Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 6

Check.

Darts of Moderate Pain.

Check.

Dagger of Nothing in Particular.

Check.

Chain mail's one thing, and everyone knows you can never really have enough Heal Wounds, or Elixir of Potency, but yeah, it's getting to the point where we need to make some changes.

Fjoork and Rostejn cook a meal together without saying a word. Afterward, we all pa.s.s around a wineskin and look up at the night sky.

Byr says, "Have you ever wanted to be something else?"

I want so bad to say yes. To tell them, I don't want to be the Hero.

"Probably a bard, I guess," Rostejn says. "I'm told I have a good singing voice."

"No," Byr says. "Not a different cla.s.s. What if there were no cla.s.ses? What if there were something, other than ranger or thief, paladin or mage? Something else. What if you could be anything?"

Fjoork says, "I'd change my name to something cool. Like Vengor, or Caldor. Or Steve. I mean, why do we all have to have weird names? Does that really help our quest?"

The fire burns down and the group drifts off to sleep.

I watch them all snoring, Trin the loudest. She's a single mother. Who is taking care of her kid at home? I don't even know. I am in love with her, and I don't even know who takes care of her kid.

Byr wakes up and catches me staring at Trin.

"She loves you, you know."

"Did she actually say that?" I ask her.

"Yeah," Byr says, throwing a stick into the fire. "But she thinks you'd be a s.h.i.tty dad."

Eventually, I drift off into a restless sleep of my own. I dream the ancient dream, the immense dream of the ancients, I am looking out across the gray timeless expanse of Evermoor, having the greatest of all dreams, until just before dawn, when I wake to the sound of Rostejn relieving himself in the wooded area.

In the morning we set out for Argoq. Fjoork, who always seems to have a sense of these things, says he knows a guy who knows an elf who says to take the long way around, steering clear of the Lake of Sensual Pleasures. The group sort of grumbles, but everyone knows they have to stay focused on the mission, relentlessly scrolling toward the right.

We stop into a shop run by an old druid friend of Trin's. Trin greets him with a peck on the cheek. Seeing her kiss him slays me. I need to make a small saving throw just to avoid getting dizzy.

The druid shows off his new wares. Boots of speed, harp of discord, bag of merry diversion. The usual clatter thrown off by the steady flow of questers along the Silvan Route.

"How much," asks Trin, "for that Ring of Regeneration?"

"Fifty," the shopkeeper says, "but for you, twenty-five."

I fish coins out of my pouch and drop them in the keeper's hand. He gives me the ring, which I nonchalantly pa.s.s over to Trin, trying to be cool about it.

Byr raises her eyebrows at Fjoork, as in, hey, get a load of Grenner the Romantic over here.

Trin refuses it. "You need this a lot more than I do," she says.

I take it back, pretending not to care, and notice that Byr is suppressing a smile. OMG: how have I never realized this before? Byr is in love with Trin. She can barely contain herself.

I'm staring at Byr who is staring at Trin who is trying to pretend that this triangle of unrequited staring is not happening. Lucky for me, Rostejn breaks up the tension.

"Check this out," he says, holding up a vial of something yellow and bubbly.

"Oil of Reciprocated Feelings," the shopkeeper says.

"We'll take two," Rostejn says, flinging the coins onto the counter. I shoot him a look.

"What?" he says. "You never know when this might come in handy. You just never know."

It is a half moon later when Krugnor joins our group. We'd spent several days slashing through wave after wave of dumb meat, orcs and ogres. Toward the end, we were barely talking to one another, just carving up bodies, leaving them in piles. Green flesh hacked up everywhere.

Krugnor isn't any of the cla.s.sic types. Krugnor is special, and everyone can see it right away.

It used to be there were only four kinds of people: fighters, mages, clerics, and thieves. What someone did for a living said something about who they were, what they thought of themselves, how they approached the world: strength, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.

Krugnor, on the other hand, is part of the new generation.

"I'm a warrior-mystic," he says. That's how he introduces himself, when we find him by a babbling brook, doing yoga. "But I'm really not into labels. We're all just people, you know?"

I try to roll my eyes at Trin, but she's not looking at me. She likes him. I can tell right away. I look over at Byr, to see if she's noticing this, but even she seems to be in some kind of trance.

Even my own disciple is smitten. "We need that guy," Fjoork says.

So I put it to a vote.

Trin votes yes, tries to not look excited.

"He'll help with hit points," Byr says. "We could take on a thousand-ogre wave, if we had to. Brute-force our way through. Just plain outslug the monsters."

Rostejn votes yes, too, although I get the sense that he just wants to get at some of the hardware Krugnor is toting in his equipment sack.

And Fjoork looks head over heels for the new guy already.

No need for me to even weigh in.

Krugnor joins the group.

"Shall we make it official?" he asks.

I say, uh, sure, what does he have in mind?

"Stare into one another's souls, of course," he says. "Isn't that how you guys do it?"

I say, yeah, sure, okay.

Krugnor starts with Trin, big surprise, takes her head in his large, callused hands. They lock eyes and she seems to melt.

"So that's what a hero looks like," Byr says.

I tell Byr to shut up.

Each member of the group gets their own turn. When it comes to me, I take a pa.s.s, but Krugnor's not having any of it.

"If we are going to be brothers-in-arms," he says, "we will need to touch souls."

I tell him I'm getting over a cold.

"It was really a nasty bug. For your own good."

"Okay," he says. "But don't think you're off the hook."

After he's done with all the soul-staring, Krugnor asks me for a copy of the battle plan. I say, uh, yeah, I'll get that right to you.

