“I don’t know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn’t this…”
When I came to, I found myself in a square prison cell.
I sat there staring at the rust-ridden bars of an iron cell door. The other three walls were made of stone. The ceiling was high, and there was a hole about three meters from the ground to let in light. In the cell was a rag that could maybe pass for a blanket, and a hole in the ground in place of a toilet. That was the extent of my newfound world. To top it all off, my wrists were locked in wooden stocks. Beyond the bars, my cell faced a similar one, but it was empty.
“Talk about a hot start…”
“Hot start” is a term used in Japanese TTRPG scenario-writing for campaign hooks that force the players into some kind of incident to start them off in media res. There was no better phrase to describe the predicament I was in.
“If there’s a game master behind all this, they sure are mean-spirited,” I said, taking in my surroundings and putting what information I had together.
The best candidate for game master is probably that so-called Watcher, I thought, my elation from before gone without a trace.
The Watcher told me I was free to do as I wished, but I couldn’t bring myself to take those words at face value. No one would go out of their way to do something so elaborate for no reason.
“It’s around noon, I suspect…” I looked at the light streaming in from the opening in the wall above.
I used the light to inspect my person. I was wearing pants and a long-sleeved shirt. I was barefoot. My specially crafted robe, with its extraordinarily large +5 Defense bonus, was nowhere to be found, nor was my staff, nor my Infinity Bag, which contained my spellbook. All the equipment I’d obtained by the end of Geo’s long adventures was gone.
“What did I do to get thrown off this metaphorical cliff? First I die, then I’m thrown into another dimension and turned into an RPG character…”
I felt exhausted. So much for feeling twenty again.
I slumped against a wall, holding my head in my hands (as well as I could). Has anyone found my body yet? Preparations for next week’s meeting had been left unfinished. I preoccupied myself with thoughts of my previous life. Rather self-serving, if I do say so myself.
I let out a long sigh.
“I really was transported to another world, wasn’t I?”
After I spent a few minutes staring off into space, the wheels in my head finally started to turn.
I took some deep breaths to calm myself. Each time I exhaled, I felt a bit of optimism return to me. Yes, I’d died, but there was nothing I could do about it now, nor was there any way I could return to Japan. I needed to accept that and focus on what lay ahead.
Fortunately, I’d come to this world as a Level 36 magic user. It would be quicker to count the few things I couldn’t do, compared to all I could do.
“If I just use a spell or two, I… Wait! That’s right! I don’t have my spellbook, do I?!”
Remembering the absence of my equipment, I felt the blood drain from my face. If I didn’t have my Infinity Bag, where I kept my various magic items and other treasures, that meant I didn’t have my spellbook, either.
“If I don’t have my spellbook… Yeah, I’m in trouble.”
Let me explain. Nothing is more important to a wizard than his spellbook.
In many games, new and old, magic users have magic points, or MP, and use those points to cast magic. However, that’s not the way magic works in D&B. In D&B, a magic user must read their spellbook every morning, and hold any spells they plan to use that day in their mind. This is called “charging” the spell. But once a charged spell is used, it is gone. It vanishes from the magic user’s consciousness and cannot be used again. That is, not until it’s charged anew during another morning’s spellbook reading session.
If I don’t have any spells charged right now, and all of my magic items are gone, then I’m nothing more than another ordinary person.
Despite having spent forty-two years as an ordinary person, I felt myself panic.
“Come on. Do I have any spells charged?”
While I had no experience actually casting spells, I tried going through the motions of remembering something like a math formula, and after some poking around my brain…
“That’s it!”
It felt as if I had come across some isolated energy source in my mind. Instinctively, I understood the energy was a charged spell. The incantation method, the steps I needed to take to cast the spell—it all became clear to me. As the Watcher had suggested, the knowledge of Geo Margilus was indeed ingrained within my mind.
“What I need to do is get out of here, and, at the very least, recover my spellbook. But who put me in here in the first place?”
While escaping was important, before I made a move, I needed to get a grasp on my surroundings. There had to be someone—or something—that had stolen my equipment and imprisoned me. Odds were, they were still nearby.
“Should I at least cast a spell to break out of this cell?”
In D&B, the biggest headache for magic users is selecting which spells to charge each day and deciding how to use each of those limited charges. Geo was a max-level magic user (and, by extension, so was I), which meant he could charge up to eighty-one spells a day—nine for each of the nine ranks of spells. Of the spells I considered casting, the obvious choice was Wizard Key, which would allow me to open the lock on the cell door or free my hands from the stocks, but there were several other spells that would also be useful if I planned to escape.
“On second thought…I should prioritize my safety.”
It took me a while, but I finally decided on the first spell I would cast: Invincibility. Invincibility was a Rank 9 spell, making it one of the most difficult to cast in-game. It completely nullified all weapon-based physical attacks and any magic-based attack of Rank 3 or below, for up to six hours. If things took a turn for the worse, its effect would be indispensable.
“This is going to work, right?”
Everything I needed to do to cast the spell was already clear in my mind. The method was something I’d come up with together with the game master, based on D&B rules, over twenty years ago. It was needlessly complex. I have to hand it to the Watcher, I thought. I’m surprised they were able to pick up on and understand the mess of scribbles in those old notebooks.
“Here goes nothing…”
For the first time in my life, I began to do the thing I had role-played hundreds of times before.
I began to cast a spell.