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  Five ice spiders. Exactly one per party member—almost as if some jackass had planned it that way. In his notes, Gary had named them frost mites and forced himself to keep that name in mind. It could be the key to him keeping stats straight.

  Name: Frost Mite Hit Points: 12 Damage: 1d3+1

  Despite their mystic appearance, they didn’t have any special properties besides a vulnerability to fire, which none of Gary’s companions could exploit. But at 12 HP each, Gary and his friends seemed like the favorites.

  The ice of the frost mites held no chill like the sensation that pierced Gary’s heart in that moment of terrible realization.

  How many hit points do I have?

  In that instant, he hated himself. Not the Gary in Pellar, traipsing about in frost-mite-infested woods, but rather the Gary Burns who’d decided to withhold the running count of hit points from his players to keep them from being cheesy and min-maxy about optimizing healing potions, calculating who could afford to take a fifty-foot plummet without risk of dying, and a million other immersion-breaking exploits.

  Right then, he’d have happily relived Marty’s race between a ring of regeneration and a camp fire just to know how many hit points he’d gotten when hitting level 2.

  He did quick math.

  First level: max hit points. The Path of Music handed those out 1d6 at a time. So, with his -1 from low Constitution, he’d started off with just 5. Add in another 1d6-1, minimum of 1, and he was looking at anywhere from 6 to 10 hit points.

  Gary Burns, level 2 bard on the Path of Music, was wimpier than these frost mites.

  This panic attack occupied the turn Gary would otherwise have spent contributing to the fighting between Zeeto and Braeleigh and the frost mites. When his turn did come around, cold fingers gripped the neck of a lute.

  Strumming a weak chord progression on the still unfamiliar strings, he sang, “Oh, the weather up north is frightful. Boy, some fire would be delightful. But since we’ve no fire to show… Use a sword! Use a mace! Use a bow!”

  Inspire: +2 To Hit

  “Nice little ditty,” Zeeto shouted as he dodged aside and sank his dagger into the spongy, squishy flesh of a frost mite’s thorax. “But you left out the best weapon.”

  Rather than break the bonus from his song, Gary replied indirectly. “The monsters are slowly dying. And the halfling’s pride is crying. But as long as you lay them low… Use a sword! Use a mace! Use a bow!”

  Despite being the object of the jest, Zeeto chuckled as he fought.

  As Beldrak formed up as part of the defensive front against the creatures, Sira healed Braeleigh of a scratch she’d taken earlier in the battle. Keeping up his song as he kept well clear of the fray, Gary continued making up alternate lyrics as he went along.

  While Gary roamed the rear flank, well beyond harm’s reach, the other four members of the party wore down the frost mites and healed up afterward.

  Zeeto came Gary’s way after getting his cuts and scratches magically healed. “So, just between you, me, and the pine trees, you planning on using that letter opener sheathed at your hip one of these days?”

  “In an ideal world, no,” Gary replied as he slung his lute onto his back. “My best contribution is by inspiring you fine boys and girls to reach greater heights. Once the math works out that my noodle arms and pointed stick add more value than my singing voice, I’ll draw steel.”

  “Math, huh?” Zeeto said with a raised eyebrow and crossed arms that concealed daggers up their sleeves. “Ever think maybe that math might come out a little more on the stabby side if you weren’t a complete pile of pig vomit?”

  “But I am.”

  Zeeto turned to the others and hooked a thumb in Gary’s direction. “You see? This is why there are still bards in the world. This guy does nothing but flick the backs of my ears all fight, doesn’t get so much as a hangnail or even pull out a weapon, and I’m still willing to cut him a share of the loot. I’d skip a meal if someone could explain exactly why, though.”

  “Just this once,” Gary said somberly. “I’ll give you my share of the loot.”

  Braeleigh and Sira were busy checking the creatures’ corpses.

  Beldrak came over and dropped a gauntleted hand on Gary’s shoulder like a hammer blow. “Thy heart o’erflows with charity. A fine companion art thee.”

