"You wake up in a prison." Teo's "DM voice" was unassailable. Deep, solemn, sonorant like a sports announcer. He wrote this stuff really well, too. I could practically see the flickering candlelight against the arched limestone, strobing off a hundred mirror shards on the floor. I could almost hear the thunder vibrating through the prison walls and thrumming in my chest, smell the oppressive must of the cell.

  Actually... I could feel the shaggy straw bed beneath me. I put a hand against the damp wall and pushed myself upright. An ornate staff leaned against the wall. I reached a hand out, picked it up, and set it back down. I felt its weight in my hand.

  No--not my hand. His hand. Arthrem's hand. There it was, the wolf tattoo on the back of my right hand, just as I had designed for my barbarian in Teo's new tabletop campaign. Arthrem was everything I wanted to be: strong, wild, confident. A breaker of goblins and a kicker of asses.

  I probed gently at "my" face and forehead. The abrasive push-broom bristles of a northman's mohawk scratch at my hand; the ridge of the scar rose beneath my fingertips, tracking from forehead to cheek. Nothing original, sure, but this was Arthrem's body without a doubt.

  "I'm him," I remember saying out loud. "I'm not playing him. I am him."

  Talk about immersion in gameplay. Good god, Teo.

  Something drew my eye to the broken standing mirror. I tied on the sandals beside the bed and walked over to it. Who let a prisoner have a mirror? I picked up one of the shards and observed a sliver of Arthrem's face looking back at me, the scarred red eye flickering in the candlelight.

  Dust shook loose from the doorjamb. There was a pounding on the door, and a voice muffled by two inches of moldy oak shouted. "Your Insightfulness!" came a voice. "An urgent matter requires your--"

  Something cracked and the door broke off of one hinge, creaking forward and knocking over the mirror. Splinters frayed behind the gouges twisted out of the oak. I had an inkling of where it would fall, and moved quickly to the bed, which is to say I dove headfirst and ass akimbo.

  "Yes, thank you, Hudrak," said a prison warden in drooping robes. He wrung a cloth hat in both hands just under a dull bronze monkey pendant that hung from his neck. Beside him stood an astonishingly tall and astonishingly nonhuman guard, aqua and cyan and legless. The monster did not so much rest on the halberd that he had clearly used to strike down the oak door as stand parallel to it, like a sideways equals symbol. His tail, supporting his body, writhed in a knot beneath him. Or her, who knew? I had never seen a snake warrior in person before.

  "Your Insightfulness," repeated the obsequious weirdo. It seemed like an unusually respectful way to address a prisoner. "Your suggestions are welcome--desired, even--at this critical juncture--"

  The serpent interrupted him. "The tower is under attack," it breathed. I was surprised it didn't hang on the sibilants. "You are needed."

  "Yes, as Hudrak says."

  "I'm not in prison?" I asked. "I was told I was in prison."

  The silence might have been awkward had it not been for the echoes of men and women shouting, the screams of the dying, and the unmistakable clanging of an attack down the stairwell behind them. The serpent man flared his hood and swiveled his slit-eyes coolly to the other. The thin human returned the look. "His... Insightfulness has been lost in meditation, I am sure."

  "I mean," I said, "I just woke up." Something hit something floors below us. The walls shook. The mirror shards migrated a full inch in random directions. "Okay. I see what this is. We're doing one of those in-medias-res things. And you know what? I say hell yeah to that." I glanced around the room. "I draw my sword and axe." The four eyebrows in front of me rose. "I... pick up my sword and axe." Another half-inch. "Where are my sword and axe?"

  "Beamon," said the snake. "Does His Insightfulness keep a sword and axe on premises?"

  The human looked speechless. "I, he, well." He thought about it for a moment while something exploded somewhere in the building. "There is the vault, of course."

  "Beamon," insisted the snake. "His Insightfulness requires a sword and axe."

  "Yes," said Beamon, although his face said the opposite. "Yes, I am of course more than happy to escort His Insightfulness to the vault." He made room for me in the hallway.

  The human Beamon led the way and the serpent Hudrak urged us forward. I didn't think he was going to stick me in the back with the halberd, but I couldn’t really know one way or another. We coiled up through the helical staircase, the din of violence ringing harshly below and above us.

  "Haven't dusted in a while eh?" I asked. Spider webs stretched across our path and above us. Not the gossamer cobwebs I would have expected, more like the long threads of the intrusive Joro spiders I had a bad habit of walking through at home, real high-tensile threads that I might find trailing from my arm hours later.

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  They were oddly bright in the darkness of the stairwell. Perfectly geometric, converting on the grout between stones in the vaulted ceiling, trailing dust...

  "Look out!" I shouted. I shoved Beamon forward, sending him tumbling up the stairs, and threw one palm to halt Hudrak.

  Black stone pistoned downward, demolishing the three steps Beamon had just walked across. The human pushed himself up to his elbows on higher stairs. "Thank you, Your Insightfulness," he gasped. "But, please see to your own safety!"

  The vault was rubble. There was a hole in the outer wall through which a projectile had penetrated, crumpling masonry through across the floor and blowing an exit wound clear on the other side of the tower.

  Wardens of the jail tower, whatever their roles, lay unmoving but for the high altitude wind coming in through the ragged stone hole in the wall, disturbing their robes of aqua and orange and yellow. An odd outfit for a jailer, to be certain, and Beamon knelt to take the pulse of several. He came away shaking his head and clasping his pendant to his chest.

