This all really happened, I was there. Well, sort of....
 

I woke up slowly, unsure of what had happened. Something reeked, I almost gagged from the stench. I could hardly move, but I tried to get away from the smell, feeling pressure on my legs and back. My face seemed to be pushed into a dark, smelly place. I struggled against the weight forcing me down, but I wasn’t making any headway.

I heard a voice, a deep growly masculine voice, asking, “Are ye alive? Someone’s alive.”

I made a noise, trying to call out, trying to move arms, legs, and head to attract attention. I felt the weight on my back lifted away and tried to roll over. The smell of blood, shit and sweat hit me like a blow and I knew I might throw up in a moment. I shuddered, trying to draw in a clean breath.

“It’s a girl,” said one voice, with a lot of interest and satisfaction.

“A girl with a lot of hair,” commented another.

Who were they talking about? I wondered. And why did those voices sound familiar? At least the distraction had interrupted my urge to vomit. I gasped again, the air was no better, but if I breathed through my mouth instead of my nose, I couldn’t smell it as well.

“Easy lass,” said that first voice, the deep one. “I don’t think this blood is yourn. Let me get you out of there.”

I tried to look around to see who might be talking, and who had lifted the weight off of me. The dim light did not make it easy, but I stared at what seemed to be a heap of discarded human body parts. The bile rose up in my stomach again.

Suddenly, I felt myself lifted up bodily, a sensation I had not experienced since I was a small child.

“Got you,” said the deep voice.

“Get her out here in the light where we can take a look at her,” said one of the other voices.

I made another noise. Did they think I was a girl? It must be really dark in here. “I’m not…” I started to say, but my voice sounded so strange that I left off talking in the middle of what I intended to say. My voice sounded awfully high-pitched, plus, it felt as if I had something in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, and that almost triggered the vomit reflex. I coughed to suppress it.

Whoever had me did not seem burdened by my weight, carrying me easily as he stepped over the heaps of carnage. I felt rough skin against mine, and he had lifted me up to an insane height. The guy must be a giant with skin like a rhinoceros, I thought.

“There, there,” he rumbled, as if speaking to a child. “Ye’re going to all right—it’s fine, it is.” He had an accent, I noticed, one I had heard before. In fact, except for the deep, rumble, he sounded just like a technical writer from Tennesee that I knew. “Trike?” I asked. Trevor X. Christian had been a member of the same gaming group with me for almost forty years and known as Trike for nearly that long because of his name and the odd three-wheeled motorcycle he had ridden in college.

“Sure, it’s me,” he said, then laughed. “Though I have a hard time believing it.” It did sound like Trike who had never gotten rid of a vague hillbilly flavor in his speech in all the years I had known him. I suspected him of privately practicing his r’s and h’s to get that particularly burry, breathy sound. And now he had added a deep rumble? As well as what must have been, well, an impossible amount of muscle to be able to lift me.

I’m Joe Moore, MoJo to my gaming friends because there is a lot of me. I’m a quarter inch short of six feet tall and fifteen pounds less than four hundred. Or I was. If Trike was carrying me, well, he just couldn’t. At six foot three or so, Trike was no lightweight himself, but he did not have that kind of muscle. Or he hadn’t.

We emerged from whatever dim chamber we had been in to a wider, taller space with windows in one wall. I supposed they must be windows, but they were just openings several feet off the floor that let in light and air. No glass, though it looked as if interior shutters had been left open. Or maybe smashed open, they looked broken.

I tried to take it all in, looking around in amazement. The man-mountain who claimed to be Trike straightened up or something, and I saw two other men as if looking down from an upper bunk.

One of the two new figures looked typecast to be the hero in the sort of movie that these days usually starred Dwayne Johnson, except this guy was blond. He had massive shoulders and huge pectorals and biceps as big as…. Why the hell was I staring so hard at the beefcake? The naked beefcake, I saw, staring even harder. If I’d thought his upper half was overdeveloped….

I tore my eyes away to look at the last member of the little group. And damned if he didn’t look familiar. Hoyt Weston had been another member of our long-time gaming group, a rich kid who started hanging around us low-class types when he was still in high school. And this guy looked enough like Hote (everyone had a nickname) to be his twin. Except he looked like Hote had looked thirty years ago when he graduated from college with an M.D. after his name. So if we didn’t call him Hote (his name kind of suggested that plus the joke that his family owned all the hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place), then we called him Doc.

I stared at him, if not quite as hard as I had at the beef man. He stared back. And he was naked, too. A lot healthier and younger looking than the last time I had seen him, but definitely not wearing any clothes.

The last time I had seen him?

When was that?

Hote and I and… Trike? We’d all been together…

With a fourth member of our crew….

