I’d like to say that my first reaction, upon waking up from a transdimensional journey to find that a monster had eaten my wife and stolen her voice, was suitably heroic. I think most people, immersed in fantasy scenarios as we can be through fiction and movies, picture themselves having some atypical reaction in these situations. In the moment though, I think I let out more of a dopplered scream as I ran across the first floor to the front door where we kept an old baseball bat. It was the only thing in the house that registered to my rebooting brain as a weapon.

I heard it coming down the stairs behind me, calling out to me, and steadied myself around the corner, out of sight. It used her voice, again, as though it thought just the sound of her was going to throw me off- “Honey did something just happen, it felt like an earthquake- or maybe I got really dizzy- are you alright, what’s going on?” The words rolled off me as I hefted the bat in both hands. It came around the corner, much faster and lower to the ground than I had anticipated, and I heroically screamed and flailed hard with my improvised club.

It was much smaller than I’d have guessed from that initial glimpse- fear really does alter perception, I guess. it couldn’t have been more than 4 feet long, 2 high and maybe 60 pounds- and I missed the head entirely, bringing the bat down on the short spiny ridges of its back. It had four legs and wings. Why did it have wings?

Inexpert as I might be, my adrenaline fueled slug with a bat should have stunned it, given the vast size difference. But it did nothing. Well, virtually nothing- “Ow! Sean! Did you just hit me with a bat?!?” The creature seemed shocked and a little offended, but entirely uninjured.

It was interesting, I thought in some detached part of mind, how much our socialization makes us vulnerable in moments like these. We just aren’tequipped to do violence to someone we might know, without time to process and prepare. In that sense the creature’s voice emulation was terrifyingly effective. Even at the height of my fear, just hearing it call my name was enough to give me pause. But I wasn’t quite done yet- I hefted the bat back for another swing, which is when two things happened:

I cracked the head of the bat straight through the paper-thin door to our broom closet, and

The creature’s head darted forward like a streak of yellow lightning and snatched the whole damn thing right out of my hands.

The bat splintered apart in its jaws even as it glared at me. The force that thing could exert- the speed it could move- and it still hadn’t hurt me even after being attacked? “ Jesus Christ Sean, what’s got into you? Look what you did to the closet! You hit me with a bat!”

Something about that outraged, exasperated expression clicked with me. Now, of course, the whole thing is embarrassing to recall. I don’t even know why I thought she was monstrous. The small face glowering up at me was alien, to be sure, but no more so than any form I could recall Sherriff having worn, in our shared memories. Elongated like a dog’s, a golden-scaled snout that curved sharply down into a nearly beak-like overbite, with teeth projecting everywhere. Two high ridge lines over silver-white eyes, arcing back into golden fans where ears should have been, and the first hint of horns breaking the top of the brow. In hindsight it was almost cute, how young that face looked. In the moment, as it somehow spoke in Haley’s voice, it was just disorienting. All I could call to mind was the movie Annihilation, and that scene with the mutant bear that screamed like a person even as it tore the villain apart. “Sean-? “ But- but it hadn’t hurt me. It was concerned about me. It was- it was.

“Uh” I said, very intelligently. “Haley?”

She sat back on all fours, looking extremely concerned. “Yeeessss, who did you think I was? What’s going on? Did you hit your head? Do you need a doctor?”

“Haley, you’re- you can’t have missed it. You’re a dragon.”

“Okay you definitely need a doctor-”

“Haley you’re two feet tall and you have six limbs! Did you not notice I’m standing four feet above you?!?”

“What- I- I’m on the ground because you hit me with a bat! One of us is definitely going nuts.”

“Look just- look at yourself. Maybe I am hallucinating, but this is the second weirdest thing to happen tonight and I can’t believe the two are unrelated.”

She paused, for some extremely unfair reason suddenly wary about taking her eyes off the person who’d just tried to club her to death in her own home. She backed up a pace or two, then turned her entire neck nearly 180 degrees and looked at her own torso, wings outstretched. She froze like that, for so long I was beginning to worry something had happened to her. I reached out- “Haley?” but before I could make contact she spoke.

“Huh.”

“That’s- that’s it?”

“Sean, it would appear that I am a dragon.”

