theglitchedworld

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Twelve

The iron went from warm to so freezing cold it felt hot again the moment it hit my bare skin. The next instant, agony shot through me, sending me to my knees with a choked off cry. Magic surged through my body, much worse than anything Emelia had done with my shoulder, but, unlike then, blessed unconsciousness didn't claim me.

I could feel my bones breaking as the magic pushed new material into them, changing and lengthening them as they rehealed. From my skull all the way down to the smallest bone in my feet, they smashed and burned their way into new forms. My skin tore as the bones forcibly lengthened, shredding apart where it couldn't grow fast enough to adapt. The muscles, nerves, and blood vessels slithered like worms over the pink stretches of freshly exposed bone as they worked to reattach themselves to their traditional places.

I wanted to scream.

I didn't have the vocal cords to do it. My throat was in pieces that crawled like millions of snakes worming their way around the elongated bones of my spine to create a more masculine structure. Somehow, even with my nerves not being connected right, I could still feel the crawly, wormy sensation all over my body under the waves of pain.

My stomach churned. Partly because the pain and slimy, crawling sensation all over my body was making me want to throw up. And partly because it felt like someone had rammed what had to be a white hot iron bar into my groin. If my ears had been capable of hearing sound, I'm sure I would have heard my flesh sizzling as the bar was dragged back out, pulling me inside out as it did. I threw up part of the way through it. Or at least I tried to.

I sobbed for it to stop. Tears streamed down my face from my eyes even as those eyes distorted and reformed. My nose ran even as it broke and pieced itself back together. I clawed at the floor, my skin, the walls, anything I could reach with nails that peeled back and forced themselves out anew on fingers that twisted, shattered, and lengthened as I watched.

I was dying. I had to be. No one could live through being shredded and reformed like this. Only the sheer weight of the magic streaming into me from that damned iron chain forced me to remain in my destroyed body. Forced me to remain conscious. Forced me to be aware of every moment of the torment.

And then it was over.

I lay curled on the cold stone floor. I felt weaker than a newborn kitten. I had no energy left to do anything more than drag in one agonizing breath after another through my raw throat. I shook with the aftermath, shivering violently like someone who'd just had a terrible fever break. I felt completely and utterly drained.

I had been wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong. There was no way that chain had been made as anything other than a torture device. I couldn't even imagine how the victims of the crimes it was used as a punishment for could have bared to endure it. It had felt like days that I'd writhed on the floor as it forcibly remade me into a new mold, but later I would learn that bare minutes had past since I'd left the others.

Slowly, my strength and energy returned. I held up a hand before my face, staring blankly at the wider, blockier form. It didn't look like mine any longer, but it wasn't unfamiliar either. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, raising my head to look in the silver mirror.

A familiar face looked back at me. It was similar to mine, enough that we could have been brother and sister back in the real world. We shared the same muddy brown eyes and the dark brown of our hair - though I think maybe his was a bit darker, almost black - but his brow was heavier with thicker eyebrows, the jaw stronger with a wider chin than mine. A dusky haze shadowed the curves of his cheeks, but otherwise he was clean shaven. His nose was stronger, the tip curving up a little more than mine did, yet still having the same unfortunate crookedness near the bridge that had marred my own nose. For the record, I really don't recommend tackling the steepest hill you can find when you're still having trouble staying upright when skating. I was lucky I got off with just a broken nose.

I blinked at my reflection. Raising my hand, I almost clocked myself in the face before I realized my arm was longer than it had been. Once I realized it, I managed to adjust the motion, dragging my fingertips awkwardly over the planes of my face as I stared into the mirror. It was astonishing how much I looked like my father.

I never thought I'd see this face again.

I climbed to my feet. My head felt light as I stood, a rush of vertigo as my body struggled to adjust to the sudden change in elevation. I was taller than I had been before. Maybe six or even ten inches. My shoulders were wider, my arms and chest more developed with muscle. Certain... other dimensions had definitely changed as well. Thank God the men of my family tended to the less hairy side of things. I wasn't sure I could deal with being a bear on top of everything else. But the more I looked into the mirror, the less I could deny it.

This was almost the same body as my avatar from The Bested World outside of the face that was almost creepily like that of someone from my family and a few extra inches of height. Other than that, I was that Theron again. From the top of my head to the four parallel scars on my side where I'd had a nasty encounter with a wolf demon in my first year of play even down to the angle of my... actually, that part wasn't important.

The important thing was I knew this body.

For all that my brain was giving me fits over the height adjustment. I'd kept my height matching my real height of five foot in The Bested World, but apparently this system wanted me to be taller. It was awkward and hard to get used to my longer arms and legs. I'd have to spend time in this body getting used to it before I could even hope to get myself into the corrupted army's ranks.

Which meant no going back to my normal body for a while.

To be honest, that didn't bother me a bit after the experience of changing into my male form. I could only imagine how bad being changed back would be. Actually, I didn't want to imagine it. All it would do would make me try to avoid it and for all the benefits a male body might have, my normal body was more comfortable. And at some point, this thing's power would be used up and I'd have to go through with it whether I wanted to or not.

Oh what a wonderful thing to have to look forward to.

I shook my head at my own absurd thoughts. As it was, Crysal had only just stopped giving me crap about playing a guy in The Bested World. She was probably going to have a regular field day with it now. But however she decided to behave, I needed clothes. The oversized shirt of Crysal's I'd been using wouldn't even fit, let alone actually cover the important bits. Sadly, my new boots were probably in the same boat. And I'd only just gotten them too!

My gaze caught on the heavy armoire as I looked about the room. It seemed promising. And Radani had told me I could use anything I found in the room.

"I just hope everything isn't to the same scale as the rest of the room," I murmured before stopping with a hand raised to my throat. "Ok. That will definitely take some getting used to."

My voice was much deeper than I was used to hearing. It was strange. I'd always had my voice in The Bested World. Hearing what I could only guess were the new normal tones of my reformed throat was just surreal. I made myself ignore it as I crossed the room to the armoire. After all, it was much easier to focus on the fact that I tripped over my own damn feet at least three times before I managed to reach it.

    When I came out of the room, I still felt weak as a kitten and my stomach was growling like an angry dog had taken up residence, but at least I'd managed to find a pair of loose pants that relatively fit and had my older clothes bundled up in one hand. I'd needed to borrow the sash from a weird looking dress to stand in for a belt to hold them up, but at least I wasn't flashing everyone. No shirt though. I was starting to feel like I was condemned to forever only have half of my clothes at any given time.

I'd managed to tie my hair back into a ponytail with a bit of ribbon, so at least I didn't have a bad butter or shampoo commercial moment going on. I really needed to get a haircut. Maybe Crysal could help, though I wasn't sure how safe it was to let her have anything sharp around my neck. Walking was still taking way more concentration that I liked, though I had to admit that I was developing a new found appreciation for why teen boys looked so damn awkward all the time. Growth spurts sucked.

    "Sorry it took so long," I said as I opened the door. My deeper voice still weirded me out a little. "Whatever sick freak came up with this thing needs to be dug up, resurrected, and shot out of a cannon. Preferably into a vat of acid."

Everyone was staring at me.

I suppose I could understand it. I mean I was at least six inches taller. And a guy. Ok. That part was probably a little more surprising. Even if it had been the whole reason I went through with all that crap earlier.

"What?" I frowned, rubbing at my face. The stubble on my cheeks prickled my palm. Great. Now I needed to shave too. Does this place even have razors? "Something on my face?"

"It worked..." Radani's rumble sounded surprised.

"Wait, you thought it wouldn't?!" My voice cracked embarrassingly as I stared at him. "What did you think was going to happen?!"

"Well... we, I suppose," Moreina began, looking aside, a blush tinging the height of her cheeks, "that we weren't certain it would work. It has been more than two hundred years since it was used last. It was possible that the... charge would no longer be strong enough to cause a full change."

"Ugh." I scrubbed a hand through my hair, not trusting my balance enough to do more than glare at the ground. "I can't believe you didn't even know it would work..."

"Hey!" Tomy's outburst accompanied by a surprised little squeak from his little sister made me look up.

Crysal was on her feet. Staring at me. The staring part wasn't new, but the fact that she'd all but dumped poor little Shel on the ground to jump up was. The staring was starting to get more than a little unnerving.

"W-what?" I took a step back almost without thinking. "Crys, come on. You're freaking me out here."

"It's-" She shook her head, reaching up to scrub at her face with both hands. When she lowered her hands again, for a split second, she looked like someone had just murdered her favorite puppy right in front of her and then started cooking it. "It's not fair."

I couldn't find any words to respond. I didn't know how to react. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open like a hanger for flies. I had only known her a couple weeks, so I probably didn't have nearly enough context to base my stunned response on, but I'd never heard her sounding so... I didn't know how to describe it. Her voice just sounded hollow. Like everything that made her her had drained out and evaporated.

I tried to smile, but it couldn't have looked good with how forced it felt. "Not fair? Trust me, you really didn't want to go through what I just did." My attempt at laughing the awkward atmosphere off fell about as flat as a mud balloon.

"You're a girl." Not this again. I really wasn't in the mood. But she kept going, her hands dropping to ball into fists at her side, shoulders trembling so much even I could see it across the room. "Theron's a girl. He's...you're not a guy at all. You... he... you never were a guy, were you?"

I groaned. I couldn't help it. "Dammit, not that again. How many times do I have to tell you that?! I'm me! Yeah, I was a girl! Would you deal with whatever your issue is and get over it already?!" I flung my arms out to my sides, only missing knocking anything over by virtue of not being close enough to hit anything. "I've always told you the truth about who I am!"

"I know." She sounded like a lost little girl as she stared at the ground, her shoulders slumping. The irritation I was feeling shriveled into a tiny knot and faded away as I watched her. "I know you have. I just..." She shook her head, still not looking at me. "It's not fair. I wanted... It's not fair."

Before anyone could stop her, she turned and bolted from the room. The door out to the hall actually slammed behind her, unlike my efforts with the one to the bedchamber. I slowly stopped, staring at the closed door in confusion, having started moving towards her without realizing it.

"What-" I stopped, shaking my head.

It didn't makes sense. Not that much of anything made any real sense in this messed up world. Goat people and bull people and messed up chains that ripped you apart and knitted you back together in a different form and God only knew what else. But even all that made more sense than my being a girl not being fair of all damn things.

"What the hell just happened?" I finally asked. I felt completely bewildered. We'd been getting along. I thought we had a chance of actually getting to be friends. And now?

Moreina sighed and rose to her feet. "Radani, if you'll please see our guests to their chambers, I'll go and see if I can discover what's troubling our young friend. If the records are accurate, I'm sure Theron will be wanting more to eat to replace the energy used in his change."

"Wait. I can go-" I started to protest, only to be stopped by Radani's hand settling on my shoulder. Even as a guy, his hand was freaking massive compared to me.

He shook his head. "My queen can find her much more quickly with her connection to the castle. You have my word that she won't come to any harm while in our walls. Please. Allow me to take the three of you to your rooms. There should be another meal waiting for you by the time we arrive."

My brows furrowed. The whole thing had me feeling uncomfortable but I couldn't really express why. Finally, I gave in to my stomach's piteous grumbling, pushing the whole uncomfortable issue of Crysal's outburst to the back of my mind.

"Alright. But can there please be clothes that fit me too?" I asked, deliberately changing the subject. "I'm getting a little tired of only wearing half an outfit and this place is nice and all, but the floors are a bit cold."

Radani laughed as he led us from the room. "I imagine it can be arranged."

    I didn't realize at the time that it would be weeks before we'd see Crysal again.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Eleven

The room they led us to was small only by comparison with Radani's bulk or maybe a school gymnasium. Maybe you couldn't play a full court game of basketball, but you could probably get away with a half court game if you took all the furniture out first. There was no one in the room when we arrived, but it wasn't long after Moreina sent two... pages? Runners? I have no idea what the right word was supposed to be, but anyways, after she sent two little kids in flappy outfits running off that a trio of two men and a woman in long, loose fitting robes appeared accompanied by a couple of honest to God maids pushing silvery carts full of trays that smelled amazing even from across the room.

"Master Allicort, please, see to their injuries if you will," Moreina requested of the robed trio, nodding towards the two couches that the four of us had all but collapsed upon. "I will tend my husband's hurt myself."

"Very well, your Majesty." The silver haired man with what looked for all the world like ram's horns jutting out from the sides of his head - curling back in a complete turn before angling out from his face - bowed deeply before turning towards us. He wore the darkest green robe of the three and seemed to be the leader of the trio. "Emelia, please see to the smaller woman. Judging from her posture, there is damage to her right shoulder, possibly a dislocation, with accompanying muscular damage. There may be older wounds which need care as well. Carlsen, the children appear to be suffering from general injuries and possible malnutrition. Please see to them. I will tend to the taller woman's injuries myself."

    I tried to press myself back further into the overstuffed couch as the woman approached me, feeling incredibly creeped out by what was approaching me. Her face looked like a porcelain doll more than something that belonged on a living person. Long silver hair slid past her shoulders and two sets of horns jutted out from her head, one set curving up towards the ceiling and the other downwards like cheek guards. Her robe was a medium green compared to the deep forest green of Master Allicort or the pale grass green of the young man with spiky silver hair and a small set of ram's horns of his own crouched down beside the couch Tomy and Shel had claimed.

    "Hello," she said, cocking her head to the side with a tiny smile. Her eyes were barely open, but it felt like the full weight of her attention was on me nonetheless. She folded her hands in front of her stomach and bowed towards me. "My name is Emelia. I am one of the royal physicians and journeyman under my father, Master Allicort. If you would allow me, I would like to treat your injuries. They seem rather painful."

    "I... guess so." I still felt mildly creeped out by her appearance, but my shoulder was killing me. A glance over at Crysal showed her allowing Emelia's father to work on the massive bruise covering her face which sent an uncomfortable feeling washing through my empty stomach. If she could allow one of these strange people to treat her, what was my problem? I forced myself to nod and scoot forward on the couch so she could reach me. Before she could touch me though, I made myself ask the question that was bothering me. "Sorry for, uh... being rude. Probably. But... what are you?"

    Her eyes widened ever so slightly, showing just a glimpse of a pale blue iris surrounding a creepy horizontal, almost rectangular pupil before narrowing again to their normal barely open state. "You've never encountered a Caprian before? My apologies. I understand it can be... discomforting for your kind the first time you meet one of my kind. We are, shall you say, something like distant cousins of the Bosan." She gestured towards Radani and Moreina. "Such as the royal family. Our kind often has something of a gift for the healing arts so many of us who leave our lands do so as physicians." The tiny smile appeared again for a moment. "I do assure you that neither I nor any of my family have made any compacts with any dark lords or silly things of that nature despite our appearance."

    "Ah, I, uh, see..." I could feel my face flushing, the embarrassed heat creeping down my neck. "I'm, uh... I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

    "Nonsense. If you did not ask, you would not have known. Asking is a crucial part of learning. Never be afraid to ask of that which you do not know. Now, if we may return to your treatment, do you mind if I use magic to assist in your healing?" she asked. Her voice was unusually musical, with strange over and undertones that I was only just barely picking up on. It made me wonder if she wasn't speaking the same language as me, no matter what I was hearing. "I can confine my treatment to more conventional practices, but using magic will make your recovery go much faster. It will also help to ensure that the healing is done properly and thoroughly in order to decrease the chance of future re-injury. Though it may also be very painful depending on the depth of your injury."

    I grimaced remembering the health potion Crysal made me drink after my scuffle with the gremlin back at the village. "Bad as a potion?"

    Emelia laughed. It was a strange sound. More like the cool tinkle of a glass windchime than the warmth of human laughter or even that odd mooing laugh of Rasani. "Ah. Now I understand the source of your unease. I'm afraid it may be a little similar, but please don't be alarmed. Unlike a potion, I can focus my efforts solely on the affected area, so while it may be painful, it shouldn't be as extreme or as long a duration as a potion's effect." She smiled again, the doll-like effect it gave her face sending a chill up my spine. "If you would like, I can block much of the sensation of pain for the duration of the treatment as well. You will still feel some of it as it is necessary to experience at least a portion of the pain in order to properly understand the degree of injury you have received."

    I opened my mouth to accept the offered pain block, but before I could say anything, pain blossomed in my ankle. "Ow!" I turned to glare at Crysal fast enough that it jarred my shoulder, sending another bolt of pain through me. "Why-?!"

    Crysal ignored me in favor of smiling sweetly at Emelia. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it didn't mean I wasn't getting pissed off at her violent tendencies towards me. Why couldn't she be as nice to me as she was to the kids at least!?

    "You don't have to worry about the block," Crysal said, squeezing my uninjured shoulder hard enough that it was probably going to leave a bruise. "This idiot needs all the reminding she can get about why it is stupid to jump into the middle of fights where she is completely outclassed."

    "Ok! Ok!" I ground the words out between gritted teeth, my eyes watering with pain. "I get it! It was dumb! I'm sorry!"

    "Mistress, if you could please refrain from increasing my workload, I would deeply appreciate it." Emelia's creepy doll smile was back in full force as she turned to face Crysal with those barely opened eyes of hers. "I don't have any great reluctance to not using the pain block. It would free up more of my reserves to ensure that the work is done quickly. I also feel that it is very important for the pain of an injury's healing be experienced in order to more firmly cement the lesson received from the injury into place."

    I groaned, clutching my injured shoulder. "Great. Just great. Why do so many women around me have to be violent sadists?"

    "Who are you calling violent?" Crysal snapped, glaring at me. "You want to get slapped, idiot?!"

    "I'm sorry you feel that way," Emelia said, reaching out to place a cool, slim fingered hand on my injured shoulder, "but I'm afraid you're mistaken. After all, I would need to find pleasure in your receiving pain in order to be a sadist. It is not pleasurable for me to cause pain however. I merely wish for you to receive the full benefit of the lesson you have received by your injury."

    Before I could say anything else, a sodden pop announced my shoulder slipping back into place and white hot lines of electric fire started mapping out what felt like every single nerve and muscle fiber in my shoulder as they began knitting back into the places they were supposed to be. The pain was so intense, I couldn't even scream. The last thing I remember was Crysal grabbing my uninjured arm and keeping me from swinging at Emelia's porcelain like face before everything went black.

    When I woke up again, the pain was thankfully gone. So were the three Caprian physicians. I didn't particularly like that I found Emelia so unnerving, but I couldn't deny it was true either. I sat up with a groan, a coat sliding down from where it had been lain over my shoulders as I slept.

