C.J. Carella's Website

A novella introducing a brand-new universe, plus two short stories and a smaller novella set in other times and places: two-fisted tales across the Multiverse!

@2018 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”

- Stephen King

One

His day sucked, and then he died.

Fridays weren’t fun anymore. No money, no plans. No job, no prospects. Will Verdi – short for Wilfredo; his name was but one of his parents’ many crimes against humanity – had nothing to look forward to until Sunday, when his regular tabletop RPG group met. Sunday, he’d be able to forget his miserable life for a few hours, rolling dice and pretending to be everything he wasn’t. Brave, successful, larger-than-life. Well, he was larger-than-life in the real world, but only in terms of gross displacement. Ever since his divorce, Will had let himself go, going from a 38 to a 44 waist in three pizza-rich years. The character he played in the game, on the other hand, was perfectly fit. Reality never seemed to measure up against fantasy, which was why Sundays had become his main escape from all the bad stuff.

Until then, he’d figured on binge-watching something on Netflix – next month he’d have to cancel his subscription unless he found gainful employment – and play some PC games. Before he could do either of those things, however, his ex-wife decided to call him.

He looked at the phone – his ringtone for her was ‘Crazy Train’ – for several seconds before picking up.

“Hey, Wilfredo.” She was the only one who insisted in using his full name, or shortening it to Fredo, which was worse. Claimed it made him sound ‘diverse,’ whatever that meant. Makes me sound like a tool, was his counterpoint. Never got her to stop, though.

“Hi, Wendy.” Wendy and Wilfredo. Wildy? Wenfredo? Doomed from the start.

“This was supposed to be our date night, but Morty’s running late, as usual,” she said without preamble. Morty was husband 2.0, new and improved, with a much higher income and more ambition than Will had ever displayed. Morty was almost literally dripping with prospects. On the other hand, 2.0 was so busy he often didn’t come home until late in the evening.

“So I have a little time to kill,” Wendy went on. “Realized I hadn’t heard from you in like forever. What’s new, honey?”

They’d divorced amicably and were still friends. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m good,” he lied.

He hadn’t told her about losing his job, or about the unsuccessful search for a new one. Shockingly, there wasn’t a lot of demand for college dropouts. His last job as a motel clerk had lasted five boring but uneventful years, until, in the words of the nice Pakistani man who’d purchased the motel, Will had been ‘made redundant.’ Eking out meager unemployment payments barely enough to cover his basic expenses, Will’s quest for a new job had been an epic fail so far. He’d struck out at all three of the local Starbucks, the dying shopping mall, and a temp agency. He had a couple months left before unemployment benefits ran out. He didn’t know what would happen then. His parents were both gone, and he had no family to speak of. All his friends were as hard up as he was. Homeless wasn’t an impossibility.

“Are you really okay?” Wendy persisted. “You sound down.”

“It’s nothing.”

To admit he was unemployed and maybe unemployable a year shy of his thirtieth birthday was to admit she’d won at the game of life, at least by the rules she’d set. She was happily married with two children and a Mac-Mansion in one of the better parts of New Jersey, and he was a jobless gaming geek whose only claim to fame was having a roleplaying game blog that on a good month got ninety unique visitors and two hundred pageviews. Which reminded him, he hadn’t updated it in over a week. Maybe he could write a review of the new Multi-Verse! ™ sourcebook he’d borrowed from a friend, now that he could no longer afford to buy anything fun.

“Fredo? You still there?”

“Sorry, mind wandered off.”

“As usual,” she said, not quite nagging-judging but close enough for discomfort. “You should try living in the here and now a bit more, honey. You’d do a lot better.”

Elementals and Demigods is the latest but not greatest release in the Multi-Verse! ™ franchise. Unfortunately, the book disappoints far more often than it delivers, he wrote in his head before being forced back to the here and now by her not-quite nagging voice.

“You were always so smart, so creative. But you always wasted your talents on those stupid games of yours.”

“I know, Wendy. I know,” he said. When in doubt, agree and deflect. Hadn’t saved his marriage, but probably had kept it alive a few extra years. Longer than it should have lasted, he figured.

“I worry about you, Fredo.”

You broke my heart, he thought, then chuckled at the aptness of the Godfather Two quote. He didn’t say it out loud, though; Wendy had never watched any Godfather movies.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked, sounding a little peeved. She’d never gotten his weird sense of humor. In all fairness, very few people did.

“Nothing. I’m okay. How are you?”

That was her cue. He hung up twenty minutes later, having heard only half of her long discourse on her life, her children, and other facts of life in the better parts of Jersey. He mentally wrote about half the review of the Multi-Verse! Elementals and Demigods Sourcebook in that time. After getting off the phone, he thought about setting his thoughts down in his computer. With a shrug, he decided to wait until Saturday.

Will set his worries aside and spent a mostly-joyless Friday night watching Netflix and eating leftover pizza. As he went to bed, he felt a little off. Maybe the pizza had gone bad. His left arm got a bit tingly, so he rolled onto his other side, cursing the lumpy bed he couldn’t afford to replace. He ignored the discomfort, and the faint but growing feeling of impending doom that followed. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of it.

The heart attack woke him up, but only briefly. He reached for his phone but didn’t quite make it.

Truly sucks, was his last thought as everything went black.

* * *

There was no light, no friends and family waiting for him on the Other Side. Just coldness in the dark.

At least, that was the first thing he noticed. Utter darkness. Next came sound: breaking glass, followed by screams that woke him in a panic.

Did I die? Will wondered as he opened his eyes. Having eyes seemed to argue against that. The massive chest pains that had woken him up were gone, too. Only problem was, he couldn’t see. His eyes were open, but everything was out of focus. He was on his hands and knees on a cold tiled floor. The floor was also wet with something thick and sticky. A strong disinfectant smell hit his nose, the kind of thing you encountered in hospitals and public restrooms, except turned to eleven. Even worse, under the chemical stench was something else, a hint of rotten flesh that was strong enough to be noticeable despite someone’s best efforts to eradicate it.

Where am I?

Somewhere bad. It wasn’t just the combination of institutional and rotten stink. Every instinct in his body told him this was a bad place.

“Guards! Restrain it!”