  Hudrak motioned for me to wait by the mound of rubble that had previously been the vault entrance. He slithered across the broken masonry and jagged stone shards and tugged at protruding hafts, freeing a couple of dusty weapons for me and returning with a dubious look in his eye, even for a snake-man.

  "Your Insightfulness's requested armaments," he said, handing over a pair of ridiculously ornate weapons. The sword was broad-bladed and forged of charcoal-gray iron. Or maybe steel. I don't know. I make copies for a living.

  Its crossguard terminated in two howling wolves' heads, the pommel in a spike. The axe was bearded and notched, all wicked curves with a bird-skull token dangling from the end of the haft. Dust and flakes dropped from them as he handed them over to me. I took them both, lifted them to the--oops! They clanged, simultaneously, to the stone floor. "Damn," I said. "These are heavy as shit!"

  Huldrak and Beamon shared a look.

  With an effort, I was able to lift them both. It bore repeating. "Good lord. So heavy!" If a brutal, battle-forged Barbarian couldn't swing these around, what were they good for? No matter. It was just too much weight on my wrists anyway. I could sheathe one and just wield the other two-handed for now... except I didn't have a sheath. Well, we would cross that bridge when we got there.

  "Mmm. So." The voice blew in howling on that chill wind. There was something wronger than wrong with the sound, as though it echoed first, a fractional second before it was spoken, the pitch-black syllables chopping the sound off like a guillotine.

  All heads that were able turned: Hudrak's, Beamon's, a couple of the other robed jailers running into the room. The serpent-man hissed, coiling his long trunk and readying the halberd. Beamon took a sideways step back.

  It was a man--a human man, I should say, with an air of familiarity in every sense, because he felt like he belonged here. I felt like I knew him, and he knew me.

  I could not imagine why, though. Maybe he was Arthrem’s nerd spellcaster cousin? He wore gray and black robes, not a whiff of color about him aside from pale eyes, pearlescent and flat. Pale beads, body ink all along his arms and chest, with a tattoo of a third eye in the center of his forehead. He was slender, lithe, almost frail. He held uncalloused hands in some sort of magic gesture. A sorcerer? Some kind of spellcaster?

  But then, that was Teo for you. Always pushing the boundaries. He'd never quite give us what we expected.

  "You must be the replacement," his voice reverse-echoed. I will admit that, even as the fearless Barbarian Arthrem, currently level 3 and dual wielding (too-) heavy weapons, the backward resonance of his voice made me squirm. Every sound he spoke made me eager for his words to be over and done with. He laughed, or rather puffed a single syllable from his nose, dissonant like microphone feedback. "And my servants are already yours. So quickly you turn on your master, Hudrak? Is not loyalty part of wisdom, Beamon?" The human bent his knees, and the snake-man's tongue lashed the air silently, fast as a whip.

  "It is you who abandoned wisdom," hissed Hudrak. "Reason-poisoner! Thought-twister!"

  "Your Insightfulness," Beamon said, glancing askew at me without taking his eyes off the monochrome intruder. "Run!"

  I lifted the heavy sword and axe. It took all of my effort to keep them aloft. "Like hell," I said. It was more of a lob than a throw; I had to do a full shotput spin before letting go of the axe, but it did achieve a nice arc, end-over-ending through the air.

  The color went out of the room, fleeing from the dark monk. What was left, the lack of color, the dark and monochromatic remains drew together into a downward-pointed hexagon, gray glyphs and metal studs--a shield. The axe sparked against it and clattered to the floor, the noise harsh over wind whistling against jagged stone edges.

  There was, for a moment, an arm holding the shield, gray cloth draped from a second gray man, seething with monochromatic resolution. He faded, a hint of color returning with his disappearance.

  "That wasn't very wise," said the dark monk, words reverse-echoing.

  "My lord, flee this place!" shouted Beamon.

  "I'm a Barbarian," I said. "It's not in my nature. Teo, I charge him!" I had, momentarily, forgotten how in it I was. Teo had really built something immersive here. As esoteric as it was, this felt like a real confrontation. And what a villain!

  "Do you?" asked the dark monk.

  "No!" said Hudrak.

  "Don't!" said Beamon.

  I did. I let the wild feeling of my character take over. If I was going to be Arthrem, chaotic neutral Barbarian, merciless killing machine, sole survivor of his clan, slayer of evil and good alike, I was going to call the shots. One foot after another, it was less a matter of hurling myself forward than it was turning the world with my feet. I passed dead jailers, wide-eyed Beamon, my shaggy mohawk whipping in the wind, drawing back to cleave this self-important dork in half and suck out those sweet experience points. I wondered what it would feel like, absorbing XP in this immersive, tangible world.

  I pictured the robe, or was it a shawl? Regardless, it made a perfect track for me to slash, diagonally from shoulder to ribcage, two-handed with the wolf-hilted sword. For some reason it looked like the palm of a hand growing rapidly larger.

  I never did see what disarmed me or what popped me in the nose, but I felt pain explode through my face and blood explode onto the floor. I heard the sword topple (pommel, tip, pommel, tip) across the room, without really being aware of losing track of it.

  A sinewy, bald shadow--wiry but without an ounce of body fat, dark eyes and palms spinning in a dance--wiped into existence and right back out of it.

  Then his hand, his real hand this time, shot out like an arrow and caught me by the throat. Yes, I clawed impotently at the wiry fingers. But, to my credit, I also bled all over him. So I had that going for me.