  It came as no surprise that there was no loot on the frost mites. Oh, maybe as a player, there could have been some vain hope of gold in the creatures’ stomachs, devoured along with a less-fortunate adventurer at an earlier meal. Or perhaps one could have been forgiven for thinking that these otherworldly beasts might be useful to alchemists in whole or part.

  Alas.

  Gary had tried to limit the incentives for amateur taxidermy mid-adventure when populating his monster field guide. While a few dumb creatures might have collected shiny objects with magpie compulsion, only intelligent adversaries were likely to hoard useful treasure.

  Zeeto didn’t speak to Gary the rest of the afternoon.

  It was evening by the time Braeleigh called their halt. By the reckoning of Gary’s stomach, it wasn’t dinnertime just yet—and it didn’t help knowing that dinner was a lunch redux.

  “Someone’s been here,” Braeleigh informed them in a whisper that carried on the cold air.

  The elven ranger pointed out the holes jabbed by tent stakes into the frozen soil, the ash-black where a fire had been set. It might have been Gary’s imagination, but his nose insisted that a lingering whiff of bacon floated in the vicinity.

  “Pray tell, who hast visited this vale ‘ere our arrival. Can aught be gleaned from these mean environs?” Beldrak asked. Gary wasn’t even positive some of those were words.

  “Also, can you tell who’s been here?” Zeeto asked.

  Sira glanced around nervously. “If they didn’t want to be here any longer, perhaps we should move on as well.”

  “Shh!” Braeleigh hissed past a finger at her lips. She crouched low and waddled around the campsite. Her hand brushed aside fallen pine needles to expose the ground below. She pinched a bit of campfire ash between her fingers. Placing an ear against the ground, she listened.

  “So?” Gary asked, unable to contain himself in the role of observer. He wanted to scream, “It’s an elf who camped here.” Her kind were few and scattered. This was a chance at a side quest to connect with a long-lost member of her ravaged race. “What can you tell?”

  Braeleigh’s shoulders rose and fell in resignation. “Nothing. With the frozen turf, I mistook this site for recently occupied. But these signs could be weeks or even months old.”

  Gathering up her gear, Braeleigh started off on their original heading. “Keep up the pace, everyone. Sorry for the delay. Nothing to do but make up the time. Chop chop!”

  Last to follow was Gary. He wanted to rush up, grab Braeleigh by the shoulder and scream that there was a renown warrior living off the land just to the east of here, a nomad for whom the forest was a grocery store, not a hazard. The target roll for discovering even the most basic facts around the site were so low that…

  Gary fell into step at the back of the group. He knew what must have happened.

  Braeleigh had rolled a 1.

  There was no overcoming that.

  9

  Long hours and short breath gave a guy a lot of time to think. While certain minor XP bonuses could sneak up on him, Gary knew that those frost mites were 125 a pop. He cross-referenced his character sheet, finding that the 625 from those spiders, split five ways, had been the only ones he’d earned since leaving Durrotek.

  But as he lagged at the rear of the formation, falling behind their nominal rear guard, Beldrak, Gary had more on his mind than character arithmetic.

  This world hadn’t gone away, and this was day three—or was it four?—of this adventure. He was already losing track without a cell phone to cross-reference. The gnawing uncertainty of how or why or where this was all happening compounded by the day.

 
A brief blackout seemed impossible. This dream was too lucid, too cogent to be a moment that only felt like longer. Sudden nearness to death was said to flash your life before your eyes, not some all new life based on a game setting. And no blow to the head caused cooking side quests that didn’t even give XP.

  The stuff in that toy of Zane’s could well have been hallucinogenic. Horror stories floated circles around social media about zombie drugs and plant extracts that could destroy your mind with a single exposure. For all Gary knew, he was sitting up in a hospital bed as a nurse spoon fed him applesauce.

  Then again, if that were the case, he was glad to be where he was—er, wasn’t.

