Jake and his friends looked forward to play Dragons Blood Online during their monthly LAN gaming session. It was going to be a big night now that their characters had finally all reached level 60. Sure, the forecast called for some rain and maybe a little thunder, but with an industrial strength UPS, who worried about the weather?

---

Here's a little something I've been threatening to start posting ever since Elsbeth posted her "Beyond the Pale" story. So, umm, my remaining 2 or 3 fans can blame her for any delays in other requested sequels. jk! On that note, I am also working on two additional stories right now. ADD for the win! One is a sequel to my MAU story and the other is tentatively titled ASEE. Sorry, Whisper and Mystique are kinda low on my ADD radar. However; there is a link to Mystique in this story. Well, I intend for there to be one anyway. Thanks go out to Beyogi, HSE and Draflow for their feedback and ideas. djkauf for fixing all my errors to make this more readable.

~o~O~o~

Disclaimer: The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended.  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  Well, except for General Rommel.  Sorry, but it’s kinda hard to not mention him when you have Germans + British + WWII + Desert. This story is copyright (c) 2011 R Nelson. All rights reserved.

Colonel Claus von Oppeln stood on his seat to examine the desert terrain via his tank commander’s hatch. Sweltering under the oppressive heat, he brought his prized Swiss-made field glasses up to his eyes to survey the desolate surroundings.  It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it was only last year he celebrated his 35th birthday with his wife and children at their family home in Munich. The times seemed so much simpler then and the reach of the 3rd Reich appeared to have no bounds.

He sighed as he thought back to what brought about his current predicament.  The attack was going so well, until that new British General ordered his forces to stop retreating. General Rommel’s attack was both daring and risky.  It was going well until the British somehow figured out that Rommel’s attack was mostly smoke and mirrors.

Like most Panzer company commanders, he led his mixed company of Panzer III and IV tanks from the front.  The oppressive heat that reflected from the accursed African desert once again made him miss the cool climate and beautiful mountains of the Fatherland.

As von Oppeln peered ahead, he spotted a sandstorm heading their way.  It was still a few minutes away, but the dark clouds and lightning promised that it would be vicious.  He tapped his foot on the driver’s shoulder to signal for him to stop.  He turned and signaled for what was left of his company to halt, stop their engines and batten down the hatches.  His company could properly be called an under-strength platoon now.  He had a mere three of the older Panzer III tanks, five of the newer Panzer IV tanks and one Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track that was currently loaded down with all the extra fuel and ammunition that his men could scrounge.

He was not looking forward to spending however long it would take for the storm to blow over while he and his men stayed, closed up inside tons of sun baked steel.  However, it beat standing outside and getting blasted apart by burning sand. Stopping the engines would help reduce some of the heat inside the tanks and it would prevent the engine’s filters from becoming clogged.  He and his men had fought in this desert environment for far too long to make such a rookie mistake during a sandstorm.  At least, the sandstorm would help hide their tracks from the British.

The storm slammed into his tanks with a force unlike anything he and his crew had ever experienced.  The wind was so strong that it rocked the heavy tank on its tracks.  Then came the sounds of sand and rocks hitting the sides of the tanks.  He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they would need to repaint their tanks when the storm finally passed.  Cleaning the sand out of the main gun’s barrel and engine intakes was sure to be a chore that his men would not like.

A spark danced from his instruments as the air in the tank turned heavy and the sounds of thunder could be heard booming outside the safety of the tank’s thick armor.  He was not surprised to see his men soundly asleep during the storm.  He shrugged his shoulders. While louder than he expected, this was nothing compared to the sounds of a battle and his men needed the rest.

He started to close his eyes and relax when a loud boom shook the tank and a bright light pierced the grime encrusted view ports.  The tank felt like it was falling for a second before its tracks and suspension slammed into ground with a jolt that shook everyone awake.

“Mein Gott!” he shouted as his gunner woke and yelled, “What in the hell?”

“Have the British found us?” His driver asked with a panicked look on his face.

“Why is it so quiet?” Their gunner asked calling attention to the fact that the storm’s noise was missing.

“I don’t know.” von Oppeln said as he cautiously opened his hatch.  A light dusting of desert sand spilled in with the crisp cool air that smelled like the woods near his home.  Confused, he stood on his seat to look around.  Everyone else in the tank muttered with surprise and relief as the cool air from the open hatch washed over them.  His driver popped his hatch and poked his head out too as they both took in what looked like a large clearing that overlooked a castle in the distance.  A castle surrounded by an army of some kind.  von Oppeln looked behind him and was reassured by the sight of the rest of his tanks sitting behind him on what appeared to be a narrow dirt wagon path through some wooded area.

The hatches of the other tanks started to open as the rest of his vehicle commanders popped their heads out to look around.  They also gasped with amazement at the abrupt change in scenery.  He was just about to use his field glasses to get a closer look of the strange castle to the front of their position when he noticed a strangely dressed man appear with a burst of light twenty meters from the front of his tank.

“You there!  Are you this unit’s commander?” The man arrogantly yelled up at him.

“Yes, who are you?” von Oppeln had spent far too many days inside his tank to have any patience to deal with lunatics, no matter how strange. He unsnapped the case and drew his Walther P38 pistol from his shoulder holster.

“I am your master. You will obey me!” The crazy man’s eyes turned black.

The man was clearly deranged because von Oppeln only obeyed one man, his Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. He casually aimed his pistol at the strange man, “I am a Wehrmacht Offizier! You are neither my commanding officer nor the Führer!” von Oppeln contemptuously aimed and shot the crazy man. His bullet sparked as it harmlessly ricocheted off of an invisible barrier less than a meter before hitting the man.

He found himself lying on the ground at the crazy man’s feet.  Looking up, he noticed that what he initially thought was a man was something else entirely.  The being had pure black eyes, small horns on his forehead and shark-like teeth behind thin bloodless lips, “Mein Gott! What are you?!”

“Foolish human, your weak god cannot hear you! I am your new master!” He said with scorn.

Von Oppeln felt the beginnings of panic, but he clamped down on his fear. It could not rule him. This abomination must die, even if killing it meant that he must die. Firing the main gun wasn’t an option due to the possible sand in the barrel. If it didn’t blow the breach back into the turret, it would surely wreck the gun.

“Run it over!” He yelled knowing he would most likely be crushed in the process. He heard his tank’s engine roar to life. The creature standing over him laughed before it yelled in some twisted language. Von Oppeln turned back to see his tanks suddenly covered in a sickly green fog.  He looked on with horror as his driver climbed partially out of his driver’s hatch before collapsing with a gurgle.

“Now, perhaps you will be more willing to obey me, or shall I prepare you using the same method that I used on your men?” The creature’s asked with a sharp toothed smile that only a demon from hell could have.

“What do you mean?” asked von Oppeln as he pissed himself.

“Why my dear foolish human, I expect you to follow my General’s orders and lead what is left of your command into battle on my behalf.” He purred with satisfaction as he inhaled the aroma of von Oppeln’s urine stained fear.

“How can I do that?  My men are all dead.” von Oppeln pointed to his dead crew and the long row of silent tanks with the occasional body lying across an opened hatch.

“Fear not my dear Colonel. I will allow you to once again command them.” The demon creature said before he yelled once again in a twisted language that hurt his head just to hear.

Von Oppeln looked on with mounting horror as his men twitched, once, twice and started to move once again.  His driver’s eyes glowed with a pale green color as he soundlessly straightened himself up and once again sat back down with the top of his head and glowing green eyes peering out of the smoothly idling tank.

The creature pointed to the army below his position. “Now, direct your war machines into the camp below and follow the orders of my General.  With your weapons, I expect the castle’s defenses and its people will be destroyed before nightfall.”

Colonel Oppeln ignored his urine-stained uniform and saluted the thing.  “Ja, mein Führer.” He walked back to his tank. The sight of his men staring listlessly ahead with their green glowing eyes was almost enough to make him want to use his side arm on himself.  If he did that, he felt certain that the creature would just turn him into one of them.

~o~O~o~

 

---

 

Finally, it was the first weekend of the month and Jake anxiously looked forward to tonight’s gaming get together with his friends.  Jake, with his fiancée Brooke, Brian with his wife Emily and his friend Nick, all played Dragon’s Blood Online (DBO) together.  They usually just played over the Internet from the comfort of their own homes, but once a month they all gathered at Nick’s house for a DBO LAN party.

Jake, Nick and Brian all met and formed an unlikely friendship in high school after they each discovered that the others enjoyed playing D&D. Jake was the jock of the group and on the football team.  Academically, he got slightly above average grades without too much effort.  Athletically, he was also slightly above average.  In the end, his grades weren’t good enough for an academic scholarship and his football wasn’t good enough for an athletic scholarship. He knew that his parents couldn’t afford to put an average student through college. However, he did know the value of teamwork and he liked the college program the Army offered, so he joined, as a grunt (11B) since that MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) offered the best college money and signing bonus.

During his four years in the Army and two tours in Iraq he quickly rose to the rank of Sergeant E-5 and his Army career looked good until a roadside bomb blew up the Humvee he, his platoon leader and company commander were riding in.  Fortunately, the Humvee was one of the new and improved models with extra armor plates, so no one died. Everyone made it out with minor injuries, except for Jake.  He lost his right foot when a fragment of the bomb punched through the armor and slammed into his leg just below his knee.  Six months of therapy, a high tech prosthetic foot made of titanium and carbon fiber, and a medical discharge later found Jake back home and attending college full-time using his G.I. Bill money. Two months later, he met the love of his life while getting an ice cream cone.

Brooke worked at the local ice cream shop as the assistant manager while she attended college to pursue a teaching degree with a focus on elementary education.  Jake gained five pounds from eating ice cream before she accepted his proposal to go out with him on a date. She confessed to him that she initially thought he was the stereotypical jock that she never wanted to date again.  She saw his gait as a macho thing instead him needing to walk with a slight swagger due to his missing a foot.  She was incredibly shocked when she learned that he was an amputee.

Brian and Nick fit their stereotypes to a “T”. Brian fit the stereotypical overweight geek during high school by being the math club president, having zero luck with the girls, straight A student and D&D rules lawyer. On the other side of the coin, Nick fit the computer geek stereotype.  He was and still is the thin and pale computer geek who loved to read comic books and science fiction during the lunch hour.  It was their shared love for science-fiction, fantasy, comic books and D&D that bridged the stereotypical jock versus geek divide and forged a lifelong friendship between them.

After Jake joined the Army, Brian went to college to study engineering and Nick got a job as a sys admin at his father’s company. They managed to stay in touch via an occasional email and Facebook update, but it wasn’t until Nick got them all hooked on their first MMORPG. With that, the terrible trio was once again reunited.

Brian broke his girl curse when he met Emily in college and married her after they both graduated. Jake still couldn’t see how they could have found anything in common with each other. At the time the two of them met, she was a Graphic Arts Major and his complete opposite personality wise.  Where Brian was shy and introverted, Emily was outgoing and vibrant, but he could see how much of a positive change she made in his friend’s life.  His confidence and outlook on life improved in leaps and bounds. Now, Brian couldn’t be happier being a nerd and working as a mechanical engineer, and it is all thanks to Emily.

Emily was also happy with her hubby and worked as a graphic artist at a local ad agency. The painting that she created using a screenshot of the group when they all hit level 40 hung in a place of honor in Jake’s apartment. She did such an excellent job with the characters.  The realistic graphics in the screenshot looked good, but the characters on the painting looked like they could have been alive and breathing at one time.  Jake hoped that she would be willing and able to do another group painting to celebrate the group hitting level 60.

Of all the places someone could meet, Nick and Allison meet each other at a computer conference.  He liked to try and claim she was a booth babe, but he quickly stopped making those claims after she threatened to tell everyone how they really met each other. He stopped, but she told his friends anyway. They all thought it was funny.

She worked as an assistant in the marketing department of a company that made the best water cooled computer cases.  They met because he was such a geek, that the sight of the cool computer cases on display to his right attracted his attention more than the scantily clad booth babes on his left. He was studying the cases so hard and not paying attention to where he was going, he walked right into a pole and almost knocked himself out.  It was Allison who saw his feat of non-agility and ran over to see if he was okay.  Nick never understood why a girl as smart, good looking and friendly as Allison would agree to go out with him, but he almost broke his arm trying to pat himself on the back for digging up the courage to call her and ask her out on a date.

When Dragon’s Blood Online was first released, Nick, Brian and Jake rushed to the store to buy the much anticipated and critically acclaimed MMORPG.  It only took four months of near constant play by the guys until they had each reached the end game and were in danger of burning out when their DBO Widows put their collective feet down and issued their ultimatum.  They either stopped playing the game or they would cut them off.  The guys were seriously thinking about the pros and cons of each when Brian proposed a third option.

“You girls are mad because we play the game too much and don’t spend enough time with you, right?” Brian asked.

“Well, duh.”

“Of course.”

“Okay...instead of us stopping the game cold turkey, how about the girls join us and we all play together as a team one night a week?”  Brian asked.

“What do you mean?” Emily asked with a curious expression.

“Simple, we all  will create first level characters and then once a week and only once a week, we all play those characters and only those characters together.” Brian said.

Nick’s wife, Allison, hated the game, but Emily expressed an interest in giving the idea a try.  Emily had actually played the game once or twice using Brian’s account. After Emily broke the ice by admitting that she had played it, Brooke decided that she would be willing to give it a try if Emily and Allison would too.  Allison was dead set against the idea, but the boys admitted that there were only five slots in a group, so one of the girls or boys would have to sit out anyway. Allison relented and grudgingly accepted the solution if it would stop her husband from playing the damn game 24/7.

There was one additional condition that Jake thought of as a way to stack the deck and make the group stronger at the same time.  From their extensive knowledge of the game and experience with playing similar games in the past, each of the guys had enough experience to know what the strongest and weakest class and race combinations were.  They knew that the perfect group needed a Warrior, known in game as a Tank, a healer, a crowd controller or CC along with two high Damage Per Second or DPS classes.  

Jake usually played the tank, but he knew that a novice healer could spell disaster for the group, while a novice tank could easily grow into the role.  So, to help reduce the risk, he proposed that each of the guys play the class and race most opposite from their usual play style with the intent that the more skilled guys could take on the harder and more complex roles and shepherd the girls into roles they could grow into and learn at their own pace without getting frustrated or getting the guys frustrated by their newbie mistakes.

Jake and the guys suggested that Brooke play the warrior and much to Jake’s chagrin, she gravitated toward the wood elf race because they were so petite and pretty. While a wood elf could technically be a warrior, he felt that the race was too puny to make good warriors.  Ogres or Trolls made the best warriors. Brooke sped through the general appearances part of her character.  She just clicked the random button a few times until she saw the face and hairstyle she liked, and then she changed the hair color and adjusted the body slider to make her slightly taller than the norm for her race.

The last thing she added to her character surprised everyone. She added a long and jagged scar feature that ran from just over the top of her left eyebrow and down across the top of her cheek.  She explained that her character’s parents were killed and she had been kidnapped by an Orc raiding party. She was unable to get healed before the scar formed and that is why she was a warrior. She would never again be unable to defend herself or the ones she loved.  She used that back story when it came to figuring out a name for her character.  She named her Brelyssa Orcsbane.  Jake felt surprised and proud that Brooke felt the desire to role-play her character so soon.

Brooke joined the guys when they teamed up on Emily to peer pressure her into picking the super hot dark elf sorceress as her race and class combination.  The guys attempted to talk her out of playing the sorceress because it is not an easy class to play. They suggested she play a wizard due to their rather simple job of blowing stuff up, but she insisted because a sorceress sounded cooler to her.  They guys gave up and let it go because if it got her to play, then it was still a win in their book.

Emily took a lot of time building her character’s physical appearance.  Unlike Brooke, she tested every hairstyle and hair color combination before settling on a medium length straight platinum silver hair that complemented her dark blue skin tone with her cobalt blue eyes and blood red lips.  She even adjusted her character’s skin tone until she felt that it complemented her outfit.  The guys tried to tell her that she would go through many outfits, but their lack of fashion sense was overruled by the girls.

Emily dived into her character’s evil mythos and took great joy when she picked out Iridia Arborshate for her name. Iridia was due to her hair color sort of resembling the color of iridium and Arborshate because it just sounded evil.  Emily enjoyed making her character so much that she threatened to make a few more just to play with the possibilities.

