Balruk once again opened his eyes. He definitely felt a lot better after such a good rest. Balruk stretched his arms above his head to relieve the ache he felt in his muscles before spinning to the side and setting his feet on the floor. It was at that moment he had looked down and noticed a problem. He wasn’t wearing any clothes.

On the one side, he couldn’t help but be satisfied with such a healthy bonus from character creation, on the other side though, Balruk was pretty sure stepping outside in his current predicament would probably cause more problems than he wanted to deal with. With a sigh, Balruk pulled the blanket over his lap and did the next best thing he could think of. “Hello? Is anyone home?”

Balruk heard a yell and a dull thump that echoed through the room. After a few seconds, the door opened and a tall red draconian stepped inside. Well, stepping would probably be more of an overstatement. The Draconian, who Balruk realized must be Igneus, was shuffling his feet across the floor. His eyes barely opened more than a crack as he squinted at Balruk.

“...o wu... It is?” Igneus was mumbling out a stream of incoherencies at Balruk.

“What? Um… Sorry to bother you, but I just woke up and noticed I didn’t have any clothes on. I was going to step outside but I figured stepping out while nude might not have been a nice thing to do.” Balruk stammered a moment as he realized that the look Igneus was giving him seemed to shout out to the world that he had just been asleep moments ago.

Igneus tried to speak again, with a bit more understandable words. “Don’t you know what time it is?”

Balruk looked around the dark room. “Sorry, but no. I don’t have any windows to see outside and I don’t have any clothes to wear so I can go look myself.” He shrugged helplessly.

Igneus squinted even harder at Balruk and for a moment Balruk thought he might have fallen asleep on his feet before Igneus pointed at a chest in the corner.

“Clothes in der.” Igneus slowly turned around and shuffled back out of the room. “Damned early birds. Why can’t they wake up like normal people.” a few more scrapes of clawed feet on hardwood later and the door closed with a soft click.

After a few moments of hesitation, Balruk got up and opened the chest. Inside Balruk was surprised to find a complete set of armor and clothing. There was a boiled leather tunic with a woolen undershirt, arm and shin guards with a layer of metal on the outside parts for better protection. He also found undergarments and wool pants. Balruk was happy to see that the armor made to protect the groin and upper legs had some extra leather padding to increase the effectiveness of guarding his more vulnerable locations.

There wasn’t a helmet to wear, but he did get a nice set of boots made to fit over his clawed feet. Balruk started putting everything on and was surprised to find out how troubling it was to put on a full set of armor. His pants pulled up under his tail and had a special buckle and harness that wrapped around the base of his tail to keep everything in place.

The most difficult piece to put on was the boots though. It took Balruk a while to figure out that he had to untie the laces at the back of the boot. Then he had to step into it instead of trying to pull the boot on. The laces were then securely tied behind the leg from the heel up to the top of the boot. The end result was that his claws stuck out of some slits in the front of the boot while the rest of his foot was encompassed securely in layers of protective leather.

Balruk stood up and examined himself in a small mirror in the corner of the room. He had to say that the tan leather complimented his dark brown scales rather well. He twisted his body to check out how everything fit on him and, seeing no problems, quietly stepped out of the room he had been sleeping in for who knows how long. It didn’t take long before he managed to find the front door and quietly stepped outside.

Balruk looked into the sky and took a deep breath. The cool night air was crisp and invigorating. He suddenly felt like he was bursting with energy and decided he could go for a jog around the area. He did a few quick stretches to get the blood flowing and test his flexibility. After a minute or two, Balruk was finished and started moving in a random direction.

As he jogged, he took in his surroundings. The huts were spread out with plenty of space between them. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be a good 50 feet between 2 huts sometimes even more. Balruk suspected that the Draconians in this village appreciated the privacy that the extra space afforded them. It was something he could appreciate, after living in an apartment tower complex for almost a decade. Privacy was a rather difficult thing for him to have.

Despite the fact that they seemed to have been made of local materials like rocks or thatch, the huts still looked pretty sturdy. Balruk supposed living in an environment this hostile caused people to prioritize durability over elaborate decor. That didn’t prevent them from making the best of what they had, though. Periodically he would see rock walls with pretty drawings carved into it, or a wooden house where someone had made a painting on its side.

After only about 5 minutes he had reached a point where the huts ended and a low 10-foot wall began. There were a few draconian walking along the top that Balruk assumed must have been some sort of guards to watch for danger. Balruk gave a small wave to the ones that turned around to notice his approach. Instead of calling out, the guards gave a small nod to acknowledge him and returned to their duties. “I guess they take guard duty around here pretty seriously.”

