Young Writers Society

Raleigh listened intently, carefully committing the others' names to memory. Still hesitant, they didn't offer theirs quite yet. These people were strangers, and could very well have been bounty hunters.

"A quest sounds likely," Raleigh said, looking towards Adrian. He didn't seem like a bounty hunter. Not the kind she was used to, anyways. "If something brought us here, it must've had a reason."

Raleigh let out a small sigh; they didn't want to be stuck in a strange world. They'd worked hard to build a life for themself. The prospect of losing it was unpleasant, to say the least.

"My name's Raleigh." Raleigh said, standing up. Being stuck with strangers was only making this more stressful for Raleigh, and the same was probably true for their companions. The least they could do was establish who they all were. Besides, it wasn't their old name.

They brushed the remaining dirt off their clothes. "I'm not a necromancer or a druid, or anything, just a merchant."

Dresden admittedly hadn't had that much experience with D&D before, but the merchant was one that he hadn't usually heard of. It was the kind of class someone had if they wanted to hide their actual class - now that he thought about it, he had done that once with a similar one in a campaign with Pres.

But, hey. He had his own secrets, and he wasn't in the mood for revealing them so he could bug Raleigh. If Raleigh thought they were a merchant, he'd play along. What other choice did he have?

"So, every good quest has some kind of quest issuer," Dresden mused.

"...Or a dungeon master," Adrian hesitantly offered. "A DM can set the rules before the game starts, right?"

Dresden crossed his arms. "That's a possibility, but none of us interacted with whatever brought us here. So that means we have to follow the old-fashioned, traditional route - marching around until we stumble onto an inn or some group of traumatized NPCs."

Megara closed her eyes. I won't get home if I fight this.

"What's this game you all think we've been transported into?" she asked. A game. A gods-damned game. Whatever creature had brought her here and left Eddie alone was going to have hell to pay when she found it.

She had no idea what the jargon the boy was tossing around meant, but she figured it was part of the game. He'd read a rulebook she didn't have access to, in fact, many of the people here appeared to have. She set her jaw, pushing down her hatred for being the one ignorant member of the group, and awaited an answer.

"Dungeons and Dragons," Cornyx clarified. "A tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gigax in the early 1970's, with a system revolving around twelve basic classes, and four basic races. Over time, the system developed, adding in more complicated classes, races, alignments, and systems. Success in combat, spell use, and other abilities is determined by dice, as is damage dealt. The game's setting is in a medieval-era fantasy world that includes a plethora of monsters. The idea is that your character, along with the other players' characters, traverses this world through a variety of adventures. The world--monsters, natural events, traps, non-player characters, et cetera--is governed by the DM, or dungeon master. Every character has a race, class, level, and alignment, which categorizes any given character under 'good,' 'neutral,' or 'evil,' with various modifiers thereof. In our group, we have..."

He paused, looking around. "Well, you're an elven paladin, I believe, judging by the outfit. That means you're a warrior with some magical abilities you gain from the divine, though what these abilities are depends on what god this persona of yours worships. Dresden is, as mentioned, a necromancer--a mage specializing primarily in animating the dead, as well as communicating with spirits--and, as previously established, Adrian's a druid, so he has nature magic and probably some level of shapeshifting. I'm a cyromancer, so, ice mage. And you...a tiefling," he said, glancing over at the so-called merchant. "Which means that, regardless of your class, you have at least some magic from your infernal bloodline. Merchant isn't a class, though, so you're either lying or oblivious, and although I'd rather believe the latter, I'm inclined to believe the former."

Their party was terribly squishy, though, and he realized this the more he looked at them. Three magic-users, one paladin, and someone that wasn't wearing armor, which meant another mage, bard, rogue, or something similar. Rogue, hopefully; they didn't need the support of a bard or another mage, unless they were specifically a cleric in the life domain or something like that.