With the tank and crowd control slots filled, Brian quickly created a human rogue named Belamros Swordhand for one of the pure damage slots and for the rogue’s lock picking skills. He normally played a high elf wizard, so a human rogue was pretty close to the opposite end of the damage spectrum that he could get and still be a pure damage class.  Unlike the girls, Brian just hit the random button a few times to select his character’s appearance.

Nick grabbed the final hybrid damage slot by creating a dwarf paladin named Norros Axemage instead of his normal human priest healing class.  The only vanity appearance item he spent any time over was his character’s beard, “A Dwarf has got to have a good beard! It’s in the Dwarven handbook somewhere!”

While not the best at damage, the paladin class made an excellent backup healer and backup tank while still providing good damage output.  The paladin was especially good against undead and evil creatures. Never mind the fact that Emily’s race was known as an evil race to play.  In a group, race didn’t matter and it was all about the role play.  Based on Emily’s and Brooke’s reaction to making their characters, he knew the girls would make an exciting addition in their group’s dynamic.

That left the final slot for Jake as the group’s healer.  He normally played an Ogre Warrior, so he considered playing either a priest healer or a druid healer.  As a priest, he could be a high elf, human, dark elf or dwarf.  As a druid, he could only be a wood elf or human. While he liked the priest’s raw healing power, the druid class also had some good heals and a bit more utility over a the pure healing priest class.

Since they lacked a wizard, they would need someone who could teleport the group and the druid class filled that role almost as well as the wizard class. Brooke’s squeal of excitement when he briefly looked at the wood elf druid options made the choice for him. Out of everyone, a wood elf druid was about as far away from his typical race and class combo as he could possible get and still play the game.

His mistake was to leave the room to go to the bathroom followed by a run for another drink from the kitchen before he had saved his character.  While he was absent, the rest of the guys finished his character for him.  They changed his male wood elf druid into the most beautiful blond haired female model they could pick, changed his name from Rayven Stormshadow to Jancaryn Stormshadow, and then they saved the changes before he could get back and stop them.

“Damn it guys!  Why in the hell did you do that?  Now I have to delete her and start all over.” Jake sighed with frustration.

He was surprised when Brooke and Emily pleaded with him to keep her. “Please Jake, for Allison.  Since she can’t play we really want to have a third girl to play with.”

“But, she’s not really a girl.  She’s my character and I’m not a girl,” Jake attempted to explain while the girls just looked at him with a confused expression.

Brook placed her hand on Jake’s bicep and patiently smiled at him. “Well...No, you’re so obviously a guy, but why can’t you play a girl?”

“Would you want to play a guy?” Jake asked, sure that would be the end of it.

Brooke paused and thought about it for a second, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “No, I never really thought about it, but I might be willing to give it a try because it could be nice to play a game and not be considered a lesser player due to my appearance. Do you want me to change my character into a guy?”

Jake appreciated her offer, but he didn’t want her to waste time over something so unimportant. “No, you like your character and you spent a lot of time building her. It’s not that important and I’d rather you enjoyed your character.”  He chuckled when she exhaled with relief. “It’s not that I feel that playing a virtual girl will make me less ‘gay’.” He air quoted the word to show he didn’t really believe in the stereotype because even with the old and silly ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in the Army, he worked with two gay soldiers and he never once considered them to be any less capable.

“It’s just that I like to role-play my characters.” Jake noticed that the girls looked a little confused by his ‘role-play’ gamer term.  “I like to pretend to be my character and act how my character would act.  Kind of like being an actor in a movie or a character in a book and I just can’t see myself acting like a girl. I’m worried that everyone will just laugh at me.”

“We won’t and if you’re worried about what I will think, all I can say is, ‘Babe, you’re more than enough man for me!’” Brooke’s coquettish smile took Jake by surprise and made his pants feel too tight.

“Okay...Okay, I’ll play her. Geez, it’s not like thousands of other guys aren’t playing female characters and it will only be with you all, so I guess it’s not really that big of a deal.” Jake said and was immediately rewarded when Brooke squealed with delight and jumped into his arms, showering him with kisses.

It had been a little bit more than a year since that fateful date and everyone looked forward to tonight’s session. Since all of their characters had finally hit level 60 during last week’s session, tonight would mark the first time they could finally try some of the harder level 60 restricted dungeons. The loot from just one run had the potential to provide some pretty good upgrades for the group’s gear.  Even if they didn’t get any upgrades, at least the fights would be a fun challenge.

For the monthly party, each couple usually brought a hot dish and a bottle of wine to share and since it was a Friday night, they could play as late as they wanted too.  This time, Brian and Emily didn’t bring the traditional bottle of wine.  Brooke and Allison were the first to notice the omission, but thought nothing of it until they tried to offer Emily a glass of wine from the bottle that Jake and Brooke brought with them.  She refused with a pleased smile, which delayed the start of their game by almost an hour as the girls realized that there could only be one reason Emily would refuse a glass of wine.

Brooke was the first to make the connection. She jumped up from her chair and hugged Emily. “Oh my gawd, Emily!  Here, sit in my chair! This is so exciting. When did you find out?”

“Well, it was confirmed by the doctor Wednesday, but I knew something was wrong when I missed my period two weeks ago.” Emily smiled happily as she possessively held Brian’s hand.  Brian looked a little uncomfortable with the sudden attention that he and Emily were receiving.

Jake slapped Brian on his back and sighed. “Dude...game over, man, game over!”

Nick nodded affirmatively until he noticed the glare from both Allison and Brooke.

“Wow, so, like two months ago...Hmmm, does that mean that your baby is a DBO Baby?” Brooke laughed as Emily confirmed her theory with a blush as she looked into her husband’s eyes and pulled him down for a heated kiss.

Once the kiss ended, Brian pretended to gasp for air due to the intensity of the kiss, causing everyone to laugh at him.

Allison rushed in and hugged Brooke and Ally. “Girlfriends, we have got to talk!” She glanced back at Nick. “Why don’t you boys go down and play in the man-cave for a bit?”

Sensing the rush of estrogen fueled baby talk, the guys quickly excused themselves and retreated into the basement to set up the laptops and PCs for tonight’s game session. Jake and Nick used that time to both congratulate and bemoan Brian’s impending status demotion. Once all of the systems were up and connected to the net, Jake ran back upstairs to let the girls know that everything was ready.

“We will be right there!  Ally and I are just plotting with Emily before we descend into the pit of testosterone!” Brooke yelled back, causing the girls to giggle.

“Okay, see you in a few, then!” Jake ducked and headed back down the stairs and let the guys know that it would probably be fifteen to twenty minutes before Brooke and Emily would be ready to start playing.

Brian checked the clock and assessed the odds of the girls actually being ‘right there’. “Hmmm, why don’t we log everyone in, make sure we all have the needed supplies and spell components, and run our characters to the dungeon entrance so that the girls don’t have to worry about that stuff?”

“Excellent idea!” Nick grinned. “That should help get us started faster once they finally get done talking about babies...” He shuddered with fear at the thought that Allison might want to have a child now that Emily and Brian had broken the seal.

~o~O~o~

---

 

It took the girls a bit longer than the guys expected to finish talking about babies, but now that they were here, it was game on.  Jake liked playing in the same room with his friends. While it was kind of the same playing with each other over the net and they used the voice chat feature built into DBO, being in the same room made the group work so much better and it was so much more fun being with his friends.  An ambush could be foiled by a simple sharp inhalation and if someone was having a problem with something, there was a person who could look over their shoulder and lend a hand.  It made things much less stressful and helped a ton during the early days with getting the girls up to speed.

Since this was going to be the group’s first time in a level 60 dungeon, Jake had spent all of his free time last week researching the drops, or treasures in gamer lingo, and powers of the dungeon’s chief bad guy, known as ‘The Boss’.  He even found the fight strategy videos and studied them so he would know exactly what to expect.

Unlike the lower level dungeon instances that allowed the group to zone in, buff and prepare before moving to their first fight, the level 60 dungeons had smarter and more aggressive AI programs controlling monsters referred by the players as “Mobs” for “Movable Objects”.  The mobs could see you as soon as you could see them and instead of just waiting for you to enter some predictable aggro radius before they attacked you, they would attack immediately.  

As soon as everyone got settled, Jake took charge and began to issue the group orders, “Dia, haste and mind candy, please”.

“On it Jan,” Iridia replied as she cast her melee haste buff on Lyssa, Norros and Belam to make their attacks faster and more deadly. Once those buffs were complete, she cast her mana regeneration and storage buff on herself and Jan.  Mana powered their spells. It was their magical energy battery and they only had so much to spend before they ran out of power.  When Jan ran out of mana, she couldn’t heal and when she couldn’t heal, people started to die.  When Iridia ran out of mana, she couldn’t slow, freeze and weaken the enemy, which made the fight harder, which made Jan need to heal more, which caused her to run out of mana and people started to die.

Iridia’s mind buffs also allowed her and Jan to regenerate their mana faster and boosted their mana storage capacity by 50%.  While she lacked strong offensive and defensive powers, the combination of Iridia’s crowd control spells and her group buff spells made her character vital to the group’s success.

While they played the game, they called each other by their character names.  At first, it was a little confusing for Jake to have everyone use a girl’s name for him, but after a few months he got used to being called Jan and sometimes referred to as Jan when they got together to talk about the game over a meal.

Emily’s character name of Iridia was eventually shortened to “Dia” when in battle. While Iridia isn’t hard to say, they would sometimes stumble over the unfamiliar syllables in her name.

Everyone except for Nick’s paladin, Norros, ended up with a shorter named based upon their character’s full name.  Brooke’s character, Brelyssa got shortened to “Lyssa” since she didn’t think that “Bre” or “Brel” or “Brela” was pretty enough and Brian’s rogue, Belamros, got shortened to “Belam” and sometimes “Bedlam” for fun.

“Norros, pally bless please, then I will slap us all with drood skin and damage shield Lyssa before you two lead the way into the dungeon.  All the guides said that this dungeon has a hot LZ.” Jake said as he began to cast his new level 60 group stat and health buff that everyone derogatorily referred to as “drood skin” due to the overabundance of less than skilled druid players. He smiled as the special effects from his spell displayed a rapid succession of ghostly animal spirits infusing everyone in the group with their power. His damage shield worked exactly opposite of what the name suggested.  Instead of shielding the character from damage, it inflicted a small amount of damage to anyone who successfully hit the shielded character. In effect, it turned them into virtual porcupines.

Norros’s pally blessings were technically buffs, but since the paladin class was a hybrid of a priest and a warrior, the game called them “blessings” to keep with the holy theme.  He had some of the priest class spells and buffs that he could cast on the group.  His paladin armor and health buff was a copy of a lower level priest buff.  He did have a few specialized paladin group auras that he activated during combat.

These auras were centered on his character and radiated out to affect everyone in the group that stood within 30 feet of him.  His best aura magically raised the group’s effective armor by one level.  It essentially gave cloth the same protective properties as leather and leather the same as chain mail, etc... He also had an aura that raised the group’s strength and agility thus making them stronger, more accurate and harder to hit in battle.  His last aura gave the group a minor health and mana regen effect.  The regen effect was so minor when compared to the armor boost aura to protect and reduce the group’s injuries; they rarely used it during combat. However, it often came in handy after a major fight to help speed up the group’s recovery time.

Once the prep work was done, Jake anxiously waited for his and Dia’s mana indicators to reach 100%. “Go!”

Lyssa yelled her battle cry, “Release the hounds!” Lyssa yelled as she, Norros and Bedlam raced for the dungeon’s entrance portal.  She glanced back over her shoulder. “Come on Jan! Shake that money-maker of yours!”

“Brooke, would ya please stop talking about Jan’s butt like that?” Jake sighed with frustration as he watched Brooke’s character disappear into the portal.

Brooke unrepentantly giggled and gave Jake a quick hug before her character started to materialize inside the dungeon. “Don’t wear skin tight leather pants then!”

“Hey, it’s not my fault!  You know that leather armor is the best that a druid can wear and all the leather armor for the female characters issexy and skin tight!” Jake found himself wishing he had re-rolled his character as a male Druid.  Compared to the female armor patterns, the male Druid patterns were much less revealing and actually looked like they might provide some protection.  He found his change in attitude about blatant sexism in video games to be highly amusing sometimes.

Brooke glanced back to her screen and impishly grinned. “Yeah, I know, but I just like teasing you about it babe. Don’t I always make it up to you later?”

“Hey you two, get a room! Focus, we got a dungeon to beat here!” Nick yelled as the mobs in the dungeon entrance started to react to their presence.

Brooke turned to give him a quick raspberry before she laughed and charged the two mobs guarding the entrance of Lord Baleron’s lair.  She met them with a loud crash as the impacts of her long sword, shield and plate mail armor stopped their advance when she slammed into them.  Norros and Belam quickly joined her, helping to support her initial rush while they waited for the less armored and more fragile casters to join them in battle.

As the squishy casters, Jan and Iridia, waited an extra second or two after Lyssa, Norros, and Belam disappeared in the magical barrier that marked the entrance to the dungeon before they followed.

From the sounds that came from the speakers of the other PC’s, Jake heard the fight start as he and Emily waited for the dungeon’s entrance to materialize for their characters.  The game’s engine was very good at accounting for latency and helping a group time their entrance properly.  It first loaded the instance for everyone and then, it timed the player’s character arrivals to match the order that they had each entered the instance’s magical border.

While, they could have all arrived at exactly the same time, that would have made things harder on the casters since the NPCs guarding the entrance would have prioritized their attacks for the weakest and most easily killed targets. Like, Jake’s leather clad druid and Emily’s scantily clad dark elf sorceress.

Now that Jake was playing a female character, it bothered him a little more that the female models were so blatantly sexy, but he could also understand why the game developers designed the female character models the way they did.  It made good marketing sense because sex sells and if the picture of a scantily clad babe on the cover of the game box sells a few more copies, then even better.

Marketing excuses aside, it didn’t make any sense how a mini-skirt or sheer silk robes could offer any protection whatsoever, but magic made an excellent excuse to indulge with the fantasy. Take Emily’s scantily clad dark elf as an example. From his D&D days, Jake didn’t think that dark elves could handle the cold any better than any other elf race, but he noticed that all of Iridia’s clothes had some cold resistance built into them.  He once looked at her character screen and saw that her cold resistance was at a whopping 70% compared to Jan’s 20%.

Maybe that is how the game designers tried to justify her skimpy clothing options. Since nothing was real, they didn’t really have to worry about the weather making their characters cold or hot. They could all run their characters stark naked through a blizzard and nothing would happen. Iridia’s extra cold resistance did help her because she always took very little damage from cold based attacks and Emily liked to rub everyone’s noses in the fact that the girl wearing a silk negligee was better in a snowball fight than they were.

Against the two guards, if they had all zoned in at the same time, they would have still won, but the cost in mana and health would have been higher since it would have taken longer for Lyssa to force the guards to stop attacking the high value targets that the casters made.

By the time they did arrive, one of the guards was almost dead and the second was halfway dead, while Lyssa’s health was only down by 40%, Norros was down by 20% and Belam barely had a scratch on him.  Jan cast a quick and efficient heal over time spell on Norros, but for Lyssa, she needed to cast her biggest and slowest heal to bring her health back up to optimum levels.

As a warrior, Lyssa had significantly more health points than Norros and she needed a bigger heal to bring her back up. The larger healings took longer to cast, but were more mana efficient. As she was casting her healing on Lyssa, Iridia cast her slow and weaken spells on the second guard just as the first guard fell from a vicious backstab from Belam.

The combined forces quickly dispatched the second guard and to keep the initiative, the barely taxed group charged deeper into the lair before the rest of the boss mob’s lackeys could respond.

“Hey Bedlam, come to the dark elf side, we have cookies!” Emily glanced over at Brian with a smirk as she watched his character on her screen.

“Anything for you, babe!” Brian said as he activated Belam’s dark elf illusion mask by equipping it on his face slot. He liked using the mask.  Not only because Emily liked seeing his character as a dark elf, but because of the enhanced night vision that the dark elf illusion granted to his night blind human eyes.

He wore the mask so much, that he often thought that he should’ve just made a dark elf rogue instead of a human rogue.  He even spent additional time playing the game to have his character learn the dark elf language. He felt that from a role-playing perspective, learning the language would be the right thing to do to help better his magical disguise.

