Murray awoke flat on his back, a too-thin pillow under his head, a scratchy blanket barely covering his body, and the cold kiss of stone against his back.
Overhead, motes of dust danced in the light admitted by single barred window set high in the featureless stone wall. The light was accompanied by the ghost of a breeze and the twittering of birds.
Rolling onto his side, Murray took in the rest of the cell he found himself in. A bucket in the corner stank to high hell of stale piss and the stone floor was strewn with straw woefully insufficient to actually cover the stone, but that was about it. Three stone walls and one barred, through which he could see a row of cells extending off to either side. Each of these cells was empty.
“Hello?” he called out, still unsure of where exactly he was. “Anyone there?”
Nothing.
No distant coughs or rattling of keys; only silence and the occasional snatch of birdsong from outside.
Cautiously, he approached the door to the cell and gave it a tentative nudge. To his surprise and pleasure, it rattled noisily open, its clatter echoing down the empty hall. To the right, the hallway ended at a stone wall, while the left lead to an open door and what looked like an office beyond. Not a modern office with printers, workstations, and too-bright fluroscents, but a workspace of desks, paperwork, and clutter, all the same.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
The office was only slightly larger than the cell in which he’d awoken, but it was blessedly free of the stink of acrid piss. It was also frustratingly free of people.
The office space served as a crossroads of sorts, with doors set in all four walls. Two of these doors were closed, while one stood open, showing a larger room lined with bunks. Each narrow bed in the room had been made with military precision, sheets tucked in, nary a wrinkle in sight, and footlockers sitting at the foot of each.
“What the fuck is goin’ on?” he muttered to himself, immediately recognising the barracks from the model Sam had sent him.
He may not have been an educated man - he’d never bothered going off to university - but Murray was quick enough to put two and two together. Somehow, he had ended up inside the Fairhill barracks.
But where were the proud men and women of the Fairhill militia? Where was Berric O’Dim, the town’s quick-witted captain, or Sharil Dewsister, the elvish cleric who spent much of her time here, tending to wounded militiamen and the criminals they brought to justice?
Recalling the layout of a structure within which his character had spent a fair amount of time, as both a guest and a “guest,” Murray knew which door led where: one to Berric’s office and one out to the village.
He decided to first visit Berric’s office, although he held out no hope that the man in question was going to be there.
Sure enough, he opened the door into an empty office. The mingling scents of tobacco, leather, whisky, and sweat suffused the room, as if Berric had left only a moment ago.
The man’s office was at once cluttered and fastidiously clean, as every unnecessary object had its place. Mixed in among the standard tools of a soldier’s trade were trinkets that spoke to O’Dim’s personality - handmade feather lures for flyfishing, weathered maps of far away places, and…
“No way!”
Murray crossed to the shelf and snatched up the palm-sized wooden statue of a dragon. It was crudely done and lacked detail, but the basics of a dragon were there. He’d have recognised it anywhere, as a near identical twin still sat on the bookshelf in his home. Fudgerod the Flatulent had carved it for O’Dim after the captain had saved him from a pack of wolves during his introduction to the campaign, and he’d modelled it off the real-life model his mother had found at an antique store.
He turned the tiny model over in his hands, running calloused fingers across its polished surface in the same way he did from time to time at home.
He replaced the model with some reverence and turned to leave, but caught sight of his reflection in the polished steel mirror behind the door.
The face that looked back at him was unquestionably his, although it looked like a version of him that enjoyed mewing entirely too much, but the rest was unfamiliar to him. In place of his awkwardly gangly frame and prominent beer belly was a broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, and imposisbly oiled physique right out of 1980s schlock fantasy. His sandy blonde hair, usually cut short for work, had been replaced with a glorious mane of spun gold kept out of his eyes by a bejewelled leather band.
The man looking back at him was not Murray Graves, but Fudgerod the Flatulent in all his glory.
He did the cliched thing, moving his hands and pulling faces to see if the mirror would mimic them but there was no mistaking it - he was Fudgerod.
Now that he really thought about it, he could feel the difference. He just felt healthier, and while all of that extra muscle looked like a lot to carry, the presence of said muscle made it seem as effortless as being the skinny git he was.
Stolen novel; please report.
Chuckling to himself, he made his pecs dance - a skill he did not possess in the real world.
“This is fucking insane,” he marvelled. “Fucking crazy.”
“I don’t know about that,” came a woman’s voice. “It would be cooler if I did it.”
He turned to see a slender brunette woman, tall and willowy, standing in the doorway. Her ears were long and elegant, her eyes sparkled with amusement, and her arms were folded under a modest bust further concealed by a voluminous green robe.
“Sharil!?”
He had never met this woman - not really - but he felt an immediate sense of… was it relief? Warmth?
Whatever it was, it compelled him to cross the space between them in two strides and hoist her into a great bear hug.
She accepted the hug willingly, returning it with a brusque kiss on the cheek.
“It’s good to see you too, Fudgerod. Now, put me down before I box your ears.”
He deposited her gently on the ground, suddenly abashed by the outpouring of affection that had seized him. What would Shelley think of him hugging this lady like that?
