“She’s probably dead anyway,” said Hote, his voice flatter and distracted.

Art touched something on the remote and we had full sound, not just the muted pops and puffs of the nearly silent gunfire. The voices of my friends seemed close and immediate, and I shivered a bit in my hospital gown.

Trike charged after the retreating monsters, screaming curses in his grandfather’s Scots dialect. Seejay took up his rifle. Dolly found a spear her size and stood ready. Hote put his pistols back in their holsters and knelt over a dead greenie. Seejay slumped, lowering his rifle. “I can’t fire because I might hit Yonee.”

“She’s probably dead anyway,” said Hote, his voice flatter and distracted.

“She was already dead,” said Dolly. “The headpiece, the crown she put on, it killed her.”

Seejay stared at the red Martian girl who looked so much like me, like Yonee. “Her Enemy found her,” he said, his voice tight.

Trike stopped chasing the greenies and began trudging back to the party.

Hote muttered something over another body.

*

I stared at the screen. The greenies had stolen Yonee’s body, my body, and all the jewelry that it had been wearing. The very same jewelry that I had found on the floor of the cavern with a lot of dead greenies all around. More even than had been in the crowd that kidnapped me.

And I’d found something else there when I woke up as Betty. I looked at the green egg I still held in my left hand. Somehow, I knew the egg had something to do with the dead greenies and maybe even more to do with me waking up as Betty.

“Watch,” said Artie, attracting my attention back to the screen. Trike moped around on the edge of the group. Seejay and Dolly watched as Hote continued to move from corpse to corpse, muttering words and passing his hands over them.

“What’s he doing? Making sure they’re dead?” I asked.

“Something like that,” Artie agreed.

Hote turned to the others as he knelt over a fifth body. “I need a little help,” he said. “If you’re willing, come here and lend me some strength.” Seejay came immediately, and Trike followed. Dolly was slower, frowning as she approached.

I remembered a GURPS spell where a mage could borrow strength from willing assistants. Artie’s system had been similar. What was Hote planning? I didn’t know much about magic; back when I was alive, I sometimes played magic-users but I had specialized more in sneaks and other roguish types. Did that matter now?

The stone egg I held in my left hand buzzed like a cellphone on vibrate. I stared at it, distracted from watching the TV for a moment. The egg remained a mottled green color with gray, brown, blue and yellow swirls and an occasional reddish thread. It didn’t make a sound, and it didn’t show me any pictures.

I looked back up at the TV. The scene had changed. A dozen or so greenies loped across a desert using their four-footed gait like monstrous centaurs. One of them carried a red-skinned figure slung across a shoulder. The sound had changed, too. I recognized the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before it morphed into something else.

“Shit,” I muttered. The bad guys had gotten away with my body. Well, I sort of knew that since Artie had told me this was something that had already happened.

I looked down at the egg again. I was holding it here and now, but… somehow, I knew that I had had the egg for a long time. Maybe all the time I had been Yonee?

Artie changed something on the remote, and the music stopped. The horde of aliens still ran across a now silent desert. Where were they going? To some greenie fortress…? In a cavern…? Some place they could remove all my magical jewelry?

The Yonee on the screen, draped across the shoulder of an alien monster, was still wearing the jewelry that I had found, or would find, scattered around me on the cavern floor when I woke up as Betty.

And the egg? I would find the egg, too. Where had it been? Hidden somehow?

My old gamemaster in the hospital bed plumped up his pillow and sat more upright. “Think about it, Mojo. Where’s a naked girl going to hide something about the size of a hen’s egg?”

“Not up my ass,” I mused.

“No. But you’re close,” he said.

I suddenly got it, and the surprise of it woke me up.

* * *

But I woke up screaming. I had totally forgotten that the interlude with Artie was a dream.

Wasn’t it?

I gulped the stale air of the cavern while my heart settled back into my chest. It had been so real…Artie in the hospital, seeing Seejay, Hote and Trike on the little television.

It had made so much sense!

But I was back in the cavern with dozens, maybe hundreds, of dead bodies, a pile of discarded jewelry…

…and one jade egg.

I found it in the darkness, smooth and glassy, about the size of a chicken egg. Would it fit up inside me as Artie had implied? And would it turn me from Betty to Yonee? I suspected that it would.

Did I want to be Yonee again?

And what about Mojo, the original me. Was he gone for good? Had I died back on Earth with my friends? The four of us wiped out in a car wreck. Was that just a guess by Artie?

Hell, Artie really was dead back on Earth…wasn’t he?

If I dreamed about a dead man, did that make what he told me true?

Was the world, the universe, just a complex gaming simulator?

I held the egg in my hand, worrying it with the ball of my thumb.

The world did not seem unreal. Unbelievable, maybe, but not unreal. The darkness around me, intense and nearly impenetrable to my human eyes, was real enough. But if I were Yonee with the eyes of a Red Martian, I might be able to see well enough to get out of this place.

And Yonee had magic, a toybox of spells that could keep me alive in a desert and maybe even help me find my friends, who I felt sure were somewhere not too far away. They had set out to find my body, kidnapped by the horde of Green Martians….

…perhaps the same ones that now lay dead here in the cave with me.

Had I killed them somehow?

But there was another player in this gaming simulation. My mysterious Enemy and perhaps my owner. Or at least someone who believed that they owned me and, through magic, controlled me. The jewelry I had been wearing, the gold wire twisted around bits of jade, items that had surrounded and even pierced parts of my body.