Once, he used the mask to sneak into the dark elf capital city to see what it looked like. As a human, he would’ve been toast if his illusion failed or if he had gotten too close to city’s royal and religious centers. Those areas were guarded by special detection spells that would have seen right through his magical disguise, but it was still an interesting and exciting adventure for him.

“Aack, I’m surrounded by evil dark elves on one side and smelly tree hugging elves on the other, what would me dear ole’ mum say about me choice in friends if she could see me now?” Norros lamented. Like Jake, Nick enjoyed role-playing his character. When in character, he spoke with a Scottish accent to help sell his characterization of a surly dwarvish paladin.

“Umm, I dunno Norros. How about, grab another brew and stop yer whining?” Jake laughed as the group ran into a larger group of NPC guards.

“Why ya pointy ear, daisy eating tart! I’ll bite yer kneecaps off!” Nick switched to a fake British accent, causing everyone to laugh before the conversation devolved into simple battle commands as they each dove into their roles.

Jake didn’t have to tell Brooke to attack the enemy caster first. Lyssa charged right through the enemy guards, knocking them back from the power and shock of her rapid passage. She slammed her shield into the enemy caster interrupting its casting of a spell.  Brooke was a pro and Jake couldn’t help but be proud of his fiance’s skill.

Iridia charmed one of the enemy guards and turned it against its own people. She used the confusion caused by Lyssa’s charge and the charmed guard turning on its own to cast her slow and weaken spells on the remaining guards. Norros held the remaining guards interest and prevented them from attacking her or Jan while Belam used his rogue damage to help Lyssa quickly drop the enemy caster with a brutal back stab.

The fight ended pretty quickly after the caster dropped. Lyssa engaged the two un-charmed guards while Belam and Norros brought their most damaging attacks to bear.  Jake almost felt sorry for the last guard when Iridia canceled her charm and everyone unloaded on him.

The caster dropped a nice bracer that was an upgrade for Iridia’s current bracer and the group managed to collect a few extra gold pieces from the pockets of their fallen enemies before they were forced to move on by the intruder alert that was rapidly making its way through the evil lair.

The group managed to fight their way to and defeat the lair’s first mini-boss or lieutenant of the main boss mob, Lord Baleron. The group gained a short rest to recover their mana and health after refreshing their combat buffs.  The mini-boss mob dropped a few more gold pieces and a platinum piece along with two magical item upgrades for the group.  Lyssa scored an ultra-rare, named relic breastplate, called “Alimith’s Elvish Bulwark”.

Everyone drooled over it and congratulated her on the upgrade. When she equipped it, the generic steel breastplate model morphed into a very nice looking, form fitting mithril-steel alloy breastplate that looked protective, feminine and it also gave her a huge boost to her armor. The breastplate had very cool stylized elvish tree etched into its surface, but the most important thing, in Jake’s opinion, was the fact it added a whopping 20% to Lyssa’s armor protection. Her breastplate also added an additional 20% to her Strength and Constitution scores while giving her an extra 10% to all of her character’s magical and elemental resistances.

Belam got a wicked looking assassin’s dagger that added +15% to his character’s Agility and +5% to his Backstab chance.  The dagger would also randomly cast a medium strength poison effect when it struck an enemy.  The coolest thing about it was the neat oily smoke particle effect it gave off when drawn. It looked very vicious and deadly.

Just as they were about to move onto the next part of the dungeon, Allison poked her head down. “Hey, you guys know that there’s a storm coming, right?  The weather forecasters are saying that it came out of nowhere and it looks pretty powerful. We could lose power.”

Nick looked up at her and pointed to a large black cube sitting on top of a wooden packing crate beside the wall. “Thanks hon, but we have my office server’s old UPS system down here. It’s got enough juice to keep us running at 100% for at least an hour and at the rate we are chewing through this dungeon, we will probably be done in less than 30 minutes”.

“Okay, do you all need anything?”  Allison asked.

Everyone checked their drink glasses and after verifying that they all had enough to tide them over Brooke replied, “I think we are good to go for now Alli, thanks!”

“Okay, just yell if you need something. I’ll be reading a book in the living room.” Allison said as she walked back up stairs.

~o~O~o~

---

 

Rested, the group forged ahead. After fighting a few minor battles and gaining some more gold, silver and copper for their troubles, they reached the chamber of Lord Baleron’s captain. Flush with success, they all felt excited.  They knew that if they could defeat the Captain, they would be able to enter the final section of the dungeon and defeat Lord Baleron himself.

Jake halted the group just before they entered the lieutenant’s chamber, “Okay, this guy is a caster. So, Dia, we need you to stun and mana drain him like a son of a bitch instead of wasting a slow on him.  Lyssa, shield slam him every chance you get while Norros and Belam go for max damage to drop him.  He has an AoE ( Area of Effect ) spell ability that will damage everyone in the room each time he casts it, so I will be busy trying to keep everyone’s health up instead of concentrating on just keeping your health topped off like usual.”

“Got it, Jan!” Brooke nodded as she glanced over her shoulder at everyone else in the room. “Are we ready?”

“g2g!” Jake said with a grin as he watched his friends hunker down in front of their screens, fingers poised over their keyboards, ready to go.

Lyssa ran into the boss's chambers and yelled her battle cry, “Release the hounds!” as Brooke activated her warrior’s charge ability to cross the open distance in an instant and slam into the Captain with a crash of armor.

Brian used Belam’s sneak skill to maneuver into position behind the Captain before he unleashed a back stab that caused the boss to briefly turn on him before Lyssa was able to regain his attention with another shield slam.  Norros activated his group strength and agility aura to help their DPS, while he smashed the lieutenant with his huge two-handed battle hammer.  Iridia chained her stuns and mana drains to keep the boss from casting most of his really big damage spells, but he did have a few instant abilities that even her stuns couldn’t stop.

Jake used Jan’s instant cast healing over time spells to help preserve her mana while keeping the group’s health above 50%.  Due to Iridia’s lower caster health total, Jake tried to keep Iridia’s health closer to 100% compared to the hardier melee characters.

Once the boss's health was down to 50% and the group’s collective health was below 40%, Jake hit his group heal macro key that announced to the group, “AoE Group heal incoming! Tighten it up, make your buddy smile! ^-^”.  Jan’s group healing took three times the mana and took twice as long to cast as her big single target heal, but it was the most efficient per health point for every person that it healed over three.  As soon her spell’s initial casting phase completed, a sparkling energy radiated out 15 feet from where Jan stood and washed everyone in the group with a healing wave that pulsed every three seconds for 15 seconds unless Jake canceled casting the spell or was interrupted by the enemy.

That much healing power attracted the boss's attention and after the third pulse healed everyone in the group to 80%, the boss broke free of Lyssa and began to smack Jan around. She was able to maintain her concentration and continue casting the spell for another pulse which brought her group’s health all the way back up to 100%, while her health quickly plummeted to 20% from the Captain attacking her lightly armored body.

The algorithms running the boss must have detected an easy kill, because the boss would not stop hitting the critically wounded druid despite everything that Lyssa and Norros attempted to regain its attention.

With the Captain's health down to 20% and Jan’s health dropping by 5-10% per hit, Jake was positive that his character was going to die, quickly followed by a wipe when the rest of the group died.  He was ready to begin planning corpse recovery when Norros reached over and touched Jan when she had less than 5% of her health remaining.  Her health shot back up to 100% with Norros’ emergency Lay on Hands paladin heal and Lyssa was finally able to regain the boss's attention.

“Phew, thanks Norros, I thought I was a goner for sure there!” Jake said.

“No problem dude, watch your aggro!” Nick said with a grin.

“Yeah, I should’ve stopped after the third pulse. Now, we won’t have your Lay on Hands for the final fight.” Jake said, frowning slightly with concern.

After Norros’ save, the Captain ran out of mana from all of Iridia’s drains and he folded like a wet paper bag under the coordinated onslaught of the group’s attacks.

Lord Baleron’s captain dropped some more coins and a pair of magical caster geared shoes. All the guys looked at the shoes and commented about how nice the stats would be for Iridia, but it wasn’t until she put them on that everyone was stunned by how they looked on her character.

They looked so generic and plain on their inventory screens, but when she equipped them, they morphed into a pair of black suede ankle boots with a three inch silver stiletto heel.  Not only did the boots boost her character’s intelligence score by 10%, but they raised her sorceress’s class critical charisma score by another 20%.  Plus, the guys all thought she looked even hotter now, so she was even more of a sorceress to them.

“Me-ow!” Emily said with a pleased smile as she studied her character’s outfit.

Brian pretended to be an enthralled zombie by shambling over to Emily’s side. “Oh no, you’ve charmed me, you evil wench! I am powerless to stop kissing you.”

The rest of the group laughed and the lights briefly flickered as the storm rolled in.

“Ut oh.” Jake nervously glanced around the room. “We had better get a moving.  We have done so good, I’d hate for us to get booted while in here.”

“Don’t worry. We have cable Internet and all of the cables are buried.  Everything we need to play is plugged into the UPS.” Nick said.

“That’s cool, but just in case...” Jake gave Brooke a quick hug as she and Emily glanced nervously up at the light when it flickered again. “Okay, let’s refresh our buffs and move out.  According to all of the guides for this place, as soon as we enter into Lord Baleron’s part of the lair, a group of six fighter NPCs and two wizard NPCs will attack us.  We will need to save our strength because Lord Baleron will attack us five minutes after that fight starts.  So, we need to drop NPCs as fast as possible without using up all of our mana so that when Lord Baleron hits us, we will be ready. If we can defeat all of his lackeys before he attacks us, it will be a simple tank and spank fight.”

“Sounds like fun.” Emily said with a smile. “Should I try to charm one of the casters to use against them?”

“Sure, good idea, but don’t try to charm a caster until its health is below 50%.  Just in case it breaks charm and we need to kill it fast.” Jake cautioned.

“Got it.” Emily nodded.

“Okay, Lyssa. Lead the way, so I can admire that shapely metal clad butt of yours.” Jake said with a grin.

Brooke turned her head, stuck out her tongue at Jake. “I expect to see you do your wood elf stripper dance when we win.”

“Crap...” Jake said. He remembered feeling pretty good when Brooke discovered the dance command for her character.  Each race and gender had a custom programmed dance step that they could perform.  His ogre warrior’s dance looked like the hammer dance and it always made him laugh, but the wood elf dance looked like something he had seen performed at a stripper bar.

The sultry hip and arm movements looked like the dancer was inviting the audience into her loving embrace.  Lyssa, with her bulky steel armor looked a little silly doing the dance, but Jan’s skin tight leather armor made the dance into something else entirely. He invariably felt simultaneously turned on by watching his character dance and slightly perverted for making her dance.

Brooke didn’t care; she found it hilarious to watch her character dance and loved pressuring Jake into joining her character dancing on the screen.  The catcalls by the rest of his friends only added to his embarrassment.

Emily’s character also had it good with the dance moves.  Iridia’s dark elf racial dance looked like the Pulp Fiction dance.  She looked so dangerous when she performed her dance.  Why couldn’t the happy and nature loving wood elves been programmed with a less seductive dance style.  Something easy, like the Twist instead?

The final encounter went off without a hitch.  Emily’s charmed NPC made all difference due to its high wizard DPS.  When Emily commanded it to attack its former master, it burned through all of its mana doing tons of damage before attracting its former master’s attention and getting killed in seconds.  That worked out perfectly since it now meant that they didn’t need to worry about Iridia’s charm breaking during the fight and the group suddenly getting attacked by her former charm victim.

The group finished the fight critically low on mana.  Jan finished at only 10% mana.  That was well below the 25% Jake preferred to hold in reserve in case the group needed an emergency teleport if a fight went wrong.  Iridia ended the fight completely OOM ( Out of Mana ) from keeping Lord Baleron slowed, debuffed and a lightly damaging stun spell thrown in for good measure.  Norros was also low on mana from his casting of an occasional spot heal on the others so that Jake could concentrate keeping Lyssa alive using her big heals.

With Lord Baleron dead, the sound of thunder and lightning from the storm finally made it past Jake and his friend’s mental filters.  They had all been concentrating so hard on the game, nothing existed for them outside of the game.

“Hurry!  Let’s loot this guy and get the heck out of here before we lose power.” Brooke nervously glanced around as the house lights flickered and died.  “Ah, crap, now we will never find out what his treasure was.”

Nick pointed to their still running computers and the UPS. “Relax, we got another hour on battery if we need it, but Jake, I think that you should hurry up and loot it, just in case.”

Jake clicked on Lord Baleron’s corpse and the group was rewarded by a split of 15 platinum, 26 gold and a pair of leather pants.  Jake thought for sure that they would be for Brian’s rogue, but he was shocked when he inspected them and discovered Lord Baleron’s rarest treasure item, druid pants.

“Congrats, Jake!“ Emily and Brian chorused.

Nick slapped Jake on his back. “Nice drood pants, dude!”

“Hurry up! Put them on, I wanna see what they look like!” Brooke anxiously clung to his side and watched Jake’s screen..

Jake quickly clicked on the pants to make his character auto-equip them and was rewarded by a wolf whistle from Brooke. He thought that they would be another pair of tight leather pants. Instead, the “pants” turned out to be a dark green and black trimmed leather skirt.  The skirt hugged his character’s curves with a tight and form fitting shape that fell to just above the knee in the back, but wrapped in the front at mid-thigh to form an inverted ‘V’ in the front.

“What in the hell?” Jake was shocked.  While he liked how the skirt managed to show off his character’s legs, he wondered how in the hell something like that could offer any armor protection whatsoever.  The stat bonuses of the skirt did help to redirect and blunt his dismay at its appearance.  Surprisingly, the skimpy looking leather skirt boosted his druid’s wisdom by 20%, charisma by 10%, and constitution by 20% and had a 30% higher armor value than Jan’s old leather pants.

How in the hell that worked, Jake had no idea, but he decided he didn’t have time to ponder it. With his new “pants” equipped, he pressed the button that started Jan’s group teleportation spell. With the spell cast started, even if they got disconnected right now, Jan would continue to cast the spell and everyone’s characters would still be safe.

“Not a moment too soon!” Jake sighed with relief as the entire house rattled at the sound of a nearby lightning strike.

Brian jumped. “Holy crap! That was close!”

“Yeah, as soon as we land, let’s shut down and unplug everything.” Nick said with a worried tone in his voice.

Allison yelled down into the basement. “Holy shit! You guys should see what it looks like outside!”

“Brian, I’m scared...” Emily whimpered as she held onto Brian’s arm.

“Maybe we should-” Nick was interrupted by the flash and crack of a lightning bolt. This time, the lightning bolt struck the house and a 100 million volts of electricity surged through the home's electrical wiring, overloading the UPS battery pack. The flash of the lightning bolt followed by a loud boom was the last thing any of them saw or heard before their world went black.

~o~O~o~

---

Jake’s entire body tingled, causing him to slowly wake up. The tingling quickly subsided and he felt relieved because he worried about nerve damage caused by the electricity. He wondered what hospital he was in now and if his friends were okay. The lightning bolt that hit the house was a whopper.  First, his closed eyes reported the presence of light. Second, his ears heard the sound of a forest.  That confused him, but maybe this hospital used sound therapy to help calm their patients.  His nose further confused him by reporting the scent of rich earth mixed with fresh air and trees.

“Why does this hospital sound and smell like a forest?” Jake thought.

He tried to open his eyes and immediately regretted it as sunlight cut through large granite pillars, forcing him to blink his eyes. “Sunlight, in a hospital?  Wait, stone pillars!?”

With that observation, Jake gasped as he bolted upright and into a sitting position.  Next to him, he spotted an ornately carved, polished wooden staff laying in the grass. As he looked around, he noticed the bodies of four other people lying scattered in a small, slightly raised clearing surrounded by huge stone columns. He got the impression of Stonehenge, but in better condition since there were no columns missing and each column was capped by a slightly curved stone that bridged the gaps between the columns, forming a circle around the clearing.

Approximately 40 meters beyond the stone circle, stood the start of a thick, ancient forest filled with trees that had trunks 2 to 4 meters in circumference, standing 50 or more meters tall.

“How in the hell…” Jake whispered softly as he took in what his eyes, ears and nose were reporting to him. Everything seemed crisper, his vision sharper with colors more vibrant, he heard sounds in ranges he was sure he had lost long ago and his nose seemed more refined somehow. It was like he was smelling for the for the first time his life.

