I woke in my old room back at home. I would have woken up in my old bed except that it wasn’t there anymore. Kat and Cliff had sold the house. We can compact this section by saying that there was screaming as I appeared in some woman’s bed between her and what I’m just going to say was her husband. And how hadn’t I thought of this? A gun was pulled and the wife was calling the police but only after I’d scrambled out of the bed and out the front door. That could have gone worse.
Did I look any different than another homeless person in my neighborhood? I didn’t have a backpack, or a shopping cart and I was in a shirt, underwear and socks. I wasn’t worried about the police. It takes more than an hour for them to respond in my old neighborhood. I did feel terribly underdressed in the clothes I’d worn to bed a lifetime ago. I also felt heavy, tired, and old. In the years I’d spent in the game, I’d gotten used to the new young body. This was harder than I’d imagined.
I huddled in a neighbor’s driveway trying to figure out my options. The last time I’d done this, Kat, Dom and Cliff had still been living in the house. I’d woken up next to Dom’s snoring form and managed to grab a few things before I sneaked out and used our car to find Fizzbarren’s place in this world. I’d been so hung up on the plan in the other world that I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to wake up in a house we didn’t own. If Cliff had done his job, there was a rental car sitting near here, but where had he found that it wouldn’t be towed?
It really had gone just as planned. I knew that Fizzbarren would use his second god card to banish me to our old world, defeating me and completing his version of the Nemesis Quest. I’d only needed to get Fizzbarren to use his Smite on me and get him down to where Dom could finish the little bugger off. Dom had as much, if not more ways to kill Fizzbarren off and with only one god card left, Fizzbarren wouldn’t dare use it to take out Dom. Fizzbarren needed the last god card to return to this world.
My job now was to find my way to Fizzbarren’s workshop. I needed to earn my own god card to get back into the game with Cliff. Dom also had a Nemesis Quest that listed Fizzbarren as his Nemesis. Kat did too. Worse case scenario, if I didn’t find a way back into the game world in three weeks of their time, they would use their rewards to bring Cliff and me back to that world. We could have done that. There was plenty of ambient mana left in Fizzbarren’s old workshop to go on for what would last most of our lives just like that, but then what about you?
Fizzbarren’s world was broken and stupid. It was either hubris or confidence, but I thought I could fix it. I could balance out the things that were out of whack and make it a world we could all live happily ever after in. If I did it just right, I could take us all to that world and keep it going for as long as misfits like you and me needed a place to disappear into. The key was author mana. I had about five months to write a book that enough people would read that we could make the changes necessary to make it self-sustainable.
Now, all I had to do was find a rental car that my goofball best friend had hidden just a little too well and I had to do it before I was arrested for vagrancy or indecent exposure. I scanned the street, but there was nothing with a rental label on it. I could hide in the shadows of this neighbor’s yard all night, but that didn’t get me to Fizzbarren’s workshop.
The part of me that was the broken, autistic, old, fat woman in this world didn’t want to creep out of the shadows. The young, powerful Mage-ish from the game world said I needed to get up and move. The old woman’s mind shrank back in horror at the idea that this was all a delusion that I’d just woken from. The powerful mind won. Barely. The cold cement under my hands felt too real and my body felt too heavy, but I got up and started walking.
My powerful mind pretended I was wearing shorts and sneakers and reminded me that it was dark enough to look that way, especially with the way most people dressed nowadays. I put my head down and walked toward a nearby park, thinking I still remembered Cliff’s phone number and could possibly get a late-night jogger to let me use their cell phone. If he still had that phone number after having moved to Europe and been a bum for a year or so.
Why hadn’t I thought this part through? I’d gotten complacent with that reboot button is what had happened only there wasn’t a reboot option here. I know. I tried it. My mind had just skipped over this little detail of the plan, and I’d trusted stupid Cliff to have something here for me. What had I been thinking!?
“Trish!” I heard someone call my name and hated myself for every bad thing my mind had thought about that true blue best friend who had showed up to rescue me. He was only half an hour late? I could forgive him that and anything else because he was here!
I looked up as he pulled up in an old truck and my knees nearly buckled with relief.
“I would recognize those sexy legs anywhere,” Cliff quipped at me as I blinked blankly at him for a reorienting moment.
Of course, he was here, my mind immediately forgot every bad thing I’d ever thought of him, as he reached across the seat and opened the door. The truck was something straight out of a bad porn flick with a camper shell and dinged white paint job, but I didn’t care. Really. It was much more important that there was a huge SODA in the cupholder! I dashed into the truck and sucked on a STRAW!!! I hadn’t seen a straw or tasted a diet soda in years and years!
