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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Got you,” said the deep voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last time I had seen him?

When was that?

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

With a fourth member of our crew….

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

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

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

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

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

Tails?

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

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

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

“She’s naked,” Beef man commented.

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

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

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

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

“Mojo?” the face asked.

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

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

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

The guys started laughing at me.

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

“It’s so cute!” said Trike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

I smiled back. Just a little one.

They all grinned.

I made a noise that probably sounded like a giggle.

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

Ho-lee Shit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

They all looked at me, almost grinning.

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

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

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

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

Trike snorted.

Seejay asked, “Like the Matrix movies?”

Hote nodded. “Sort of.”

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

And we laughed.

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

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

“Fantastic Mars,” said Seejay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trike made a rumbling noise.

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

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

“So?” I asked.

“Where…” he began, but I interrupted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trike looked at me curiously, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not long, less than five minutes.”

“Feels like longer,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was pretty sure an offer of twelve dollars wasn't a compliment...
 

 

We were near what I thought of as the west wall of the big room with the windows above us. Well, above me. Trike had tried to look out but said there was nothing to see except endless red desert. The rooms, doors and hallways were all to Trike’s scale. This place had probably been built by the green Martians in some long ago time.

The windows, by the way, were just openings in the thick walls. You could sometimes hear the wind blowing through them or even across them in which case it made a very low-pitched “foom” sort of noise.

It happened to do that just after Hote and Seejay had gone down the hallway to the south, past the room where we had all woken up in a pile of bodies.

It did it again as the bandits came from the north end, out of dimness. My goosebumps chased each other all the way out to the end of my tail.

The bad guys came in a rush, a handful or two in light armor swinging machete-like swords and honking big hammers. Some of them had pistols, too. They must have been waiting in the corridor until they could all charge at once.

“Kill ze greenie first, cap-a-ture the girl,” yelled one of them in broken English. They were all Earth-type humans.

Bullets spanged into the wall near Trike as he surged to his feet, picking up a couple of rocks in his lower hands. I’d seen him making a stack of them earlier, but it hadn’t registered.

He grunted as a bullet grazed his cheek and another hit him in the thigh. “Get a-hint me, girl!” He ordered.

My tail between my legs, literally, I did as I was told, squealing and shrieking for all I was worth. This was something I had no experience within my real life, and I was terrified. I hadn’t been in any kind of fight since middle school and nothing that involved bullets.

“Ess-top shooting, cabrones,” yelled one of the leaders. “You chookos doan hit the girl, she is val-ay mucho!” A rock thrown by Trike took him in the mouth on a bounce, and he stopped shouting, falling over backward and spitting out teeth.

I wanted to cheer—my pom poms were certainly big enough for that role. Instead, I yelled back, in Spanish, since he had been mixing bad Spanish with bad English. “Chingase, pendejos!” Rude but satisfying, it gave me a little thrill to tell them to go screw themselves.

I hid behind one of Trike’s massive legs and wished I had a gun. I wouldn’t be effective throwing things, I’d never been very good at that even back on Earth with a different, stronger body, but our little group had gone to the shooting range twice, and I had turned out to be a pretty good shot. The princess in a story like this should have a gun, I told myself. Burroughs’s heroine had a gun and a sword.

“Geeve her op, greenie an’ we doan have to kill you, ese?” said the man with the bloody mouth. His men waved their weapons, all while leering at me enthusiastically.

Trike answered by charging the group of them, a rock in each hand. Four rocks, four guys down with bloody heads. But Trike had been cut by the swords and mauled by the hammers. He retreated against the enemy advance and to tell the truth, I was glad to have him back directly in front of me.

I hadn’t moved from where I cowered against the wall. I’m such a chicken shit. I tried to look at Trike’s wounds but they oozed a green slime that must be what he was using for blood, and I thought again that I might throw up. I felt terrible about not being able to help.

“I’m not hurt that bad,” said Trike, pushing me behind him again. “You can’t do anything about it, and you don’t want to get my blood all over you.” He grinned, “Red and green? You’d look like Christmas.”

I sniffed. He was right. Was I going to be completely useless in this encounter? I didn’t even have a tiara, some princess I was. Which reminded me that both of us were naked. As if I weren’t well aware of that, my tail came around in front of me and tweaked my left nipple.

“Stop that!” I yelped. I grabbed at it, and it easily avoided me. “I’m not going to play that game again!” I said aloud.

“What game?” Trike wasn’t looking at me but peering into the dimness to see what the bad guys were doing. “They’re up to something.”

The bandits pulled their wounded back and regrouped. The guys Trike had hit all got up so no one was dead but they were hurt. There was a lot of yelling and cursing in several languages, though. One of the men went to each of the injured and did or said something and they all looked better after he had.

“Magic? They’ve got a cleric or something,” said Trike, disgusted. He chunked a rock at the cleric but missed.

“Looks like,” I agreed. “Magic works here?” I had an arm, and now my tail, wrapped around Trike’s less wounded leg, carefully not looking at the spiny sausage above my head.

“Well, it worked in Artie’s campaign, there just wasn’t much of it. We were running his own system, and Artie’s rules made magic hard to find and harder to do. It was a lot like GURPS, but you rolled 2-by-2 percentile instead of 3d6.”

“Oh yeah,” I remembered Artie’s odd system now. You rolled two pair of dice of different colors, reading them as percentile somehow. I craned my neck to look up at him. “Can you do any magic?” I asked.

“Me? I’m the meat shield, girl!” He looked a little amused in a sour sort of way. “You should be asking if you can do any magic.” He tossed another rock, this time at the leader who dodged then amused us by hopping on one foot four or five times. Trike had evidently hit him on the end of a toe.

I stared toward the hallway where Seejay and Hote had disappeared, my tail whipping around me like an agitated cat. “What is with you?” I asked it.

“Who? Me?” asked Trike. “I’m keeping them thinking about me but I ain’t actually trying to kill any of them. Maybe that’s a mistake?” He half turned toward me but stopped when one of the bandits yelled.

“Hey! Giant!”

We looked back at the men who wanted me. Ragged clothes with crusty stains, dirty beards that needed to be attacked with a weedwhacker, a smell that made burning garbage seem a pleasant memory. As wretched a gathering of slime and villainy as you were likely to find outside of the Mos Eisley spaceport.

I shuddered a bit to think about what they wanted me for, it didn’t take much imagination since I was already naked, but they were actually just about to tell us what their purpose was.

The leader stepped out in front of his men and spoke. “El Capo say find-a the muy hermosa girl with long black hair, ese?”

Compliments? His chieftain described me as very beautiful. Flattering, but I didn’t need compliments right then. What Trike and I needed was for Hote and Seejay to get back, preferably with a unit of the cavalry. I kept an eye on the corridor they had left by.

Almost casually, Trike flipped another rock at the bandido leader who dodged then paused to spit blood out of his mouth. He shook off the fright and alarm and went back to talking. “He say, twenty solidos for each of us. Cien pesos, egualmente, por cada, ese?” I didn’t know what a solido was, but a hundred pesos where I came from would barely buy you a burger and fries at a fast food place.

Thinking back though, I remembered that the pesos in Artie’s game had been large silver coins about equal to how much you would usually pay someone like a carpenter or a cowboy for a day’s work.

Trike heaved a particularly large boulder into the middle of the bad guys, wounding a few more of them and making work for their healer who began to look a bit frazzled. A quiet argument started as they got organized again. “We can get the girl, but the greenie is going to kill some of us doing it, Zandro,” one of the other men said to the leader in what sounded like an American accent.

Trike heard that too. He called out, “I don’t want to tear anyone’s head off, but you know I could do that.” He looked a little sick as he realized, that yes, he certainly could do that.

I doubted that he would. Like me, Trike had never been in the military and had never contemplated actually hurting or killing someone in real life. I suspected he had been holding back when he charged the bandits, hitting them with rocks in his hands. We could both play badasses in the games, but we were really just pussies. Literally now in my case.

The leader, Zandro if that was his name, scowled around his ruined mouth as he and his men backed away from Trike a bit. The big guy had stopped throwing stones, preferring to keep the four he had left in his hands as weapons. “You okay?” he asked me in an aside.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Scared shitless, but I’m not hit at all. You, on the other hand, are still bleeding in half a dozen places.”

He grinned, showing his enormous tusks. “Which one is the other hand? I’m okay. Most of it is just scratches, except the bullet in my leg hurts. I can stand on it, but I’m not going to make another rush at them, I don’t think.”

“Ese!” called the leader. “What it is, we stan’ aqui and keep shooting you, we take aim and shoot you bastante you bleed to death! We doan hit the girl. Just geeve us to her, and we go away. We leave you que mas dinero tenemos? Hey? How much money we got now.”

“I don’t know,” said Trike. “How much money do you have?” He whispered to me, “I’m stalling.”

I nodded. I had never felt so unnecessary. Trike was standing off these banditos and me, I was just hiding behind him. Without me, the bandits would probably avoid a guy his size completely. Someone had offered them money for me? How did anyone know I was here?

“We don’t even have anything to make a bandage out of,” I whimpered. We were both still naked. My tail was between my legs but coming up in front of me, and I grabbed it like a security blanket.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” said Trike. “Seejay and Hote will be back any moment and, and….” He trailed off. We were losing hope. With all the yelling and shooting, our friends should have showed up if they were coming. If they were still alive.

Zandro yelled at us again. “We got monedas, dinero. Nine pesos is like twelve bucks, ese? You can buy a different girl in Carterville with that much money. One beeg enough you can have sex with her.” He laughed, and his men laughed, too.

Twelve dollars? Was this asshole offering to buy me for twelve dollars? I decided I was offended as much by the price as by the idea of being for sale in the first place.

“Carterville?” Trike muttered. It had been a long time since Artie’s game, but the name of the town sounded familiar.

“We not goin’ wait all day, giant,” yelled Zandro. “Maybe I count to ten, and we start shooting?” I noticed he wasn’t calling Trike greenie anymore. Perhaps my big friend had won a bit of respect.

Trike bounced a rock in his upper right hand. “I’m gonna have to kill him,” he said, sounding disappointed. I looked back toward the south corridor again. My tail did a bird dog impression, and I suppressed an urge to gasp.

The bandits lined up like a firing squad, pistols at the ready. One had a long gun that looked like an old-time musket. The leader took a half-step closer and raised his own weapon. “Enu, dwa…” he started, apparently counting in some language that was neither English nor Spanish.

I swear I didn’t know I was going to do any such thing when I ran out in front of Trike screaming, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

My tits were bouncing, which was a weird feeling, my tail was flying like a flag, which might have been weirder but maybe not. I’d never been much of a runner, back in high school I often got accused of running like a girl. Well, now I had a good reason for such a label.

Fists up, elbows at my side pushing my boobs forward, hips swiveling madly, I ran naked into a beam of light coming from a window in the west wall of the chamber. Just as the light hit me, I crossed my eyes, touched the jewels on my tongue to the roof of my mouth and wished urgently for something to happen.

Strike a pose...
 

 

I felt a surge very like an orgasm travel up my body and out my limbs as Zandro’s banditos fastened all eyes on me. My tail helicoptered above my head. My nipples got hard, I felt juicy in a place I had never had before, I smelled violets and sandalwood, and I felt clean, oh so clean.

What the heck just happened?

I stopped in the light beam, staring down at myself. The dirt, blood, and shit our naked bodies had all been covered in had disappeared, and my coppery skin gleamed in the light. I could feel my matted black curls expanding around my face like a halo of night.

I struck a pose, trying not to giggle. But then looking at the bandits got me angry again.

“Twelve dollars, huh?” I shouted, putting every bit of contempt and outrage I could into it, making it an accusation of crimes against… against what? Beauty, I guess. I’d never in my life known what it was to feel beautiful, but I did right then.

And magic. I had magic.

I’d carefully not been looking toward where I had seen Seejay and Hote sneaking in from what I wanted to call the south corridor before I ran out and did my attention-grabbing stunt. Now I glanced that way and saw them staring at me too.

Their chins were almost on their chests. But they had on clothes and were carrying what looked for all the world like shotguns. This had been what my tail was pointing at. But my little peep show had paralyzed them too!

I rolled my eyes, held my hands over my head and pointed toward the banditos with both index fingers plus my tail. “Shoot them!” I screamed.

Hote shook it off first and took a step forward, but Seejay got off the first shot, a twin-boom that almost deafened everyone in the room. Hote fired too, another double barrel explosion and Trike threw all four of the rocks he had been hoarding.

Seejay dropped his shotgun and pulled a rifle off his back, bringing it up and taking aim as if he practiced such a thing every day. Hote dropped his gun, too and produced a pair of clunky-looking revolvers. Trike stepped forward to surround me with a wall of green muscle. He was laughing and sobbing at the same time, and I realized, so was I.

The banditos ran. The entrance to the north corridor had not been far away, and they disappeared into the dimness there. They left a couple of their men behind, almost cut in two from the shotgun blasts and one more fell with a bullet in his spine from Seejay’s rifle. And another whose brains had been spilled by one of Trike’s rocks.

Zandro and the guy with the American accent, plus the guy who might have been their cleric got away, but none of us were chasing them.

Hote put his pistols back in his belt and ran to check out the casualties. Seejay leaned the rifle against a wall, picked up the shotguns and began reloading them. He looked toward me, grinning. “What the hell was that, girl?” he asked. “Your debut as a stripper?”

What the hell indeed. I stared back at Seejay, feeling warm all over. He had clothes on now, a loose, badly fitting shirt like a guayabera and some tight pants that made me think of old movies about the British Raj. Well, they made me think of other things, they certainly did. Like juicy places inside me that were not only warm but getting hot.

“M-m-magic?” I stammered.

“Looks good on you, all clean and… healthy.” His eyebrows waggled appreciatively as he looked me up and down. “You’ve done something with your hair?” he joked.

I wondered if anyone could see me blush since my skin was already red.

“You guys!” said Trike from more than a yard over my head. “Talk about the cavalry.” He made a hoo-hoo-ha-roo sound like a nine-foot rooster crowing.

Seejay laughed. His short blond hair gleamed in the dark corner. He smiled as wide as an old-time Buick. His quick fingers reloaded four crude-looking shells into two guns. He had a dimple in his chin and a bit of stubble on his upper lip. His eyes were blue and his lashes thick, long and golden.

Stop it, I told myself. Stop it, stop it, stop it! I looked around to make sure I hadn’t said that out loud.

“These guys are dead,” said Hote, moving away from the shotgun victims. He looked grim, not like our usually sunny Hote. “I’ve got, I dunno, I’ve got… skills? Things I can do, I never could before.”

“Huh?” said Trike.

Hote knelt beside the man Seejay had shot in the back. “This one is alive,” he said.

The man sobbed. “I canna feel me legs,” he whimpered. He had a vaguely Scottish accent, and his red hair seemed to confirm that impression.

“Don’t move,” Hote ordered him. Dr. Weston looked up at us. Dr. because that was who Hote had been in real life, though a hospital administrator and not a practicing physician. His face looked bleak and disturbed. “Do I save this one?”

“You can save him?” asked Trike.

“I think so,” said Hote. “Seejay got cut badly by some guys we ran into down the hall and I… I….”

“Doc laid on hands, and I healed right up, like I’d never been sliced,” Seejay supplied.

Hote nodded. “Not a mark on him. And that cut should have needed stitches.”

“This is one of the guys who wanted to buy me for twelve bucks,” I said.

“Yes,” Hote agreed. “That’s why there’s a question.”

“Am I gonna die?” asked the man.

“Shh,” said Hote. “We’re deciding that. But if we do nothing and you live, you’ll be crippled, half a man or less.”

“Better to cut your throat,” Seejay offered. He walked across the room, glancing this way and that at the two corridors. He had one of the long machete-like swords in his hand. I hadn’t seen where he got it from. “I don’t think your friends are coming back for you.”

“Cripes!” exclaimed Trike.

“Ye’re a healer?” asked the wounded man.

“I am. And I think I can help you, but I don’t know how much.”

“Anything, mon, anything!”

“We’re going to need a guide,” said Seejay. He came back to squat beside the man, keeping his blade in plain sight.

The man turned his head away, appealing to Hote. “I’m in pain. Do what you can, for God’s sake.”

“All right,” said Seejay, reaching out for the man’s hair.

The redhead screamed. “Nay, nay! I meant I’ll do what I can for ye if ye save me.”

“What about the leader, the man you were following?”

“Zandro,” I said. I felt ice in my middle.

“Fock Zandro,” said the man. “He’s a chickenshit leader, and I’ve no loyalty to him, at all.”

Seejay scoffed. “That does not do a lot to recommend you to us. In fact, I can’t think what would.” He reached for the man’s hair again.

Hote put a hand on Seejay’s arm. “I want to do this, not just for his sake but to find out just how much I can do.”

Seejay nodded. “All right then.” He stood easily and turned again to examine the dark corners of the room.

I spoke up. “Trike is hurt too. He took a bullet in his leg. And some cuts and bruises.”

Seejay looked our four-armed giant friend over carefully. “You don’t look too badly hurt.”

“Ah’m not,” said Trike. “There’s a lot of meat on my leg, and the slug didn’t hit any bleeders. It can wait.”

I sniffed and from the way Seejay grinned at me, I suspected I must be pouting. I didn’t want Trike to be hurting.

Hote’s voice got louder where he kneeled over the wounded man. He seemed to be praying. I recalled that Dr. Weston had been a deacon and lay preacher in his church.

“We’ll have Hote take a look, then, after he finishes with Red over there.” Seejay grinned at Trike, and the giant smiled back, shyly. That made me feel better, too.

“What have you been doing, girl?” Seejay asked me. “You’re all clean, your hair looks combed, and it smells like you found some perfume?” He sniffed in my direction.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was trying to make sure they were looking at me and not at you and Hote coming up behind them. I pulled some magic out of somewhere and, uh, poof!” I gestured down at myself.

Seejay laughed, and Trike chuckled.

Yikes, but his laugh almost caused me to fall over backwards with my legs open wide. I wanted to ask myself what had gotten into me but realized it wasn’t a question of what had but what might—or what would.

“More magic,” Seejay commented. “Did you notice that you’re still naked? Maybe you could have magicked up some clothes?”