As his sense of touch came into play, he began noting additional strange sensations.  He wondered why his stomach and legs felt bare while his boots felt so soft on his feet.  He also wondered if he had suffered a chest injury due to the tight feeling across his upper chest. The soft support on his chest almost reminded him of the elastic bandages he had to wrap his chest in when he broke a rib playing football.

“Mmmmmmpphh...” Jake groaned and wondered which of the two female figures lying near him drowned out the sound his own groan.

The nearest person in this clearing looked to be about five feet away from him. He shook his head in confusion and that only added to the sensations that his body reported back to his muddled brain.  He felt long hair brush across his shoulders and back when he shook his head.  He never had long hair.  He always kept his hair cut to military regulation.

“What in the-” Jake stopped himself before he completed his question.  His voice sounded so strange to his ears.  He sounded like a girl.

He looked down and he saw two distinctive mounds of flesh sitting on his chest. His brain failed to register the additions and as his eyes automatically slid past the mounds, he noticed a pair nice, smooth, shapely and tanned pair of women’s legs capped by a pair of soft looking leather boots. Her legs emerged from what looked like the leather skirt his DBO character recently won. Someone in the hospital was working with Nick and punking him. They had to have propped him up in his bed and placed a mannequin's body over his to make it look like the mannequin’s body was his own.

He reached down and patted the exposed thigh, expecting to feel plastic, mannequin legs. Instead, he felt his hand touch his leg. “What in the fuck is going on!?!?” Jake wailed, sounding even more like a girl as he started a more aggressive inventory from top to bottom.

His arms looked different!  They were slender, lightly tanned and smooth with a hint of pale blonde hair, but firm with excellent muscle tone.  He wore metal bracers on his wrists, black, fingerless leather gloves and his hands looked so small and dainty.

Jake began to hyperventilate, which caused the mounds on his chest to rise and fall in a very unsettling fashion. Maybe they were fake? He reached up with both hands and attempted to stop the movement by firmly pressing down on them. He felt breasts. Worse, he felt his hands grabbing his breasts.

“What tha fuck?” Jake yelled as he quickly let go of his breasts while gasping for breath.  He had never seen a woman’s cleavage from this angle before and he felt stunned by what he was seeing, feeling and hearing. His vision began to fade around the edges. He was starting to black out, but managed to stop himself by closing his eyes and concentrating on slowing his breathing.

“Focus, Jake.  Focus. Maybe you are just dreaming this.” Jake clung to that thought and he started to feel his panic recede. He was in the hospital and this was just a trippy, drug induced dream. He had simply played Jan a little too much and now he was dreaming about being her.  It was an admittedly strange dream, but he had weirder ones while he had been in the hospital recovering from having his foot blown off.  As dreams go, this dream was like sunshine and lollipops compared to those dreams.

Feeling slightly calmer by that thought, Jake opened his eyes again.  “Okay, this is just a dream. Nothing is real.  I should just go with it and enjoy it...” Jake’s perky, dream girl voice sounding odd to his ears.  With that thought, he looked down once again and past his chest to his legs.  His bare knees with his lightly tanned and toned upper thighs looked very attractive to him.

“Oh my god!” Jake’s eyes focused on his feet. “I have two feet in my dream!” He wiggled his toes. “I can even feel both of them!”  His voice still sounded odd, but it right now, that was the last thing he cared about because he had two feet again!

“Okay, I know that I had dreams where I had my feet again, but this is getting ridiculous!” Jake muttered to himself.

“Uuughhh...” A feminine groan came from somewhere to his right.  He turned his head and spotted one of the bodies he noticed earlier beginning to stir. Five feet away from him, the setting sun glinted off of the armor clad body of an auburn haired elvish woman who put her arm over her eyes to block out the sunlight.  The woman’s armor looked like Brelyssa’s.  If he was dreaming that he was now his DBO character, then maybe he was also dreaming that Brooke’s character was in his dream too.

“Brooke?” Jake tentatively started to crawl over to the woman.  The long grass in the small clearing dug into his bare knees and tickled his thighs as it brushed against them.  His long blond hair hung down and obstructed his vision until he reached up with his left hand pulled it back along with an unconscious puff of breath to blow an errant strand from this eyes.

“What?” The woman asked, looking almost as confused as Jake felt when she uncovered her eyes and looked over at Jake.  Unlike Brooke’s character, this woman didn’t have the jagged scar on her face.

“Who are you?” She asked.

“Umm, Jake...I think.” Jake frowned and glanced down at his dream body again.

As her eyes focused on his face, she looked confused. “What? No way...” She mumbled before her brilliant green eyes widened with surprise as recognition followed, “Oh my god!  Jake, did you know that you look just like your character?”

“Brooke?” Jake asked as fear hammered inside his chest.

She nodded her head. “Yes. Is that really you,Jake?” Brooke asked, grabbing Jake’s hand and pulled herself into a sitting position to get a closer look at Jake’s face. Her armor gently rustling as interlocking plates slid smoothly against each other.

Jake closed his eyes. “Yes and I am really hoping that this is just a weird, drug induced dream.” He whispered, ashamed and confused by the situation he now found himself in.  He flinched as he felt the rough texture of Brooke’s gloved hand on his face.

“Oh shit, sorry Jake. I didn’t realize I had this metal glove thing on.” Brooke struggled to rise to her feet.

The sound of someone else groaning nearby caused Brooke instantly jump to her feet and draw her sword.  Jake barely reacted or even acknowledged Brooke’s concern. He was still on his knees next to where he had found Brooke laying.  He felt too shocked by his situation to feel much concern for anything else at the moment.

“Jake, it’s the rest of the guys.  People that look like Nick, Emily and Brian’s characters are here with us.” Brooke anxiously noted.

“Jake!” Brooke said, this time with a little more urgency in her voice.

Jake heard Brooke sheathe her sword followed by her grabbing his shoulders and effortlessly pulling his unresisting body to his feet. He dimly noted the fact that he could feel both of his feet now.  Not just a ghost sensation, but the real thing.

“Jake, I need you.” Brooke said, desperately.

Jake felt himself being shaken, gently at first, and then a little rougher before he heard Brooke yell his name again.  He looked up at Brooke’s new face and once again felt confused by what he was seeing and feeling.  Not since he first learned about losing his foot, had he ever felt so lost and weak.  Brooke had lifted him so effortlessly.

“Jake, I’m sorry and I know you’re freaking out right now, but I really need your help!” Tears began to well-up in Brooke’s eyes. “I don’t know where we are and I don’t know what to do.  I think our friends are here with us and they are going to need your help too.”

Brooke’s plea for help and the danger that they were all in started to penetrate the fog surrounding his thoughts.  He felt Brooke’s grip on his arms relax as he began to hold himself up with his own legs.  He felt his strength returning as his mind began to work on the mundane problems of survival.  He blinked once to clear his vision before he looked up and met Brooke’s eyes.

He nodded once to both acknowledge and show her his appreciation. “Okay, first.  Brooke, you check on Emily. I’ll check Brian and Nick.” The sound of his own voice was distracting, but the act of doing something helped to take his mind off his own problems.

Brian was the closer of the two guys, so Jake stopped and knelt with one knee by his side first.  “Brian?” Jake asked as he gently shook the shoulder of the man who looked like Belamros, Brian’s rogue.  Jake felt his bare knee digging into the grass and was highly conscious of the fact that his skirt rode up on his legs and exposed more of his thighs to the light breeze that was blowing through the clearing.

Brian’s eyes snapped open and he rolled away from Jake.  He sprang to his feet and drew his daggers with a blur before Jake’s mind could even process what just happened. Brian looked just as startled as Jake as he looked down at the daggers in his hands with confusion and then raised his eyes to look at down at Jake who was still kneeling and frozen with surprise by where Brian had just been laying.  Brian broke the silence first. “Umm, sorry ma’am, but umm, who are you?”.

“Jake...” Jake cautiously stood up and realized that while Brian wasn’t a huge man, he was noticeably larger and stronger looking he was now and that made him feel a little uncomfortable.

“No, I’m Brian. Who are you?” He smiled inquisitively and relaxed his stance.

“I’m Jake.” He sighed with mild exasperation.

“Umm, how can you be Jake?” Brian asked, skeptically, not realizing he had changed too.

“I don’t know Brian, but right now I’m feeling a little nervous by the fact that you still have your daggers drawn and ready.” Jake glanced nervously to Brian’s naked blades. The blade with the inky black miasma hovering around it made him feel exceptionally apprehensive.

Brian quickly sheathed them with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, ma’am, I don’t know how I did that. I just reacted.”

“That’s okay. I’m more than a little freaked out myself right now.” Jake gestured toward his own body as if afraid to touch himself.

Brian didn’t seem to be getting it. “Hey, did you know you look just like the character my buddy Jake plays in D...BO?” Comprehension and understanding dawned on his face. “Oh. Shit. You are Jake...” He looked around and spotted Brooke helping an absolutely stunning female dark elf to her feet.

“Emily?” Brian asked as he turned toward her.

The dark elf woman looked from Brooke to Jake to Brian and down to herself. “Brian?”

He nodded his head, yes and with her cobalt blue eyes flashing with tears she broke from Brooke’s side to face the man who looked nothing like the man she married.  They both stood at arm’s length, cautiously taking in each other’s appearance as Brooke and Jake looked anxiously on.

“Ahh, cripes. Would ya two just get it over with and hug each other already?” Came a surly voice from Jake’s left.

Everyone turned and spotted a dwarf encased in full plate armor sitting up and looking on with disapproval at the proceedings.

“Nick?” Jake asked, knowing the answer before he finished his question.

“Of course!  Who tha’ f’ing else could I be?  I’m a freaking dwarf and you’re a wood elf babe.  Sorry Jake, I don’t know about you, but I think that this is some pretty f’ed up shit!” Nick ranted as he clanked and clanged his way to stand on his feet; using his huge two-handed battle hammer to help push himself up to his full four and a half foot height.  His hammer was almost taller than he was.

Everyone else in the group were stunned and silenced by Nick’s blunt assessment. They glanced nervously at each other as Nick looked down at his feet, back up to everyone else and snorted with disgust. “Would ya look at this fucking shit? I’m a freaking midget with a beard so long; it has to be f’ing braided!  Who in the Sam freaking hell thought dwarves needed beards to be cool?!?”

~o~O~o~

Jake questions reality, but concern for the possible danger he and his friends might be in help him focus. Nick discovers how hard plate mail is to remove in an emergency and Emily discovers a possible game changer.

---

~o~O~o~

Disclaimer: The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended.  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This story is copyright (c) 2011 R Nelson. All rights reserved.

Nick’s rant broke through Jake’s paralysis and brought the ghost of a smile to everyone’s faces. Jake’s Army training and experience took over.  Deal with the important stuff, like living, and the minor stuff, like waking up as a girl, will take care of itself. He hoped.

Food, water, shelter and security were the main necessities with security jumping up to the number one spot. Reality was also a concern because if none of this was real, then why worry about the other things if waking up would solve them?

Jake looked up, into the clear blue sky. “So, does anyone else remember the storm and the explosion?”

He received nods and mumbles of agreement from everyone.

“Okay, are we dead or are we, dreaming?” Jake asked, looking around at his friend’s new faces and their surroundings. They appeared just as confused as he felt. Everything looked real and it felt real, all the way down to the faint breeze and the sounds of the birds in the trees.  He had some pretty realistic feeling dreams in the past, but couldn’t remember having a dream that felt as realistic and detailed as this on currently was.

Brooke, Brian and Emily were the first to arrive at a conclusion. “No, I don’t think we’re dead or dreaming because this certainly doesn’t look like any heaven or hell I could ever imagine and I feel pretty damn awake right now.” Brian spoke first, causing the other two to nod with agreement.

Jake thought the jury was still out, but he nodded with agreement as he turned to Nick. “Okay, your thoughts?”

Nick glanced down at his stubby fingers and bushy beard. “Fuck if I know, but this sure as shit isn’t a dream.”

“How do you know?”

“Simple, I just farted inside of this tin can.” He rapped a knuckle against his breast plate. “And, now, it feels all warm inside. Well, I hope I only farted…” Nick anxiously adjusted his posture and smiled with relief. “Yep, just a fart.”  He sniffed once, and then closed his eyes as they began to water. “Oh my god, what in the hell did I eat!?”  He gasped for air and took a step back.

Jake felt his spirits lifted as he and the people he thought of as his friends smiled and laughed at Nick. “Okay, that leaves me feeling a little unconvinced because this,” He gestured to his new female body. “Is impossible and I can say with absolute, 100% conviction, that I have NEVER dreamed about being my DBO character!”

Except for Nick, Jake had to look up to everyone and he estimated that he now stood somewhere between 5’ 2” and 5’ 4”. Brooke was now a few inches taller than he was and with all her armor, she looked every inch the warrior woman she played in the game. Both, Brian and Emily looked to be the same height as they were before, maybe 5’ 8” or so; making the pair the tallest of their group.

Emily certainly won the lottery in the looks department. As a sorceress, charisma or appearance coupled with intelligence were the primary stats for her class. In the game, the charisma stat gave her a bonus to charm, but didn’t do anything for her appearance. There were only so many pixels for the character models. Now, Jake found it a little hard to take his eyes off her. Her outfit matched her in game outfit. It covered her body, accenting every perfect curve, yet left plenty of room for the imagination. She was smoking hot and would probably put a supermodel to shame.

Next to her, Brian looked positively invisible. Not because he wasn’t trying to stand out, but because the slightly overweight, geek man with pale skin and boyish features was no longer there. In his place stood a rough shaven man with average features, average eye color and average build. His appearance would help him blend in, making him perfect for a rogue. The way he had sprung up earlier and how he now stood reminded Jake of a male gymnast or dancer.  He looked dangerous and ready to react in the blink of an eye.

Brooke, he didn’t know what to think about her. Yes, she had lost a few inches in height, but out of all of them, she had the least dramatic change to her body. In his opinion, he thought she looked a little more beautiful, but not as dramatic as Emily.  Her face was different, a little more angular with larger, more expressive eyes, her hair was a different color and her ears were pointy, but otherwise, she didn’t look or act at all freaked out about her changes.  She had been the first to pull her self together and help snap him out of his paralysis.

The new Nick probably had more in common with Jake. While still a male, his body had been changed as much and possibly even more than Jake’s. They had both lost a foot or more in height. Gone was the tall, stork of a man who probably only needed to shave once a week and who would get winded if they tried walking up more than two flights of stairs. With some fake ears and a costume, the old Nick would’ve made the perfect elf. In his place, stood the epitome of a fantasy dwarven warrior.

He looked like an NFL Defensive lineman who had two feet taken out of his legs, compressing him down from 6’ something to 4’ without losing anything in his upper body. With his armor, he looked like a powerful little tank that could bulldoze his way through anything in his path. It made him feel more than a little intimidated and he wasn’t used to feeling that way.

Jake felt so tiny compared to everyone else. He had always been the tall, muscular self-confident athletic member of their little group. Even without his foot, he still kept himself in shape and weighed in at 250 pounds. He was the one everyone called when they needed help moving or lifting something. Now, he felt like he might be lucky to weigh in at 90 pounds and lift a bag of flour.

“Okay,” Jake sighed with resignation. “Then, I have to assume that this is real,” He gestured down to his body and the clearing they stood in before focusing his attention back to his friends. “And that you all are real and, you all have to do the same, right?”

They all nodded in agreement and for some reason, seemed to be looking to him for leadership. Yes, he usually led the group when they played, but it was only because his character was the healer and the role kind of forced him to hang back and keep an eye on the overall mission. With the way he felt about himself right now, he wondered what his friends could be thinking. He didn’t feel at all confident. He was the last person who should be leading this little group.

Brooke was the better person to lead the group. Her character was the warrior, with lots of armor to protect her. In real life, she had a black belt in karate and knew how to fire a weapon. While she had never served in the military, her old man had, and boy had he.  The man was a Navy SEAL and he had taught her everything he could.  Jake didn’t find out about her dad until after they had been dating for a few months.