I stared at the big blond guy again. He didn’t look at all familiar but something about him….

It takes longer to tell this than it took to happen. Trike walked out of the dim room full of bodies carrying me, and I looked around. I sorted out that a younger, leaner, healthier Hote Weston was staring back.

And if Trike was the man-mountain carrying me… unbelievable as that sounded. And if a twenty-something Hote was there….

We’d all been together, after the game, in the van, going out for burgers at In-n-Out, a ritual we’d been following since we were all young….

The blond guy spoke. “Do all the women here have tails?” he asked.

Tails?

“It is a tail,” said Trike, casually turning me in his hands to show my backside. “And she’s got a lottta, lot of hair, too.”

I yiped. “Don’t drop me!” I grabbed at his arm. Several things happened at once, then. I realized the arm holding me was big and green and that I did have a lot of hair, tons of it. And also I had tits.

These weren’t the disgusting man-boobs I had had but instead a pair of large soft globes protruding from my chest. I stared at them. I let go of Trike’s Hulk-like arm and grabbed the breasts that I should not have had. “B-b-b-buh?” I stammered.

“She’s naked,” Beef man commented.

“Seejay, always the master of the obvious,” said Trike and he chuckled like boulders falling into a well. Seejay? John C. Bostwick had been the fourth player in the van, going out for burgers. Weedy-to-the-point-of-anorexia Seejay (he wouldn’t let us call him Jaycee) who had once been a Navy Seal and the only one of us who had ever killed anyone in real life?

“Something not so obvious,” said Hote, if the guy who looked like Hote really was…. I felt dizzy. “I’m me, the green monster here is Trike, you’re Seejay. Who does that make her?” And he pointed at me.

Her? Well, I did have tits, so… and this was one effed up dream.

Again Trike casually rearranged me in his arms with two hands under my arms and two more under my butt. Four arms? Four arms! And a huge face like one of the orcs in the Lord of the Rings movie!

“Mojo?” the face asked.

I may have fainted. Maybe not, I did screech so loud that Trike really did almost drop me. In a comedy juggling routine from a cartoon, Trike passed me from one hand to another and deposited me on the floor right in front of Mr. Beef Sausage Guy who might be Seejay.

Even he was at least a foot taller than me now, and Trike loomed over him by another two feet or more. Naked Trike, we were all naked, but Trike’s own big green sausage hung almost right in my face. It seemed to have spikes, and I turned away quickly.

Something whipped by my face as I turned. I grabbed two handfuls of hair, tons of it, and pulled the black, curly stuff out of my eyes, turning again to try to get a look at what I had barely glimpsed.

The guys started laughing at me.

“She’s chasing her tail,” said Seejay.

“It’s so cute!” said Trike.

“Ten million views on YouTube for sure,” said Hote.

I stopped and glared at them, and they laughed all the harder. When the tail, yes, it was a tail, flashed in front of my face again, I let go of the hair and grabbed it. It was covered in short black fur except for a bare patch near the end and something like a fingernail at the very tip. It writhed in my grip like a snake and, weirdest of all, I could feel my hands with my tail!

I looked up at the guys—I had to look up, even Hote was taller than me now. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t start crying.

And the most extraordinary thing happened in the middle of what had to be a really spectacularly weird happening, so far. They all stopped laughing and immediately began babbling stuff probably meant to cheer me up.

“It’s all right…” said Trike, that big scary face even scarier in an expression that looked like it might hurt.

“We didn’t mean to laugh, sorry, sorry,” said Hote, blushing.

“But you really, really did look… Uh, cute?” said Seejay.

Wow.

Still holding my tail, I glanced down at my tits. Yup, a pair of knockers. I looked back up at the guys with some of my hair falling back in my face.

They looked worried, but Trike might have been trying to smile.

I smiled back. Just a little one.

They all grinned.

I made a noise that probably sounded like a giggle.

And suddenly they were laughing again, but this time it was different. I made a face, and they almost choked trying not to laugh. Then I smiled real big, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Ho-lee Shit!

I had to laugh too. It must have been like one of those pot parties back in the sixties when everyone is overcome by the ludicrousness of licorice or something.

When we managed to stop laughing, after several restarts, Seejay looked at me with something more than fondness in his eyes and said, “Is that really you, Mojo?”

“I think so,” I said. “But what the hell happened?” I kept having to push hair away from my face—it was effing annoying. I could feel my tail lashing around behind me, and that was more than annoying.

“We fell into the game?” said Trike, but ending it like a question.

“I think you’re right,” Hote agreed. “I mean, look at us. Don’t I usually play someone who is more or less me but younger and healthier? Trike loves to play monsters, ogres, trolls, half-orcs. And Seejay with his paladins and champions.”

