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Tony's Journal: Entry 2: Rooms

by Mr.RMA

Mr.RMA The next entry recording the misadventures of Tony, Cody and Jamie in a fantastical world mysteriously connected to their own. Their second journey immediately proves more dangerous than the first, and the three soon discover that their new forms take on far darker implications than they initially realized.
Things are already getting more intense, I’m writing this next part down now while I have the chance, before I fall too far behind. The day after our first encounter with that bizarre fantasy world, Cody had finally talked our ears off enough to convince us to try another hand at getting back there that evening, but there was a problem, and it very quickly presented itself to us when we opened the books and... nothing happened. We were looking at normal old books, faded, outdated academic pages and all.

Now, Cody might weird me out or downright frighten me sometimes but, honestly a lot of that comes from shitty upbringing. It’s no surprise that his dad’s a hateful, racist, homophobic little fuck who’s so far to the right that Ted Cruz would think him to be dangerously extreme. With that sort of thing waiting for him, at least Cody has some clear motivation for going back to that other world, being someone else. Still, that can only excuse so much. When we couldn’t just get back through opening the books, the crazy sunovabitch actually took a knife and drew his own blood over a pentagram he etched in the ground. When that didn’t work, as if that wasn’t enough, he started insisting we try and break into the school… in the middle of the night. Through some stupidity of our own we eventually did try to do just that. Jamie handed me a crowbar and I swung it to break open the nearest window at the abandoned school building, only to have alarms start blaring as soon as the glass shattered. Naturally we bolted back to our cars and got the hell out of there before the cops could arrive, but unfortunately for Cody, the cameras got him. Poor, crazy bastard got suspended for a week for that, leaving said week to become pretty normal for Jamie and I, all things considered. Didn’t last though, Cody was right back to it afterwards, with knowledge stemming from some geeky board game or RPG or something. Apparently, the creature I’d become in that other world was known as a Tiefling, not a demon, but at the time I was going by the “Same Shit Different Pile” logic for that.

Aside from my species name, not much more of his “findings” really helped any. He was persistent though, eventually we got to asking C.K. of all people what he knew, but the therapists got to him first, and he was more inclined to make goose-noises out of distress than talk about anything he’d seen or done that day we followed him. That left the janitor… a perverted old fart who was actually alive, and working, when the old school was still functional. He knew about the cult room, said kids used to gather there back in the day. He joined them on occasion, but purely to try and get with some of the girls there, otherwise he had little to no idea what they actually used to do. When we explained that we wanted to search the old building, he said he couldn’t simply let us in, we needed some sort of extracurricular purpose. Such was the beginning of our school’s newest “History Club”. Signing our names and a few other students we knew on the official form, and having the janitor as our “Adult Chaperone,” we had all the clearance we needed.

We convened after my Friday night game was over, planning to begin our expedition through the abandoned building, for any sort of presence or trigger to the books effects. The room we’d used was still in complete shambles, so it was all a matter of finding another, similar location, if we could only figure out just where… For a time, we came up with nothing, but eventually, my mind suddenly felt… out of sorts. I can’t say I completely remember what was going on in my head, but I ended up wandering my way almost absent-mindedly to what appeared to be the costume room for some kind of drama club. Seemed no one cared about said costumes as plenty were still left on the hangers to fade and decay, but we weren’t lingering on that for very long. The point was that we’d found the strange presence we were looking for, and lo and behold, once we opened our books, we were sent right back to that strange world, where we’d been when we left it. I can’t say I felt any more used to that “Tiefling” body the second time around, but at least some of the shock was gone this time. Only surprising thing was that we really weren’t just dreaming up that first encounter, and this time we were going to try and figure out something about this strange, alien world we’d found our way into. It seemed this forestland stretched out for miles, no civilization in sight, and hardly any wildlife for that matter, but eventually, we stumbled upon something, something that appeared to be living, if only we had a damn clue how it was alive in the first place. It was a giant plant-like monster, with vines moving around a carnivorous mouth… attached to a plant, mind you. Cody, being the “genius” that he was, decided, without consulting us, that the best way to see if the creature was dangerous would be to throw a rock at it, and see what would happen. Spoiler-alert, it didn’t like it, and the vines shot in our direction.

Suddenly we were in a fight, in bodies we weren’t familiar with, in a world we didn’t understand, facing an enemy we knew jack-shit about. Not like we could panic about it though, not if we wanted to live, we had to just suck it up and take it to this monstrosity. Cody was the first to get wrapped up in the thing’s vines after he shot a few arrows in its direction. Jamie managed to get a few good sword swings in, definitely the fastest to get the hang of her second body’s physique and abilities, but that left me trying to maneuver a frail, sickly body with a tail weighing it down. Having drawn a weapon that was strapped to my back, a pole-like device with three sharp blades at the end, I tried swinging it at the creature, but for my trouble I was the next target for its vines. Things weren’t looking so hot for us, Jamie was still swinging away, but eventually those vines were gonna overpower her and then, well, something unthinkable was likely gonna happen for sure. We had to think of something fast, but fortunately, luck started to actually turn back in our direction as something seemed to pop into my head… and all of a sudden I was chanting a spell as if it just came naturally. A glowing aura surrounded me for a moment, and, no bullshit, a straight-up hippogriff flew down through the trees and absolutely tore into the plant-monster. Miraculously, we emerged from that shitfest victorious, and after we made sure to offer a few… choice words to Cody for his brilliant rock-throwing idea, the hippogriff flew off, and we were left to continue our wandering about, looking for perhaps something just a little friendlier to inform us where we were.

