Dream (2 page)

“Boys, I don’t think we’re in Texas anymore,” Shad’s voice was hollow. “We’re not dreaming: we’re somewhere
else
.”

“Derek, sit down,” Shad snapped. The ball of light followed Derek when he moved and would travel a short distance on command, and the slender Shadowmancer had spent the last half-hour playing with the orb while Jeff and Shad argued possibilities and Fred scowled at the table top.

“This is so
cool
,” Derek grinned, but he sat down. Shad wasn’t just the group’s GM, he was the default leader, having been their squad leader in Iraq and the captain of the milsim paintball team they had founded, a leadership based more on force of personality than ability. If Derek was the most potentially violent and Fred the calmest, Shad was easily the most abrasive.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Shad rolled his eyes. “So, to sum it up, we know squat.”

“It’s like a campaign hook,” Fred rumbled.

“What?”

“ ‘
You wake up in an abandoned cottage, with strange tattoos on your arms
’ ,” Fred said. “It sounds like the opening line of a role-playing campaign.”

They pondered that, but before they could discuss the issue a polite cough was heard outside the hut.

The four froze. “You know how to use that thing?” Shad jerked his chin at the pistol crossbow.

Jeff nodded. “OK, load up, boys. Let’s take a look outside-I’m on point.”

The hut sat in a small clearing covered in tall grass and low brush and closely surrounded by tall pines; the sky overhead was a deep blue. Not far from the doorway a tall woman of august years perched on a stump that had been used as a chopping block in the distant past. Her white hair was bound in a complex plait which was tossed casually over her left shoulder, and she wore a long dress of what looked like pink silk which was almost entirely covered with tiny blue script that resembled Nordic runes.

“Ma’am,” Shad nodded politely, noting the mismatched but expensive-looking jewelry she was wearing and that her cloth slippers were unstained by grass or dirt.

She smiled as the four emerged, a pleasant-faced woman who had aged well, but Shad noted the smile did not reach gray eyes that were as hard as the axe Fred was holding casually at his side. “Good morning. I am the Exalted Guardian Yorrian.”

“OK,” Shad nodded. “I’m guessing you know who we are and why we are here.”

“I do indeed. We called you here.”

“Where is ‘
here
’, exactly?”

She shook her head, still smiling. “This is where…things go.
Unwanted
things.” The smile faded. “What you call legends. Monsters. Magic. The things Mankind cast aside. Things banished by the steel lines of technology, the harsh winds of the sons of Judah, the burning sun of the followers of Christ. Faith,” she bit the word out of the air. “Has power beyond that of anything else. So our ancestors were sent…here.”

Shad looked around. “Seems…like Earth. Nice.”

“Ah, yes.
Nice
.” Yorrian was openly sneering. “As a banishment, it is not unpleasant. None of us have known anything else, and few would leave even if they could. Over the many generations we have made lives for ourselves. Until now.”

“What happened?” Shad was all too familiar with this sort of exchange but saw no way out. Fred was right: this read like the onset of a campaign, only from the
inside
.

“You changed the rules. You started to…
believe
, in ways that we do not understand.”

“Believe?”

“In monsters, in magic. In an organized fashion, but not religiously. Belief has…power, even this strange sort of half-belief. It has warped our prison, twisting it to conform to new ways. For generations we have seen the power in our world re-shaped. At first we hoped it meant we were to return, but that was not the case. You simply twisted the powers that shape our world to fit patterns that you created, and we were forced to live with the results.”

“Uh-oh,” Derek muttered.

“So you brought us here for…what?” Shad deliberately avoided the word ‘revenge’ even though it was blazing in the forefront of his brain.

“You four are typical of the new belief, of the shapers who changed our world,” her eyes flashed. “Your arrogance is amazing, your hubris…this problem is of your making, and so
you
shall solve it.”

“What problem?”

“Five of your kind have crossed over into our realm. Those of us who watch have ensured that no others will come, but the damage is done. Five of you walk our world, and that is intolerable. Five
intruders
.”

“The tattoos,” Derek breathed.

“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.”