My body shuddered along with my mind.

Will -1

Character sheet, I thought at nothing on a lark. After all, when in Rome and your mind is sinking into a puddle of psychotically fantasy-manifesting irrationality, it is only the sanest thing to do to try to… who was I kidding? How would I even recognize sane at this point?

Name: Undetermined (pick something fun and entertaining that you will then be stuck with for the rest of your life and will then understand how your parents could have picked such a horrible name for you in your old existence)

Class: Undetermined (to say that you have no class at this time is an insult, I’m sure, but please use this horrible experience to develop some determination to become something… anything)

Level: 0 (considering that you haven’t done anything of note, is this really a surprise to you?)

Health: 10/10 (default minimum – if we calculated your actual health points, you might kill yourself on a splinter)

Mana: 10/10 (default minimum – see above)

Brains: 5

Brawn: 6

Beauty: 9

BS: 6

Skills: Do stuff. Get some.

I had a sudden urge to throw the bucket in the well and find out what was beyond that pen of not-pigs. I resisted. I’d had a lot of practice subduing my feelings to think logically. I was hungry. I wasn’t above doing dishes to earn a living. Looking down at the mud caked into most of my skirt, I wasn’t above much at this point. I was going to have to get something to eat and while it wasn’t a great job, it had already given me a few stats and sheltered me through one nervous breakdown, so... No, that wasn’t what I thought right away. There was some stomping and mental anguish in the form of kicking the bucket across the yard and uncomfortably close to the not-pig pen. But you shouldn’t have to see me like that. Okay, I’m not putting in most of it because you’ll think less of me.

Then again.

I kicked that bucket all over the yard. You see, right now in real time, there’s this feather quill writing all this down that has the nerve to psychically admonish me for not telling the truth. It just told me that it would switch to the third person if I didn’t tell the whole story so… I also bruised my foot on that bucket. It probably would have deleted this whole paragraph except that it contains a tiny bit of embarrassment on my part. It’s already deleted two paragraphs of me arguing with it.

Health -1

Ah yes, that’s where I was. I was not wearing any wooden shoes so when I kicked the bucket with my new strength, I stubbed my toe. Don’t judge me; I was pre-med on my own dime, not an athletic scholarship. I was pretty happy about the idea of having lost almost a hundred pounds overnight. I tried really hard to focus on that instead of the…

Character sheet.

Sure enough, it came back up. I had no name? I picked up the undamaged yet rickety bucket and filled it. Dishes? I could do dishes, right? I scrubbed metal plates with sand and a cake of something that was going to leave my new hands cracked and bleeding. OH! That’s what was wrong with my hands. They were young? They were smooth and, well they were a bit calloused, but they were not the hands of a fifty-something-year-old woman! A little lavender and aloe and I could do dishes all day with these hands.

“Get yourself a bowl.” Grump-woman pointed at a smaller pot of something I wanted to pretend was oatmeal.

End game.

Nothing. Okay. It was worth a try. Yeah, I was almost forty years younger and had just lost a hundred pounds, but I had just been getting to the point that I could like my life! My old, flabby life was just fine. Now that my mind was settling down from the panic, an ache had settled in my heart. I had a daughter, a husband, friends, and family. My daughter and I were best friends. We were in pre-med together back at home. No, really. She was sixteen going on fifty. I was fifty going on five. She was the responsible one, the reasonable one, the best of us. My husband was the love of my life and if I really wasn’t going to see my best friend again? Yes. I wanted to go home.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

My mouth ate the sticky stuff in the bowl while my mind scoured my new environment. I focused on the purple light, hoping my favorite color wouldn’t betray me. Petty? Superstitious? Yeah, but the world had flipped.

A quill pen appeared with a dramatic flourish and scratched the following words across my vision. I cast a furtive glance at the grumpy woman, but she seemed oblivious to the pen, the quest and me. I wanted to keep it that way. My only instructions so far were to try to blend in.

Nemesis Quest (Beau Bard)

Level: Epic

Requirements for Completion: You must epically and personally defeat your greatest enemy from your original world.

Description: Your entry into this world has been made possible because you were someone’s greatest foe from your original world. They have accepted the Nemesis Quest to bring one of their loved ones into this world. The bad news is that they are coming for you. The other bad news is that they are a higher level than you are. The good news is that they are X days travel from your current location in this world where X is the number of class levels they have over you. The only other advantage you have is that you know their name on this world and they do not know yours. Good luck, budding adventurer! May your story be epic!