“Uh, help yourself to my soda,” Cliff was saying. “Want a day-old box of fries?”
“What the HELL?” I choked out once I’d downed a good half of a semi-flat super big gulp. Cliff was looking a little chubbier than I remembered him. Then again, looking at the plethora of candy, snack food, and fast-food wrappers that took up more space than I did, maybe we’d left Cliff alone too long.
“You’re early,” Cliff laughed at my cross expression. He was like that. I could get crazy stupid mad around Cliff and he just laughed me off. “I wasn’t expecting you for another three weeks. Good thing I was listening to the police scanner and heard them call in our old address.”
“I’d like fresh French fries, a big mac, some clothes, shoes and is that a Snickers bar?” I looked pointedly at the half-eaten, half-wrapped thing in what was otherwise a clean ashtray.
“Um, yeah,” Cliff answered me, only stalling in his good humor for a look of wariness as I snatched the candy bar and ate it in big mouth-filling chews. “We can do all that. I’ve got some of your old clothes in the back. You can change back there while I get us to the gas station.”
I looked up around a mouth that was probably smeared with melted chocolate and had a horrible thought that I probably looked more like a rabid animal than Cliff’s old friend, but as I looked up at him with that complex set of emotions flitting across my face, Cliff just smiled and wrapped me into a great big hug. I’m going to leave the rest of that humiliating episode with the fact that we sat and cried on each other long enough to see the cops respond to our old house and that was probably too long, but we’d both needed it.
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An hour later, we were full of gas and chowing down on fast food as we headed for Kansas. Yeah, you heard me. Kansas. Fizzbarren’s workshop was in a small town in Kansas that was barely big enough for a Chili’s and a Barnes and Noble, which is to say that it was a pretty big town for Kansas. I won’t say exactly where since Kansas never pissed me off. I was wearing my T-shirt that had a saying on it that said, “Careful, You’re Very Close to Being Killed Off In My Novel.” I had a pair of black, Rebok hightops and loungy pants that made the drive comfortable. The best part was that there were sixteen hours of a road trip with my best friend, Cliff.
Did I mention he still had his cat, Damon? We were cat people. Damon was a big old black Bombay who had taken to the camper like he was born to it. He might have been old and snaggily but he was cuddly and comforting as I missed Terra. I couldn’t wait to get Damon into the other world where he could talk. Then again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what he had to say if he was going to talk about what Cliff had been doing in this camper alone for the last few months. Cliff told me stories that were more than enough. Kidding. Seriously though, Cliff regaled me with tales of the circus in Europe, things Kat had lightened up, and I told him all about the other world.
We stopped once to take a nap in the camper, which other than being a mess because… Cliff, was more comfortable than I’d expected. It helped that we were parked at a truck stop in Colorado outside of Denver where it was cold enough outside that we didn’t need the AC. I’d forgotten how annoying the change of temperatures could be. We took a luxurious hour and a half eating at the truck stop diner.
“I thought I was the fidgeter,” Cliff pointed at my hand, which I hadn’t noticed was still doing the rubbing I’d gotten used to while building my mana.
“Friction makes mana go up faster, so I fidget now,” I admitted, trying to will myself to stop only to find myself doing it again a moment later.
“It sounds awesome,” Cliff said, his tone gone wistful. “I can’t wait to get inside.”
“I brought you in a few times that you don’t remember,” I admitted, fussing with the straw of my diet soda. “I just couldn’t take you not remembering after that.”
“I know why you took them first,” he looked down at the check to avoid my eyes. “I get it.”
I checked my watch, something else he’d bought for me so I’d have it when I got back, and my insides lurched with guilt. How could I explain how I’d needed them before him? He’d put me first all the time I’d known him. He’d taken care of my kid when I was trapped in the other world. I didn’t have words to thank him for all he’d done and been for me. It had been like choosing one kid over another to choose Dom before Cliff, but I’d needed Dom’s ruthlessness as much as my neurotic Kat had needed Cliff’s lackadaisical outlook on life while I was gone. She’d needed him like I had when he first came into my life, and he’d done for her what he’d done for me. He’d given her the freedom to be amazing.
“I know you do,” I snatched napkins out of a tabletop holder and held them to my leaking eyes. “It’s just that I needed you too. I needed you and I couldn’t have you. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even really my fault.”