    "Ah." Moreina looked up from the book she had been perusing with a smile as I looked around. "You're awake. Please," she gestured at the carts of food that were still in the room, though looking rather more picked over now than they had before I passed out, "help yourself to some food and perhaps we can discuss the reason I sent my husband to retrieve the four you."

    "Uh, yeah." I ran a hand through my messy hair, trying to get it to lay flat or at least less tangleweed-like. It was a lost cause though. Sleeping on couches that smelled distinctly like they were stuffed with horsehair - and probably upholstered with horsehide now that I thought about it - apparently didn't do anything nice for my unruly mess. "Sorry about that."

    Radani laughed that weird mooing bellow laugh of his. "Pain will do that. Don't fret about it and eat. It was a good fight, hobbit! Enjoy your rewards!"

    "I'm really not enjoying the hobbit comments," I grumbled, heading over to the cart to fill a plate.

    "Apologies. I shall find some other term to call you then," he rumbled, what I could only interpret as an unapologetic grin on his bovine features. "Perhaps you'd prefer to be a brownie? Maybe more a phooka though..."

    "Radani, stop antagonizing our guests," Moreina chided, lightly slapping his thigh. "Especially as we require their assistance."

    "Very well, my queen," he rumbled in response, raising her hand to his lips to press a kiss against her knuckles.

    A light blush colored her cheeks when I sat back down, but I decided to eat instead of making any comments. And going by the glare I caught from Crysal, it was probably the safest choice I could have made. At least the food seemed normal here.

    "So what is it you wanted from us?" Crysal asked, one hand on Shel's tiny shoulder as the little girl curled up beside her using her lap as a pillow. Tomy sat almost at attention on the other side of her, so overwhelmed by what was going on he looked more like a carved statue than the determined boy we'd met earlier.

    "To be quite frank," Moreina said, sighing softly, "I'm afraid we must ask your help in saving our kingdom."

    "Well, this is one hell of a story quest," I muttered into the drumstick I was chewing on.

    "It's hardly a quest," Radani rumbled, glaring at me. Every damn body wanted to glare at me lately. Who was next? Little Shel?

"I'm afraid much of the... unrest you have been most unfortunate to encounter in my kingdom has been the fault of my family," Moreina continued, though a slight twitch between her brows showed that her apparent ignoring of our sniping wasn't as ignored as it looked. "As much as I am loathe to admit it, my grandfather or, I suppose if I'm truly being accurate, my great-grandfather was not much of a king. The son was as weak as the father when it came to ruling, I'm afraid, and that weakness has inevitably lead to our current dilemma."

"So... people from what? Four generations back? Screwed everything up." I raised a disbelieving brow. "And you had no part in all that, so... what? We're supposed to believe it's not your fault? Really?"

"Things are not as simple as you would make them appear," Radani said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "Moreina's mother and father both lost their lives trying to correct the mistakes of her grandfather and great-grandfather. The problems those weak willed men created are extremely difficult to correct."

"What did they do?" Crysal asked, waving a hand at me. She probably wanted me to shut up. Or she wanted to slap me. Both very possible desires when it came to her.

"I'm afraid they handed more and more of the traditional powers of the crown to the office of the prime minister," Moreina admitted, lowering her head in shame. "By now, my family is little more than figureheads while the prime minister is the true head of the state."

"And the little jackass who managed to weasel his way in there before her grandfather kicked the bucket," Radani growled, his dark eyes flashing dangerously, "is the dirtiest politician I've ever heard of."

"So... what?" I asked, scratching my head. "You want us to assassinate the prime minister or something?" I wrinkled my nose. The whole thing smelled disgusting. "Need to use throw away foreigners that you can blame it on? That's nasty."

"What?! No!" Moreina's head came up, staring at me in shock. "You can't murder him! He may be a horrible little man, but he is the prime minister of this country!"

I blinked at her.

"But you clearly need to get rid of him," Crysal said slowly, looking about as confused as I felt. "He's destroying this country."

"What we need," Radani said, shaking his massive head, "is to regain control of the army. If we had that, we'd have the strong base we need to make the reforms we want to make."

"Like getting rid of the slave pits," Moreina said, her voice firm. "And seeing to the care of the children his policies have orphaned."

"Y-you..." Tomy spoke for the first time, his voice all but shivering apart. "You don't want the slave pits?"

"What? Of course not! Slavery is appalling," Moreina declared, sitting up even straighter. "It's a blight upon this nation and I will not have it! The people of this nation are this nation! They cannot be bought or sold! That it is being allowed now is an utter disgrace."

"If we control the army-" Radani began only to be cut off by Tomy of all people.

"The army’s the ones that want the slave pits!" he cried, visibly shaking. "They come into the poorest areas and take people away! They say they're making them join the army, but everyone knows they're being sold!"

Radani and Moreina jerked as if they'd been slapped. "What?" Moreina asked, her voice trembling. "T-the army is?"

"My Da was taken," Tomy said, looking down at his knees as he gripped the edge of the couch. "I know he's not in the army. He'd've sent money if he was. Would've wrote. Ma could read. She taught us before she died. Everybody knows we ain't fighting nowhere... he got sold. Probably cause he didn't have enough money to pay their taxes."

Moreina was pale as a ghost. She clutched at Radani's arm. "That... that can't be true."

"Oh, it's true," Crysal said, with a little snort as she shook her head. "That army is nothing more than an oversized and overfunded pack of brigands. You'd be better off just killing most of them."

"That..." Radani swallowed, his oversized adam's apple bobbing noticeably under the brown fur of his throat. "That is a significant setback to our plans."

"That's a capsized boat of your plans," I said, rolling my eyes. "How were you even planning on taking over the army anyway?"

"Well, we were hoping that it could be infiltrated," Moreina admitted, biting her lip. "That if someone could just reach the Chief Commander with word from us, we could sway them to our side."

"Right now, the army supports the prime minister," Radani added, grimacing as he realized just how much they did. "And with the army's support, there's nothing we can do. But if the Chief Commander threw in with us, I was certain the army would follow him."

"And now you know they might not." I sighed, scrubbing my hand through my hair. "Even if they would, I thought that place was a nasty spot for women. How could we help?"

"And before anyone suggests it, we are not playing whores to the damn army!" Crysal snapped, glaring at the two royals as if she was their equal. "You want someone to fuck the whole damn army, then go hire some professionals and leave us out of it."

"I would never suggest such a thing!" Moreina's hand came up to grip her gown over her chest. "I... When I heard that you'd taken out a guard unit, I thought at least one of you had to be a man. I didn't-"

"You didn't think a couple of women could take out a guard unit." Crysal's voice was flat. "See, Theron? Even women in this world don't think women can handle things."

"She's a member of nobility in a fantasy setting." I leveled the flattest stare I could at Crysal. "How is that surprising in the least? And you call me an idiot." I shook my head, turning my attention back to Radani and Moreina with a roll of my eyes. "Sorry. Anyway. Now that you know we're not guys, what do you want to do?"

"I could go!" Tomy said suddenly, his outburst almost making me fall off the couch I was sitting on in surprise. "I could! I'm a guy! I could-"

"Absolutely not." Crysal, Moreina, Radani and I all interrupted in eerie synchronization.

"But-" His voice cracked on the word.

I sighed. "Tomy, don't be absurd. It's bad enough you've gotten lumped in with us. I'm not going to let you throw your life away on a suicide mission."

"Besides," Crysal pointed out, "I'm pretty sure you'd be recognized in a heartbeat. You're a local, kid."

"We are not so hard up as adults that we need to have a kid do the heavy lifting," Radani rumbled, shaking his horned head. "There's... another option."

"Another option?" I raised a brow, looking up at him. "Like what? Finding someone else to throw in your dungeon and brawl with?"

He laughed, but it was Moreina who spoke. "There is a-" She hesitated, her expression troubled. "A relic, I suppose you'd say. A remainder of a," a wince crossed her features, "rather unfortunate time of my family... of this kingdom's past."

I groaned. From what we'd already heard about Moreina's family, I didn't have any hopes for a positive surprise. Hell, at that point, I wouldn't have been surprised to find out her family tree bore a suspicious lack of forks. It was probably either a miracle or something extramarital that let her be as seemingly normal as she appeared.

"Ok, I'll bite." Crysal shrugged when I looked over at her. "What? I want to know what this relic thing that could fix this whole messed up plan is."

Moreina waved one of the kids with the flappy clothes over and whispered in his ear. He took off at a dead bolt and she smiled at us, folding her hands over her stomach. There was a touch of unease to her smile, but I tried to ignore it.

"Millie is going to retrieve the relic from the vaults. Please be patient." Radani settled one massive arm around her shoulders as she spoke in a gesture that would have been sweet from someone less monolithic in scale. "This relic is very old, but still quite powerful. According to our records, at one time, there were two of these relics, but at some point one was either destroyed or lost in some way. It pains me to admit it, but they were used as a means of... punishment for the vilest of crimes."

"That sounds even worse than I was imagining," I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. I had the awful sensation that a massive headache was impending. "So we have to use an ancient torture device. Awesome."

Crysal was glaring death at me by the time the kid - Millie, right? - came back with a small wooden box. The box was more impressive than the kid. It was black and shiny like the Japanese lacquerware I'd seen in a museum as a kid, glossy as a beetle's shell. But there were these strange streaks running through it. Red streaks that seemed to stream out from a center pool of the red. And it was a red that I could only describe as blood red. And not the dark, rusty color of dried blood, but the fresh stuff that was still bright and glossy. Too be honest, the more I looked at it, the creepier the whole thing seemed.

When Moreina took the box from Millie, my imagination made it seem like the red actually pulsed. Like there was some kind of heartbeat or something. At least, I hoped it was my imagination because I definitely didn't want to know what would be involved in creating something like that if it had pulsed.

"This is that relic." She opened the box, exposing the loop of black metal chain laying on a red velvet cushion inside the box.

It was an ugly metal, rough forged, the chain a heavy one despite the fact that it looked like the loop was supposed to be worn as a necklace. I could only imagine that it was some kind of iron. There was a yellowish tracing along the links. Gold? It almost looked like writing, though not like any kind of writing I'd ever seen before.

"It's called the Chain of Change." Neither Moreina nor Radani made any move to touch the ugly thing. "When worn it-" She hesitated again. I was really starting to not appreciate the hesitations. "Well, it... changes a person."

"It turns them into a different gender." Radani rumbled, holding out his free hand with the palm up. "If they were a man, they become a woman. Or a woman into a man. It's more complicated with the races that have more than two semi-distinct genders."

Crysal raised a brow. "So... an illusion?"

Radani's massive horns swung from side to side. "No. For as long as it is worn, it changes them."

"I don't get it." Crysal's brow furrowed as she tried to work her mind around what they were saying. "What do you mean it changes them?"

I sighed. Oh yeah, that headache was definitely on its way. "He means it forces a gender swap on the wearer. Like a full bore transformation. No illusion. Transformative magic." I glanced up at Moreina and Radani with a raised brow. "Whether the wearer wants it or not, right?"

Moreina looked troubled as she slowly nodded. "As I said, it was once used to punish those who committed the vilest crimes. This relic's twin was traditionally worn by the victim. Once the... task was complete and the relic's power exhausted, they would revert to their original forms."

"How would-" Crysal's eyes widened as it sunk in. "Wait. What?! Are you serious?! That's disgusting! That's almost worse than the crime itself!"

"The more I hear about your family, Moreina," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose even harder, "the less respect I have for them."

"There is a reason it's been locked away," she said, her shoulders drooping and head hanging down. The box rested in her lap, still open. "If... If it were possible, I'd wear it myself and take this task on."

"No." Radani didn't offer any explanation to his firm refusal, but he also didn't look at us, his eyes only on his wife. "That is not an option and you know it."

"I know," she said, leaning into him, one hand resting on her stomach just below her breasts. "But I feel terrible asking of anyone else what I would not risk myself."

"It is not just you you risk," he rumbled, nuzzling the top her head in a way that made me feel even more uncomfortable being in the room.

I glanced over at the other three members of my party. Tomy looked like he wanted to curl into himself and disappear. Probably typical for a teen boy who'd just been shot down like he had, but I didn't exactly have a lot of experience with them. Shel was fast asleep. Poor kid was probably worn out by all the excitement.

And Crysal looked like she was steeling herself for something. I turned my head to look at her more fully instead of out of the corner of my eye and was surprised by the red flush that colored her pale cheeks. I raised a brow and the flush only darkened.

I sighed, shaking my head.

"I'll do it." I held my hand out for the chain.

"What?! Theron, don't be stupid!" Crysal probably would have jumped to her feet if she didn't have Shel using her lap as a pillow.

"Are you sure?" Radani's rumble almost overpowered Crysal's protest.

I shrugged. "It's a gender swap. I've played a guy before. It's not a big deal."

Moreina's soft brown eyes widened. "Theron, I am aware that this is a grave thing that we ask. Please do not rush into a decision of this depth without thought. Our records show that those who wore the chain often suffered irreparable damage to their psyche. Even upon those enacting the punishment!"

"I'm pretty sure that was probably because your sick freak ancestors had them raped as soon as they were changed." I could feel my lips twisting in disgust. "Or doing the raping. I've got no idea why the hell you didn't think that could mess up someone's mind. You'd have been better off just killing the poor bastards." I held out my hand again. "Now give me that thing before I change my mind."

"Theron, you can't!" Crysal protested again.

I pushed myself up off the couch and walked over to snatch the chain out of the box myself. It was strangely warm to the touch. Almost like something alive. "Want to bet?" I looked up at Radani. "Do you have a private room I can use? I don't want to mess up my clothes."

He pointed to the door across the room from the one we'd entered. "There is a bedchamber through there. Use anything you find within as you see fit. If you need assistance, just call. Someone will come."

I nodded and strode across the room. It probably looked pretty pathetic in comparison to the giant bull-man and his wife or even Crysal, given my height, but I was pretty pissed off too. How dare anyone even create something like this? I glanced down at the chain still gripped so tight that my knuckles were turning white. Hell, it probably hadn't even been made for the reason they'd used it for. For a sweet lady, Moreina was descended from way too many sick freaks.

The door closed behind me with a muted thump. Nowhere near the slam I'd hoped for, but given how heavy it was, I was more surprised at how quietly it did close. For a fantasy setting, it had some decent engineering going on in the architecture.

The bedchamber I found myself in was well appointed, albeit on a scale that I found a bit intimidating. The bed was ginormous compared to what I was used to, probably like two big king size beds shoved together, with a massive four-poster canopy. Way too big for a five foot nothing like me. The bed frame and the rest of the fixtures of the room were of a warm, burnished wood. Maybe oak? Or whatever this world's equivalent was. But it looked well polished and cared for like beloved antiques.

But the best part was the long, polished silver mirror hanging on the wall across from the foot of the bed. There were some spots of wear around the corners, but for the most part, it shone back nearly as clear an image as the mirrors from the real world. Looking into it, my fears that my avatar was me were realized. I sighed as I took in the messy, albeit long-ish brown hair and muddy brown eyes. Average and bland as always. Maybe I could convince Radani and Moreina to let me use a bath and find a comb somewhere. It'd be a relief to get the tangles out.

I undressed quickly, folding my clothes neatly on a chair. I could feel my cheeks reddening as I gave a brief prayer of thanks that Crysal hadn't insisted on following me into the room. I wasn't anywhere near in the mood to hear her snarking about my lack of figure.

Standing in front of the long mirror in all my average glory, I took a deep breath. The chain was held in front of my chest, looking like something evil thanks to the rough iron work. The gold chasing didn't really help at all. It took some effort, but I forced myself to stop procrastinating and raised the chain up.

Closing my eyes tight, I lowered it over my head.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Ten

    I dodged back as fast as I could to get away from those horns. Capped or not, I didn't want them anywhere near me and that lowered head put them way too close for comfort. Unfortunately, even with the few extra points for agility I'd managed to scrounge from leveling up in my last two fights, it was still appallingly low. And, apparently, trying to run backwards when a scary monster popped up told the system to do a skill check.

    In other words, I promptly tripped over my own feet and fell on my ass.

    "Shit!" The minotaur might have been scaring the crap out of me, but falling on a cobblestone floor while wearing a distinct lack of pants was far from even the middle of by list of fun things to do. Besides that it was cold and the loincloth that passed for medieval underwear does not a great insulator make. I scrambled to get my legs under me - they were far more bare than my ass but also far less uncomfortable to have directly on the cold as hell floor - and proceeded to drop my dagger in the process. It clattered off the floor with a noisy metallic clatter.

    "What's this?" The minotaur's voice was unnervingly deep. "Who let you have a weapon?"

Fear gripped my chest like a cold band constricting my ribs as I stared up at the looming monster. I risked a glance back over my shoulder at the other three. Tomy clinging tightly to Crysal's shoulders with one arm even as he tried to reach out with the other. Shel cowering behind Crysal's leg with a bunch of the fabric of Tomy's pants clenched in one tiny hand, her eyes wide with fear. Crysal's expression unreadable, her jaw clenched, whole body looking like it was on the verge of exploding with the need to run.

I looked at my dagger, the torchlight flickering over the dull shine of its ragged blade where it lay on the cobblestones barely an arm's length from me. It was the only weapon we had. I didn't even know how we had it when everything else had been taken, but it was there. One tiny chance against a minotaur that made it look like barely more than a splinter.

When I looked back up at the minotaur again, the fear band clinched tighter, forcing out an almost inaudible whimper. I couldn't fight. Not against that. But what else could I do? Give up? Let him take away my dagger and push us back into the cells? Just cower in the dark and wait to die? A tiny echo in the back of my mind chose that moment to pipe up.

We're probably all lucky to be down here and not in the slave pits.

My eyes widened as my imagination went to work flooding my mind with images of Tomy, Shel, and Crysal in shackles, iron collars digging into their necks. My breath caught in my throat as cruel imagery I remembered from history classes in school blended with the faces and forms of my friends. The fear band loosened slightly as one word crossed my mind.

Friends.

That was right. Maybe I hadn't known them long. Maybe Crys was an astonishingly stubborn jerk much of the time. Maybe Tomy was just a kid with a way overblown sense of my skills and his little sister was being dragged along for the ride. But they'd chose to stick by me. That's what friends did. They looked out for each other.

I lunged for my dagger.

"Theron, you idiot! Stop! Don't!"

I could hear them yelling behind me. Crysal and Tomy. Even little Shel.

The minotaur let out a roar and reached for me but I rolled out of the way, my dagger hugged close to my chest. The wall stopped my roll more than any conscious effort, knocking the air out of me for a critical second, but I somehow managed to stagger to my feet. The point of my dagger wavered in time with my pulse as I held it between the minotaur and me. My hands were wet with cold sweat, but I didn't let it drop or turn my eyes from his.

