"Barbarian?" he asked, the reverse-echo bouncing around directly in my brain pan at this proximity. He raised a hand and closed it into a fist, a long, rectangular box appearing there, hanging from an iron ring, gray-black. It was shaped like a lantern, a similarity confirmed when it burst into light. The effect was not dissimilar to turning on my harsh bathroom light when I get up to pee in the night. Light gouging at the very back reaches of my optical nerves. I could not look at it. Invasive, intrusive light, harsher than the cruel UV of rainy days when your eyeballs want to use your low-light rods but the merciless day blinds you with weirdly bright gray. Eyelids did almost nothing to shield me from it, and I tried to turn my face to either side to shield myself.

  He could see, I was sure, everything. The moving parts of my spirit. The photosensitive inner workings of my soul. He bathed me in it, and I felt my heart scorching like thirty-five millimeter film in daylight.

  I shielded myself with one hand, and closed my other hand around something metallic. Golden light flooded the room, warm and somehow comforting, reinforcing, protective. The dark monk shrieked and I felt myself falling, my ass bruising against the stone floor. I felt that I could open my eyes, that shower moment when the shampoo is rinsed away. I gasped, gulped the light, let it drive away that scorching false rays.

  I held a lantern. Not a harsh, monochrome box, but a simple hexagonal thing, roughly symmetrical, iron-ribbed, hanging from a simple ring, swiveling out of my control.

  He recoiled, covering his eyes, his own lantern vanishing in a wash of ink. His back foot nearly slipped against the hole in the wall. How many floors up were we? I couldn't hear Teo's voice, not exactly, only see the effects of it, and I apparently couldn't ask.

  Scaly hands dragged me back.

  I couldn't look away from my own light. It spilled from me, changing everything. In my own lantern light, the dark monk looked shorter, exposed for what he was. Was his forehead eyeball tattoo squeezing closed?

  Golden threads interconnected between every stone in the tower wall. Numbers and markers hovered by various things, offering information in white-gold. A paragraph of text beside the dropped sword. Load-bearing directions and strengths in the structure of the tower. Dotted lines tracing stones as they should be, from before they were blown out by the dark monk's siege. A panel of words and numbers appeared by the dark monk.

  Well, I sure as hell knew what HP was. What I didn't know was why Beamon's own label read, in glimmering gold-traced English,

  or why he was running directly toward the dark monk, leaping with all of his momentum to tackle the monochrome man.

  They disappeared together, robes flapping, the sounds of rage and struggle cut short by the wind.

  Hudrak shrieked too, arching his back and tensing his long, serpentine trunk. His sharp nails clawed the air. The forked tongue stiffened, stabbing out from his fanged maw, then went limp. He dropped in a coil on the ground. Something short and assholish-looking bellowed over his twitching body. I say "bellow," but the sound was like what I imagine it sounds like if you squeeze a squirrel as hard as you can, which I've never done and don't plan to, just for clarity.

  It flexed and brandished--yes, brandished!--one of those curvy knives with blades like sine waves, green-black blood dripping from its undulating edge.

  The little guy looked like if you tore off a bat's wings and smooshed him together with one of those giant hissing cockroaches, and maybe a slug. He worked a series of sharp teeth or maybe mandibles. I couldn't tell which, but I felt equally about coming into contact with either. He rushed me, hairs on his long arms or possibly carapace bristling in a very insectoid fashion. His eyes were light bulbs that had just turned off.

  I flailed for the sword nearby, my fingers finding it against the stone. This was a strong opening, and I should tell Teo that at some point. Very exciting. Very detailed. I scrambled to my knees and tried to turn that movement into a strike.

  Here we go. I was feeling this. Time for some honest-to-gods, hulk-smash, bicep-flexing barbarian shit.

  The weird little guy batted the sword out of the way like it was a fly. Not only that, but the blood on the handle and on my hand made it slippery, and it spun out of my grip which had felt very strong a moment before, whirling away like every autorotating helicopter in Black Hawk Down.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The bat-bug-slug barely flinched, and jumped on me. It clawed and bit, tearing at my robe.

  I don't know if you've ever had a bat-bug-slug invade your personal space, but it's not like a game. This was not my first experience with a pen-and-paper RPG. In fact, that's kind of the whole reason I created Arthrem--none of my previous characters really gave me the escapism I craved. I hadn't been able to really let loose with my uptight paladin, and my mage died in the first session. When you live a life like mine, that's not what you're looking for in a game of pure imagination (if I may borrow from the esteemed Willy Wonka). Arthrem was that. Two hundred fifty pounds of skull-crushing muscle, wild man aesthetics, and chaotic neutral sensibilities.

  Another thing I knew was that this was supposed to be turn-based. Whatever black magic devilry Teo had pulled had made it much, much more immersive than that. This didn't feel turn-based. This whirling, Tasmanian devil of a beast did not seem to have gotten the memo about patiently waiting its turn and conducting battle in an orderly fashion.

