I heard a battle cry of “GAAAAHHHH!!” followed by the sounds of clanging metal, and, amid some grunting and brunting, six araknor squeals. Then there was silence, and Mag’s body was lifted from mine.
“You’re good. They’re gone,” a very deep, masculine voice said nonchalantly. I opened my eyes and saw a large knight standing above me. His black steel armor covered every inch of his body and face. In one hand, he held a huge sword, the long blade drenched in dark red araknor’s blood. His other hand was holding onto Mag, who he had slung over his shoulder.
He was clearly one of those people who own every room they enter. He was the kind of man women would crawl through barbed wire to get their hands on. It wouldn’t matter to them that they couldn’t actually get their hands on him on account of all the armor. He was so manly that their brains wouldn’t piece that together until after the barbed wire had already done its damage.
Mag was in rough shape. Not in such rough shape that I would refer to her as a carcass, but she was somewhere in that neighborhood. I was overwhelmed with relief when I saw she was breathing.
“She’ll be fine,” the knight said coolly, his armor making his voice extra deep and boomy. “I gave her a potion. But we should still get to a safe zone.” Fortunately, the knight knew the way to one that was nearby (it was he who had marked them). We were there within minutes.
We didn’t speak along the way, as I was still rattled from the araknor attack. Even if I was in the mood to talk, this knight wasn’t the kind of guy you spoke to unless he spoke to you first.
Which he finally did as we entered the safe zone. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Emerson,” I said. “What’s your name, sir?”
“No, but you can call me Sir if you like,” he said dryly.
I smiled. I liked that someone who looked and sounded so cool could say something so lame, so I decided to roll with it and call him Sir. That worked out well, as I’d come to learn he didn’t know his real name anyway.
Sir plopped Mag onto the ground. He wasn’t gentle about it, either. He just let her unconscious body slide off of his shoulder like she was his gym bag.
“You take any damage from those things back there?” he asked me.
“One of them got me on the back with its spit,” I said, showing him the welts on my back through the hole in my shirt.
“What’s your HP at?”
“My what?”
“How much HP you got? It’s not a hard question.”
“I didn’t even know I had HP,” I said meekly. I was confused. I knew what HP was from the RPGs I played—HP stands for “hit points,” which is another way of saying “health.” However, I didn’t understand how I could possibly have HP. Obviously, this world was more like a video game than I realized.
Mag sat up. “Thank you for saving us,” she said to Sir. If I didn’t know better, I would have had no idea she had just been attacked by six araknor. There were no tears in her flesh, no hint of weakness in her voice. Whatever potion Sir had given her had worked wonders. “But who are you?”
“I don’t know,” Sir replied. “What I do know is that not many people end up in these parts, and I could really use some allies. So, naturally, I came to help when I heard you screaming. You’re lucky I found you when I did, there, uh… What’s your name?”
“Mag.”
“Mag? What the hell kind of butcher-ass name is that? Please tell me it’s short for something.”
“It’s just Mag,” she said defensively.
“There’s no way. No parent would name their daughter Mag. I don’t think they’d even be allowed to. I’m pretty sure that’s a form of abuse.”
“YOU’RE a form of abuse,” Mag said, folding her arms across her chest. “My name is Mag, and I like it.”
“Fine, have it your way. But if you don’t tell me what it’s short for, I’m going to assume it’s short for Magoo. Is that what you want? You want me to think your name’s Magoo? You want to spend all day bumping into gumball machines and apologizing to them and asking when the baby’s due?”
“It’s just Mag.”
“Whatever. I’m calling you Magoo.”
Mag and I exchanged a glance. I don’t like this asshole, our eyes said.
“Anyway, I was impressed with the way you protected Emerson,” Sir said. “It’s supposed to be the guy’s job to protect the girl, not the other way around.” He turned his head toward me as he said this. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was judging me.
“Have you had any luck finding the Mother Araknor’s Lair?” I asked, deflecting the conversation away from my lack of manhood.
Sir said he had never heard of the Mother Araknor or a lair. When we told him that an apple tree had spoken to us and informed us of the Mother Araknor, he became confused. None of the trees had ever spoken to him. Even now, he couldn’t hear them chatter amongst themselves as we sat in the safe zone. And, unfortunately, Sir was just as clueless as we were about how to navigate the forest. He didn’t even have a map.
We told him about the mission the apple tree had presented us with that morning. We also told him about the Mother Araknor’s plan to unleash an army of her children on him and how we hoped to stop her and acquire the Knowledge Bracelet so we could find our way home.
“Did you say Knowledge Bracelet?” he said, suddenly enthralled.
“Yeah. The Knowledge Bracelet,” I said. “Why?”
