I counted the exits. (Six on the top floor, three on the bottom floor.) I counted the orb lights. (Thirty-two.) I counted the steps from one edge of the granite, placing one foot flush, heel to toe, in front of the next. (Eighteen.)

  When I looked up, Arthrem was still flailing with his arm between the bars. I had never seen Godzilla treated on-screen as a helpless baby, but there it was. His fingertips were brushing the edge of the moaning guard's fallen torch, which had sputtered out against a gross, wet floor, just barely disturbing it at the full length of his armspan.

  This gave me several questions. Was my character doing the mental work here? Or was I out there somewhere playing the game, unbenknownst to... myself?

  All I could sense was the here and now. So where and when was that?

  More immediately, had Arthrem gotten an idea with the torch? With each push, he nudged and sent it rocking precariously. The slightest excess of force would roll it in the other direction. With it, perhaps he could grab hold of the keys, or if not directly, then the clothes of the incapacitated guard?

  For a guy whose intelligence was literally deceased, that sounded like a remarkably bright idea. Of course, it might have just been that the bright, moving lights of the sputtering flame had caught his attention.

  Strength whooped. "There he is! My good guy!" Arthrem had caught hold of the inert torch. His fingers slowly closed under it, and as he prepared to thrust it forward, slowly getting a good grip on the stingily short held end of the thing, I noticed a gray-purple blur in the background.

  "Do you see that?" I said, jumping down from a bench which I'd been using as a balance beam. "What is that?"

  The streak of twilight bloomed like some kind of dim omen, a vertical pillar plunging downward. On the end of it, a knot of flesh unfurled claws, stubby but sinister.

  "An animal," suggested Strength. "The guard-dogs of the prison."

  That's no animal," I said. It was going for the keys, grasping toward the open pocket of the guard on the floor. "Look up, dammit," I said, exasperated.

  "Don't swear," chided Strength. "No swearing at Arthrem."

  "Oh no," I said, probably out loud, as the gnarled, purplish fingers made contact with the keys. Bong bing, ba-dong, ga-dong. Like an inverse claw game, I slapped the sides of my face and watched the hand retreating out of view with our prize in an impotent, frozen stare.

  The bony, demonic hand having pulled out of view, a swirl of black robes came into view. They billowed like those tiktoks of dust storms overseas, encompassing the guard's form.

  "Is some kind of magic," said Strength. I would have started singing Queen if not for the terror for Arthrem's freedom. Finally, I saw the big boy's arms beginning to pull back. At long, long last, he had the good sense to look up. Not all at once, of course, because Arthrem didn't do anything fast, or else we just experienced everything from a hyper-perception, hummingbirds in the soul of a Megazord-scale barbarian, able to savor every nanosecond. The frame of what I could not stop thinking of as the "camera," although this was surely some composite view of the perspective seen from both my barbarians eyes--all one point five of them, I suppose--tilted up with all the purposeful patience of an establishing shot.

  The keys were coming this way, in a robed, purple hand. Still it rose. A glimpse of a boney chest above fine black silk, trimmed with zigzags. I could see every stitch, every rogue thread frayed by the prison wardens' mishandling. A magenta chin with black stubble, a smirk on fey lips, a relatively human nose, then two eyes of ghostly flame peering out at us, directly into the viewport, beneath a mop of black hair and the swept-back horns of an ibex.

  I was looking at the Statue of Liberty, if the Statue of Liberty was also a purple version of my friend.

  "Suresh?"

  I took a step forward. I waved to the frozen smirk a quarter mile beyond the viewport. I jumped up and down. "Hey! Suresh! Can you--can he see us in here?"

  Strength was peering at me with the kind of concern that family had on their faces at the end of Old Yeller.

  "That's my friend," I explained. "Or, uh. I guess it's his warlock."

  "Purple warlock is not your friend," said Strength. "Purple warlock is out there."

  "No, I know," I said. If I could signal him somehow, maybe he could get me out of here. I wondered what that would entail. I didn't think there was a protocol for sending a rescue party into a fictional character. "But, like... that's a guy. Like a real guy. A Player." Strength cocked his head. "Not like an NPC."

  He shrugged. "I don't know about ‘plaiyres’ and ‘enpeecee.’ I think you make this up. This is one of the lesser gods aligned with Arthrem. One of his servants. You will see."

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Servants? No, that's Suresh. He's only *playing* a warlock. He's not a servant, he's designed by..." I realized how silly this sounded. "They're working together."

  "No, look," said Strength.

  Suresh's--geez, I really needed to remember Suresh's character's name--hand thrust forward below our perspective. I expected a click, but instead of the shifting of oiled tumblers, I heard the banshee wail of clocktower gears. I covered my ears. So shrill, and interminable. Finally the twisting guts of the lock relented, entire scaffoldings of spring-loaded iron flying into place, a sequence of rapid hammering, like the forge of giants. Whung-whung-whung. To Arthrem, I'm sure this was the simple click of a lock.

  Suresh's (character's) black robes flapped dramatically, trailing him in front as he leaned backward into a reverse step. Arthrem's great hands were already insinuated between the bars, the back of his fingers slowly swiping them out of the way like, a gesture of utter dismissal writ larger than life. Waiting for the cell door to slide open called to mind the sound of train wheels, the big, steady rhythm of passing boxcars over tracks. How many minutes of my life had I wasted waiting for them to pass so I could get on with my day?