Yonee’s body.

I tried to work it out. By deduction, inference, intuition and pure guesswork, I came up with a theory of what had happened. And perhaps a plan of what to do, how to escape this cavern of death and find my friends. But a plan that might make my recapture by Yonee’s owner a risk or even a certainty.

The first part of the plan was to decide which bits of jewelry to try to wear. When I had put the tiara on, the circlet of gold trimmed with pieces of green stone, my Enemy, Yonee’s owner had ordered me telepathically to stop my breathing and my heart.

So I wasn’t going to put that back on. But the rest of the jewelry could prove useful. The way magic had worked in Artie’s games had been through a substance called mana, created by living things and other natural processes. Mana was a sort of ethereal energy necessary for all magic. When spells were cast, or magic was invoked in some other way, the mana got used up.

Or perhaps mana was subject to the same laws of thermodynamics as energy and entropy were. Energy can’t be destroyed, but if entropy in a system is too low (too high? whatever), there is no usable energy available. That might not be right but it was a way of thinking about it that made sense to me.

Mana could be stored in gems. So, all the jewelry I had worn had bits of mana in it, some of which had already been shaped into spells that could be cast by the wearer.

And what was the biggest piece of gemstone around? My jade egg….

Was it full of mana, of magic? Did it have a spell on it to turn a human woman into a Red Martian? Would it fit inside me, inside Betty, to turn me back into Yonee?

Obviously, only one way to find out….

I held the egg between my hands. Like any stone, it felt cold, but I could almost sense it pulsing with some hidden energy. Or was I just imagining that? How had the stone ended up inside Betty if that was where it had been?

“Damn,” I muttered. I hadn’t said much since I woke up in this place, alone with hundreds of corpses. The echo of my voice sounded hollow.

Before I put the egg back where it belonged, if it did belong inside me, I needed to secure the jewelry. But I had no container, not even a pocket in the clothes I wasn’t wearing either. Even wearing the hospital gown in my dream of Artie, I’d had to hold the egg in my hand.

Martians, Red or Green, don’t usually wear clothes. Trike had a loincloth, but that was because he hung out with humans and had a human mind. Instead of clothes, Martians often wore decorative jewelry, even belts and harnesses, but I didn’t want to try to wear Yonee’s stuff in Betty’s body.

Especially not the damn tiara.

But I didn’t want to lose track of the gold and gems either.

Wild greenies did often wear belts and such, mostly to hang weapons and tools from. And sometimes they had pouches. I needed a pouch.

Nothing for it, but I would have to search bodies for what I needed and could find.

I tried not to think about it and instead reflected on my various identities as I went about the macabre task.

I’d been born Joseph Malcolm Moore, but as an adult I’d been known as Mojo to all of my gaming friends. Then, four of us died in a car accident and woke up in new bodies, or rather, in the bodies of characters from one of the games we had played.

From being a fat middle-aged human male, I had become a lithe, young, tailed Red Martian woman that my companions soon named Yonee. But Yonee had a history of her own and had once been an enslaved young human called Betty on an Earth where the South had won the American Civil War.

I had experienced part of her life in dream states, but how had Betty gotten from Earth to Mars and been transformed into a Red Martian? The large jade egg I had discovered after waking up in a cavern full of Green Martian corpses must have had something to do with it.

The dream/ghost of Art Gannon, our old gamemaster, had suggested what I could do with the egg. It sounded preposterous, but I had to give it a try because I really did not have many options.

On the third six-limbed corpse, I found a belt (worn above the middle set of limbs) of some kind of leather with half a dozen pouches sewn into it. One of the pouches had what seemed like an awl or leather punch of some type and a good length of coarse twine. Another pouch held a few coins, which I could not really examine in the feeble light of the cavern.

At any rate, neither Yonee nor Betty could read so I wouldn’t be able to decipher any inscriptions. I could barely tell silver from brass. The largest and only silver coin seemed about the size of an American quarter or a British shilling. Three more were nickel-sized brass plus an assortment of large and small dark bronze or copper coins, some of which might be American one-cent pieces.

Another pouch held a rough stone and a short pin of some kind of metal. I didn’t waste time figuring that out. The belt with pouches had been the kind of thing I’d been looking for, and I left off stealing from the dead immediately.

Touching corpse flesh had been progressively creeping me out. I murmured confused apologies to my post-humous mugging victim and made my way back to where I had first woken up. The belt was too long for me, but the closure was a simple twine knot and served well enough, settling around my hips instead of my waist.

I picked up as much gold and jade jewelry from the cave floor as I could find in the darkness and filled all the pouches with what had been Yonee’s finery. I didn’t put any of it on because my Mysterious Enemy might be able to control me through it again.

At last, it came down to just me and the egg. Did I have the nerve to put the egg inside me in the only way I probably could? And would the egg turn my current self, human Betty, into Red Martian Yonee, who could see in the dark and had a much better chance of finding her way out of this cavern?

And the truth was, I wanted to be Yonee again. Yonee, who had made love to the human Seejay, who had magic of her own. And a tail!

Okay, yes, I missed having my almost four-foot-long tail tipped with a pom-pom of coarse black fur and a fingernail. My tail that seemed to have a mind of its own and obeyed me no more faithfully than a stray alleycat obeys the cat lady that feeds her on the backsteps.

I heard myself giggle. Then I squatted, seized the henfruit-sized jade egg and inserted it into my own yoni, pointy-end first.