She had mentioned that her father had been in the Navy, but never that he had been a SEAL. While they served the same country, the Navy and the Army didn’t exactly get along and Brooke knew that. She sprang that critical little detail about her father being a SEAL only two days before she introduced them. It was the only time he had ever seen her act nervous about anything.  While in his 50’s, her father kept himself in shape and he had a presence, almost an aura of danger that made Jake feel very wary around the man, but he could tell that beneath the tough exterior and hardened eyes, was a man who cared deeply about his daughter and would do anything to protect her.

Jake left the meeting feeling more than a little intimidated, but Brooke practically glowed with happiness. “He likes you!” She giggled and kissed a surprised Jake.

As much as he wanted her to, Brooke didn’t look like she was going to step forward and take charge. Someone had to and he realized that his friends were all waiting on him to provide them with direction. He sighed with defeat, causing Brooke to smirk with satisfaction.

“Shit!” He realized that having his arms crossed against his chest gave him more cleavage and made him look just as hesitant and intimidated as he felt.

He uncrossed his arms, widened his stance and placed his hands on his hips to make himself look and feel more aggressive. “Okay, I’m probably the last person who should be leading you all, but since no one else wants to take charge, I will.”

No one countermanded his assertion.  Brooke smiled, Brian and Emily looked hopeful and Nick, well, Nick just scowled as if he was daring him to change his mind. The scenario looked pretty grim to him. With their security in mind, he surveyed their current position with a little more thought toward defending it from attack. The large stones that made up the Stonehenge like circle provided some cover and concealment from anyone observing them from the wood line. They would probably block anything short of the armor piercing round of a tank cannon.

What was beyond the stone circle and in the forest was another matter. Jake’s posture stiffened with resolve as he turned to his friend. “Okay, Brian. Since you’re probably a rogue and not wearing a noisy steel suit, I need you to help us establish a perimeter.” He pointed to what he thought was north. “Head that way until you hit the trees, then do a full circle of our current position. We need to know where we are at and if there are any signs of civilization. Roads, trails, lights, etc...got it?”

Brian nodded once and glanced over to Emily. She returned his nod and sighed when her husband silently stalked away from the group. “Okay, Brooke and Nick. I need you two to keep an eye on Brian and cover him in case he runs into something he can’t handle.”

“Got it.” Brooke turned, picked up and donned her helm, grabbed her shield and strode confidently out of the stone circle in the direction Brian left their location.

Nick nodded and shouldered his large war hammer. “Aye.” His Scottish accent was thick. “Ah crap, what’s with the aye crap?”  He muttered as he moved to support Brooke.

“What about me?” Ally asked, nervously glancing down at her scantily clad body before she reflexively crossed her arms against her chest in an effort to cover up.

“You and I, we do what we usually do.” Jake smiled in an effort to appear less tense than he felt and give Ally some reassurance.  “We stand here and look pretty while the boys do all the dirty work.”

“Hey, I heard that…” Brooke chuckled

~o~O~o~

Brooke didn’t know what to make if things. She and her friends were now their DBO characters and even more disturbing to her, her boyfriend was now a beautiful, petite, little female wood-elf. He looked exactly like they had made his character and now she felt a little guilty about playing that trick on him, but no one had planned on turning into their characters. If any of them had known it could happen, they probably would have picked different characters, or not played at all.

Was this real? Brian’s magical dagger looked real, but otherwise, she hadn’t seen anyone blow something up or do anything cool.  Her sword looked and felt real. It looked exactly like her character’s sword with elvish runes or something written on the blade. Other than that, it was kind of plain. It didn’t glow or have flames dancing across its surface, but her character’s sword didn’t do anything flashy. It was magically enhanced, but it wasn’t her character’s epic sword with all the cool particle effects.

She knew Jake was majorly freaked out and it made her feel a little guilty because she felt the same as she always felt, but at the same time different, more dangerous or something. She had never seen Jake look so lost and helpless before, but she couldn’t exactly blame him. Unlike him, she had only lost a few inches, but she felt stronger, more supple and full of energy. She knew she was a little more fearless than the typical woman. Her father had seen to that by teaching her how to defend herself using every SEAL trick in the book, and then some extra tricks of his own. She was never able to beat him, but now, she felt like she might be able to give him a serious run for the money.

Her armor looked and felt like it was made from real metal, maybe even steel or some mythical alloy. Jake or one of the guys would probably know what it was made out of. Regardless, it had to be heavy, but it felt like it weighed next to nothing. Her shield, as bulky and heavy as it looked, she effortlessly carried on her left arm. It, most definitely, wasn’t made of plastic. It was made from real metal on the outside, thick, heavy looking wood on the inside with sturdy handle and thick leather straps to help hold it onto her arm.

Brooke liked how she felt.

“Damn, woman, slow down. We ain’t running to put out a fire or anything!” Nick grumbled as he noisily clanked his way over to her side. With his shorter legs, he had a little harder time matching her stride.

Brooke laughed and with the steel armor covering both of their bodies, along with their helms; she wasn’t sure how to hug or kiss him to show her appreciation. Instead, she slapped him on his back like a man would. Her gauntleted hand clanged lightly against the back of his steel breastplate. “Thanks for not freaking out, Nick. You’re sense of humor really helped, and well, Jake needed the kick in the pants.  You’re the best.”

Nick grunted noncommittally and shifted the grip of his hammer, but didn’t add anything as they pair made a half circuit around their camp. “Where did our little ‘spelunker’ go?” He asked, glancing anxiously into the woods.

Brooke peered intently into the woods and shrugged. “Beats me, I lost sight of him almost as soon as he entered the trees. If he’s not really a rogue, he’s damn good at hiding. Have you spotted anything from down there?” She grinned mischievously at him.

“Hardy, har, har...other than the small trail opening back that way, no I haven’t,” Nick grinned as he looked up at her with a thoughtful look in his eyes. “But if yer elvishness is getting a nosebleed from having yer head up in the clouds, I’d be more than happy to help you out. Ya know, knock out a knee cap or two.”

“Ha!” Brooke laughed. “It’s not my fault that you got in a fight with a trash compactor and lost, short stuff, but what do you think about all of this?”

Nick noncommittally shrugged his shoulders before turning his gaze to her. “Damned if I know, but right now, I’m not worried about that because I can’t do anything about it.” He grunted a repressed chuckle. “But, if ya really wanna know, I’ll tell ya what’s really got me worried right now.” He sighed deeply.

Concerned, Brooke stopped and turned to face him. “Of course, Nick. What is it?”

He grimaced with pain. “I gotta take a piss like a frigging race horse and I don’t have a fucking clue to how take off all this armor. Do you?”

~o~O~o~

Emily glanced over at the new Jake and found herself feeling a little envious of him. With his warm looking leather top, skirt and boots, he looked so pretty and petite. Elvish, exactly like she had always wished she had looked. She had always been a little overweight, not obese, but always a layer of ‘cute’ baby fat and she hated it. Buying clothes that fit was always an exercise in frustration and the extra ‘fat’ didn’t help in the bra department either. She was a full figured woman and bras, no matter how expensive or custom fitted, were always a painful necessity for her.

She glanced back down to her much smaller chest and sighed with frustration. Not because her breasts were now smaller, but because they were perfectly sized. The size she always wished she could have been, but knowing that with her ‘baby’ fat, smaller breasts would have made her look less feminine, less curvy. God, how she hated that term, curvy. She wasn’t fat, but when thin people tried to compliment her by using that word, they somehow made her feel fat.

Emily thought she looked pretty now, but she had no idea how pretty. Brian certainly seemed appreciative of her new appearance, but without a mirror, she couldn’t tell for sure. She felt and looked thin, but not emaciated, healthy, very healthy. A surreptitious glance over her shoulder, down toward her back told her that her butt was probably more perfect than it had ever been in her life. Her hair was almost a foot longer than she preferred to keep it and it was bright silver. The artist inside of her thought it contrasted nicely against her deep blue skin.

She thought she looked a lot like that Mystique girl she saw on TV a few months ago. The one who shot up the convention center during a comic book show and mysteriously disappeared. Her picture had been all over the place for a week or two, but then the next new super villain made the news and everyone forgot about Mystique. She did too, but due to her new appearance, her mind was bringing up everything she could remember about the girl.

There were some rumors on DBO forums that Mystique had played the game and yes, with her blue skin, she looked a little like Mystique, except Mystique’s hair was red and so were her eyes. She did have pointy elf ears and judging by skin and body type, they could be related or something. Except the girl on TV looked like she was only 16 or so, which really made Emily wonder what her own face now looked like.

She didn’t know how Jake could do it. He looked almost ready to have a meltdown a few minutes ago, now, he looked so confident and in charge now. Well, ‘she’ looked confident and in charge. Jake was most certainly not a man now and looking at her, Emily had a hard time thinking of Jake using the male pronoun and using his very male name for  someone who most certainly did not fit the name.

Jake kept a watchful eye on Brooke and Nick while they made their circle of the ‘perimeter’ while the two of them stayed in their ‘position’, as Jake had called it.  She made it sound so military, but Jake was in the Army, so it made sense and she found herself feeling relieved by the use of the jargon.

Emily did her part and kept an eye out for Brian while occasionally stealing a glance or two at Jan. Yes, she decided that she was ‘Jan’ and perhaps it would help her adjust if she referred to her using that name. After a few minutes of simply standing there and feeling anxious about everything, she decided to rip the bandage off. “So, umm, Jan…”

Jan tensed, taking her eyes off of Brooke and Nick and glancing at her with a slightly confused and haunted look in her eyes. “Yes?”

“I know it’s probably a little crazy for you right now, but I’ve been thinking and worrying about myself. Kinda selfish, right?” Emily smiled, attempting to take the sting out of her words.

A ghost of a smile danced across Jan’s features. “Umm, not really. You have changed, a lot. You’re very beautiful.” Jan halted and hastened to reassure her friend. “Not that you weren’t pretty before…” She groaned with frustration. “Oh hell, I dunno, we’ve all changed.”

Emily giggled, reached over and hugged Jan, surprising the petite wood-elf. “Yes, we have.  Brooke and Brian are probably the least affected by all this, but you and Nick, well, more you, I don’t know how you are keeping it together right now, but thanks. You’re a lot stronger person than I could ever be.”

“I doubt that, I mean, I think you’re going to surprise yourself.” Jan pulled away, stole a glance back to Brooke and Nick.

“Where are they going?” Emily asked as she watched the two of them  head for the tree line, but not with alarm.

“I’m...not sure, wait…” Jan anxiously gripped her staff for a few seconds before she chuckled and relaxed. “It looks like Nick has to go to the bathroom.” She turned back to Emily with a smile on her face.

Emily thought she looked so darn pretty when she smiled. “Oh, I never considered how they would manage to do that in their armor.” She motioned to her silky, gossamer gown and gestured to Jan’s skirt. “I guess we are kinda lucky that way, right?”

Jan blushed, turned back to watch her girlfriend and best friend try to figure out their armor. “Yeah, I guess…” She mumbled.

Emily wondered if she was pushing Jan too hard. She turned her gaze back in an attempt to catch sight of how Nick got his armor off. The scene was kind of comical with Brooke pointing out the parts of Nick’s armor that he couldn’t see due to his breastplate blocking his view. Of course, Nick didn’t find it at all amusing and his profanity could be heard all the way back at their position. “Ah, fuck it Brooke, just cut the fucking belt off for me before I pee my fucking pants!”

A few seconds later, Brooke abruptly turned away from Nick. “Ahhh, about fucking time. I thought my freaking kidneys were gonna explode on me. I had piss coming outta my eyeballs!”  He laughed as he glanced back over his shoulder at Brooke. “Ya should see the size of tha monster I had in my pants. It’s no wonder it took so long to get it out!”

Brooke waved to Emily and Jan before turning back to Nick. She pitched her voice loud enough to be heard by her friends. “Yeah, right. It only looks like that because you’re a LOT closer to it now.”

Emily found the exchange humorous and it brightened her day.  Brooke and Nick seemed to be coming to terms with their changes just fine.  Brooke and her had always gotten along, but Brooke had more of a driven personality. Brooke and Jake were both so alike and perfect for each other. Brooke was more direct and forceful than Emily and probably not a person who she would have become friends with under normal circumstances, but the two of them had grown to like each other over the past year.

Emily was the sensitive artist type who would always sniffle or cry over a friend’s Facebook post of a cute kitten or friend in need story.  Brooke would laugh at her for reacting so emotionally, but she would also show her support by giving her a friendly hug. “You’re such a softy and I think it’s great. The world needs more people like you.”

She glanced back to Jan and could tell the interaction between Brooke and Nick troubled her. “She still loves you.” Emily whispered and briefly pulled Jan close to her.

Jan sighed. “I hope so, but right now, I’m more worried about the two of us.”

“What?” Emily asked, surprised by Jan’s statement.

“Well, does magic exist here?  If not, you and I are screwed.” Jan pointed to Brooke. “Look at them. They have tons of armor and Brooke has a sword. What can you and I do if we are attacked?”

Emily glanced over to Jan. At least she had a nice staff to hit someone with, but what did she have? A tiny dagger on her hip, what good would that do? She looked down to her hands and wondered about it herself.  Even with her dagger, she didn’t feel equipped to take on a spider, much less a man or a monster. What could she do besides run away screaming for help?  “Well, we could try casting a spell, right?”

“Any ideas on how to do that?” Jan asked, somewhat bitterly.

“No, but talking like that doesn’t help. You just need to have a little more faith in yourself, and your friends.” Emily lightly admonished her friend.

Jan momentarily looked like she might break down and cry, but she quickly recovered. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry.” She smiled wryly at Emily as she pretended to try to type on an invisible keyboard. “Umm, okay, any ideas because I don’t have a clue about which button to push here.”

“I dunno either…” Emily closed her eyes and thought about her character’s spells. She didn’t have anything flashy or dangerous like a wizard’s fireball, but she did have a lot of ‘little’ indirect spells.

The first and least dangerous one to pop to mind was the mostly useless, but sometimes fun, level, one, “Dancing Lights” spell. She liked to sometimes cast in the newbie zones. She knew it was wrong, but she had to do something to live up to her ‘evil’ Dark Elf heritage. So, she would sometimes hide the newbie zone and freak out the new players with her dancing lights spell by directing the lights to make attack runs.

She didn’t feel too bad about being evil every now and then. Her evil was easily offset by her drive-by buffings of the newbies. It was amazing how grateful the newbies where when she ninja cast her mana regen buff on them. Jan was right. Casting a spell in the game was a simple push of a button.

Magic had to be harder than that in this life, but she was at a loss for how to go about casting a spell.  Somehow, she doubted that yelling ‘abra-ca-dabbra’ and pointing her finger would work.  It had to be something a little harder and more personal.  Ignoring Jan, she sat down, cross legged on the ground and began her yoga breathing exercises to help center herself. Emily took a deep, calming breath as she concentrated on listening to her mind and body. Nothing else mattered, breath in, breath out, focus on the Dancing Lights spell.

Emily thought she felt something, a tiny spark from somewhere deep inside her body. She exhaled and imagined herself expanding the spark like she was dipping her brush in paint. Opening her eyes, she pointed to the air in front of her and focused on extending the spark past her finger and onto the canvas.

Four balls of light burst into existence.

~o~O~o~

Well, I hope you all are enjoying this story and will continue to do so. It is the story my muse seems most focused on at the moment. However; a 4th story broke through the barrier and I finished the first, rough chapter of it this evening. I know, insanity to even consider writing four different stories at the same time. Well, not literally at the same time because that would be impossible, even for a crazy person and I'm not crazy. Mostly. Now, I just need to win the lottery so I can write full time and purge these story demons from my mind. Barring that highly unlikely event, I'm afraid you all may start seeing more posts from me, but slower single story updates due to my Muse's ADD.

---

~o~O~o~

Disclaimer: The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended.  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This story is copyright (c) 2011 R Nelson. All rights reserved.

Jake gasped with shock as the magical balls bathed the area in bright white light. He knew Emily’s display of ‘real’ magic shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. If he and his friends could dream about being their characters and transported to a fantasy world, or be sucked into the game world as their characters like it was the Matrix, then what was a little display of magic?

“Just how real is this dream simulation and can I do that?”

He still wasn’t 100% sold on his experience not being an incredibly vivid lucid dream. He was leaning more toward it being a big virtual reality experiment like “The Matrix” or “Caverns of Socrates” with ‘everything was real’ as the least likely of the three options.  Was Emily’s use of magic a confirmation for any of his three hypotheses?  No, her magic demonstration only made the dream and virtual reality scenarios more likely, but didn’t eliminate the real life scenario either because if this was real, maybe magic in this world was also real.

