"The pain is gone," I babbled. "But you--you're hurt! What do I do...?"

  She wiped at the stream of blood with the back of her wrist, smearing it across one strong cheekbone (scarred, like mine, I noticed), and motioned me back with a bloody palm. "Rest," she said. "I'll be back to check on you later."

  "You're bleeding," my mouth continued without my permission. "I'll get help." She shook her head, smiling.

  "I can take it. This is nothing." She turned to leave, stumbled, bumping a shoulder into the wall and leaving a bloody smudge there, half-grunted and half-whimpered, and disappeared around the door. The uneven shuffle of her footfalls on stone and little moans became quieter as she retreated.

  I looked at my body in disbelief. It was whole again. Well, not my body, but the one to whomever this belonged.

  Because it wasn't mine, that was for sure. And even more certain was that it was not Arthrem's.

  In the attack on the tower, I'd had very little time to make sense of what had happened. I could really use some out-of-character chat with Teo about now. Why did my prison break look a lot more like a siege? Why was I a fraction of the size that I had planned to be, like the annoying little brother of the character I had designed? And why did my character appear out of a glowing mirror to save my bacon?

  Because that was certainly him, right? I had never DMed before, but wasn't that breaking the first and most foundational contract between dungeon master and player? I tell you who I am, and you say "No"?

  The stone floor under me creaked mightily. Somewhere beneath, far beneath, something moved and flowed through. Fantasy HVAC? It wasn't out of the question. More and more, the core stories and setting coming out of D&D had crept from the "medieval-flavored pre-enlightenment fights against goblins and ogres" of Gen X's youth to a patchwork of ahistorical time periods and vibes. I wasn't alive for it, but I think there used to be more thee's and thou's and by-your-leave-m'lady's, and now campaigns could have rocket motorcycle races and computation machines. It was all up to the imagination of the DM.

  And Teo had quite an imagination. He'd been working on this homebrew for months. We'd barely heard from him. I caught him at the student center writing on a notepad or tack-tacking into a graphing calculator--I'm not kidding. He'd decline trips downtown with the guys Friday nights. We knew he was brewing something major for us.

  We didn't know it was going to literally transport.

  And for that matter, where were the others? Suresh had made a dark wizard or a warlock or something. Dane had made a cranky dwarf thief.

  To be honest, I hadn't committed their characters' names to memory. It had all been a shuffle of papers and DM screens and miniatures. Teo'd had us submit our character sheets a week ahead of time, and he'd 3D printed miniatures based on our physical descriptions.

  Three wasn't a robust party, it was the bare minimum. In better years, we would have a healer in the form of Kris, who was taking a semester off due to family stuff. I could even imagine the hypothetical character: half-elf, pink and/or green hair, a an over-the-top theatrical fast-talker, like all the characters designed from that fast-talking theater kid.

  We looked good, the three of us, even in pudgy, sludgy gray miniature. You could tell what Arthrem was and what he was supposed to do at first glance. Polylactic acid muscles rippled. The little filament lines were swallowed up by animal hides. His mohawk was articulated nicely, even if it had a little excess that needed to be clipped off. You could see the scar down one eye. I'm pretty sure Teo had begun with a model of the Hulk.

  The line of thinking brought me back to the here and now, wherever and whenever that was. I needed to find Arthrem. I had to tell him what had happened to the huge caretaker.

  Still favoring my no-longer-existent wounds, I twisted and slipped down onto the floor, leaving blood that was no longer mine on the examination cold and surprisingly smooth examination table.

  In the stone hall, a trail of blood that should have been mine led to darkness. The other direction led to light. The decision was not hard.

  There were more of the orbs on sconces, casting a weirdly modern frequency of light, iridescent auras that had LED levels of throw. The juxtaposition of familiar light on old, irregular stone walls felt like every final level of every tacticool, shoot the terrorists type first person shooter game, a brave and longshot infiltration into foreign insurgents' lairs obviously ripped from headlines for the ultimate terrorism revenge fantasy.

  A turn, another, another, following my nose. I smelled food. Fried grease, something sauteed and savory. The aroma became stronger, telling me I was on the right track. I found myself in the upper benches of an auditorium--some clash between one of those ancient Greek outdoor performance venues, and an IMAX theater.

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  An enormous set of windows seemed to be the focal point of rows and rows of stadium-raised benches. The windows were dark. On the floor, in the center of the room, facing the windows, sat Arthrem at a long mead-hall table, watching the dark windows. The table was set with a chaotic feast, jammed edge to edge with aromatic food. Roasted poultry and what might be pork medallions. Shallots draped over beef flanks with capers, drizzled in who knew what. Exotic fruits piled up. It reminded me of the kamayan feast I'd gone with Kris's family to once, an ordered free-for-all buffet of everything you could think of.

  And my D&D character slouched over two chairs, knee hung over the adjacent arm rest, stuffing his face and staring up at the blackened windows.

  "Hey," I said. He turned his head, the red mohawk swiveling above full cheeks and a massive jaw working through a pork chop. "Your friend. She's hurt."

