'vehicles' are the most bizarre things I've ever seen; all of that shiny metal and colors and glass. And the houses! The many houses are so impressive, and so different!"

  "You ... explored my street?" Jason repeated. Morgana had left the house? She didn't know anything about the world yet.

  "The one called Kestrel," Morgana said. "There were also two other streets that connected to it that I walked some. There were more, but I didn't explore those. I've gotta say, Jason, the people here seem much more happy, though many of them are fat."

  Jason looked at Riley. He smirked and shrugged.

  This was going to be interesting.

  Jason emerged from the hall far enough to see the clock in the kitchen. It was a little after one.

  Wow, he thought. He had no idea when they'd gotten to bed, but it was dark at the time. He no doubt slept way over eight hours. Still, it was better than sleeping for two days like he'd jokingly planned.

  "Holy shit," Jason said. "It's after one. I really slept in. Back in a sec..."

  Jason ducked back into the hall and went to the bathroom. He cleaned up his cut-up face, pissed, and pulled his backpack out of the shower. His hanging Merc armor still smelled a little like beer. The bottom of his CamelBak was still soaking wet.

  Damn it, Jason thought, shaking the bag off. He'd never counted on being totally submerged. Unzipping the smaller pouch in the front, he searched through his little bits of EDC gear until he found his phone. It was an 'active' phone, so it was supposed to be water resistant, but would it survive being submerged in a freaking beer ocean?

  All of the stuff was wet. "Fuck," Jason muttered, finding his phone and trying to turn it on.

  It was dead.

  By now, he usually turned off his phone whenever they went to another universe. If he didn't, it would spend all of that time searching for active cell phone towers, not find any, then kill the battery within a few hours. Was his phone dead because of the beer? Or had he just left it turned on the last time they went to Primoria?

  Jason blew into the inputs and blasted the moisture away just like he used to do as a kid blowing dust out of Nintendo cartridges. Taking the phone back into his bedroom, he plugged it in and watched with slowly growing fear, waiting for the charging indicator...

  The charging indicator came on. It wasn't dead from beer. It was just drained.

  Jason sighed and smiled.

  Then he remembered the necromancer's journal. It had been in his backpack as well.

  "Shit!"

  He rushed back to the bathroom and tore into the main compartment of his pack, immediately seizing the scrapbook/diary of Derek Norton, a.k.a. Malydamus the necromancer. It was wet. Soggy. Jason sat on the closed toilet and cracked it open, feeling a crushing weight of disappointment in his chest.

  Damn it, he thought. It was all wet! The cover was soggy and the edges were soft. The pages were stuck together. With great care, Jason pulled the book open to a random page. He had to be careful not to tear the pages. When the book was cracked open, Jason felt a blow of sadness in his chest when he saw lines and lines of handwritten notes—written in ink—all blurred and washed away. He gingerly peeled back a clump of pages and looked farther into the book. It was all ruined.

  "Shit!" he muttered. "God damn it! Fucking Ghrag!"

  The only things that had really survived being submerged were the photographs. Even the clippings from magazines and newspapers were mostly destroyed.

  "Damn it!" he repeated. He'd been hoping to study the book while the Reality Rifters were on downtime—their R&R—and maybe figure out why the hell the necromancer had recognized him.

  Jason heard Riley's voice from down the hall.

  "Uh oh, something's wrong," the soldier said. Jason could hear the smile in his voice. "Jason's cursing to himself again."

  Jason felt a stab of embarrassment and stood, carrying the soggy, open book with him out into the living room. Riley watched him enter with subdued amusement. Morgana's green eyes were open wide, her face slightly concerned.

  "What's the matter?" she asked.

  "The damned book!" Jason replied, dropping it onto the coffee table. "The whole thing is ruined from when I fell into that beer ocean!"

  Riley cocked his head and leaned forward to look at it. He carefully pulled up a soggy page then turned to the next one.

  "Yep," he said, releasing it.

  "Was that the necromancer's book?" Morgana asked.

  "Yeah," Jason said, crossing his arms over his chest. "That asshole Derek Norton recognized me. I was hoping to figure out why, but the whole book is unreadable now."

  Jason took a deep breath.

>   Riley looked up. "Maybe it had something to do with the 'evil Jason' that 113 had mentioned in the universe's notes."

  "Yeah, no doubt," Jason replied.

  Riley kicked back again and smirked. "Well, shet, we can always go back there and shift along the fifth or back in time a little to get another copy."

  The idea suddenly brightened Jason's heart.