It was something about the prim and proper, matter-of-fact tone of voice she used. I burst out laughing- lost all control, really- and slid backwards down the busted door of the broom closet until I was sitting at eye level with her. It took a long minute to get my composure back even as she snapped back to her glare. “Ohhh man, okay, needed that. Yes you do appear to be a dragon. How did you not notice?”

“I was busy! Grading papers! I get very… absorbed! It can’t have happened that long ago, you would have seen something or I would have noticed, these claws don’t exactly seem suited to operating a laptop.”

“Okay, fair enough. It’s probably connected to whatever just- as I came in- it felt like the whole world ended, and I went somewhere else . I met someone, and brought them back when their world started to collapse- I’m sounding crazy again aren’t I?”

She was certainly giving me the look again. “Given the circumstances I think we can make some allowances. You went somewhere? Met someone? You were only outside for 2 minutes!”

“It was almost like a dream, of a whole other life. It wasn’t on earth. They’re here now, in my head- aren’t you Sherriff?” I cocked my head as if waiting for a response. The other consciousness took that as its cue:

“< I suppose I am. Seems all three of us are in a tight spot. Howdy ma’am, pleased to meetcha.>”

That was what I heard it trying to say. But whatever organs Sherriff’s race had for communication, they were apparently quite different from ours. What came out of my mouth had more in common with a 2400 baud modem than human speech. Haley reared back and flared her wings in alarm. “Okay! Whatever that was, I didn’t understand a bit of it, but it sure wasn’t human! Are you sure it’s not hostile?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. I think Sherriff’s an infomorph? Its species seems to breed and keep livestock for use as interchangeable bodies, but I think the core being- the part that’s in my head- is just a consciousness. I can understand what it’s saying, but I guess it was a little foolish to assume anyone else was going to be able to. Sorry, Sherrif.” < No harm done> “As to hostility, I don’t think they’re any more malicious or organized than we are- so, no immediate danger? Also, Sherriff sounds like Sam Elliott in my head and I have a hard time attributing menace in that accent. But I’m not sure what happens when something that eats information rides around in your head for too long. Sherriff?”

“”

I relayed this as Haley sat for a moment and considered. Eventually she spoke: “I notice I am extremely confused. You say the world ended in a lightning strike, and then you met an alien, and his reality collapsed, and now he’s in your brain? And I’m suddenly a fucking dragon and it was so seamless it didn’t even interrupt me grading papers? That’s two extremely improbable events, apparently at the same time, with seemingly no correlation between them.”

“Improbable, not impossible?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well obviously not , given that they both just happened, but certainly not something I’d have counted within the realm of probability just an hour ago!” She gestured toward the stairs- with a wing, I noticed with amusement- “Why us? Why now? Has this happened before? What is the link between these events? We need significantly more information and I find that I’m suddenly afflicted with the kind of claws that are going to make it a challenge not to punch a hole in my keyboard. Can you get my computer?”

“Of course” I said, standing up. She closed her eyes, trying to find some reservoir of inner calm that I sure didn’t have. I hadn’t even made it up one flight before her eyes snapped open and she called out “ SEAN!” which brought me about a sparrow’s-fart away from falling all the way back down. I regained my composure and turned around. “What now?”

“I have a user interface.”

---

1 hour later

---

“Okay, let’s summarize what we know” I said, reviewing the legal yellow pad. The power had gone out a half hour ago- not terribly surprising, with the storm raging outside, but still kind of ominous. Luckily, with our newfound superpowers and half the internet loaded up in tabs on her laptop browser, we had easily enough distractions to go an entire night without network connections. Maybe even two. “You did not just get turned into any old dragon, you are literally a gold dragon wyrmling from the Pathfinder game system, complete with Feats, Stats, and Skills which you are able to manipulate. “

“These numbers seem to correspond in some way to real life. You can see enormously far in perfect grayscale even in total darkness, you can feelevents as minuscule as a pin drop up to 60 feet away, you might be immune to baseball bats, and- “ I glared at her- “you are definitely immune to fire.” She looked a little sheepish at that last. She’d gotten a bit carried away and stuck her- paw, I guess- directly into the gas burner on the stove, for that last test. I shuddered to think what would have happened if that line on the character sheet had been inaccurate.