“At least you left me Kat,” Cliff said, taking a few napkins for himself.
We didn’t care that we were in a coffee shop in the middle of Colorado or that we looked like a couple of blubbering idiots. What was amazing was that we didn’t care. Before all this, I’d have cared. I did emotions but only in private where no one could see me. Now? What did I care if a hundred people in Colorado saw me cry? I had a world to save. I had a world that I could save and it wasn’t this one that had scoffed at my every solution to world hunger or research about how it was not overpopulated.
I don’t know if I thought that if I didn’t cry in public someone might finally listen to my ideas and fix this stupid world, but I didn’t care anymore. This world didn’t even want me. That world not only needed me, but it wanted me. There were people in this world that wanted that world, the world that I could make amazing. That could happen. That was all that I wanted. What good did my amazing brain do if it couldn’t change the world for the better? I’d been headed to medical school just to get someone to listen to me!
Cliff left two hundred dollars as a tip on the table. We didn’t care if it didn’t help someone. I think maybe I didn’t care about it at all. I needed one little house on the outskirts of a place in Kansas. I needed to make it there and then I’d never leave. My eye caught on the news being broadcast over the television in the corner of the coffee shop, but I just couldn’t find it in me to care about it even if it did have diet coke and straws, big macs and high tops.
This wasn’t my world anymore. We stopped at a Costco and stored up all sorts of supplies just before we rattled up the loose stone drive of what was little more than a farmhouse at the edge of the Arkansas River. It was white clapboard and it looked like Grandma Baker lived there and would smack you if you slammed the old rickety screen door on your way out or in from the porch. There was a little attached garage, but the door looked like it was going to fall off and that it was singed around the edges.
Cliff and I got out of the truck slowly, not sure of what our welcome might be. My mind balked. What if this place was just normal? What if the furniture didn’t talk and all the rest was in my head?
“I drove out here, but I didn’t have the nerve to go up and knock,” Cliff admitted. Of course, he hadn’t. Fizzbarren had still been here a little over a day ago.
“That was probably good,” I took a tentative step forward and saw the curtain on the left window twitch. “It would have been bad to give Fizzbarren any warning.”
“I thought about taking him out so that he couldn’t get to you in the game world,” Cliff whispered.
“Someone knows we’re here,” I said, nodding toward the window.
“Yep,” Cliff bounced on the balls of his feet.
“What if he has a wife?” I stalled nervously. “What if she’s a witch and we end up in Oz next? I didn’t like Oz.”
“This is Kansas,” Cliff nodded and settled back on his heels.
We stood like that, stupidly, practically on the doorstep thinking things we hadn’t been smart enough to think while we’d been driving.
“I could be crazy,” I told Cliff.
“But your daughter is in there,” he replied with a solid hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said, and I took a deep breath and set my shoulders to stubborn bravery or crazy foolishness depending on what existed beyond that threshold.
I knocked on the door and felt silly doing it. Who was going to answer? The mop?
“Come in,” came an answer that sounded very human. Then again, Sammi sounded human.
After twenty-seven hours and approximately thirty-two minutes of questioning my sanity, I finally took a full breath of relief as I stepped back into madness, where I belonged. The outside of the house looked like a normal farmhouse that Dorothy would have recognized, but inside I found more friends that I didn’t know I’d been looking for all my life.
The workshop held one long table made of planks that were barely more smooth than Mabel’s kitchen tables. There was a more modern armchair that looked very comfortable for all that it was upholstered in a hideous green and gold brocade. There was an ancient cuckoo clock on one wall and a rag rug. Across from the front door was a doorway into what looked to be a rather messy bedroom and what looked like a double or queen-sized bed.
There weren’t any modern appliances like a television or stereo but there were two more closed doors. I’d consider myself lucky if this guy had indoor plumbing. I automatically tried to cast my Clean spell only to remember where I was.
The bench that was tucked under the large table moved. It was just a tiny movement, but it moved. I smiled. There was also a large box that was almost tucked under the table except that it had a very large old-fashioned typewriter propped up on it so it couldn’t get all the way under the table. A tassel on the footstool twitched. The floor length mirror had just a tiny extra glimmer.
“Hi folks,” I told the room. “Sammi, you’re looking good.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” the mirror let out a long sigh of relief.
“Karma?” the bench asked, moving out a little and obviously trying to hide the slight wobble of a broken support.
“Yes!” I grinned. “And this is Cliff and boy are we ready to get started!”