“How did you do that?” Jake helped a slightly distracted Emily back to her feet as she concentrated on controlling the balls of light.

She didn’t answer and her unfocused gaze told him why. He turned and watched as the four balls moved as one unit, but split into two units, moving in separate directions before they split again into four distinct units. Somehow, Emily was controlling the magic balls with her mind. Each ball of light separated from each other until they got about 3 meters apart. Then, they stopped moving away from each other. Emily smiled happily  as her magic balls of light began to slowly circle inside the inner perimeter of the columns.

Jake appreciatively watched as Emily’s confidence and control increased. The balls of light danced in and out of the columns, and then briefly spun around Jake like they were doing attack runs before they faded away after about a minute.

“Wow, that was pretty cool, Emily.”

The man’s voice came from behind him, causing Jake to flinch with surprise. His voice made an embarrassing high squeak sound as he spun around to face a mischievously grinning Brian. “Damn it, Brian! That wasn’t funny. How in the hell did you sneak up on us?”

Brian shrugged his shoulders and smirked unrepentantly. “Beats me, bud. I just walked like I normally would, but I do have to admit; it does seem almost trivial to move silently.  It’s like I’m really a rogue now and...” He pulled up his leather jerkin, briefly exposing his chiseled abs. “I have to say, this is pretty damn cool.”

Jake felt a twinge of jealousy. From personal experience, he knew that six pack abs like Brian now sported took a shit ton of diet and exercise. One more point for this being either a dream or a virtual reality experience. His thoughts and emotions swirled as Brian casually reached over and hugged Emily.

“That was pretty cool, Emily,” Brian pulled back and sighed with appreciation. “And, wow, just wow. You’re hot.”

Emily giggled demurely. “You really think so?”

“Hell yes!” Brian got down on one knee in front of Emily. “Iridia, umm, I can’t remember your character’s last name, but will you marry me?”

Emily gasped and clutched her hands to her chest with surprise. “Silly man, we’re already married and my name isn’t Iridia, remember?” Her musical laughter rang across the clearing.

“Yes, but maybe we aren’t married in this world and I wanna make sure nothing changes between us.” Brian stood and held her tightly to his body as he gazed determinedly into her eyes. “No matter what, I love you, Emily.” He softly whispered to her as he leaned in, kissing her passionately on her lips.

Jake turned his back on the happy couple and spotted Brooke and Nick noisily tromping their way back into their landing zone.  Their armor made noise, but Nick’s armor was easily the loudest. Brooke’s armor was a soft, metallic rustle compared to the harsh, clanging sound Nick’s armor made with each step. There would be zero chances of him sneaking up on anyone. “Did you two find anything?”

Brooke shook her head as Nick spoke up. “Notta thing boss, but I did spot a deer in the woods. Maybe a few bunnies.” He smirked and gestured to the happy couple. “What about Brian?”

Brian reluctantly pulled himself away from Emily, but the pair remained side-by-side, holding hands. “Well, I spotted an old road or something over there,” He pointed off to the north east. “It was pretty overgrown and looks like it hasn’t been used in at least a decade or two.” He shrugged apologetically. “Hard to say.  There was a game trail to the south, but nothing else beyond that.  I didn’t go too deep into the woods, only 10 or 20 yards at most, but no other signs of civilization.”

Jake nodded as he took in Brian’s report, but now he needed get his own eyeballs on the problem of defending their position. “I need to take a look around and think. Wait here, yell if you spot something. I’m just going to check the outside of these stones, okay?” Jake moved outside the protection of the stones for the first time and studied both the stones and the tree line. He spotted the break in the trees where Brian said the old road was located.  He circled the stones, paying closer attention to the tree line.

He decided that an attack could come from any side, but due to the old road, that might be the more likely origin of an attack. Without modern weapons, he was at a loss for what to do about defensive positions. If he had his old squad, he would emplace a pair of claymore mines to cover the road. Dig a couple of firing positions on each cardinal point to cover an attack from any side. Man each position with one man, but keep the remaining members of his squad in reserve so they could reinforce the dug in positions based on the attack direction. Yep, within 30 minutes, he could have this position set up pretty well.

Unfortunately, they only had swords, knives and a staff. Maybe Emily could cast a spell or something for a ranged attack, but other than that, zip. Any fight would be up close and personal via bloody hand to hand combat. All his Army training and experience was pretty much out the window.

Jake glanced back at his heavily armored friend and girlfriend. They both were keeping a watchful eye out for him. He nodded to them before he passed behind another stone column. “Okay, they are my heavy weapons team. If we are attacked, I send Nick forward to engage the enemy while Brian and I handle anyone who gets past him. Brooke defends Emily while she keeps the rest of the enemy forces distracted with her lights spell.”

As an action plan, it kind of sucked, but what else could he do? He knew he should plan on sending Brooke and Nick out together, but he didn’t know what he would do if she got hurt, or killed.  What kind of boyfriend would send his girlfriend out to fight for him? In this virtual reality dream world, she was a warrior and a warrior fought from the front.  She would be pissed at him for even considering holding her back.

He sighed with frustration and leaned up against the northern stone. The sun was getting low in the sky, causing the shadows to lengthen and make the surrounding forest appear more forbidding. They had maybe another hour of daylight to work with and a lot to do.  The solid, granite stone against his back felt reassuring and helped calm him down. He felt like he had a connection to the stones. Maybe it was because they reminded him of the famous Stonehenge monument in Great Britain?  Jan was supposed to be a druid and Stonehenge had something to do with druids, right?

Feeling a little calmer, Jake pushed off and returned to his friends. “Okay, here is what I’m thinking. It’s going to get dark here soon. Maybe another hour, at most and we have a lot we need to do and decide. First of all, we don’t know how long we are going to be stuck here, wherever ‘here’ is.  We could be here an hour, days, weeks or forever.” He sighed. “Worst case, forever and we should plan on worst case, right?”

Brian reassured Emily with a hug, causing her to relax. Jake wished he could hug Brooke right now. A little physical contact would feel so nice right about now.  “With that in mind, we need to plan for security. We appear to be in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a forest containing unknown wild animals or people.” He studied his friend’s faces and saw an appropriate amount of concern and determination. “So, if we are attacked, here is the basic response plan.” He glanced to Brooke and hesitated for a second. “Brooke and Nick, you two are our heavy assault. You two will identify and attack the strongest point of our enemy’s assault. The rest of us,” He looked at Brian and Emily. “Will do what we can to support the two of you. Got it?”

“Yep.” Nick nodded.

“Loud and clear, sir.” Brooke stood at attention and smiled.

Brian simply nodded and Emily agreed with him.

“Good, I know it’s not much of a plan and maybe nothing will happen, but it’s better than everyone panicking and running around like a chicken with their head cut off.” Jake sighed, his chest heaved, reminding him of his ‘problem’.  “Okay, the sun is going to set soon. I want everyone alert and ready to defend our position at that time. Sunrise and sunset are the times an enemy is most likely to attack. We will need to get our sleep tonight, but also post a guard. We will each have a two hour slot. Any volunteers for the midnight shift?”

“Yo.” Brian quickly raised his hand.

“Okay, I’ll take the shift after Brian.” Jake volunteered himself to take the next hardest shift so that his two heavy fighters and Emily could get the best rest. “Emily, you take the first shift, Brooke, do you wanna follow Emily and Nick takes the final shift?”

Everyone agreed with Jake’s guard roster. He smiled with satisfaction. “Great!” One item down, who knows how many to go.

“No one goes solo. Not to the bathroom, or even for a walk around the camp. You grab a buddy, okay?” They all glanced anxiously to each other, before nodding with agreement.

“Yeah, good idea…” Brian whispered.

“Next on the agenda, food, water and shelter.” Jake glanced around the place they would setup camp. “Other than the stones here to help block the wind, I don’t see a shelter and I don’t see any tents. It’s getting a little late to try hunting for a source of water or food, but we could use a fire and for that, we need wood and a way to start a fire. Before it gets dark, we should gather some wood from the forest, then do an inventory and figure out how to light the wood. Maybe one of us has a lighter or something in a pocket, who knows?” He glanced down to his waist, patted an empty feeling pouch and shrugged.

“So, we’ll split into two teams. Brooke, you and Brian team up, don’t go too deep into the woods. Make sure you can spot and know the direction to the stones from wherever you are at. Nick, you’re with me and Em. We will all spread out as much as possible, but keep each team and each other in sight at all times. No playing hide and seek games and don’t try chopping any trees down. Just grab dead wood, sticks and branches as dry as you can find. Maybe some dry leaves or pine needles if you can find any. If, at any time you find yourself without a buddy, yell, ‘Marco’. Response by everyone who can hear it will be ‘Polo’.” Everyone nodded and smiled, amused by the childhood game instructions.

“Now, if you are attacked by anything, yell or scream for help and if possible, retreat to the stones. Got it?”

The danger reminder sobered everyone up, but again, everyone nodded. “Great, let’s get some wood.”

Once they reached the wood line, Brooke and Brian paired and headed away at an angle from Jake, Nick and Emily. Emily’s high heel shoes and skimpy clothing weren’t really cut out for traipsing through the woods, but she seemed to handle the heels easily enough. Maybe they were magic and worked just as well for her as his boots did for him, or, Emily was just good at walking in heels.  He glanced down to his boots and leather outfit. Except for his bare knees, he was pretty well protected. “I guess I got off lucky.” He thought.

They quickly found enough dead wood in the area and didn’t need to rove too deeply into the woods.  Within 30 minutes, the group had a nice stack of branches and pine needles to burn and even better, nothing attacked them.  Jake did notice a few trees with claw marks gouged into the bark well above his head. He had to use his staff to reach a few of the marks. Whatever the animal was that left the marks, it was pretty damn big, but the marks looked old and Jake prayed that whatever it was that made the marks wouldn’t be returning anytime soon.

Jake did have one adventure in the woods that he wished he didn’t. He had to pee and that proved to be an eye opener for him.  One, it proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt that he no longer had a penis. Two, squatting to pee made him feel very vulnerable and three, he had no toilet paper to wipe with and he didn’t want to use leaves for that part of his anatomy. He had wiped his ass in the woods using leaves before, but girls got all kinds of infections down there and it just didn’t seem like a good idea to wipe that part with a dirty old leaf.

Thankfully, Emily was there to help him. She was able to help in figure out how to get at and remove his undergarments. It was much easier than it was for Nick and probably Brooke, but he wasn’t sure because the details on that issue never came up. Emily also helped him find a good spot to go and how to properly squat to avoid peeing on his own feet. His only contribution to the process was to use the tip of his staff to dig a shallow latrine to cover his urine with once he was done. Proper sanitation practices in the field were very important to prevent troops getting cholera or some other infection.

For wiping, Emily recommended just hanging out for a minute or two to allow himself to air dry before pulling his fabric lined, leather panties snugly into place against his far too smooth undercarriage. His bladder felt much better, but his ego took a huge bruising and he stopped mentally cringing each time Emily addressed him using his character’s name. He didn’t like being called Jan, but his friends had used his character’s name in games and during game discussions. Why did it bother him so much to hear Emily use it now? He decide that he would worry about his name if Brooke or the other guys started calling him Jan.

Jake stood watch as Emily did her business and unlike him, her only complaint seemed to be the lack of toilet paper.  When he got back to being himself, the first thing he was going to do for Brooke, and any female guest that visited their house, was make sure they were always stocked with the best and softest toilet paper he could buy. Additionally, he promised himself that he would never again complain about Brooke using too much toilet paper.

They stacked their gathered firewood against one of the stones and Jake arranged the sticks and pine needles to make lighting a fire as easy as possible. All they needed was a match or a lighter. “Okay, inventory time. We need to dig into our pockets,” He chuckled as everyone, himself included reflexively reached for pockets that none of them had. “Sorry, pouches, or whatever and empty them out so we know what we have to work with here.”

Jake’s belt pouch proved to be a little larger on the inside than it looked from the outside. When he opened it, it looked empty, but to be sure, he carefully reached inside. His fingers didn’t encounter the bottom after a few inches in like he expected. “Holy shit!” His entire arm, up to his elbow went into the pouch.

“Whoa! We all have Bags of Holding, sweet!” Brian whistled with appreciation as he pulled out a small pouch of tools followed by a thin, leather face mask.

“Bags of what?” Emily whispered as she anxiously reached for the small silk pouch on her belt.

Jake felt his fingers brush against something that felt like an animal. He flinched, but it didn’t move and he realized it wasn’t something alive. He grabbed and pulled out a very nice looking fur lined, hooded cloak. He, along with everyone else, was amazed at how his tiny little pouch could hold such a large item and with the ease in which he pulled it out.

Everyone else had a warm looking cloak in their bags. Emily’s cloak looked like it was made of silk, but it was fairly thick and looked like it would do a good job keeping her warm. Based on what he could remember about Dark Elves, the silk was probably made from spider silk. Brooke’s cloak looked a lot like hers, just a different color of fur. Nick’s cloak looked like a horribly butchered bear pelt that looked like it was too small to wrap around his body as a blanket. Brian’s cloak was a simple, heavy cloth cloak dyed black. Nothing that would make him stand out in a crowd.

Nick pulled out a pick axe and a small shovel that resembled an entrenching tool. Jake thought it might come in handy if they needed to stay here longer because they needed to dig a proper latrine. Brian’s next item was a small hand axe, perfect for chopping firewood. Brooke pulled out a whetting stone for her sword while Jake and Emily’s next item was a bedroll.

Everyone else also had a bedroll, followed by a small bag of dried rations, a leather water skin, beer skin for Nick, and a spare set of undergarments. Jake’s, Brooke’s and Emily’s bag had an extra set of items that confused Jake, but the girls seemed to be happy to see them. They were small, flattened cheesecloth bags filled with bleached wool. He thought they might be field dressings, except they were missing the extra band of cloth used to tie them in place around a wound and none of the other guys had them in their bags.

“Pads, or tampons for, you know what.” Brooke whispered to him as he inspected one of the dressings.

He quickly set this aside, but not on the ground where they might get dirty.

A bar of floral scented soap, a ceramic jar of something that smelled like shampoo and a small glass vial of some amber colored liquid that Jake feared was perfume. Emily’s vial was filled with a white fluid. She sniffed it, smiled and quickly dabbed a small amount on her neck. He thought she smelled nice, but he refused to try any for himself when she offered to share. Brooke didn’t hesitate to try Emily’s perfume, but she tested and liked her own a little better. Jake liked how it smelled on her too.  It was a light floral scent while Emily’s was a floral with cinnamon overtones.

Brian’s bag contained a rough oblong shaped stone and a straight shaving razor while Nick’s bag lacked the personal hygiene items, but he didn’t seem to upset about the oversight. “Hey, dwarves hate water and they most certainly don’t shave! Right?”

The small bags held a lot of stuff and he was just beginning to worry about having a fire for the night when his fingers closed around a small, metal box. It was a flint and tinder. Things were looking up. “Nice, now I can start a fire and we have something to sleep on instead of the cold, hard ground.” He pointed to their bedrolls and cloaks.

Everyone’s bags contained the flint and tinder box and that was the last item they were able to pull from their bags.  It was like they had each been given a standard adventurer’s kit tailored to their characters, except they never had the soap or feminine hygiene products to worry about when they played D&D back in high school.

“Well, these are pretty cool.” Emily stared at the tiny bag in her hand and down to the objects on the ground with amazement. “I wish I had one of these back home. Think of all the stuff I could’ve crammed into my purse, but how does it work?” She looked back to Jake and the guys.

Jake glanced over to Brian, the rules lawyer and resident expert on all things written in the D&D manuals. “Why don’t you explain while I get a fire started?”

Put on the spot, Brian nervously cleared his throat as Emily and Brooke turned their attention on him. “Okay, well, in D&D, it was thought that Bags of Holding were gates into a nondimensional space that could hold a lot of stuff.” He glanced down to the small pouch attached to his belt. “Except in D&D, the bags actually looked like large cloth sacks and not little pouches like we have. In D&D, you had to be careful with how you loaded your bag because it worked on a first in, last out rule. Of course, some Dungeon Masters and players,” He glanced meaningfully at Nick. “Incorrectly interpreted it otherwise and tried to grab what they wanted directly.” He sighed with resignation. “Then, DBO and all of the MMO games kind of used ruined the Bag of Holding idea by giving players an inventory system where they could simply drag and drop their stuff however they wanted.”