“Huh,” I said, not making it a question. “And most of my characters are female, uh….”

They all looked at me, almost grinning.

I squirmed a bit, and they caught their breaths. Oops.

Hote nodded. “You always used to say, Mojo, that a girl who would do anything you wanted was the essence of fantasy.”

I rolled my eyes, and that got a reaction, too. “Okay, so we fell into the game. How could that happen?”

Hote looked thoughtful. “You know some scientists think that the universe is really just a simulation running on a computer in another, uh, another, other, bigger, uh, universe.”

Trike snorted.

Seejay asked, “Like the Matrix movies?”

Hote nodded. “Sort of.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “We’re characters in a book.” I glanced down at my tits. My tail came around in front and tried to wrap around my left wrist. I peeled it off. “Possibly a really kinky book?” I grumped.

And we laughed.

Hote always recovered first from any sort of laughing jag and eventually wiped his eyes. “Seriously,” he said, which set the rest of us off again. He waited us out. “Let’s assume we did fall into a game, which game?”

He and Seejay looked at Trike and me, and we looked at each other.

“Fantastic Mars,” said Seejay.

Hote nodded. “Four-armed green giants, red-skinned women with tails. This is serious guys, if you remember that game had three TPKs.” Total party kills. We had all died more than once in a game that happened twenty years ago run by our old gamemaster, Art Gannon, who had died himself in real life not long after the finale of the game.

“If that’s true,” said Trike. “And I reckon it might be, maybe Artie is somewhere around rolling dice?”

I swallowed to think of it. Art had been a good, which is to say, cruel-in-an-entertaining-way GM. Swallowing reminded me, I could still feel something on my tongue. I made several faces trying to spit it out then realized the guys were watching me. “Sorry,” I said. “So what should we do now? Besides maybe find some clothes?” Would I be able to find any that would allow for my new appendage?

Seejay turned serious too. “We should stop making so much noise, this looks like a dungeon. We might attract monsters.” He glanced at Trike. “No offense, big guy.”

Trike shrugged. A four-armed shrug is something to see.

“We need weapons,” said Hote. “We all woke up in that room full of bodies, so someone is down here with us killing things.”

I said, “If they’re the typical bunch of murder-hobos,” a gamer joke, “they gathered everything they thought might be of value in one place and went through it dividing up the treasure.”

Seejay grinned at me. “They must have thought you were dead.”

I did a double take. Once again, Mr. Obvious made a point. In Fantastic Mars, a lot of the tailed, red-skinned women were slaves unless they were living in their own savage tribes with other tailed people. If I’d been captured alive, I might have been considered part of the treasure. I felt around my neck, no slave collar there, so that was a good sign. I guess.

Trike was looking at me too, and I looked back. The big green, uh, Martians were at constant war with the redskin natives and the steampunk invaders from Earth in Gannon’s original game. Sure it was loosely based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars series, but it had flavors from other sorts of sci-fi and fantasy. Something like Burroughs mixed with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, stirred by Arthur Conan Doyle, and seasoned with a little H.P. Lovecraft. Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester Del Rey, Robert E. Howard, and of course, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, were also in the marinade.

But how close was this world to the world of the game? Details like my tail and Trike’s thumbs (the lower hands had fewer fingers, and thumbs on the wrong side), argued that it might be pretty complete.

I mused on that for a moment but then had to stop my tail from pulling my hair down in my face. The effing thing had a mind of its own, literally. Art had said the tails had brain-like nerve complexes in the spine and the tail’s owner (me!) had no direct control but had to learn to communicate and even negotiate with the thing. Almost more like a pet than a body part.

Seejay suddenly took charge. He wasn’t the brightest member of our group, but he was a man of action and a natural leader. He looked around, peering into the dimness. The chamber we were in had more than one doorway leading off and what looked like hallways at either end.

“Trike,” he said after taking a moment to make some sort of decision, “you stay here and guard Mojo. You’re big enough to scare most things away. Hote and I will scout around to see if we can find anything useful, clothes, weapons, food, water. We were both in the military at one time, too, so we have some training.”

“Water?” We all paused, lingering on that thought. In the Fantastic Mars campaign, finding water was often the maguffin of the storylines. Mars was mostly desert, a sort of 1890s concept of the place, with canals connecting oases and towns. And a lot of empty land in between, dotted with ruins from earlier more prosperous times on the dying planet. In fact, this structure we were in had the look and feel of one of those ruins. Not that we had ever seen one for real, but Art had found images in NatGeo and other places.

Most of the photos had had a vaguely Arabic flavor to them, but some were like this place, making one think more of India or even China.