Once Balruk reached the base of the wall, he turned to the right and continued his jog around the base of the wall and slowly made a circuit around the village. Altogether, it took about an hour for one lap around the village. When Balruk returned to where he had started, he had built up a light sheen of sweat on his scales and decided he would stop to enjoy the sunrise as he noticed the darkness fading with the early morning light.

He walked a short distance to one of the stairs around the wall perimeter and made his way to the top. There was a guard standing at attention with eyes focused on the lands outside. Instead of breaking the silence and interrupting the guard's work, Balruk decided to remain silent as he stepped up to the parapet and simply enjoy the view as the sun rose above the horizon in the distance.

The guard, appreciative of the Draconian’s gesture but bored out of his mind didn’t wait long before he willingly broke the silence on his own. “We don’t have many earthen Draconians around here, so I’m pretty confident when I say I haven’t seen you around here before. You that new arrival that had the shit beat out of him just a few days ago?”

Balruk smiled wryly but didn’t turn away to look at the guard. “Yea, I wasn’t awake for the whole thing, but I’ve been told I was a real mess. I’m feeling a lot better now though.”

The Draconian guard nodded. “Yea, I was on duty when they brought you through the gate. It looked like you had the scales beaten off your hide pretty hard. I’ll bet that’s an interesting story to pass the time if you wouldn’t mind sharing.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t mind hearing the tale either. I got another hour to kill before my shift is over anyway.” Balruk turned his head to see another guard that had been nearby wandering over to them.

Balruk shrugged. “Alright, I don’t have a problem with sharing, but I hardly believe the story myself.” Balruk went on to explain the adventure of his first week coming into Dreamscape online, starting with how he had woke up out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a loincloth and a scarce amount of food and water.

The guards grinned when he mentioned going through all that effort of making a rock club only to lose it after “falling” off of the stone tower he had climbed. They cheered at his victory with his first encounter with the skitters. They gasped in shock when he talked about tripping and falling right into the entrance of their hive and burst out laughing when he tried to block the tunnel and ended up destroying the entire hive instead.

So focused was Balruk in telling his story that when he finally finished and looked at his surroundings, he was surprised to see he was surrounded by even more guards. Some looked fresh and ready for action, while others looked to be worn out from their long night’s watch. All of them though held a look of rapt awe, clearly hanging on his every word. He decided to embellish the end of his story a tiny bit. The guards were so into his story, he didn’t want to disappoint them.

“I crawled out from the rubble of my last attack. I didn’t see anything but I didn’t let my guard down. My body was so exhausted, my very bones ached. Yet still, I pressed onwards. I didn’t know where I was going. All I could think of was putting one foot in front of the other. The dust from my last attack was still heavy in the air so I had to be careful of my surroundings. There was no telling what could be hiding.”

Balruk lowered his voice so the guards had to lean forward to hear him better. The tension in the air was palpable. “I heard the something moving ahead of me and, thinking yet another foe had risen to block my path, I raised my club to defend myself. A few seconds later, I could see a silhouette approaching me. I had yet to see something so massive previously and knew that if it came down to a fight, I wasn’t likely to make it out alive. Nonetheless, I readied myself for the inevitable fight. Willing to die fighting rather than give in to an easy death. Instead of charging me like I expected though, I heard a voice. ‘Fear me not, brave warrior!’ it said, ‘You have fought well. You can rest assured that your life is no longer in danger!’”

Balruk straightened up proudly. “I didn’t want to believe the voice at first, but despite my worries deep down I was sure I could trust this voice. Before I realized it, Darkness had crept up on me and when next I awoke, I was safe and cared for thanks to the noble actions of Igneus and the gentle ministrations of Lily.”

There was a moment of silence as the guards around Balruk soaked in the last words of his story. Then as one, they all broke into cheering. A few even went so far as to stomp their feet on the stone wall we stood upon.

I basked in the moment before a barking voice cut everyone off. “What the hell are you slackers doing?! You want to pull off double shifts? Huh?! Get back to your posts!!!”

Without a moment of hesitation, every guard stopped what they were doing. Some going to take over the night shift, others leaving the wall for their long-awaited sleep. Balruk turned towards the voice he heard only to see a rather short Draconian standing on the ground below him. Despite his short height, the figure had an imposing aura around him that seemed to scream ‘Obey me!’ The Draconian seemed to have scales colored a very light green almost white. If he remembered correctly Balruk was pretty sure that meant this Draconian had an affinity with air.

“Are you gonna stare at me all day like some lovestruck fool, or are you going to get your scaley ass down here?!”

Balruk snapped out of his daze as he realized he had in fact been staring. He quickly jumped to his feet and was about to move to the stairs, but changed his mind when another idea occurred to him. He took a few steps away from the wall before making a running leap off the wall to the ground below. At 30 feet, the wall wasn’t anywhere near as high as the stone tower had been, and he had lived through that.