“Sorry, it just- for some reason fire doesn’t seem threatening anymore? It almost felt like running water over my hand. Refreshing even.”

“Yes, of course, if the water was literally nine hundred degrees. Luckily you’re fine. Also luckily, we did not test your breath attack, which- if my math is correct- would be about the equivalent of firing a literal, actual M9-7 flamethrower indoors even at your… reduced … age.”

She perked up at this. “Oh yeah! How young am I? And what’s the life expectancy of this body?”

I turned to my reference books- it had not escaped either of us that, conveniently , we had all of the Pathfinder reference material sitting on one of our bookshelves due to a long running game with some friends back before we’d moved. “Uh, it says here you are between zero and five years old, and you’ll get much bigger as you age, on what looks like a logarithmic scale. But you’re functionally… immortal? Huh.” I felt a bit of a pang of jealousy. As many times as we’d talked about transhumanism and wanting to live forever, it was a little melancholy that one of us might actuallyexperience that without the other.

She smirked “Zero and five. So, cradle robbing now? I never knew you had it in you.”

“Oh no, I’ve seen enough anime to know where this is going, miss baby-dragon-who’s-actually-37. No fun in this household until you figure out how to shapechange.”

She looked hurt by what was, in hindsight, my incredibly insensitive statement. “ Gosh wife sorry you’re some kind of weird mutant now, but I’m just not into cloacas.” We’d had talks before about what we’d do if one of us got injured or crippled, and I think we were both secure enough to know that the other would never leave us in those circumstances, but the idea that one of us might suddenly just not be into the other was fresh, and a little jarring. We sat in silence for a minute.

I cleared my throat and soldiered on. “Your Feats appear to have filled out automatically, giving you some additional physical attributes- toughness, multi-attack, flyby attack- power attack. But you have nothing in your Skills yet, and an astonishingly high 72 points to spend. Presumably these will actually grant you the relevant abilities, somehow.”

She nodded enthusiastically. I could understand- despite the madness of the situation, the opportunity to instantly gain the equivalent of a complete graduate degree in pretty much any “Knowledge” skill in mere seconds was hard to pass up. “Let’s test that, okay? I’m going to put 2 into Linguistics- one for English, one for Sherriff’s language.” She closed her eyes. “Okay- Sherriff, say something to me.”

“”

She shook her head. “No this is… pretty far from the usual- oh! It worked!” She jumped up and spun in a circle with excitement. Silently, I decided it was just about the cutest goddamn thing I’d ever seen. She settled back down. “Ahem. Okay, verified that spending skill points grants instant expertise. This is incredibly powerful.”

I nodded. “Oh you have no idea. Wrapping up, you can fly, you can also breath some kind of should-not-exist paralysis gas, and eventually you’re going to gain access to magic. Pathfinder’s not just an RPG system, it’s a broken RPG system. Less broken than the older d20 system, but still. As far as we can tell, you aren’t bound by GM fiat- you are literally getting the Rules-As-Written version of every power. It’s incredibly open to abuse. Once you can cast spells and craft items there are about a dozen ways this whole thing can be exploited, at which point actual apotheosis might be on the table, or at least near-omnipotence in the material universe.”

I expected excitement or at least interest, but instead she almost looked troubled by what I was saying. I was about to ask why when there was a pounding on the door. A frantic pounding.

Suddenly the scene in the living room- destroyed closet, shattered bat, Haley and I spread out on the candlelit floor with a laptop and a half dozen rule books- which had started to feel downright homey despite the presence of the storm at our windows, flashed over into vulnerability. We exchanged a silent look. “What should we do?” I asked.

Haley padded on all fours over to the door. “ Open it, obviously. Try not to hit anyone with a club this time, you barbarian” - this last with a small smile. I assumed that’s what all the teeth meant.

“Hey! I was avenging your death at the hands of-” before I could finish my thought the pounding picked up. A woman’s voice, possibly belonging to our neighbor Amy, picked up over the sound of the fists hammering the wood. “Oh god! Open up! Please! We need help!”