Jake listened to Brian’s explanation with half an ear as he worked on getting the fire started. His time spent camping as a teenager and making field expedient camp fires in the Army helped. Of course, in the Army, everyone had access to lighters, matches, gas and sometimes explosives. It was very easy for a fire to get a little too exciting, but it sure was fun to pick on your buddies who burned off their eyebrows.

With the fire going, everyone’s stress levels dropped a bit due to the safety, security and warmth having a fire a night brought.  Jake repacked his belt pouch and confirmed it worked on a first in, last out rule. Like everyone else, he kept his new cloak and his bedroll out.  Along with Brian and Emily, he and Brooke set up their bedrolls to lie next to each other during the night.

He joined Brook next to the fire. He wanted to hug her and feel her body against his own, but she still wore her armor and hugging that wouldn’t feel the same. “You should probably strip out of your armor before you try going to sleep tonight. I’ve heard that metal armor was very uncomfortable.”

Brooke glanced down at her breast plate. “Oh, yeah, I guess it probably would be, but what if we are attacked?”

Jake shrugged his shoulders. “Not sure, leave your boots on. You still have your sword and shield. With a guard, maybe you would have enough time to get your breastplate back on?”

Brooke nodded with agreement. “Sounds good, can you help me with this stuff?”

Her armor proved to be extremely well fitted to her body. Brooke sighed with relief once her breast plate was removed. She twisted and stretched her back. “Wow, I didn’t realize how uncomfortable all this was until now.”

Underneath her armor, she wore a high quality, leather padded linen gambeson to protect her skin from chafing against the rigid metal armor plates. Jake thought she looked every inch the noble, elvish warrior woman and he found himself feeling a little jealous of her. He felt so weak and helpless next to her.

Brooke surprised him with a hug. “What’s wrong?”

Jake tensed for a moment before he sighed and relaxed into her arms. She smelled nice. A hint of delicate flowers mixed with the strong scent of metal and leather. “Oh, nothing, and everything.” He glanced up at her concerned face. “What are we going to do, Brooke?”

~o~O~o~

Brooke didn’t know how to answer her, no him, and that was confusing her. Intellectually, she knew the petite, blond, female wood-elf hugging her was her fiancé Jake, but emotionally, no. Jake as Jan tripped all of her protective big sister instincts and that was the problem. Jake was supposed to be her fiancé, the big strong male who loved and protected her.  She simply wasn’t feeling that way about the woman sitting next to her.  She sighed and frowned. “I don’t know, Jaa-ke.” She caught herself almost calling him Jan like Emily had been.

“This whole thing is weird and I just don’t know what to think. I do know that I love you and always will, but I can’t say right now where we will end up later. We both know that I’m not into women.”

Brooke felt Jake tense and then a moment later, sigh. “Yeah, I know, but I think I was hoping we could pretend that nothing had changed. I look at you and I still see the beautiful and strong woman I fell in love with.  Maybe not the woman I met at the ice cream shop, but still the woman I love. If this,” She pulled away and gestured to her body, her eyes beginning to glisten with tears. “Dream or nightmare lasts much longer and I lose you…” She turned away to hide her tears. “I’m just not feeling very strong right now and I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Brooke pulled Jake back to her, hugging her tightly and kissing her tenderly on her forehead. “Shhhhhh, we’ll figure something out. Right now, I’m just glad you’re here and alive because I think we’d all be lost without you here.”

“You’re stronger than that, Brooke. I know you. You’d have taken charge and we’d all probably be halfway home by now.” Jake chuckled, mocking himself in the process.

Brooke gently grabbed Jake’s chin. “Look at me. You’re the one everyone, myself included, look to for leadership. None of these guys would’ve listened to me, but you, they respect and it doesn’t matter what you look like, we all trust you to make the right decisions.  You’ve been there and done it, no matter how much my Dad taught me, I don’t have the experience you have.”

She spotted movement out of the corner of her eye, causing her to tense up before she recognized Emily coming over to join them. She wrapped her arms around both of them. “Yep, we need ya, Jake and sorry about calling you Jan, but...well…”

A snort of amusement escaped Jake’s lips. She turned away and wiped the tears from her eyes before turning her face to Emily. “It’s okay…you all can call me Jan if you want to. I mean, I’m not really looking like myself right now; See, I have two feet.” She grinned and lifted her previously amputated right foot before looking up and spotting Nick and Brian standing anxiously nearby.

Jan stood and faced her friends with a stern, determined glint in her eyes. “But if any of you chuckleheads think that just because I’m a chick that I’m going to go all soft on you and let you screw up, you got another thing coming! Got it?!”

Brooke’s heart swelled with hope and relief. Now, there was the Jake she knew and loved. She stood and saluted her. “Sir, yes sir!”

~o~O~o~

---

~o~O~o~

Disclaimer: The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended.  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This story is copyright (c) 2011 R Nelson. All rights reserved.

~o~O~o~
Thanks go out to all my beta-readers and their awesome ideas/feedback. Crowd source stories are kinda fun. Sorry if I've been ADD with all the other stories I'm bouncing back and forth between. Thanks go out to djkauf for his grammar fixes. Lie, Lay, Laid, Lain, Layed are bad words.

Jake woke without flinching and snapped to full alertness with a light touch to his shoulder. He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes. He tensed slightly at the unexpected sight of a male dark elf, but quickly realized it was only Brian, using his dark elf disguise mask. It must be time for his guard shift and he felt somewhat reassured by his response because despite his screwed up body, he still reacted like an experienced combat veteran.

Brooke lay next to him and he felt a little twinge of reluctance at the need to leave her side and the shared warmth of their bodies, but he had a duty to perform. In a potential combat zone, it was critical for everyone to get as much rest as possible while ensuring the safety of the troops under their command. Fatigued soldiers got sloppy and made bad decisions in battle.

Brooke whimpered a little, but remained asleep as he carefully extricated himself from her side.

Jake shivered momentarily when the cool night air struck his exposed legs and upper chest. The air temp had to be in the mid fifties and he knew he should feel colder than he did, but maybe his body was acclimated to the climate or his skimpy outfit magically kept him warmer than it should. While he could appreciate the freedom of movement his skirt provided, the exposed skin on his legs was definitely not a comfortable feeling and he lamented looting it from the boss fight. If only he hadn’t equipped the new druid armor and kept Jancaryn’s druid hotpants, he might feel less exposed right now.

“Anything to report?” Jake asked, stepping closer to Brian and keeping his back to the hotly glowing coals to help his night vision. The fire probably needed another log or two added to keep it going until the morning.

Brian shook his head. “Nothing, boss. It was pretty quiet, but Emily can’t get to sleep for some reason.”

Jake glanced over to her. She sat in a lotus position with her back to the fire.  “Well, at least she’s relaxing.”

“Yeah, a little, but she’s mostly been working on her magic.  She managed to cast her Human illusion spell on herself and was pretty damn excited about it.” Brian grinned wryly. “She canceled it after a few minutes because the illusion also gave her human vision and she hated feeling night blind. As you can see,” He gestured to his face. “I can’t really blame her, but she thinks her disguise spells should last an hour or two on their own.”

Brian reached up to his face, his fingers somehow found the invisible seams of his mask and with a careful, gentle motion, his dark elf illusion mask peeled off his face. Instantly, his body wavered and shimmered as he returned to his human shape. He grimaced with distaste as he blinked his eyes. “Damn, human vision sucks.”

Jake nodded with agreement because as a wood elf, he thought his night vision was pretty good and far better than what he had as a human.  He knew it could be a significant advantage in battle, but he’d trade it in a heartbeat if he could be male again.

“Well, it’s good that she can disguise herself…” He smiled with appreciation as he considered the possible hassles they may have with a dark elf in their group.  He hoped D&D and all the fantasy authors got it wrong about the hatred for the race.

Brian’s face clouded momentarily as he considered the possible problem. “Yeah, that could be a good thing.”

Jake fondly patted his friend’s back. “Hey, get some sleep. Nothing we can do about it now.”

For a brief second, Jake thought Brian was going to hug him when he turned to toward him. Thankfully, he jerked to a halt before he did something uncomfortably non-dude like. “Good plan.” He shyly grinned before turning back to his wife.

Jake watched as Brian spent a few tender minutes with Emily before he lay down and fell asleep with his head on her lap. He felt a little alarm when his eyes started to tear up and his throat tighten at the sight of his friend’s love for each other, damn girl hormones. He managed to make himself laugh at the situation by telling himself the ‘How do you make a hormone?’ joke. With his girliness suppressed, he decided to toss another log on the fire before starting a slow patrol around the stone columns of their camp.

After his eighth or ninth pass around the perimeter of their camp, he came across Emily leaning casually against one of the columns and staring up into the night sky. At his approach, she turned her eyes to him and smiled. “Hey, Jan. Have you looked at the stars?  They’re so beautiful.” 

He glanced up at the brilliant tapestry displayed above their heads. “Yes, they are pretty bright. They kind of remind me of the night sky in Iraq. Without the lights and when the desert winds weren’t blowing, the night sky could be very clear, but this is much better.” He sniffed the crisp, clean air. “No pollution at all to mess up the upper atmosphere.”

Emily pulled away from the column and wrapped her cloak around her body. “Well, like Brian said, I’ve made some progress with my magic. Do you wanna see if I can help you figure out yours?”

“Umm, sure?” Jake asked, hesitantly before he caught her glance at him with concern. He straightened with resolve. “I mean, yes, please. What have you figured out?”

Emily described her burgeoning magical ability as being more like math. A + B = C. She felt like she had a slowly charging essence battery deep inside her body. When she wanted to cast a magical spell, she tapped into her battery and added the essence (A) to the spell formula (B) and got a result (C).  “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that because B also seems to be tied to my own imagination because I used my art skills to visualize the spell, but you’re a druid; So, I think your magic will be different from mine, but I’m not sure.” She shrugged her shoulders apologetically.

“Okay, sounds logical, I guess.” Jake moved to a spot inside their camp that was furthest away from the rest of his friends and to further try to account for Murphy’s Law.

Jake mentally reviewed his character’s low level spells. He had a few nice, safe ones he could try, but he decided his Summon Water spell was probably the safest and most useful. Cure Light Wounds needed an injury and Detect North was hardly a definitive display since he could simply look for moss on the back of a tree to figure out where North was. He had a few higher level spells and abilities he would like to try, but he figured it was better to start out small. He also faced away from them before he tried to figure out a way to tap into his possible magical ability.

It took a few minutes of relaxing and centering himself, as Emily called it, before he felt ‘the spark’. Once he had the ‘ah-ha’ moment, magic happened and his precautions proved to be a wise move, because unlike in the game, the water didn’t magically appear in his inventory as prepackaged, stackable water skins. Instead, the water started as a small blob hovering a few feet off the ground and then, with a slight gurgling sound, rapidly grew to about two feet in diameter.

Casting the spell was also the closest thing to a religious experience Jake had ever experienced in his life. Unlike Emily’s description of the magic, his magic seemed to come from all around. For a nano-second he felt a connection to every living plant, animal, the earth and even the sky. As brief and fleeting as his connection to ‘the world’ was, the brief touch left him with an indescribable feeling of peace and security. The entire world was alive, he was a part of it and it felt wonderful.

“Holy crap! Emily, do you see this?” He smiled with satisfaction as he turned back to his friend. With his focus broken, the ball of floating water promptly fell; splashing harmlessly on to the ground.

Emily smiled and hugged him. “That was awesome, Jan!”

Jake spent the rest of his guard shift thinking about what he experienced when he cast his spell. He remembered feeling a deep and personal connection to something much larger than himself, something simultaneously primal and deadly, but also warm and loving. He didn’t know what ‘it’ was and he had a hard time describing it, but Emily seemed to understand.

“Gaia.” She said, smiling peacefully at him.

“Gaia, what?” Jake asked.

“Sorry, I thought you knew.” Emily paused and gathered her thoughts. “Okay, you’re a druid, right?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah, I think so…”

“And, druids are protectors of nature, right?” She smirked expectantly.

“Yeah...” Jake hesitantly agreed even though he had never considered them as such in the game, but based on their powers, he could kind of see the link.

“Well, Gaia is essentially the same concept as Mother Nature, the goddess of the natural world and as a druid, you’re a part of the natural world. It’s the source of your magic, I think.” Emily smiled as Jake digested her information.

Everyone knew about Mother Nature, but people invoked it more as a warning to not build a house in Florida and call it Hurricane proof because ‘it’s not nice to try fooling Mother Nature.’ To him, this Gaia thing sounded and felt more like what he expected “The Force” to be back when he and his friends pretended to be Jedi Knights. As a test, he closed his eyes and looked deep inside himself.

The connection to this ‘Gaia/Force’ thing was still there and it was both reassuring and alarming to him. Reassuring because it meant he could tap into it at will and with a moment’s notice versus spending priceless minutes ‘centering’ himself.  Alarming because his dream and virtual reality theory were both starting to feel a little less likely to him.

However, if he really was Jancaryn, a 60th level druid, he might not be the helpless female wood elf he initially thought he was. Jancaryn’s nature based powers would certainly help his friends survive in the wilderness and with a source of fresh drinking water; they had one less survival necessity to worry about. Hell, his character even had a little used Create Winter Berries spell. They might not need to worry about food now either.

He sighed and the extra bounce on his chest brought him back to reality. Jake had been focusing so much on his magic that he completely forgot about how wrong everything else was. His hair was too long, his voice was too high, he was too short, frail and weak, his clothes were all wrong, his girlfriend was only a girl friend, he blocked out the problem with his missing manhood, but it could be worse, he could still be missing his right foot. Despite everything wrong in his life, he found his last thought extremely amusing and ironic.

“What’s so funny?” Emily asked, concerned.

Jake chuckled. “Oh, nothing, and everything. I was just thinking about how messed up my life is right now, but hey, I’ve got two feet!” He giggled as he briefly lifted up his right foot.

He found himself wrapped in a tight embrace by Emily, with his face pressed against her wonderfully perfect chest. He wanted to complain about being so damn short, but it felt so good being held by her. He couldn’t help it, he started to cry and once he started, he couldn’t stop himself. 

“Shhhh, it’s okay. Everything will be fine. I’m here…” Emily rubbed his back and whispered into his ear, occasionally repeating those words, or something similarly reassuring.

He lost track the time, but when he finally stopped crying, he was amazed at how good he felt. It was like the weight of the world had been lifted off his chest. It made him realize that he wasn’t alone and he had friends who cared about him.  He knew it before, but it wasn’t until his unexpected cry that he consciously realized it. He sniffed and gave Emily a quick squeeze before disentangling himself from her. “Thanks.” He looked up at her and grinned. “I think I needed that.”

Emily grinned mischievously at him. “Yep, consider it a girl advantage. You can cry, no one will ever call you a wuss and it often leaves you feeling better in the end.”

Jake couldn’t help it, he giggled, which made Emily giggle, which caused a chain reaction of giggles and another spontaneous, hug between friends as they both struggled to contain their mirth.

He still felt curiously buoyant and cheerful when he woke a grumpy Nick for his guard shift. Once Nick got started with his shift, Jake lay down and snuggled against Brooke. It wasn’t until his body was pressed against her delightfully warm body that he noticed how cold he felt. For the first time in their relationship, he shivered and hugged her tight to warm up instead of Brooke stealing his warmth.

He could normally fall asleep in less than a minute in just about any position or situation, but he found it a little hard to relax. His body didn’t feel right and it took him longer to find a comfortable position. He was also a little keyed up from his successful casting of a spell and despite of how good he felt now, his breakdown in Emily’s arms had him a little concerned.

He knew women could be a little emotional at times. What if he had a similar kind of breakdown in the middle of a battle? Women weren’t that bad, where they? He didn’t think so and he even remembered joking with his squad mates about allowing women into combat roles. The joke was to just wait until it was that time of the month and let them go at the enemy. The enemy would probably surrender in no time.  He thought it was kind of funny at the time, but not so much now.