"There's a good chance that whatever entity brought us here is pulling strings," he mused. "I guess that would make them our DM. But even so, I agree that we should go onwards and see what we see. Something's bound to come up. We need to be careful, though, since except for Megara's probable Lay on Hands, we have basically no support, and three of us are mainly magic-users."

"My probable what?" Megara asked, processing. This game didn't sound like one she was going to like, and not just because she was here against her will.

For one, this 'persona' of hers apparently worshiped some kind of god. That was unacceptable. She took a deep breath. She would deal with that later. She'd like to deal will all of this later, or not at all.

It was around that time that she noticed the proportions of the people around her, specifically how they compared to her. She looked down, then back up. Up at the canopy of trees, then at the people around her. Either everything here was significantly more ill-proportioned than they were in the other worlds she'd visited, or she had gotten a lot taller.

She blinked, shook her head. Later. That's a later problem.

"A game." Raleigh said. "You expect us to believe that we are in a game?" They lashed their tail, which thwacked against the bush that they were half-standing in. As crazy as Cornyx sounded, Raleigh was starting to believe him.

They could recall a game similar to the one Cornyx was speaking about, and although Raleigh hadn't played it in years, it sounded similar to the one he had mentioned. "We have a similar, er, game, where I'm from," They looked between the people before them. "And honestly, being sucked into it wouldn't be the weirdest thing to happen to me."

Adrian gave a small smile.

"It wouldn't be the weirdest thing to happen to me, either," he quietly said. It thankfully seemed like some of his early embarrassment was subsiding - the last thing that Dresden wanted to do was be stuck with some lovesick kid.

Dresden gave a grin of his own. "I've been in my fair share of strange situations before," he said. He was downplaying it, but he couldn't afford to share a lot about his life - after all, a good magician never revealed his secrets.

"As have I," Megara muttered. So she was in a group of other world-hoppers. Again. This was not going to end well. Not at all.

"Shouldn't we be going somewhere? Doing something? If this is a game like all of you keep saying, then I'm going to guess that it's not played by standing around and chatting with the group. There should be some task or something, right?" she tried to get them all to focus. She wanted to get home, and right now she relied on them to help her with that.

She relaxed her posture with that thought. If she was going to need them to stick around, seeming hostile and annoyed right off the bat wasn't going to help.

Dresden crossed his arms and thought over where the best place to go was.

There was no sign of an inn nearby; he couldn't even hear a NPC running throughout the forest. Which meant they'd have to take a risk and just go in some random direction.

Of course, he wasn't sure who'd actually want to listen to that plan, so he would have to seem a bit more confident than he really was about which way they had to go.

Without giving any warning, he started walking straight ahead of him.

"Where are you going?" Adrian hesitantly asked.

"To find a quest issuer," he said.

"But there's nothing in that direction," Adrian pointed out. "Why are you heading that way?"

Dresden froze mid-step.

"...It felt like a good idea at the time," he said.

Adrian didn't say anything for a moment; Dresden was pretty sure he had been caught in the act. But then Adrian spoke again, and Dresden realized that Adrian was the one of them with the better plan.

"I can turn into a bird and try to find something for us to head towards," he offered.

Dresden finally turned back. "That sounds like a good idea."

One minute and two transformations, Adrian was back on the ground - and pointing in the direction that Dresden had been heading in. "I saw some smoke that way. It looks like there's some kind of town there."

Dresden grinned. "I told you it felt like a good idea at the time."

Without waiting for the others, he started heading towards the town.

A second later, Adrian was rushing to catch up with him.

He had been walking for less than a minute when Adrian suddenly gave a startled cry from behind him. A second later, he found Adrian clinging to him. They weren't even far enough away from the others to not see them in the distance - what had spooked him so much?

Dresden glanced back at him.

"What's wrong?" he said, momentarily dropping the theatrical tone.

Adrian, seeming to realize who he had grabbed, hurriedly let go and took a step back.

"...I saw a spider," he sheepishly admitted.

Dresden stared.

"In the bush," Adrian added. He faltered. "...It was a big one?"

Dresden just sighed and kept marching towards the town.