The grove was still and silent, the faint rustle of leaves sounding in complaint of a passing breeze. The sunlight which streamed now through the foliage was that of a new day, and it lighted upon a small, curious, unconscious creature. Its cloven hooves, like those of a celestial hart which, until recently, frequented this very grove, were completely at odds with the ape-like hands on its front limbs. A sparkling white fur, like a pair of very fine pants, spread from the hooves to about the creature’s waist, before halting suddenly before a more hairless skin, which completed the figure there upwards, save for a bit on the arms, the face, and the scalp. This sort of hair was very different. That of the scalp had been unchanged with the merger of the human and the body of the deer he had killed. It was as long and dark as before. It was, however, now accompanied by two stubby deer antlers.

The faun, for that is what he was now, stirred and groaned.

Gone now were the toga and sandals, and even the braided rope sash. But remaining on his arms were the same boxy bracers as before.

He sat up, disturbing some squirrels who had deemed him safe enough to forage next to, but who now reconsidered and made for the relative safety of the trees.

The faun rubbed his face in exhaustion. Then his hind brain tapped him on the shoulder and presented a recap of the latest events. He screamed.

He wasn’t surprised to find the rear half of a deer where his lower half should be. He had done all his “being surprised” when he had lived the merger, and this was in large part the reason he had screamed. The bit of his brain which considered it aloof of panic and which thought itself better than the rest of his brain, noted that his scream sounded more than a little like a bleat. It also found this anachronistic with the fact that he was part deer now, and not part goat.

Getting his breath back after a nice scream, he had to admit it had made him feel better.

“I suppose next item on the agenda,” he said to no one in particular, “is to figure out how this all works. What was it the supervisors said at those meetings? The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time?”

He tugged thoughtfully at his new curly goatee as he said this. Come to think of it, he thought, that was all rather difficult to pronounce. That would probably be the new teeth I felt come in. She really left no part of me untouched, did she? Spiteful bi-

But the thought was cut short as with the sounding of a terrifying cry, he was rushed from behind the trees. A white-clad figure with a flash of bronze – matching the bronze helmet - had rushed him, screaming.

In what could only have been counted in seconds, unless you commonly used really tiny fractions of minutes, there was a human figure standing over him with a line of cold metal pressed to his throat. But the screaming continued.

He realized by stages that he had joined in with the battle cry, and that the continued screaming was him. His attacker, who had been overcome with a stay of execution, was now silent. And perhaps curious? The scream was allowed to fade away.

He was staring into two eyes beyond the face guard of a bronze helmet while he was being pressed to the ground with a forearm.

Sparse moments passed and he was still alive, so he hazarded light conversation.

“Please don’t kill me,” he begged as an icebreaker.

The attacker, brow furrowed and frowning, pushed off him to stand back up. He remained where he lay.

The foliage rustled again, and a man asked, “Athena?” The faun risked a peek. A less armed man had just arrived, wearing both white and blue cloth, girded, but still rather impractical for traveling through the brush.

“It talked,” a woman’s voice said, coming from the helmeted attacker. Now that he was given a moment’s pause, the faun did notice a few hallmarks which telegraphed the aggressor as female. There was a subtle softness of what skin he could see, and, yes, he thought the hips were wider than normal despite the well-trimmed toga she wore.

“Don’t be silly,” the man said.

“I got the drop on it, and it screamed and talked, Apollo,” the woman said more firmly. “None of them have talked yet.”

“I’m sure you were imagining things-“ the unwise man said. He didn’t get a chance to finish saying it, having decided better while in the act of speaking. The sudden elbow in his gut was merely a gentle reminder.

“What are we doing if it can talk?” his attacker asked. This she asked in the way some do where they have already decided and are looking for another to justify that decision.

Deciding that the talking was a sticking point for her, the faun spoke up, saying, “If you’d like my opinion, for what it’s worth, I’d like to not die.” As an after thought, considering Apollo’s rudeness, he added, “Please.”