The two normal humans (well, Seejay was normal if you consider Dwayne Johnson normal), set off down the hallway. Seejay led the way with Hote behind and to the side, avoiding the infamous “lightning bolt formation.”

Trike made a rumbling noise.

“What?” I asked. I hoped the big guy wasn’t getting hungry. It would take a lot to feed someone his size. My tail was in my left hand, as if seeking some sort of reassurance. I squeezed it, gently and it squeezed back. Odd to feel both sides of that without… without thinking it was crazy?

“I was just a-thinkin’,” he said in the vaguely Irish sounding burr of his native Tennessee hills. “That campaign was more than twenty years ago. Almost before the Internet, before the WWW got popular, at any rate.”

“So?” I asked.

“Where…” he began, but I interrupted.

“Can you sit down or something? I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

He sat down very carefully, his back against one of the walls. Even sitting, he was taller than me, the feather-like growths on top of his head almost half a foot above my eye line. Each of his massive legs was more than twice as big as my body, my new body.

I noticed that his lower arms were thicker than the upper ones and that his lower set of hands had only two fat fingers and a thumb on the wrong side each while his upper arms had a more usual arrangement. This had been described just so in Art’s campaign notes. We stared at each other again for a minute or more, and I started getting uncomfortable.

“You were saying?” I finally prompted him. I had to get him to talk so I could stop figeting. My tail was starting to play with my hair again, and his stare made me want to get a good look at myself.

“Nothin’ impawtint,” he said. “Just wonderin’ where Artie got all those photos he showed us without using the Internet.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, there were times he practically lived at the library.”

The big green head nodded. “Artie was something else. Very creative and meticulous, too. He should have been a movie producer or something. We had him doing all that stuff gaming with us. Just games.”

My turn to nod. “He never seemed to keep a job very long. Normal living bored him.” I suddenly giggled, surprising myself. My tail came around front and appeared to be checking me out to see if I were all right.

Trike looked at me curiously, too.

“Remember the religions in the F.M. campaign?” I said. “Some of the normal Earth religions, ancient or modern. But there was a group of, well, non-player characters who worshipped the gamemaster.”

“Artists,” Trike grinned. “And there was an Artist colony where they all lived. Mallaboo he called it in the notes.”

“And their priests all wore those yellow polo shirts, just like Artie liked to wear. Blue jeans, baseball caps, clodhopper boots.” Artie’s comfort costume that he wore anywhere and everywhere he could get away with it. We laughed quietly.

“Ah, Artie, why did you have to go and die on us,” Trike said after we had both fallen silent.

“Maybe he’s not dead,” I said. “Maybe he’s up there watching over us. Maybe we should become Artists, ourselves.”

“Ahh, I can’t even draw a straight line,” he said. We smiled at each other and let the subject drop. We’d talked over Artie’s passing for years but mostly we had good memories of our friend, and it was hard to stay sad while thinking of the man.

After another long interval of silence, we both spoke at once and stopped at the same time, too. “You first,” said Trike.

“Uh, I was just going to ask how long the guys have been gone?” I admitted. My tail whipped around as if peering first right and then left. I grabbed it when it got close enough, and it vibrated in my hand like a purring cat.

“Not long, less than five minutes.”

“Feels like longer,” I said.

“They’re being careful. The adventuring party that left the mess,” he indicated the carnage room with a big thumb, “might still be around.”

I found it easy to believe that Trike had a better time sense than I did. He seemed calm and relaxed in a weird situation while I felt nervous and wired. I needed to be alone for awhile and figure some things out, but being alone here would be too dangerous. It made me antsy.

“Are you aware that you have a tongue piercing?” he asked suddenly. “Maybe more than one of them?”

“Uh, shit,” I said. “I am now. I knew there was something there, but….” I stuck a finger in my mouth and sucked on it, feeling around. Two beads on my tongue. No, four, five? Seven of them in a diamond pattern! They felt enormous, and I wondered how I could even talk with them there, but really, I hadn’t had much problem. They couldn’t be as big as they felt. I checked the underside of my tongue too, and found even smaller beads holding the top ones in place.

Trike made chuffing noises, and I looked up at him.

He grinned. “You crossed your eyes when you stuck your finger in your mouth,” he said. He turned a deeper shade of olive green telling me about it.

I blew him a raspberry, and my tail contorted itself into a loose knot that looked like it was giving him the finger. We agreed on something.

Trike started to laugh then stopped himself. He looked at the end of the room opposite to where Seejay and Hote had gone. “Listen,” he said in a lower voice than we had been using.

I leaned toward him. “Do you smell something?” I asked in a whisper.