"So the hobbit has a sting, does she?" The minotaur's voice rumbled through the air, crashing over me. Wait. Hobbit? Sting? My eyes narrowed.

"Want to see if it works on minotaurs as well as trolls and spiders?" I shot back, somehow finding courage in the creature's words.

He laughed, the sound like a cross between a cow's lowing and the overly emphasized belly laugh of a mall Santa. "You're welcome to try, hobbit. Though a minotaur, I am not."

"Still look dumb as a bull!" I shouted as I lunged in, ignoring the screams of my friends. My dagger's tip arrowed for the creature's belly. I had to end it fast before my lack of real skills became too obvious and a cut belly was all I could think of.

His hand slashed down before I could even think to move out of the way, fingers wrapping around my forearm. His palm almost covered my arm from wrist to elbow. His grip closed, stopping my charge as if I'd just tried to stab through a vat of molasses.

A scream escaped me as he tightened his grip, sending crushing pain through my arm as he lifted me off my feet. My hand began to open involuntarily, my dagger loosening in my grasp no matter how I fought to keep my grip. My shoulder screamed in pain as the full weight of my body hung off my arm as my feet left the floor. I could dimly hear Crysal and the kids yelling behind me, all of my focus on the pain radiating from my arm.

"What now?" The minotaur asked, giving me a little shake that sent another wave of pain shooting through me. "Still want to fight, little hobbit?"

"Dammit, Theron! Just give up!" Crysal's voice sounded weird through the haze of pain from my arm being manhandled.

"I won't-" I gasped in pain as he shook me again. "I won't let you make my friends into slaves!"

"Slaves?!" His nostrils flared as a burst of steam shot out, his voice a dull roar. "You think I'm some kind of slaver?! I should kill you for that insult!"

I screamed as he shook me again, my eyes closing involuntarily. The dagger finally slipped through my fingers as they went numb. I reached out without thinking with my still free hand. The dagger's soft but rough leather slapped into my outstretched hand as if it was planned, settling against my palm as I kicked my legs to swing forward despite my shoulder feeling like it was ripping apart.

"Not if you die first, Radani!" I screamed as I swung the blade at his massive thigh, my arm still hanging from his grip feeling like it was tearing free of my body as I forced my body to pivot around it. A hideous pop from my shoulder sounded near my right ear dragging another agonized scream from my lips as I felt the dagger tip sinking into his flesh. "Crys, run!"

"Stop at once!"

The command slashed through the chaotic sound of battle like a hot knife through butter accompanied by some sort of echo that I couldn't quite understand threaded through the words.

A strange force flowed through the room at the new voice's command. Instantly, everything froze in place as if someone had hit pause on a movie. From my suicidal last attack to Tomy sliding from Crysal's back as she flung herself towards Radani to Radani's own rage fueled blow crashing towards my head. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, everything in the room ceased moving. It was all I could do just to move my eyes in that frozen tableau.

A slim hand appeared on Radani's muscular shoulder, gently pulling his arm down from the blow that would have killed me. "Your temper gets the best of you too often, love." The voice's owner stepped around Radani's bulk, entering the room.

The woman was taller than Crysal or myself - not that the latter would take much, even in a fantasy world, I wasn't anything you could call tall - but the top of her head still only came to Radani's chin. Soft brown hair flowed past her shoulders and down her back, almost hiding the brown cow-like ears that hung along the sides of her face. Only the odd white splotches on their hide kept me from completely missing them at first. Her eyes were large and brown, even for a human, though the rest of her features were even enough to be considered beautiful in most parts of the real world. A simple golden circlet rested on her forehead between a pair of considerably daintier horns than Radani sprouted.

"W-who are you?" I gasped out, forcing the words past the force that held us all still.

"My name is Moreina. Radani is my husband. So, if you don't mind, I would like him to remain-" The woman smiled at me even as she reached out to removed my dagger from Radani's thigh and pulled his arm down so that I stood on the floor once more. Her long gown scraped the floor with an almost metallic sound as she moved. "-intact."

A deep flush colored my cheeks. "I... that wasn't what... I mean..."

She laughed, a softly melodious sound compared to her husband's lowing. "I realize. It is just a little joke." She laid a hand against Radani's broad chest as he grumbled, patting him gently. "He's a good man, if a little quicker to raise his fists than explain himself."

"I don't need your defense, woman," he rumbled, tossing his head as the strange force slowly receded. "I can more than handle a handful of children."

Behind me, Crysal stumbled to a stop, barely managing to keep her feet by grabbing my uninjured shoulder. "What the-?" she whispered in my ear.

"Shh-" I held a finger to my lips before attempting to lift my injured arm with a grimace. "Let her handle it."

"Yes, I am aware but it is hardly necessary," she said. "I asked you to retrieve them as our guests, not engage them in a common brawl. Now the small warrior is injured and we'll have to see to that before speaking."

Radani's head hung low, his chin scraping his chest as he sighed, shoulders slumping. "I'm sorry, my queen. Sometimes my human heart makes this bull's head of mine too quick to rise to any challenge I see."

Moreina turned towards him, reaching up to wrap her slim arms around his neck and laughed again before leaning up to brush her lips against the side of his muzzle. "But I love that human heart of yours as well as your bullishness. All is forgiven, my king. Now raise your horns and let us once more attempt your original task."

"Very well." He grumbled, but his head raised and his shoulders straightened once more until the tips of his horns were brushing the ceiling. One massive arm slid around Moreina's shoulders as she turned to face the four of us with a slight bow.

"Please forgive the poor start and allow us to start anew," she said, inclining her head slightly towards each of us. "I am Moreina and this is my husband Radani. We are the rulers of this land."

"And doing a damn poor job of it too," Crysal said, glaring at them with a hand on my uninjured shoulder as if to hold me in place.

"We're very aware," Radani grumbled, his small eyes narrowing at her, "of our land's problems."

"Like taking folk's parents off in the night?" Tomy asked, limping up on my right side. Shel reached up and took my left hand as she worked her way between Crysal and me. "Or stealing kids' money so they ain't got enough to eat?"

Moreina's smooth brow creased as she listened to us, fine lines appearing along the sides of her full lips. "I... didn't know about that," she admitted softly.

"How about the slave pits?" Crysal asked, raising a brow at them. "Or," she gestured to the cells behind them, "places like this? Gonna say you didn't know about that either?"

Moreina's brown eyes darkened, her lips tightening as if something had just hit her hard and she was bracing against the pain. "No... I am sorry to admit that I do know of that... distasteful trade."

"If you're the ruler of this place," I asked, trying to ignore the pain from my dislocated shoulder, "then why not do something about it?"

"It's not that easy-" she began only for Radani to cut her off.

"Let us first go some place," he glanced around the empty dungeon with a grimace, "more comfortable and see to our injuries first. There is a small room not to far from here that we can use. There is nothing that can be achieved with rushing blindly now."

"Can we eat?" Shel asked softly, looking up at me as she clung to my hand. "I'm hungry, The'on."

I smiled awkwardly down at her, not sure what to do with having a child depending on me the way she seemed to want to. "I'm sure we can find something to eat soon," I said with a little nod.

"I'll have a meal brought up while the physicians attend you," Moreina promised as Radani turned and ducked out of the room before following after him.

"Well..." I winced as a fresh jolt of pain surged through my injured arm. "This isn't exactly how I expected to get out of here."

"You're not the only one," Crysal said as she moved to help Tomy climb on her back again and headed out of the dungeon, leaving me to bring up the rear with Shel still clinging to my good hand with both of her tiny hands as I tried desperately to ignore the pain that shot through my right arm with each fall of my feet against the stone floor.

[theglitchedworld]

Apologies

I’m afraid I caught a virus of some kind. I apologize for the delay in releasing chapter 10. I’ll do my best to have it up at some point today or by tomorrow at the latest. Again, I am very sorry for the delay.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Nine

I woke up feeling like someone had stuffed my mouth and eyes full of cotton balls before deciding to use my skull as some kind of ceremonial drum. My head throbbed to the painfully steady beat of my pulse, sending flashes of light across the darkness of my closed eyelids. A musty smell filled my nose and something prickled all over anywhere skin was exposed. And given that I still hadn't found suitable pants, that covered quite a bit more space than was comfortable. I groaned, reaching up to cover my ears to try and block out the rasping sound grating on my ears before realizing it was my own breathing I was hearing.

"Well, well." Crysal's voice was at once welcome and a fresh source of pain that made me curl up into a tighter ball on whatever I was laying on. "Looks like Sleeping Beauty finally decided to wake up."

"What happened?" I groaned, my voice sounding almost as miserable as I actually felt. "Feels like we went on a week long bender without any of the fun parts."

"Close." She snorted, a soft clang of something hitting metal underlining her words. "Your need to play hero landed us in a dungeon. Congrats."

"Seriously?" I opened my eyes tentatively to look around, even the dim torch light illuminating the cell seeming too bright for a moment.

It was definitely a cell. Small and cramped with such wonderful features as rough cobblestone floors and walls and musty piles of straw to serve as beds. The bars that ran the entire end were each thick around as my wrist and the door set into them was equally massive. I groaned anew as I slumped back into my prickly pile of straw.

"Wonderful."

"See what happens when you don't listen to me?" she asked, knocking her head against the bars again. A nasty bruise colored the left side of her face, blotting out the freckles the spread over her cheeks and swelling her eye almost closed. Her hair was down in a rough tangle around her shoulders with a smear of dried blood near her hairline that I almost missed in the dim torchlight.

Both of our armor and weapons had been taken, but they'd at least had the decency to let us keep our clothes. Not that an oversized shirt probably actually counted as clothes in my case. However they had taken my belt so the shirt felt more like a nightgown now than the almost-a-dress vibe I had been rocking.

"I wasn't the only one in that fight," I reminded her, pushing my hands down into the straw to try and sit up as I spoke. Just as my right hand hit the cool stone of the cobbles beneath the straw, however, my left came into contact with something very different. I froze.

Crysal noticed, closing her eyes with a groan of her own as her head clanged back against the bars once more. "Please don't tell me you just felt a rat."

"N-no..." I spoke slowly, my fingers questing over the shape they'd encountered with an almost morbid fascination.

She opened her unbruised eye to peer at me. "...a lizard?"

I shook my head, staring at the straw with wide eyes where my hand was covered.

"What?" She sat up, now fully focused on me. "What is it?"

Familiar curves settled easily against the palm of my hand as I wrapped my fingers around my find and drew it up out of the straw and held it where she could see it. "This."

Crysal's eyes widened in surprise. "Are you kidding me?!"

I shook my head wordlessly, unable to look away from it. In my hand was the ugly knife I'd used to kill the gremlin that had once owned it. At first I'd thought it was maybe just another like it, but the more I held it, the more I knew it was the same one. The same dagger they should have confiscated while I was unconscious.

"How-?" She shook her head quickly. "Never mind. Can I see it?" she asked, holding out her hand.

"Why? You hate this thing." I held it to my chest, leaning away. "I'm not letting you throw it away!"

"Seriously were you dropped on your head as a kid? Like a lot?" she asked, her brows furrowing over grey eyes. "I'm not going to throw our only weapon away!"

"Then what do you want it for?" My head still throbbed, making it hard to keep my eyes open in the flickering torchlight, let alone focus.

Crysal pinched the bridge of her nose with a sigh. "You really are the biggest idiot I've ever met, you know that? I want to pick the lock."

I frowned. "I might be an idiot, but I know you can't pick a lock with just a knife. Even in a game."

She glared at me for a moment then reached down to the inseam of her pants and pulled a slender strip of metal from it. "I have a pick," she said, holding it up. "What I don't have is a tensioner. Which is why I want to see your stupid knife. Now do you want to get out of here or not?"

I watched her warily for a couple of throbs of my skull before holding it out. "Don't break it."

"Keep being stupid and I'll break it on purpose," she snapped, grabbing it out of my hand and moving towards the massive door. "God, I swear, sometimes I really have no idea why I put up with you."

"That makes two of us," I said, getting to my feet and stretching my arms. "I guess we'll have to figure out where Tomy and Shel got to after we get out of here."

"Across the aisle," Crysal said, her attention focused on the bit of metal and my dagger as she worked them in the oversized hole of the lock.

I froze. "Huh? Come again?"

She sighed and I didn't even have to see her face to know she was rolling her eyes. Her forehead bumped against the back of the lockplate as she groaned, gesturing outside the hall with my dagger. "Use your eyes and look. They're right there."

I stumbled across the cell and grabbed the bars with both hands. The chill of iron bit into my palms, but I ignored it. All I could see was the still form of the two kids I'd been certain had gotten out. "Dammit!" I let go of the bars only to smash my hands into them, making the iron ring. "What the hell?!"

"Jesus! Keep it down will you?!" Crysal hissed, glaring at me. "Do you want to call the guards down here, idiot?!"

I flinched, letting my head hit the bars as my shoulders slumped. "Sorry." My regret didn't last long before I was glaring across the aisle again though. "Dammit, Tomy! Why didn't you run away?!"

He groaned, sitting up slightly more where he leaned against the wall. Shel huddled against his chest in his lap, one of his thin arms around her shoulders. "We tried." His shoulders hunched forward as he brought his other arm up around his sister's shoulders, holding her protectively close. "They were outside the window too."

"You're lucky they got dumped down here with us," Crysal said as she worked. "Hell, we're probably all lucky to be down here and not in the slave pits."

"Slave pits?!" My voice cracked as I spun to stare at Crysal. Slavery wasn't a normal part of fantasy games. Most companies avoided programming it in to avoid getting an indecency charge or national ban against their games. "What the hell do you mean slave pits?!"

She kicked a stone from the floor at me, catching me bruisingly hard on one shin. "Shut up, moron! God, why can't you just use your brain without opening your mouth for once?! Yes, slave pits, okay? This place is just fine and dandy with that shit and pissing off the guard is a damn good way to end up there. Which is why I tried to keep you from rushing in like you did yesterday."

I spotted Tomy hugging Shel tighter at Crysal's words out of the corner of my eye. Of course I knew what she was talking about, but I didn't regret doing it. Even if I hadn't had a clue about the real consequences at the time. "I'm not going to apologize for stopping those assholes," I said instead, narrowing my eyes at Crysal.

She shrugged. "Didn't say you should." A soft click announced her efforts on the lock as successful and she pulled her arms back into the cell. "But it was still stupid."

"I don't care." I pushed the door open before she could, grabbing my dagger back from her as I did. "I can't believe Radani puts up with slavery. That's bullshit."

"Believe whatever you want." Crysal crossed the hall and grabbed a ring of keys from a hook on the wall. "But it's real. Now," she unlocked the door to Tomy and Shel's cell and pulled it open, "let's get out of here. Can you two walk?"

Tomy nodded, letting Shel get up on her own before standing himself. He winced as he put weight on his right foot however and leaned back against the wall again. "Sorry." His voice cracked. "Guess not." He leaned down and gave Shel a tight hug before pushing her towards the door. "Take care of Shel for me. Ok?"

"No!" She spun away from him and ran back to wrap her little arms around his waist. "I'm not going!"

"Shel, come on," he said, smiling bravely as he pulled her arms away from his waist. "You gotta go with them and get out of here."

"No! I won't!" She struggled, but even small as they were, he was stronger. "Tomy, I don't wanna go!"

"You got to," he said, trying to push her away again only to be interrupted by Crysal coming over and grabbing his wrist.

"Contrary to what it might look like with the midget over there, I'm not a babysitter," she said, glaring at him for a moment before dropping his wrist and turning around. Crouching down, she waved a hand over her shoulder at him. "Now come on."

"Huh? What?" He stared at her back in confusion.

"She's offering to carry you on her back," I said, frowning at the lot of them. "Now climb on and let's get out of here."

"Are you sure?" he asked, taking an uncertain step forward with Shel's help.

Crysal turned her head to glare at him. "Do I have a sign on me saying Morons Welcome or something?! We're not leaving anyone behind, so move your ass!" His face darkened even in the dim torchlight, but he managed to get on Crysal's back with Shel's help. She stood easily, shrugging her shoulders and tucking her arms under his knees to get a good grip. "Now hold on and try not to choke me or I'll drop your ass."

"O-ok." He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, holding onto his wrists to try and avoid her neck. "I'll do my best."

She shook her head, rolling her eyes at me as she headed out of the cell. Shel had a grip on the side of her pants as she walked. "You're armed, so you're in front." She nodded at me with an expectant look. "Try not to get into any fights though."

"Try not to get into fights while escaping from prison. Got it." I shook my head as I turned for the only door that seemed to be leaving the dungeon. I'd been asked to do more impossible things in the past, but that one seemed a higher order than usual. "Would you like me to learn to fly next? Or maybe walk on water? Turn it to wine while I’m at it?"

"Just shut up and let's go."

I reached for the door's latch only to jump back as it creaked up on its own. The heavy iron door swung open like it weighed no more than a feather. I looked around but there was nowhere to hide and even if there was, we couldn't hide that the cells were empty. The shadow of the person coming into the room was massive, easily filling the overly large doorway.

He had to duck to enter the room despite the doorway being taller than what I was used to back in the real world. A heavy set of ivory horns sprouted from behind the flaps of his ears, jutting forward to end in gold tipped points nearly a foot and a half past his forehead. The long blunt muzzle and massive neck of his head was covered in short, dark brown hair that erupted into a black mane between his horns that cascaded down his back. His torso, arms, and legs to mid-thigh were bare skin a shade or two lighter than the hair on his head and densely packed with muscles. His lower legs were as bestial as his head, curving in a way unnatural for a human being and ending in cloven black hooves the size of dinner plates.

Two black leather straps crossed his chest supporting a greataxe held on his back. A loincloth covered his presumably human loins, hanging to mid knee. A candle lantern that would have taken me two hands to hold up was dwarfed by the single massive hand that held it aloft. When he spotted me, his nostrils flared like that of a bull spotting the matador in one of those old movies.

"Escaping?" His voice rumbled low enough to make my ears feel like they were vibrating as he set the lantern on the ground and straightened to his full height again.

"M-m-minotaur?!" My voice broke in a squeak as I stumbled back from the door staring up at him. The top of my head barely reached midway up his ripped abdomen.

He snorted, lowering his massive bovine head to look fully at me. "Who are you calling a minotaur, hobbit?"

I really needed to learn to keep my mouth shut.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Eight

Thankfully, the room over the small inn's stable that we'd managed to trade rat killing services for - though I'd far prefer to have coin next time given Crysal's idea of bait was apparently me - included use of the inn's bathhouse. Well, I say thankfully, but the only ones appreciative of it was probably Crysal and myself. Tomy and Shel's idea of fully bathed were definitely informed by the setting and resulted in both of them being sent back in more than once before they finally met with Crysal's standards of cleanliness.

