Dan the Barbarian Read online

  That had to be it.

  He looked up as he was passing the Sparks Building and slammed to a stop in the middle of the path.

  Halloween had come early to the Sparks Building, which suddenly looked ancient and spooky. A pair of stone gargoyles sat atop the steps. Heavy vines wrapped its signature columns. Near the top of these pillars hung a gauzy cloud, like massive cobwebs.

  Behind this thin and eerie veil, dark shapes moved, scampering, half-seen, along the upper reaches like… well, like giant spiders. But those shadowy shapes couldn’t be actual spiders. They were big as cats… hell, big as dogs.

  Something even bigger slammed into Dan, and he stumbled but didn’t fall.

  “What the hell are you doing standing there, asshole?” the huge, bald guy who’d run into to him bellowed.

  He was taller than Dan and bigger, too, with muscles that looked like they were carved out of marble. This was easy to see, since the guy wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  The only thing covering his bodybuilder pecs was a strip of leather that apparently kept the massive battle axe strapped to his muscular back. Below this, he wore blue jeans tucked into tall leather boots and a wide belt, from which hung a nasty scrap of something that very much looked like a human scalp.

  Dan just blinked at the guy.

  Holy shit.

  Did this mean what he thought it meant?

  To either side of them, students passed, barely taking notice, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

  The guy pushed Dan’s shoulder. “I’m talking to you, asshole.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Dan said. Without even thinking about it, he dropped his right foot back, blading his body from the guy and making himself a smaller target.

  The guy’s girlfriend tugged at his thick arm. “Come on, Erik, let’s go to the Skeller and have some fun.”

  At first, Dan thought that she was ugly. But then he realized that she wasn’t human.

  The girl’s brow was low and heavy, the eyes beneath small, dark, and pig-like, set to either side of a stubby upturned nose. Her mouth was wide, and her lips were full, savage, and somehow alluringly sensuous.

  She had a fantastic body, muscular but curvy. Her breasts, squeezed between the straps of a backpack, strained against the fabric of a Penn State t-shirt, which she hadn’t bothered to tuck into her leather pants, alongside which hung the stubby scabbard of what could only be a broad-bladed short sword.

  “He’s not worth your time,” she told her glowering boyfriend. “Look at him. He doesn’t even have a weapon. He’s just a peasant.”

  The guy snorted with contempt, spat at Dan’s feet, and followed his girlfriend, whom Dan very much suspected to be a half-orc, down the hill toward town and the Skeller.

  Dan just stood there for a second, watching the students flow past. In most cases, flow was definitely the right word, as most of them wore long, fluttering cloaks, a good percentage of which were blue and white with Penn State logos.

  The students themselves were a weird mash-up of the people he was used to seeing here and characters from a T&T adventure. They wore jeans and sweatpants, sneakers and backpacks, t-shirts and cotton hoodies, but also leather boots, leather armor, and leather belts holding hand axes, daggers, and swords.

  The guys looked more muscular than usual, and the girls looked hotter and also more muscular. He saw dwarves, even smaller students that he assumed were halflings, and a slender, beautiful girl, whose huge eyes and pointed ears meant that she had to be an elf. Beside the elf strode a girl with cruel eyes, dressed all in black, with a hunched and horrible creature that could only be a quasit riding on her shoulder.

  Usually, students shuffled along campus walkways, mumbling quietly. Tonight, however, a weird energy crackled in the air.

  People were animated. Conversations were loud. Laughter was bold and raucous. Here and there, lusty voices rose in song. It felt like anything was possible.

  This was still Penn State, but a very different Penn State. A Penn State with elves and half-orcs, where people wore weapons and didn’t even blink if some shirtless psychopath might lop off a peasant’s head.

  “Holy shit,” Dan said aloud. “It worked. My wish came true.”

  His stomach lurched, caught in a tug of war between wow and what the hell.

  Zohaz the Magnificent had transformed Dan’s life into something like a T&T adventure.

  Which meant what, exactly?