Our feet were beginning to get sore once we finally saw a few buildings off in the distance. Upon closer inspection, we saw they were houses of some kind, and we were walking into a small community. Another lucky break, but it seemed far less so once we noticed the severe lack of people in the place. Not a sight of any living being, friendly or hostile. We feared we were stepping into a ghost town, but, not to be deterred so soon, we checked what looked like the local inn to see if anyone was around. No people, but, instead, several tables with freshly cooked meals welcomed us. All the movies and TV shows I’d ever seen were screaming “trap” to me, and the others were no less suspicious, but, of course Cody tried another scheme, despite how successfully the last one fared. Placing some coins from his pocket on the table, he tried sampling a dish, and for his trouble he was suddenly picked up by some invisible presence and dragged out of sight. The creatures responsible then showed themselves to us, a bunch of small glowing things with wings, pixies of some kind. They had indeed set up a trap as we figured, but they assured us they weren’t going to kill Cody or anything so, we decided to just wait for them to have whatever weird pixie fun they were intending to have. I mean, they seemed like they were just a bunch of tricksters, he was probably just getting tickled a lot or something like that. In any case, what was particularly more interesting than the pixies themselves were their leader. The guy looked like a miniature flying version of Skeletor, with a voice to match. If that wasn’t odd enough, he very clearly recognized us, or at least, he recognized the bodies we were in. And of course, why wouldn’t he? He was the one who defeated us, centuries ago.

It really only dawned on us at that moment that we were essentially possessing the bodies of dead adventurers, which seemed to further explain why we all felt so much pain when we first traveled across realities. These guys had all apparently faced some pretty painful shit in their final moments, Cody and I were turned to stone and Jamie was dead and buried. This was the sort of thing one didn’t expect to come back from, and I guess the original guys didn’t, seeing how we were them now. A nice bonus for me however – I was apparently the last Tiefling left in existence. The race had been exterminated to complete extinction ages ago, leaving me the only one left, as if our group needed any more attention potentially drawn our way. Fortunately, this fairy king we were dealing with had mended his ways by now, no longer part of the evil cult he’d once led when he was human, merely taking on more of a trickster’s mentality these days. As if to prove his point, he brought Cody back… miniaturized, in a small glass bottle. Furthermore, he’d apparently passed out from whatever they’d done to him, but, the lack of scars or scrapes seemed to infer it wasn’t anything serious. The spell was temporary, but nonetheless the poor bastard was clearly humiliated once he regained consciousness.

We were given rooms for the evening, and considering the day we had, we were happy to take them, get ourselves back to our regular bodies so we could work out all this new information presented to us. Lying down and letting sleep take hold, I could remember thinking something that continues to worry me now… Cody had lost consciousness, he was out of it, but he didn’t end up back on Earth… which meant the transfer only seemed to happen if we were legitimately asleep. What did that mean if we were to end up getting killed in this world? One that was clearly dangerous and full of shit we didn’t understand or comprehend… It wasn’t something I enjoyed thinking about as I woke back in my human body, but it was an all-too-real issue. Once again the room we occupied seemed to be in shambles as we stood just outside of it, so now it seemed we were going to start running out of viable rooms in the future as well. All these thoughts were starting to give my admittedly simple mind a headache and I remember going to the window to get some air, when we all heard something… something that wasn’t the doing of any of us… Someone else was in the building. We managed to catch a quick glimpse of what appeared to be a girl our age in… startlingly bright and vibrant attire, windbreaker and legwarmers and all sorts of outdated stuff, just before she bolted, making her way out of the building and running off. I recognized that girl slightly… she was on the news, years ago, on one of those programs that talked about missing people and unsolved crimes… It was a cloudy memory at best but I knew that was her, no doubt in my mind. Was she stuck here all this time? What did we do to get her out? Just a couple more questions to toss into the burning heap of mystery… and trust me when I say the answers to those questions proved to explain very little in the long run… I’ll write more about it, but maybe tomorrow, I gotta rest my head now. I just really hope if this whole thing ends up in the hands of someone else that it’ll be the right sort of people, because I can’t say I know just how many players were already in this warped little game before the three of us joined in, but I know for a fact we weren’t the first to make this jump between worlds, just the latest arrivals.