He still couldn’t see. Rough and ice-cold hands hauled him to his feet. His body reacted on its own; Will grabbed someone’s wrist and twisted it until bones cracked and broke. He chopped at another hand, breaking someone’s forearm.

Holy crap, what did I just do?

They let him go. Without their support, he dropped to his knees.

“It’s broken loose! Take it down now!”

Two new sets of hands dragged him back up, and someone punched him in the mother-loving face. Will felt knuckles smashing into his head, right at the juncture of his jaw. It hurt like a mother, but it also made him angry.

I’m ‘it.’ They’re calling me an ‘it!’

At least three people were holding him: one from behind, another grasping his left arm, and someone in front of him, the one who’d just punched him. Will raised both feet and slammed them against the one in front, sending him sprawling. And that’s when someone Tased him or something. An electric shock sent waves of agony running through him, and next thing he knew he was back on the floor and someone was poking him with an electric stick, each poke sending another shock through his system. The pain made it impossible to think. His first impulse was to curl up into a ball and hope the strangers around him stopped hurting him.

That’s not what he did, however. Something took over him, and he became a passenger inside his own body. The pain from the tasering grew less intense somehow. Will struck blindly at his tormentors and hit someone’s leg. More bone broke, and that surprised him, because he didn’t think he’d hit whoever that was all that hard.

“Shoot it! Shoot it down!” A male voice, hysterical.

“The Master will be angry.” Another male voice, but emotionless and cold.

“Just do it!”

Will’s attackers moved away as he swung something – something that felt like it was a part of him, like a set of claws, only longer – at them. His vision was clearing slightly, enough to see tiles on the floor, spattered with something dark.

Blood?

Something with the strength of a sledgehammer hit him in the shoulder even as he was deafened by multiple blasts that felt like someone was dropping sticks of dynamite all around him.

Gunshots. Shooting me.

More hits, each as powerful as the first one, and the pain from those made the taser batons feel like baby kisses. The part of Will that kept on thinking even at the most inappropriate times wondered idly why he was still alive. Next he wondered where he’d gotten a gun, because he was shooting back, short automatic fire bursts at the dimly-seen men in colorful uniforms standing around him. And falling as soon as he shot them. He knocked them down one by one. He got shot three more times for his troubles, but finally it was all quiet except for the ringing in his ears.

Will got to his feet and leaned against the nearest wall, a cold, rough surface with the consistency of poured concrete. There were bodies everywhere: men wearing something like eighteenth-century military uniforms: green coats with golden buttons, white pants, and shiny black boots. They had helmets instead of fancy hats, though, and their guns were big, ugly Thompson submachine guns, the kind immortalized by the original gangsters of the 1920s. He had never seen a real gun in his life, but a lifetime of gaming had given him a lot of theoretical information about weapons throughout the ages.

The uniformed men weren’t moving, and their uniforms were marred by a bunch of holes on their chests. Plenty of holes, but no blood. None of the soldiers Will had shoot were bleeding. They weren’t moving, they looked pretty dead, but there was no blood.

Before he could figure that out, the only survivor of the shootout let out a whimper. Will turned towards the sound and saw a man in a lab coat cowering behind a piece of machinery. The lab weenie realized he’d been spotted, and he scrambled frantically to put as much of the machine – a boxy contraption made of wood and riveted metal bands, with lots of levers and dials on top – between him and Will.

“Please don’t kill me!” Lab Coat yelled. He’d been the one giving the orders to shoot. The man’s voice sounded tinny through the ringing in his ears, but it had the same whiny-Germanic quality as before.

“You guys started it,” Will said, realizing even as he spoke how lame he sounded.

“Please! I was only following orders!”

He stopped paying attention to the hysterical pleas and scanned the room, looking for an exit or any surviving enemies. The same part of him that had reacted to the attacks with sudden and final violence was concerned only with important stuff like that. Lab Coat seemed harmless, so he ignored him. It was almost as if he wasn’t Wilfredo Verdi, college dropout and gaming geek, but someone else.

The new him was pretty good at noticing details, too. Details like the size of the room – thirty feet wide, forty-four feet long – and the fact that there was a stone altar in the middle, its surface covered with mystical signs, many of which any fantasy geek would recognize. Will saw pentagrams aplenty, some of them drawn with a twist in the fashion a Call of Cthulhu fan would identify as the ever-popular Elder Sign. Bad mojo, in other words. Around the stone block, several tables were festooned with a bizarre collection of tools and machines. Will spotted an ancient Mackintosh computer next to something with protruding vacuum tubes and punch cards. A set of surgical tools from before the invention of stainless steel or the germ theory of medicine lay on another table, and some of the sharp implements were covered with reddish stains that could be rust or dried blood. There was more, but new-Will was only interested in two things: potential threats and a way out.

There were no windows, and only one door. Riveted metal door, tall and solid-looking.

He turned back to Lab Coat, still going on with his ‘I was only following orders’ spiel.

“Yo.”

“Please.”

“Yeah, whatever. Can you open the door?”

“That is not allowed. We are under attack and all doors have been locked down.”

That answer generated about fifteen new questions, but Will had a feeling Lab Coat wasn’t going to be very forthcoming: he’d gone back to hiding his face behind his folded arms and rocking back and forth. The man was terrified of Will. Which sorta made sense, since he’d just mowed down a roomful of armed guards. Something he hadn’t really thought about it much in the ten seconds or so since the shooting stopped.

He was still holding a weapon, but hadn’t paid much attention to it until now. When he finally took a good look at himself, he swayed on his feet and nearly passed out.

No freaking way.

First of all, he’d been naked when he woke up. He’d felt the dry cool air over his skin. Now he was wearing a black jumpsuit. Except it wasn’t clothing, more like he was covered in some jet-black substance that flowed around him like a liquid but didn’t drip away. And he wasn’t holding a gun. His left hand had been replaced by a massive two-barreled weapon of the same substance, all in a black so dark it seemed to have a depth to it.

And he knew exactly what the stuff was.

He knew what his hand had become, just as he knew that the black substance that covered his skin was a mystical element from the Shadow Realm known as Umbral Essence. The gun-thing that had replaced his left hand had a name, too: the Death Dealer, a weapon designed to kill gods.

I’m dreaming.