Scrubbing that much couldn't have been fun, but it had given me enough time to go out. Turning up a clean change of clothes for the kids and dinner for the four of us from the innkeep took what few coins were in the pouch I'd taken from the guard. Looking back, the money I'd lifted from the guard probably hadn't been as meager as it seemed so much as I just sucked at bargaining. Crysal likely would have been the better person to go out, but she was so dead set on the kids being clean before dinner that I had a feeling it'd be an even worse idea to point out the obviously bad idea of sending me to buy things.

The kids cleaned up pretty well though, much to Crysal's satisfaction, and were more than willing to dig into the food the innkeep's son brought up. Well, they were once we tried a bit of everything to prove it wasn't poisoned or something, I guess. Which probably should have clued either of us in that something was really off with the city, but I hate to admit we missed it. To be honest, I was more interested in the fact that the thick brown stew and black bread we were served didn't smell like it'd taken a dip in a sewer first.

"So why does the army want little kids?" Crysal asked once the initial eating frenzy had died down. "You can't be as much help as an adult or even a teen."

"I'm almost fourteen," Tomy snapped, his brows furrowing as he glared across the table at her. "And I'm big as her." He pointed a finger over at where I was ladelling more stew into my bowl. "So stop calling me a little kid."

"Being big as a midget is hardly proof of not being a little kid," Crysal said under her breath as she glanced at me.

"Keep it up, Crysal. Go ahead." I said, rolling my eyes as I tore a fresh chunk off the loaf of bread. "Your obsession with my appearance is really cute. Super mature too."

"Whatever," she said, shrugging before turning her attention back to the kids across from her. "But seriously, why are they after you? That was hardly a recruitment drive. Looked more like you were getting kidnapped."

Tomy shrugged, handing Shel a chunk of bread. "We don't usually go out during the day. Kids, I mean. The guards like to grab us and make us enlist. Especially since we ain't got a ma or da anymore to pay 'em off. Rich families ain't gotta worry about that stuff cause they got money to buy people to join for 'em."

My eyes narrowed and I set my spoon down. "Wait. Forced enlistment?" I looked at Crysal. "Is this place at war or something?"

She shook her head, spooning a thick chunk of vegetable into her mouth and eating it before replying. "Not as far as I know. But I spend most of my time in the survival zones hunting. I suppose it's possible."

"Da always said we're not," Tomy said, stabbing at a hunk of meat in his bowl. "But the criers all says we gotta keep a big army to keep other places from attacking us."

"That sounds like bullshit." Worse, it sounded like an excuse to keep the populace in check. Like something right out of one of those poli-sci books I had to study in school. "A big army is just a drain on the economy. It's not bad to have an army for defense, but there shouldn't be a reason for it to be so big that they have to force people to join. Especially not kids."

"What happened to your Da?" Crysal asked gently. "You said he was taken to the army, but he should have been allowed to visit right?"

Tomy shrugged and put and arm around Shel's shoulders. "Don't know. Lots of people who go to the army don't come back. Criers never talk about fighting or nothing. They're just gone."

"I don't like it," Crysal whispered, shaking her head. "Sounds bad."

"Told you there was something wrong here," I said, sighing. "Being right sucks sometimes."

"See? This is why you should listen when I tell you to wait." She elbowed me in the arm, which irritated the wrapped cut I'd gotten earlier.

It hurt, a bright sting that made my eyes water even as I grabbed my arm. "Dammit, Crys! Why'd you have to do that?"

"Sorry." She didn't look sorry despite her words, smirking at me like that. "I'll make a point of hitting harder next time just to make sure you remember how much it sucks to get hurt." Nope. Not sorry at all.

"Oh!" Tomy sat up a little straighter as if the injury had reminded him of something. "That reminds me! How'd you do that?"

"Do what? Elbow her? It was easy."

"No! Not that. I mean earlier. Back there. How'd you fight like that?" He stared at me fixedly enough to bring a blush to my cheeks.

"Uh..." I scratched my head trying to figure out how to explain that I'd learned how to fight in an entirely different body.

"This should be good," Crysal said, propping her head on one fist and watching me. "I'd love to hear how a no skills noob managed to pull that off myself."

I grimaced, reaching up with both hands to scrub at my scalp. "It's not a big deal..."

"Oh, it's a big deal," she said, nodding towards the kids. "They're pretty impressed after all. So regale us, wonder tyke."

"It's called arnis," I said, shrugging as I looked away. The way the focus on me seemed to get even more intense made me even more uncomfortable. "It's just... you know. It's something I learned as a kid. Back, uh, where I came from."

Crysal's eyes widened as she realized what I was trying to say. "Oh! So from..."

"Yeah." I nodded, shrugging again. "It's... I used to practice with my sister a lot. It's kind of instinct more than anything by now, I guess."

The chair Tomy had been sitting in clattered to the ground as he bolted to his feet, hands planted on the table. "Can you teach me?!"

I almost fell over in surprise at the sudden move. "What?"

"That... Arny. Arnose. That whatever you called it." He trembled as he stared at me, his nostrils flaring slightly. "Can you teach me that?"

"I-" I looked over at Crysal, but found no help there. I reached up and scratched the bridge of my nose. "I'm not... I'm really not good enough to be a teacher though. I only know what I learned in school a long time ago..."

"But-!" I cut him off with a chop of my hand.

"No way. I'm not a teacher. I don't know enough to teach anything properly." I sighed, shaking my head as I ran a hand through my hair. "Besides I'd probably end up teaching wrong anyway."

"You know more than pretty much anyone here," Crysal said, shrugging one shoulder. "What could it hurt?"

"What could it hurt?!" I gaped at her. That had to be the most idiotic thing I'd heard in a while. "Jesus, Crys! It's a martial art! People here kill each other with that shit! If I screw up teaching it and someone relies on that bad teaching in a fight, they could die! Hell, someone could get bad hurt just in training if I don't teach it right!"

"Hey, calm down," she said, sitting up and holding her hands up defensively. "It was just a suggestion-"

"A stupid suggestion!"

She sighed, rolling her eyes. "Alright, fine. It was stupid. But all I'm saying is you can let the kid copy the way you practice, right? You were pretty good out there. You've got to at least know the basic stuff, right?"

"I'm not a master," I said, folding my arms over my chest and hunching my shoulders.

It should have been obvious. Of course it was obvious. All I knew was what I'd learned as a kid. The basic basics. Nothing that a real teacher would know. Every time I looked at the hopeful expression on Tomy's face, I reminded myself again that I couldn't teach him.

He wanted to use it to fight. Even an idiot could see that. Maybe he was just an NPC, but the NPCs were... strange here. They responded better than NPCs in other games I'd played. Definitely better than The Bested World's NPCs which were little more than signposts for the next quest.

But more than that, as I'd learned back in Gallador, they could die here.

Not just lose all their HP and derez before respawning a little while later in the same place, but actually die. They didn't derez. Their bodies stayed where they fell. Their blood stained the surfaces it pooled on. Graves had to be dug and they had to be lowered into them. Other NPCs mourned them for God's sake!

It was either the most realistic programming I'd ever seen or even heard of in the history of gaming or... it was something else. I wasn't sure what that something else was exactly, but it made me almost as uncomfortable as the lack of kids running around the city had made me earlier. I didn't want to think about it too hard either at the time.

But I could imagine Tomy learning the bastardized version of Arnis I'd be able to teach all the same. And worse, I could imagine what would happen if I did. My stomach churned as my mind twisted my memory of finding the murdered barmaid into Tomy laying there on the bloodstained floor. His arms and legs slashed like mine after the fight with the guards. His brown eyes dull and blank, staring sightless at things I could never see.

I shuddered, chafing my arms at the sudden chill the vision invoked in me. I didn't want to see that. I might have only met the kid, but I didn't want him to die. Not because of me.

"Theron," Crysal said softly, reaching out to grip my shoulder. My arms twitched, but I managed to suppress my first instinct to knock her hand away. "It's ok to not be a master. No one's expecting you to be. Tomy just wants to learn what you do know. That's all."

"I don't want it to be my fault," I muttered, shaking my head. "If I screw it up, he could die-"

"If I gotta die," Tomy broke in, his voice hard with determination, "then I want it to be cause something I did."

"I don't want you to die at all!" I yelled, my hand lashing out to smack the table's surface hard enough to cause the crockery to rattle and Shel to jump back in alarm. "You shouldn't trust your life to something I barely remember how I learned!"

"I'm gonna die anyway!" He yelled back, nails scraping on the table's surface as his hands curled into fists. Shel grabbed onto his tunic, her eyes full of fear. "Maybe not now, but someday. They almost dragged me off to the army today. They would've if you hadn't shown up. I don't even know what would've happened to Shel if you hadn't come. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even protect my little sister!"

"Tomy, listen-" I started, only to be cut off.

"No! You listen! I saw you fighting," he said, his eyes suspiciously bright as he looked up at me again, his lips a tight line. "I saw you get hurt. I know it's dangerous. But so is everything else! I want you to teach me how to do what you did."

"But I-"

"I don't care!" His shoulders trembled, but he didn't look away. "I don't care if you're a teacher or a master or whatever! You can do something I can't and I want to learn how! I gotta look out for my sister! I can't do that with how I am now!"

Something snapped deep inside me with his words. I remembered that feeling. That need to look out for my family. Of wanting to protect my sister no matter what. My head dropped to my chest, a tight band squeezing my heart as I took one shaky breath after another.

"Ok." The word barely made it out of my mouth and I didn't raise my head as I nodded. I didn't want anyone to see my face. "Ok. I'll teach you what I know. But you don't fight unless I say you can or you have no other choice." I finally felt confident enough in my expression to raise my face and meet his gaze with a hard one of my own. "And if Crysal or I say to run, you run."

He colored at my last statement, male ego wounded at the idea of being made to run away. "But-"

"No buts." My hand chopped the air between us. "You want me to teach you, that's my requirements. No fighting unless either I say or there's no other choice and if Crysal or I tell you to run then you run and you do not look back."

"I'm not a child-!"

"I didn't say you were. But your job is to protect your little sister. Which means if you need to run away, you run away. Understand?"

I could feel Crysal's gaze on me as I spoke, fully aware of how hypocritical I probably sounded in that moment. But, in my defense, I hadn't been trying to get her to be my teacher at the time. Not that it changed how stupid I'd been running into a fight that I had no business jumping into with the abilities I had. Hell, jumping into the fight with the guards had been beyond stupid all by itself. But I prayed for her to be quiet even as I could feel my cheeks heating slightly under her steady gaze.

Tomy struggled with my demands. You could see it in every line of his body. I knew it would be hard for a guy, especially a teenaged boy, to accept having to run away from a fight. Not fighting unless you had to was probably a common demand, but running away would be a blow to his ego.

"Tomy..." Shel's soft voice broke the silence as she tugged on his shirt. "Tomy, please?"

His shoulders slumped suddenly. "Alright," he said, shaking his head. "Fine. If that's what it takes, then fine. I agree."

My eyes widened slightly before I could stop myself from reacting. I hadn't really expected him to agree, though the twinge of relief calming the roiling of my stomach was certainly a grateful outcome. "Ok. Then you two should get some sleep. We'll start first-"

The door slamming open with a thunderous crash interrupted before I could say anything else. Beneath us, horses screamed in alarm as men in grey armor poured into the stable. Our chairs clattered to the ground as we lunged for our feet, getting tangled in the simple furniture in the chaos.

"City guard!" The man in the front yelled, brandishing a long pole with what looked for all the world like an iron omega symbol attached to the end. "You're under arrest for assaulting a patrol! Surrender now!"

"Tomy, remember what I said about running away?" I asked as we backed towards the room's one window that looked out over the stable's roof.

"Yeah, what about it?" he asked, his wide eyed gaze fixed on the men beginning to fill the room, Shel cowering under his arm as they backed away together.

"She's telling you to run, idiot!" Crysal yelled, turning to give the two of them a shove towards the window. "Get out of here!"

"But-" He stumbled when she pushed him, his hip hitting the sill of the window as Shel fumbled the latch holding the shutters closed open.

"No buts!" I yelled, turning my attention away from the guards to glare at him. If they hadn't been so focused on capturing us, it would have been a fatal mistake. "Run!"

The last thing I remembered before that weird pole slid around my neck and a burst of blue lightning drowned my consciousness was the sight of his scared face as he picked his sister up and jumped out the window.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Seven

The capital - apparently called Tauron according to the guards at the gate - was an entirely new experience for me. And I don't just mean new because I'd never been there before. I mean I'd never experienced any thing like it before.

Even in the real world, there was the change in atmosphere when you went from small towns to big cities. The way that things seemed like they were going faster and everyone had more important things to deal with than you as they bustled about. The way the buildings were larger and closer together so they seemed to block out the sun in a way that just didn't happen with smaller towns and villages. The nasty smell from the detris littering the sides of the streets that I would have been outright thrilled to not have filling my nose.

But this was different.

There was a strange atmosphere to the whole place. Like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on a hot party or something. Everything seemed subdued and quiet. Which isn't to say the place wasn't noisy, because there was the constant clamour of hooves on pavement, metal clattery clanging from tradesfolk, and the murmur of people talking everywhere we went. It just wasn't a happy clamour. It took me a while to put my finger on what was missing but once I did, I just couldn't seem to stop noticing it.

There were no children.

It wasn't that there weren't kids in the world. I'd seen plenty at the village after all. But there didn't seem to be any here.

And that... bothered me.

The more I looked for them, the more it seemed off that they were missing. It was a feudal city after all. Or at least, programmed to look like one. Which meant that there should have been kids running errands or learning a trade beside their masters or parents. Or even just playing in the streets.

But there weren't any.

I was equipping the light steel breastplate Crysal had managed to bargain down to the range of the handful of coins I'd gotten for killing the one gremlin during the raid and helping the villagers bury their dead after when it finally got too much for me to keep bearing in silence.

"Where's the kids?"

"Huh?" Crysal looked up from where she'd been adjusting the fit of her new boots on the bench beside me. "Oh! Hey, what do you know. With that breastplate you actually look like a boy again! That should make you happy."

"Would you drop that already?" The constant prodding about my gender since she'd apparently decided to accept that I was who I said I was was annoying, but not enough to distract me from my discomfort over the missing kids. "I asked you where all the kids are."

"What kids?" She cocked her head to the side, looking at me with a puzzled expression.

"What-" I threw up my hands in exasperation. "The kids of this town! I haven't seen any the whole time we've been here! Where are they?!"

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she stared at me. "Wait... you're not-" They narrowed even further. "That's not your thing is it?"

"Thing?" Now it was my turn to be confused. "What are you talking about?"

"You know. The whole looking for kids thing," she said, flicking her fingers in a weird way as if I was supposed to know what the hell that meant. "You know. Like that."

"What? That doesn't make any-" I stopped as what she was implying finally sank in. "Wait, what?! No! Not- Holy shit, no! I'm not like that! What the hell?!"

"Well, what am I supposed to think with you suddenly asking about kids and all?!" Crysal asked, folding her arms over her chest with a glare at me like the whole misunderstanding was my fault instead of her twisted mind jumping to conclusions again.

"Not that I'm a...a-" I sputtered, unable to get the word out for a good moment, "pedophile or something! Jesus! What the hell is wrong with your mind?! There should be kids around and I haven't seen any! Anyone would ask about something weird as that!"

"Nobody's ever said anything before," she said, still all but glaring at me. "Why are you getting all worked up about it?"

"Because it's wrong. There should be kids. In the streets, learning trade, working, something. Not missing." I frowned, turning away to look around the small plaza. "But... this place has no kids."

"Maybe they're in school?" she offered, shrugging. "I mean, it is noo-"

"Don't be stupid." I cut her off with a sharp chop of my hand in the air, not looking at her. "This whole place is pretty obviously based off of a Euro-feudal setting. Only the rich have the leisure for formal education. Unless that's different here?" I glanced back over my shoulder at her with a raised brow.

A pink flush tinted her cheeks as she looked around the plaza herself. "Well... no. I guess not. I've never really thought about it though."

"There were kids in the village," I reminded her. "We know this isn't a child-free setting because of that. So the fact there's no kids here means something's wrong."

"Wrong like what?" She turned those grey-green eyes on me again. There was something unsettling about how easily those eyes seemed to change color on me. I was starting to realize that green shades were a lot better than grey though. Grey tended to get me smacked.

"I don't know," I admitted, shrugging helplessly. "I just know it's wrong. It makes me feel uncomfor-"

I was cut off by the sound of someone screaming down the alleyway beside our bench. My eyes widened nearly as large as Crysal's before I threw myself off the bench. I was already three strides away and turning down the narrow alley before she started moving. I could hear her yelling at me to wait, but my anxiety about this place that had been building all day wouldn't let me listen.

The scream had been from a kid.

The alleyway was narrow enough that one shoulder or the other tended to scrape against the rough stone walls as I ran. The footing was soft in a way I didn't dwell on. Especially not considering the fact that there was a decided sound to the softness with each step. Thank God I'd managed to afford boots to finally replace my battered sandals. Pants would have been nice too, but boots and a breastplate had been all I could afford.

I could hear the sound of Crysal's footsteps splashing away behind me. A part of me was surprised she'd bothered to follow me, but I was too focused on reaching wherever it was that scream had come from to think about it. I careened off the wall as a turn came, bouncing painfully from a broken barrel someone had left in the way before managing to squeeze past and out the other end of the alley.

The first kids I'd seen all day were in the small square formed from three different alleyways meeting together. A boy and girl that looked similar enough that they were probably siblings. The boy was older, maybe ten if I had to guess, and had placed himself between the smaller girl and the four grown men blocking the ways out of the square. One of the men had the boy's arm in a hard grip, pulling him half off his feet as the others laughed. The men were well fed compared to the kids and dressed in matching grey armor with red accents that probably should have clued me in on who they were. But I was moving too fast to think about what I was doing before I started doing it.

I ducked under the arms of the man blocking the alley I was running through and aimed myself at the man still holding the boy's arm. I may have leveled up slightly from fighting the gremlin, but that didn't mean I'd gained any significant skills. And the desperate rolling on the ground brawl with that creature had hardly been the same sort of thing as this.

I lashed out with a blow into the man's armpit where his armor gaped open, forcing him to drop the boy. Unfortunately, it also made him draw his sword. And got his buddies to draw theirs too.

My body reacted without thought as they moved, following the same patterns that I'd practiced over and over in the real world. I stepped into the first man's range, my hand sweeping across my body, covering his sword hand and pushing it down. Before I'd consciously grasped what I was doing, I'd brought my other arm down elbow first on his outstretched arm, my covering hand letting go of his sword hand to smash the back of my fist into his face.

