Austin Grossman - You

The four crowded awkwardly into the skate shop.

“What are we doing here?” Brennan said, gazing around at racks of boards and skatewear.

“I think it’s important,” whispered Leira. “I think we’re here for a reason.”

Lorac scowled. “This is humiliating.”

“Shred regular or goofy-foot?” asked the teenager behind the counter.

“Regular?” Brennan said uncertainly. Leira and Prendar shrugged—regular would be fine. After an agonizing pause, Lorac replied, “Goofy.”

The skate shop attendant showed them an array of possible T-shirts. Lorac chose a black one. He was a necromancer, after all.

They found themselves in the parking lot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary.

“Skate!” cried the arch-lich. “Skate!”

Brennan scanned the others’ faces grimly. “Aye. We will skate.”

They learned to ollie and nollie and heelflip and air it out and, yes, grind. Prendar kept an eye out for cop cars while Leira tentatively worked out half-pipe moves in a concrete spillway to a grunge-and-speed-metal sound track. Lorac had promise as a tech skateboarder; Brennan went in for vert. When perfected, his double-handed Decapitation-Vacation 360-degree grab raked in a huge bonus.

They improved. They got licensing deals and won competitions. And there really were moments when GtA-L came mind-bendingly close to working. Prendar gliding through the suburban gloom, elf ears glimpsed for a moment under a streetlight, then just a shadow as he rounded the corner of a Safeway and disappeared. Lorac closed his eyes a moment as he rolled down the long hill toward downtown, felt the sun on his face, set aside, for the time being, his long years of study, the price of his arcane knowledge, the doom waiting for him. He ollied to grind the curb, nollied into a 360 to land clean. He grinned.

When Leira managed a handplant on the edge of an abandoned public pool to the cranked-up sound of surfpunk guitar, it almost made sense of the insanity, her body extended almost vertically in the last light of day, her arm straight on the lip, supporting her body, her back arched against the sunset, orange light glinting liquid off the centuries-old katana strapped to her back and pouring over the grass that was poking through the concrete, over the trash piled against a sagging chain-link fence.

“Skate! Skate, or taste the wrath of the arch-lich!”

That night as I was falling asleep I noticed a light through the crack under the cheap door dividing my apartment’s two rooms. At first I thought the refrigerator door hadn’t closed, but when I looked, I found that the Four Heroes of Endoria had showed up to visit.

It was unexpected, and I wasn’t set up for company; in fact, I had exactly one card table and one folding chair, which Lorac the wizard had claimed. They were a striking quartet, larger than life, angular in the way of computer models.

Their glowing, pixelated forms took up a surprising amount of room. Brennan was nearly seven feet tall, and his broad shoulders seemed to swallow up the entire kitchen.

“What are you doing in my kitchen?” I asked them.

“My friend, the time has come to embark on our quest,” he said in the smooth baritone of the semiprofessional voice actor who recorded his dialogue.

I guessed, sure, we were friends, in a way.

“You are the chosen one,” said Princess Leira, who leaned against the sink. She had the requisite Amazonian figure, full red lips, and jet black hair. She had bright eyes and a mouth that drooped at the corners, which gave her smile an appealing, sheepish quality. She wore a traveling cloak, which was a relief; some of her costumes were pretty revealing.

“Chosen for what? What quest?” I asked. “I don’t understand. Am I supposed to find something?” We were always finding things in games. Rings, books, crowns.

“You’re the one we need,” said Prendar the thief, a tall, pale half elf with sandy red hair and black eyes. “A man of courage and strength, but also guile.”

I’d never seen an elf up close before. From a distance they were graceful, elegant beings, but from a few feet away Prendar was vibrantly inhuman. You’d think an elf would have a cute snub nose, but his was long and beaky. Maybe it was his human father’s. I’d never heard the word guile used in a conversation, either.

“Russell, we entreat your help,” intoned the magus. “Our worlds are in great danger, and only you can save them.” His cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread, Lorac spoke with a theatrical old-guy quaver. He was an Arabian Nights character, an exotic older man with a Levantine cast, a thin, crooked nose, and a neatly trimmed beard. His staff was too long, and he brushed the dusty lighting fixture with it. “Sorry.”

“But you’re the Heroes,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense for you to talk to humans.”

“We’re all in the game, Russell,” Leira said. “We’re characters, but you’re the player. We need you.”

“A great danger is coming,” said Brennan. “Greater than any we have ever faced.”

“Beware Adric! Beware the grieving blade!” Leira whispered breathlessly.

“Just play the game, asshole,” Prendar snapped, and drew on a cigarette.

“Wait… what game?” I said. “ Realms VI ? VII ?”

“The Ultimate Game,” sing-songed Lorac. He began to laugh. They must have gotten a really good voice actor. Looking closer, I saw that his staff had a small animal skull on the end of it. It might have been a ferret’s. The ferret’s eyes glowed.

I fell asleep again, and this time dreamed I was still at work but there was an extra office marked Secret Projects, and I went in and found Simon there where he’d been all along and he told me how he’d built the Ultimate Game and it was just a golden ring, and he said he’d already spoken the wish and tomorrow the five of us would wake up and be fantasy adventurers together like I’d always wanted. I’d get to be the elf. I started crying right then and there, I just thought, what a relief, because I remembered now how much I wanted it. How had I forgotten that?

Hey, Matt, are there any magic swords in the Realms universe?” I asked.

There was no reason for preamble; Matt got thrown these questions. Black Arts didn’t have an archivist. The closest we had was Matt. He did the research to find out what make of Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945, and what breed of horse a Knight Templar might have ridden. He was consistently cheerful, and he was Black Arts’ biggest fan. He’d read every comic book and novel adaptation and was an authority on the past and future histories of the Black Arts multiverse. Although for all I knew, he made up the answers on the spot.

“Oh! Well.” Matt thought a moment, then drew a breath. “I mean, there’s the usual ones, plus one, plus two, that kind of thing. There’s flaming swords, ice swords, vorpal. Silver, not really magic, but it interacts with those systems. There’s Sunshard, pluses against undead. Daemonsbane—obviously—a bunch of other… banes, giants, and stuff. You can make one out of star metal if you have the right equipment, that’s pretty good. There was a place you could find a vibro-sword from Solar Empires, that was just in as a joke. And, well, there’s the Rainbow Blade, has a bunch of different effects.”

I was impressed, by his humility, if nothing else. He always talked as if he were ticking off the obvious points everyone knew.

“Are there any evil swords?”

“Evil… swords…. Nothing comes to mind, not swords, anyway. Staff of the Ancients turned out evil, obviously. The DireSpear. At high level, antipaladins manifest burning swords as a class attribute. I don’t think the blades themselves are aligned, but I can check.”