  Strength stood just a little bit taller, if that were possible, with every beat of the wheels on the railing. By the end, the door was open to Arthrem, and the Cryptozian Gaol awaited his chaotic neutral barbarity.

  "Yyyyeeeeeeeehhhhh," came a deep, pitched-down voice so slow I could hear the individual flapping of vocal chords. "Ooooohhhhh ooooooouuuurrrrssss." I saw that Suresh's (warlock's) mouth was open, but was it moving? A fuchsia tongue flicked against the ridge behind straight, slightly sharp teeth. "Dt-uuuuuuhhhh," he said. As Arthrem leaned forward to place his first foot outside the cell, Suresh continued. "Ffffffffffff."

  Yeeee-ooo-uuurrssss-duff?

  The tiefling was beginning to extend a clawed finger toward the entrance. A stack of torchlit cubbies bulged with hafts, rolls of hide, chains, scabbards, coiled rope, arrow fletches. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "Your stuff. Our stuff."

  "His stuff," corrected Strength.

  "It makes sense everything was confiscated. I guess our boy has to get dressed and geared back up, right?"

  "Do not call the Arthrem 'our boy.'" Strength's lip curled. "He is not boy. He is man."

  “Okay, but you called him that.”

  His nose wrinkled; the taste of being caught in a contradiction did not agree with Strength. “Is different. Is like… fatherly affection when I say it.”

  Standing at the cubby wall was a thick man fastening a short cape and pulling up a hood. His stature screamed 'dwarf' to me. Wide shoulders, a veritable square of considerable girth. The fingers didn't seem to be subject to the supersized slow motion. They twirled the ties of the clasp, dancing.

  A waltz, maybe, from my perspective. Even seen this way, he felt somehow unmoored from the weighty pace I was observing through the viewport--like the only normal but slow person in the room, rather than Suresh('s warlock) and Arthrem's sludgy, almost underwater movements.

  He was midway through a turn, seen in profile. A knobby nose swiveled, orrery-smooth and slow, above gritted teeth and wide eyes. He was moving away from the door, backwards on his feet, or beginning to.

  "That's Dane's rogue, I guess," I said. "The dwarf."

  Strength shook his head, displeased at my appraisal, but it wasn't clear why.

  "He looks scared of something," I blurted before I saw it. Tracing the direction of his eyes, something emerging from the hall. A dull triangle appeared with a muted glimmer of torchlight. It spun, growing, approaching like a comet. "What do you think that is?"

  "What what is?" said Strength.

  I looked at him. I looked at the viewport windows. I looked at him.

  "That big thing. The big triangle getting bigger?" He shook his head. "Something coming right at us?"

  He shrugged.

  "Are you for real? You can't see that?"

  "I think you imagine things. You are new to Wisdom, anyway, ya?"

  I walked over directly next to him. It was plain as day--a dim triangle slowly rotating and growing in the viewport. Suresh had not yet noticed it. The dwarf had, and was watching it pass. No... watching the trail right behind it, his eyes not fast enough to keep up. "Look, man. Right there." I pointed. He tilted his head over my arm, closing his good eye and squinting with the scarred one.

  "Hey, there is arrow coming in," he said.

  "Arrow?!"

  "No, well," he wrestled with an imaginary linguistic foe with clawed hands in front of him. "What is exact word?" He sighed. "Not arrow, but arrow from sideways bow."

  "Crossbow? Crossbow bolt?!" Even I could hear the panic in my own voice. "That's bad! That’s gonna hit!"

  He made a raspberry with his lips. "Is not the first arrow from sideways bow that has hit the Arthrem."

  It wasn't? These were the opening moments of his first adventure. I literally made him up last week, and I even did that in a hurry. Time obviously didn't pass the same way here as it did for Arthrem, but was there something more complicated going on there?

  "Besides," said Strength. "If is big dangerous problem, ehh... the big deal lights go on."

  "Big deal lights...?" I knew I was developing a bit of a Solid Snake repetition problem and resolved to address that just as soon as I was a little bit more confident in... my role as a dump stat inside of a giant barbarian I had just made up.

  All of the orbs in the Observatory, which I had counted at least once and forgotten the number of, turned from sterile LED white to, well, red alert red. They pulsed consistently in a high alert, danger pattern.

  "Oh shit," I said.

  "Yes, this is pretty big deal."

  "So what do we do now?"

  He made a duck bill of his lips as he thought about this long and hard, giving the inbound crossbow bolt time to track another foot and a half, although it looked to me like it covered a thousand feet.

  "Battle stations."

  "Yeah," I said. "Okay. That sounds right. Where are those? Do we have counter-measures? What do I--where do I go for battle stations? Do I have one?"

  He began counting, doing some kind of math on his fingers, adding, subtracting, trying to make it all work out, to balance something. "Is pretty much right here."

  "This is battle stations?" The bolt was disappearing under the viewport faster than Arthrem could turn to track it, if he had even had time to notice it.

  I'd never seen the combination between a shrug and a nod before, never even considered it, if we're being honest. Strength invented the body language version of "Sure" or maybe "Your words, not mine" right there on the spot.

  The last of the lead-colored bolt shaft was gone from view. That meant that, at any second, we were due for impact.

  The view distorted as Arthrem was hit.