“The Knowledge Bracelet is one of the three talismans I need to collect.” Sir sat in his thoughts for a moment. “Yes, we must work together to find and defeat the Mother Araknor.”
Mag and I agreed. Although Sir was a jerk, I felt much safer knowing we’d be traveling with someone who could kill araknor so easily.
“How long you guys been here?” Sir asked.
“Since last night,” Mag said.
“Do you have any skills yet?”
“I’m good at kickboxing,” Mag replied. “And math and science.”
“I don’t have any skills,” I said, “though I’ve recently discovered I have a knack for getting rescued, if that counts.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Sir said, making no effort to mask his irritation. “I mean battle skills.”
“Kickboxing,” Mag repeated, thinking maybe Sir hadn’t heard her the first time.
“No!” Sir said. “There is no kickboxing class, you dumb fuck. Did you guys not get classes?” We stared at him blankly, which he correctly took to mean we hadn’t. “Fuck, I had a good feeling about you guys. I was hoping you weren’t as useless as everyone else I’ve met.”
“Who’s everyone else?” Mag asked. “The tree who gave us the mission said people randomly pop up in this forest, but how many others are there?”
“None at the moment. People do show up here occasionally, but they aren’t given a class and, therefore, can’t learn any battle skills. Instead, within a week, they randomly go crazy and attack me for no reason. Then, after failing at that, they attack and kill themselves. It’s weird. It’s like something possesses them and puts them in a murderous rage. Anyway, am I right to assume you guys didn’t get classes when you opened your menus?”
I had no idea what menus he was even talking about. “Do you mean our maps?” I asked doubtfully.
“Is a map a menu?” he snapped. “No. A map is a map. I mean your menus.”
“Well, how do you access this menu?” I asked.
“Holy shit! Do you guys not know anything?” Sir said, letting out an annoyed sigh. “Just think to yourself that you want to see your menu, and it should pop up. It’s not rocket science. And you’d better hope it tells you to activate a class, or else you’re as good as dead.”
Mag went first. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell from the way her eyes darted about that she was observing her menu. A few seconds later, her body shimmered. When it stopped, she was wearing a fashionable black dress, a red hood, and black boots with buckles. She looked like Little Red Riding Hood, but if Little Red Riding Hood was kind of a badass. Also, a wand had appeared in her hand. She had gotten the red mage class.
Sir’s delight knew no bounds, yet he still found a way to be rude about the situation, remarking that Mag might not be “completely useless” after all. He then turned to me. “All right, Emmy, let’s see what you’re made of. And don’t worry—my hopes for you are so low, there’s no way you can disappoint me.”
I opened my menu, hoping to be an archer or something like that with long-range attacks. Or maybe there was a messenger class that could sprint away from battles. Like the map, my menu took up most of my field of vision as a semi-transparent overlay, so I could still see Mag, Sir, and my surroundings as I checked it out.
I didn’t get the messenger class, which was disappointing, as I had already come up with my catchphrase: “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Instead, my menu told me I was a level-1 white mage. It also told me my name was Emerson, but I already knew that.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The white mage class was as good as I could have hoped for, as white mages aren’t known for fighting but for healing their allies. It was the perfect excuse to avoid battling without looking like a coward.
Mag snickered at me. “Nice costume!” she said, but I could tell she was being sarcastic.
I was wearing a white wizard’s robe embroidered with stars and crescent moons of pastel purple, yellow, and pink. I also got a pair of sandals as my footwear. My weapon was a wooden staff so ordinary that it took me twenty minutes to even realize I was holding it.
When I said I was a white mage, Sir was very pleased, perhaps even more so than I was. “Having a healer on the team is going to make all the difference in the world,” he said. “It’s actually a good thing you’re a pussy. A real man would never have been offered the white mage class.”
It sucked because when someone as big as Sir, who wields a sword that is equally as big, calls you a pussy, you can’t do anything about it. You just have to stand there and take it. Like a huge pussy.
Now that I had my class, I could explore my menu. The menu had three tabs: Status, Items, and Skills. The Status submenu was open by default. This showed my basic stats, like my attack power, defense, speed, and so on. It also showed me that I had 74/100 HP and 25/25 MP (MP stands for “magic points” and is what mages use to fuel their spells). I also had 20 EXP (experience points).
My Items submenu displayed five empty slots. This was significantly fewer item slots than any RPG I had ever played, but Sir said you get more slots as you gain experience. He had thirteen.
The Skills submenu was more complicated than the others. This submenu contained a list of the techniques you could learn. The options available to you depended on your class and what level you were. Since I was at level 1, I had only two options. One was called Heal, and the other was called Remedy.