It is foretold that there will be two hundred fifty-five battles in our path to destiny.

In the Final Battle, Battle 256, we will face the final boss.

Sounds pretty exciting.

And it was, for a while.

Today is Battle 253.

I think.

Hard to tell, though.

To be honest, epic battles of good and evil, they're pretty epic, but after about the first two hundred, they all start to kind of blur together.

Before setting out to the battlefield, we pray to our G.o.d, Fred. He's a minor deity, but sort of an up-and-comer. At least that's what he tells us.

We get a lot of s.h.i.t from other groups for worshipping him, but he's really Byr's deity. Now that I think about it, she's partly responsible for this mess we're in. Before we became acolytes of Fred, we all kind of did our own thing. And we definitely never talked about it, it was just sort of no one else's business who or what you worshipped or sacrificed poultry for, so long as you pulled your weight and your deity wasn't some imp who was going to screw with everyone or make us give up gold coins for safe pa.s.sage or cause us to suffer ordeals. But then Byr went away to the north over summer vacation and when she came back she had that look like someone had cast Slightly Crazy on her, and she was all Fred this, Fred that, she couldn't stop talking about the guy, and we were all like, okay, cool, but you're not going to go all druid on us, are you?

"Fred," Byr prays, "O Sort-of-Omnipotent One, protect us today. Keep us safe, body and soul. Let us fight without fear, and vanquish our enemies."

"Or at least let us not get our a.s.ses kicked like last time," Rostejn adds.

"G.o.ddammit, Rostejn," Byr says.

"No, no, fair enough," Fred says, from wherever he is. We can't see him but his voice booms from on high. "I have to apologize for not doing such a great job the last few moons. I have gotten all of your prayers. Honestly, I've just been going through kind of a weird time."

Byr rea.s.sures Fred. "You're fine. Seriously. You know we love you," she says, and everyone murmurs in agreement, but it's not the most rea.s.suring thing to realize that the G.o.d you worship actually just wants you to believe in him.

Krugnor turns out to be an absolute beast on the battlefield. Not that anyone is surprised. He's ripped.

"Has to be at least Sixteen Strength," Rostejn says, watching him tear through some bad elves.

Byr's like, "Nuh uh. Seventeen, man. Easy."

Trin isn't even fighting, she's just standing there staring at the dude's muscles while he brandishes his +3 broadsword. I'm not even sure I could pick that thing up.

"Does he really have to fight with his shirt off?" I ask, but no one's listening. He flexes a lot, even when it doesn't seem necessary, and he can do that back-and-forth thing with his pecs. Ugh, look at him, just standing there in the river as it rushes by and splashes on his hardened body.

Even Fjoork gets in on the love fest.

"Did you see what he did to that kobold?" he says. "Split him clean in half, one-handed, with his short sword."

If I didn't know better, I'd think Krugnor had cast Infatuation on everyone. The guy is a totally cheeseball beefcake brooding sulking warrior type. Such a cliche. Although, I have to admit, I do feel safer with him out there in front.

Maybe that's what a hero looks like.

And for the first time since the quest began, I start to feel a little wobbly, as if my POV isn't so stable. As if the center of things is moving. As if the frame is unsure of who to follow, whose story it is. As if, maybe, I'm not so destined for my destiny after all.

We cross the highlands and come to a ridge, on the other side of which is the Valley of Aaaa.

"I've always wondered how that's p.r.o.nounced," Rostejn says.

Byr says a prayer to Fred as we begin our descent into the valley. We trudge through the Bog of Uncertainty. Trin reminds everyone to be careful of what we eat or even look at. Last time we were in the bog, Rostejn fell under the sphere of influence of a powerful mage in the Abjuration school and almost got everyone turned into black pudding.

Now we're in a dead zone for magic. Alteration prevails on one side, and Necromancy on the other. Neither one can practice in the other's region, as they are mutually forbidden schools. We walk the tightrope in between, maneuvering carefully, taking the narrow path, as shown on our scrolling map.

Krugnor follows my lead. Everyone else does, too. I try not to look too happy about it.

At one point we encounter some halflings, a quiet, intelligent people who live around these parts. One of their young has disappeared. The boy's mother is sobbing. Trin goes to comfort her. The mother explains that her son had fallen asleep on what he thought was a nice soft pile of leaves.

"Shambling mound," Byr says. The mother looks at us, unsure.

"A creature that looks like a heap of rotting vegetation," Byr explains. "But is actually a flesh eater."

"Yuck," Rostejn says. "That is nasty."

Byr shoots Rostejn a look like real nice, idiot, and the mother starts her crying again, even harder this time, and everyone is looking at me to do something, so without a word I leap straight into the mound, diving into the creature's body to grab the halfling kid, and then hacking my way out with a scythe. Which is messy, to say the least, and costs me about eight hit points, but in doing so, I level up. Everyone congratulates me, and I'm feeling pretty good. Even Trin looks impressed, and for a moment it doesn't seem so impossible that she might be in love with me after all.

The good feeling doesn't last long, though. The next battle is Battle 254 and we just aren't quite ready for this kind of onslaught yet, not tactically, not in terms of speed or weapons or as a team. Byr nearly dies, Rostejn nearly dies. Even my health dips down into the red zone.

I start to flicker in and out, a warning that my existence on this plane is in danger.

I know what I should do, but I can't bring myself to do it.

Another hit, direct to my torso, and that's it, my health is critical. My soul starts to tug itself out of its mortal coil, and my POV is floating up toward the clouds. I watch my body down there, fighting without spirit.

Fred help us, I cry out, in a moment of desperation.