“I’m not sure Sara is going to approve of this, Mark.” Simone marched down the dirt path, staring down at the tiny, isolated hamlet nestled at the bottom of the valley. “She explicitly told us to go to Sunnydale, buy wagons, and stock up on food.”
“Sunnydale is more expensive,” Mark said, his eyes fixed firmly on the village below. He was walking a few paces ahead of her and hadn't looked back since he hijacked their route. “We can get double the food here and meet some really… cool people.”
Simone shook her head, recognizing the name on her internal map. “Didn’t you fill Rod Stewart’s Rippling Biceps with… sex elves?”
Mark shrugged, his voice tight. “Yeah. But that was a joke. That was before everything went fucky.”
Simone waited for the rest of the explanation, but it didn’t come. “You’ve been awfully quiet since we left the store. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Mark lied, poorly.
“Failed your Bluff check, dude.” Simone stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop on the trail. “Talk to me, Mark.”
A quiet, seething frustration bubbled up into Mark’s face. “Like you calling and talking to me for hours about nothing in the middle of the night back home?”
Simone flushed. She had no one else back then. She was closer to him than anyone else in the group, but it still stung to have it thrown back at her. “Yes, Mark. Like that. Except now you know my truth, and you know the reasons I bawled my eyes out to you on the phone.”
“You could have told me, you know?” Mark’s defensive anger melted instantly, his eyes softening as tears formed in the corners. “I might have even helped you do this at home.”
“Mark.” Simone reached out and put a gentle hand on his cheek. “The world we lived in... I wasn’t even ready to accept it fully myself. There is hate and violence toward us, and you know what the government is doing. Here? I don’t even have to worry about it. I showed up in a natal woman’s body. My body. I am completely free here. So, thank you for the offer, but can we just get to the now, now? This isn’t easy to talk about, even with this body.”
“Simone,” Mark sighed, his shoulders deflating. “Thank you for trusting me with that. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Simone cleared her mind with a quick shake of her head. “It’s nothing. Now, will you open up to me? Why are we ignoring the person even you, the almighty Creator, named leader, just so we can detour on foot to a sex-elf village?”
Mark stood in silence, a glazed, haunted look in his eyes as he stared down at the quiet town in the distance. A silent tear broke free and ran down his pale Changeling cheek. “I… I didn’t… I didn't actually think this would ever be real. And… now that it is… I have a lot of people I need to check on. People I’ve opened up to a lot of real pain.”
Simone stared at the man, seeing an entirely new side of him. “Raven got you to see it?”
Mark nodded his head slowly and sniffled. “I mean… yeah. I made a lot of stupid and jokey things like Jon Stewart’s Fascinating Iguanarium, which are fine and hurt no one. But Craig is exploiting people. And I’ve been thinking about all the really niche, cruel things I wrote into random games over the years just for a laugh…” He collapsed to the ground, burying his face in his hands. “I don’t know what to do!”
Simone looked at him for a long moment. The almighty Creator who brought them here, the god who accidentally gave her a body that finally matched her soul, was broken. Just like everyone else.
She knelt in the dirt, wrapped her strong elven arms around his shoulders, and pulled him into a deep, grounding hug. “I’m with you. Let’s help people together.”
She felt him burst into a rumbling, heavy sob and simply held him through it. She could feel the tears and snot soaking into her leather tunic, and she didn’t care. To know that Mark cared so deeply about people—even fictional NPCs he made up—was profoundly endearing. For another few moments, Mark blubbered into her arms before he finally quieted down and gently let go of the embrace.
“These elves,” Mark sniffled, choking out the rest of his confession. “I wrote a magical compulsion into their lore. They have to fuck anyone who asks.”
Simone cocked her head, her stomach twisting. “I thought you said it was all consensual back at home?”
“That was Fuck City,” Mark said, wiping his eyes and standing back up. “This place is from April of 2009, just before you joined the table. I made it as a joke for Craig’s druid. I didn’t think every little thing from every campaign would make it through the portal, but here we are.”
“But, what about the corruption?” Simone asked, a cold dread pooling in her gut. “Not everything is exactly the same because of Craig and the Taser. Maybe… I don't know, everything seems to be about dicks with Craig, so maybe they… oh god. What do we do?”
“Well,” Mark shrugged, his face hardening with grim resolve. “I don’t know. I just need to check on them and see what they are doing now. To see if they are okay, and if we can help them.”
This was the first time she had seen Mark like this. Sure, he had a broody, mysterious vibe back on Earth, but she had never seen his armor crack before. She gently scooped up Mark’s hand. “Then, let’s go find out. Together.”
Mark looked down at their joined hands. He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles and nodded. “Okay.”
They proceeded down the large hill toward the small town, but as they drew closer, Simone’s Ranger instincts flared. Something was terribly off. “Mark, I don’t see anyone moving down there.”
Mark’s hand tensed. “They’re probably just inside.”
“What’s that smell?” Simone caught a foul whiff on the wind, her elven nose wrinkling. “It smells like… spoiled milk?”
Just as her voice trailed off, they rounded the entryway gate and could finally see into the center of the village.