  Last but not least, there was the good old-fashioned coma. There were entire daytime soaps about coma dreams. Sure, maybe the Dr. Phil crowd liked their alternate realities filled with eye-patch-wearing, evil race car driver twin brother love triangles. Why wouldn’t a geek-to-the-core like Gary get a homebrew RPG?

  d20: 15 + (CON -1) = 14

  He knew as he plodded along that he’d just passed another endurance check. It would have been a hit to his tattered pride, but he’d have preferred collapsing to the frigid forest floor and forcing the party to carry him. Yet in a streak he knew he’d pay for later, Gary was on a string of five straight passes.

  “Almost there!” Braeleigh shouted from the head of the line, a good hundred feet ahead. She knelt and spoke with Caspian. “Just a short climb!”

  The wolf pup bounded to the back of the line, looking a little bigger than he had on their first quest down in the sewer. Just as he caught himself marveling at how quickly the little scamp was growing, Gary realized that he’d leveled up along with his master. No longer a little puff of fur and a lolling tongue, he was the size of a typical house cat.

  It was all adorable until Caspian nipped at Gary’s ankles.

  “Hey! Quit it!”

  Not fully versed in the human language, Caspian ignored Gary’s protests. Worse, the little wolf grew emboldened.

  Gary dodged and darted. The few nips he got didn’t feel like the sort that would take healing magic to repair. Caspian was clearly playing, and from the laughter up ahead—Braeleigh chief among the comedians—Gary being the target was no accident.

  “Better get a move on!” Sira shouted back, cupping her hands to her mouth. “I hear he has a taste for slowpokes.”

  “Want me to carry you?” Zeeto asked, his high-pitched voice needing no help to carry on the wind.

  Beldrak stood with a stern scowl on his face that could have been meant for either Gary’s slow pace or the prank they were playing on him. It was hard to tell.

  The instigator of it all laughed from her belly, doubled over at the sight of her puppy herding Gary like a stray sheep. She only called him off when Gary caught up to the rest of the group. By that point, she was wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her tunic.

  From the vantage where the rest of them had stopped, Gary saw why they’d waited. The foothills rose with a switchback trail winding up toward an encampment visible a short ways up the mountainside. It was nothing special, just a scattering of pavilion tents and a couple crude log cabin structures.

  “What do you think?” Sira asked. To his surprise, Gary found the question directed at him. The fact wasn’t lost on Sira. “Yeah. You. Beldrak thinks you might actually be useful as a strategist for some reason. I’m willing to take the chance at finding something you can do besides cook weird foreign food and make up goofy songs.”

  I can craft entire worlds, peer into the minds of the gods themselves, understand plant and animal life with the perspective of the craftsman who breathed life into them. You manage the database of a detergent company, Kim. Don’t go getting high and mighty.

  “Yeah. Sure,” Gary said instead of all that. He squirmed into a more dignified posture. “Let’s see. Arguile wanted us to deliver the weed to Previn’s mine.”

  “Pipe weed,” Zeeto corrected.”

  “Check mark on that,” Gary said, ignoring the halfling. “This fits the description. It’s a mining camp a full day’s forced march from Durrotek, so they’re not popping down to the local bodega for beer and a pack of smokes. If they want to get lit, they need a supply chain. That’s where we come in. Face it. If these guys want to smoke some weed, we’re their hookup.”

  Zeeto cleared his throat. “Pipe weed. It’s for pipes. This isn’t the low-class stuff you roll up in a scrap of parchment from your old man’s wanted poster. Gotta make sure these blokes know this shit is genteel.”

  “Can we not try to cut a deal with this Previn character?” Sira asked with her hands spread.

  Zeeto leaned back as if Sira had taken off a mask to reveal a hideous creature beneath. “What are you talking about? We have to haggle. It’s our moral obligation on behalf of our employer.”

  Beldrak’s chuckle caught Gary off guard. He hadn’t been sure that Darryl had imbued the paladin with any sense of humor at all. “Think we be fools? Thou havest not the intention to return a dram more than Goodman Arguile presently expects.”

  “Damn right, you glorious pillar of muscle,” Zeeto said, hands on hips. “Five hundred gold might sound like a lot—”

  “It is,” Sira deadpanned.