He had to be. Because the Death Dealer and the Shadow Realm and Umbral Essence were imaginary, made-up, make-believe stuff from his Sunday games. He’d picked up the Shadow Assassin character class because it’d sounded cool as heck, not to mention being ridiculously overpowered even for the ridiculously overpowered Multiverse! ™ game system. But all that stuff, including his character – Johnny Umbra, Shadow-Gun for Hire – existed only as a written description and some game statistics on a sheet of paper – and a backup file in his computer; he wasn’t a barbarian – along with some poorly-drawn sketches he’d doodled over the years.

This can’t be happening.

Only problem was, it all felt too real. The cold liquid texture of the shadowy matter covering his body, as if he was dipped in mercury. The ringing in his ears from all the gunfire. The fading pain on the spots where he’d been struck by bullets but survived thanks to his Umbral Essence armor and the healing factor it bestowed upon its wielder. All real as life. Too real.

Above all, Will knew in his heart that if it’d been just him in that room, good easygoing Will who let most everyone walk all over him, he’d be a wet puddle on the floor, adding his own bodily fluids to the mess on the floor. The part of him that was dealing with things in a controlled, deliberate fashion wasn’t Will Verdi. It was Johnny Umbra. Every time he’d roleplayed as Johnny he’d felt different, more confident, tougher and braver. And now he felt the presence of the freelance assassin somewhere inside his skull. And instead of weirding him out even more, the cool presence gave him a faint hope that he might be able to get out of this alive, whatever this was.

Okay, Will told himself. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I did die on Friday and this is some crazy form of afterlife, or someone uploaded me into the Matrix. Doesn’t matter. Got to treat it as if all this is real because if I don’t, I might die – again? – and I don’t want to find out the hard way that there is no respawning in this reality.

That cut through the hysteria trying to overwhelm him. He took a second look at the room. The guards he’d killed weren’t bleeding because they weren’t normal people, he realized. A second glance at the bodies showed their skin had a gray pallor, the kind you’d see in someone who’d been dead a lot longer than a few seconds. Will spotted a line of stitching at neck level on one of the corpses, right over the collar of his green coat. It looked as if someone had crudely sewn his head back onto his body. Or sewn someone’s head on a different body, he thought. He spotted more stitching around their wrists: and yeah, a couple of them had hands with noticeably different skin tones and shapes. Their eyes were mostly open, revealing solid orbs, light purple in color.

Reanimated undead guards in Napoleonic era uniforms armed with Tommy guns?

 The part of him that wasn’t totally weirded out was a bit relieved. Killing some sort of zombie guards wasn’t as bad as murdering a bunch of human beings with spouses and children and what not. He needed answers, though, along with a way out.

Will turned to the cringing guy and pretended to be Johnny Umbra. It came surprisingly easy to him, just as if he was on a Sunday night game.

“Okay. What’s this place and what am I doing here?”

Normally Wilfredo would have used ‘sir’ or two and been overall a lot more respectful. But normal Wilfredo had been fat, bald and had most likely died last night, and he was in a taller, gut-free and super-powered body, so he might as well try to match his personality to the persona.

“This cannot be happening,” Lab Coat said. “You shouldn’t be awake! The process wasn’t finished.”

“You’re not being helpful, Lab Rat,” Will told him. “Where are we?”

“I can’t help you! The Master will...” Instead of completing the sentence, he gestured towards the jigsaw-puzzle bodies of the guards.

Will didn’t like that one bit. He checked himself for evidence he’d been put together in a similar fashion. The Umbral Essence covering his right arm rolled back and revealed the skin underneath as soon as he thought about it, which was the way the game rules said the stuff worked. The arm and hand looked normal enough. Lean and muscled, nothing like his chunky Wilfredo self, but it all seemed to come from a single body. It also lacked the bloodless gray pallor of the dead bodies sprawled all around him.

Lab Coat laughed. “No, that’s not how you were made, you foolish creature! The Master’s skills have improved greatly over time.”

“You’re saying someone made me. Like in a lab.”

“Yes. Or rather, you were in the process of being created. The work is unfinished.”

“I’m feeling pretty well done, actually. So I’m going to get out of here, if you don’t mind.”

The scientist or technician didn’t reply. Maybe he figured he’d said too much and his master would punish him by grafting a dog’s behind to his forehead or something. 

Will checked the door himself. There was no visible lock, and a tentative push made it clear it was as solid as it looked.

“All doors will remain closed until the end of the emergency,” the lab weenie said.

“Good thing I’ve got a special key with me,” Will replied in his Johnny Umbra voice. The Death Dealer materialized a moment later, turning his hand into a small artillery piece made of solid shadow stuff.

“You might want to cover your eyes. There is going to be an earth-shattering ka-boom.”

* * *

This was supposed to be an easy job.

The bitter thought did little to comfort Ariel Le Fay as she ran for her life, leaving the corpses of her teammates behind.

Did Moriarty screw up? Or did he set us up?

Didn’t matter, and this wasn’t the time to ponder such things. The brutal firefight had accomplished that rare thing in small unit combat: mutual annihilation. Her team had been ambushed by the minions of the Madman. A dozen heavily-armed guards had been waiting for them on the manse’s foyer. The six Regulators had walked into the trap and been taken by surprise.

Phuong had been killed as she emerged from the portal, her witch-charms useless against the hail of cursed bullets that struck her. Deadeye Brown had survived a few seconds longer. The Outlands’ gunslinger had survived the first fusillade, although he’d been wounded. Even as he the death-curses did their work, he returned fire with his hexed six-shooters. He accounted for half of the attackers before he fell.

Ariel had experienced the short-lived battle as a continuous blur of motion and sudden death. Her preset aegis hex – you never went into possible danger without a defensive spell ready to be released – had deflected the first burst of automated fire aimed at her. She’d replied with an ice shard that transfixed one of the attackers, and then ducked for cover when another shooter had shattered her arcane shield.

The Doorman had opened a dimensional trap under three of the attackers, sending them to some hellish realm, but the bullets from a third had lay him low. His blood brother Percival watched him die before he fell, surrounded by the slashed bodies of two undead guards. Fiona, riddled with bullets, managed to assume her wolf form and tear apart the last minion before bleeding out, and then silence had returned to the Madman’s castle.