The man staggered back, his sword clattering to the ground as he clutched his arm with a yell, blood streaming down his face from his broken nose. I scooped up the sword as I turned to face the next attacker and almost dropped it just as quickly. It was heavy. I could hold it, but my arms shook trying to pull the point up to a useful height. Grimacing, I dropped it again and pulled my dagger.

"Theron, what are you doing?!" Crysal demanded, finally emerging from the alley and taking in the scene. "You can't fight them!"

"I'm not letting a bunch of assholes harass a couple little kids!" My dagger felt good in my hand, the slightly rough leather seeming to grip my palm as much as the other way around as I let my body follow the patterns engraved on my subconscious instead of following the flailing basic level moves the system wanted to allow me.

"Yeah, but they're the city guard!" Even as she yelled at me, she brought the butt of her spear down on the helmet of the guard nearest her, sending him crashing to the ground.

Much of the fight blurred for me, to be honest. I'd spent years practicing arnis with my sister, even after my family had moved back to the States when my father transferred positions at work. It was something that had been a constant in my life despite our many moves and had become a comfort in its way. Knowing that even the glitch that brought me here hadn't managed to take that away with all of the skills that I'd earned in The Bested World was a relief.

I'm not entirely sure how, but we somehow managed to best the four between the two of us. Not without injury, I'm afraid. I had a couple of nasty slices on my arms and a cut on my thigh that would probably need bandaging sooner than later and Crysal hadn't fared much better. Thank God the system didn't seem inclined to make bleeding a status effect on every cut or we'd really be in trouble.

"You damn moron," she said, breathing heavily as she leaned on her spear. "Do you have a death wish or something?"

I grinned at her, running a hand through my sweat soaked hair. "Can't say I do. But wasn't that fun?"

"Your idea of fun is suicidal," she muttered, shaking her head as she probed a slice to her ribs with a wince. "Remind me not to listen if you ever suggest something fun in the future."

I laughed, too caught up in the adrenaline rush of surviving a fight to get mad at her dig. That was when I noticed the boy and girl from earlier hadn't ran away. I started to crouch down when I realized that the boy was nearly as tall as I was. A fact I had no doubt Crysal would be highly amused by later.

"Hi," I said, offering my hand with what I hoped was a friendly smile. "I'm Theron and that's Crysal. What's your name?"

"Tomy," he said, his voice careful as he nursed the wrist the guard had a hold of him by. I could see a bruise forming even through the dirt liberally coating his skin and it made me even more upset with the guards that had been harassing them. "This is Shel."

"Nice to meet you." His eyes were wary, not that I could blame him if what I'd burst in on had been an example of how adults in the city treated kids. "What was going on here?"

"They was tryin' take Tomy 'way." The little girl's voice was soft, her pronunciation making me scale the guess I had for her age down to six or seven from the eight or nine years I'd previously guessed. She clung to her brother's shirt as she spoke to us, peering out around his side.

"Take you away?" I asked, concerned.

He shrugged. "For the army. But I gotta look out for Shel."

Crysal frowned. "Where's your parents?" He shrugged. "Come on, someone has to be looking out for you two."

"I am." He frowned, hunching his shoulders, his hands balling into small fists. "I promised Ma I would and I will."

"What about your dad?" I asked, an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach about where this was going. "

"Da got tak'd for the army," Shel whispered, pressing closer to Tomy's back. "He got tak'd 'way."

"It's just what happens round here," Tomy said, straightening his back. "But we're fine. Don't need any noseys poking round."

One of the guards groaned where he laid on the ground. "Nosey or not, I don't think any of us want to be here when they wake up," I said, crouching beside the groaner and giving him a sharp rap with the pommel of my dagger before slicing the strings holding a small coin pouch to his belt with a quick swipe of the blade. I'd probably have had more qualms about stealing from someone I'd probably guaranteed a concussion for at best if he hadn't been attacking little kids first.

"What? You don't want to have more fun?" Crysal asked, sarcasm all but dripping from her voice.

"Nah. I'm good. Come on, you two," I said, nodding for the alley we'd come from. "I want to ask some more about what's going on around here. If anyone knows about a city, it's the kids."

"I suppose we can afford a meal for a couple of brats," Crysal added, a little smile lightening the harshness of her words. "And possibly a bath," she added as she peered at the two. "You two are filthy."

"They're kids," I said, rolling my eyes as I headed down the alley back towards the plaza. "You can't expect them to be spotless models of perfection."

"I can expect them to not have enough dirt on them to grow vegetables though!"

I never dreamed that helping two kids out of a bad spot would end up turning out like it did.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Six

To say the clothes Crysal managed to find for me didn't really fit would have been something of an understatement. Build-wise, I suppose we weren't too much different, though she definitely had a few inches on me in height, but when it came to how our clothes fit, the minor differences became a lot more noticeable. To put it simply, compared to Crysal's muscular yet shapely build, my level one avatar's build looked more like that a prepubescent teen.

Much as I'd rather not admit it, my avatar's build wasn't too far of a cry from my real world build. Not to say I didn't have curves of my own. I was an adult after all. But comparing them to Crysal's made them look decidedly less notable.

So it was all too obvious that the clothes she'd managed to "scrounge up" as she put it were actually her own spares. It was nice, in a weird sort of way, I suppose. Even if it did make me look like her grade school little sister trying to play dress up with her clothes.

"Are you ready in there yet?" Hearing the irritation in her voice just made me grimace. Suddenly I felt a deep level of kinship with guys in relationships with people who insisted on asking questions that seemed custom-made to get them in trouble.

The clothes were too big. There was no getting around that. But somehow I knew if I said so, it'd just get me in trouble. On the other hand, if I didn't say anything, I'd probably still get in trouble. I looked down at where the bottom hem of the trews she'd thrown in at me earlier fell over my sandaled feet, nearly completely obscuring them, and sighed. If I'd had a needle and thread, I could have hemmed the legs and at least made them walkable. But not only did I not, the pants weren't even mine.

"Just a couple more minutes." I called back, hoping against hope that the dread I was feeling about walking out of the room for her judgment on my garb didn't carry across on my voice.

Agonizing over my clothes just made me feel even worse, so I finally just decided to bite the bullet and do the only fix that made sense and didn't damage Crysal's clothing.

"You look like a pixie."

Crysal's deadpan observation the moment I walked out of the room caught me flat footed for a second. I stared at her with a blank expression for a long moment before I finally managed to figure out what she was talking about.

"I look like someone wearing clothing that's too big for me, thank you very much." I turned away from her towards the door outside before she could see the way my cheeks were heating up. That it also meant I didn't have to see her smirk was an added bonus.

In the end, I'd ended up taking off the trews altogether and belting the tunic around my waist. Luckily, my belt had survived my tussle and Crysal's height advantage on me plus her... other advantages meant that a shirt that was mid-thigh on her was more like knee length on me. Going by the hem lengths on the villagers I'd seen so far, it was probably wildly indecent for the area, but if this world was anything like the size of The Bested World I had no doubt there were areas where this was normal. For peasants at least.

Which, apparently, was what we were supposed to be pretending to be.

"Explain to me again why this whole masquerade is necessary?" I asked, raising a brow. "Considering you're ever so fond of sucker punching complete strangers for mistaking you for an NPC?"

"It's going to be harder with you insisting on the whole slutty peasant look," she said, pointing at my bare legs with a lazy gesture. I glared, but I wanted an answer more than another fight so I kept my mouth shut.  "But it's to keep from getting drafted. Radani's army has NPCs members of course. It would be impossible to have an army without NPCs after all. But players are a special case cause we can level up and get a lot stronger a lot faster than NPCs. And this far out from the capital, his idiot captains think making players enlist with all the diplomacy of your average caveman is A-OK."

I still wasn't entirely sure how on the up and up she was about everything, but I hadn't gotten screwed over too bad yet by listening. And if they were doing things like that, it definitely made sense to play pretend like this. "So they're press-ganging players is what you're saying. And NPCs are left alone because they're, what? Not worth it?"

"Wow. For a moron, you can be pretty clever sometimes," she said, shrugging. "But that's pretty much it. Closer to the capital it's less of a problem. Unless you get on the wrong person's bad side, anyway. But that's the same pretty much anywhere you go. Of course, you-" she shot another pointed look at my bare legs "-are just asking to get on the wrong side of something. But what do I know? Maybe you like that sort of attention."

"You know," I turned fully towards her, glaring, "you can be a real bitch when you want to. It's not like it's my fault that I'm small and you're a damn Amazon. I know these clothes don't fit me, ok? At least I can move in them! If I'd tried to wear those trews I'd have been tripping over myself every five steps and pissing you off that way! Give me a break already!"

For a moment, I thought she was going to blow up at me given how red she looked. But then she surprised me and sighed with a shrug instead of yelling. "Alright."

"Alright?" Given her past blow ups, I felt understandably uncertain about this lack of one. "What do you mean 'alright'?"

"Catch a clue, genius." She rolled her eyes, folding her arms across her chest. "I'm agreeing with you. I'm being a bitch and you called me out on it. Fair's fair."

"And...that's it? You're not going to yell? Or hit me?"

She raised a brow, cocking her head to the side. "Do you want me to hit you?"

"Wha-?! No! Of course not!"

"Then why are you pushing it?" Crysal shook her head. "Look, you wanted a break, I'm giving you a break. That doesn't mean I'm good with you being dense. You've got to get to the capital if you want to find yourself some kind of decent gear so you don't get killed by the next lizard you trip over and I've got business of my own there. So it just makes sense that we travel together. And if we're going to travel together, it's not worth giving you crap all the time."

"So you're going to be... what? Nice?" Somehow I didn't believe it. "Did you get possessed or something while I was out?"

Crysal's greenish-grey eyes closed and I could see one of her hands opening and closing with a deliberate rhythm. "Are you sure you don't want to get hit? Cause you're really asking for it."

"Hey, I'm just trying to figure out who I'm working with. I mean, when I first met you, you were really violent and now-" I trailed off as her eyes opened, grey as storm clouds and sword blades. Sometimes I really needed to learn to keep my mouth closed, I realized as I slowly backed away.

"Why can't you ever leave well enough alone, idiot?!"

My head throbbed fiercely with every step, but I kept my mouth shut as we walked through town. For what it was worth, Crysal didn't actually hit me. Apparently, she wasn't even going to hit me, just push past me on her way out of the hut. But I had assumed her earlier violent tendencies were the norm for her and tried to dodge the punch I was imagining was on my way.

Which prompted the system to read my low agility and give me a lovely stool to trip over when I tried to step back. Which I did. And then smacked my head on one of the posts that held up the roof of the hut. So my head was throbbing from a knot on the back of it due to my own stupidity.

Not that she didn't take the time to point that out before we left.

"Why'd you want that thing anyway?" she asked out of the blue, looking back over her shoulder at me. She was carrying a pack slung like a messenger bag over her back and her spear disguised as an oddly shaped walking stick. The pack had her bow that she'd somehow folded down much smaller than I ever expected possible and probably better than half of the bread and water supplied by the villagers, but she didn't seem weighed down at all. Unlike me.

At my confused look, she rolled her eyes and nodded at my waist. "That. The ugly knife."

I glanced down at my hip where the thing she called an ugly knife rode in a hurriedly clapped together sheath. It was an ugly thing. The blade had a grossly jagged edge - the sort of thing designed to rip and tear more than cut - that looked like the metal had been broken roughly instead of forged. The hilt was bone - I thought anyway - wrapped in a dark green, scaly leather that the villager that had made my sheath said was probably some kind of lizard. There was no guard and the pommel was a barely shaped at all chunk of stone.

But I rested my hand on it as we walked along. "It's a good knife."

"It's nasty." She grimaced shaking her head and turning back to keep her eyes on the path again. "You should use something decent. Or at least human."

I wasn't about to lie or try to pretend the knife had been made in the village. It hadn't. Though that was where I'd found it.

As far as anyone could tell, the knife had originally belonged to the hideous little gremlin I'd fought with when its band had attacked the village. It had dropped the knife while we were rolling across the ground. Which is probably why I'd survived as long as I did.

Then when I'd reached for something to help in desperation, it had saved my life by taking the life of its former wielder.

"I like this one." I said, giving the crude pommel a little pat with a smile. "It fits my hand nicely."

Crysal looked over her shoulder at me again for a moment before shaking her head. "You are one seriously weird person."

I shrugged. "Pretty sure weird is relative around here. How far is this capital anyway?"

"About a couple of days’ walk to the east from Gallador."

That caught my attention. "Gallador? What's that? Another country or something?"

"The village we just left." I could almost see her pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration despite the fact that I was almost two whole paces behind her. "Either you're appallingly good at acting, suffering from a major head injury, or you definitely aren't lying about being a new glitch."

"Haven't we gone over this enough?" I scowled, glaring at her back. "I'm not a liar and you can just stop giving me shit about it already. I told you I just woke up where you found me. How many times do I have to repeat myself?"

"How should I know?" she asked, not even looking at me. "I've never met a new glitch in the two years I've been here. People have been figuring no one was glitching anymore."

"Right. In an entire world, it's not even remotely possible that you somehow haven't heard of new... are we seriously calling ourselves glitches?!"

Crysal laughed. It was a rich, melodic sound. I rather liked hearing it. It was a lot better than her getting pissed off at me anyway.  "You have a better term? Far as anyone knows, we got here via a glitch. So why not call ourselves that?"

"Cause it's an error?" I asked, shrugging. "Look, I don't care what you call yourself. Have at it. But it kind of sucks to think however many people are running around calling themselves after defective programming. I'm not calling myself that anyway."

"Suit yourself. Don't call yourself a glitch. Don't call this world a glitch. Whatever. Something went wrong with your login though and you ended up here. Same as all the rest of us." She shot a glare over her shoulder again and hiked her pack up a little higher on her back. "So shut up and deal just like all the rest of us."

After that, she stopped responding to any more of my questions. Eventually I got the hint and went back to quietly plodding along in her shadow as the day wore steadily towards night with only the dim glow that Crysal said were the lights of the capital on the horizon ahead to show us the way.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Five

In what was starting to feel like a disturbing trend, I woke up laying on my back and aching all over way more than I should. The difference this time seemed to be that instead of hard-packed dirt under me and the smell of green growing things, this time it felt like I was on some kind of cot or bed and the smells filtering in were a smoky scent of something burning that was actually supposed to be burning and a warm meaty smell of something cooking. Something off to my left was making a slow and steady grinding sound like two rocks being rubbed together. A faint crackle and low burble down near the warmth licking at my feet made me think of a campfire with a pot of something over it.

For a long moment, all I could focus on was how bad I hurt. I couldn't remember why I was there. Hell, I wasn't sure where I was - still in the virtual world or... somewhere else. I'm pretty sure that somewhere else wouldn't hurt as bad, but it wasn't like I could ask anyone that had first hand knowledge or anything. But slowly the events that had led to this moment filtered back into my half-numb brain. I remembered the creature - it almost looked like something that would have been called a goblin in The Bested World and for a moment a ember of shame glowed in my chest at nearly dying at the hands, literally, of such a weak mob - and why I'd been fighting.

And what I'd seen.

I didn't want to open my eyes. To be honest, I wasn't completely sure I could open them. My face felt swollen and heavy and my whole neck felt even worse. My throat burned faintly with each breath and I didn't want to think about the dull pain radiating from my ribs and hands. I hurt in a way I hadn't since I'd gotten into a minor brawl on the playground at school as a kid.

I hadn't exactly come out as the winner in that bout either.

The longer I laid there, the more details I seemed to be able to pick out about what was around me. The grinding off to my left must have been someone working on something as I could just barely hear them muttering to themselves as they worked. There was a faint sour scent of people in too close living space and too poor health underlying the stronger astringent scent of herbs and burning wood.

I tried to move my hand to my neck and promptly decided that was a big mistake. My arm felt like someone had been beating on it with a baseball bat. Hell, my whole body felt like I'd taken a ride in one of the big industrial dryers at the laundromat. A groan slipped out in protest and the sound of grinding beside me stopped.

"Miss." The voice was unfamiliar. A woman's voice or at least I thought so anyway. I started to reply before she continued. "I believe your friend may be awake. Do you wish to come back in?"

Oh. She was talking to someone else. That made sense. As much as anything that had happened since the I'd woken up in this messed up place did anyway.

"She's not my friend." Now that voice I recognized. A strange sense of relief flooded my body as I realized she must have survived the fight. It was oddly nice to feel like I'd succeed in something. Even if she was kind of nuts.

Something scrapped the floor right besides me and I had the distinct feeling of something really dangerous deciding to take a seat beside me. The sharp smell of cedar mixed with some kind of mint filled my nose, something I hadn't noticed in my previous interactions. I wanted to open my eyes and see what was happening, but at the same time I really didn't.

For a several heartbeats all I could hear was the snap and crackle of the fire near my feet. It wasn't an easy silence though. I could almost feel the burn of her glare searing its way through the side of my head as I tried to keep my expression slack and eyes closed.

"I know you're awake," she said, her voice low in a way that sent a shiver up my spine. "You're not dead. And I know you're not going to be able to keep this fake sleep act up for much longer. Just give it up and open your eyes, idiot."

I grimaced. "You're a real jerk sometimes." The words came out in a harsh croak that sounded closer to a crow squawking than my regular voice.

I prised an eye open to peer up at Crysal. Going by how I could barely open it, I was pretty sure I had some truly amazing shiners. Everything was blurry from the way the sting of trying to open it made it water, but I could see. More or less, anyway. It wasn't exactly bright in the room. Or hut, I guess. Wherever it was we were.

She wasn't in her leathers anymore, which was a bit of a surprise. The shirt looked roughspun, almost like the one I'd first woken up in this world wearing, but nicer. A band of embroidery ran around the loose collar and along the hems that I could see on the elbow length sleeves. The collar was laced, but not tied, the thongs dangling from the top holes from the way she was leaning towards me. Some kind of trousers covered her legs, her arms resting loosely on her thighs as she frowned at me.

She didn't say anything, something I found more irritating as time went on. "Take a screenshot," I grumbled, trying to move to get up despite the pain moving caused, only to have my shoulder caught by one of her hands and pushed back down on the cot.

"Oh, no. You don't move." Her full lips were pressed down into a thin line and the crease between her brows seemed even deeper than usual as they arched down over her eyes. "I told you to stay put once and you didn't listen. Now look at you."

I tried to sit up again despite her hand on my shoulder. "I would, but there's not exactly a mirror around." The joke apparently fell flat as her eyes flashed and I was pushed hard enough to make my back audibly crackle.