Rewards: Upon completion of the requirements, you may choose one person from your original world to bring into this one.

For just a moment, my mind stumbled on the name of my nemesis. Beau Bard, really? Beau Bard was the pretentiously idiotic stage name of a person I’d put behind me a long time ago. I didn’t hate the guy. Okay, I did still hate the guy but only because he was a massive jerk with no redeemable qualities. Okay, he had a few redeeming qualities, like the fact that he could craft music, but that only made him a bigger cad. I’d written music with the guy in high school, and we’d been really good friends. Then we’d tried to be more than friends and that’s an old, boring story. It was a little hard to believe that he considered me the bad guy in our story, much less as his nemesis.

But that thought was only a second’s worth of my attention, because I skimmed, like a good college student, to the end to read the good stuff. My heart lurched selfishly. I wanted my family more than I wanted to breathe. They were the whole reason I even liked my life at all. I’d been living the dream. My husband was the love of my life, and our marriage was just getting to the point that you don’t have to work so hard at it anymore. He was in a boring tech job, and he’d jump at the idea of coming to another world for adventure. He’d done it enough in Beau’s crowd as they’d gone on LARPs at least once a year. That and he was lost without me, and he knew it.

There was also my brother from another mother, my best friend and oldest supporter. A big burly lug of a man with a heart so big that it could eclipse this whole world. What I wouldn’t do to have him at my side through this. He’d love it, besides, he’d just lost his dream job at a big casino, so what did he have to do with his life there anyway?

Even though I loved both men with all my heart, the first person I needed at my side was my daughter. Sixteen and bright and full of life and fun. She always knew how to cheer me up and was my very best friend ever. She had such a bright future, and she was only sixteen. I was glad that my guys were there for her right now, but my throat closed painfully on the lump of sticky not-oatmeal at the thought of living here without her. I blinked back tears and tried very hard to swallow the thought out of my mind.

Would I go out of my way to kill Beau? No, I barely thought about him anymore. Would I kill a person to bring my daughter into this world? Yes. And the congealed lump in my stomach could attest to my own self-loathing at the thought of it. My husband would do it in a heartbeat and my best friend, the paladin at heart, would turn him in for it.

But…. Technically, it didn’t say kill. It said defeat. Specifically, it said that I had to epically and personally defeat him. That could be a cookoff or a dance battle or even maybe a duel for all I knew. And, if Beau was coming for me, no one, not even my own conscience could blame me for defending myself. I knew I was justifying, and I’d deal with the psychological repercussions of that bit of psychosis later. I pictured my daughter’s face at my funeral and symbolically pinned it to my waffling spine.

Besides, they’d love it here. What wasn’t to love? Primitive health care, short life span, and lack of building codes of the Middle Ages. They’d jump at it, right? That’s it! I was the official worst parent ever and worst friend and worst wife. I was selfish and deplorable for even suggesting the idea of “defeating” an old boyfriend from high school so that I could ruin my family’s lives like Beau had ruined mine by bringing me here.

I scraped out the last bite of gunk from the wooden bowl and found myself staring at a soiled mound of rags in one corner of the kitchen. It was close enough to the hearth that it might be warm at night, but not close enough that it might infest the food with whatever was crawling around in those rags. Yeah, scullery maids slept in a pile of rags in the kitchen getting scraps like a dog. I suddenly had a quick new quest, not from the sky-writing quill, but from the bottom of my disgust at the thought of sleeping on the floor in that pile of rags. Maybe there was a dog, and I had a room upstairs waiting for me, but dogs didn’t normally have a small, cracked mirror over their bedroll. It might have been the classic start for wizards to have a little not-quite-a-room under the stairs, but I wasn’t a wizard.

Or was I?

Character Sheet.

Yep, it said mana. Mana meant magic. Magic meant…

Magic. This world had magic. That changed everything. I wasn’t a horrible person to bring my family to a place that had magic. My daughter would kill me if I didn’t bring her here. In summers we’d kick back with video games and dream of living where real magic worked. Video games. Magic meant healing instead of Middle Age quackery. Magic meant fireballs or mana darts or familiars or …. Not that I knew what kind of magic there was, but magic meant options. In fact, I could walk out that back door with a magic missile and basic healing and disappear into those woods until I was more than capable of kicking Beau’s butt from here to the town he’d started in.