Ariel had checked for auras, her healing magicks prepped and ready to cast, but it was no use; all her friends and associates were gone, their souls gone to whatever reward or punishment their actions had earned them. All that was left of them was cooling flesh, a home to nothing but decay. She fled before any more guards arrived.

Her only chance was their alternate exit point, which led right past the team’s objective. If that exit was blocked, she was dead. Ariel smiled grimly. If she went down, she’d do her best to take everyone with her.

The way to the central hall would be barred and warded, of course, but the security blueprints Moriarty had purchased at great expense revealed a long-disused servants’ corridor with far lower protection levels. The Madman had few servants and he had them come and go through the regular hallways. He’d only purchased the palatial castle because of its remote location in a barren land, and its large and elaborate dungeons, which he’d put to a use the previous owners would have found both revolting and disturbing.

Upon reaching the right spot, Ariel reached out with her mind, found the disguised doorway on the wall, and sent out the psychic key the good professor had given her. For a cold, long moment, nothing happened, and she steeled herself for death or worse. Then, there was a click and the hidden door slid open, revealing a narrow and dank corridor. All expenses had been spared when it came to the welfare of servants and other lesser beings, and years of disuse hadn’t helped. She rushed into the dark and musty space, pausing long enough to close the door behind her and imprint it with a prepared ward of her own. Anyone trying to follow her in would find a nasty surprise waiting for them.

On she went, her combat boots making surprisingly little noise. Muting sound wasn’t the easiest cantrip to fashion, but she’d mastered it during her first semester at the Universita Arcana. She doubted the faculty would approve of the way their prized pupil had used their teachings. Or her mother, wherever she might be.

Stop it, she scolded herself. Concentrate on the mission.

Her team had been massacred, but the exit from the servants’ tunnel was right next to the objective, and she hated the idea of fleeing without finishing the job. Especially after losing Fiona, Deadeye, and the others. The mission had been a snatch job. The Madman was in the process of fashioning a new Creature, as was his wont. Someone who didn’t want that to happen had hired the Regulators to steal the living weapon. Losing Doorman would made capturing and transporting the Creature almost impossibly difficult, but she would try.

There was a commotion up ahead. Ariel heard faint gunshots in the distance: the staccato reports belonged to the Madman’s household guards, who favored thauma-enhanced Tommy guns from Elsewhen Eighty-two. Similar guns had murdered Ariel’s colleagues, she wished good luck to whoever was being fired upon. The counterfire was something else, however: automatic, if the ripping-canvas roar was any indication, punctuated with larger booms. Either someone else had chosen to invade the Madman’s manse tonight, or…

Or the Creature has awakened and turned on its creator. Makes sense. We disrupted the ward network throughout the entire castle. Maybe we weakened whatever was keeping the Creature in check, and now it’s loose.

It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, or the twenty-first, for that matter. In fact, the Madman’s very nature made such occurrences more likely than not. The necro-technologist was a Soulless Incarnate, a fictional entity given a sort of life empowered by the minds and souls of those touched by its story. Lacking real free will, Incarnates without a true soul were often doomed to repeat their mistakes, in an endless string of minor variations. Sad really: the Madman was a being with the raw power of a demigod but remained a slave of the writings of a long-dead Englishwoman and the twisted retellings by hundreds of other sources. Not that she was prepared to extend a great deal of sympathy towards the Modern Prometheus. He had taken the worst traits of his character and nurtured them over the centuries, becoming far worse than anything his original creator had envisioned.

I wish I could kill him, but that’s beyond me – for now, at least. But I can ruin his plans.

Ariel followed the tunnel leading towards the underground laboratories. Not surprisingly, that path also led her closer to the sounds of battle. The distraction would be welcome, and very possibly was the main reason no more minions had shown up. The Madman has two companies of undead soldiers at his disposal – about three hundred men, give or take – but most of them had followed him on an expedition to the Outlands, leaving behind a skeleton crew. That was why this had been the ideal time to raid his castle and steal his creation. The fight on the main level must have accounted for half the remaining force, which meant perhaps a dozen guards remained.

The shooting stopped. Either the rebellious lab project had been destroyed – which doomed the mission unless she could salvage its remains – or it had managed to wipe out the opposition, at least until reinforcements could be assembled. In the latter case, things might just work out. It would depend on who was in charge of security.

The Madman’s not here. Neither is his chief assistant, the Hunchback. Which leaves…

A harsh female voice echoed throughout the castle.

“The Creature is loose! We have intruders in the Manse! To arms, everyone!”

The Housekeeper. We’d hoped not to run into her. Not sure if I can handle her on my own.

Ariel reached the exit. Before opening the doors, she projected her senses onto the other side. One of her most useful tricks, and only possible here because the anti-scrying wards built into the castle walls had burned out. She saw a wide corridor with several reinforced doors, each leading to a laboratory, or, more accurately, a place where unspeakable horrors were perpetrated to breach the barrier between life and death.

Five guards had set up an impromptu barricade, using pieces of furniture dragged into place. The single human was ab arcanist, busily adding a spell-crafted protective web to the hasty fortification, while the four reanimated corpses fired their weapons at an open door two dozen yards away. The Creature must be there. No sign of the Housekeeper; she must be off rallying the rest of the troops, and arming everyone down to the lowest chambermaid. As luck would have it, the servant’s door was located behind the barricade. Best to get this done before reinforcements arrived.

Ariel loaded six lightning bolt hexes into her aura. The process took some thirty seconds and would allow her to release the deadly spells instantly. The hidden door slid open; the enemy arcanist turned around just in time to watch twisting, arcing death reach for him. His wards burst into fire a moment before the tightly-focused current cut into his flesh. Death was hideous, but quick.

The remaining guards reacted with deadly swiftness. They turned towards her as her second lightning bolt struck and opened fire by the time the smoking body of their companion hit the ground. Ariel’s left hand conjured up a shield, a multifaceted crystalline construct that turned the bullets’ kinetic energy into flashing – and harmless – light displays. They weren’t using regular bullets, however; each successful hit drained the shield’s power. Ariel drove another bolt through a third target, then grunted as she felt two impacts like hard slaps on her chest. She’d worn body armor, of course, but even the Kevlar-mithril blend of her vest was not proof against curse-enhanced lead traveling at supersonic speeds.