“I don’t… I didn’t… I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t even know how I did what I did.”

“Mmm,” said Seejay. He took his time looking me up and down. My own gaze traveled to his crotch.

I’d forgotten all about my tail that was suddenly in my face, waving back and forth like a mustache gone rogue. “What is it with you?” I snapped, grabbing the thing by its non-existent throat, whereupon it went completely limp, drooping off each side of my hand.

“A fuzzy chaperone,” said Seejay. “I had a girlfriend who had a cat like that once.”

“What?” I said. It seemed like a non-sequitur.

Red, Hote’s patient, cried out just then and we all looked. He had rolled over and was sitting up. He and his doctor were both smiling, though they also looked tired.

“Magic,” said Trike with wonder in his voice.

Still smiling, Red the bandito got to his feet and stuck out a hand to Hote. “Many thanks, doctor,” he said, shaking Hote’s right hand as he pulled a knife out of somewhere with his left. He stabbed at Hote at the exact same time as Seejay fired the rifle.

The sound of the shot at such close range made my ears ring, and I added a scream to the noise. The bullet took Red under the chin and blew out the back of his head. He toppled over with a vague look of surprise and… disappointment.

His last act, thrusting with his knife at Hote’s unprotected side left the handle of the blade protruding from our healer’s ribs. Hote coughed, made a choking sound and slowly sank to his knees, right hand grasping the hilt to keep the knife from doing more damage, or maybe just to keep it from hurting so much.

“Damn,” he said. A smile flickered around his lips then faded.

I just stood there. Frankly, I was paralyzed with fright. I’m not going to faint, I’m not going to faint, I told myself.

“Can you heal yourself, Hote?” Seejay asked, kneeling beside our friend.

“I don’t know,” said Hote. “I healed you and then this asshole, and we’ve been running around and now I— I….” He coughed, and a look of agony crossed his face.

“Trike!” Seejay snapped. “Watch out those guys don’t come back. I don’t think they will but keep watch. Get some more rocks to throw or find one of these swords you can use.”

“These little things?” said Trike, glancing at the yard-long machetes. “Don’t die, Hote, don’t die,” the big goon muttered as he moved away, gathering rocks.

“Girl, get over here!” Seejay ordered.

I wasn’t Mojo anymore? And sure I was coming but did I have to scamper? Was there anything I could do about the way Seejay giving me orders seem to melt my insides? Well, I could think of one thing but now was not the time.

“Can you do anything? You must have some magic, too?” Seejay asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe magic is class-based, and I’m not a healer?”

“Try,” said Hote. “I’ll pray, maybe that will help.”

“I’ll pray too,” Seejay said.

I nodded. They both knew I was a devout agnostic and didn’t expect me to offer to pray. I felt like ice inside. Looking at the knife sticking out of Hote’s side made me feel sick. “I will pray, but I’m not sure who I should pray to,” I said.

Hote shook his head. “If you don’t mean it, don’t—just try your magic.” He coughed weakly, and I saw a speck of blood appear on his lip. That looked very, very bad.

I put my hands on Hote’s chest and my tail, all on its own, wrapped itself around the hilt of the blade. I blinked to see that but went ahead with what I was doing. I crossed my eyes, put my tongue to the roof of my mouth and wished for healing of Hote’s wounds.

Wish may be the wrong word. What I did was want Hote’s wounds to heal, really hard. I guess there is no good way to say it.

I felt energy go out of me and as I did, my tail drew the knife out of Hote’s side. The wound was knitting itself together, a really strange thing to see, like time-lapse photography or something. But it didn’t complete the job. After ten or fifteen seconds, we realized nothing more was happening. Hote still had a nasty gash in his side, but it was not oozing blood, and he wasn’t coughing either.

On the other hand, I felt weak and dizzy, drained like you get after several hours of hard work. That hadn’t happened when I did the earlier spell. Maybe because I’m not really a healer…? Face it, I have no effing idea.

“It worked,” said Seejay. “You did it, girl!”

Again with the “girl”?

Filthy lucre...
 

 

I knew my magic had just healed the wound in Hote’s side and Seejay had called me ‘girl,’ again. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It sounded dismissive, I’d known these guys for years, and they certainly knew my name. Then again, anything Seejay said seemed to have a strange effect on me, as if touching me somewhere inside.

Hote had been sitting up the whole time, but he tried to get a look at his wound. “Maybe I can finish the job in a bit, now that I’m not bleeding and hurting.” Some raw flesh showed where the wound had not been healed completely. “Hey, these clothes are all clean? Even the bloodstains are gone.” He fingered the rip in the shirt where the knife had gone in. “Do you sew, too?” he joked.

“I smell Old Spice,” Trike commented behind me.

They were looking at me. I shrugged. “I think I could probably have mended the shirt, but I kind of ran out of gas there. And at least he doesn’t smell like lavender and roses or something?”

They all laughed, and a giggle escaped me. My tail waved around, apparently enjoying the joke, too.

I felt a little tired, but not a lot. Most of the energy, magical energy is called mana, came from the jewels in my mouth, I supposed. At least, that’s how it would likely work in Artie’s system and would explain the piercings there without having to think of other reasons. My personal energy had been used a bit but maybe more just from getting so excited. I did feel like I could do the heal again in a few minutes.

“I could try again?” I offered.

Hote shook his head. “No. Let us both save our magic in case of another emergency of some kind. Don’t use yours unless you feel you have to, to save us or something. At least for today.”

“Uh, huh,” I agreed with that. It made sense. “I don’t even know what I can do with it. Both the distract spell and the healing were more or less surprises.”

Trike shook his head. “Boy, howdy,” he drawled and we all laughed quietly.

Something else occurred to me. “Hey, you guys are both wearing clothes? Where did you get them?” I asked. They even had shoes, or clumsy looking boots, maybe.

“Uh…” said Hote.

“We killed someone for the guns and clothes and stuff,” said Seejay in a flat voice. “We brought some other things, too, and now,” he gestured at the dead bodies right in front of us, “now we’ve got some more stuff.”

I made a face. Did I want to wear some dead guy’s clothes? Did I want to keep walking around naked? I swear I couldn’t figure out which was the worse choice at the moment. How could I have become so comfortable with being a naked girl in front of a bunch of guys so quickly? I suspected magic. At any rate, wearing someone’s clothes after my friends had killed them creeped me out in a weird way.

Hote stared back toward the hallway they had explored. “Four guys jumped us; we had to kill them.”

“How? You had nothing but maybe some rocks in your hands?” It was turning into a truly bad-ass story.

“I remembered my judo,” said Hote. “I threw one guy into two others, Seejay stomped on some necks and the other guy ran away.”

Seejay looked grim but the memory obviously bothered Hote more. More badassery, Seejay looked dangerous and hot as…. Down, down, girl.

“I bet you didn’t find anything I can wear?” asked Trike.

“Actually, we did,” said Hote. “It’s sort of a fur jockstrap. I think they had looted some of your people earlier.”

“My people,” said Trike, as if the idea were completely new to him. But yes, if we were stuck in this world we would eventually meet more green—and red!—Martians. How would Trike and I react to such meetings and how would the natives react to us?

Seejay took up describing the loot they had acquired. “We found a pistol that’s too big for either of us to hold, too, and a six-foot-long sword. We didn’t bring everything because we heard the gunfire down here,” said Seejay. “Let’s check out what these guys have and then we can go look at the other loot we got.”

He went to the first body, that of Red, the Scotsman, and started going through his pockets, “Some coins,” he grunted.

“If you find twelve dollars, it’s mine,” Trike joked.

* * *

The coins on the bodies turned out to be very interesting. Well, interesting in a bloodless way, in contrast to what else had happened.

But also frightening.

Neither Trike nor I could read the inscriptions on the coins.

We recognized the eagle and George Washington on what had to be an American quarter, and the lady on similarly sized coins looked a lot like Queen Victoria to me. But the inscriptions meant nothing. I had the best spoken Spanish in the group but that writing was a cipher to me, too, and in fact, I couldn’t even recognize the language or guess what it might be from the appearance of the unfamiliar coins. I had to be told which ones were in Spanish.

“Makes sense,” Seejay said. “You two are from barbarian races that don’t have written languages.”

“That might make sense but… I sure don’t have to like it,” I said. What the heck? This world probably didn’t have as many situations where not being able to read would be a big handicap but it didn’t offer any advantage either. And I had been a reader all my life, since before I started school.

“You both have designed characters with just that limitation. Remember, we’re in the games we used to play? There are probably other things like this that are going to bite us.”

I made a noise. I still didn’t have to like it.

Trike shrugged, top and bottom. “I guess there are tradeoffs. Maybe you can play the ukelele now?” He grinned.

I could play the ukelele, or at least I used to be able to. “If they have ukeleles here,” I said. I could feel my lower lip sticking out and knew I was pouting.

Seejay looked at me with a peculiar expression.

“What?” I asked.

He did a slow grin and I guessed what he was about to say. “You’re cute when you’re grumpy.”

They laughed and I made a show of still being grumpy but I couldn’t keep it up and ended up giggling. Considering what else had happened to me so far, not being able to read was kind of minor in our present circumstances.

“We have lots of clothes now,” said Trike to me. “You should pick something to wear.”

I shook my head. “I can’t wear a dead guy’s clothes. Besides, all this stuff would fit me like a tent.”

Trike seemed to be considering that. “It is kind of creepy to dress in the clothes of someone you watched get killed. But what about shoes? Boots? You’re barefoot and there might be snakes or scorpions around?”

I winced. “You had to say that, didn’t you? I’ll watch where I’m going but walking in a dead man’s shoes would be even worse than wearing his guayabera. And a worse fit, too.”

“With the other spells you’ve got, maybe you can alter clothing or something, huh? When you get your magic back.”

I nodded, not mentioning that I thought I had only run up to a limit on how much I could spend at one time, I was pretty sure I had more magic left than I had already used. And I was even surer that I didn't want to wear any of the clothes we had.

Hote continued sorting stuff, including the coins, while Seejay went through the nasty task of examining our “loot.” I avoided watching what our leader was doing and hung around Hote while he counted the money.

“We’ve got seven of the larger, quarter-sized silver coins, most of which are the Victorian schillings,” said Hote. “And we have a bunch of these nickel-sized copper ones that say ‘one penny’ on the English ones and it looks like ‘dos centisimos’ on the Spanish ones. Though they aren’t exactly the same size.
“We have some other copper coins, bigger and smaller, and some small silver coins. Altogether, uh, it would add up to probably less than… than three dollars? Then we have this one tiny gold coin that says it is ‘One U.S. Dollar’ all by itself.”

The darn thing was smaller than a dime, but being gold probably weighed more. For some reason, I was even more annoyed at the banditos after seeing just how big a dollar was in this world.

Our other loot consisted of a bunch of knives, and some rather crude looking swords and pistols. All were revolvers, except one that had several barrels, and according to Hote, was called a duck-foot. Clothing, belts, shoes, some odd pieces of metal that might be tools of some kind, and various scraps of leather made pretty poor pickings.

The men all had canteens and flasks, with water in the larger ones and the smaller holding liquor of some kind. We didn’t find any food except what looked like a small biscuit folded around a greenish-looking piece of jerky.

Trike volunteered to eat the disreputable biscuit and meat. “I’m hungry,” he explained. None of us wanted to argue so we let him have it. Hardly more than a morsel for someone his size, it disappeared into his maw, serving only to remind us that we might all get hungry before we found more food.

Trike tried the water in the canteens, too. “Smells funny, but tastes okay,” he pronounced.

Hote took a sip of the liquor. “It’s rotgut whiskey, just what you would expect,” he said. “Tastes like moonshine, 150 proof or more.”

I had turned down the odd-smelling water. Nobody offered me any whiskey, and I didn’t ask.

* * *

Seejay finished his grisly task and stuffed all the plunder we were going to keep into bags made of clothing tied together. “Let’s move our camp out of this open chamber and into those rooms we found down the hall,” he said.

I had been resting and staying out of the way but had gotten up to look at Trike’s wounds. Bruises and scratches mostly, except for the bullet in his thigh. “Does it still hurt?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said but he didn’t seem concerned. “I can walk on it,” he added.

“You want Hote or I to try healing?”

He shook his head. “Let’s wait till later. Hote isn’t recovered yet, either, and he hasn’t healed the rest of his own gash that you worked on.” He looked at me. “And I think you both are still tired.”

I nodded, willing to let it wait. I wasn’t really tired. I had cast two spells and felt sure I could cast two or three more if I had to. The gemstones in my tongue piercings seemed to hold magical energy, too, and mostly I had used those.

“Besides,” Trike added, with a small grin around his tusks, “I might end up smelling minty.”

I sniffed but it was funny. My tail poked him in the lower set of ribs and he made a startled yawp noise that caused me to giggle. Jeez, I did that a lot.

Seejay organized us to move out. “I’ll lead, Hote will bring up the rear with another shotgun loaded. Trike, you carry the loot and watch out for the girl. Stay in the middle of the party. Maybe you can take some of these swords to use as knives.”

Now I was ‘the girl’? I wanted to say something but I had no idea what.

Trike tied the bags of loot around his waist and took a sword in each hand. “Hilts are small,” he grunted. “I’m liable to cut myself if I have to use them.”

“Just look fierce,” Hote suggested. “It should be enough.”

Trike made a comical face, and we all laughed.

Seejay handed me the duck-foot. “Think you could use this, girl?” he asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Oh, ye little fishies! It’s heavy!” I took it, surprised at the weight and the greasy feel of the metal.

He nodded. “No heavier than the revolvers. They’re all larger calibers, even though this thing has four barrels. They’re all loaded, too, but not cocked.”

“How do you…,” I started to ask but suddenly wanted no part of the thing. “No, thank you.” I handed it back. I had a sudden image of the explosion, the rounds from the gun tearing into someone, the blood and pain it would cause. “I don’t think I could do it.”

He pushed the weapon toward me again. “You sure?” he asked.

I nodded. “It’s as heavy as a bowling ball to me. I don’t think I could aim it.”

“That’s why I offered you the duck-foot. Pull the trigger all the way back and it fires all four barrels, you don’t have to aim. And it’s double-shotted, so it would be like a shotgun….” He trailed off watching my expressions.

Somewhere inside me, something was objecting to even the idea of using a weapon. My tail came up from between my legs and wrapped itself around my wrists, pulling my hands down. I felt a bit sick, like I needed to urp.

“Like that, huh?” Seejay said. “Maybe it’s a class restriction like mages in D&D not being able to wear armor?” He grinned.

“Artie’s system didn’t have classes, but it had vows. Maybe I have a vow to not use weapons?”

“Could be,” he said. “You don’t seem as upset about not being able to use a weapon as you were about not being able to read.”

I made a face. “Being a reader sort of defined me, uh, the old me? And I never was into weapons much.”

“What happens if we run into an ambush? You going to depend on your magic?”

“If someone jumps us again, I’ll just do another striptease,” I said, wagging my tits at him. I knew I must be blushing again but being near Seejay did things to me.

He laughed. “Girl, you’re already not wearing clothes,” he pointed out.

“Saves time,” I said, trying to keep my face straight.

Trike made a noise like an avalanche chuckling and Seejay turned away, still grinning. And, of course, I ended up giggling.

We fell into line behind Seejay and started down the corridor. I had a great view of his butt almost the whole way.

If no one remembers my name, do I really exist?

 

It took us ten minutes to reach the vicinity of the rooms where Hote and Seejay had stashed the earlier loot they had acquired because Seejay had to approach every intersection alone and check out all the cross-passages.

“Can’t see a thing,” he complained at one point. “It’s really dark down here.”

I traded glances with Trike. Both of us looked at Hote bringing up the rear and apparently peering blindly into the darkness as well. It was dim and gloomy, but I could see pretty well and thought Trike was the same.

“The girl and I can see fine,” Trike volunteered. His accent made almost three syllables out of a word like ‘fine’ but what I noticed was that now he had called me ‘the girl.’

“Crap,” said Seejay. He took time to think about it then announced a change in procedures. “Trike, you keep watch behind mostly, and the girl can come up here to be my eyes.” He made a face that he probably didn’t know I could see quite well.

I didn’t like it either, and my tail wrapped itself around my knees so I couldn’t move. “Eep!” I said.

“Trike?” Seejay asked. “Is she okay?”

“I guess so?” said our giant. “Are you all right?” he asked me directly.

I nodded, feeling a bit too stubborn to speak. My tail had now hobbled my ankles as well as my knees. How long was the damn thing anyway?

“She’s -uh- she’s….” Trike was trying not to laugh at my predicament. “She’s indisposed?” He made it a question.

Seejay turned around. He moved his head back-and-forth and side-to-side to locate me in the darkness. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer. Aware that he probably could see me only in silhouette against the light in the big chamber behind us, I just shrugged. My tail seemed to be trying to tie itself in a knot.

Abruptly and for what reason I could not determine, I burst into tears. Sniffles and sobs turned into quiet whimpers and wails. I felt heartbroken, abandoned, unloved and… nameless?

But I had a name, didn’t I? Even if no one was calling me by it, I had a name. I remembered having a name. But I could not seem to remember what that name had been. I wept. I ached down to the center of my being, to someplace inside that felt bereft. I had a name—and I had lost it!

The game was messing with me again, or something. I wanted to be mad about it, but it frightened me too much. I opened up and let the tears flow, shivering a little, too.

And all the time Hote and Seejay gathered around me and tried to offer comfort while Trike stood sentinel, looking this and that with his darkness-penetrating eyes.

After several, “There, there” and “It’ll be all right” platitudes, Seejay said, “Tell us what’s wrong?”

And suddenly, I could. It poured out. “You guys! First, you started calling me, ‘girl,’ instead of my name, and then you called me ‘the girl,’ and you started talking about me as if I weren’t right there hearing you.”

They looked distressed and mystified and confused, and Trike began leaking tears himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whispered in his soft drawl.

“And now, it’s worse! Even I can’t remember my name. I know I had a name, but I can’t think what it was.”

“Sure you had a name…” began Seejay then he stopped, and his eyes got wide.

“Some kind of magic,” said Hote. “A geas that no one can call you by your name or remember it?”

