I woke with a fistful of dirt in my mouth, spitting it up like a hairball. My fingers dug into the sparse grass of...

Constitution +1

Where was I? I blinked. I blinked again. My vision was slow in coming into focus. Grass, dirt. My mind was slower in coming into focus. My dad had once mentioned finding himself on his front lawn not knowing how he’d gotten there after a wild college party. I didn’t remember going to a party.

“Wake up, ya lazy girl,” thundered into my ears as a pail of cold water turned the meager grass into a gritty mud. It was so cold that it shook the slow right out of my soul. I was now AWAKE.

Beauty -1

I pushed up carefully to my knees, dripping hair hanging in my eyes, my mouth hung open in a gasp for air that had been stunned out of me by the freezing water. If the water dripping from my hair wasn’t clear, I’d have sworn it was a slushie. It was harder than I thought it should be to get my knees under me and when I looked down, I realized why. I was wearing a skirt; a single pocket full of mud. What the hell?

Wooden shoes clopped into sight under my nose as my tormentor dropped the now empty bucket with a splat. I ran my gaze up to find another long skirt much cleaner than my own, but brown as the mud. Higher and there was this stained apron stretched over ample hips that were highlighted by beefy fists that made me look back at the wooden bucket under my nose.

The Renn Faire. I was at the Renn Faire. That would explain everything. Only at the Renn Faire would I have managed to get so stinking drunk that I’d pass out in the mud while wearing a peasant skirt and wake remembering almost nothing. Wooden shoes. I gave a chuckle and plopped back on my ass, mud be damned. It was the Renn Faire. It wasn’t like I was going to be out of place drenched in mud and hung over.

“Don’t just sit there, ya waste of space,” the rotund bucket-bearer growled at me. “I need four buckets of water from the well before I can start tonight’s stew, and you’ve got dishes that still need scrubbing.”

“Did I neglect to pay my tab at the bar?” I grumbled, rearranging the skirt that kept tangling up my legs. I didn’t normally go for the peasant-girl garb at the Faire. I was more of the witch they tried to burn in that era. Where were my pointed shoes and hat? Someone must have convinced me to go subtle. I wracked my brain for a memory. A dare? A bet? My daughter? Yeah, she’d be the only one who could get me to do something this stupid. I didn’t even remember going to the Faire this year. It wasn’t in the curriculum.

Intelligence +1

College. The bane of my existence. The necessary evil to overcome the idiocy of the world and be taken seriously. My whole life had been college, home, study, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. If it wasn’t college related, I didn’t do it. So what was I doing in a mud puddle?

“I swear it’s the last time I’ll be hiring a simpleton,” the woman grumped, stomping those wooden shoes away toward… was that a wooden building?

Now I looked around. I’d been about to protest that I was a pre-med student and hardly a simpleton. I was Phi freaking Kappa Phi, that’s the Dean’s List on crack, top five percent of my whole school! An initiation? Not possible. They didn’t do crap like that anymore. A secret society initiation? That could be exciting. Who was I kidding? This wasn’t a Las Vegas Renn Faire.

Intelligence +1

I was in the back yard of a wood building that belonged in a ghost town between a stable and the kitchen door. The well from which I was supposed to get water was just close enough to scoot my butt a few feet over to rest my back against the wall of it. That was no prop. Straight out of a fairy tale, that well was a round thick wall with a pitched straw roof and an honest to goodness wooden crank that looked like it worked. The well was made of solid stone. The tavern was made of wood and the stable smelled like, well, a stable. There was even a horse in there. There was a small pen surrounded by what looked to be a slapped together bunch of long twigs and in that pen were a half dozen pigs.

Perception +1

I was in hell. Aneurysm? That would explain the blinking dots at the edge of my vision. Something needed to explain them. An aneurysm would do. I must have died quickly.

Not quite sure what to do, I followed directions. College will do that to you. When in doubt, follow the directions of the person who appeared to be in charge, no matter their apparent lack of wit, intelligence or ability to lead or teach. I used the well wall to push myself to my feet and picked up the bucket. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the well mechanism. I might never have pulled a bucket of water up out of a well, but turning the crank to raise the bucket didn’t seem like a challenge.

Dexterity +1

Intelligence +1

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Strength +1

I thought frantically as I rotated the clunky crank, my head on a swivel trying to take in everything at once. There were no wires, no telephone poles, no civilization sounds. I poured the water from the well bucket into the one I held. The bucket was heavy, so I carried it between my legs as I awkwardly waddled toward the door the woman had disappeared into. I could figure this out. I was smart.

Perception +1

Dexterity +1

Strength +1

Once in the kitchen, I dumped the bucket of water into a large pot over a live fire in a hearth that the grumpy woman grunted toward. A hearth. Not a stove. A smoking fire pit that had a chunk of smoldering wood over a bed of ashes that rested right on the rough stone floor. I could think of a dozen fire code violations. How did this place even exist?