You learned skills by spending EXP, which you gained by winning battles against enemies like the araknor. You didn’t have to deal the killing blow to get EXP; you just had to get at least one move in, and all EXP for a victory were split evenly between the team. The 20 EXP I currently had were for hitting that one araknor on the leg with that rock.
I focused on the Heal option, and a pop-up window with additional information appeared. Restore one party member’s HP by 50. // Cost: 5 MP // Requires 15 EXP to learn.
Then I observed the Remedy option. Cure one ally’s paralysis. // Cost: 7 MP // Requires 50 EXP to learn.
I activated Heal since it was the only spell I could afford. I immediately received another pop-up message: Congratulations! You have reached level 2!
Every time you learned a new skill, you leveled up. You could also level up by upgrading previously learned skills, but upgrading a skill generally took much more EXP than learning a new one. As your level increased, new skills became available to learn.
This level-up system wasn’t at all familiar to me. In the RPGs I had played, you simply leveled up when you got enough EXP, and every few levels, the game told you you’d learned a new skill (which wasn’t of your choosing). In other words, the system in this world required some strategy. This did not bode well for me, as strategies tended to hurt my brain.
Now that I was at level 2, in addition to Heal and Remedy, my list of available skills included a technique called Barrier (Reduce the amount of physical damage an ally takes by 25%; expires after one battle. // Cost: 8 MP // Requires 100 EXP to learn).
Also, Sir informed us that your basic stats slightly increased with each level-up, which is why he could kill araknor so soundly. Furthermore, every time you leveled up, your max HP and MP automatically increased by a few points, though they didn’t get topped up. At level 2, I now had 73/110 HP and 25/27 MP.
Wait. Was that right? I was pretty sure I had 74 HP just a minute ago.
“Hey, what gives? I said. “My HP just went down for no reason.”
Sir explained that the spider venom on my back must have put a burn status on me. My HP would deplete gradually if the burn was left untreated. Fortunately, he had a green potion on him. It tasted exactly like green Kool-Aid, and drinking it healed the burn on my back in an instant, preventing my HP from dropping any further.
It was abundantly clear now that we were in some kind of video game. But that isn’t to say it was just a game, not if it had sucked other people in and made them kill themselves. This place was dangerous, and we needed to get out of here as soon as possible.
However, it was getting dark by now, and Sir said we should stay in this safe zone until morning. It was difficult for him to fight at night, as his accuracy stat went way down in the dark.
“Oh my God, can we build a fire?” Mag asked excitedly. She had learned the only skill available to her at level 1, a spell called Spark, and she was eager to try it out. “Please say we can build a fire. Screw it, we’re building a fire.”
She asked Sir if she could borrow his sword to chop some wood, but he said, “Absolutely not. You might hurt yourself. But I don’t mind doing it. Wood-choppin’s a man’s job anyway.”
Sir went and chopped up a dead tree that wasn’t too far from the safe zone while Mag and I gathered some kindling. Once the fire was built, Mag pointed her wand at it and cried out, “Spark!” She didn’t do this for dramatic effect; the way you used a spell was by saying its name out loud like that. Mag’s Spark wasn’t too impressive—it was pretty much like her wand was a barbecue lighter, but I suppose you couldn’t ask more than that of a level-2 red mage, and it was enough to start the fire.
That night, as we sat around the warm, crackling fire, the sound of crickets filling the air, Mag and I explained to Sir how we had arrived in Desolation Woods. We asked Sir how he had gotten here, but he couldn’t remember.
“Do you remember anything from another world that isn’t this forest?” Mag asked. “Me and Emerson are from a planet called Earth, for example. Did you ever live on Earth?”
“I don’t know. It feels like I’ve spent my whole life in this forest, but my memories only go back so far, so I suppose I could be from anywhere. I remember nothing of my childhood or my early adulthood. Or perhaps I’m in my early adulthood right now. You could tell me I was twenty-five or fifty-five, and I’d believe you either way.”
“Maybe you’re an NPC,” Mag said.
“A what?”
“An NPC. A non-playable character. If this world is a video game, it may have generated you simply to be part of the game, which would explain why you can’t remember your past. Because you don’t have one.”
“Hey, what if Earth is a video game and everyone but me is an NPC?” I asked. “Because when you think about it, there really is no way for me to know for sure that other people are real, is there? Is everything anyone ever says to me predetermined?”
Boy, did those questions ever get Mag going. She loved talking about that kind of stuff.
As we talked, I watched Sir’s shadow from the firelight crawling through the trees behind him. I know there’s probably a logical explanation for it, but I’ve always found it mesmerizing how someone can cast a shadow so much larger than they are. Sir’s looked like it could swallow him whole.