  Dan had no idea. He couldn’t even tell if the rush of emotion that he was feeling was excitement or white-knuckled, eyes-flung-wide, hair-standing-on-end-just-before-it-turns-white terror.

  At that moment, he knew only one thing: if he was going to survive long enough to enjoy this adventure, he had to get home and meet his mentor.

  7

  What Have I Done?

  Dan hurried downhill toward home but slowed his pace when he left campus.

  Crossing College Ave, which was now a cobblestone road, he saw no cars, only horses and wagons and pedestrians, but as he crossed to the other side, he heard a horn blow and looked down the street to see Penn State’s blue and white bus, the Campus Loop, coming down the street.

  So, he thought, no cars or trucks… but a bus?

  How did things work in this new world? What were the rules?

  Town was crazy. It felt like a football Saturday night on steroids. Swaggering packs of heavily armed drunks shouted and sang and cursed, lifting tankards overhead, sloshing dark grog over the world.

  Dan entered the westbound river of revelers and bobbed along toward home.

  Long lines waited outside the bars. The bouncers carding people wore chainmail and permafrowns. Most of these doormen, he noticed, were half-orcs. In addition to the weapons strapped to their backs and belts, these doormen all wore heavy plate gauntlets.

  Man, Dan thought, I’d hate to get punched by them.

  Someone coming the other way bumped into Dan’s shoulder, then spun, giving him the stink eye.

  Dan looked away. He was used to guys doing stupid stuff like that on crazy weekends, bumping into him, trying to start something, but those guys didn’t have longswords at their sides.

  He kept moving.

  When the crowd slowed, bottlenecking around a pair of bloody combatants wrestling on the sidewalk, a female called from above, “Hey, baby!”

  Dan looked up to see a pretty girl leaning out of a second-story window, smiling down at him. “Hey, handsome,” she called. She bit her lip and pulled down her lacy halter top, revealing small yet perfect breasts. “Want a date?”

  Dan gulped, feeling a rush of heat. Then, noticing the red-tinged light of the room behind the teasing girl, he thought, That’s a whorehouse.

  And not just a whorehouse. A whorehouse straight out of the imagination of his roommate and tower master, Willis.

  Hey, handsome. Want a date? the girl had asked, a line straight out of Willis’s campaign.

  When Dan had made his wish–Make my life like a T&T adventure–had Zohaz the Magnificent crafted this world specifically from adventures Dan had played? Was the world around him now stitched together with Willis’s TM style?

  And if so, what would that mean?

  Good times, fun quests, beautiful women who loved sex, and men who were willing to fight to the death over pretty much anything. Abrupt and frequent violence, twisty and complex plots, unthinkably evil villains with legions of backstabbing minions. And monsters. Lots of monsters.

  Then the crowd was moving again, and Dan was pulled along past a body stretched in a pool of blood on the pavement. The other combatant, bloodied but victorious, was rifling through the pockets of his unconscious opponent.

  At least Dan thought the guy was unconscious.

  Either that, or…

  He turned right at South Garner. Across the street, McClanahan’s, the one-stop shop for Penn State students, was still McClanahan’s, but mannequins in the windows wore a mish-mash of college gear, armor, and what looked like a leat
herworker’s spring S&M collection, little strips of black leather barely concealing the figures’ breasts and privates.

  Signs in the window advertised current sales, as usual. Instead of ramen noodles on the cheap, however, the store was currently offering specials like Cure Light Wounds-only 85 gold pieces! and This week only: potions, buy 2, get one free!

  The line outside of The Lion’s Den was huge, filled with muscular, shirtless guys and hot girls dressed like McClanahan’s S&M mannequins. The guys and girls bopped in place, dancing to the incredibly loud hip hop music thumping from within the bar.

  The fenced outdoor patio at the back of the Den throbbed, jam packed with a crowd of enraptured drunks dancing close, their hard bodies rubbing together. Their lithe bodies glimmered with sweat beneath flashing red and blue lights overhead.

  Then Dan noticed the elevated dance cage at the center of the patio and slammed to a stop. His jaw dropped.