“A curse,” I whimpered. My tail had unwound itself and hovered near my face where I began using it as a tissue, dabbing at my eyes with the soft furriness, even trying to wad it up in my fist. That caused it to retreat for a moment, pausing to stroke my cheek with the fingerlike extension at the very end.

“It had an ‘o’ in it,” Trike said, trying to be helpful. “Your name had an ‘o’ in it.” That was pretty funny if you thought about it, neither of us could read and wouldn’t know the letter o if we saw it.

“Yonee,” said Hote. “Whatever your name was, we can call you Yonee now.”

“Joanie?” asked Trike.

“No, Yonee,” said Hote, firmly.

“That’s got an O-sound in it,” Trike said, beaming.

“Where did you come up with that?” asked Seejay.

“I don’t know,” admitted Hote. “I think I read it somewhere. But doesn’t she look like someone called Yonee?”

“You mean naked?” said Seejay, he had a little bit of a grin.

As soon as he had said the new name, I stopped crying. I blinked. “Yonee?” I said aloud. It did sound like it fit, even fitting whatever it was inside that made me different.

Seejay nodded. “Much better than Mojo, that wouldn’t fit for a girl.” Then he blinked. “Now we can remember your name?”

“Guys?” said Trike. “I’ve been watching, and the light from the windows in the big room is going. It’s going to get too dark for even my eyes in a little bit.”

“Yonee,” said Seejay, “get up here and help me find the rooms we found before.”

I scurried forward, and Seejay put an arm around me. It didn’t help me think about what we were doing, but it was nice.

“You happy now, Puss?” he whispered to me, burying his face in my hair.

“Puss?” I asked, startled.

He chuckled but didn’t explain. “Just watch out ahead of us. With your caterwauling, I think anyone in the area would already have found us. And the room we’re looking for is a little farther down this corridor and up some stairs.”

My tail worked its way into my hands, and we made much better time even as the dungeon got darker and darker. “If the light goes completely, I don’t think even I will be able to see,” I said.

“Trike might be able to, but no worries. We’re here.”

There was, of course, no door, just a doorway. In fact, I hadn’t seen any doors in any of the hallways we had traveled. Maybe the original builders didn’t believe in privacy? But the room was lighter than the corridor with a single high-up window in the wall that must have faced east. Stars showed in the rectangle fifteen feet above our head giving very poor light but not complete darkness.

It wasn’t a small room, bigger than some apartments I have lived in. There was a bunch of junk stacked against one wall.

“I can’t see a thing, Puss,” said Seejay. “There should be two doors, one on each side.”

“I see them,” I said.

“Go peek inside, make sure we don’t have company we don’t know about.”

I did so. The left-hand room was shown as empty by a tiny sliver of starlight but the right-hand room had no window at all and was dark as the inside of a coffin. “Can’t see anything in here,” I whispered.

Hote and Trike arrived behind us. “Cozy,” the big guy remarked.

Our healer just looked relieved to get out of the corridor.

“Check out the right-hand room,” Seejay told Trike, “after you dump the loot against the wall.”

Trike untangled himself from the luggage then stuck his head into the other room. “Dark,” he reported. “Continued dark until morning. Darker than dark, I mean really dark. But it’s empty.”

“How can you tell, if it's that, uh, dark?” Seejay asked.

Trike made a show of sniffing the air. “All the smells are stale.” He grinned, and his tusks gleamed in the dimness. “Yonee hasn’t been in here, I can tell. Or Hote.”

“I’m going to try to heal myself again,” said our physician, “then I need to sleep. Is it okay if I use this dark room?”

“Sure,” said Seejay. “Yonee and I will take the room on the other side and Trike can have the big center room.”

My eyebrows and tail went up, but my feet were already moving. Try not to look too eager, I told myself. Good grief.

But Seejay called me back before I reached the door. “Yonee, give Trike a heal before you do any resting.” He did grin as he said that. “That way we can start tomorrow with everyone healed up and spells recharged?”

I couldn’t think of a reason not to do that, so I stepped up to our giant friend and put a hand on his arm.

“This ain’t gonna tickle is it?” asked Trike. “You know how Ah hate to be tickled.”

“You better tell her what you want to smell like, too,” said Seejay. “Wildflowers, licorice, cat butt bouquet?”

“Not that last one,” said Trike. “Licorice might be nice, or chocolate?”

I giggled at their clowning and did my routine: crossed eyes, tongue touching the roof of my mouth and silently wishing.

When I looked again, Trike was sniffing his arm. “Caramel peanuts?” he said. “Is someone hungry?” he joked.

He didn’t smell like any kind of food. He smelled like earth, freshly turned over and waiting for rain. It was a good, clean smell.

“We’re probably all a little hungry,” said Seejay. “And will probably get a bit hungrier before we get anything to eat.” Trike’s stomach chose that moment to growl audibly, and we all laughed. I didn’t feel hungry, but obviously, Trike did.

“Puss, wait for me in the bedroom,” Seejay went on. “I want to talk to Trike about a watch schedule.”

This time I did hurry. Bedroom? Oh, boy.

Seejay and I had had characters who got involved before but this was different, we were inhabiting these characters. And as far as we knew, for the rest of our lives. But we weren’t acting like that. In some ways, we were still acting like this was all a game. I didn’t want to think about it.

I went into the side room and looked up at the stars through the tiny window high up on the wall. Was reality just a computer simulation? Was Artie out there somewhere rolling dice? Where would that somewhere be?

Was I really going to make love with Seejay in this very room? Was something somewhere inside me happy about that idea?

I told you I didn’t want to think about it.

Seejay and Trike were working out a watch schedule in the other room. In four hours, Seejay would replace Trike at the only door into our little apartment. Then in four more hours, Seejay would wake Hote to take watch until dawn, unless morning came sooner than that.

They didn’t expect me to take a watch. And how were they going to know when it had been four hours? Seejay probably had a method, I supposed. Looking at the stars maybe.

A stray thought intruded. Did Mars have polestars? Earth has a North Star but no south polestar worth mentioning. I knew Mars had a tilted axis like Earth, so there would be seasons, but I didn’t remember how much the tilt was. It would be sheer coincidence and a spooky one at that if Mars and Earth both pointed at the same polestar.

And wherever here was, this Mars might not be the same as the Mars one orbit out from the Earth I came from. Well, it couldn't be, there was air to breathe, and none of us had noticed the gravity being particularly different. We could have been on Earth somewhere. The Earth where I was a fifty-something roleplayer who liked female characters. What did that say about my sexuality?

What is taking Seejay so long?

Wow, I managed not to think about it for all of maybe half a minute.

I needed another distraction.

My tail had been going this way and that, down, up, feeling of the wall and floor, burrowing into my hair and stroking me on the back of the neck. I didn’t know if I would ever get used to that. The tail, I meant, but now that I thought of it, the hair, too. I hadn’t had long hair since the seventies and never down to my butt. It would be down to my knees if it weren’t so curly.

Better than going bald? Ma-ay-be. I giggled and tossed my hair with my fingers, feeling the curls on my back. Okay yes, I liked having long hair.

The tits were another thing. They seemed very large and…bouncy. The lower gravity of Mars helping out there?

Did this Mars have lower gravity? How would I tell? Send Galileo up a tree to drop an apple on Sir Isaac's head? Were there trees, let alone apples, on Mars?

Did Seejay like my large, bouncy tits? I grinned in the darkness. Actually, I was pretty sure he did.

Was he ever going to finish talking with Trike so we could get to doing what we were surely going to do?

Back to the topic, I was trying to avoid.

This whole thing of being female now. And being attracted to Seejay and knowing he was attracted to me. And being pleased about that, like a treasure I could keep inside me. And wanting to find out what it was really like to make love…to a man?

I’d never been married. Seejay was divorced for the last ten or fifteen years. Hote was married with kids in college. Trike had been married briefly almost forty years ago, but it didn’t take, they’d got it annulled.

Wait. Hote’s wife? Claire was a gem, a gamer’s spouse who was tolerant of her hubby’s hobby. Was she alone now, back on Earth? And how was being separated from her going to affect Hote? He was devoted to Claire and never played the little sexual shenanigan side games that Seejay and I had indulged in for years.

As Mojo, I hadn’t been a virgin, but I had never had a personal relationship with someone of the opposite sex that had lasted as long as my gaming career.

Oh!

Something just tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around so fast I almost fell on my fat little ass. It was, of course, just my tail playing tricks on me. I could feel its amusement percolating up my spine from the pseudo-brain that Artie had said red Martians kept at the base of their tails. Little hooligan, worse than a cat.

“Puss?” Seejay’s voice came from the doorway.

The pet name he’d come up with made me shiver to hear it.

“I’m here,” I said. “And I’m naked.”

He chuckled, stepping forward but obviously not seeing me. “I think you like being naked.” He was carrying a couple bags of clothes, probably so we could use them as pillows on the stone floor.

“Maybe,” I said. “I like it fine right now.” I stepped toward him, my tail waving around my head and I knew when he had spotted me in the darkness. He tossed the bags against the far wall and stepped close to me.

We came together. I ran my hands over his chest. “You, on the other hand, are still dressed.” We were close enough I could smell his male smell, muscles and sweat, body hair and musk. Could he still smell my perfume?

“Hmm,” he said. He took my wrists in his hands and held them off of him. “Yonee, do you want to do this?”

I didn’t resist him holding my arms, but I pushed forward so that my nipples touched his shirt and my face was next to his shoulder. I wanted it with all of me, inside and outside. I wanted it so much it astonished me. “Do I want this? Like a little girl wants a pony for Christmas,” I said.

He laughed. “An unfortunate choice of simile. You don’t know this, but in the face, you look about fourteen in this avatar.”

“Seejay are you going to chicken out on me?” I said, letting a pout creep into my voice on purpose.

“Not exactly, but….” He sighed. “I’ve noticed something.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I’ve noticed that bulge in your pants.”

“You’re why Hote and I had to find clothes soonest, but that wasn’t what I meant.”

“Hmm?”

“Yonee, put your hands behind your back,” he said, letting go of my wrists at the same time.

I put my hands behind my back, giggling a bit.

“Close your eyes,” he said, and I closed my eyes. For some reason, this little game was making me hot. Hot in a specific place inside me. And hotter, just thinking of even having such a place.

“I want you to think back. At any time since we got here have you not done whatever one of us told you to do?”

Damn. There was that thing I didn’t want to think about again.

I held the egg in my hand and wondered where I should put it for safe keeping?

 

“You make it sound like I don’t have free will,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think that. No one made you run out in front of those bandits and distract them. You thought that up yourself.”

“Uh-not exactly,” I admitted. “I didn’t know I was going to do it until I was already moving.”

We both smiled. In our games, my characters were famous for sudden impulses that turned out either very good or disastrously bad. But they kept the games interesting. Now though? When this was—maybe?—real life? Maybe not so good.

We stood there for a long moment. I still had my eyes closed, but I could sense him staring at the top of my head, we were standing that close together. Plus it was dark, and he really couldn’t see anything either.

“Maybe I’m just an NPC?” I said finally. A non-player character, part of the scenery.

He shook his head again. “C’mon, Puss. You know better than that.”

I shivered though I was not at all cold, despite being naked in a giant-scale pile of stone. The heat inside me had not gone away. I was more than warm. I opened my eyes and started to bring my hands back in front of me. He didn’t give me an order not to so I put my hands back on his chest.

He sighed, his chest moving under my touch. “You see why this is a problem?”

“Uh, huh,” I said. “But does it have to be?”

“I don’t see how not,” he said.

My turn to sigh. I knew something almost no one else in the world knew. Seejay, or John Bostwick in real life, had been molested as a child. More or less held captive by a relative and made to do some pretty awful stuff. He had escaped, but his values and judgment had been forever altered.

It was complicated by the deep relationship he’d had with his captor. Coercion and bondage had a seductive appeal to him, as a consequence. In a twisted way, it made sense, but it left him exquisitely sensitive to this situation.

He had power over me if what we both thought was happening were true. But that power could tempt him into becoming a monster, and he feared that more than anything in the world. Something in him had died when he was a child, and he still felt that emptiness and struggled to fill it. His marriage had failed because of his past.

“We can work this out,” I said. “In fact, I need you to work with me on this.”

“Um,” he said. “I can’t believe you look so fine, smell so good, and… I only have to reach out to make you mine.”

I nodded, leaning against him so he could feel it.

Outside, the Martian night had closed down completely, and clouds obscured the bright, thin light of the stars. It was too dark even for my alien night vision. Seejay’s arm around me felt like safety, a kind of certainty.

He adjusted his position a bit, pulling me closer and breathing into my hair. He sighed before he spoke. “But, Puss. I’m afraid of what I might do to you. I’d rather not even go down that road at all.”

“Is that why you arranged this private room, luxury suite?” I asked, trying to sound like the sassy girlfriend in a romcom.

He laughed.

“I need you,” I said. “And not just for what you’re thinking. I need you for the very thing you’re afraid of.” I nuzzled against him, my breasts moving on the cloth of his shirt, my nipples getting stiff.

“You’re making this hard,” he said. “To coin a phrase.”

I giggled. Seejay always could deliver such jokes in a tone as dry as expensive gin.

“I’m not, I’m not kidding. If I have to do what anyone tells me….”

“Maybe it’s just us, our gaming group?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve taken over the life of some rich guy’s toy. A rich wizard, probably. That’s why those banditos were after me. There’s a reward for my butt, tail and all.” A chilling thought, but I still didn’t feel cold. Instead, I felt safe and warm in Seejay’s arms.

“Christ.” Not something he said much when Hote was around, but he knew it didn’t really offend me. “You’ve got an Enemy.” He meant in game terms. An Enemy was someone who recurred in the game, pursuing you for some reason. Having one gave you more points to spend on building your character.

“Yup,” I said. “That’s what it looks like. And I think I may be Valuable Property.” Which was another game thing. I probably had tons of points for buying Spells and Stats and Advantages.

I went on. “You remember how Artie casually mentioned that in some of the Martian colonies, the places settled by humans from Earth, that Red Martians and sometimes Green Martians were kept as slaves? And that because of a lack of women from Earth, a lot of the Red Martian women were…. 'Concubines' is the word used in the Bible. Slave wives.”

He grunted, meaning that he did remember.

“This is a real world, however much it resembles that game. Maybe somehow, Artie was mentally connected to this world, and maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs and others before Artie….” I didn’t know where I was going with that, so I dropped it.

“I guess what I mean is that real-world people can be a lot nastier than fictional ones. Would anyone have believed in gas warfare, the Holocaust or atomic bombs in fiction before they actually happened? It could be very bad out there.” I didn’t mean to shiver as punctuation to what I was saying, but I did it. I tried to snuggle, wanting to feel warm inside again.

He sighed, pulling me close, not pushing me away anymore.

“We have to protect you,” he said. “We have to get outside your Enemy’s reach. Uh—.” In game terms that would be “buying off a disadvantage.” I would have to earn points to do so by adventuring, risking my life in the game. Otherwise, any enemy I simply outran would be replaced in the game with a new one. Would the world continue to behave like a game world?

“One of the best ways to protect me is to use your power to order me around,” I said.

“You must be smarter than me cause I don’t get that,” he said.

“You have to tell me that I can’t do what anybody else says without getting approval from you.”

He let out a big breath. We both thought about it. “That’s not quite right.” He swallowed, my fingers were on his chin, and I could feel it. “We’ll have to work on it,” he said.

“And you’ll have to give me such an order every day, cause these things wore off. I was able to bring my hands back in front of me after only a few seconds.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “Puss,” he said, “who knew Mars had fifty shades of red?”

We laughed together, softly, then we made love standing up, and it was wonderful.

At the end, some small bit of magic escaped me and made it even better. Something reached up from inside me and touched us both—a simultaneous orgasm that left us gasping, staggering, wiped out and wanting more. So after waiting a bit, we made love again on the improvised pillows he’d brought and the magic a second time left stars in our eyes and visions of being together for a lifetime in our hearts.

Somehow in that ecstatic moment, I knew exactly what Seejay thought and felt and I knew he could feel and think my thoughts, too.

We lay there quietly for some time, murmuring to each other.

“I never knew Martian women were so tight,” he joked.

“I never knew Earthmen were so big and hard,” I said. “Seriously, I didn’t. Not in my experience.” I giggled, thinking about it. It actually felt like he was still inside me, making for a warm and comfortable afterglow.

“Why do you call me ‘Puss’?” I asked after a long sweet silence.

“Besides the obvious reason?” he chuckled. “Because that’s what the name Hote gave you means.”

“Yonee?” I said. “In what language?”

“Sanskrit I think. It’s a New Agey kind of thing.”

“Puss as in kitty cat?”

“Uh, no. As in the part of a girl she sits on,” Seejay seemed amused.

I felt something—down there?—when he said that. Satisfaction? “Well,” I said, thinking about it. “You and I may be the only two on the planet who know that now.” I giggled.

“The scary thing though is how you got the name. There was magic working there. Or a gamesmaster playing little tricks?”

I nodded. “That’s obvious. But…. If Artie is watching us in the game, then there may be some kind of hope we can get out of here and go home again.”

“Hmm? Would you want to?”

I didn’t answer right away. I had to think about it. And that was surprising.

I had left behind a fairly rich and fulfilling life. I ran online stores for a number of niche retailers. There was enough technical stuff for my inner nerd and enough personal interaction with clients and customers to keep me from feeling like a hermit.

And there, I was male, in charge of my own life and decisions and had no one chasing me to do… whatever it was my Enemy wanted to do to me. Return me to my “owner”? That seemed likeliest.

Going back to Earth seemed so very logical but felt emotionally flat. For one thing, going to Earth would be the end of this relationship with Seejay. And more, this relationship between Yonee, an exotic alien slave woman, and Seejay, a handsome, dashing adventurer. Our game seemed based on one of the great romantic fantasies in literature.

And here we were both young with the possibility of long and interesting lives. The uncertainty of our survival, not to mention possible other fates, seemed a minor cost for a new universe of feeling and being.

Here I felt wanted and needed, and I wanted and needed someone else. I hadn’t had those things back on Earth.

My tail touched me in various places, behind a knee, under a breast, at the corner of my mouth, in that secret place that was always near my center, reminding me of its existence. And yes, back on Earth, I had not had a tail. That counted, too.