Bones, blood, and viscera littered the cobblestones. Mark dropped her hand and immediately fell to his knees in the dirt, violently throwing up his meager lunch. “I… I did this…”
Simone stepped numbly into the village. Everything was dead. Elven bodies hung limply from shattered windows, and butchered corpses littered the muddy ground. Her people. Elves. Completely slaughtered. “Who… who did this?”
Mark went catatonic. He just stared at the carnage, rocking back and forth on his haunches in the dirt.
“We need to leave, Mark.” Simone knelt, putting a hand on his back, trying to reason with him. “Something isn’t right. This blood is fresh. Whatever did this is still close.”
Mark’s rocking slowly built into a violent tremor. “Craaaaiiiiiiiiig!” He stood up abruptly, turning and marching blindly back up the hill. “I’m going to fucking nuke his shop from the top of the lift! He’s fucking sick!”
Simone looked around the village square, her eyes scanning the wreckage. She spotted thick puddles of melting strawberry ice cream and crudely painted soft-serve cones on the walls. “This doesn’t look like a Craig thing, Mark. This looks like Humptus Nibblenanny’s work.”
Mark froze in his tracks. “You’re right.” He turned slowly, looking back at the slaughtered elves. “But why? What in the hell do the Dairy Queens want here?”
“They wouldn’t fuck ‘em.”
A gravelly voice echoed from the shadows of the nearest tavern. A massive, heavily muscled man stepped out of the building. Absurdly, he was wearing a pristine, 1950s pastel-pink soda jerk uniform, complete with a striped paper hat and a bowtie, though it was currently splattered in elven blood. He was holding a weakened, bleeding elf by the hair. “Who ever heard of sex elves that don’t sex?”
“Please!” the elf cried out, reaching a trembling hand toward Mark. “I have a famil—”
The soda jerk casually shoved a massive, sharpened, tactical ice-cream scoop into the side of the elf's throat, instantly ending the plea as the body hit the ground. The man wiped the scoop on his pastel apron and sneered. “And who do we have here? You know the boss, so you know we don’t like it when people interfere with our business.”
Mark took a slow step forward. His fists balled at his sides. He reared back, pointed a single, trembling finger at the man, and let his absolute rage take over the magic.
“Interfere with this, bitch. Water to Acid!”
The pastel-clad man laughed.
Then he stopped laughing.
He shrieked as he literally came apart. The sixty percent of his body that was water instantly transmuted into highly corrosive, boiling acid. He melted from the inside out, acidic foam bubbling violently from every pore in his body until he collapsed into a dissolving, steaming puddle of sour, curdled whey and pink fabric.
“Holy fuck, Mark,” Simone whispered, staring at the gross, cottage-cheese-looking puddle. She looked up, expecting the rage in his eyes to be gone, but it was burning hotter than ever. Then she saw why.
Five more men wearing the pastel pink and gold soda-jerk uniforms of the Dairy Queens had just stepped out of the surrounding buildings, drawing their oversized, dairy-themed weapons. He looked at the butchered bodies of his creations, realizing there was nothing left to save.
“Fireball!” Mark screamed, loosing a massive, roaring sphere of flame from his hands. It exploded against the gathering group, sending them flying backward, their paper hats incinerating as they crashed into the wooden buildings.
“Fireball! Fireball! Fireball!”
Fire rained down relentlessly on Rod Stewart’s Rippling Biceps, incinerating the bodies, the buildings, and making incredibly short work of the remaining Dairy Queens.
The fire raged and roared, casting tall, dancing shadows across the valley. Mark stood in the center of the inferno, his chest heaving, completely consumed by anger. “We’re going to fucking kill Nibblenanny, and every other motherfucker who is trying to hurt my world and my people.”
Simone stood beside him, letting the fire rage in the village and in Mark’s heart. She had never seen this side of him—the protective, vengeful god—and she kind of liked it. “I’m with you. All the way. We give this world back to its people.”
Mark didn’t back away from the encroaching, blistering heat. He stared into the flames. “I need a new class to do that. This Wizard build is good for burst damage, but I need to min/max if we are going to war. I'm too squishy. We have to go to the Respec Fairy.”
Simone raised an elven eyebrow. “You mean way down in the subterranean dwarven city of Rocksylvania?”
“Yeah.” Mark finally turned his back on the burning village and started heading back up the hill on foot.
“I think a few people in the party might want to visit her, too,” Simone said, following him. “Let’s go get the food, because Sara will literally kill us if we return empty-handed. Then we will gather who wants to go.”
“Ok,” Mark said, his voice distant and cold again. She didn’t like this tone nearly as much as the soft, caring Mark from an hour ago.
She paused, letting him walk ahead, and just stared. Who was this man who tugged at her heart and frightened her?
“Let’s stop by Balder’s Hate and supply,” Simone said, walking beside him. She took a final look over her shoulder at the hundred-foot-high fire completely engulfing the small village. “We have people to feed.”
[SYSTEM ALERT: Encounter cleared.]
[XP Awarded: 4,000]
[Level Up Available! Unspent Attribute Points: 4]