  Dancing within the cage was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  Though, she wasn’t exactly a woman. Not a human woman, anyway.

  Dressed in a gauzy, diaphanous shift, the dancer had green skin and a lithe ballerina’s body that undulated like a thing made not of flesh but of water.

  Dan stared, unable to breathe.

  The dancer gyrated her hips slowly, looked over the crowd, making direct eye contact with Dan, and licked her lips.

  Dan grew hard in an instant.

  Still staring at him, the dancer reached a long, shapely arm through the bars of her cage and curled her finger in a come-hither gesture.

  Before Dan knew what he was doing, he was scaling the low metal fence, crazy with lust.

  Then, just as abruptly, he slammed to the sidewalk.

  The crowd flowed around him, laughing and shouting down at him and calling him an asshole.

  “Get in line like everybody else, punk,” the hulking half-orc bouncer who’d shoved him said, leaning over the fence.

  Punk, Dan thought.

  The only people he knew who used that word were Willis and the NPCs that Willis created. How many times had short and skinny Willis imitated some hulking NPC, doing his best to make his high-pitched voice gruff, saying, “You want to make something of it, punk?”

  Were Dan’s suspicions right, then? Was this new reality governed by Willis’s TM style?

  If so, it would mean getting laid a lot, getting attacked frequently, and pretty much immediately getting sucked into a dungeon expedition, a siege, a wilderness adventure, or a more complex city-bound campaign, with Dan battling some evil overlord and his henchmen.

  And what else?

  It would mean good things, like a loose interpretation or rejection of nitpicky rules and regulations, such as level limitations or class restrictions based on race, and instant attainment of hit points and abilities when leveling up.

  But it would also mean that magical items were rare and characters leveled up slowly.

  “Get lost, punk!” the bouncer shouted.

  Dan picked himself up and moved on down the street, careful not to look back at the dancer. Whatever she was, she’d had him under some kind of spell.

  If he looked back, she would lure him once more over the fence, and Dan would end up with a mouthful of shattered teeth.

  So he kept moving uphill, crossed over Calder Way, which had transformed into a twisting, torchlit alley of seedy looking shops, and passed the big parking lot, which was now filled with horses and wagons. Strangely enough, through the big plate glass windows of Playland, things looked pretty much as they had before he’d made his wish, with rows of flashing arcade games.

  So weird.

  Lay low, he told himself. Figure this place out.

  Of course, if this was Willis World, he wouldn’t be allowed to lay low for long. Slow play always resulted in random encounters.

  These encounters often felt like the wrath of a bored TM, a punishment that taught players to stay active. If Dan didn’t find trouble, trouble would find him.

  Hurry home, then, he told himself. Find your mentor before you get killed in some random encounter.

  Leaving the throbbing heart of town for the quieter backstreets, Dan was instantly on edge.

  Things were darker here, quieter. Normally, that was a nice change of pace on the long walk home, but now he stayed on point, ready to run if someone–or something–stepped from the shadows.

  Luckily, however, he made it all the way back to his block without trouble. As soon as he sighed with relief, however, he went rigid with fresh apprehension.

  Across the street from his apartment house, on the front lawn of the Alpha Alpha Alpha fraternity house, shadowy figures danced around a huge bonfire that was so bright it made him squint.

  “Look!” an inhumanly deep voice growled from that direction, and a huge shadow, easily seven feet tall, dispatched itself from beside the bonfire, marching in his direction. Other shadows followed quickly in its wake.

  The tall shadow reached the street, its features becoming clearer. The thing, which he now saw to be not a human but a humanoid covered in reddish-orange fur, wore studded leather armor with AAA emblazoned on the chest.

  It pointed a long, muscular arm in Dan’s direction. A menacing grin packed with sharp teeth gleamed on its short snout.

  “It’s Danielle,” the Grady-thing said, and his frat brothers, also tall and doglike, erupted into crazy, keening, hyena laughter.