  "Oh yeah!" he said. He could pretty much do anything like that. There were many, many ways that he could get another copy of that book ... without even putting himself or his party in danger again. "Let's do that."

  The stress fell off of him immediately.

  Riley let out a long, dramatic sigh and looked up at the ceiling. "Not yet, dude," he said. "This is R&R time, remember? I don't know about you, but I don't really wanna go back to that world and that tower right now."

  Jason sighed. Riley was right. Shit—they could literally do it any time. He made a mental note to practice adjusting coordinates solely along the fourth dimension. He'd have to play with the fifth and sixth some as well. He knew that he could traverse 'Probability space' with the OCS, but he didn't really know how to consciously do that yet. So far, he'd just done it by accident while trying to go back to the same time and place, then been shunted off onto another branch of the tree; another parallel universe.

  Time travel is weird shet.

  Hell—Jason could probably do the same with the higher dimensions. If he could find his way back to the coordinates in space-time where he picked up the book originally, he could just ... slide along the seventh or eighth dimensions to the next universe over where the necromancer was dead and just snag another copy. Well, if he understood it correctly. He could just use the seventh to head to an adjacent universe in another multiverse where the force of gravity affected things in a manner 0.0001 differently than in u936 ... right? He wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

  Planeswalking is weird shet.

  Jason realized that his friends were watching him get lost in thought.

  Morgana smiled up at him. "I don't really want to go back there right now, either. I don't want to see that place for a long time. Besides, there's so much to do here!" She pointed at the TV. "This show is in a big city. Is there a big city like this close to the house?"

  Jason smiled back at her. "Yeah. There's Denver nearby. That's the biggest city for ... um ... hundreds of miles around, I guess. We can go there sometime soon. It's a bit of a drive." He looked at the kitchen. "Anybody cooked anything? Want me to grill some steaks?"

  Riley sat up again at that. "Fruk yeah, man. We've just been scavenging. Gliath ate, of course."

  Scavenging? Scrounging? Jason thought. Different worlds, different slang.

  "How long have you guys been awake?" he asked.

  "Gliath and I've been up for maybe two hours," Riley replied. "Morgana was up sometime before that."

  "I was going to try your 'shower' again, Jason," Morgana said, "but your equipment was in there."

  "Oh," Jason said. "Sorry. I'll move it and put some steaks on the grill, okay? R&R, huh?"

  "R&R," Riley replied with a grin, scratching his beard.

  Gliath looked up with his eyes half-cracked closed just like any cat does when dozing.

  "How long?" Jason asked. "I mean, I'm cool with resting for as long as you want to, but I'm just wondering what's ... ah ... standard for R&R with the Reality Rifters."

  Riley stood, drawing another tired look from panther-Gliath. "Eh. Maybe a few days. After that, you'll want to get back into the action." He smirked. "Trust me on that, Jason." Riley wandered off to the kitchen. Jason heard the hiss of the soldier opening a beer, then he sauntered back to the couch running one hand through his short, dark hair.

  "I'd really like to explore some more," Morgana said. "Perhaps get some of my own clothing? This is a whole new world for me, Jason. I'm certain that there is a lot for me to see."

  "Yeah, I bet," Jason replied with a smile. "How about I move my stuff for you and we cook some steaks? I've gotta clean and organize my gear some more, but yeah—we totally need to go shopping. We can get you some modern clothes, some gear, probably a pistol..."

  "And show me your time? Your village?" she asked. "Maybe visit ... Denver?"

  "Tomorrow," Riley added, sinking into the couch again. "I'm pretty sore, myself. And you look like shet, Jason. I'd like to just relax today, if everyone's alright with that, and I reckon we should spend some time in the Wilderlands today, too."

  "Wilderlands?" Morgana asked. She looked back and forth between them with her mouth pressed into a pensive line. For a moment, Jason thought that she was going to demand right then and there that they head out into Ridgeview. Then, she sighed.

  He was impressed by Morgana's desire to get right out there and understand the new world. He still couldn't believe that she'd just left the house without having any idea of what she'd find out there. She didn't have an ID or anything, of course, and no concept of what kind of culture or technology she'd run into. She was very brave, and very independent.

  "To heal," Jason said. "The Wilderlands will heal our wounds. You must be sore yourself, huh?" he asked her.