Haley, possibly forgetting (again) that she was literally a monster now, opened the door. Sure enough it was Amy, with her two year old in tow. They spilled damply across our doorstep and into the house, bringing them eye-level with what was at first glance, as I knew from recent experience, a very concerned looking winged alligator. Amy shrieked, a full-throated scream of pure terror that seemed to fill the room, and actually passed out. I wasn’t even sure that was a thing that happened in real life! This was far too much excitement for her kid, who started wailing at the top of her lungs as well.

I shook my head to clear it. “Well, wonder what that was all about? Let’s get her in and comfortable, I guess.” I started forward but stopped when I noticed Haley still peering out into the gloom and rain. I couldn’t see a thing without street lights- perks of draconic vision, I guessed.

She spoke quietly. “I think I see what had her so terrified. Sean? I don’t think it was just us that the weird shit happened to, tonight.” I heard it then, thinly over the sound of the rain. Doors slamming, cars honking, people screaming out in the night, dogs barking, gunshots. It sounded like the apocalypse.

“” Somewhere she’d started speaking Sherriff’s language. In just a moment I could see why- a hulking mantis-like creature stooped and squeezed its way through our front door as Haley backed up to make space. The child screamed even louder, and I reflexively tensed up before Sherriff tapped me on the shoulder mentally.

“Haley, that’s a woodcutter vessel. Used by carpenters. You guessed correctly- it’s from Sherriff’s world.” I walked over to the kid, trying to comfort her with some human presence as I spoke directly to it- “ ”

The mantis-woodcutter almost looked- sheepish? It put one clawed hand up behind its head and gazed at the floor as it spoke. “” He (she?) - was getting really worked up and Sherriff prompted me to put up a hand to delay her. Luckily the gesture translated.

Hey Sherriff what do you guys do for gender anyway? Why am I interpreting Delmutt as a she?

She sat down, as Haley tried to speak. (I found it somewhat ironic that my wife was probably going to have an easier time speaking to infomorph aliens for a while than she would speaking to human beings.) “ I’m sorry, Sean, can you do something with the girl? I can’t hear myself think.”

The kid did have an impressive set of lungs and wasn’t afraid to use them. I continued to make soothing noises, while checking on her mother, who was starting to come around. “Shhh shhh, don’t worry, no monsters here, just weird shaped people, kiddo. Look, see? Mom’s waking up and sheunderstands that she should not panic don’t you Amy, let’s all just not panic while my wife the dragon and miss alien bug woodcutter over there have a conversat-” Amy, now fully awake, finally realized that her monster had joined us in the living room. Apparently deciding that the dragon was fine but that the mantis was entirely too far, she resumed yelling.

“That thing ate Tom! It ate my husband!” She pointed and stared, wild eyed.

I tried to moderate. “Now, okay, things are real weird tonight. Pretty sure based on the one in my head-" that drew an alarmed look- " that these aliens are infovores though- sorry, that means they eat information, not people, as a rule of thumb. Did you see miss Delmutt over there eat your husband? Has it done anything violent towards you since then? ” Delmutt shook her head emphatically no, still in conversation with Haley. It was a weirdly human gesture coming from a bug monster.

Amy hesitated. “... No, but I went to bed with Tom and woke up next to it! What else could it be?”

“Well, why don’t you sit tight and we’ll all work to figure that out. Haley, what are you going on about over there?”

“I was just saying to our new friend here that there’s obviously some kind of body-swap going on. I got one, Tom got swapped for her, you sort of got the brain portion of one…? On top of that, you and Tom are both swapped with something from the same reality, and I’ve got something from fiction. We can’t rule out that these aliens are from a fictional setting-”

“It doesn’t feel fictional, based on my memories, but go on.”

“Right, so, out of 5 people here present, 3 had something happen tonight. And it sounds like a lot more based on what I’m hearing out there. Depending on how widespread this is- city, state, planetary - there could be a lot of people in trouble tonight. And if Amy and her daughter are typical, you and I might be the only two, uh, ‘Universal’ translators around.”

She turned and looked out the open door, into the raging storm. We’d walked in and out of that door every day for two years, ever since we moved to this city. The neighborhood was so ingrained I didn’t even notice it on my way through anymore. But tonight that door felt like a threshold into the unknown, even so.

She turned back and I could see the concern in those giant catlike eyes. “We need a plan.”