  Dan’s blood ran cold. They’re gnolls, he realized. Grady and his frat brothers are gnolls.

  With that realization, Dan sprinted away from their insane laughter and ducked into the relative safety of his apartment house.

  Peering out the door’s little window at the monsters leaping and laughing in the street, Dan thought, What have I done? What in the world have I gotten myself into?

  8

  Oh, Holly…

  Dan slipped inside his apartment, closed and locked the door behind him, and leaned back against it, letting his eyes close and his mind cool down.

  In the next room, he heard voices and laughter, probably the guys gaming in there. The thought made him grin. His friends were so obsessed that they still played T&T inside of a T&T world.

  Hearing a noise in the hall, he turned and looked out the peephole.

  The door across the hall opened, and Holly stepped out, only… wow.

  Holly had gone from incredibly gorgeous to impossibly gorgeous. Her pale blonde hair shimmered even in the low light of the hallway, falling in a golden cascade all the way to her ass.

  Her face was still familiar, but the features were more angular and refined, the high cheekbones sweeping sharply back to pointed ears. Most striking of all, however, were her bright violet eyes.

  Holly wore a matching cloak of fine violet silk. The garment fit snugly against her slender body, covering her neck and shoulders before opening again to bare the tops of her tremendous breasts, beneath which her abdomen was encased in a cummerbund of braided golden metal that matched glowing golden bracers on her wrists.

  Beneath the cummerbund, a thin strip of black silk encircled her narrow waist. She wore black leather pants and black leather boots, and black leather covered her shapely arms.

  In her hands, she held a slender staff, which, like the bracers, glowed softly with magical enchantment.

  Dan’s eyes narrowed at the sight of magical items, and he growled instinctively.

  What the hell?

  Then he grinned.

  Ah yes, he thought. I’m a barbarian, and barbarians hate magic.

  But he sure didn’t hate Holly.

  She was an elf. And not just any elf. A grey elf. The most noble, intelligent, and reclusive of all the elves.

  Only she wasn’t alone.

  Some guy followed her out of the apartment, closing the door behind them. He was short but thick with muscle. He wore ring mail and had a small metal buckler strapped to one forearm. His opposite hand rested on the ornate pommel of a sheathed long
sword.

  Holly’s violet eyes stared at him intensely. Her face was serious. “You’re certain?”

  “My brother will be there,” the guy said. “How could he forget? It’s the biggest event of the year.”

  “Noon,” she said. “It’s very important to me.”

  “You worry too much,” he said with a lazy smile and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Holly brushed the hand away. “And you are too familiar.”

  Not her boyfriend, then, Dan thought, and his eyes fell again to her half-exposed breasts. She was shorter now, just a hair over five feet, he’d guess, but her boobs were even bigger and rounder than they had been in the real world. It was incredible, completely—

  “Hey, punk,” a high-pitched voice said, startling him from behind, “is Holly out there?”

  The voice was familiar but wrong. Willis’s voice, but way too high, as if his roommate had inhaled a dozen helium balloons.

  Dan turned and shouted with surprise. “Willis!”

  “Dan,” Willis said. In real life, Willis was short… but now he was only three feet tall with ruddy, nut brown skin and a thistle patch of unkempt sandy hair. His eyes were glittering black orbs.

  “You’re a gnome!” Dan said.

  “And you’re an asshole,” Willis said. “Now quit hogging the view and pop me up to the peephole, dude.”

  Too stunned to refuse, Dan picked up his tiny roommate–the guy weighed no more than a sack of groceries–and hoisted him up to the peephole.

  “Aw, crap,” Willis squeaked. “She’s gone.”

  Dan put him down.

  Willis hooked a tiny thumb toward the living room, from which came sounds of laughter. “The game’s still in session. You in or what?”

  Dan followed Willis into the other room, where he encountered a familiar scene, his friends gathered around a table covered in books, graph paper, dice, lead figures, two-liter soda bottles, and an empty pizza box.

  “Dan!” Rick shouted.

  “Uh oh,” Jerry said. “Hide the prostitutes.”