  Morgana stood tall with her hands on her hips. Jason looked her up and down then looked away when he realized that he did. They'd met Morgana only a few days ago. She'd been carrying years' worth of stress of possibly being killed every night along with the agony of her family being murdered over time by a political coup executed by that bastard cult leader. She'd fought gargoyles alongside them like a freaking Valkyrie, been hung from the crosses in the center of town twice, and was carried through the night to the necromancer's tower to suffer a terrible fate ... if they hadn't rescued her. Morgana had killed those soldiers back in her family's dining hall. She'd been captured. Hell—Jason had even seen her thrown across the room like a ragdoll when they were fighting the necromancer's huge golem. Morgana had to be hurting, but she was also obviously chomping at the bit to see Jason's very different world.

  "That's fine," Morgana replied with a smile. "Let's go ... shopping ... soon. I look forward to seeing this 'Wilderlands'. I want to see everything."

  With that, they all got to relaxing.

  Jason made sure that Morgana could take a shower again and found some reasonable clothes of his for her to wear afterwards. She elected to keep the Pink Floyd shirt on. Jason moved all of his gear to the garage. He eyed the two basketball-sized wyvern eggs again—secure in their duffle bag—wondering if it was possible for the nasty things to hatch in his house. They really needed to sell those damned things. Then, Jason cranked up the grill and made everyone some minotaur steaks for afternoon-breakfast.

  When Morgana joined them at the table—her skin clean and flush from hot water, her dark hair damp and gathered behind her back—Jason couldn't help but grin at her like a fool. She looked like a new woman with tons of heavy weights shrugged off of her shoulders and features. Jason was sure that she'd been rather psychologically scarred from the last five terrible years of her life, but right then, Morgana really seemed happy.

  Both men grinned at her when she sat at Jasons' small dining room table. Gliath stayed in the kitchen in his warrior form, comically tall in the mundane setting, slurping down piece after piece of fridge-cooled meat.

  "Better?" Jason asked her.

  "Oh, yes," Morgana said. "I was so gross after that stuff at the crossroads. That shower of yours is a truly wonderful thing, Jason!"

  "Yeah," he replied, cutting a piece of meat. "Modern niceties."

  Jason's steak tasted awesome.

  Morgana started eating, and after a few bites from her plate of nothing but seared meat, she spoke up again.

  "Your kitchen," she said to Jason. "Can you show me how everything works?"

  "Um ... sure," Jason said. "What did you use back in New Bozeman to cook? Some sort of grill? A cooking pot over a fire?"

  "Yes," she replied, struggling to keep her fork under control while she cut at the ste
ak with her knife. Jason recalled that she'd never seen a fork before, other than that 'spork' in her collection of 'relics' from the ruins of Bozeman, Montana. "I frequently used a large cooking pot for making pottage and soups. There was also a spit for meat, a smoking hut out back, and a stone oven for bread."

  As Morgana talked, Jason watched her mouth and eyes. He watched her slender hands as she cut meat and delivered pieces of food to her lips. His mind wandered to what it would feel like to touch her face. Her eyes were mesmerizing. He was totally infatuated; he knew it. God—when was the last time that he'd had a girlfriend? There was Sophie from back when he'd worked at the bookstore ... two years ago? But that wasn't serious. None of them had really been all that serious. Jason simply never went out. He never bothered to meet anyone. He'd just spent his life playing games, DnD with his old friends, and dreaming of getting around to doing something with his life.

  Morgana continued talking to him as his mind wandered and he soaked in her casual beauty. "...Do you cook, Jason?" she asked, and he paid attention again. Morgana paused. "How do you use that strange equipment in your kitchen?" Her green eyes stared into his. She was smiling.

  Shit. Jason had zoned out staring at her face.

  "Uh ... yeah!" he replied, snapping out of it. "I cook sometimes. Sure. I can show you around."

  Riley chuckled. Jason caught the cyborg's eyes darting back and forth between him and Morgana. Jason felt his face and neck turning red.

  "That's good," Morgana said, looking back down at her food again. She resumed eating. "We should eat more than just meat. I can cook a fair amount of things."

  "Well," Riley said, clinking his utensils on his plate as he worked at his steak. "I sure liked those eggs and ... what was that stuff you made with bison meat and wild cherries?"

  "Pemmican," Morgana replied.

  "Yeah, that," he said.

  They finished their meat. Jason showed Morgana the kitchen, giving her a patient primer on how the oven and range worked, how to operate the microwave, where his pots and pans were, and where his knives, spatulas, and everything else was located. Afterwards, they worked together—scrounging through Jason's meager bachelor-like mish-mash of ingredients in the fridge and cupboards—to put together a rice dish with cheese, mushrooms, and spices.