He sighed with frustration and shifted his hips a little until he found the perfect spot snuggled up against Brooke. Jake heard Nick and Emily softly speaking in the background and he felt a little curious about what they were talking about, but he was comfortable and sleep claimed him before his curiosity could be satisfied.

~o~O~o~

Nick grumbled when a too cheerful Jake/Jan woke him for his guard shift. “Damn it, I was in the middle of a good dream…”

“Sorry, bud...” Jan sleepily yawned and politely covered her mouth. “But it’s your turn. Em’s awake and helped me cast a spell; maybe she can help you too?”

Nick had to suppress a smile. Jake was damn cute as a wood elf chick. “Yeah, maybe.” He sat up and his armor dug into his side. “Ouch, this shit hurts!”

“Why didn’t you take it off before you went to sleep dude? You’ve played enough D&D. You should’ve known better.” Jan smirked as she offered Nick her hand to help him stand.

Jan gasped with surprise and stumbled forward. She quickly grabbed onto Nick with both hands and braced herself to keep from falling onto him as he pulled himself upright. She might be half a foot taller than he was, but her body was so lithe and petite. Nick chuckled at her determination to help him up. “Damn dude, sorry. If you’re 90 pounds soaking wet, I’ll be surprised.”

She looked a little disappointed with herself and it made Nick feel bad for making a joke about it, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it right now. It is what it is. He twisted, causing his neck and back to crack in multiple places, sounding like a machine gun to his ears. “Ahhh, phew! That felt good!”  He grinned and stamped his feet on the ground a few times before grimacing uncomfortably.  “Fuck me to tears...Now I gotta take a piss again.” He sighed with resignation as he looked outside of the stone columns for a place to relieve himself.

Jan giggled and gasped with surprise as she caught herself giggling like a girl. “I’m glad I’m not the only with problems in that department. Umm, I’ll keep an eye on you, but don’t go too far away and don’t piss on the columns either, please.”

Nick grabbed his battle hammer and strode out of the relative protection of the circle. He glanced behind him when he reached a spot in the middle of the field that looked good.  Jan maintained an alert watch over him while Emily looked away. This time, it took him a little less fumbling with the catches for his armor to free himself. He smiled with satisfaction as he relieved himself. “Ha! Brooke doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Closer my ass.”

Nothing jumped out at him and if it wasn’t for the fact he had a wood elf and a dark elf babe back near their fire pit, he could almost fool himself into thinking everything was normal. He was simply out having a keg party in the middle of a corn field. He knew it wasn’t the case and he sighed before securing his armor and clanking his way back into camp. 

With him back, Jan saluted him before she lay down and snuggled against Brooke. The idea of two wood elf babes in bed together made his armor uncomfortable. “Damn dude, that’s just wrong…” He muttered with frustration.

The two of them together reminded him about Allison. Jan had Brooke and Brian had Emily, but what happened to his wife? He was trying to be a man and tough it out, but was she alive and back in their world mourning his death? Was he dead or was this all like Jake thought, a dream? If it wasn’t a dream, he prayed that Allison escaped the explosion, but at the same time, he selfishly hoped she was somewhere in this world.  He loved her and no matter how cool it might be to be stuck in some fantasy world, he didn’t want to be alone.

Being a dwarf kind of sucked too. If Allison was in this world, was she also a dwarf? If she was, he prayed she didn’t have a beard because she would freak the fuck out and it would be wrong on so many levels.  He made another circuit around their camp and added a new log to the fire. He figured it would take the fresh log an hour or two to burn down. He would use that as his timer to wake everyone up.

“You’re looking a little lost in thought there Nick, how’s it going?” Emily asked, softly, her beautiful and exotic dark elven features with her piercing cobalt eyes capturing his full attention.

He dismissively shrugged and rested his hammer on the ground. “Oh, going fine here. Sucks to be so f’ing short, but meh, could be worse.” He guiltily glanced over to Jan before returning his attention to Emily.

Emily softly chuckled. “Hey, being a woman isn’t the end of the world, but Jan is probably going to need our help adapting, just like you’ll need help with your, umm, reduced stature.” She grinned for a moment before pursing her blood red lips with determination, making her look even more attractive. “You’re not going to be too stubborn to ask for help, are you?”

Nick shook his head and held up his hands in mock surrender. “Oh noes, not me. Under this gruff, short exterior, I’m a bastion of compassion and understanding.”

“Ha, right!” Emily grinned. “But, seriously, if you need someone to talk to, I’m here. I think we’re all here for you because I’m worried about Ally too.”

Nick startled. Emily was too damn perceptive, but she and Ally where thick as thieves together. “Whoa, who said I was worried about her? I’m sure she’s safe. I mean, she’s not here, so she has to be okay, right?”

Emily bent down and hugged him, her face and expressive eyes an open book to him. She was clearly worried about him and Ally. She also smelled nice. “Ahh, right, thanks…” Nick rubbed his eyes to keep them from betraying his emotions. “Got some dust or ash from the fire in my eyes there…”

Emily smiled fondly down at him and snuck a friendly, affectionate kiss on his forehead. “Yeah, the new log is popping a lot, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s tha ticket.” Nick grinned as he tried to mimic the liar from SNL, his gruff voice struggled to reach John Lovitz’s higher registers, causing Emily to giggle. “Well, umm, I better keep an eye open here and you should get some sleep.”

Emily frowned. “I want to, but I’m at all not tired, and this,” She gestured to their surroundings with wonder. “It’s just so exciting! The colors I can see in the dark are amazing. I wish I had my sketchbook here…”

“Hmmm...” Now Nick was worried about her. Emily was such a gentle, compassionate and caring woman. He hoped Dark Elves in this world weren’t as universally feared and hated as they were in D&D because he wasn’t sure she could handle it. “Well, Ja-Jan mentioned something about magic. Since yer awake, would you mind helping me with that magic mumbo-jumbo stuff?”

Emily giggled. “Sure, but me thinks you’re going to be a problem child.”

Nick frowned. “I’m not that bad, am I?”
 

“Oh no, but Paladins are holy warriors, right?” Emily canted her head to the side, quizzically studying him.

He slowly nodded with agreement. “Yeah?”

“Well, when was the last time you went to a church?”

Nick rubbed his chin through his thick beard. “Hmmm, my wedding?”

“Yep, and do you believe in God or any god?”

Nick hadn’t really giving it much thought before, but now seemed like a good time. Especially, if it helped him figure out how to use his paladin’s powers. “Well, maybe? I guess I’m kind of Agnostic, hell, maybe even Atheist because which religion is right? I mean, with all the religions on Earth and with each one having their own ideas about god or gods; what if they’ll all wrong?”

“And, that is why you might have a problem with your powers.” Emily pantomimed reaching for and grabbing his throat. “Your lack of faith disturbs me…”

Nick almost fell over. Emily’s Darth Vader impression was pretty damn funny. “Oh my god, Em. Please don’t do that again. I don’t wanna accidently soil my armor!”

Emily wrinkled her nose. “Oh yeah, that would be bad!”

“Yep, but I think I get what you’re saying. In D&D, Paladins were always lawful good and devoted to their god or goddess. I could never play one because they were just too goodie-goodie for my tastes.” Nick frowned as he considered his problem. “Shit, I’m screwed because I don’t even know the name of my character’s god. I mean, I kind of know they had gods in DBO, but I never paid attention to them.”

Emily smirked and nodded. “That’s what I thought, it’s Moradin.”

The name resonated with Nick and surprised by the feeling, his eyes snapped up to her face. “How in the fuck, sorry, hell, did you know that?”

“I’m a nerd?” Emily grinned and shrugged apologetically. “I mean, to help me get into and really understand our characters for our group’s portrait I painted, I read the DBO manual and background story. The names of most of the gods just kinda stuck with me for some reason.”

 “Well, that’s good…” Nick glanced away. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to bring up his and probably Brian’s concern about her race. “Umm, what did it say about Dark Elves?”

“I’m guessing you already know?”

“Well, kind of.” Nick glanced over to the sleeping Brian. “We all played D&D and Dark Elves or Drow Elves weren’t very popular with the rest of the races.”

“You mean, they were evil, right?”

Nick pinched his fingers together. “Just a little.”

“Yeah, the game manual said the Dark Elves were an evil race and everyone feared and despised them.”

“Well, that’s how they were in D&D too, but hey, maybe they aren’t like that here?” Nick tried to be hopeful for her. It didn’t work.

Emily sighed. “I hope so, but I kind of doubt it. I’m not that lucky.” An ironic smile danced across her face.

Nick reached out and hugged her. “Don’t ya be getting all down on me, woman. I’ll kick the everlasting shit outta anyone who tries to mess with you!”

Emily giggled. “And bite their kneecaps off too?”

Nick grinned and wagged his finger at her. “Hey now, don’t ya be hating the dwarf here. I’m not short, I’m just vertically optimized for hitting people where it hurts!”

Emily’s laughter brightened his soul and left him feeling confident. He didn’t expect her to be aware of the possible problem with her race and her refusal to let it drag her down made him even more determined to protect her and all of his friends. As Norros, his character had an Aura or Protection spell or ability that magically protected the entire group from damage.

Nick gripped his hammer with determination and took a step away from Emily. “By Moradin’s beard, protect my friends from evil!”

Thrumm!

His entire body vibrated with power. It filled him before overflowing and flashing out in a perfect circle, encompassing all of his friends with a pale white aura. To him, it felt like a bomb went off and he was surprised to find the camp still intact when the after image faded from his vision.  He blinked his eyes a few times. “Holy fucking shit!” He glanced up apologetically. “Sorry, I mean holy, freaking Moradin!” He glanced over to a grinning Emily. “Did you see that?”

She nodded. “Yep. It was pretty wicked.” She pinched her arm. “I glowed a little for a second and I feel a little safer, like you’re watching over me, I think.”

“Well, hot damn!” Nick laughed until he considered the implications of their discovery. “Hmm, I guess this means there really are gods and I’m guessing I need to get my shit together, I mean, clean up my act because it would be mite harder to keep my promise to protect you without the power of my new god, right?”

“I dunno about that Nick.” Emily smirked mischievously. “You’re a dwarf and if nothing else, dwarves are pretty damn stubborn, right?”

“Hell yeah…” Nick nodded with agreement.

“So, I’m not worried,” Emily crossed her arms and glared at him with determination. “But if you start going door to door, trying to sell people bibles or something, I’m going to have to stop you.”

~o~O~o~

A hand on his shoulder followed by a gentle shake was all it took to wake Jake from a confusing dream.  He dreamed about being a giant black panther like his DBO character, Jancaryn. He decided he had been playing the game a little too much if he was dreaming about being his character.

“Hey, I need to go to the bathroom. Do you need to go?”

He looked up and at first, he felt confused. Yes, he had to go, but why was he camping outside, who was this elvish woman and why did he think she was Brooke?  Then, it all came back to him. “Oh, crap, it wasn’t a dream…” He muttered as he sat up, clutching his cloak against his tiny, frail, female body.

It was brighter out than he expected. Nick must have let them sleep later than he should have. They were all supposed to be up and alert at sunrise in case their camp was attacked by orcs, dragons or something crazy, like mice. Intending to chew him out, he glanced over to Nick. He stood resolutely, giant hammer in hand, watching over the camp. Brian and Emily were still asleep. He stopped himself; it wasn’t worth worrying about now.

Jake turned back and nodded to Brooke. “Yeah, I gotta go…” He grimaced as he considered how much of a hassle the simple act of relieving himself was going to be now that he couldn’t just whip it out and pee behind a tree. He sighed with a mixture of resignation and frustration, but there was one thing he could do to make it a little easier. “Nick, gimme your shovel. I need to make us ‘ladies’ a proper field latrine.”

The simple hole in the ground helped a ton. Even Brooke appreciated having it and with the necessary, unpleasant business done, the pair returned to camp. “Umm, Jan, could you help me with my armor?” Brooke asked as she held up her breastplate and apprehensively glanced at all her other miscellaneous armor bits.

On the inside, Jake cringed when Brooke addressed him as Jan, but he promised his friends he would be cool with the name and he refused to prove his friends wrong. “Sure, not a problem, love.” He grinned as he helped her into the tight fitting metal breastplate.

It took the two of them about ten minutes to get Brooke fully prepared for battle and seeing her fully kitted out made him feel a little inadequate in his comparatively skimpy leather skirt and top outfit. Sure, Brooke had a shield, sword and lots of protective armor, but he had successfully cast a spell. While it was only a simple Create Water spell, he had a lot of other Druid spells and abilities that could make a huge difference for the group. It made him feel a little anxious to prove it to himself and his friends that he was a valuable member of the group.

“What time did Emily finally get to sleep?” He asked as he returned Nick’s shovel.

Nick looked up at the sky. “Maybe 30 minutes ago? She started yawning as soon as the sun started to rise and conked out pretty fast after that.”

Emily was their best magic user and if they got into a firefight; her spells could be the deciding factor. Without her operating at peak effectiveness, things could be tricky. “Hmmm, I’m a little worried about her…” Jake decided to leave his thought there because he caught himself factoring her combat effectiveness against a possible encounter.

It was the same thing he did as a squad leader in the Army and in the game, but now it made him feel a little insensitive and cold hearted because these people were his friends, not trained soldiers or some computer simulation that always worked when the player pushed a button.

Jake decided to table his concerns for another time. His friends seemed to be holding up and adapting to the situation better than he was. Brooke and Nick were doing the smart thing and eating some of their rations, but based on their expressions, they probably tasted like crap. A rabbit or two would’ve been nice, but none of them had a bow and he wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to send one of them off to hunt anyway. However, a pot of coffee would be heavenly right about now.

It was time to wake Brian and based on his reaction yesterday, Jake grabbed his staff and used it to gently nudge him awake from a safe distance. Instead of popping up and dropping into a combat stance, ready for action, Brian’s eyes calmly open. “I’m awake.” His voice roused Emily, but instead of fully awaking her, she mumbled discontentedly and snuggled herself deeper against Brian’s chest.

With as much of their rations eaten that they could stomach, Nick and Brooke took the initiative and began packing up their sleeping gear. Jake motioned for Brian to come to him. He nodded and carefully extracted himself from his wife. She whimpered a little, but otherwise remained asleep. “I’m a little worried about her. I know she wasn’t able to get any sleep during the night and now she looks pretty dead to the world.”

Brian frowned. “Yeah, I’m worried she might be nocturnal, but it’s hard to say since nothing in the old D&D Players Guide never specifically mentioned it.”

Jake nodded with agreement as he reviewed his meager knowledge on the subject. “Didn’t the guide book have something in it about their magic and items getting weaker when exposed to sunlight?”

“Yep, but I’m hoping all that was just BS to give GM’s something to mess with their players if they tried to play a Drow.”

“Me too…” Jake frowned as he considered the possible problem having such a weakness could do to their little group. He sighed and decided to move on because there was nothing they could do about it right now. “I guess we can let her sleep for a few more minutes, but we need to get a moving, find some kind of civilization and hopefully get some answers as to where the hell we are as soon as possible.”

“Yep, do ya want me to scout the old road a bit more?” Brian gripped his dagger’s hilt.

Jake glanced over to Brooke and Nick.  Nick was done packing his kit and Brooke was done with her own, but she was also taking care of Jake’s kit. “Yeah, that would be a good idea, but take Nick with you and don’t go too far.”

“Got it.” Brian quickly nodded.

“30 minutes, max. We’ll wake Emily up when you get back.”

Brian smiled with excitement and gave Jake a half-assed, sloppy salute. Jake was tempted to dress him down for saluting him like he was an officer, but he couldn’t decide which offense was worse. The crappy salute or the fact he attempted to salute him. Brian probably thought he was showing Jake respect or something. He sighed with resignation. “Just go, you lunatic. Remember, 30 minutes.”

As Nick clanked noisily behind Brian, Jake turned to Brooke. “You heard the plan?”

She nodded. “Yep. Sounds good.” She picked up his bedroll and handed it to him with a grin. “Sticking shortie with him will keep them from getting too far.”

Jake chuckled and coughed with denial as he took the offered item and repacked his bag.  His stomach grumbled and reminded him he needed to eat something. The ration bar wasn’t as bad as he expected it to be, but it also wasn’t something he wanted to eat on a regular basis. He might have to try his berries summoning spell soon. On the plus side, if the ration bars were anything like MRE’s; they may stop him up and take care of part of the latrine problem for a day or two.

~o~O~o~