* * *

Amazingly, I fell asleep in Seejay’s arms. I woke when he stirred.

“Trike promised to start snoring if he fell asleep,” said Seejay. “I think that’s him now.”

The noise coming from the other room did sound like the snoring of a giant with tusks growing out of his face. I giggled, but my tail wrapped around Seejay’s legs and hampered him from getting up. So I kissed him extravagantly everywhere I could reach.

“Can we one more time?” I asked, putting as much pleading into my voice as I could. My secret place wanted to touch Seejay once more.

“Not right now, Puss. I need to recuperate,” he said grinning and unwinding my nether appendage from his left ankle. “Leave go,” he ordered, and my tail, just like the rest of me, obeyed.

Before I could work up a good pout, which would not have done a lot of good in the darkness, Seejay continued with the commands. “Stay here, Puss,” he said. “Get some more sleep. Wake up when I call you.”

I was out like a light.

I had a strange dream in which I wandered through a tall house set among red hills. The valleys between the highlands were an aching green, rich with growing things. The house stood on the tallest hill and was made of red stone, smooth as glass, deep as night. I looked out a window while my tail fluffed my hair around my face.

I looked down and saw that my hands had rings on my fingers and bracelets on my wrists. I could hear the jangle of multiple rings in my ears, and even my tail wore jewelry.

I wandered through the building, starting from the top. On a lower parapet, I found a huge crossbow loaded with a lightning bolt. Above a gate to a pretty courtyard a fishnet made of electric eels hung, ready to fall on an unwelcome visitor.

A banquet hall was set with only four place settings at one end and a single cup and bowl at the other. The cup held wine made of quince and melons, I don’t know how I knew that. The bowl contained nuggets that looked like raw gems, uncut and unpolished.

Stairs led down to an underlevel, basement or dungeon. In the center, guarded by hairy snakes and teeth without mouths lay the treasure of the castle: a single green egg, enormous, though it fit in my hand. It was a clear soft green but full of the smoke of burning wishes and unextinguished passions.

I held the egg in my hand and wondered where I should put it for safe keeping?

* * *

Seejay stood at the door of the room and called to me. “Puss. Puss, wake up.”

And I was awake, the dream egg fading from my hand, my tail alertly poised above my left shoulder.

Seejay sat down on the improvised pillow beside me. “Trike is still asleep, but Hote is awake to take last watch. If I’m right, it should be dawn in two or three hours.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Where were we?”

He laughed softly and gathered me into his lap. “Lovely Puss,” he said. “Yonee of the jeweled tongue.”

I giggled while he invented sillier and sillier compliments. We made love again in the darkness with the magical jolt that brought us to climax at the same time and then when it appeared that Seejay did not have enough energy to raise things up again, I proved that I knew what to do with the jewels in my tongue.

After that, we both slept, and I don’t remember any dreams I had.

Why did it have to be lizards?

 

Things got lively right at dawn.

Hote and Trike were sitting quietly, letting us sleep in while they discussed what their favorite choices were from the breakfast buffet at the Malagua casino when they heard the rushing sound of clawed feet on stone.

Big honking sword, pistol and spear at the ready, Trike covered the door with Hote backing him up on double barrel, all the while they screamed to wake us up.

When Seejay and I came out of our “bedroom”, both of us naked, Trike was stabbing at a toothy lizard head only half as big as a Cooper Mini. The extra-wide doorway gave the monster plenty of room to maneuver and the fight had to be over soon—or else.

“Hoo-Hah!” shouted Trike just as Hote stuck the shotgun between the big guys’ legs and gave the lizard both charges, right in the throat. Trike finished the oversized luggage off by stabbing through the roof of the still open mouth with the long spear.

Morning light came through the windows in two of our rooms but it was not a pretty sight. Blood, guts and gobs of lizard meat decorated the doorway and my angle of view was past Trike’s big green heinie. “Who knew Mars had alligators?” I asked.

Both Trike and Hote did double takes in my direction and somehow that made me feel good. Hote gaze lingered just long enough that if Seejay had been watching he might have got jealous. How could I giggle with a life and death struggle going on? I don’t know but I did.

There were more lizards in the hallway but now they were squabbling over who owned the rights to the carcass. Trike let them have at it, only poking them if they tried to come in the door.

Seejay took his shotgun to the door and watched the mayhem, too. “Hote, reload,” he said, standing there naked with his big old gun. Despite the danger of the lizard attack, I wanted to giggle, he looked so cute. The smoke in the room made it all a little unreal.

“Yeah, got it,” said our healer. He began the process of putting charges and shot down the barrels of the big muzzleloaders.

“Hey guys!” shouted Trike to the ravening throng, “Save some for us!” He sounded jovial in his deep-voiced drawl.

“You’d eat that?” asked Seejay.

“Sure,” said Trike. “If there’s any left.”

Two smaller mars-igators got dealt with as they came over the top of Uncle Albert and Trike managed to skewer the littler one to drag it inside our rooms. “Yum! Tastes like chicken,” he said.

The thing would have given nightmares to any Floridian: longer than Trike was tall, lean and a dingy grey in color with two rows of sharp, blade-like scales down its back. The claws were longer than my hand, not particularly sharp but the teeth made up for that, being long and keen as razors. And this was the smallest of the ones we had gotten a good look at.

I watched the guys deal with the hall monitors and stayed out of the way. Frankly, they scared me—a lot! The first one could have swallowed me in a single bite and only Trike’s strength, mass and bracing had kept it out of the room long enough for Hote to rip out its throat with the double-barrel.

This was why the guys did not have me on door watch, wasn’t it? I couldn’t handle a weapon big enough to do harm to such monsters and besides that, anytime a fight started, I spent several seconds trying to keep myself from throwing up. Trike and Hote might not know that, I suspect Seejay did, but I certainly knew and it was not good.

“Yonee,” Hote yelled while reloading again. (We were all near deafened from the shotguns going off inside the room with the smoke burning our eyes and choking us.) “Do you think you could figure out how to cook one of these chickens after I cut it up?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’m the girl so I get to do the cooking?” My tail was in my hands and it was all I could do not to wring it like a washcloth, I was so frightened.

“We’re all going to be watching the door,” he said simply.

I nodded. It did make sense. Seejay was a good cook, his stuffed peppers were yum, and Hote was fine at stuff like BBQ. My own skills involved microwave ovens and instant ramen. But…needs must. “Have we got anything to start a fire with, or for that matter, anything to burn?” I asked.

Other than the big spear and the handles to an axe or two, we hadn’t seen anything that even looked like wood. The gun stocks were all bone and horn.

Hote rubbed his face, thinking. “Some of the clothes we don’t need, I guess. And that big old flintlock pistol can be used to start a spark. You can spill a little powder to get it burning….”

My expression must have been something because Hote left off talking and looked at Seejay.

“I’ll do it,” said my main man. “I’ll get the fire started for you at least, Puss.” He grinned. “No Better Dungeons and Castles here, huh?” A fictitious magazine often referred to in the gamer press.

I rolled my eyes but I felt pretty useless just then. The idea of touching one of the weapons, even to use it as a firestarter, had caused me genuine fright and distress. Yes, it appeared that I was—designed? created?—as a rich man’s toy, useful only in bed.

And as if to emphasize that, my tail came up between my legs, wrapped itself around both wrists and pulled my hands down to my waist, tying itself in a knot to keep them there. This was not comfortable, have you ever had a knot in your tail?

“Guess not,” said Seejay. He shrugged. “Relax, we won’t make the princess do any work.”

My tail unknotted and I pried my hands out of the loops it had made.

“You were talking to my tail?” I said. I didn’t want to cry and I was doing a pretty good job of it, mostly because Seejay had said to relax.

“Both of you,” he said. “Go stand in the light from the window and be decorative.”

And of course, I did so, posing like a statue where the light splashed against the wall. The guys all glanced at me, frequently, smiling. The doorway where occasional lizardly squabbles could still be heard was to my right but I kept my eyes turned left. I would find it hard to be decorative if I were scared half to death.

Hote disjointed the lizard Trike had killed and Seejay prepared a fire. I watched. But being useless didn’t bother me so much now, I was decorative. In game terms, using Artie’s system, I would be providing a morale bonus to my team which could be worth as much as 5-25% in efficiency. I began to feel better about myself. There are more ways to be useful to your crew than killing or cooking monsters.

The smell of the meat cooking though was not so agreeable to me. At first I thought it was because it was being cooked over a fire made of burning rags. But no, I just didn’t like the smell of cooking meat. Almost by reflex, I did my ritual and removed the smell from my immediate area using magic. It took very little and I knew, somehow, that with a few minutes rest I could easily replace the energy used.

Huh.

Being clean and smelling good mattered to me but how much magic did I have? And what kind? I tried to make a list in my head. I could cancel smells or create them. I could clean myself or others. I could heal wounds. I could cause people to be fascinated looking at me, either suddenly and dramatically as when I had done my striptease or more subtly while being decorative.

These were all small effects. Could I do other things? Probably. How could I find out what they were? An idea occurred to me.

“Yonee? You want some lizard-ka-bob?” Trike offered.

I shook my head, smiling. It looked revolting and smelled worse, like cheap turkey franks burned by incompetent girl scouts.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds, in fact, it’s pretty good.” Trike trying to wheedle me was funny, partly because he was so big and fierce-looking.

I giggled but shook my head again. “I don’t seem to be hungry, but I had another thought. Seejay?” I turned toward my man.

“Not hungry?” Seejay looked interested in that idea. “Puss, we’ve been running around and it’s been twelve to sixteen hours since we got here. And if you remember, we were on the way to lunch in the van when… whatever happened, happened.”

“Seriously, I’m not hungry. Uh….” I was in danger of being sidetracked on that topic instead of the one I wanted to talk about. “I think I’ve figured out how to know what magic I can do.”

Seejay eyed me speculatively. “If you’re sure you don’t want anything to eat? We’ll keep some of this for later but we need to get out of this place before those bandits bring reinforcements. So does your idea involve me telling you to tell me what magic you can do?”

“Uh, yeah. Pretty obvious, huh?”

“Well, you’re still the first one to think of it.” He grinned. “This lizard meat has almost no fat in it. It’s almost as dry as the sand outside.” He sipped from one of the canteens we had confiscated. “But I haven’t seen you take a drink yet, either.”

I blinked. “I’m not thirsty.”

Hote looked concerned. “Dehydration can sneak up on you.” He stood, wiping his hands on a rag that had not gone into the fire. “Do you mind?” he asked, stepping close.

“I guess not? Mind what?” I asked.

He took my wrist in one hand and with the other softly pinched the back of my arm, watching closely as the skin went back to normal almost instantly. He shook his head. “You’re not dehydrated, and you’ve got the skin texture of a teenager.” He patted my hand, absently. “How much magic do you have on you, Yonee?”

Seejay interrupted. “The way to phrase that is, ‘Tell us, Yonee, how much magic do you have on you?’”

I felt my eyes get wide. “Lots,” I said. My tail came around in front of my face and seemed to be peering at me.

“What kind of magic?” asked Trike.

“Yes,” said Seejay. “Tell us, Yonee, what kind of magic have you got on you?”

“Uh,” I felt my eyes cross briefly then the double vision effect faded away. I could sort of see into an aura that surrounded me. “Transformation magic. Body control magic. Food, air and water spells. M-m-mind control? P-power enchantments.”

Hote whistled. “I did some introspection last night, trying to figure out what I might be able to do myself. Spells I know exist in my mind, kind of like memory structures? Like how you remember the layout of a building?”

Spells didn’t look at all like that to me, more like toys with buttons on them. And I had a toybox full of them, each with an aura colored by what they were made of and what they could do.

I was looking down at myself. The aura surrounding me seemed to be centered on one part of my body. The part I had been named after. My yoni. I heard what Hote had said and I could see structure now in the aura. Threads that went to parts of my body, like my tail, my belly, my head, my eyes. And one thread that went to each of my friends, a thicker one for Seejay.

And one last thread, fine but strong that arched away from me, high up toward the ceiling before disappearing through the wall. The east wall.

“Oh, crap,” I said.

“What?” Seejay had seen the look on my face.

“The… whoever? The mage or wizard or whatever who… —uh?— enchanted me? They can tell where I am.” I pointed at the invisible thread disappearing into the wall. “Location magic.”

Hote squinted in that direction. “I have a location spell myself…. For finding hidden injuries? Uh? I think she’s right. I can’t see the trace clearly but there is something.”

Seejay took charge quickly, that ability was what made him our leader. “We’re going to have to get moving. Your Enemy can send his henchmen directly toward us. Ten minutes, let’s get this all cleaned up. Trike, take a look in the hallway to make sure the lizards are gone.”

Everyone but me gobbled up the last shreds of the cooked lizard that had not been set aside for later and took long swigs from the canteens. The smaller liquor flasks had not been touched.

“Enemy?” said Trike. “Like an in-game Enemy?” He squinted at the wall but obviously wasn’t seeing anything there.

Seejay and I nodded. “We figured that out last night,” I said. “We think that I’m someone’s Valuable Property and they want me back.”

Trike shook his head. “They can’t have you,” he said. “You belong to us.”

“Thank you, Trike.”

“But you still owe me twelve dollars,” he added, his eyes twinkling.

We all laughed. Twelve dollars had been what Zandro, the leader of the banditos had offered for me.

“Keep talking, Yonee, tell us about your magic while we pack up, tell us what you can do?”

“Uh,” I said. “I can make and unmake smells. I can clean myself and other people and things. Uh, I can… I can make people like me and want to look at me and get confused.”

They all nodded.

“I can find water, I can…. Um, I’m not sure how to say this? I can give myself food and drink without eating or drinking? That’s why I’m not hungry or thirsty? I don’t catch diseases either….”

Hote started to say something but Seejay kept him quiet.

“I can clean wounds and do some healing. I can help other people resist disease and get well if they are sick. I can help people not feel tired? I can, uh, I can make people feel really, really good while, uh, having sex.” I had to stop while they all laughed and Seejay actually blushed.

I grinned at him but my smile faded after a bit. I paused. “I can make a gust of wind, even a pretty hard one. I can keep someone from breathing. I can electrocute anyone who touches me when I don’t want to be touched.” Those two surprised me.

They stared.

“And, uh,” I said, “I can shoot lightning, not too far and not too much but maybe enough to knock someone down?”

“Wow,” said Trike.

“Oh,” I said. “And I can do this….” I caused a small flame to appear on the end of my finger. I made it a bit bigger then made it go out. “It looks like that would hurt but it doesn’t.”

“These are the shitheads who already killed us once, ain’t they?”

 

We got moving pretty quickly after that.

Seejay led the way. His real life military training as an intelligence officer in the Army included infantry training and he was our natural leader as well. He carried his double-barrel at the ready, pistol, sword and knives at his belt and rifle slung across his back. He had the real sword, the one that looked like an old movie cavalry saber.

Hote backed Seejay up, also carrying a double-barrel, with two pistols on his belt. He was ambidextrous in this world and could take advantage of it. He had two swords, too, the peculiar, cheaply-made machete-like things that Seejay called hangers. And on his back, he carried one of our extra double-barrels, charged and ready because we didn’t have a second rifle.

Trike carried our loot, bringing up the rear, still armed with spear, two-handed giant sword and his oversize pistol. He had better peripheral vision than any of us, and could see behind himself by only half-turning his head. Something about how his eyes were placed, plus he could see into shadows better than humans. He had two smaller swords handy, though they did not fit his hands, and he carried our piece-of-junk last shotgun with the trigger guard cut away so his big finger could reach the trigger.

I mostly walked in front of Trike. I wanted to be up with Seejay, but I would just be in the way if jelly turned to jam. I carried nothing and I still wasn’t wearing any clothes, which I hardly even thought about. Hote had suggested I carry some of the extra ammo but Seejay pointed out that wasn’t a good idea in case I had to electrocute someone or shoot lightning. I agreed. The idea of a spark reaching any black powder I might have been carrying horrified me.

Since the location spell trace of my Enemy pointed East, we wanted to go West. But the corridors ran North and South. North was back toward the banditos, so we headed South, looking for an exit from the building, preferably one on the West side.

The carnage of the lizards in the hallway had oddly been mostly cleaned up. They ate or carried away the large chunks, and various small scavengers took care of the rest. We spotted a few of these: a creepy, many-legged, scaly, rat-like thing, a number of skittering insectile types and the largest, a beast that looked like a cross between Trike and a raccoon. It had a fuzzy, feather-like growth over most of its body in a striped red and green pattern that made it amazingly hard to see in dim corners. It even had a mask which gave it our name for it: redmask.

Hote talked about what he had figured out about his own magic as we walked. His visualization of magic as a building with architecture was much more organized than my box of colorful toys. It made me giggle to think about how anal he sounded.

“Think of the lobby of the building as the spells that affect magic itself and other spells,” he was saying. “There are hallways opening out and even staircases to higher level magics.”

Seejay kept his attention on the path forward and sometimes motioned for silence while he went ahead a bit to scout. But Hote kept talking when he could.

“On the first floor are corridors representing earth, air, water and fire spells, these are basic. So I can seek earth, air and water, and create earth, water and fire, and shape earth and air.”

“Uh, huh,” said Seejay. I wished he did not have the rifle on his back; the stock hung low enough to interfere with my view of his butt. It was an overly long thing anyway, almost taller than me when he was loading it earlier. If the pistols were revolvers, why wasn’t the rifle a repeater of some kind, too? But it wasn’t. Daniel Boone would not have looked out of place carrying the thing, except it had a cap instead of a flintlock.

“On the next floor up is the corridor of body control spells. I can do a quick, minor heal and a slower major heal. Also, I can paralyze someone temporarily as an attack or just numb a limb so it can’t be used.”

“Wow,” said Trike.

“But I have to touch someone to do those,” said Hote. “I’ve also got spells to blind or deafen someone or undo those things. And a resist disease. Also, a purge spell to rid a body of foreign objects, like bullets left in wounds or contamination or whatever.”

“Sounds like you’re almost a mobile ER all by yourself,” said Seejay.

Hote was quiet for a bit while Seejay investigated a side corridor that seemed to go the direction we wanted but deadended after two doors.