  Reflexively, I waved it away, flailing and kicking. Someone was yelling "Ohshitohshitohshit" and that turned out to be me. I don't remember deciding to kick at the critter, but I had connected with my strappy sandal and sent it on its ass, if only for a hot second.

  It scintillated. I'm serious. It started to sparkle with warmth, glowing like the weirdest angel ever. I realized then that my lantern was up. I was holding it like I had a chance of fending it off, blinding it. It didn't love the light, if its gurgling screech was any indication, but it didn't seem to harm it in any way like it did with the dark monk.

  It did, however, produce a panel of data. Runes writhed until they became the regular old Latin alphabet.

  This floating information burst into tiny dust devils of golden mist as the "Nag" charged at me, teeth first.

  "Well shit," I said, I think out loud. "Guess we're losing this character too, huh, Teo?"

  This did not faze the creature. However, the fanblade swirl of golden light did, a humming disk that swiped its feet out from under it, causing it to kick and twist like a helpless overturned beetle.

  I looked around the room. Beamon was gone. Hudrak was dead. There was nobody else to help me. So who had done it?

  The spinning disk slowed. It was not a disk at all, but a strut of white-gold light, lightsaber-bright and flickering. It stood upright like a spear. In fact, it kind of looked like a spear, just with no blade. A staff, maybe?

  "Okay," I said. "Teo? Tell me more, here. Is it too hot to touch?"

  If Teo replied, I didn't hear. Or maybe I did. Maybe all of this, everything that was happening, was Teo's response. I put my hand out to take the staff. Stave? Teo used to correct me when I would say "staff," but he never did satisfactorily define what the difference was. I'm pretty sure just spelling.

  The darted jumped back out of my reach, like a cat that suddenly doesn't want to be pet, the "touchy / no-touchy" response. The nag was scraping sorta-claws, sorta-hooves against the floor and getting back up on its revolting feet. It made the squirrel-squeezing shout and charged again.

  "What do I do?" I asked Teo, or maybe just the chaos of the room. "I can't pick it up. How do I do that again? Do I have to, like, mimic it? Like a Gundam pilot?"

  I chopped the air with my free hand in the general direction of the nag. The floating, golden stave whirled to work, pummeling the hideous creature with rapid hits as it spun. Whappa-whappa-whap. Left and right the monster recoiled, like a kid getting pummeled in stereo from a schoolyard bully. I pulled back my hand, and the stave responded, rearing back like a pool cue. And like a pool cue, I motioned it forward. It stabbed forward for a killing strike, faster than I could ever thrust with my living muscles in the real world.

  It impaled the thing's head, right between its pale eyebulbs, and was back by my side before the monster's body understood that it was dead. The nag stood in momentary shock, pausing to let death make up its mind. Then it sank to its knees. Then it tilted to one side and plopped on the floor, its ruined cranium a jam donut pumping a pulpy dark jelly center onto the floor.

  My mind raced as I searched for a one-liner. This was my primary requirement for playing Teo's convoluted D&D homebrew, that I be allowed to say pithy one-liners after wrecking goblins. I wasn't sure what a nag was, but it seemed close enough to a goblin for Arthrem's sensibilities.

  "Guess he... uh... guess he couldn't quite face the music." I blurted. No one was alive to either appreciate it or groan at me. "Wait. Better one." I cleared my throat. The wind whistled against the open wall. "Stop while you're a-hea-"

  An all-too-familiar screech assaulted my ears in that room. I turned to see another pair of bulbous eyes climbing into the great smoking wound in the wall. And a second, a third, and... more than I could count while turning and sprinting back up the stairs.

  I didn't consciously decide what to do with the lantern and stave of light, but I understood after I fell down almost an entire flight of stairs in the darkness that they were not with me. Dropping my stuff and running didn't feel very barbarian of me. But then again, I didn't feel very barbarian. Was this what 250 pounds of muscle felt like? It felt a little slim to me. Had Teo overriden my character sheet?

  That was something to think about. Not now, but at some point. For now, there was a cacophonous nag-chorus of squirrel-squeeze-screams chasing me up the dark single helix of stairs. It corkscrewed out from the earth, my sandaled feet barely touching the stone, taking two and three at a time where possible. Gaps in the outer wall blew cold air into the stairwell, tracing the austere steps in starlight and the cold flickering of siege flame. A glimpse out of one of the yawning gaps showed not a raid, but an army. Perhaps hundreds of torches. Dozens of disorganized mobs of the same creatures, and bigger ones, and even bigger bigger ones.

  I was forced to consider the strategic value of fleeing to the top of a besieged tower. But the horrible croaking voices in hot pursuit left me no choice.

  It was either turn and face them and probably die, or get to the top and face them in a constricted position, a chokepoint. Maybe I could throw loose stones at them as they came through the door.