  His eyes were more bulbous than I had imagined. Not "crazy eyes" per se, but the kind of "under a lot of strain" eyes you see with gym bros who are maybe sorta hitting the juice a little bit. I could see them appraise me absently, see no threat and nothing demanding his attention.

  He finished chewing. I pointed down the hall I'd come from, although hell if I knew how to get back. I waited.

  Finally, he gulped. I could see the bulge of food passed down his throat, cartoonishly. "Is okay," he said.

  "I mean she's bleeding, man. She's really hurt!"

  He waved the absolute minimal gesture of dismissal and turned back to his food. "Is fine," he assured me. "Connie is made of tough stuff."

  "I think she... took my wounds." I had meant to report what had happened, but the sickening guilty feeling squeezed my throat shut.

  "Oh," said the giant. "Well, I am surprised." He seemed to have a thought, but considered it pesky, and swatted at it like an annoying bug. "But she does from time to time these things." He plunged his hairy hands into the feast and came back with some kind of crustacean claw, which he broke in half and slurped from.

  He waved me over. "Come." He did not get up. He did not stop stuffing his face with food.

  I carefully made my way down, cautious of tripping on shin-height seating, long struts of worn granite polished smooth, sporting a hairline fracture here, another missing a beveled corner. The last time I'd done something like this, ironically, had been for the Dungeons and Dragons movie that our crew went to see, and I arrived late to. But in this auditorium, there were no restless crowds of geeks to squeeze past. Who was this made for?

  The sounds of mouth-open lip smacking literally echoed around the room, amplifying the awkwardness as I made my way down the steps and crossed over from the seating into the central circle. The orchestra pit, maybe, where my barbarian stuffed his face.

  I wasn't hungry, but up close, the hoard of food called to my senses. I waited for him to offer me something. Instead, he stared, chewing with all the subtlety of an improv troupe on stage. He swallowed at long last.

  His eyes passed over my single-shoulder robe, the cluster of pale beads around my neck. He took in my shitty sandals, a fraction of the size of his huge boots, currently depositing dirt on the second chair that he was not offering me. We had the same mohawk, sort of. Mine was sparser, his was like the plumage of one of those stereotypical centurion costumes, bristly like the mane of a war-horse. His beard was twisted into nautical grade ropes beneath his chin, the vermilion of freshly spilled blood. Mine was more neutral, and dangled a few inches beneath my chin. There existed in his face an entire system of musculature I did not believe I owned, in this body or my real one--my first? My other?

  "Hey, listen," I said. "I don't think I'm supposed to be here, maybe. My name is M-"

  "There is a resemblance," he said, nodding. He nodded as if in agreement with his own self.

  "I think I'm supposed to be you. You're him, right?"

  "Am I?" he asked, and spat a date pit on the floor.

  "You're the barbarian. You're my--you're Arthrem. Right?"

  A smiled positively unfurled across his face. "Alright, you can stay. That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me since..." His brow darkened like rain clouds. "Wait. You are not, how you say... rizzing me?"

  Now it was my turn to go bug-eyed. "'Scuse me?"

  "You are not, ahh, pulling my leg-chain? Giving me the, you know." He tapped a potato finger in the air, trying to make it land on the right word, perhaps, though invisible. "The bullshit?"

  "Sir," I said, straightening. "I'm not sure I would even know how to give you the bullshit."

  He frowned openly. "Do not call me that. The respect, I like it. But... it feels, ehh, yucky."

  My barbarian had a mind of his own, apparently.

  "So, if you're Arthrem, then who-"

  He stood, and it was such a production that it felt like being interrupted. The workings of this bodybuilder's muscular system lifting a leg, pushing himself to his feet, it was as convoluted as Michael Bay's Optimus Prime transforming. So many moving parts. Dizzying.

  "Yes, I am Arthrem. Or I, what is word... aspire to be him. Every day, every decision, every action I take. I think, what would Arthrem do?" He shrugged, showing me his armpit. He even had muscular armpits. "I will earn the name. You watch."

  At full height, he actually blocked out the light. He cast a shadow over me, like a rampaging kaiju over a defenseless Tokyo.

  "Well, alright," I squeaked. "So if you're not Arthrem, am I Arthrem?"

  He bellowed. I felt the force of it, another battle cry. It curtailed and he did it again. I was forced back a couple of inches. It was on the third bellow that I realized he was laughing. He vibrated a bowl of nuts off the table, the ceramic breaking and mixed legumes scattering.

  "Oh ho ho ha!" He explored every possible vowel sound there was to make, every pitch and tone. "Heh hee hee haaahh!" He wiped tears. "Oh by every constellation. No. Hah haugh hou hee. Hooooo. No, you are not him. Look at you." He then was seized by another fit of laughter, this time less forceful. "You are funny! The last guy, not so funny." This sobered him. He wiped at glistening liquid from his eyes and snorted wetly. "But then... we will make sure you do not turn out like him, yes?"