“Next to the body control spells is a hallway for necromantic spells,” said Hote when Seejay returned.

That left all of us quiet for a bit. “I can seal a corpse so it can’t be raised as a zombie, or I can raise a zombie myself. Or dismiss one of mine or repel one of someone else’s. Or some other kind of undead but it works best on zombies.”

“Hmm,” said Seejay.

After a bit, he went on. “Remember that city in the game ruled by vampires?”

“Red Tower,” said Hote. “But Countess von Blut wasn’t a vampire, she was a necromancer. One of the barons was a vampire and she had him on a short chain.”

“Countess Ermalina von Rotebad,” said Trike. “That was her real name. When we were in town and I was playing my ranger, I was archery tutor to her kids.”

“Sam Treefall,” commented Seejay with a grin. “So called not because he felled trees but because he fell out of them.”

“Twice,” said Trike. “Only twice.”

“Not that many forests on Mars,” I said. “I think it was a long way between opportunities to fall out of trees.” I giggled and everyone laughed.

“Quiet,” said Seejay and did the cut-off sign with his free hand.

We listened. Trike heard it first, sounds up ahead of us, people talking in voices that were probably too loud for where we were, but soon all of us could make out the murmur that rose and fell with emotions.

Seejay gave us the look and the handsign that communicated that we should stay back while he moved up and reconnoitered. He really ought to send me, I thought, I’m the quietest one of us because I’m barefoot. Well, so was Trike but I didn’t have toenails like a polar bear.

We watched as Seejay approached a doorway. When he paused a few yards away from the opening, we held our breaths. After standing there listening for a bit, he crept a bit closer then suddenly froze.

And just as suddenly, I realized I could understand some of what was being said. “There’s something outside the door,” a rough masculine voice said. It wasn’t English or Spanish or whatever Zandro had been counting in there at the last. It wasn’t any human language I had ever heard before.

“Probably a redface,” meaning what we had just started calling a redmask, most likely, another, lighter voice answered. I knew I could have replied in the new language, too. Heck, I realized I could think in it.

“Animals are your department, farwalker,” said the first voice. Mostly I was still thinking in English, mentally translating as the conversation went along.

Seejay eased even closer to the wall and switched weapons, holding the shotgun under his left arm while drawing a knife from his belt. I should mention that these knives could just as easily be considered short swords. The blades were longer than my hand and forearm with hilts sized for someone like Seejay. And they were all metal; steel apparently, with a single winding of leather around the grip.

I wondered if Seejay could understand what was being said, too. A glance at Hote and Trike made me think that maybe he could. Trike had that, “I know I’m eaesdropping, but isn’t this fun?” look on his big, ferocious face. And Hote had a look of concentration he wouldn’t spend on something he couldn’t understand.

Well, it made sense that a party of adventurers would speak the local language.

I felt something tingle in the end of my tail. It was up near the side of my face and I saw a blue aura crackle around it. I could feel power building there. I pulled my tail down and behind me, using my hands. I didn’t know if whoever came out of the room might also be able to see auras. In my mind’s eye, my tail “fingered” a toy shaped like a miniature lightning bolt, folding and unfolding it, and each time it unfolded, it got bigger.

Inside the room, people argued. “We wouldn’t have so little loot to divide if you hadn’t killed the biggest piece of treasure in this whole vorlakh.” Vorlakh didn’t easily translate to English but I knew the word as meaning one of these enormous deserted buildings found on the edge of the old sea coast deserts.

“How was I to know another copper-bottom was her? She was throwing lightning, so I toasted her. A teensy little fireball shouldn’t have killed her anyway. She must have inhaled just as it hit her.”

I realized that they meant me! Or rather the former inhabitant of this body.

“You ought to know that you should never throw a fireball into the face of someone you might need to capture alive,” growled still another voice. That would do it, inhaling fire was a quick way to die. But I felt fine, not even a cough.

“Fireballs are yards across! You can’t aim to miss the head or face with one of them.”

About that time a figure slipped out of the doorway into the relative dimness of the hall, a figure I wasn’t expecting to see. At first glance, she looked something like me. A tailed-woman with coppery skin wearing no clothes. But this woman had metal wire around wrists, ankles, neck and forehead and other jewelry on her body in places. She carried a sword in her right hand and a pistol in her left and she peered down the hallway.

Trike waved at her.

She opened her mouth to scream or shout and Seejay cold-cocked her, knife hilt to the side of her head.

I grabbed my tail and held it so it would not release its bolt, the aura of which still sizzled around my nether partner. I could keep the lightning hot and ready and at the maximum power I could manage but I couldn’t cast any other spells while I did that.

No matter, I didn’t have to hold onto it long.

While Seejay had knocked the coppery woman out, it took a while for the message to get to her tail. That appendage reached for the doorway and signaled the other members of their party by screeching its one fingernail on the floor.

Seejay dropped the woman and switched back to holding the shotgun in both hands just in time to give both barrels to the first one through the opening. Hote rushed forward, ready to blast the second one.

Trike roared then shouted, “Kreegah! Bundolo, bundolo!”

I had to giggle. “Wrong series of books, Trikey!” I told him.

“Okey-dokey!” he said cheerfully. “These are the shitheads who already killed us once, ain’t they?”

The man Seejay had blasted moaned and tried to pull himself away. Two barrels at point blank range and he was still alive though blood spilled out around him in a widening pool. “Oi’m hit!” he said in what might have been a cockney accent. “Oi’m bloody well done for, mates! I needs a healer!” He added a cough, probably prompted by the gunsmoke.

Hote, our healer, holding his shotgun in one hand like Seejay had done, pulled a knife from his belt and threw it right into the dying man’s throat. “Shut up,” he snarled.

The man gurgled and went silent.

Wow! I remembered that Hote from some of our bloodier games, a bad man to make angry. And Red’s manipulation of his healer instincts yesterday probably still rankled, but it left me feeling on edge and a bit sick to see.

I got distracted quickly. “Gatita! Ven aqui y busca esta puta,” Seejay said in worse Spanish than my own. Kitten, come here and search this whore. Rude and he left out a preposition but understandable to me and maybe not to the bad guys.

I scuttled over, tail up high so it didn’t accidentally zap someone. It seemed to co-operate more with what I wanted it to do while carrying the lightning bolt spell. I searched her quickly, she wasn’t wearing any clothes except a couple of belts, but I gasped. Some of the jewelry she wore looked awfully familiar. Had it belonged to whoever I used to be?

I hadn’t actually seen myself but I had a pretty good idea what I looked like. This woman resembled me: copper skin, pointy ears, naked with a tail but there were definite differences. Her hair was brown instead of black and she didn’t have near as much of it as I did. It wasn’t as curly, either. She was a good bit larger and had some muscle on her bones and calluses on her hands and feet, too.

Why didn’t I have calluses? No time to think about that!

She started to come to, so my tail came down into her face and I showed her the nimbus of energy that danced around the tip. This wasn’t just the magic aura but the sort of static electricity effect made famous in Frankenstein movies. “Lie still like you do for your customers, bitch, or I’ll blow your left eyeball out the back of your head,” I said.

I spoke quite naturally in what I knew must be Red Martian and I spoke it back like a native. I didn’t exactly call her bitch, dogs had a higher reputation than that in her culture but I used an equivalent word. She understood and stopped struggling. Unlike a fireball, a lightning bolt can be used precisely. I wasn’t sure I would, or could, blow her head apart but she didn’t know that.

“How is it you are alive, plaything?” she snarled back in the same language I had used. What she called me wasn’t exactly plaything, it was more like if you called a guy dildo.

I leaned in close, putting a knee and most of my weight on her stomach. “Alive? What if I’m not?” I asked.

"You could just have a taste?” I suggested.

 

The copper-skinned woman I held down with a knee moved suddenly, throwing me off before I could let loose my lightning bolt. Or maybe I chickened out on actually using it, I’m not quite sure.

“Get off me, you trifle,” she grunted, pulling a knife from her belt.

Now, I had noticed the knives she carried, but I hadn’t touched them. I didn’t know why I hadn’t and to be honest, I’m not at all sure what I was searching her for if it wasn’t to remove her weapons. Seejay told me to search her, he didn’t tell me what to do with anything I found.

And there was that jewelry that seemed to be mine. That’s what really interested me. “Oof,” I said as I landed on my ass.

Before the woman could come at me with her knife, Seejay pointed his pistol at her ear from a handsbreadth away. “Drop the knife,” he ordered.

When she had, he spoke to me again in Spanish. “Kitten, what the screw?” He tended to make up his own idioms. “Why didn’t you take her knife when she was sleepy?”

’N-no-uh?” None of the reasons I could think of made sense. I can’t touch weapons unless someone tells me to and you didn’t tell me to? That wasn’t something I wanted to say out loud, even in Spanish and especially not since I couldn’t quite parse how to say it. Fortunately, he hadn’t phrased his question as an order.

The woman smirked at me, and I wondered how much Spanish she knew but she spoke in Martian, “I will not fight because I choose not to, but your little treasure here cannot fight. It is not permitted of bed slaves such as her to touch blades or guns or anything they might hurt their masters with.” Maybe she did understand. She held both hands up to show she was not reaching for any more weapons.

But bed slave? That hurt. “The jewelry she’s wearing,” I said in Spanish, “it’s mine!” I got back up on hands-and-knees and glared at the red woman. She had my stuff, I felt certain of it down to the center of my being.

She didn’t react. I had thought it was important to get that fact out there, but after I said it, I realized it made me sound like a real ditz.

Seejay sighed, his attention being drawn back to the stalled fight around the door. He tapped her skull fairly hard with the barrel of his pistol and told me in English, “Puss, strip her, belt, jewelry, anything else that comes off easily. Put it in a pile behind you and don’t let her touch any weapons.”

He gave her another tap, third time’s the charm, this one on the back of the hand she had put on top of her head. Then he turned back to deal with the fight. “If you give Puss any more problems, Pinkstuff, I’ll have the greenie step on you,” he said in Martian as he turned away.

“I’m the greenie,” Trike mentioned from above us in the same language. He was using his spear to turn over the body of the man who had Hote’s knife in his throat.

Seejay calling the woman Pinkstuff made me giggle. Jeez, maybe I was a ditz. If anything, my skin color was closer to pink than hers. I was more or less the color of a new penny, just not as shiny, while she had the deep ruddy shade of old bronze, probably from a life spent outside adventuring.

While she moaned and rubbed her head and hand with the uninjured one, I took off one of her belts, careful not to touch the two knives she had carried there. A second belt held a small pistol on the other hip. It looked like a peculiar revolver of some kind, and it was the first gun I had seen here that might be sized to my hand. Not that I was going to touch it either.

I took that belt off her, too. I didn’t want the pistol at all, and I treated it the way I might a sleeping rattlesnake. It went with the first belt into the pile I was starting behind me. Both of the belts were suspiciously thick and deserved further exploration, but I didn’t spend time doing that right then.

Her jewelry was what I wanted and wanted desperately, I realized. I had never felt anything similar as when I took the bracelet off her left wrist and admired the green gems twisted up in the gold wire. Lust? Maybe. It kind of felt like it came from the same place. But Seejay had told me to put all of it in a pile, and I did so, though it made me screw up my face in an awful expression that I suspected was a pout.

“Your new owner is a cruel man,” said Pinkstuff in Martian. I tended to agree right at that moment. Not letting me put on my jewelry immediately was cruel and maybe unusual, too.

But owner? The Martian word she used made me pause to squirm a bit. The idea of Seejay owning me had connotations that felt exciting. And the Martian word left no doubt about the exact sexual meaning. Jeez, I thought, I’m turning into a real kink here. How could I like being owned? Well, as long as it was Seejay…. I pulled a bracelet off her other wrist.

“You’re disgusting,” Pinkstuff sneered as if reading my mind.

“Yeah, well, Mom always liked you best,” I said, smothering her accusation and removing an anklet.

“I am not your sister!” she protested.

The guys all chuckled at my dig, and I had to giggle. Okay, I kind of liked giggling but I was doing so much of it I began to suspect I was on the edge of hysteria.

I gestured with the piece in my hand at the two of us, both lying naked on the dungeon floor, tits, hair, ass, and tail everywhere. “We’re not going to be mistaken for brothers,” I said. I gave her a cross-eyed smile at the same time. She already had a low opinion of my smarts, and I decided that letting her continue to underestimate me was a good choice.

Most all of her jewelry was made of gold wire wrapped around green gemstones with some plates and fasteners made of bronze. The few pieces of silver were precisely the ones that did not seem to belong to me. I took another anklet and a leg band that went around her thigh, right up next to where her bush grew. Cute but not as exciting as the gold-wrapped gem on the leg band.

Crossing my eyes had reminded me of something else, I was still maintaining the lightning bolt spell on the end of my tail. While continuing to remove jewelry from Pinkstuff, I waved my tail near Seejay’s line of sight. “What do you want me to do with this?” I asked.

For some reason, Hote and Trike laughed at that, and I giggled in reaction to their laughing. I couldn’t help it.

Seejay looked amused. “Can you actually shoot a lightning bolt at someone?” he asked. “With your tail?” He and Hote were taking turns recharging their shotguns while watching the doorway.

“I can if you tell me to,” I said. “Apparently, I can’t hurt anyone or even touch a weapon unless someone orders me to.” I squirmed again, oddly excited by my own admission of helplessness. I hadn’t even been able to hold Pinkstuff down with a knee in her stomach.

Trike had drawn the dead body out of the firing angle and was searching it for loot, gingerly with an expression of distaste. Someone who has been shot with two sets of double-barrels and then stabbed in the throat is a total mess. He used a pair of swords to turn the body over and cut away the ruined clothing, then spoke up. “This guy has some papers or something in his backpack.”

“Are we going to be able to read them?” Hote asked.

“Not me,” said Trike who like myself, being an avatar from a barbarian race, could not read. “I can just tell that this is writing on the papers and not printing or drawing.”

Tell writing from printing? I wasn’t sure I would be able to do that. All the letters I had seen, the ones on the coins, had just been meaningless squiggles.

“Save it for later,” said Seejay. “Puss, get over here.”

I scrambled over Pinkstuff without even thinking about us being two naked girls until I heard the guys catch their breaths. I crouched beside Seejay, trying not to giggle. Back when I was a guy, I would have liked to have seen that, I knew.

Seejay patted me on the head with his free hand, and I pretended to purr. He laughed, and my purr turned into more giggles. Death and dismemberment all around me and I felt happy. Jeez! But things turned serious quickly.

He whispered to me. “I’m going to take my pistol and lay down some covering fire for you. On my second shot, I want you to peek around the corner of the door and shoot your lightning bolt at the first person you see in there. Tell me if you can do that.”

“I can do that,” I said. As long as he told me to, I could, but I knew that shooting anyone with my lightning bolt couldn’t be done without orders.

“Okay, get ready,” he said. He stood up and edged closer to the doorway. I stayed low on hands-and-knees directly below his gun hand. “Second shot,” he said quietly. “Give them hell.”

He leaned around the door and started firing. Pinkstuff screamed, perhaps trying to distract us. On Seejay’s second shot, I stuck my head and tail around, too, and looked for a target. In the billows of gunsmoke, one bearded guy caught my eye as he brought up a long gun to return Seejay’s fire. I pointed at him with my tail and let him have the bolt I had been saving.

The boom was louder than the shotgun blasts had been, but not as deep. The flash almost blinded me, and Seejay’s hand on my shoulder had to pull me back. He’d forgotten to tell me to do that, and in the excitement of shooting someone, I had frozen in position. Smoke billowed out around us, caustic and choking. It must have been much worse in the room.

“Mother of God,” someone in the room said between hacking up another lung. “They’ve got a wizard.”

“I cain’t see anything but smoke and a purple haze,” said someone else. “Did they get anyone?”

They were shouting without realizing it, deafened by the noise from the bolt.

“Hedrick is down,” said a third voice.

“He daid?” asked the second voice.

“He ain’t got a breastbone,” said the third.

I think I fainted for a moment. I had just killed someone. Seejay stroking my cheek brought me around. In my mind’s eye, I could see my victim just before my lightning bolt hit him. He’d had a powder horn hanging by a cord around his neck! It’s a wonder I hadn’t blown his head off.

“Good shooting,” Seejay said just loud enough for me to hear over the ringing in my ears.

I didn’t gag, but it was a near thing with the smoke in my face and thinking about the probable origin of some of that smoke.

About that time, Hote charged into the room. The men inside were still blinded and deafened and may not have known what was going on until he opened up. He fired his reloaded double barrel, dropped it, drew his revolvers and started shooting. Seejay went in behind him, and Trike with his spear loomed in the back, but neither had to shoot or stab anyone.

The last of the men inside begged for mercy. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! Mother of God, I’m wounded! I surrender!” It was the first voice, the one that thought I was a wizard.

Two more shots from Hote’s pistols silenced him. “Never again,” I heard our healer say between clenched teeth. His voice sounded far away amid the ringing in my own ears, but it sounded very, very sad, too.

Pinkstuff tried to make a break for it just then. She snatched at the pile I had made, trying to pick up the belts with her weapons. That pause was her undoing. I got in her way and tripped her with my tail. She punched me in the jaw as she went down then Trike, turning away from the room, scooped her up in two of his big hands.

“Don’t let him eat me!” she screeched in Martian and repeated it in English.

“Eat you?” Trike looked puzzled. He poked her with a third hand. “You’re not even properly cooked. I’m a barbarian, not a savage.”

“Eat her,” I said, rubbing my jaw.

“Hote! Hote!” Seejay was shouting back in the room. “They’re dead, stop firing!”

“I’m out of bullets,” said Hote, reasonably. Seejay led him out of the room and back into the hallway.

Trike juggled Pinkstuff from one hand to another. “She’s trying to bite me,” he explained.

“Hote, go tie the prisoner up, so she can’t bite our tank,” Seejay ordered. “And don’t shoot her.”

“I’m out of bullets,” Hote repeated. He holstered his revolvers. “The rope is in your backpack, Trike,” he said. “Kneel down where I can reach it.”

“Hee, hee, hee,” said Trike as Pinkstuff got him in the webbing of his lower left thumb. “That tickles.”

I wanted to giggle, but my jaw hurt, so I pouted instead.