During our conversation, I asked Sir if he knew what happened if you ran out of HP.
“If my HP reaches 0, I go to the Abyss. If your HP reaches 0…” He paused to think. “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe you just die. Fuck, I would do anything for a fate like that. But it’s the Abyss for me.”
“What’s the Abyss?” Mag asked.
“Picture what you think Hell is,” Sir said. “Then multiply that by a billion. The Abyss is like a never-ending root canal for defective souls like mine.”
“And you’re sure that’s where you’ll end up?” Mag asked. “Like, I’m not going to sugar-coat it: you’re a pretty big asshole. But you don’t seem evil.”
“Well, I am. I did something unforgivable.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I can’t remember.”
“Then how do you know you did it?”
“It’s hard to explain... It’s like when you go on vacation, and when you’re halfway there, you know for certain you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t put your finger on it until you’re getting ready for bed and you go, ‘Oh, fuck, my toothbrush!’”
Sir thought hard for a moment. “I know in my heart that I did something unforgivable, but I just can’t remember. I also don’t remember how I know about the Abyss in the first place or how I know the only way to redeem myself is by collecting the three talismans. I also have no clue where the talismans are or even what they’re called. But, somehow, when you mentioned the Knowledge Bracelet, I knew that it was one of them.”
We continued talking for a short while. Or at least Sir and I did. Mag had gone silent. I wondered how Sir could speak English and how he knew of vacations and toothbrushes and Mr. Magoo’s antics if he wasn’t from Earth. Even if he had no memories of living on Earth, he seemed to have knowledge of our world. He said maybe he was from Earth after all, then.
Eventually, the fire died down. We had grown tired and decided to get some sleep. Mag and I picked two mushroom beds right next to one another. Meanwhile, Sir opted to sleep on the ground, as all the mushrooms were pink and purple, and he refused to sleep on something that was “such a gay color.”
As I lay on my mushroom bed, I stared up at the colorful stars, wondering how anything from the last two days was possible.
Mag nudged me out of my contemplative trance. “Hey, you awake?” she whispered.
I turned over to face her. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“Do you trust Sir?” she asked, still whispering so he wouldn’t hear us.
“I think we have to,” I whispered back. “We have a better chance of getting out of here with him than without him.”
“I know. I just... I wonder if the unforgivable thing he did...”
“What?”
“...I think he might be Archie’s murderer. I know that probably sounds crazy, and it’s totally just a hunch, but I still think we should be careful about how much we trust him. That’s all.”
“I agree. I don’t like his vibe.”
“Cool. I just wanted to put that out there.” After a pause, Mag added, “Just so you know, if my hunch turns out to be right, I’m going to fucking kill him for what he did.”
I understood Mag’s desire to avenge her brother’s death, but I foresaw a problem. “But if you kill him and then we die before we make it out of this world, won’t you be sent to the Abyss, too? As much as he’d deserve it, I’d imagine killing him would still count as an unforgivable act.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure I’d go to the Abyss anyway. I’ve already done something unforgivable.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mag took a deep breath. “It’s my fault Archie’s dead.”
“What do you mean? How could it be your fault? You didn’t murder him.”
“No, but it’s still my fault. My moms were away for the weekend, and I was left in charge. On the night he was killed, he had gone for a sleepover at a friend’s house, but he called in the middle of the night. He said he was feeling sick and wanted me to walk him home because he was afraid to walk alone in the dark. He had been terrified of the dark ever since he was little, and he never got over it like most kids do. And even though I knew how afraid he was, I was pissed at him for waking me up, so I told him it was only a five-minute walk and to not be a pussy. And then I hung up on him. I fucking hate that those were the last words I ever said to him.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “There was no way for you to know what would happen.”
“That’s what my counselor keeps telling me. Not to blame myself. But no matter how much time passes, the guilt won’t go away. I just have to live with the fact that I’m a piece of shit. Whether I kill Sir or not, I deserve to go to the Abyss.”
“I don’t agree with that at all. But if that’s how you feel, then we’ll just make sure you don’t die while we’re in this world. I reckon we’ll be back home by tomorrow. If we can beat Battletoads, we can get out of this forest. Right?”
“I guess,” Mag said, dissatisfied. “You should get some sleep. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
I told her okay but that she could wake me up if she needed to talk some more. Then I closed my eyes.
A minute later, Mag whispered to me again. “Hey, Emerson?”
“Yeah?”
“...Can you touch me with your foot?”
I stretched my leg onto her mushroom bed and pressed the sole of my foot against her shin. “Like that?”
“Yeah, thanks,” she said. “I just need to know I’m not alone.”