Ariel fell to her knees. Shock dulled the pain, but her hands found blood right below her ribs, where one of the bullets had punched through. The death-curses inscribed on the bullet began to do their dreadful job. And the two survivors took aim at her.

I guess we failed after all.

Something exploded between the two guards, flinging shards of some black substance in every direction. A couple of the deadly missiles sliced the air a couple inches above her head; the guards were slashed multiple times by the explosion’s strange shrapnel. They collapsed almost in unison, bearing gruesome though bloodless wounds.

She swayed but didn’t quite fall, not yet, so she saw the Madman’s latest creation walk out. It looked vaguely humanoid, but it was covered in – or made of – some black substance that made it look like a living shadow, broken only where two glowing green eyes regarded her. A two-barreled gun seemingly made of the same material turned towards at her.

That’s the ugliest Creature yet, she thought, somewhat unkindly.

Dying on her knees seemed rather undignified, but getting up wasn’t an option. She let herself fall instead.

Darkness enveloped her before her face hit the floor.

* * *

Don’t!

Will’s Johnny Umbra side seemed to be in full ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mode. It took everything he had to keep his alter ego from shooting the kneeling woman at the end of the corridor. The corpse-strewn corridor.

More undead guys had opened fire at him as soon as he blew the door open. A stray round had hit Lab Coat in the head. The sight of an actual dead person – as opposed to a dead-again reanimated body – paralyzed Will for several seconds. Amidst the gunshots, he heard something like short electric arcs, brief buzzing sounds ending in thunderclaps. There were more gunshots, but no more bullets went through the open doorway. He’d peeked out and saw the guards turning towards a woman; she threw a lightning bolt at one of them before she got hit and went down.

Johnny Umbra took over. The Death Dealer gun had two barrels; the one below fired bigger, deadlier rounds. He dropped one of those on the two guards; the blob of Umbral matter exploded like a grenade. It was only luck the woman didn’t get killed by the blast, and next Johnny almost shot her for no good reason.

Dude, watch the woman! Will shouted in his head while he wrestled for control over his own body. Or, he supposed, Johnny Umbra’s body. Either way, he wasn’t going to let that nut hurt someone who’d been clearly trying to help. Or at least trying to kill the people trying to kill Will, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for him since he’d woken up in Weird World.

He won the contest of wills – perhaps because Johnny didn’t think they were in immediate danger – and turned his attention towards the woman. The Shadow Armor and Death Dealer disappeared when he took over, along with the murderous urges. Being naked would have bothered him more if the only witness had been in better shape.

The woman was no longer kneeling, having faceplanted sometime between Will’s not shooting her and taking over his body. The safest thing would probably be to keep moving and just leave her be. But he wasn’t going to leave someone to die just because it might be safer or easier to do so. He might be a loser, but he’d never been an a-hole. He ran over to her, trying not to step on any body parts with his bare feet and mostly succeeding.

Will couldn’t tell much about her at a glance. She was wearing a military-looking outfit, except it was light blue, an odd color if camouflage was intended. A chest piece made of overlapping armor plates covered her torso; her hands were cupped over two wounds a couple inches above her waist. Blood was seeping slowly through her clenched fingers. He wasn’t sure it that was good or bad.

His Will side only had a dimly-remembered first aid course going for him. Keep pressure on the wound and wait for the EMTs was about the limit of his expertise. On the other hand, when he’d created Johnny Umbra, he’d made sure the character had a ‘heal’ power. The way his buddy Matt ran games, it was a good idea not to count on your party’s dedicated healer (who was usually a non-player character, since few players wanted the responsibility). Thinking his made-up character could do something to help in a real life-or-death situation was insane, but that was all he got.

Carefully, he let his inner Johnny out of the mental cage he’d thrown him into to keep him from killing the woman. He felt a burst of anger; from the looks of it, his character wanted to be in the rider’s seat. It took some coaxing, but he got his powers back. First thing he did was grow a new set of pants.

Healz please, he said. That wasn’t from his RPG games, but the old-school computer MMOs he played on the side.

Will reached towards the wound; the woman opened her eyes and recoiled from his touch.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m trying to help.”

“Waste of time,” she said between gasps, but let him place his right hand over the wound and closed her eyes again. She was dying. He had to help her.

The way the rule book explained it, Umbral Healing repaired damaged tissue by temporarily replacing the torn flesh and organs with shadow stuff, which held things together until natural healing did the rest. Will felt the shadowy ectoplasm flow out of the pores of his hand like cold, vaguely slimy sweat. His hands and forearms were soon covered in the stuff, and their outline became blurry, his fingers stretching and moving like tentacles instead of something with bones in it.

Next time I’m playing a vanilla fighter, Will told himself, even though he was increasingly sure that his gaming days were over.

The oozing darkness reached into the wound, stopping the bleeding and pushing its way into the torn flesh. He felt everything the shadow stuff touched: ‘gross’ couldn’t begin to describe it. No way he could pull away, though, not when he could also feel that the process was working. The Umbral Essence was spackling over the damage. There was more, though. Will felt a warning tingling on the back of his head. He didn’t recognize it, but his Johnny side did.

Magic.

Too late to claim he didn’t believe in magic, not after everything he’d experienced in the past couple minutes. He detected the magic in question: something meant to accelerate decay in living things. It was the sorcerous equivalent of flesh-eating bacteria. The tissue around the wound was beginning to necrotize, and unless he could figure out a way to stop it the woman was going to be dead in a few minutes.

The tendrils of darkness found the bullet fragments – they had broken apart in a dozen pieces after getting through her armor – and dragged them out. That seemed to help a little. The woman opened her eyes again and hissed through clenched teeth, in pain but alive.

“Thanks,” she said when she could talk again. “I got it from here.”

She closed her eyes again and mouthed a string of words in a raspy, guttural language that gave her voice an inhuman, reverberating quality. The kind of thing you could create with a sound studio or some decent smartphone apps, except this was happening live and for real. The tingling was back: she was doing something magical.