"Do you think that's funny?! Asshole!" She stood so abruptly, the stool she'd been sitting on went flying. "You almost got yourself killed! What kind of idiot are you?!"

"I didn't though." This time I did manage to sit up since she wasn't playing sick-bed enforcer anymore.

"That's a really stupid reason." She turned away, shaking her head as she crossed her arms over her ample chest. "You should have just stayed in the damn room."

"And what? Let you die?" I asked, shooting a glare of my own at her back. Why did she piss me off so much? It was irritating.

"If that was what needed to happen, then yes!" That surprised me. She spun back around, shoving a finger into my face. "It was my fight! I could handle it-"

"It was going to stab you in the back! You can't tell me you had that under control!"

For a split second, I thought she was going to slap me, but she visibly restrained herself, her hand clenching and releasing bare inches from my nose. "You are such an damn moron. Didn't you figure anything out? This isn't The Bested World or whatever game you came from. If you're stupid, you die."

"But the Safety Protocols-"

This time her arm visibly shook as she pulled her hand back to her side. Her voice was tight, far more controlled than from moments ago. "There aren't any Safety Protocols. You didn't think there was anything wrong with the village getting attacked?"

I shrugged, but this was starting to sound a lot worse than I thought. "I figured it was an event or-"

"An event." Her gaze was flat, almost like she was looking right through me. "You're a bigger idiot than I thought. This is the Glitched World! There are no events! There's no safe zones. No resurrections. No-"

"No healing potions?" I reached up to my poulticed neck with a pained grimace. Having to wait for my injuries to heal naturally was going to suck.

She snorted, shaking her head. "You have to drink a potion. You were out like a damn light. Did you want to get drowned in your sleep?"

My cheeks heated and I found myself looking down at the blanket over my lap, feeling about as stupid as Crysal apparently thought I was. "Ah, well, um, no. I guess not."

She sighed, reaching for a leather bota bag sitting on the small table beside me and tossing it into my lap. "Good God. You're such an idiot I don't even know why I stuck around until you woke up."

I ignored her comment to fumble the cork out of the bag's mouth and held it up to my lips. The smell was promising - light and fruity like a juice smoothie - and I took as big a swig as I could. Then the taste hit me. It was like minty cow patty mixed with a rotted banana. I gagged in disgust but Crysal grabbed the bag and kept me from dropping it, making me drink the whole thing.

The liquid burned its way down my throat like the cheapest rotgut and pooled in my churning stomach. I coughed violently, throwing the bag away from me as soon as she let go and wiping at my mouth. "What the hell?! Was that some kind of revenge or something?! You trying to poison me?!"

Crysal rolled her eyes. "Try not to be stupid. If I wanted you dead, I could have just stabbed you through the gremlin you were playing with and called it an accident."

I opened my mouth to respond, but that was the when the delay before the onset of the potion ended. For a moment that seemed to last no longer than a heartbeat and several eternities blended together, every little nick and bruise made themselves known in excruciating detail. I was intensely aware of every single injury to my body down to the tiniest graze and exactly how much it had hurt, and did hurt, and ever would hurt as it healed. I wanted to scream, but the muscles of my throat were completely locked in the agony. My muscles felt like they'd somehow caught fire inside my body, every inch of me soaked in blazing napalm. My skin itched violently as it rippled across my body under the influence of whatever it was I'd drank, smoothing out the imperfections from my scuffle.

When it finished, my HP bar was fully restored, but I felt weak as a newborn kitten and collapsed back onto the bed. I was shaking violently in the aftermath, panting for breath, and covered in a cold sweat. Worst of all, I was terribly hungry as if I hadn't eaten in over a week.

"W-what-?" I couldn't finish the sentence.

Crysal cocked a brow at me and smirked, though I felt like there was a bitter edge to it. "Welcome to the reason we don't try to push ourselves to the point of needing a healing potion. Feeling better?"

"No!" It was my first reaction, but as my energy started to seep back into me, I realized I wasn't hurting like I had before. I almost felt rested for all that I was so completely drained and positively starving. My stomach growled noisily, causing my cheeks to flush again. "Y-yes? I guess? That... that was awful."

"Forcing yourself to do something you're not supposed is generally like that." Her voice was dry as the Sahara. "You can heal over time too. It just takes longer and generally sucks, but it sucks a lot less than using one of those. Even in a fake world like this, we're not designed to insta-heal."

"Y-yeah." I looked down at my hands. The cuts and bruises from trying to defend myself had disappeared. But then I noticed a very important detail. "Wait! WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES?!"

Crysal stared at me for a long moment, then burst into laughter. I snatched the blanket up to my bare chest, glaring at her as she doubled over clutching her stomach. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she slowly dropped to her knees and toppled over with mirth.

"It's not funny!"

"No it's freaking hilarious!" she gasped out, still laughing. "All that and you didn't even notice you're naked?!"

It felt like my whole damn body was blushing. It wasn't fair. It really wasn't fair at all.

"You're a jerk!" I looked around the hut but couldn't see any sign of what I'd been wearing. Of course, with how much they'd been damaged, they could have just been gone. I didn't want to think about that too much though. "I don't know why I saved your life!"

That made Crysal sit up, wiping at her eyes. "Neither do I," she said, a chuckle still hidden in her voice. "But, well, thanks. I guess. Not that I couldn't have taken care of that gremlin myself," she added, getting to her feet.

"Right. By getting stabbed in the back." I grumbled to myself, hunching my shoulders to try and get even more under the small blanket as I looked away.

Her hand flashed towards my face and I'm ashamed to admit that I flinched in anticipation of a slap. Instead her fingers lightly tapped the tip of my nose, making me look up at her in surprise. She cocked her head to the side and smirked at me.

"You know, you're actually pretty cute when you're all embarrassed."

My eyes widened for a moment before I grabbed my pillow and threw it at her. My crappy agility meant it missed by a mile and the whole attempt to throw something caused my blanket to fall down again, making her start cackling all over. The flush covering my face and chest got even deeper as I scrambled for it again.

"You're such a jerk!"

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Four

The door closed behind her with a wall rattling slam that knocked the cross-stitch sampler hanging on the wall to the floor. I could hear people running outside the room, their heavy footsteps clattering over the rough wood of the floorboards. A sharp smell of wood smoke filtered in through the high window in the wall, the flickering light outside telling me something was burning out there. Shrill screams and a bizarre chittering that sent primal chills up my spine mingled with the sounds of metal and wood striking against each other.

My hands were shaking as I reached for my menus, making summoning my crappy dagger from storage take much longer than it should have. I almost fumbled it as it appeared and I couldn't even blame it on my bottom-of-the-barrel agility. A hard lump had settled it self in the pit of my stomach and was building a whole damn lumptroplis to live in. A cold sweat beaded along my hairline and trickled down my back under my stained shirt. Bile boiled and churned in the back of my throat and I'm pretty sure if needing to use the facilities was even a thing in TVRMMOs, I'd probably have no need of a bathroom any time soon. New pants, yes. Toilet, no.

I was afraid. Hell with that. I was freaking terrified. It was the worst thing I'd ever experienced in a TVRMMO - a deep, visceral feeling of abject terror without any source. Even the incomparable nastiness of the smell of what passed for beer had nothing on how I was feeling. I wanted to run. No, I wanted to hide. I wanted to burrow somewhere safe and not come out again until the danger was past.

A glance at my status showed the truth - a sickly orange outline to my HP bar and two quivering lines at the end. Fear status effect. If this was how the system was going to inflict status effects, I really didn't want to experience some of the others.

Status effect or not, I forced myself to my feet. Crysal was right. In that moment, I was a peasant. No levels, nothing to make the system help me succeed. The fear status was probably the standard in-game affliction for peasants during events like this. Force the NPCs that couldn't contribute to the fight to behave right.

One step at a time, I fought against the fear status, chipped dagger gripped so tight in my sweaty hand even the leather wrapping the hilt was feeling soggy. Maybe I was just a level one peasant, but I was still me. I had no reason to be afraid. It wasn't even my fear. It was just the system forcing me to believe I was afraid and like hell I was going to let that happen. I glared at the door blocking me from leaving the room, at once torn between the sensation of its thick wood planks being a shield from whatever was happening outside and my growing desire - no, need - to be outside in the midst of it.

"I'm getting real sick and tired," I said under my breath as I finally managed to make myself grab the rough rope of the door's handle, "of this damn system trying to make me something I'm not!"

As I jerked the door open and thrust myself through the doorway into the inn's main room, two things happened. The first involved a strangely musical tinkling sound in my right ear and the visual effect of the sickly orange status effect border and two quivering lines at the end shattering and falling away from my HP bar. The effect of that was immediate as the gut-churning sense of impending doom almost completely vanished. I was still scared - I'd have to be an idiot to say otherwise - but it was a more normal sort of scared instead of the piss-myself-silly terror of moments before.

The second was slightly more profound, looking back on it now, though I didn't even realize it had happened at the time. Deep in my status menus in the bar under my name on my character sheet, a single word blurred out and became something new. With the simple act of opening the door and stepping out, my class had changed. The system had acknowledged my forcing myself through its status effect as something a peasant would never do and updated my record, though I wouldn't notice until much later.

In that moment, I'd become an adventurer.

The main room of the inn was a marked difference to how it was when we'd arrived. The noisy clamor of men and women enjoying dinner after a long day had vanished, benches and even tables overturned in the rush of everyone trying to leave at once. A scent of mingled copper and an open sewer assaulted my nose as I headed for the partially opened door across the room.

A woman was slumped half in and half out the door to the street, keeping the door from shutting properly and allowing the ferocious noise from the street into the still air of the mostly abandoned inn. Her face wasn't visible - a fact I was almost deliriously happy about - but the slick brownish-red puddle soaking into the floorboards under her and the crude spear tip jutting from her back between her shoulder blades told me all I needed to know.

I forced down the urge to hurl. It wasn't the first time I'd seen death in a TVRMMO. After five years playing The Bested World, that was probably a foregone conclusion. But it was the first time I'd seen death that lingered. In The Bested World, dead NPCs and mobs derezzed after a few moments. Long before a real odor could build up in the area. Yet again the system was reminding me that I wasn't where I belonged.

I stared at the woman's body for a long moment. Her vest, dark brown with embroidered ivy and flowers around the edges now violated by the spear that had taken her life, seemed to haunt me. It looked so much like the vest of the barmaid that had greeted us when we'd arrived that I had to force myself not to grab her shoulder and turn her over. I didn't want to see her face. I didn't want to know if what I was imagining was real or just another mindfuck by the system. If I didn't look, I didn't have to know.

It took longer than I want to admit and another painful shriek from outside the door to shake myself out of my funk and stop staring at her. She was blocking the door. If I wanted to get out, I'd have to either move her or climb over her and climbing over her just felt wrong. Shaking my head hard, I knelt beside her and wrapped my arms around her waist, forcing myself to ignore the cooling stickiness coating my hands and arms as they slipped under her limp body.

"I'm sorry," I whispered before trying to stand with the woman's corpse in my arms.

A grunt of effort escaped me before I managed to budge her, the effort far more than I would have expended with my male avatar. My arms and shoulders burned with the effort of keeping a grip on her completely unresisting form. A white haze clouded the edges of my vision but I took one shaky step back and then another, pulling her from the doorway. Her outstretched arms caught the door as I pulled her inside, finally letting it settle back against the jam and block out some of the noise.

I settled her in the lee of an overturned table as best I could with the spear that murdered her jutting out her back. In the process, I accidentally caught a glimpse of a freckled face and upturned nose and an unexpected sob almost got away from me as the cheerful grin of the barmaid flashed into my mind. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my nerves before getting back to my feet. I gripped my chipped dagger again and headed for the door once more, teeth gritted so hard that my jaw ached, each step faster than the last. 

By the time I reached the door, I was running.

The door burst outwards and slammed into the wall beside it as I checked it with my shoulder hard enough to drop a couple of points off my HP. I skidded to a stop on the rough-hewn porch of the inn, the thin leather soles of my sandals offering barely enough traction to let me stay upright when the door smacked back into my arm as it swung closed again. I didn't even notice the ache from my arm though. I could only stare wide eyed.

The quiet village had devolved into chaos. A house across the street was fully engulfed in orange flames, a dark figure dangling half out of a window that I didn't want to look at too closely. Thick smoke from the fire hung heavy in the air. In small knots and clusters, villagers struggled with their attackers using what I could only guess were improvised weapons like clubs and their daily work tools. People were sprawled on the ground in awkward poses that I refused to look at too long. Dead, I knew, but that didn't mean I wanted to dwell on it.

The games I'd played before were violent, don't get me wrong. NPCs and mobs died all the time. I'd even killed any number with my own hands. But this was different. It was wrong. It was like the difference between playing a violent game and logging off only to walk outside and see your neighbor get run down by a car in front of you.

In the games, the bodies of mobs and NPCs didn't linger after death unless it was a plot point. And even when it was a plot point, it was somehow sanitized. There was no smell of death and the burning of things that shouldn't be burning like pervaded the air around me. NPCs didn't scream and writhe on the ground as they tried to pull out the weapons that were ending their lives. Injured mobs didn't try to drag themselves away from the fight, visibly wounded and in pain.

My chipped dagger slipped from nerveless fingers to clatter on the porch beside me, the tip bouncing off the jut of my ankle bone but too dull to even leave a scratch. I didn't notice. Everywhere I looked, people were dying. Not NPCs. Not mobs. People.

My mouth went dry. I couldn't even swallow. My heart thundered in my chest despite the feeling of a thick band shrinking around me, crushing my chest. My ears rang with the sound of my pulse. My hands sank into the snarly tangle of my hair, broken nails catching and pulling strands from my scalp. I wanted to scream for everything to stop but I couldn't make myself move, couldn't breathe.

My vision seemed to shake, blurring the horror around me as I moved my gaze to my HP bar. This feeling - it was another system induced status effect. It had to be.

The dull grey border of my HP bar gleamed pristine, unsullied by any status effect notifications. This wasn't a system inflicted issue. It was me. It was my problem.

Knowing that didn't help make it stop though. No matter how I raged at myself inside the locked fortress of my mind, I couldn't make myself move. Couldn't even shut my eyes and stop seeing the horrors around me. I was trapped. Locked in my body, unable to even defend myself when one of the attackers inevitably noticed me. All I could do was keep turning my head from side to side like some kind of messed up security camera determined to capture every moment of the village's destruction.

That was when a flash of blue against the orange flames caught my attention. My head snapped around more in reaction than any conscious effort. My breath slowly calmed down as I finally managed to focus on something besides the overwhelming panic drowning me. I reached out and caught the railing around the porch as I tried to see what had caught my attention, the rough wood biting into the palm of my hand. There were three small people around a taller one fighting with some kind of long stick. Or a spear.

Crysal.

Before I even realized what I was doing, I had launched myself over the railing and was running headlong towards them. I was completely unarmed, my chipped dagger forgotten back on the porch, but I wasn't thinking about that. All I could see was the barmaid's face, my mind blurring it with Crysal's features. All I knew in that moment was that I didn't want her to die.

The wind ripped at my skin, drawing tears from my eyes that blurred my vision, but I ignored it, pushing myself harder. I could see one of the attackers creeping up behind her while she was distracted by its two brethren, its dagger raised to stab her in the back. I reached for it even as I knew there was no way I could cross the distance between the inn and where she fought in time to make any difference. I couldn't think of that though. I had to get there. 

I had to. 

Crysal might have been a violent jerk, but I couldn't just let her die. Not like the barmaid or the other villagers. I had to reach.

The thing about a person's speed in TVRMMOs was that it wasn't affected by any system tracked stat. Sure, a high agility would keep you from tripping, but it wouldn't make you go any faster. Instead, a person's speed was determined by a combination of how their mind worked and their connection to the server the world was hosted on. I didn’t know it at the time, but in the Glitched World, all of the Glitched had an astonishingly strong connection to the server - which was probably part of the reason it was so hard to pull them back to the real world - which let them all move noticeably faster on average than NPCs and even lower level mobs. But in certain moments, if someone was focused enough or driven enough, they could exceed even that speed for a short time, moving a speeds that could easily be called superhuman.

In that moment, with my mind so completely focused on reaching the attacker before it could stab Crysal in the back, I managed to achieve that, crossing the distance between the inn and the knot of fighting it what felt like little more than a heartbeat. One moment, I was reaching for the lumpy back covered in mottled grey skin from several yards away, the next my arms were wrapping around its waist, my shoulder crashing into the bony juts of its ribs. My strength stat was just as miserable as the rest of my stats, but my speed in that moment made my whole body like a cannonball slamming into the creature, sending both of us flying to the ground past Crysal and the other two.

We hit the ground hard enough to flip us over. The impact knocked the wind clean out of me and I gasped for a moment, trying to get the stars to fade from my vision. The creature didn't seem to have any similar trouble though. Before we'd even hit the ground it was clawing at my head and shoulders with ragged claws trying to get away, kicking at my stomach with its bony feet. We rolled across the ground, each one trying to get the top position.

I could feel its ragged nails slicing into my skin as it screeched and chittered at me, opening cuts on my face and arms and tearing my shirt. Somehow it got itself turned around in my grip despite my best efforts and wrapped its absurdly long fingered hands around my throat.  Its nails were biting into my skin and I could feel the hot warmth of my own blood trickling down my neck even as my vision greyed around the edges from my air being cut off.

I struggled to breathe, clawing at its hands with my own broken nails, trying to pry its grip free. I kicked my heels against the ground trying to roll, to push it off, but it planted its feet on the ground on either side of me. All I could see was its leering grey face. The misshapen bumps that made up its skull hideous even without the wispy grey threads jutting from the bumps to pass for hair. Even the long fox-like juts of its ears were tipped with stringy strands of the grey hair stuff. Its teeth were broken and jagged and its breath so fetid it made the beer's odor seem positively floral.

My pulse roared in my ears like an approaching freight train, drowning out all other sounds. My vision kept growing darker, my HP bar dropping lower and lower. I started to relax as it approached my standard derez point - higher than some, but I didn't like taking risks when I logged in from new equipment so I'd set it higher - waiting for the inevitable fuzzy feeling of being derezzed. It inched closer, closer. Hit the point. 

Passed it.

The creature's nails dug deeper into my throat, making me gasp desperately for air. The realization that the Safety Protocols weren't working sank in like a weight coated in liquid nitrogen, freezing my soul. The creature laughed, a gasping wheeze of its own as it sensed its impending victory, its spittle flecking my numbing face. I felt strange. Like I was starting to float away from my body. Was I dying?