  “But think of it this way,” Zeeto continued. “He’s buying in bulk from Arguile for a reason. Parceled off in smaller amounts, you could get nearly twice as much for it. Granted, more work, but hear me out. The same holds true the other way. If Previn wants to buy this much, the alley price for a puff this fine would run him the same if he had someone go out and beat the back streets for him. We’re giving him the bulk discount and delivering it to his door. That’s worth a little something extra from him for our trouble. Just taking our share from Arguile is only getting half of what we’re due. This is a two-party transaction we’re brokering. No free rides for the boonies side of it.”

  “Can we just go now?” Braeleigh asked. “I stopped listening halfway through. I just want to go and get rid of the stinky box.”

  As they ascended the switchback trail, Gary wondered how badly his friends were going to screw this all up. He had built in layers of contingency this time around, but so many of his prior campaigns had veered badly from his planned narrative arc.

  Previn’s Mine would determine whether these were the cleverest characters of Gary’s gaming career, the hard luck sort who’d plod their way through adversity, or the sort who’d be rerolled after an untimely demise.

  Gary shuddered.

  Rerolling the other was fine. In a world where resurrection magic was the stuff of myth, adventurers came and went. But what would happen if he died?

  Suddenly his footsteps slowed. Previn’s Mine was a gallows draped in plain-spun tent cloth. Gary knew what lay beneath.

  “C’mon, sloth foot,” Zeeto yelled down the trail to him. “In this lifetime.”

  Yes. In this lifetime was exactly where Gary hoped to remain.

  10

  The party ignored the shabby tent city and headed for the log cabin just outside the mine shaft. Over the right side of the shaft entrance was an askew sign tacked in place with nails. It read, “Previn’s Mine,” and the cracked and splintered left edge suggested that the original sign had said something longer.

  Above the door to the cabin was another sign of similar construction with equally sloppy painted lettering. When choosing their lone permanent structures, the miners had made sure one of them was a tavern—the Lucky Strike.

  As taverns went, the Lucky Strike was dismal and cramped. There were only four tables, an unpolished bar, and three patrons drinking. Oil lamps kept the worst of the darkness at bay, but even without them, there would have been light peeking through the gaps between timbers.

  “We seek Previn,” Beldrak announced as if requesting a royal audience. “Hath any among you seen this man?”

  One of the patrons pushed back his chair, wooden legs scraping the bare rock floor. “Who’s asking?”

 
“I am Beldrak Evenhand, servant of Makoy,” Beldrak said, placing the hand of the arm not holding their cargo over his heart. “Our errand be one of commerce, fine goodsir, and—”

  “We’ve got your shipment,” Zeeto cut in. “The supplier sends his regrets for the delay.”

  Previn was a barrel of a man with a flattened, upturned nose and a prominent lower jaw and a thick forehead betraying the orcish blood that mixed with human in his veins. With a muttered apology to his two drinking companions, he came over and sized up Beldrak from a pace away while addressing Zeeto. “Your boss put me to a lot of trouble. Thinking that comes with a discount.”

  Gary listened with one ear while keeping an eye to the mine owner’s companions. No one else in the party seemed to be interested in the other two drinkers at all, and that was a shame.

  The thin one was Biel. He’d come to this forsaken mine to collect payment for the murder at The Uncommon Room. The victim had been Previn’s business partner, leaving the half-orc as sole owner of the mining outfit. If the party were to play detective, they could uncover the truth, free the innocent bard who was being held as the prime suspect and would result in them gaining ownership of the mine after the authorities came to arrest Previn.

  The mine operator’s other guest was Murrow Greenmoor, there to negotiate the sale of the same pipeweed on behalf of the Talis Guild. He’d left before Gary’s friends repatriated the goods, and this was the first he was to hear of its disappearance—unless the party kept coy about where their employer had obtained a replacement shipment.

  “Discount?” Zeeto scoffed.

  “Yeah!” Braeleigh said. “Zeeto says you owe us more because we delivered it. Plus, I think, you know… since we had to steal it back from the thiefy people, that means we tried extra hard to get you your smelly weeds.”