It wasn’t very impressive, other than the sound effects, but he felt something like electricity coursing through her body, and he removed his hand, leaving behind a shadow plug holding the wound closed. He was still holding the bullet fragments; he felt them quivering with dark magic, full of malice towards all. He tossed them away with a disgusted grunt.

“Looks like I might live after all,” the woman said, struggling to her feet.

Will stood up as well. He was glad he’d used the shadow stuff to fashion himself some pants for modesty’s sake. Being grossly overweight had made him rather body conscious. On the other hand, he was now in Johnny Umbra’s body, all wiry muscles and one percent body fat, not to mention long lustrous hair, a huge improvement over Will’s early male pattern baldness, which had begun to make its presence known shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday and was now painfully obvious, five years later.

“My name is Ariel Le Fay,” she said.

“Le Fay? As in Morgan Le Fay?”

She grimaced. “Something like that. But we have to hurry up. What do I call you?”

“Will, Will Verdi.”

“Follow me, Will, and maybe we can survive the night.”

Her words didn’t have quite the punch of Come with me if you want to live, but it was pretty convincing all the same.

He followed her.

Two

What is he?

The Creature had saved her life but also complicated everything. Questions could wait until they were out of the Madman’s manse, however. The Doorman had been their primary escape route – his ability to open short-ranged dimensional gates had made him nearly indispensable – but you never went somewhere dangerous with only one way out. The alternate route was risky and unpleasant, but it would get them out of the castle. That, of course, assumed things would work out the way they’d expected they would. Her dead teammates made a powerful argument that they would not.

They are gone.

The thought washed over her alongside a surge of sad weariness, and she nearly stumbled. Now that she’d had a few minutes without fighting or running towards a fight – a few minutes doing nothing more than tiring, boring manual work – everything hit her at once. She was also exhausted after burning off the last traces of the death curse the bullet had introduced into her system. Running on empty while mourning her friends made it hard not to lose all hope.

Fiona and Deadeye are gone. They had taken her in after she’d lost everything and gave her a home, a job, a purpose. Gone.

 “You okay?” the Creature – Will – asked her from below. They’d been climbing down a work ladder for what felt like an eternity, and she’d sent him ahead of her, on the grounds that she didn’t trust him not to fall on her. As it turned out, she’d almost lost her grip and dropped on top of him instead.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“I bet.”

“Fine enough. Keep climbing. We should be close to the bottom.”

“Yeah. About twenty feet down. I can see it.”

It was pitch dark in the narrow shaft, but he could see better than her, and she had an active Cat’s Eye hex enhancing her night vision to inhuman levels.

What is he? Wondering about the nature of the Creature was better than surrendering to despair. She’d scanned his aura after he’d fixed her wound using a technique she’d never encountered before. The black fluid he controlled was like nothing she’d heard of: highly energetic, and to her magical senses somewhat similar to ectoplasm, but with an elemental ‘charge,’ and not one of the traditional Five, either.

“End of the line,” Will said, interrupting her musings. “Or rock bottom, I suppose. And it stinks down here.”

“That’s because we’ve reached the sewers underneath the castle.”

“We were in a castle?”

“Yes. And due to the owner’s eccentricities, it needs a pretty big drainage system. Which we’re going to use to escape.”

She reached the bottom. Will was looking down the low-ceiling tunnel they’d arrived to. The smell was indeed not very pleasant. Much of the stench came from the noxious experiments the Madman conducted. Medical waste was pumped down here, where it went through an extensive thaumatic purifying process before being sent back into the river that would serve as their escape route.

“There’s a door, like an airlock door, about ten yards out,” Will said. “Is that where we’re going?”

“No. That leads to the water purification plant. Not a good place to be. The system would treat us as medical waste and remove all impurities. As in the thirty-odd percent of our bodies that isn’t water.”

“Okay, so we’re skipping that one.”

“Here, I’ll lead the way.”

He stepped aside and let her past. Wherever he came from, his culture wasn’t one of the deplorable majority that treated women as second-class citizens.

Speaks English. That only narrows it down to about sixty Primary Elsewhens. Late twentieth or twenty-first century in the Christian calendar would be my guess. Mostly because he sounds like I do.

Ariel had been born in one of those Elsewhens. And lived there long enough to know how nice life had been there, the world of cable TV, microwaves, mac and cheese, and Disneyland. She pitied the Creature; he wasn’t going to like where they were going. Not unless he was a crazed adrenaline junkie with delusions of grandeur.

In which case he’ll fit right in. Perhaps too well, given his power.

* * *

The narrow tunnel ended on a double airlock, with a small glass window one each door. Peering through it, all Will could see was flowing water, dark, with no hint of a surface anywhere. For all he knew, they were hundreds of feet underwater.

“That’s the Styx River,” Ariel told him. “Our way out, provided we can open it.”

The riveted metal door they were facing had some sort of electronic lock, but instead of a digital biometric screen or digital pad, it had a rotary dial, like the ones telephones had back in ancient times. And both door and locking mechanism were covered in mystical symbols that made the back of his head itch again. More magic.

I went to bed thinking all that crap was fiction.

Problem was, if this stuff was real and he didn’t accept it, he’d probably end up dead. And if all of this was a dream or a psychotic break, going along wouldn’t hurt. Hopefully.

Going along with the woman – Ariel – had seemed like a good idea at the time. Having nothing better to do other than watch her working on the rotary-dial control pad, he thought about it. She’d killed a bunch of zombie guards. So had he, back when Johnny Umbra had been in the driving seat. Will wasn’t big on killing people, not in real life. He accepted that violence was a necessary evil – he’d studied enough history to know that the people who claimed violence didn’t solve anything hadn’t been paying attention – but only when absolutely necessary. He didn’t know enough about the situation to know if that had been the case, back at the castle.

Castles and magic. This crap is bananas.

For all he knew, Ariel Le Fay – the only character he knew with that surname hadn’t been a good guy or girl, which didn’t help – was some sort of terrorist, and he’d become her unwitting accomplice after going crazy in that lab.

On the other hand, there’s the stone altar.

That hadn’t looked either medical or professional. More like the kind of ritualistic device meant to appease dark entities via the liberal application of blood sacrifices. The big drain in the middle of the room hadn’t been very reassuring, either. Most clinics don’t spill bodily fluids in enough quantity to require a drain in every exam room. That was the sort of thing you’d expect to find in slaughter houses.