“I, uh… Sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Old friends can’t embrace after so many years apart?”
“Years?”
But of course, it had been years. The campaign had fizzled out after first Damien, and then Carl, had left, leaving just Murray and Tanya to defend the good people of Fairhill. While Sam had assured them he could still make the campaign work with two players, it hadn’t felt the same without their fearless fighter and their stoic cleric, and the game had ended. They hadn’t even ended on a cliffhanger, just a wet fart of a combat against a bunch of kobolds in a mine outside town.
“Years,” she confirmed. “We thought you dead when you failed to return from the Emberdeep Mines. What happened?”
She reached out a slender hand to touch his suddenly chiselled jaw, her soft fingers playing across the stubble. He flinched away from her touch, and she withdrew her hand as if stung.
“Sorry, I, uh… I’m married.”
He held up his hand to show a ring that was not there. For a moment, Sharin’s eyes shone with unwept tears but, in typical elvish fashion, she quickly composed herself.
“I see,” she replied. “That would explain your absence, then. A letter, perhaps, would have been appreciated. I thought…”
She trailed off there, evidently uncomfortable with the emotions warring within her.
“I didn’t…”
What do you say to your Hand of Fate character’s girlfriend? Young Murray hadn’t contemplated the possibility that he might someday have to break up with the pretty elf from the illustration, let alone that he’d have to do it because he had married Shelly McGuffin from his woodwork class.
True to her race’s reputation for cold-hearted practicality, Sharin pressed on as if she hadn’t just learned her missing lover had taken a wife and neglected to tell her earlier. She turned towards the empty office, gesturing for Murray to follow.
“Much has happened in your absence,” she began. “Not the least of which has been the coming of Samman to these lands. I know you are not a religious man, but to see a god walk the earth was moving, even for a follower of the Sacred Glade such as myself. My faith did not waver, of course, but my order quickly aligned itself with the Risen God in his crusade against the Dark Sovereign. For a time, our combined efforts seemed sufficient to thwart the Sovereign, but something terrible occurred, and Samman was forced to flee back to his own world - your world, if I am not mistaken.”
“The bees are on the what now?” Murray replied, quoting one of his favourite Simpsons episodes.
“I’m sorry?”
“Uh, it means, “I didn’t understand all that.”
“Oh,” she sniffed. “Well, suffice it to say, things here are not good. When Samman lef, he did something to our world - broke it, I suppose - as a means to either protect us or thwart the Sovereign or both. Regardless, he left things in a bit of a shambles here, and only the arrival of Fred the Fighter seems to have begun to repair things.”
“Damien’s here?”
“I don’t know who that is.” she replied dully. She was not as good at hiding her emotions as she thought. Her coldness stung Murray.
“Fred the Fighter, sorry. Damien is just my nickname for him.”
“I see. Well, he arrived recently, and has succeeded in restoring both the tavern and the blacksmith. I assumed he had recruited you to restore the barracks, but it would seem you were unaware of one another’s actions. I thought you battle brothers, bonded by blood spilled?”
“We were - are,” Murray sputtered. “It’s complicated. We haven’t been close these past few years.”
“He does not approve of your new wife?” Sharil’s words were both cruel and laced with hope. Murray wasn’t sure how to respond, but it did not seem Sharil expected a response. Instead, she went to the door and flung it open.
Murray had expected to see the idyllic rural surrounds of Fairhill outside: kids playing on the green, a mule-drawn wagon making its way to market… that kind of thing.
What he saw was a slender bridge of cobblestone lined with dirt and grass, stretching from the barracks door to the smithy. He could see the Goose & Child, firelight glittering in its windows, was joined to the smithy by another tendril of sanity amidst an otherwise shapeless, lifeless void. Three islands bobbing in a vast sea of hungry dark.
No source of light was visible, yet the paths were lit as if by the noonday sun.
“What the hell happened to this place?” he asked.
Sharin shrugged. “We are unsure. Samman seemed to think breaking the world apart would in some way impede the Dark Sovereign’s plans, but one cannot know a god’s mind. The Sovereign was drawn to your world, as was Samman’s plan, but we cannot know what has occurred since. We thought the presence of you and Fred here might have been part of his grand scheme, but you seem entirely unaware of it.”
Murray was too creeped out by the void surrounding them to take in everything Sharin had said. Something about a god and a BBEG and a plan. Something about Damien having been here too.
His distraction proved fortuitous, however, as his nervous scanning of their surrounds allowed him to see the first of the grey-green monstrosities materialize on the path between the smithy and the tavern. There had been no sign of them previously, yet now no less than a dozen of the brawny, heavily armoured figures moved stealthily towards the tavern door.
“Orcs,” he snarled. “I fuckin’ hate orcs.”
Fudgerod’s instinctual desire to charge into their midst warred with Murray’s very human desire to run as far as possible from creatures wielding vicious axes, yet both were overruled when a sudden, dizzying sensation struck him.
“Fudgerod!” Sharin said, her countenance softening as she moved to hold him up. “What is happening?”
He could not give an answer he did not have, yet he felt an immediate sense of relief when his eyes fell upon something familiar on the path ahead of him.
A booster pack.