Balruk looked down towards the stern Draconian below him. He expected to see a look of surprise or even fear. Instead, Balruk only saw a slight frown on the figure below him as the Draconian only raised his arm, whirling energy amassing around his arm. As he approached the ground he readied himself for the impact.

Moments before he crashed into the ground, however, an invisible force slammed into him and instead of crashing into the ground, it sent him careening sideways until he slammed into the very wall he had just leaped from. The unknown force didn’t vanish, it kept pushing, keeping him pinned against the wall with his arms and legs splayed out to the side.

“YOU STUPID IDIOT! You think I’m just gonna let a stupid earth lizard wreck the ground right next to my damned wall just because he was too lazy to use the stairs?! Clearly, you need some fucking discipline!”

Balruk was completely dumbfounded at the man screaming in his face. Literally screaming in his face. Despite the fact that not only was Balruk taller than the Draconian by a good 16 or so inches, but his feet were also another 4 feet from touching the ground. The Draconian seemed to be standing on nothing, as he screamed loud enough to cover Balruk’s face in spittle and used a clawed index finger to poke his chest with enough force to make him wince.

Balruk was sure this Draconian wasn’t about to let him down just because he asked him nicely, so instead decided to go in a different direction. “Uhh, Who are you?”

Balruk was hoping to throw off the Draconian with the sudden change in topic. However, the Draconian didn’t even lose a second of hesitation. “I am the fire that forges lumps of iron and coal into polished steel! I am the chisel that chips away at the ugly boulder to form it into a polished statue! I am the force that changes a whining sniveling brat like you into a warrior of honor on the battlefield! People that have earned my respect can call me Krest. YOU have not earned that respect! You shall call me Sir and only Sir! Do! You! Understand?!”

Balruk knew he had stepped into some deep shit now. He knew there was only one way you could reply to someone like the man before him. “SIR! YES, SIR!”

Krest stepped back on the air and looked him up and down. “Good. Maybe you aren’t as hopeless as I expected you to be. Go and get yourself some breakfast and report to me at the training grounds in an hour. Let’s see if I can forge you into a proper warrior.”

Quest: Training for Dummies

Description: Krest wishes to beat the shit out of you until you can properly learn how to fight. Report to him in the training grounds in an hour.

Penalty for refusing: Krest will come find you, beat the shit out of you, then drag you to the training grounds to beat whatever is left out of you as well.

Balruk winced once he read the quest description. Instead of denying the inevitable he made his way back to Lily in hopes that he could find something to eat before his “training” began.

……

In a dimension filled with shadows, a large humanoid cat creature sat on an elaborate throne carved of stone. In front of him, a portal hovered in the air. If one were to stand in front of it, they might be able to see a bird’s eye view of a small village bustling with activity. The humanoid sat with his chin resting on his hand and elbow resting on the armrest of the throne, a bored expression on his face. Obviously, that was me.

“I can’t believe my portals have a 12-hour cooldown whenever I return to my dimension. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have used it as a means to escape those rabbits.” Since I was the only one in my dimension, I was a bit whinier than usual. It’s my dimension! I do what I damn well, please!

Even as I thought that though, in a fit of paranoia I still checked the area for surprise witnesses to my childishness before refocusing my gaze on the portal that served as a live broadcast of the world outside my realm. “7 hours. 7 hours until I can re-enter Dreamscape… I guess if I just stopped watching the outside world I could change my perception of time and leave more quickly.”

I closed my eyes and thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, I would miss out on seeing how everyone reacted to my little trick. On the other hand… I don’t really get any audio on this thing anyways. It’s not like I’m missing much anyways.” After a few more moments of thought, I decided to close the portal.

I can get in on the action more quickly, and this way I’m not torturing myself with watching everyone doing stuff while I’m stuck in here. A sudden thought struck me. Whenever I spent all those months in here I had felt no inclination to leave. Suddenly I’m like a kid at the dentist, being able to leave couldn’t come soon enough.

“I guess finding the place comfortable while I was stuck here was some sort of coping mechanism.” I shrugged away the errant thought and urged the lapse in time to increase. After about a minute, I was once again staring at an open portal. Not much had changed except the town was a lot tidier than before, and there were a dozen adventurers in the bunny pasture slaughtering the fluffy menace.

I moved the portal’s exit down to the ground and, after creating my feline body anew, stepped into the lush landscape before me. I quickly checked my surroundings to make sure I was alone before taking my first step towards the center of the forest where I was certain I would find my rival. “Just you wait, Aragor, I think it’s about time you got what was coming to you.” I couldn’t help but smile at the grim thought as I made my way towards the center of the forest.