“I could use your help,” Ariel said, stepping back from the lock. When he’d first seen her, he’d pegged her as someone in her mid- or late twenties, but she looked as if she’d aged a decade in the past few minutes. Tired, maybe in shock. Which wasn’t surprising, since she’d been shot, and with something a lot worse than cop-killer bullets or whatever.

“Sure. What can I do?”

“Breaking through the wards protecting the locking mechanism is going to take everything I have. Watch my back. I just picked up a dimensional surge above us. I think the Housekeeper has summoned Hounds.”

The way her tone capitalized the word ‘hounds’ made them sound way more ominous than normal.

I ain’t afraid of no dogs.

The stray thought and the bravado behind it were pure Johnny Umbra. Will might be inhabiting his gaming character’s body, but at best this was a time-share, not full possession. It was like having a split personality, even now that Johnny had gone dormant. He knew his alter ego was around, waiting for his turn at the wheel, especially if he thought danger was nearby.

Whoever or whatever the hounds and housekeeper were, Ariel was afraid of them, and she could throw lightning bolts like she was a fifteenth level magic user. That meant something bad was coming their way. Level Boss bad.

  He stood by the entrance to the airlock. At least their pursuers could only come from one direction: down the ladder he and Ariel and used, then through a straight corridor. A straight shot: he raised his left hand, and shadow stuff surrounded it, transforming it into the weapon Johnny Umbra had used to rack up twenty-three experience levels via the slaughter of thousands of assorted non-player characters in hundreds of random and not-so-random encounters.

Those were games. Rolling dice and waiting for the Game Master to tell you if you’d succeeded. This is real.

The Death Dealer felt real enough, though. He looked down the oversized barrel. The weight of the weapon comforted him somehow. This wasn’t a toy, or a cosplay prop. This would kill people. Had killed the reanimated dead, back in the weird lab room-sacrificial altar combination where he’d woken up after dying. Or thinking he’d died. Then again, maybe he was dead and this was where the dead went, except for the life of him he couldn’t tell if this was Heaven or Hell.

Nothing. No hound dogs or angry chambermaids. Behind him, he could hear weird sounds, like chiming bells mixed in with the buzzing of insects and metal gears grinding together. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a bunch of semi-transparent things floating around the airlock. Holograms, maybe. Spirals of light with glowing sigils around them spun in the air and made the noises he’d noticed. The rotary dial began to move by itself. Ariel’s eyes were tightly closed, she was biting her lower lip, and her skin had gained a fluorescent quality, as if someone was shining a black light over it.

Will turned back to the entrance. Maybe she’d be done before anybody showed up. That would be nice. Brave thoughts aside, he wasn’t sure if he could shoot somebody, even a dog, not in cold blood. Make that especially a dog, some poor critter who didn’t know any better. Shooting zombie guards wasn’t so bad, although for all he knew the reanimated bodies weren’t mindless and had great un-lives until he'd casually snuffed them. He felt terrible about Lab Coat Dude, who he’d been planning to let go before his own people shot him. Would he kill some normal human who was probably working as a minion to feed his family? No way.

A shimmering halfway down the corridor interrupted his thinking. It looked like a heat haze, until it grew into a hole hanging in thin air. Something rushed out of it, coming right at him. And it was no dog, unless it came from Tindalos, Hades or Hell itself.

What Will saw in the split second before he cut loose with Death Dealer was something with many legs that appeared and disappeared from its vapor-like outline, a thing of smoke and mirages, ever-shifting, like a nightmare shaped by the mind of a lunatic. He would never be able to describe it, or understand anything about the monster, other than the fact it lived only to kill. It didn’t run but rolled or flowed towards him. The only sound it made was a low hiss like the sound of a distant ocean. The only shapes he could focus on were a pair of red glowing eyes and a multitude of rusty razor teeth. It covered two thirds of the distance between it and him before he reacted. Or rather, his Johnny side did.

Something that mind-bendingly bizarre and deadly deserved both barrels of the Death Dealer, and it got them.

He felt the recoil run all the way up his arm and shoulder, but somehow managed to keep the gun on target as if sent a good twenty-odd shadow bullets and two big Umbral slugs at the Hound. Half a dozen shots missed and blew neat inch-wide holes on the wall at the other end of the corridor. The rest hit their mark. The slugs tore huge holes through the Hound’s cloud-like shape; the smaller bullets flared up and exploded on contact like so many chunks of pure sodium dipped in water. The hazy figure was briefly illuminated by multiple explosions, and Will caught a glimpse of something like a centipede, if the centipede’s legs had been borrowed from a dozen different kinds of spider and then given tentacle fingers, not to mention a body that was parts endless void and part ravening mouths mounted on the back of a Komodo dragon, except uglier. It lasted less than a second, but he was positive he’d be seeing that in nightmares for the rest of his life.

The Hound disappeared. Dead or sent back to whatever hellhole it called home. Either way suited him fine. All that remained were a few puffs of smoke, which drifted into nothingness a couple of feet away from him. That’s how close he’d been to finding out if its bite was worse than its hissing bark.

Will lowered the shadow blaster. He felt shaky and light-headed, but he hadn’t run, fainted, or lost control of his bowels, so he was way ahead of where he’d have expected to be under the circumstances.

“Take your time,” he called over his shoulder. “I can do this all night.”

* * *

What is he? Ariel wondered again as she finished dismantling the ward that stood between them and safety.

An Incarnate, for one: a being given form through the massive expenditure of magic, relying on a legend or archetype as a mold that was then made flesh. An ensouled one: she’d noticed that with a quick look at his aura, shortly after he’d healed her. But a recently awoken Incarnate shouldn’t have the power to handle even a Hound so easily. Or at all, for that matter. The only exceptions were entities created from mythical or legendary figures, their fictional powers enhanced by the belief of millions of human souls. Whatever Will was, it was something different. Ariel had hoped the Hound would hesitate before harming its master’s property, which might have bought her enough time to open the airlock and try her meager best to banish the entity before it tore her to shreds. Instead, Will had destroyed it with nearly effortless ease.

Dangerous. And rather cocky.