He was able to get a better look at both of them. He couldn’t see his attacker’s face behind the helmet. She was wearing a toga similar to the one he had been before the whole deer incident, but it was more sufficiently secured with bronze clasps. She, too, wore leather sandals, though hers were equipped with shin guards and did a better job covering her feet.

Apollo, on the other hand, was mostly concealed by his own toga, this one supplied with a purple sash that went over one shoulder. He had a sprig of shiny bronze leaves over one ear, held on either by hair clip or merely secured behind his ear. His toga was rather shoddily girded, freeing up his rather legs for movement through the brush. In his arms he carried some form of tablet or notepad - he analog kind – and his sandals were rather simple.

Both had similar boxy bracers to the faun’s own. Apollo, if that was his name, had a royal blue set which had two gems on the left bracer, but Athena, whose bracers were bronze, had four gems.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“See?” she asked, pointing at the faun. “And he’s got the bracers.”

Clutching his side where the elbow had landed, without putting down the tablet, he walked steadily to the faun, who had decided on his own that it was in his best interests to remain sedentary.

As the man walked closer, the faun noticed for the first time that there were five cards floating just outside of his vision, responding to his curiosity and moving such that he could get a better look. They each had a purple border, and the images themselves, at a glance, were not very pleasant.

He began to worry, considering his last encounter with floating cards had not ended nicely.

Will they think I’m being offensive? He wondered. I’m dead if they do.

Apollo walked through the small cloud of cards, which moved around him to avoid being touched, and he at least pretended not to notice them as he crouched next to the little faun.

“I have selected for this encounter,” he said calmly but sternly, “an attack with highest priority and sufficient damage to incapacitate. Do not try anything, and I will not be forced to use it.”

He has an attack selected? The faun thought, But I don’t see anything floating around his head. Can he really not see my cards? He nodded to let the man know he understood.

“Good,” Apollo said with a crisp smile. “We’re on the road to friendship, then, you and I. And, as budding friends, I would like to know your name.”

The faun thought frantically. Name? Yes, right. People have names. And I have one. But I don’t know these people. I don’t know where I am. And what kind of name is Apollo or Athena? Are they real? Maybe they’re in the same boat as me. I can’t trust this guy as far as I can throw him. Come to think of it, that has grown much harder, of late.

“I need a name,” Apollo said again, looking at the tablet. He didn’t sound rushed, but there was an implication of violence if he took too long to answer.

“I’m…” the faun said, buying some time. It’s probably the dumbest- he thought, but cutting himself off to say, “Pan. Call me Pan.”

Apollo’s face didn’t even twitch. “Well, Pan, my sister and I have had an issue. It would be hard to describe, but we were wondering if you perhaps have come by this same issue.” Pan looked over the man’s shoulder at his attacker. She was standing in a way he would describe as “trying not to seem worried”, her arms crossed as though she trying to palm each of her elbows.

“Your sister?” Pan said skeptically.

Apollo nodded, and Pan stifled a scoff.

“I’d tell you not to get any funny ideas,” he said, regarding Pan’s deer half briefly, “but I think she would probably welcome the challenge. A contentious woman, my sister is.”

Pan clicked his tongue as he nodded slowly, then said, “I’m afraid I’ll need more information on your problem. And,” he hazarded, “some…personal space?”

“Where are my manners?” Apollo asked, a grin forming like a cold-snap. “Of course. Please, help yourself up. Get comfortable.”

Pan, who had been propping himself up on his elbows, tried to sit up and sit cross-legged. The deer legs didn’t cooperate after an attempt, so he just laid them out in front. In the reconfiguration, he had had to move a short white deer tail out of the way.

Apollo had stood up, and his sister came over. They whispered a few lines, and then he said, “Our problem is rather outlandish. You’re not likely to believe us. But we can probably risk it with you.”

You’re a loser, so we think we can trust you not to have friends, Pan translated in his head. “Try me,” he said out loud, and if not Apollo, Athena had visually reacted as though she had recognized the phrase, like a circus ringleader recognizing his chief clown in the adult store they both happened to be patronizing.