Seejay knelt beside me where I still crouched like I had been when I tripped Pinkstuff. “You did good, Puss,” he said. “But from now on, warn me if I give you an order you can’t actually do.”

I trembled some, but it was so nice to have him close. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think about not being able to touch weapons.”

He stroked my cheek again, and I turned my face up to kiss him. Life had turned very weird and scary, and I needed some reassurance. He gave me a peck on the lips and stood up. His kiss tasted of bitter gunsmoke and sour adrenaline.

“It’s okay, Puss. Now stay out of the way while we clean up but keep an eye out both ways in the corridor to warn us if anything is coming.

I sighed. “Can I put on some of this jewelry?” I asked indicating the pile that had gotten kicked around in the scuffle.

“Put it all on, Puss,” he said. “Wear as much jewelry as you want from now on.”

He grinned at me, and I wriggled in anticipation of getting all of the jewelry that had probably once belonged to me back. For some value of “me.”

Hote was very efficiently hogtying Pinkstuff with knees, ankles, wrists, and elbows all behind her, while Trike kept her from biting anyone. She didn’t have as much hair as I did to get in the way. “What the hell do I do with her tail?” Hote asked when he had finished with her other limbs.

“I could bite it off,” Trike offered with a gleam of mischief in his eyes.

Pinkstuff screamed again. “Don’t let him eat me! He’s going to eat me! Greenies raise us to be eaten, they do!”

“We do?” Trike looked astonished. “Damn! Maybe we are savages.”

“You could just have a taste?” I suggested which set Pinkstuff to screaming again.

"Jewelry is sacred to me so I’m taking it all!” I suggested.

 

I put on the bracelets and anklets I had taken off our captive while the drama wound down. It felt so good—and having the gems close to my skin gave me a warm, comfy feeling. I decided the stones must be jade. They had about that color and went so nicely with my pale copper skin.

Seejay was watching everything while picking up discarded weapons. “This rifle is a repeater,” he observed. Then mentioned to Hote. “Pinkstuff’s tail is going to be a problem, she could undo her bonds with it. Puss, how do we tie her up so she can’t use her tail?”

“Can you bring her here?” I said. Mostly, I wanted to get more jewelry off her.

“Don’t give me to your girl-toy,” said Pinkstuff. “She’s cruel and evil! She wants to torture me! She wants the greenie to eat me!”

“I do not!” I protested. “Not really. Seejay, please order me to not mistreat the prisoner,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Seejay gave me the order. “Don’t torture the prisoner unnecessarily but make sure she can’t use her tail to get free. And don’t suggest that Trike bite or taste her anymore.” He grinned and winked at me.

“I need to take all her jewelry off,” I said. The guys laughed at that. I wasn’t sure why, so I giggled. I had to stifle a squeal of anticipation as Trike dumped her right in front of me. The gold, the jade, oh, my precious! I had it bad.

“My tail,” she whimpered, trying to pull herself away from me with her arms and legs tied behind her. “Tails are sacred to my people, if I lost my tail I’d never be able to go home to my tribe.” While she spoke, our tails began circling one another, like two hostile cats.

“Oh, boo hoo,” I said. “Listen to the sound of the smallest flicha on Mars playing a sad song just for you.” A flicha is what came out when I tried to say violin in Red Martian. “Jewelry is sacred to me, so I’m taking it all. I’d never be able to go back to Nordstrom’s without all my gems, so stuff your sob story.”

The guys overheard this and almost busted a gut laughing. So of course, I had to endure a giggle storm, too. I probably sounded like a deranged super-villainess. This confused and terrified our prisoner, and her weeping and babbling finally brought me out of my hilarity.

“You’re all insane,” she wailed. “I’m captured by maniacs! I’m going to die while you all laugh at me!”

Trike got himself under control first and stopped laughing. He did something I had never seen him do before, he went down on two pair of legs, becoming more or less a Martian centaur. This put his height to the top of his head at only a couple feet taller than me instead of more than twice as tall.

“You’re right,” he said to Pinkstuff. “We’re crazy. We think we’re on Mars. How crazy is that?”

Okay. That didn’t actually help her calm down all that much. She lay there on her stomach, tied hand and foot and wept great shuddering sobs in between incoherent babblings about being dismembered and eaten.

Trike sat down in front of her, another thing I’d never seen him do, his back legs sitting like a dog while his front legs sort of knelt. He tried to calm her down with soft words but she was having none of that, and after one particular shriek she suddenly went quiet.

Seejay and Hote finally stopped laughing when they realized that Pinkstuff had passed out from hyperventilating, she was so scared. I actually felt sorry for her. Her friends and comrades all lay dead around us, and we were laughing at her. Jeez. I would have been a basket case.

She might have stolen my jewelry but I was dead at the time and…. You know what, that is still really complicated to even think about.

* * *

We cut her legs loose but left hobbles around her knees and ankles. Then I threaded her tail up through the bindings on her wrists and elbows, Bending her tail into a loop, I fastened that last finger-like few inches to the overlap using the silver wire from one of the pieces of jewelry I didn’t intend to claim.

That way, she couldn’t immediately pull her tail out of the other bindings or use her finger to loosen them. She could probably get the silver wire off eventually and be dangerous, but we could watch her for that. Besides, the silver wire stuff was hers.

In fact, I was going to let her keep all the silver pieces with their little black jewels. They really clashed with the gold and green motif of the jewelry I thought of as mine. One of the other things that had changed about me in this world, I seemed to have developed—or came equipped with in this body—a fashion sense. Who knew?

She came to while I was doing this and glared at me, panting and with the whites of her eyes showing. We really should have put a paper bag over her head for the hyperventilation, but she probably would have taken that the wrong way. Besides, we didn’t have any paper bags. I didn’t mention this thought to the guys for fear of setting off laughter again, but I giggled to myself about it.

After recovering from their conniptions, Seejay and Hote took over sorting and cataloging our loot while Trike served as lookout. I really didn’t participate in either of those activities. I’d been told to stay out of the way, so I didn’t go into the room where Hote and Seejay were working, and with his full height and nearly 360° vision, Trike didn’t really need my help keeping watch.

One thing I did to maybe encourage our captive to think we would let her live was to ask her name. “What is your name and what did the humans call you, if those things are different?” I asked her while working on tying her tail in a knot.

“Djelora Panep is my tribe name, but the humans called me Dolores,” she said.

The Martian word for human actually meant “de-tailed,” a dishonorable fate for a Martian, perhaps, but it made me think of getting my car washed at the dealership.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m Yonee, but Seejay, that’s the big human, calls me Puss. And I think we’re going to call you Dolly. Or at least I am. It’s friendlier.”

She snorted but didn’t protest and did seem to be calmer after getting a name. “My shoulders hurt,” she complained. I ignored that.

Dolly and I stayed by the wall just outside of the room while I took jewelry off her and put it on me. Bracelets, armlets, anklets, rings on fingers and toes, that thigh band and a similar armband. Necklaces, I took three and left her two silver ones. One of the gold ones I took was long enough to go around my neck twice and still hang down almost to my navel.

I felt like a kid at Christmas, and that would weird me out if I thought about it too much. Getting excited about jewelry? Was I becoming that girly?

Apparently. Like, it was hard to suppress my glee when I discovered more items in the pouches hidden in her belt. Three of them resembled the thigh-band and armband I had already taken off her, gold network with large green stones I suspected were more jade. The rest was small stuff that resembled earrings and such.

And some of the gems in the jewelry had stored magic in them. Most of that was just manastore, what were called power stones in one of the games we used to play: energy for doing magic.

But the large gems in the network bands seemed to have something more. An enchantment? Dolly had been wearing the thigh band and the armband. I asked her, “Why weren’t you wearing these other net bands? And where do they go?”

“They were too small for me,” she said. “The smallest is a neckband and the largest is a belt. The middle one went around your forehead.” She gasped as she realized that she had admitted to looting my body previously.

I glared at her but my chin had stopped hurting, and I really felt in a good mood about getting my stuff back. Even though the me I was now had never seen any of it before. Still too complicated to think about that.

I tried on the thigh band. It seemed hard to believe with her height and muscles, but apparently, my thighs were bigger than hers. It barely fit, and I sort of had to stretch the net to close the clasp. But once it was on, I felt taller and more graceful.

I couldn’t figure out what the enchantment might be, as a gamer I thought perhaps an agility boost? I liked it, whatever it was.

She had worn the armband just above the elbow where her arm was most slender. I tried to put it on there on my arm, but I was just too skinny to get it to stay. I had to wear it up higher, right over my bicep, if that’s what the meaty part of your upper arm is called. Again, like the thigh band, I had to stretch it a bit to make it fit there and once closed I felt an enchantment on the armband. Were my fingers longer and more tapered? A dexterity bonus? Whatever, the effect was delightful and worth more giggles.

“Will you not laugh at me like that?” Dolly pleaded. “You sound so bloodthirsty. It sends chills down my spine.”

I suppressed more giggles at the thought of sounding bloodthirsty. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m just enjoying myself.”

She snorted and did not look convinced. “The ropes on my wrists are too tight,” she whined.

“Tough,” I said. “You sign up to be a looter, you get caught, you pay the penalty.” I had no sympathy to spare for her, the jewelry was occupying all my thought.

I considered the other bands but I was in a quandary.

Dolly had lots of piercings, and I had no holes to match any of them, even though some of the items seemed to be the gold-and-jade motif I considered to be mine. Had I accidentally healed up my own piercings? I took a closer look at some of her piercings, but when I touched the ones I suspected of being my own, like her earrings, they simply fell off in my hand. And they left no hole behind.

“Must be magic,” I said. There didn’t seem to be any way to open the clasp either, each of the earrings had been held in place by a complete circle of gold. Not the recommended way to do that.

I held one of the earrings up to my earlobe and felt it melt right through the flesh. When I let go, it dangled there, a pleasant-feeling weight. I put the other one up to the other ear, and it slid into place, too. “Wow,” I said. I couldn’t detect that either of them did anything to my hearing and when I tugged on them, they stayed in place. No pain, either.

“You see why you were so valuable as a prize?” said Dolly with a sour note. “You were not only beautiful yourself, you were richly decorated.”

“Hmm,” I said. There were several more piercing hoops, some that Dolly had been wearing and some that she hadn’t. Did I want piercings in my lip, navel, nose, or eyebrow? And what about my nipples? And… down there?

I picked up one of the pieces that had been hidden in a belt pouch, a curved gold stud with a jade bead at each end. “Where did this one go?” I asked.

“You don’t remember much from before…” she paused to swallow. “…from before your death?”

I shook my head. “Not really.” Which was true.

“You wore that one sideways through the end of your tongue,” she said.

I blinked. I already had piercings in my tongue, tiny power beads in three rows further back, I wasn’t aware of them mostly. “Wouldn’t that interfere with talking?”

She nodded. “I’m sure the men thought it gave you an adorable lisp. My arms are hurting,” she added.

A cute lisp? I decided not to use the rest of the piercings just then and scooped them into one of the belt pouches. “Live a little longer,” I said. “Let them hurt. How is it you came to kill such a valuable property as me?”

She squirmed. “It was an accident.”

“Uh, huh?”

“Your guards were in a fight with a group of greenies, we came in from the side to help drive them off. When the fight was over and the surviving greenies had left…” she glanced toward Trike. “Well, you and your guards were all dead and about half of our party, too.”

She winced suddenly, a stray pain caused from struggling against her bindings. “Your pet greenie there was one of the attackers, I’m pretty sure. And your two guards were part of our party. Our leader, Rollo Garland and our healer, Stief Hale. But they don’t recognize me!” She started blubbering again.

I winced. That would be tough. Old friends back from the dead who don’t know you and tie you up, all while you are sure you are destined to be a snack for their favorite monster. It was baroque, bizarre, absurd, almost slapstick and I had a terrible struggle not breaking out in giggles again.

“I know the greenie is going to eat me,” she said, not helping in the least.

Such a treasure...

Seejay came over to us and kissed me on the forehead. I beamed at him and stood up so I could snuggle better and get another kiss.

“We’re going to be moving out in very short order, what should we do with the prisoner?” he asked after our mutual snogging.

“I’ve named her Dolly,” I said. “She’s got useful information, including stuff about who our avatars are, or were. I—I think we need to keep her.” For some reason, it felt strange to be offering advice to Seejay, as if I really weren’t allowed to do that.

“I can’t feel my arms and my tail hurts,” Dolly complained. She tried to look helpless and innocent, but her barbarous nature showed through. She made me think of a dog that has been caught knocking over the garbage can.

“What did she know?” Seejay asked in English.

What I wanted to know was whether we could trust her, but I told him her story of a Greenie attack on the original party who I had been part of and how he and Hote were wearing reborn bodies of members of her old party. “Rollo and Stief? Stief not Steve?” he asked me.

Dolly’s ears had pricked up. “Rollo?” she said. “You act like you don’t know me and I saw you dead with your jaw gone.” She shuddered. “I don’t know what is going on?”

“How much English do you understand?” I demanded.

“A few grains,” she said in English which is how you would express that thought in Red Martian.

“I suspected as much,” said Seejay in English.

He squatted down beside her. “We don’t remember you,” he said flatly in Martian. “But we need some help getting out of here, and the rest of your party is dead. Are you willing to join us and follow my orders?”

“Yes, Rollo, of course,” she said in Martian.

He stared at her. “Call me Seejay,” he said. “We can’t trust you yet, but unless we just cut your throat, I guess you’re going to go with us.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” she whimpered. “The lizards come at dusk and dawn. There are greenies here and a group of bandits looking for the reward….” She glanced at me.

“Tell us,” he said. “Hote, come listen to this. Trike, can you hear?”

“Ah can hear her fine,” said Trike. “If Ah get close she gets hysterical.”

“Okay, keep watch. We’ll hear her story, and then we’re ready to leave.”

Hote knelt on her other side. “There was a lot of loot in there,” he said, motioning toward the room where Dolly and her crew had been holed up.

“This is Dolly, Hote,” said Seejay. “She thinks you’re someone named Stief.”

“Not Steve? I don’t think I look like a Steve—or a Stief,” said Hote, smiling.

“Steve, Stever, Stief, Steverama, Steverino, Steverissimo,” said Trike chuckling.

“You couldn’t live with a greenie spear through your chest,” Dolly said. “You had to be dead. Ow,” she added. “My arms hurt, my tail hurts.”

My own tail cramped up in sympathy then crept into my hands for a reassuring squeeze.

Seejay stared at her and Hote gave her a look just as hard. “So what’s this story?” he asked.

Dolly glanced at all of us, flinching a little when she looked at Trike. “I want to be untied first—before I talk. I think you will kill me when you’ve heard it all.”

“That bad, huh?” said Trike.

Seejay grunted. “You want us to trust you, so you’ll have to trust us. We’ll untie you when we’re ready to, after we’ve heard the story.”

Dolly burst into weeping and whimpering again, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at her tears. The laughter felt cruel, and the tears felt like yielding to manipulation. The noises I made in trying to control my reaction were pretty funny themselves—if I could have objectively listened to them.

I noticed that both of our guys had new guns and Seejay had a new shirt with pockets. Hote had a hat and a good set of boots, too. “I wanna hat,” I heard Trike murmur. He’d been the only one of us that habitually wore headgear, preferably an Angels baseball cap, but where on Mars would we find a hat to fit his huge head now?

And the mental image of that ferocious green face under an Angels cap set me off into gurgles and yawps again. The others glanced at me, but all I could do was shrug until I got control of the laughter. After a minute, I managed to say, “I’m okay.”

“Keep calm, no hysterics,” Seejay told me, and I nodded.

As Dolly wound her whimpers down, squirming a bit, Seejay said, “You’ve got a few minutes,” in English. I didn’t think there was a way to express such a small division of time as a minute in Red Martian, but she seemed to understand.

She sighed and stopped crying. “If you decide not to take me along, just kill me,” she said. “Don’t leave me alone to be eaten by greenies or lizards or raped by bandits.”

Hote and Seejay both nodded, and I turned my face away.

She told her story simply, and in Red Martian since we all understood that and it was easier for her to find words.

Rollo and Stief had put together a group to go looking for a lost caravan carrying a treasure from Basil Ares, ruler of Aresopolis, to Captain Clemens, chief of Sky Haven. She didn’t stop to describe more about where or what those people or places were, assuming perhaps that we would know. Aresopolis was what she actually said, but Sky Harbor was what came out in English in my head.

The treasure they went seeking included such things as fine machinery, sapphires, expensive wines and a magical bed-slave who knew both the science and magic of pleasure. And she looked at me.

Yikes. I stayed calm. Still, the fur on my tail fluffed out like a frightened cat.

Dolly was one of the guides hired by Rollo to lead the expedition across the desert to the area where the caravan had apparently disappeared, near the ruins of Uth Praebek, she gestured at the walls around us, located on the shore of the Forgotten Sea. Again, Uth Praebek was her words for the ruins, and Forgotten Sea was my English translation of the Red Martian name for the area. Sea? I wondered, but didn’t interrupt her narrative to ask.

After a brief run-in with a group of cowardly bandits lead by a man named Eksander (Zandro?) Dolly’s group had followed the sounds of battle and come out behind a group of greenies attacking what looked as if it might be the remnants of the caravan guards. And here she paused for a moment to glare at Trike. Our pet giant quirked an eyebrow at her.

She continued her story. The newcomers joined the fight, taking the greenies by surprise and eventually driving them off with heavy losses. All of the caravan party were dead plus the leaders and more than half of the rescue expedition. Dolly told this flatly, compared to her earlier histrionics when she thought she might be killed or eaten.

While dealing with dead bodies and treasure, her party had split in two, squabbling over the treasure. The smaller group had been driven off and not heard from again, and they had gotten away with very little.

Seejay and Hote traded glances at this point, and I remembered the group that had jumped them while they were out scouting and had provided the first weapons and clothes for our team. There had been at least one survivor from the ambushers who had escaped and was presumably still out there.

For a deserted ruin, Uth Praebek seemed a trifle crowded, what with lizards, caravaners, greenie raiders, bandits and who knows what else. Uth it occurred to me was half of a Green Martian word meaning something like “lost,” or even better, if less grammatically, “losted.” A place that had been deliberately lost and its exact location forgotten on purpose. Abandoned, we might say in English. Praebek was just a name as far as I knew, I had no clue to any other meaning it might have.