“If the Housekeeper has the time, she’ll send an entire pack next time,” she told him before his head got too big for his shoulders.

“Um. How many in a pack?”

“Six. Five now.”

“Are you done yet?”

“Almost.”

It took her a handful of tense seconds before the airlock finally cycled. Sending a pack their way should take quite a bit longer than it would take for them to escape, but best not to tempt fate. Especially since the Housekeeper might instead choose to come herself instead.

“Let’s go.”

He followed her in and the outer door closed. “How good are you at holding your breath?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said, sounding a lot less sure of himself. “No clue. Not sure if this body even needs oxygen to survive.”

Curiouser and curiouser. “Just in case, take this.” 

She handed him a spare diving collar. The dubious expression in his face told her he’d never seen anything like it before. At first glance, the dull metal circlet, wide enough to fit over someone’s head, didn’t seem to have anything to do with surviving underwater, so she couldn’t blame him.

“Um, what do I do with this?”

“Put it around your neck. It will adjust to fit.”

“Okay,” he said. He complied and winced when the circlet tightened around his throat. “Never liked wearing ties. Freaking wage-slave nooses. Although this feels more like a gimp collar, not that I’ve ever worn one.”

“This is neither of those things,” she told him, putting on her own. As far as thauma-tech went, the collars were a tried-and-true design, and these models were designed to resist counter-magic and electromagnetic pulses. “Our main worry will be to stay together after we go into the river; the current is rather strong.”

“My Swim skill is maxed out,” he said. “Or at least, my character’s Swim skill is.”

She didn’t have time to parse the nonsensical words. “Never mind. I’ll tether us together.”

The climbing line she kept in a pouch on her belt would do. Never go on a caper without at least a hundred feet of rope. Fiona had drilled that lesson into her over the past three years, and Ariel had taken it to heart. In many ways, it hadn’t been very different from studying at the Universita Arcana, although most students and faculty would vehemently deny any similarities between their renowned institution and the Regulators, who were considered unsavory mercenaries at best and thinly-disguised criminals at worst.

“Tie this around your waist.”

Will did so. At first, he fumbled with the line, as if he didn’t know how to tie a proper knot, but a second later he seemed to remember and secured the line over the Umbral armor he’d grown over his legs and lower torso. There are two minds inside that head of his, she realized, hoping she might live long enough to unravel the Creature’s mystery.

“The collars will go active as soon as you come in contact with water,” she explained.

“Okay.” He peered out the viewing slit on the outer door, and the dark waters beyond. “I never believed in magic, you know. Still kinda don’t.”

“That’s normal. You grew up in a low-thauma world. So did I, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, okay.”

“I’ll explain things later.” Assuming we survive the next half hour or so.

“Sure.”

Ariel pulled the lever and the outer airlock door began to open. Water poured in.

* * *

As soon as water reached up to their ankles, a translucent yellow bubble appeared around Will’s head, generated by the metal collar Ariel had handed him. She had one as well.

I guess the magic necklace will also provide us with oxygen, he thought as the water reached up to his neck. Seconds later, he was completely submerged, but the bubble kept his head dry. Neat.

Ariel gestured at him to follow her and swam out. He did as ordered, although his Johnny-self wanted to be out in front. Whatever this body of water was, it was deep and dark. He couldn’t see the top or bottom, or much of anything beyond the yellow bubble around Ariel’s head. Will hoped she knew where they were going. She was swimming like she did, and he did his best to follow, trying to keep the line between them slack. As it turned out, his new body did have a high Swim skill.

I have all of Johnny Umbra’s abilities, so I should see in the dark, too. He had done so before, but only when he grew shadow stuff over his eyes. He did so, and the darkness became a mix of red hues, near transparent for water, and darker for solid shapes. Will saw the bottom, a good sixty or seventy feet down. The remains of a sunken ship were below them, rotted away with age.

And, coming from inside its hull, long, serpentine forms, larger than a man. Three of them, eel-like, and Will’s shadow-vision let him see their big beady eyes and tooth-filled maws, easily large enough to tear a non-survivable chunk of flesh out of someone. Each had a second head grafted on top of their original skull: a monkey’s head. Either this entire world had a fetish for stitching body parts together, or those critters came from the castle’s lab.

Oh, crap.

He tugged on the line to get Ariel’s attention and pointed at the fast-approaching critters. Her eyes widened when she spotted them.

Will turned back to the predators. They’d spread out, one heading straight for him while the other two circled around to hit them from the sides. Shadow armor spread out to cover him from head to toe in the time it took him to signal Ariel.

The river monster was almost on top of him. Its regular head was as big as a horse’s. He summoned the Death Dealer and opened fire, barely fighting off a surge of panic that would only get him killed.

The eel head – and the monkey one on top – broke apart under multiple hits. Momentum carried the huge body into Will, and the impact panicked him. He was flailing around in blind terror when the second one bit down on his arm. He felt a crushing pressure followed by sharp pain, and began screaming into his bubble helmet.  

Johnny Umbra took over, shouldering Will’s mind aside. He became a spectator in his own body once again.

He watched himself calmly bring the Death Dealer under the monster’s jaws as it kept chewing on his right arm. At point blank-range, the explosion beheaded the creature. Its body began to drift away as its jaws clenched down for one agonizing second before going slack and letting him go. The monkey head glared at him as the undead fish floated away.

Minor damage, Will heard in his mind. Johnny’s voice was eerily calm. Its fangs barely got through the armor. We’ll be fine.

The line securing him and Ariel together tugged at him. Will reclaimed control over his body and twisted around to see what he could do to help.

He didn’t have to do anything. The last river monster was limply floating away. There were no visible injuries on it, but it was clearly dead. Whoever – whatever – Ariel was, she could take care of herself. She gave him a thumbs up sign.

Johnny should have tried to help as soon as he was done with the second eel, but instead had checked on his injuries first. That wasn’t how he’d envisioned the character, or played him. Sure, many roleplayers behaved like psychopathic murder-hobos, but that wasn’t how he rolled, and the idea that he was time-sharing his body with someone like that scared him more than being nearly killed by three giant water snakes. He didn’t know what to do about it, though.

Apparently unfazed by the encounter, Ariel pointed towards the surface and went back to swimming. He followed.