“We’re not from…er…this world,” Apollo started slowly. “In fact, we had just started playing a game-“

“You were playing a game and suddenly it became all too real,” Pan finished.

Athena looked relieved, like tension had just run out of her shoulders.

“So you are one of us, then?” Apollo guessed. “I was rather unsure, given the-“ He didn’t finish the sentence, merely gesturing at Pan.

“Yeah,” Pan said, “but I’ve had a hell of a time.”

***

It was later in the day, and the trio had resolved to travel together.

“I’m not the actual Apollo,” Apollo had said. “That was going to be my handle. Likewise for my sister. We were interested in setting up twin characters to adventure together, with different main toons for personal play.”

Pan, unversed in the lingo, had needed the term toon defined.

“A player character,” came the answer, rather surprisingly, from Athena. “Like, Athena would be one toon of mine, and, for example, I’d also have different characters to play. Like a Hunter or a Scholar.”

Apollo knew more about the immediate area than the other two. He claimed there was a town several miles away at the mouth of the valley. “You could get there by following the river. It’s built on the same river. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“The groves around here are decent for levelling,” Athena interjected, “It’s just that there’s a dungeon upstream of the town. Things get dicey around there.”

Pan had wondered if that town was where they were taking him.

“We’re doing some scouting and resource collecting,” Athena replied.

“So we’re not going straight there,” Apollo added.

They’re protecting something, Pan thought. They’re not being outright dishonest, but they evaded my question.

The group traveled with Athena on point and Apollo driving Pan between them, though not impolitely. Apollo seemed concerned with things on his tablet, which Pan saw was a dark slate. He was using a fine chalk stylus to make notes occasionally.

Athena walked with her senses attuned, almost sniffing the air.

“We cleared out most of the area before we came upon you,” Apollo said quietly. “We wanted to do a final sweep before we broke for camp.”

So while they walked unimpeded by encounters, Pan took note of the cards which still hovered in a small cloud in front of him, just out of his vision. They graciously moved into his line of sight at the effort.

Fumble, Trigger Trap, Extinguish, Voodoo, Rose Thorn? he read the titles to himself. I still don’t like the look of these pictures very much.

The Fumble card had an image like a leg – a human leg, from the looks of it – slamming its knee into a bar of some sort. Trigger Trap showed a man in pain as a mechanical bear trap clamped on his hand. Extinguish showed a candle flame against a black background, the flame bookended by two fiendish red eyes. Voodoo was split down the middle by a thin lightning bolt, one half showing a straw effigy being poked with pins and the other half a person in the same orientation as the doll – that being wracked with pain where the pins went into the doll. Rose Thorn had some particularly evil looking black metal brambles surrounding a rose, which was in the act of dripping a single drop of blood.

Why couldn’t it be unicorn hugs and rainbow candy? Pan thought wryly.

Below each of the images on the cards, which dominated the top half of the card, was an embossed plaque. He hadn’t noticed before, but there was what looked like writing there.

When he concentrated on that part of Fumble, the card shifted. The image shrunk and the plaque enlarged. It read: Discard your hand and draw two cards.

He gave the card a rueful look. “Well that’s helpful,” he muttered.

The card fled to the edge of his vision as he almost ran into Athena. She had stopped.

“Let’s camp here,” she said. She held up a hand, a card appearing briefly in front of it before vanishing, a picture of some logs on fire. It was titled “Campfire” appropriately.

There appeared beside her, appropriately, a small but serviceable campfire.

“Sounds great. I’m bushed,” Apollo said, sitting down.

And the light of the fire, as it bathed Pan in its flickering glow, suffused him with a renewed vitality. Perhaps now he could get some sleep. Before he even knew it, he had.

Unbeknownst to the sleeping Pan, a purple card slipped out of his left bracer, its picture and name both a Nightmare, and slunk off. If a card could cackle, this one would have.