At this point, Seejay stood up. “Enough for now,” he said. “We have to start moving. Cut her loose, Hote, but don’t give her any weapons. Trike, come with me, we need to talk.”

While Dolly told her tale, I had continued messing with the jewelry I had taken off her. In particular, I had wrapped the gold-and-jade web belt around my waist and tried to get it to fit. I had to suck in my tummy and stretch the net a bit but the sliding clasp finally closed and I felt a surge of magic go through me, centering somewhere inside me.

It felt deliciously sexy, and I watched Seejay walk away with some regret on my part. I licked my lips in anticipation of some future encounter between he and I.

Hote had efficiently removed Dolly’s bonds and left her sitting there, rubbing her arms to get the circulation back, while he moved off to help Seejay load packs onto Trike’s back. The big guy was doing his centaur impression to make this easier but suddenly flinched, almost knocking the other two down.

“What the hell?” asked Hote, staggering back from the wall.

“Don’t get so close to my armpits with those straps,” Trike complained. “I’m still ticklish, and I’ve got twice as many ribs!”

I giggled a bit at this. Trike was fierce-looking; it was funny to think of his weakness being his ticklishness. My tail joined in expressing amusement, pointing at Trike and wriggling like a fish.

Dolly watched me, half-smiling. “You are braver than I to wear so much of that enchanted jewelry. When I discovered that I could not take the items I put on off, I stopped putting more on.”

I shook my head. “I had no trouble taking them off you?” I said, making it a question.

She nodded. “Only you, apparently. No one else could remove them from me. I guess because they belonged to you before… before you died.” She looked a bit uneasy. “How is it that you are alive? And Stief and Rollo?”

I shrugged. “Magic I suppose. But none of us remember being these people you name.” Maybe I shouldn’t tell her anything else without talking it over with Seejay. Instead, I asked a different question. “Did they have a name they called me?”

She nodded. “They called you ‘Yonee,’ just as Rollo does when he is not calling you that other name. Also, one of them called you something else, but he did not speak English, and I had never heard the word before.”

Yonee? The very name Hote had come up with, seemingly at random. A name that turned out to be a word in an ancient language. I felt a tingle go all the way down my spine to the tip of my tail.

She stood. “Yonee is the usual name for a woman who has been sold as a bedslave,” she said. “It’s not really a name, more a purpose.” She smiled at me, “Let me help you put the rest of your jewelry on. Once you’re wearing it, no one can take it away from you.”

“Okay,” I said, not really sure if I should but wanting so very much to do so. I discovered that while futzing around with our captured jewelry, I had already put on several more items, mostly toe and finger rings and two that seemed made to fit my tail.

“Stick out your tongue,” Dolly said, and I did so. She quickly put the double-ended tongue stud through the tip of my tongue, sideways. It didn’t hurt at all, seeming to slip through the flesh. That felt so strange. I could feel that it curved a bit, so the two jeweled ends pointed almost forward on either side of the tip of my tongue. I wondered if it would be any trouble while talking.

“Every time you say something, the men will see the jewels in your tongue. It will drive Rollo mad with desire to have you,” said Dolly.

I shivered deliciously, liking that idea despite myself.

Dolly continued working. Hoops several inches across went through my nipples, again seemingly passing through my flesh without pain. Other jewelry went through my eyebrows, the tops and tips of my long pointy ears, my lips, nose and cheeks and several in even more intimate places. I could feel them down there, several big solid rings and a slender one with a moveable jewel in my most sensitive part.

I felt dazed from the impact of multiple magics and any movement at all sent sensation from my center directly into my brain. I swayed with desire to have Seejay come and make love to me right then, and I almost cried out.

But Dolly said, “Shh. Be quiet until we are finished, then you can go to him. His lust will fill you and you will….” She trailed off, looking at me with a peculiar expression. “You’re purpose will be complete,” she finished.

Two pieces were left. The net collar, next to last, went on easily without any of the tightening and straining to fit of the other net jewelry. A delicious feeling of warmth spread down from my neck to my nipples with their new adornments. It felt as if my breasts were filled with warmth and longing.

Last of all, Dolly held up the headband and placed it on my forehead. The clasp would be in back, buried in the curly mass of my black hair. I anticipated her closing of the catch with a quiet giggle but was unprepared for the feeling of illumination that the last piece of my lost jewelry brought.

I felt as if a strong light shone through me, making me glow in coruscating waves of red, white, green, blue and every other color too. I didn’t think I was really glowing, but I did feel as if I could.

My tail reached up and booped me on the nose, and I did some more giggling.

Then a voice I had never heard before but somehow recognized spoke to me without making a sound.

“There you are, Yonee,” it said. “It’s been a bit of trouble finding you. Now don’t move until I figure out where you are and can send someone to collect you. That’s a good girl.”

At the same time, Dolly screamed, and Seejay and Hote opened fire on a horde of attacking Green Martians.

---

Image modified from one uploaded to social media by the photographer, Pat Loika.

If I should die before I wake...

They came from the same direction we had come from, more of the huge green things than I could count. Gunshots banged out from our side, but they had firearms, too, monstrous pistols like the one we had found for Trike.

I was facing the wrong way to see how our guys were doing and I could not move. The voice in my head had told me not to, and I had to obey!

“Who are you?” I tried to ask mentally, since I could not even move my mouth to ask out loud.

“Don’t ask questions,” said the voice. “Tell me what is happening there.”

“Greenies attacking,” I said. I didn’t want to give more info than I was getting so I kept my answers short.

Above me, I could see Trike firing back at the attackers, using his own big greenie weapon. He had an expression that seemed a mix of fierce anger and worried concentration. Back in our world, Trike had been the gentlest of men.

In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Hote banging away with his revolvers, and I could hear the heavier boom of Seejay’s repeater rifle. They were probably holding the big scatterguns in reserve until the enemy got closer.

The only cover in the hallway were the doorways of rooms and Trike retreated toward one. I lay flat on the floor of the hall and Dolly beside me while leaden horror flew overhead.

“Are you dead?” Dolly asked but I couldn’t answer. “The evil cunt has fainted,” she snarled.

Hey! I tried to protest, but I couldn’t even grunt.

“Are you in danger?” the voice in my head asked.

I didn’t answer him either; he hadn’t phrased it as a command.

“Tell me if you are in danger of being captured by the green Martians,” he ordered.

“Yes,” I said. From the noise, the giant greenies outnumbered us, maybe by a lot.

“Stop breathing,” he said.

“I’ll die!” I mentally protested.

“You’re just going to play dead to fool them. You’ve done it before.” The voice explained. “Now stop your heart.”

The noise I never notice, the sound of my own heart beating faded away. My vision faded with it. Was I dead or only playing at it? My hearing faded too, gunshots sounding like muffled hand claps.

Something touched my face, and a voice in Dolly’s tones murmured, “She is dead, dead, dead… dead.”

Exceedingly dead, I thought. She probably hadn’t kept repeating it; it just echoed in the emptiness of my mind because I felt even thought beginning to slip away. If I stopped thinking, would I cease to be?

Had the voice given me another order? I couldn’t tell. Gluey darkness swallowed my conscious self, and even dreams don’t exist when you’re dead.

* * *

I spent some time in a place where the existence of thought and memory were only hypothetical. It wasn’t a dream; dreams have more substance and less reality.

After a time in that void, I wandered through empty halls that resembled the Martian ruins where I had already died twice. The ceilings vaulted above me, built for giants who were dead many times over. Doorways opened into darkness, thick as the drapes at the back of a theatrical stage, silent as buried coffins.

I had no sense of owning hands, feet, a body, not even eyes. I was just a two-dimensional point of view drifting through metaphorical corridors. Memory had a short circuit, I didn’t know how I had come to be in that place, and I didn’t even wonder about it. But when I heard what sounded like voices, I increased my imaginary speed and hurried my immaterial soul toward the sound.

* * *

I remembered being very small when the war started. “That man” got elected, and when he moved into the White House, riots happened all across the country. I heard only vague noises about this, and being a child, I didn’t understand much of what I heard.

My nanny, Aunt Elna, quickly moved me away from any adult discussion of such troubles and I played and laughed with my brothers and the other children of the farm without worry or anxiety like any other little girl.

My brothers were the chief troublemakers in my life at any rate. Rafe and Jamie were the closest to my age, and they were hellions. They frequently told me how ugly I was with my red hair, freckles, and mud-color eyes but Aunt Elna assured me that they were lying and that I was much prettier than any boy.

The war went on, and when fighting seemed likely to come close to our farm west of Hagerstown, Maryland, we children were sent south along with most of the family slaves, to the plantation of my mother’s aunt and uncle, Tobias and Genevieve Carter in Virginia.

My name was Joanne Evelyn Elizabeth Maugh, commonly called Joanie. My family was descended from Scottish earls and distantly related to the Stewarts who had been kings of England and Scotland before being displaced by German George. In Maryland, we had been Catholics, but now in Virginia, we became Episcopal, something that caused much anguish to my mother who did not see why we could not import a proper Catholic priest into the area.

Another discussion that nearly caused some fights was how to say Maugh. Father and my elder sister Bellamy held out for a traditional Scottish sound of something like Maowkh while the Virginians insisted it should be said Mo with a long oh sound for a simple ending. Others said Maow or even something like Moff or Maowf. Most of the slaves and farmhands said it as Maw and so did I since I was so often left in the care of Aunt Elna.

I loved that woman. She had light skin for a Negro, the same color as my eyes. I was told, while her eyes and hair were the color of an old penny. She always had a smile for me and often a treat in one of her many pockets. A trifle, like as not, sticky molasses cooked almost hard and wrapped in paper that stuck to it but could be eaten, too, and had a flavor like sour dust that made the candy even sweeter.

Aunt Elna held me close when I was frightened or confused, stroking my hair and murmuring to me. The words didn’t matter, but I heard my name, Joanie, repeated with assurances that all was fine or would be fine. I always believed Aunt Elna because I knew she loved me, too. She smelled of spice and love.

Things were going bad in the war. My father, who I had seldom seen anyway, went back to Maryland and never returned. My mother became more distant despite remaining nearby. Even when she was with me, she spoke to someone else, often someone I could not see. I began to stay away from her because she frightened me.

One day, I woke up feeling terrible. Many of the rest of the people at the farmhouse had already been sick, some for days. I vomited and had diarrhea again and again. After a time, I began to feel better. Aunt Elna nursed me with fruit juice she boiled and added salt to. I recovered, but several others did not.

I never saw my mother, my sister Bellamy, or my Aunt Genevieve again. Aunt Elna had had a daughter of her own, Betty, a little older than myself but I never saw Betty again either. Most of the men who worked the fields had died, too, and others had run off. Everyone seemed sadder.

Except Uncle Tobias became angry all the time. Aunt Elna and I began staying out of the big house. I even slept with her in the building reserved for the house slaves. “Are you my mother now?” I asked her. She wept and held me close. Instead of “Nana,” I started calling her “Mam,” like the black children called their mothers.

Soldiers came. Some of them dressed in gray or green but most in the mismatched clothes everyone else wore, dominated by the tan created by homemade dyes. Uncle Tobias argued with a tall bearded man wearing gray with white and green facings on his coat. Another soldier struck Uncle Tobias to the ground with his rifle butt, and the argument seemed over.

Mammy Elna and I hid in the slave quarters. The men in gray moved into the big house and large guns, as big as any wagon, were brought and dug in behind little hills the men built. Uncle Tobias moved into the stillhouse and even took over doing the brewing and stilling since the old slave who had done that before had died of the fever, it was said. He drank a lot of what he stilled his ownself, too.

I stayed out of sight of the soldiers as much as I could. “Your name is Betty, now,” Mam told me. And she rubbed me all over with some of the homemade dye to make my skin and hair as brown as her own. “If they was to know you was white, they would take you away,” she said. Afterwards, I smelled like vinegar, but I thought it was fun to be as dark as my playmates and now I did not have to hide when the soldiers were about.

Mam and I moved back into the big house, Mam to do cooking and cleaning for the officers. In particular for one called Colonel Neary who would pinch and slap her when she got near him but not as if he were angry. It seemed like some sort of game I did not understand, but I didn’t like it. I tried to kick him in the shins when he slapped her on the thigh hard enough to sound like a gunshot.

“Doan you be hittin' my Mam!” I told him while he held me away from himself with a hand on top of my head. He laughed and joked with Mam and she laughed too but it sounded worried. That night and after, Mam slept in Colonel Neary’s bed and I slept on a pallet in the same room. I covered my ears when they made noises long after midnight.

Mam had to use the dye on my skin about once a week. It tended to wear off. I thought it was nice to be such an even brown color all over. You could hardly tell that I had freckles.

Uncle Tobias when he had been drinking called me over to him and asked my name. The smell of sourmash and woodsmoke clung to him like a coat.

“Betty,” I said.

“Is Mammy Elna your mam?” he asked. His breath had the sharper smell of whiskey, and he sounded puzzled.

I said yes, but he said I must say, “Yassuh.”

“Don’t you be trying to talk like a white child, Betty. Something terrible might happen to you,” he warned.

I promised I would not, and from then on, I tried to sound like all the other black and brown children, which wasn’t too hard.

But something terrible did happen. Colonel Neary decided that he wanted all the slaves on the plantation to be branded to prevent any more runaways. All would be marked on the back of the left shoulder to show that we belonged to the Virginia Artillery and could be brought back for a reward. Uncle Tobias objected that we belonged to him, so Colonel Neary arranged to buy us for the Army.

One of the Sergeants made two brands shaped like the battalion’s mark. Two other men heated the irons in a fire near the well. They made us all line up, all of the people with dark skin, including me. Mostly old men, women and children, most young blacks having already run off or been taken by the Army for labor elsewhere. Uncle Tobias watched with a bottle in his hand, taking a drink whenever anyone screamed.

It was a bad thing because it hurt like the very devil, but it was soon over, and Mam doctored it so that it hardly hurt at all. In a few weeks, it made a scar that I could feel as a lump under my fingers. I couldn’t see it back there, but I didn’t have any letters so I would not know what it said anyway. Mam stopped dyeing my skin since the brand proved I was a black child even if with my red hair and pale skin I looked white.

Besides, Colonel Neary had been killed along with several other men when a gun blew up the day after the branding. The new colonel did not want us in the house since he had brought his wife and baby son with him. So Mam and I were living in the slave house again, and that’s when Uncle Tobias became Uncle Toby because he said so. He was oft times more pleasant to be around when he was drinking than when he was not.

Eventually, the war ended, and our side had won, so we did not have to change the way we lived. The Army sold all of us back to Uncle Toby, and they dug up all the guns and left. We could go back to farming, and living civilized Uncle Toby said. He moved Mam and me back into the big house, and he slept with Mam now, and I slept with the other girls in another room.

Life was good. We all had enough to eat, and Mam had a new baby, almost as light-colored as me. Uncle Toby named him Hiram and told me to take care of him because he was my little brother but I did it because I loved Mam and Hiram and Uncle Toby too.

Sometimes Uncle Toby was gone for days. Mam said he had to take care of the farm up in Maryland as well, but he always came back, and we would have ham and apples and real wheaten bread when he did.

Sometimes people who visited the farm would comment on my color, but Mam would show them the mark on my shoulder from when we all belonged to the Army and then, often as not, they would want to buy me. I got scared the first few times this happened but Uncle Toby would not sell for any price, and I came to be proud of my looks and the amount of money offered for me. “She really is my niece,” he would say, “Elna is her mother, but her father was my wife’s brother.”

Mam made me promise I would not tell the other girls how much I was worth to some white men. “Betty,” she said, “it ain’t no virtue of your own they want to buy so don’t go making anyone jealous over foolishness.”

“I won’t, Mam,” I promised. But Uncle Toby seemed tickled to get the other men to bid on me and then tell them no, so it was hard not to feel pleased sometimes.

Hiram and I were sleeping out of doors one summer night. He was big enough to be talking and asking lots of questions, and I was tall enough that I had started wondering why boys my age no longer seemed so awful. He pointed up in the sky and asked, “Betty, why are some stars red?”

I looked and saw a red star, red as the sun at sunset, and I knew its name.

I said it aloud, “Mars.”

* * *

And just like that, I wasn’t dead anymore.

Which came first?

I knew I wasn’t dead anymore because my butt felt cold like I had been sitting on a cement park bench in the winter. My mind felt half-frozen, too.

Not a park bench, I sat on the floor of a cave that had been smoothed out and altered as a living space. I could barely see in the dimness but light filtered in from somewhere above. There were large mounds on the floor all around me, and by large, I mean much larger than me.

The darkness stretched away in all directions getting thicker and thicker. There were no visible walls—hidden in the gloom, I supposed. The light from above seemed to have no source that I could focus, on and I really couldn’t see a ceiling, either.

I had trouble bringing my mind into focus, too. Thinking took a lot of effort and didn’t seem worth it at first. My memory didn’t want to co-operate either. For one thing, just who the heck was I?

The voice from the—headband?— I had worn had ordered me to play dead, going so far as to tell me to stop my heart. Was that a real memory?

With my heart stopped, I was dead, and my spirit went wherever dead people go in this reality. Some empty place full of loneliness. But I had discovered a door or some way out, into another world.

I had spent years in that world where I was a little girl named Joanie and then a slave named Betty. It had seemed so real, much more real than being a tailed, naked and slightly kinky Red Martian woman named Yonee. That had to have been some sort of fantasy.

Because I didn’t have a tail now.

I searched for it, looking behind me in the dark and even feeling of my butt with both hands, just to be sure. No tail. I was naked though, just as I remembered. I had breasts, seemingly not as large as Yonee’s had been, but larger than Betty’s little adolescent bumps at the moment when I left her life. It confused the heck out of me.

What had happened? Was I Yonee if I didn’t have a tail? Maybe I was still Betty? I pulled my hair in front of my face to check the color, but there was not enough light for that. It looked black like Yonee’s, but in the darkness, I couldn’t tell for sure.