I use the term kitchen loosely. It was a bunch of wooden work benches where grumpy was butchering a small animal of some sort. There must have been more than one animal to begin with because there were four drumsticks on the table next to her, but she was peeling a scaly skin off of the largest piece. The work benches were made of rough planks you couldn’t buy at the mega-tool-warehouse in Vegas. Nope. The warehouse that I loved to browse in didn’t have planks that rough in the fencing section.

Perception +1

I stumbled back out the door and down rickety steps that would not have passed muster for a bribed building inspector, my stomach sinking. I was headed back to the well, for my second bucket when I accepted that I wasn’t in Vegas, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Kansas anymore either. My mind raced to find a realistic explanation for my current insanity. That was it. I’d cracked under the pressure. I’d just received my acceptance letter to medical school. This was … I cranked up another bucket of water, my eyes glued to the “pigs” in the pen. They were big. Boars maybe? They had tusks jutting up out of their lower jaws and ears the size of elephant’s ears. Yeah, not boars.

Perception +1

I don’t know what it says about me that I didn’t notice the difference in me at the time. I was on my third bucket by the time I realized that my arms looked… different. And I only noticed that because my mind found that easier to deal with than words floating in my vision. Words scribbled across my eyesight by a scratching quill pen full of skywriting ink like a movie announcing the executive producer during the opening scene.

Strength +1

Perception +1

I ignored the words, just like all movie-goers, mentally checking out with my box of popcorn. They couldn’t actually exist so if I pretended they weren’t there, I’d be okay. My stomach growled at the thought of a big buttery batch of movie popcorn. I self-soothed with the image of Milk Duds. Hell, a box of Hot Tamales were not out of place in this scene and I was stressed, so that gallon of diet soda…but I digress.

Perception -1

You see, I’m a stress eater. I’ll admit it. I used to be chunkier than the grumpy-water-tossing woman. I was in pre-med. That’s a lot of stress eating over midterms and finals and papers that have to be worse than anything the professor can write and completely unoriginal while still not plagiarizing anything. It didn’t matter how unhealthy my weight was, not getting into medical school was worse. It was always a matter of being able to lose weight when I got through that next tough class. But the arms carrying the third bucket of well water into the kitchen weren’t the arms of a stress-eating pre-med student watching a movie. These new arms were skinny, almost scrawny.

Strength +1

I dumped the newest bucket, keeping my head down to hide my bulging eyes. My mind was not coming to any rational conclusions. I was scrawny, with my original long legs of which I could only see the abnormally unswollen ankles, but with a new thin waist that I hadn’t known since high school almost forty years ago. While I realize that most of you reading this will want to know about my boobs, I’m not talking about them. My eyes are up here, and I’ve got a brain. This is where my mind went while it tried very hard to deny the floating words that had faded away. That was okay until they floated right back up there.

Will +1

Strength +1

I nearly dropped the bucket into the well. I mean, “yea!” weight loss, but expletives were the only things my mind was capable of producing. I had dishes to do. I picked up the bucket. Wait, dishes? Really? That was my next move? Because somebody ordered me around? I’d been in college too long. I dropped the bucket in the mud I’d woken up in and took a moment.

Will +1

I decided to acknowledge that blinking set of lights that I’d assumed were an incoming aneurysm. But, seriously, if I was already in hell, an aneurysm seemed unlikely. Then again, everything was rather unlikely. And by unlikely, I meant bat-shit crazy!

Intelligence +1

There were a few of those blinking things. It was like a single 2mm square of pixels on my billion-inch, surround-vision, virtual reality, smell-enabled, impossible television had fritzed out and in and out. They blinked in a flickering pattern.

“Come on, pull yourself together,” I warned myself sternly out loud so that my voice could echo somehow and expose this as a dreamscape of bad cheese before bed. “Pick a color and focus. Nothing is going to happen. It’s just the newest symptom of an oncoming migraine or complete mental breakdown or something else that I’m choosing to assume is relatively innocuous even though that’s totally impossible.” Call me an optimist.

The blue dot looked the least threatening, but the purple dot was my favorite color. I wasn’t ready to be betrayed by my favorite color. It was my favorite. If it betrayed me, what would I have left?

“That is not pulling yourself together, kid,” I found an odd comfort in hearing my voice. It was mostly my voice. There was something wrong with my hands, but my mind hadn’t put together what yet, aside from being thin. They were still my hands. I should know. I’d looked at the backs of my hands through dozens of boring lectures as they’d scribbled across the latest notebook page.

“Still not together,” I blew out a quick breath with that voice that was almost my voice like everything else that was almost my whatever else, like my mind that was shattering into something that was not what….

I looked at the blinking blue square of light that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Notification: Welcome to Your New Life

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