I wasn't ready to give up yet though. I reached out with my right hand, scrabbling along the ground for something to use as a weapon. A stick. A rock.

Anything.

What I found was something wrapped in a rough leather that gripped the skin of my palm. My fingers wrapped around it before I could identify what it was, the rises and hollows of the rough leather settling into my grip as if it was made for it. My vision almost totally blacked out, I swung the object with all my remaining strength into the side of the creature.

The creature screamed, its grip loosening enough that I could drag in a breath of smoky air into my sore throat. I swung again and again as my vision swam back into being, a sticky warmth coating my hand as the object thudded heavily into the creature. It let go of my throat without another sound, collapsing down onto my chest as the sticky warmth soaked into my shirt.

I could dimly hear something that sounded like cheering, but I couldn't seem to find the energy to move. Everything hurt. All I could do was lay there under the collapsed creature and try to breathe. Even that hurt. I was just so tired.

The last thing I thought I remembered before it all went black was Crysal leaning over me. I couldn't figure out her expression thought. It was strange. Not like the earlier ones. She almost looked...

Scared?

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Three

The heavy, wooden tankard crashed down on the worn wood of the table in front of me, splashing some of the thick, pale substance inside over the edge and onto the table top. I nudged the carved handle suspiciously, leaning in to give the tankard's contents a tentative sniff. A powerful, pungent odor reminiscent of what you'd get if you mixed cat piss, swamp water, and Limburger cheese together assaulted my nose hard enough that if it was the real world, my nose hairs probably would have curled up and died in horror.

I lunged backwards away from the vile odor with a gag that I only barely kept from turning into a full on vomit-in-my-mouth sort of moment. Unfortunately, I also managed to shove the tankard and ended up slopping the nasty smelling glop on the table and me. "What the hell?!" The smell had me constantly trying to resist gagging as I scrabbled for the towel the inn's barmaid offered. "Are you trying to poison me or something?!"

Crysal laughed and picked up her own tankard, swilling down the contents in a long gulp. "It's what passes for beer around here. You're supposed to drink it, not smell it, idiot. It's not that bad as long as you don't breathe when you drink it."

"What the hell is in it?" I reached for the tankard of vile smelling concoction with a hesitation born from the very real fear of that smell getting anywhere near my face again. "Smells like- Oh God-" I turned my head away from the foam seething up over the rim of the tankard with a grimace. "I don't even know what to call that."

"Trust me." Crysal shook her head with a glance at the door of the private room we were holded up in, her lips set in a frown and eyes - green as a cypress tree this time, damn it! - held a look I wasn't sure how to interpret. "That is not something you want to ask. It's kind of like hot dogs. Better you don't know what's in it."

"Can't I just have water?" I nudged the handle again with a grimace. Whoever programmed that odor mess needed to be dragged out into the road and shot.

She shrugged in response, drawing my attention to the bare curve of her shoulder where her leathers didn't cover. "Sure if you want to offend the innkeep and find yourself somewhere else to sleep." She held up a finger before I could even open my mouth to respond. "Probably should warn you that there isn't anywhere else to sleep in this village. Not without spending one hell of a lot of time building relationships with the villagers anyway."

Screwing up my courage, I wrapped my hand around the handle of the tankard. The trembling in my arm was less from a lack of a decent strength stat and more from just how much I didn't want to have it near my nose again. "Whoever programmed this place is a sadist." I muttered before raising the glass to my lips and forcing myself to let the pale foam into my mouth.

The taste that washed over my tongue was as far from the stench of the brew as I could have imagined. There was a mild sweetness like marshmallow fluff mixed with a crisp sharpness reminiscent of apples and cinnamon. It was smooth in my mouth despite the thickness of the brew - like a thin pudding more than a drink -  and I couldn't help but swallow. That was when the burn of the alcohol kicked in, radiating heat into my chest and burning away the chill I hadn't even realized was there. I gasped in reaction, not expecting a kick like that from what I was told was the equivalent of beer. Unfortunately, I hadn't moved the mug far enough from my face and the punch of odor to the face turned my gasp into a fit of coughing.

Crysal's laughter from across the table made me look up and peer at her with watery eyes, grimacing with the mild burn of betrayal simmering in the back of my throat. Though that probably more the bile from my body's natural reaction to the smell than any real sense of betrayal. She had propped her head up on one hand, her elbow on against the worn smooth surface of the table as she watched me with a grin, the long tail of her braid draped over her shoulder instead of hanging down her back like usual. The grin brought a warmth to her expression that almost made her seem like a whole different person.

"Told you not to breathe." Waving her own reeking tankard at me was a bit much, but I was finding it hard to get upset about the teasing. Especially since she was the one who was actually paying for our drinks. And lodging, I supposed, since she'd told me she'd arranged it. "Tastes not bad though, doesn't it."

"Can't these people smell?" I demanded instead, giving my tankard a dirty look. "Sure, it tastes okay, but that smell..."

"Didn't your mom ever teach you not to judge something by the way it smells? Lots of cheese stinks but tastes good." Her grin was going from something special to something annoying pretty fast though. "Wait until you try the stew here. It's really pungent."

"Sorry." I shrugged, mopping at my mouth with the front of my already stained shirt. "I have a policy of not eating things that smell like feet."

"Your loss," she said with a shrug of her own as a barmaid pushed through the door to our room and dropped trenchers of thick stew on the table in front of us. Along with fresh tankards of the reeking beer. Yay. "So, what's your plan from here, noob?"

I narrowed my eyes, feeling my lips thinning almost of their own accord as I glared at her. "Can you knock it off with the noob crap already?"

"Why? You're about as fresh as they come. And-" the grin vanished for a moment for a glare of her own, "I still don't really believe you about that name."

"What is your problem?!" The tankards and trenchers on the table rattled as my palms smashed into the surface with stinging force. "Who even cares if someone crossplays?" I could feel my cheeks reddening already and hated it. I was probably red from my chin to my forehead thanks to how most systems over-exaggerated expressions and I looked like crap when I blushed, all mottled and gross. An over-exaggerated version was probably verging on some kind of apoplectic fit. "It's just a game!"

"Nobody crossplays! That's a PC relic!" She'd planted both arms on the table and was leaning over her stew, practically in my face as she snapped at me. "TVR players don't lie like that!"

"TVR players don't lie-?" I snorted in disbelief, shaking my head and folding my arms over my chest. "Right. Because a five four, muscle-bound bardbarian is more believable than the possibility that someone could be playing a different gender. You know we had cat-people and saurians in The Bested World, right? And that one guy that played as that samurai dolphin thing. But a girl playing a male character is what's blowing your mind."

I was right. Blushing looked really bad when exaggerated like that. Or maybe it was just a red-head thing. "Everyone knows trying to play a gender type that's not yours doesn't work in TVR. Stop being an ass and just admit who you are!"

I almost hate to admit it, but my first reaction was to laugh. Okay, no, that's a lie. My first reaction was to call her a moron and log off, but obviously that didn't work out so well. So I went with my second first reaction and laughed in her face. I mean, come on, how stupid did you have to be to think playing a different gender would be impossible because of VR??

Her first reaction was to smack me.

While I can't say I blame her - now more than right then anyway - it really hurt. 

"The fuck is wrong with you?!"

"You're such an asshole!" 

"How am I an asshole?! You hit me!" I rubbed at the sore ache on my cheek, wiggling my jaw tentatively. "Again!"

"You can't just laugh at people and not expect to get hit!" Crysal glared at me, her weird eyes gone grey again on me. I half expected lightning bolts to start jumping around her irises. "You act like an asshole and you're going to get hit!"

"You can't just hit people because you're upset! What are you? Five?!" My cheek felt like it was throbbing now that the initial sting had worn off. Whatever else I could say about her, Crysal could pack one hell of a slap. I kept rubbing at my cheek, waiting for the world's Safety Protocols to kick in and reduce the pain as I glared at her. "And what you're all worked up about is stupid!"

"Stupid?! You've been lying to everybody for years!"

Okay - this was far beyond a normal reaction. I mean, she actually looked like she was going to start crying.

"It's just a game-"

"It's not just a game!" Her nails were digging into the table hard enough to gouge it, probably trying not to slap me. Again. "People looked up to y-"

This time my fist smashed into the table instead of my open hand. "Knock it off! It is a game! It's something I play to have fun with my friends! I don't even know you, so knock all this stupid crap about my lying off already! I wasn't lying to anyone. I was playing a game. It's not like I was using it as some kind of creepy pick up chicks for cybering bullshit."

She dropped back into her seat with a sort of boneless grace that I probably would have envied if it didn't look so damn depressing. "You're really an asshole," she muttered, low enough that I could at least pretend not to listen. "Theron could have dealt with Radani. You're just-"

"Theron." I reminded her, my lips pressed into a thin line. "I'm Theron. Remember? Just because I'm not some muscle-bound jock with an ax-lute strapped to his bare back like some kind of moron doesn't mean I'm not still me." I shook my head, moving to get up. "People like you really piss me off, you know that? You don't even know me and you're all making-"

A scream outside the room cut me off.

Yeah, we were in an inn and I guess those sort of things happen, but that didn't sound like that kind of scream. That was a bad scream. More like a "holy shit I'm being murdered!" scream than "oh god yes!" sort of thing.

In other words, definitely not something I was supposed to be hearing in a safe zone like a village.

"What-?!" I could barely get the words out, stumbling over my bench as I tried to finish getting up.

Crysal pushed me back down, reaching for where her spear was leaned up against the wall behind her. "Stay here. It's probably a raid."

"Stay here?! What do you take me for?!"

"A peasant." Her words burned as she glared at me with those stormcloud eyes. "Now stay here and try not to die."

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter Two

My heart felt like it was going to burst through my ribs and I swallowed harshly behind the gloved hand still covering the lower half of my face, my mouth drier than the Sahara. I could feel a cold sweat beading along my hairline, the acrid bile still lingering in the back of my throat tinging the musty scent of the glove pressed roughly into my nose. The heavy tramp of boots on dirt pounded hard by years of other feet trodding it grew ever closer, the rattling chain sound transforming into the jingle of spurs on cavalry and clank of armor as my ears finally figured out how to separate the sounds.

I suppose I should have been grateful the troop clomping past thought they were in friendly territory. The lack of scouts on the wings meant the pair of us weren't discovered in the nook she'd dragged us into after all, but watching the gaggle of armored fighters wandering past and knowing that that was supposed to be Radani's army just pissed me off on a fundamental level. The closest thing the group had to a uniform was a ragged looking red tabard with a black flame logo on the chest. It was so damn generic it made my brain hurt to look at.

I squirmed, trying to get free of the iron grip of the woman, but it only made her jerk me hard enough to make my vision swim. "Knock it off," she hissed in my ear, "or I'll let them have you!"

The threat was enough to bring me to my senses. Or at least realize how epically stupid it would have been to run out there and start berating a group that was clearly way higher level than myself. It didn't stop me from glaring at them hard enough that they probably should have realized we were there though.

I did know the name Radani after all. He was one of the early rumors about the Glitched when he stopped logging into the Star Crusade world. It was years before anyone gave any credence to the possibility that Glitching was an actual thing though, so I had assumed that if he had been one of the early Glitches, he must have passed before anyone found him. Star Crusade wasn't a fantasy world and I hadn't spent much time in it, but only an idiot could have missed how high on the leaderboards that name popped up during championships. Never quite top ten, but for an unsupported, clanless player that was still impressive.

Having what looked more like a generic group of mountain bandits running around claiming Radani's name pissed me off more than it should have. I didn't actually know that player after all. I'd just been impressed by his rankings. Full size unit tactics and strategies weren't my thing by a long shot. One-on-one or even a small party, I could handle, but trying to keep track of what various units across an entire map were doing? No thanks.

Radani seemed to have a gift for it though, only being kept out of the top ten ranks by the weight the various clan's aces could bring to the field which a clanless player couldn't match. Watching the feed for his matches had been more pleasurable than actually playing the game. Which was good, since I sucked at it. I'd ended up transitioning to The Bested World when it was released and almost entirely forgotten about the Glitched rumors involving Star Crusade. I hadn't even really realized that anyone could play it via a fully logged in SLS. Tactical games like that didn't seem to lend themselves to the TVR interface, but I suppose I never tried it either.

Still, twenty fighters in mismatched armor claiming to be one of his units? Really pissed me off. I fought down the irrational anger, reminding myself that it was just a name. Hell, it probably wasn't the Radani I knew of anyway. Unfortunately, that left me with nothing to focus on but the sounds of mismatched armor clanking and clacking as its wearers trudged past.

It seemed like forever before the troop marched themselves out of earshot down the road, but probably was more like a couple of minutes at the most. The woman finally let go of me. Or, well, shoved me off her might have been a better way to phrase it. Whichever way it happened, I found myself face down in the fragrant loam of the forest floor even grimier than before. I pushed myself to my feet, my hands and knees sinking into the soft black dirt before I managed to clamber up. I was trying to dislodge a particularly stubborn bit of soil from my ear when a hard shove between my shoulder blades sent me stumbling forward into a tree.

"What the hell-" Before I could finish, she was already talking.

"So... what? You got some kind of death wish or something?" she demanded, spear jammed into the ground beside her and both fists planted on her hips. Her brows lowered over eyes that were definitely grey and by grey, I mean pissed off as hell storm clouds sort of grey. "What the hell is a noob like you even doing in a survival zone?"

"Like I said I-" I cut myself off, shaking my head hard. "Wait, what did you just say? Did you just call me a noob?"

She rolled her eyes, one hand leaving her hips to gesture at my crappy gear. "Like anyone who wasn't a noob would be caught dead in that shit. Actually, no. You're pretty likely to be caught dead going out in that shit."

I stared at her, eyes wide and I'm pretty sure my mouth was hanging open like a character in a bad sitcom. "Holy shit, you're not an NPC?!"

She blinked at me without responding for a solid moment before her fist lashed out and caught me square in the gut. Not what I was expecting. I folded around her fist like a sheet and probably went about as white as one too.

"Do I look like a goddamn NPC to you?!" she demanded, grabbing my collar before I could drop to the ground again. "You're in the survival zone, moron! There's only mobs and players out here! What kind of idiot are you?!"

I gasped for breath, my bruised abdomen and choked off collar making it hard to draw air into my battered lungs. "H-how would I know?" I said, grabbing her wrist and trying to take some of the pressure off my neck. "I don't even know where I am!"

That must have gave her pause, because she abruptly let go of my collar, letting me drop to my knees in the soft dirt. "Wait," she said, her voice soft and almost delicate sounding in the absence of irritated anger from moments ago, "you don't know where you are?"

I shook my head, massaging my sore stomach. "I was logging in and something went, I don't know, wrong or something. I woke up here feeling like I'd gone five rounds with the Ogre King."

"So... what? You're, like, new?" It was definitely weird hearing her voice sound almost gentle and it was pretty much freaking me out too. "You're really new?"

"Didn't I just say that?" I muttered, groaning as I accidentally pressed too hard on a bruise. "Damn, woman, you hit like a freight train."

A blush colored her freckled cheeks. "Sorry." She shrugged, turning partially away. "I got carried away."

"Tell me about it." I pushed myself to my feet again, feeling like I was getting a nasty preview of how growing old was going to feel as I did. Crossing the few steps to the side of the road, I glanced both ways before stepping out onto the hardpack surface again. A rustle of underbrush behind me gave me a pretty good idea that she'd followed me. "What's your name anyway?"

"Crysal." She didn't offer anything else, which made sense. Usernames were for the general masses. Only the closest companions ever shared their real world names. Which probably explained why it took so long to figure out that these Glitches were a lot more than just an urban legend. "What about you?"

I hesitated a moment before responding. It wasn't like I was embarrassed by my name or anything. I mean, I chose it. It was mine. I just, well, things were definitely not the same here as they were in The Bested World. And my avatar had a pretty significant difference between here and there. I didn't remember seeing a Crysal on the player lists in The Bested World, but it wouldn't be the first time I missed a name, especially if it was someone lower in levels or I didn't play with.

"Theron." I finally admitted.

"That's a guy's name." Okay. Not the response I expected.

"Sorry, but it's my name." I held out my hands, smiling just as awkwardly as I had when I'd been convinced she was an NPC. "Pretty sure I'm not a guy."

"No," she frowned, one brow rising higher than the other as she stared at me, "that is definitely a guy's name."

"Do I look like a guy?" I asked, holding my arms out. I may not have been well endowed, but I certainly wasn't flat-chested either.

"No, but Theron is a guy." Crysal folded her arms over her chest, glaring at me. "And you're not him."

"Sorry to disappoint you," I said, suddenly understanding what she meant. "But I'm not a guy. And Theron is still me."

The anger was returning to her voice as her spear lowered to point at my chest. The sun glinted off the sharpened blade of the tip in a way that I found extremely unpleasant. "You're lying. I knew Theron and he's definitely a guy. Now, who are you? Be honest with me!"

I held up my hands, suddenly way too familiar with how people robbed at gunpoint must have felt back in the real world. "Seriously! Honestly! I swear to God that's my name!" I stepped back slowly even as I scrambled for the words to make her believe me. "I fought for Clan Ruxxell in the last guild war! Johnny Blade could vouch for me if he were here! Why would I lie about being me?!"

Her spear tip caught at the roughspun fabric of my tunic between by breasts. "Why were you playing a male avatar?!" she demanded, glaring at me like my crossplay was a personal insult.

"'Cause male avatars got a strength bonus!" I admitted, my voice going shrill at the feel of cold steel pricking my skin through the shirt. "A-and I wanted to play a bardbarian!"

"A-a what?!" She took a step back, her expression twisted with confusion.

"A bardbarian," I admitted, grimacing at the admittedly stupid class name. "You know... like a bard who's also a barbarian?"

"That... are you serious? That has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard of." She wasn't wrong, I admit, but at least the spear was back to being planted in the ground and - more importantly - not pointed at my chest any longer.

"I was fifteen, okay?" I said, folding my arms over my chest and glaring at the ground. "I thought it sounded pretty cool back then."

"So you're a young idiot," she said, sighing and picking up her spear. "Damn if I don't feel like the bigger idiot for thinking you were a guy though. Come on then."

"Huh?" I stared at her in confusion for long enough for her to get several feet ahead of me on the path headed the opposite way the so-called army had disappeared.

"For God's sake." she muttered, pinching at the bridge of her nose. "Are you coming or not? It'll take the rest of the day to get to the nearest village Radani's idiots aren't at and I'm not dumb enough to try and camp in the survival zone. But, hey, if you want to die out here by yourself, be my guest."

"Oh!" I tripped over a rock in the road as I tried to run after her, sprawling face first on the rough ground.