Was I actually someone named Mojo who lived in a world of smartphones and Google Earth and drones and something called Uber? That seemed even more unlikely because Mojo was supposed to have had a dick and I didn’t. I checked. Nope, soft and smooth and a little furry (which Yonee had not been), and with a warm, damp slit instead of Tom, Dick and Harry.

Nope, I wasn’t a boy, and I had a tough time imagining that I had ever been one. It was ridiculous. Seejay, I remembered him, had said that my little slit and I had the same name, Yonee—that that was what Yonee meant.

But where was I and how was I going to get back sexy Seejay and serious Hote and dear, goofy, gigantic Trike? I remembered them vividly now. I missed them terribly, too.

But I forgot for the moment about the voice that had told me to stop my heart, and I bent all my effort to discovering where I might be.

Stumbling around in the dark, I bumped into the nearest mound and felt the yielding firmness of cold flesh. I peered closer, not really able to see in the darkness, (Yonee could, but not Betty). I groped around, feeling of the thing. I screamed when I realized that I had found a corpse. A huge corpse with too many arms and with tusks in its face. A Green Martian.

Was it Trike my friend who had become a Green Martian in this world? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t be sure, so I screamed and cried and wept until I was sick.

Having been dead myself recently—twice!—I recovered eventually wishing I had some liquid to rinse out my mouth. Yonee with her magic could have conjured up water, but I didn’t seem to have that resource.

I explored some more, avoiding the body I had already discovered. I found I was surrounded by the corpses of Green Martians, too many of them for me to count. I fell on the floor again in panic and horror. I writhed around making whimpering sounds, fighting off invisible ghosts. I found myself calling out for Mam.

But Mam wasn’t real. She came from the death dream I had. Her and Hiram and Uncle Toby and all the rest had existed only in my mind. While I was dead. Hadn’t they?

I didn’t know.

Still, I remembered it as if it were real. It seemed more real than the long-ago life of someone whose friends called him Mojo. I had been Joanie/Betty for years, much longer than I had been Yonee. And if it had all happened just in my mind, isn’t all of life experienced only in the mind?

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the darkness out. Slowly I stopped being so frightened. I tried to do some breathing while I counted, a trick Mojo had learned in another world. A yoga show on early morning television.

Slow count. Breathe in, one, two, three. Hold the breath, one, two, three. Breathe out, one, two, three…. What comes after three? Mojo would have known….

Television, what a concept, as someone must have said. Unreal pictures projected from one mind to another through a common household appliance. Like a toaster or one of those foot massage basins you can buy on Home Shopping Network.

Primetime. Late night. CNN. Saturday morning cartoons. Afternoon game shows. Oprah and Judge Judy. Sunday morning preachers and political pundits.

Do toasters have religion? Political parties? Bachelorette parties?

Sitcoms, news shows, reality tv….

I may have dozed a few minutes, lying there on the cold stone surrounded by corpses. I woke up, and the terror had receded, but horror still lay in piles around me. Some bigger, some smaller, some I knew must have been Green Martian children, mothers, families. I was convinced now that none of them was my friend Trike.

I crept among them like a cockroach creeping past a crowd of cats. I tried not to touch them, to not see them, to not think of them. It all seemed like a frantic dream, one where you keep doing the same insane thing, but you can’t wake up.

Still, I couldn’t help I wondering, what had killed them? I stopped, frozen in panic again. I dropped to the floor.

Had I killed them?

That thought got me up and moving again. I searched around for some clue, anything that might tell me something about where I was and what had happened.

Had the greenies captured me? How had they got to Virginia? No, wait…

That hillside in Virginia had not been the end of Betty’s story because—here I was on Mars and I was still Betty! How had Betty, a white slave from a world where the Confederacy had won the war ended up on Mars? Had she used the same method from in ERB’s books? Literary license?

But there were other memories there, buried, unexperienced by my waking self. I shied away from them, pulling myself back into the underground mausoleum of slaughtered greenies.

I shouldn’t call them greenies, I reflected. They are people. Were people. Chromatically challenged indigenous Martians? How very California of me. I suppressed a snicker of hysteria, still trying to look around and find some sort of evidence of what might have happened.

I did find a sort of canteen full of what I hoped was water. After tasting it, I still wasn’t sure, but I could at least rinse the taste of vomit out of my mouth. I swallowed the nasty stuff, re-corked the gallon-size flask and slung the strap around my neck. Not high fashion but it was the only thing I had found to wear.

There did seem to be a lot of loose stuff on the floor, though. I picked something up and recognized it, an earring. Hadn’t I had a lot of jewelry on? Yonee had…

I couldn’t remember for sure. Where would a slave girl in Virginia get jewelry to wear? Had I stolen it? No, Betty had no jewelry. It was Yonee who had worn gold and gems. Yonee who had placed a tiara on her head. A Princess of Mars?

I checked the top of my head, my ears, wrists, neck, breasts, tongue! Nothing, no jewelry at all.

I searched the floor, lots of loose jewelry and most of it I sort of recognized. Bracelets, anklets, belts, rings.

Then I found the egg. Smooth, hard, cold, it seemed to be made of stone and about the size of a hen’s egg or a little larger. Didn’t the Red Martians in Burroughs’s books lay eggs? Had I ended up in the wrong story? But it wasn’t a real egg. It was made of stone. Even if it was the right size and shape, it was way too heavy. And the Red Martian eggs in those books had been much larger, like ostrich eggs.

As Betty, I was familiar with the size and shape of henfruit, I had spent years collecting the eggs from the farm’s chicken coops, and I had the scars on the back of my hands from being pecked to prove it.

I checked. I did have several tiny round scars on the back of my hands. I could feel them in the dark because I knew where they were. They had shown up as pink when my skin was dyed brown. Betty’s skin.

Something else occurred to me to check for. And yes, the scar just above my left shoulder blade was there too. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the familiar lump of it with my fingertips.

That settled it. I was Betty, or maybe Joanie. And I was on Mars. I didn’t know whether to feel relief or not. I knew who I really was now, but being Betty might not be the best thing….

As a Red Martian, Yonee could survive on Mars much better than a human could and with her magic, better yet. She didn’t even need to eat or drink, somehow.

Wait. Betty had never had magic. Did I?

The egg I still held in my hand tingled. Magic, I thought at it. It almost sang, a vibration I sensed rather than heard or felt. I remembered that feeling, Yonee had felt it at the very center of her being when she had sex or worked magic or got excited.

I had felt it.

This thing was Yonee’s magic, I could feel it even now. It thrummed and hummed and buzzed in my hand. Except it did none of those things physically. I felt its power with my nerves and my mind and the center of my being.

I was Betty, I was Yonee, and there was not a lot of Mojo left, at least, not while I was holding the stone ovoid.

I tried to work magic through the egg. The toybox of Yonee’s spells was right there, but it was like it was in another room behind a glass wall. My mind could not touch the magic, could not work it.

But I had worked magic. Somehow, I had killed all of these greenies. I knew I had done it and I felt sick. But I had been under the command of that voice. I glanced toward the heap of jewels at my feet, somewhere in there was the tiara-like headband that had given him control of me.

Wait.

The headband had given him control of Yonee. I felt of my shoulder again. I was still Betty. If I put the headband on again, would he be able to control me? Or could I just use it to communicate with him?

Did I want to?

I got up and wandered around in the darkness, leaving the jewelry behind, trying to find a way out. There didn’t seem to be one. The cavern was quite large, larger than one of the fields back in Virginia, though the poor light may have fooled me. Several caves opened off of it, and I ventured into a few of them, but they were all deeply shadowed from what little light existed in the main chamber.

I had already found and avoided pits and holes in the floor, some of them so deep that a rock dropped into them made only a tiny, far away noise after several heartbeats. Perhaps one of the side openings was the route out of here, but I didn’t dare explore them without a light source. A pit in one of the side caverns would be deadly to an explorer who could not even see the floor.

I couldn’t risk that.

I found the pile of jewelry amid the corpses again, guided back to it by the sense I had of the green egg. The smoothness and seductiveness of the little ovoid called to me and gave me the sense that we belonged together. It held my magic, Yonee’s magic, Yonee’s very identity, if I could unlock its secret.

Yonee could get out of this place. For one thing, she could see in the dimness much better than I. For another, she had magic and could make light and water and food. I wasn’t hungry yet, but I knew I would be, sooner or later. I was only human, Yonee was something more.

And less.

Wait. Wait, wait, wait!

The stone egg I had found, that I still had in my hand…. It was too dark in the cave to see colors, even with Yonee’s eyes I could not have done it.

Then how did I know the egg was green?

Can reality be projected from one mind to another through a common household appliance?

 
I wore myself out, trying to make a decision. Did I keep exploring, hoping to find an exit? Did I take the risk of putting on the tiara headband where Yonee’s mysterious “owner” might still lurk? And what should I do about the stone egg that seemed to hold Yonee’s magic?

Nervous exhaustion struck suddenly. I barely had time to drag myself near a wall, away from all the corpses, before I passed out. Sleeping on bare rock doesn’t even sound possible, but I seemed to be developing a talent for it.

I kept the egg in one hand, and the tiara lay nearby. Of course, I dreamed.

* * *

Hiram and I had found a swimming pool in a crick behind the doctor’s house. I knew how to swim but Hiram didn’t.

“I’m afeared,” he said. He stood on the bank of the stream and danced from one foot to the other, his chubby little legs pumping with excitement.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go first.” I stripped off my shift and dove in, a flat dive in case it was much shallower than it looked. The water was cold at first, and I felt goosebumps all over, with two particularly large ones on my chest. I ducked my head under and came up laughing.

“Is it safe?” Hiram asked. “Can you teach me to swim?”

“Sure,” I said. “Put your clothes with mine and come on in.” I stood up to show him that it was not that deep near the shore, not more than a few feet.

Soon we were splashing back and forth in the shallow, muddy water. I showed him how to dog paddle and how to float on his back and warned him that he must never go in the water without me or someone my age who could swim with him.

The summer heat made us both drowsy after a while, what with all the violent exercise, and we crawled out of the water and napped in the shade, letting the air dry us.

In a dream within a dream —or was it a dream within a memory?— I heard music coming from the little pond. I dove back in to try to find what was making the strange familiar tune. Under the surface, crawdads, turtles and catfish were having a lively shindig.

A golden carp wearing a straw hat and playing a banjo invited me in. “Dance, Betty,” he said. “Dance and sing, you know the words….”

I did, too, but when I swam to join them, the creatures moved deeper into the water, just out of reach. The music changed, too….

* * *

It wasn’t calypso. It sounded like a Muzak version of “Under the Sea.” Instead of dancing, I trudged down a hallway with green walls and beige doors on each side.

The long corridor made me think of a hospital. People in pastel uniforms with urgent purposes rushed by me. I tried to stay out of the way. The murmurs of speech I heard were mostly incomprehensible. I did not hear anyone paging, “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.” It was too solemn for that, even if almost absurd enough.

Reflective surfaces showed me my red hair and hazel eyes. I was still Betty, but instead of a slave’s light brown shift, I wore a hospital patient smock, off-white with a blue-figured pattern. It opened in the back and a couple of strings made of the same fabric held it closed. Stylish — not.

The dream-place looked and sounded like a typical hospital, and it even smelled right. Disinfectant, fear, and that faint, almost certainly imagined whiff of corrupted flesh. I wandered around for some time, in a timeless sort of way.

I kept looking around, seeking a clue as to why my mind had chosen this dream-place. I didn’t have a clue what to look for, but when I found it, I had to puzzle it out. Betty didn’t know her figures or letters real well, but something was not right.

A room number, out of sequence, 42, with the doors on either side labeled 23 and 25. The name tag slipped into the door marquee clinched it. I stared at it until it made sense.

Gannon, Arthur.

Art Gannon had been our gamemaster years ago, and he had designed and ran the Fantastic Mars campaign before he died. I checked the door tag again. The diagnosis said Congestive Heart Failure. That sounded right too, though I don’t think I had ever heard exactly what had killed Art.

I started to open the door and realized I still had the green egg in my left hand. And yes, in the dream—in the too bright, too blue, hospital light—it was definitely green. Jade perhaps, but maybe not. There seemed to be a lot of black matrix around the too-green colored part. I stopped staring at the egg, opened the door and stepped inside.

Typical hospital room with a standard hospital bed, but the windows behind the bed showed the landscape of Fantastic Mars outside—an aching vista of red rocks, pink sand and a magenta sky. A pinhead of a sun hung low on the horizon and a single moon—I couldn’t tell which one—glistened in the Martian twilight with stars beginning to appear above and behind it.

It looked damn realistic, and I wondered how I could be so sure that it was Mars. So far, I couldn’t recall having seen the surface of the planet.

Artie lay in the bed, tubes sticking out of his left arm and a 2x2” bandage on his neck, held in place by that funky paper tape they use. He scribbled something on papers that lay on the sort of hospital table that sticks across the bed before looking up. His graying blondish hair stuck out all over his head above his receding hairline. His thin lips looked pale, but his watery blue eyes had a lively animation in them.

“Hey, girl,” he said. For a big man, he had small hands, and he waved one limply at me. He wore the same black-framed bifocals he had worn the last time I saw him. “You must be Mojo.” He grinned. “You look like one of his characters.”

“I guess so. I’m not entirely sure. Anymore,” I admitted. I came farther into the room. It had a single bed of the kind with cranks to raise and lower the head and foot. On the wall opposite the bed, a flat screen television hung in a sort of cradle. It was on, an image flickering like a dream-within-a-dream but the sound was muted. From the angle where I stood, I could not see the screen well enough to guess what Artie might have been watching.

He waved around at the room. “Not exactly the afterlife they promised me back in Sunday School, but it’s better than the flaming pits of hell, I guess. Ozone smells better than sulfur dioxide, I suppose.” He grinned at me, again, amusing himself like always.

I stepped closer to the bed. Artie indicated a hospital chair, and I sat in it. I could see the television screen now. It appeared to be some old black-and-white adventure movie. I thought I glimpsed a very young Van Johnson chewing on a piece of scenery. “Ozone?” I asked.

He nodded. “One of the things that make up hospital smell. All the fluorescent lights and their electric ballast transformers make small amounts of O3, ozone. It’s a powerful smell and flavors the whole experience.”

Definitely Art Gannon, full of acute observation and obtuse explanation. I grinned at him. “It’s good to see you again, Artie.” I giggled and then squirmed on the chair when I realized how I sounded.

He smiled fondly at me. “You always played the girl roles to the hilt, Mojo, but maybe you overdid it this time?”

“You should see my other avatar,” I said, smirking.

“I have,” he said gesturing at the television. “We don’t have cable in the Afterworld, that’s a monitor.”

I looked up at it, realizing that the blond man I had taken for Van Johnson was really Seejay, holed up behind a few rocks and firing an antique-looking long gun at some Green Martians. Transfixed with the image, I stared, wondering if it were a live feed. Was Seejay in trouble right now? For some value of now?

“We’re all dead, you know,” Artie said.

“I—” I almost got whiplash looking back at him.

“Heart failure for me, though I didn’t die in a hospital like this one. I just fell over dead when I got up in the night to go get a drink of water.” He nodded vaguely. “You and the rest of the Swampers apparently died in a head-on collision with a wrong way driver.”

“Sonnuffabitch!” I said. The Swampers, Swamp Crew, Gaming Crew, or Dungeon Crew was our sometimes name for our group of gamers. Or just Crew. Not very imaginative but not super-dorky either. Swamp originally came from our devotion to the M.A.S.H. television show. We hadn’t used the name much after Artie died I suddenly realized.

The screen on the wall pulled my eyes back to it. The ugly tusked face of a Green Martian in grayscale glory filled the view. Trike, I realized. He had a worried grin and was firing the oversize pistol Seejay and Hote had found for him. Again I wondered, when was this?

“I have a theory,” said Artie. “I think the whole universe is just a gaming simulator.”

I waved a hand at him and distracted myself by noticing that it was Betty’s hand, slender, freckled and scarred from hard work. “If it’s a simulator, are we players or just code?” I asked. Actually, this was an old argument and Hote, Artie and I could go round and round, taking different sides, until Trike and Seejay were ready to scream with boredom.

“Nevermind,” we both said at the same time.

We smiled tired smiles at each other. The joke was too stale for outright laughter, and the monitor attracted my attention again.

On the screen, two naked Red Martian girls lay in a heap on a stone floor. Dolly and myself? Was this the last fight in the corridor when the voice in my head made me play dead?

Artie picked at the sheet covering him then pointed at my left hand. “You’re wearing the body from your character’s backstory, and you’re carrying her egg.”

I glanced at the green stone. “Betty’s egg or Yonee’s egg?” On screen, Yonee wore all the jewelry in the world and lay limply while Dolly poked and prodded at her then tried to drag her into cover. I didn’t remember this part, I realized. It must have been after I passed out from stopping my heart.

“Both. The same,” he said. “Betty arrived on Mars and used the egg to become a Red Martian.”

“She did? I did?” I looked back and forth between him and the green stone and the monitor. “How do you know this?”

He gestured at the television. “I’ve been watching you.”

I turned back to the video action. A wave of Green Martians poured over Yonee’s limp body, my body, as Dolly leaped out of the way, taking cover with Seejay who stood up with his shotgun blazing. The sound faded in, or maybe Artie turned it up with the remote.

Seejay’s shotgun boomed, Hote’s pistols cracked, and Trike made a noise like a whole wolf pack. Some of the local greenies had firearms, too. Seejay dodged, Trike took a hit in his upper left shoulder, and I distinctly saw a bullet bounce off of Hote. Magic?

Seejay switched weapons, using the double-barrel for two more shots. Green Martian bodies fell left and right. Hote fired two six guns, and Trike waded into the monsters who looked like him with sword, spear and gun—his four hands all occupied with killing and his face a grimace.

But when the tide of grayscale greenies had passed, my body, Yonee, was nowhere to be seen.

“Sonnuffabitch,” I repeated.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hote muttered something over another body.

*

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

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

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

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

“Something like that,” Artie agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not up my ass,” I mused.

“No. But you’re close,” he said.

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

* * *

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

Wasn’t it?

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

It had made so much sense!

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

…and one jade egg.

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

Did I want to be Yonee again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had I killed them somehow?

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

Yonee’s body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously, only one way to find out….

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

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

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

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

Especially not the damn tiara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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