Pushing myself up to my hands and knees yet again, I vowed to myself that one way or another, the first stat I was raising was my damn dexterity.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter One

I woke up laying on my back and aching all over way more than I should for a virtual world. Even my hair seemed to hurt, which royally sucked. The smell of green growing things and the sounds of small animals of some kind moving through underbrush told me I was in a virtual world before I opened my eyes. If something had gone wrong with my login, I'd just have been dropped back into the orange-ish goop of the nutrient solution which definitely didn't smell anything like green growing things.

I opened my eyes to see a shockingly blue sky above me. And when I say shockingly, I mean so damn blue it looks like it's the realest thing you've ever seen in your life. God knows I've never seen a real sky look such a deep shade of blue in person before. I never spent much time looking up while I was playing before, I guessed. Must have missed out on a ton of stuff while I was rushing around to finish quests before my Suit made me log out. Yet another reason the Tank was so very worth the cost. Grinning at being so fully in The Bested World for what felt like the very first time, I reached up towards the sky like I could grab one of those puffy clouds floating so high above.

That was when the first clue that something was really damn wrong hit me.

The hand reaching up to the sky above me wasn't mine. Or, well, it was mine, but it hadn't been one I'd seen in ages. And the gloves that should have been equipped were missing. I shoved myself up from my prone position staring at my hands. My dirty hands. Like I'd been scrabbling about with something grubby for days.

And that wasn't the only problem. My arms - hell, my whole body - felt weak. Gone were the corded lines of hard earned muscle that had defined my body just yesterday, replaced by smooth skin that looked appallingly similar to my real world arms. A rough tunic and loose pants with a rope drawstring had replaced the customized gear I'd spent whole weeks clambering about for in some of the nastiest caverns The Bested World had to offer.

It felt like my heart was trying to rip itself out of my chest like one of those monster things from that old classic SF film with the space ship as what might have happened started to sink in. Everything was gone. Something had gone wrong on my login. Something had... No, it couldn't be. This was just a screw up with the server. It had to be. But still, I felt like I was going to be sick as I reached for my status menu.

The sight of my drastically reduced HP bar was like a fist to the gut. Level one. One. All the way back to the beginning. All those hours, those years, of work wasted! I blinked through the menus as fast as I could but it was all the same.

All of my stats were the miserable garbage I first rolled up when I started The Bested World and for a brief second I was almost glad I never got into any of those kiddy games that have even worse starting stats. All of my hard won gear was gone, replaced with noob crap. My skills had vanished. Even my class-

"Peasant?" I muttered, staring at the black print floating before my eyes with a frown. "What the hell kind of class is a peasant? It sounds like some sort of crappy NPC thing."

The one thing I knew for sure was that it definitely wasn't a player class in The Bested World. And the more I tried to convince myself I was wrong, the more evidence seemed to pile up that I wasn't. Wherever I was, it wasn't The Bested World. Which could only mean-

"Glitched?"

The word barely escaped my mouth it was so quiet. I felt hollow, like a plug had been pulled and everything that made me me had suddenly just drained away leaving nothing left. It wasn't possible. It just wasn't. Glitching was like winning the lottery. A freak accident. It wasn't something that happened to regular people like me.

But here I was.

I tried to log out. I could feel the switch with my mind, the familiar commands in my thoughts. But every time the rainbow swirl seemed like it was going to begin, it abruptly canceled, dropping me nauseatingly back into my avatar over and over. By the end of the sixth - or seventh, I think I lost count somewhere - try, I had to fling myself to the side of the path I was on to hurl into the bushes.

The gut churning wrench of needing to vomit, the burn of the bile in my throat, the disgusting taste in my mouth - all far from things that I had to experience when I logged in from my Suit. I chalked it up to yet another deepening experience from logging in via a Tank - not that it was a pleasant experience by any means. The other possibility didn't bear thinking on, but whatever it was, I could have done without the full reality experience of hurling my guts out on the side of a path.

I dropped back down on my ass after crawling a few feet from the muck and wiped the remains from my face with the tattered rag that passed for a sleeve with my new equipment as I tried to gather my thoughts. So I couldn't log out. That was bad. I knew that was bad. But at the same time, it was kind of exciting too.

I don't mean to sound like some kind of adrenaline seeking nutcase, but I had to admit that the trembling in my hands wasn't just from the epic purge I'd just experienced. If this really was a glitch - and I still wasn't fully ready to admit it was at that point - then I was looking at a whole new experience. Something no one had written any guides or recorded any playtest videos for. A whole new world to explore and beat. I wasn't worried about my body back in the real world - my Tank was set up to allow me to login without anyone needing to maintain it for months if necessary. And no one knew what happened to the Glitched when their real world bodies died anyway. It wasn't like anyone could find their connection's end - something that was supposed to be impossible - after all. Maybe they just became permanently part of this world.

So it was exciting. Scary exciting - definitely scary, just like anything completely unknown, right? - but still exciting. The first time logging into a new world was always exciting. This was just a terrifyingly high level of that rush. Or at least, that was what I wanted to believe. It wasn't like anyone was going to come checking on me any time soon and there had to be a logout point somewhere. This was still a virtual world, so it had been programmed by someone. All worlds had an out built in, even prison ones. You just had to find it.

That thought held firmly in the forefront of my mind, I got to my feet and tried to knock the worst of the dirt and grime off my body. All I had to do was find the world's log out point and everything would go back to normal. It couldn't be that hard, right? Even for noob gear, my equipment was pretty obviously for some kind of fantasy world, so at least I wasn't completely in over my head. The Bested World was one of the biggest fantasy TVRMMOs out there and I had years of experience in that world that had to correlate somehow to this one.

Looking at my skill page again made me groan though. Zero ranks in everything. At least the basic skills were still on my list. Trying to figure out how to find a trainer to learn how to defend myself before I got attacked by something would have royally sucked. The zero beside Botany would make things harder since I didn't want to risk a status effect gathering food, so I'd have to hunt and hope for the best until I figured out where I was.

I rezzed up the only weapon in my inventory, catching it the moment it fully synchronized with the game world and dropped out of the air. It felt light and easy in my hand, the leather wrapped grip comfortable and familiar, but the blade made me grimace. It was chipped and almost completely dull but the worst part had to be the length. I didn't have a ruler with me, but the pitiful length looked shorter than the big blade on my multifunction pocket knife back in the real world. Even if I could run one down - which I doubted in my current crappy stat state - I doubted I could even kill this world's version of a rabbit with it. If I had to go up against anything bigger, I'd almost definitely hit derezz before I could do any real damage. Not that I knew what would happen if I did hit derezz. God only knew where the respawn in this area was.

Not that I had time to worry about that. I was in the middle of who knew where with crappy gear - I didn't even have a decent pair of boots for crying out loud! - and a shit weapon. If there were safe zones in this world, this probably wasn't one of them. So I needed a weapon. Well, I needed a better weapon. And in the middle of a forest the most obvious thing had to be a club. If I could find a good stick and actually make one anyway.

Hearing a larger rustle in the underbrush than earlier made me swallow hard and look around the ground at my feet. A rock would also be good. I liked rocks. Nice heavy rocks that could brain big bad wolves were awesome. Or even a bunch of pebbles to convince whatever the hell made that noise that I wasn't as tasty as I probably looked.

The branches closest to the road moved visibly and so did I, scrambling towards the middle of the path so quick I tripped over my own feet and sat down hard. When they actually parted and I caught a glimpse of something pale coming through, I hate to admit it, but I screamed. I possibly also covered my head with one arm while waving my pathetic dagger at whatever was about to eat me with the other, but I'm not going to admit that.

"What are you even doing?"

The cool soprano washed over my ears brought an absurd amount of relief and I peeked out to see a tall woman in mottled green and blue leathers standing over me. Auburn hair slicked back from her face so hard it had to have been either pulled back in a crazy tight ponytail or braid or else held down with a lot of product and her eyes were a weird color that I couldn't tell if was grey or maybe green in the dim forest light. The upper arm of some kind of bow peeked over her shoulder, but I was more interested in the spear she was leaning on as she glared at me.

"You deaf or something?" she asked again, her eyes narrowing. "Or just stupid?"

"W-what?" Not my best response, I admit.

She sighed and shook her head. "Just stupid, I guess. What are you doing out here? Trying to get yourself drafted into King Radani's little army?"

"Who?" I frowned up at her. Wait. Radani? Didn't I know that name?

"Wow. You really are stupid." Her frown deepened. "Radani's the asshole who claims this area. And your ass is on his road. Unless you want to get drafted, you might want to get off it before his army blunders their way over here." She glared at me for a long moment before sighing and holding out her hand. "I just know I'm gonna regret this, but come on."

"What?" I shook my head before she could respond, her brows drawing down like thunderclouds. "Sorry, I just... Radani? Are you serious?"

"Do I look like I'm joking? If you don't get off your ass and start moving in the next five tics, I'm going to leave you here and you can figure it out for yourself."

"No! No, I'm coming, I just-" I shook my head and started pushing myself up to my feet. "I never thought I'd hear that name again."

"Did you hit your head or something?" she asked, cocking her head to the side and peering at me through narrowed eyes. "Radani took over years ago. Treats people like shit, but you're the first person I've come across claiming to have forgotten him."

I held up my hands, shrugging with an awkward smile. She had to be an NPC, so I couldn't break character too much without risking throwing off the AI. Not that I was sure what character I was supposed to be. "Sorry. I just... yeah, must have gotten cracked in the head with something. I woke up out here and, well-" I let my words trail off, not sure how to explain how I got out here, given that I didn't actually know how I had in the first place.

The growing irritation of her expression seemed to fade with my half-assed explanation. "Damn. Someone must really hate you." She turned her head, glaring up the road at a faint sound I could only barely pick up. It almost sounded like someone playing with a thin metal chain, rattling it between their fingers. "If you want to take your chances in that death brigade be my guest, but I'm getting out of here."

"Wait!" I scrambled after her, almost falling over myself again as she passed me headed for the opposite side of the road. Thanks to my crappy dexterity stat, I tripped over a rock on the edge of the road and fell headlong into the brush. "Shit!" The rough branches scrapped over my clothes, tearing the fabric and drawing long red welts on my skin. The sudden jolt of pain made me curl around myself defensively with an indrawn hiss. It also made me miss the heavy tread on the path that had joined the clinking rattle of chain sound.

The feeling of something grabbing the collar of my shirt and dragging me bodily backwards pulled a scream out of me, but it was muffled by the leather gloved hand clamped over my mouth.

"Shut. Up." The rapidly growing familiar soprano hissed in my ear, her breath hot against my cheek as she spoke each word so staccato they seemed like separate sentences instead of a single phrase. Startled and overwhelmed, I did what any red-blooded woman would do in that moment.

I froze.

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Prologue

In the year 2032, the medium of virtual reality took a massive step forward with the introduction of the Spinal Link System or SLS. Though the name of the device was an initial detractor, the actual unit was not as frightening as it implied. An articulated series of plates that were worn along the user's spinal column protected the delicate sensors that used a low tack, reusable, medical adhesive to adhere to the user's skin while a clam-shell set of audio/visual devices cupped the user's head from the back and covered the eyes and ears. The device used the myriad sensors in the spinal plates to pick up the signals being sent from the brain and the series of high-grade onboard CPUs interpreted them into virtual motion.

Originally designed as an interface unit to help paralysis victims be able to walk again with the use of a cybernetic exoskeleton among other healing purposes, it wasn't long at all before non-injured users began to see the potential for other uses as well. The military, especially, pushed for the development of virtual worlds for the purpose of training their soldiers without the expense and hazard of real world live fire training. The medical world soon jumped on the same bandwagon, sending would be surgeons through hundreds of hours of virtual surgeries with all manner of outlandish complications to prepare before ever touching a laser knife to a real world patient.

But it was the gaming community that made this new interface truly blossom once it came into contact with the general public two years after initial development. The ever improving CPUs allowed for more and more detail to be layered into the virtual worlds shared by so many as MMOs. Eventually even scenes such as scent and taste joined the original trinity of sight, sound, and touch. People from around the world were brought together in an instant and able to interact with each other in landscapes that previously only existed in the fevered dreams of artists and writers of the past. Social media fell to the wayside once people realized they could connect virtually in person with people they'd only dreamed of meeting before. No one had time for typing status updates or posting selfies when whole worlds waited to be explored.

However, it took almost eight years in the public sector before the next step into what became known as True Virtual Reality or TVR managed to occur with the development of the TVR Suit. Before the Suit, the SLS could only be used in specially prepared empty rooms or with the user sedated into a dream-like state in order to avoid accidental injury. There was also an alarming number of cases of death relating to more hardcore users forgetting to tend to the needs of their real world body due to being too engrossed in their virtual activity. But the TVR Suit changed that.

The Suit was to all outward appearances a skin tight bodysuit, similar to a wetsuit in the way it hugged the body, with a interface slit for connecting to a user's SLS along the back. However on the inside, countless tiny sensors studded every inch of the material and fed real time data to the SLS the entire time it was worn. It could detect everything from an abnormal heart rhythm to a need to eat or drink or even something as relatively minor as a full bladder and send a signal to the SLS to remove the user from the virtual world. But more than that, the sensors could also detect nerve pulses to trigger a movement in the body - such as the user attempting to raise their arm - while the SLS was logged in and send a counter-acting pulse to cancel the movement before it could occur, eliminating the need for special rooms or sedation drugs to log into virtual worlds. The introduction of the Suit revolutionized the SLS and it quickly became standard to purchase a custom-fitted Suit as a package with a SLS. Logging in without one was soon considered just as dangerous as getting into a race car without a proper helmet and harness. And foregoing the evident advantages of not needing a specialized place to login or the fogginess of sedation made even the most stubbornly resistant to console accessories line up to be fitted for their own Suit. As adoption of the Suit increased, the tragedies of death relating to logging in too long decreased. And the development of Safety Protocols that would derezz a user once they hit the last 1% of their HP - or higher if the user put higher focus on safety - to prevent the rare case of mental conviction that they'd died actually killing the user in real life made even that possibility far rarer than it was at the beginning of TVR.

In 2047, one last major change was released - the introduction of the Dive Tank. Previously a medical use only device, the Dive Tank completely immersed the user in a oxygen rich nutrient solution that could remove waste and feed the user for as long as it remained powered. Suddenly, the need to log out in order to survive was effectively removed and those who wanted to truly disappear into a virtual world now had the ability to do so. Provided they had the real world funds to afford it. Dive Tanks were exorbitantly expensive when they were initially made available with only the wealthy able to afford the cost of a unit and its inevitable upkeep. The price slowly decreased as demand increased, but it still remained out of reach of many but the most determined gamers.

But around the time of the Dive Tank's introduction, a rumor began circulating through the virtual worlds. It spoke of people disappearing while logging in of being routed to some other place where no one could find them. No one sharing the story ever knew the people who were said to disappear. They were always a loner, someone who spent more time taking risks like soloing party dungeons or trying to raid above their level, and most of the time the story was from a different world altogether. And all that seemed to happen was they stopped logging into that world. No one ever really knew them in the game and it was hardly the first time that someone lost interest in a game and moved on without telling anyone.

But the rumors persisted despite the lack of evidence that anything truly nefarious was happening. Eventually whenever someone wasn't logged in, the first thing anyone looking for them would hear was "maybe they glitched" followed by a laugh. No one took it seriously, just a meme carried on for fun and games.

In 2055, that all changed.

"Glitches" began to happen to more well known players and more frequently. It became harder and harder to laugh off the old throw away comment about them glitching as the number of possible glitched players steadily grew higher. The media didn't get involved until someone went looking for a possibly glitched player they knew in the real world and found them in the unresponsive state of a logged in user. Nothing would log the user out and trying to trace the signal of their log to the world it connected to inevitably became lost in a bewildering series of jumps between virtual worlds. It was like something had grabbed their signal and dribbled it throughout the whole of the virtual multiverse like some sort of digital basketball before throwing it at some unknown basket without ever disconnecting their consciousness from it.

The discovery of one glitched player quickly snowballed as more people investigating possible glitches and more and more glitched players began to be found around the world. For some, discovery came far too late even with the use of a Suit - death by malnutrition and lack of care once the Suit and the user's SLS couldn't pull them from the login. Some could only have been the sources of the first rumors, they had been gone so long once they were found. Others were taken into the care of their local government, long term facilities set up with Dive Tanks to hold the players in each country while their mental disappearance was investigated. The numbers steadily grew until they seemed to level off somewhere in the thousands of victims.

Fear began to take hold in the virtual multiverse as players started wondering what made a person glitch. Some stopped logging in altogether, giving up the pleasures of the virtual world in favor of the real world's placid sameness. Others developed a sort of paranoia, constantly scanning and updating their SLS's software for viruses and flaws or only connecting through a wired connection to a personal terminal instead of the SLS's wireless point. But for the majority of users, the fear wasn't enough to keep them from their daily login to their favorite worlds. After all, barely even 5% of users could be called glitched victims. The chances that it would happen to any particular person was vanishingly small and the world's governments were quick to reassure people that all efforts were being made to find out why it was happening and stop it.

Personally, I thought the whole thing was silly. It'd been almost two years since the media reported any major glitch incidents after all. Glitching was nothing more than a freak accident. There was no real dangers to logging in and I'd put so many hours into my character, throwing it all away by not logging in seemed like the bigger loss. There hadn't even been one glitched player from my server, so the possibility of glitching seemed about as remote as getting into a plane crash without ever boarding. And besides, I'd finally managed to afford a real Dive Tank. There was no way I was letting it go to waste.

I stretched in the glass enclosure of my tank, warming up for my first deep login. I know it's silly since my avatar and my physical body don't really connect like that, but I can't help it and besides, it makes me feel more relaxed before I login. Just like how the orange-ish nutrient solution feels warm as it washes into the enclosure, even though I know it's only room temperature. Some things are just the way they seem no matter what reality might say.

I settled my oxygen mask over my mouth and nose and took a deep breath of the filtered air as the solution washed over my face. Taking one last glance around my bare room - selling off the last few bits of furniture I had to bankroll this Tank was a big decision - through the orange-ish soup of the solution, I let my eyes close and reached for the familiar command menu of the SLS nestled against my bare back.  The Bested World's logo hovered tantalizing close before my face as I opened my eyes again, the SLS overriding the signals my real eyes were sending my brain with its command menu. I'd been playing in The Bested World for the last five years with my old Suit. Now I was finally going to have an advantage only the top players could meet with my Tank.

Grinning, I reached up with a virtual hand and tapped the logo to login, waiting for the familiar rainbow swirl of connection.

Only for everything to go completely white.