I almost dropped the handfuls of berries I was gathering as her words sunk in. They were Humans? Then… I was super short. Tiny. Weak. Pathetic. How little was I? If that doorframe was around 6 feet, then I must be barely two and a half feet tall. I could handle a lot, but frankly, my whole life I have been taller, stronger, and bigger than almost anyone I have met. I was 6’3”, and nearly 250 lbs, much of it muscle. “That means…” I looked at her more closely, remembering a certain movie that had come out a while ago. “You are a Dwarf?” I asked her, holding on to my reaction by a thread.

“Of course I am,” she stated simply, smiling broadly. Hell, she did everything broadly, it seems, “And you are a Kobold. And you are not banded, which is weird. I thought all Kobolds had to be banded when they learned to talk, or they get killed fast because they cannot evolve naturally once they get sentience.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm. This was important, “What do you mean by banded? Why wouldn’t I be sentient, or sapient, or whatever?” I asked, leaning out and handing her two more full handfuls of berries. I wish I had the ingredients to make a blackberry cobbler. I started eating more of them myself since I was a bit peckish as well.

She held up her left arm with a copper band with 3 tiny stones “Adventurers all get bands. Without it, you cannot level up right, as far as I know. Most monsters, if they evolve intelligence, will also find a shrine and get a band too… I mean, a monster can still do monstrous things, but with a band, they get an alignment, and without an alignment, you cannot get reborn.”

I nodded and said, “I woke up this morning, in a sewer, in the middle of a pile of dead bodies. I have no idea how I got here. I don’t even know what a kobold is, except that in some games brand new players would kill scads of them to get up to decent levels…” The thought was sobering. Not only was I weak and puny, but I was literally the crappy monster that noobies killed to train in tutorials.

“You woke up? In Sindaenaway sewers? There are no kobold populations in Sindaenaway. Except in the collegium, they buy a bunch of the presentients from catchers for experiments and training new mages… but It takes kobolds a long time and a lot of kills and they have to be really powerful before they naturally evolve sentience unless they are familiars or being forced into it…” she looked very worried. “They are not supposed to force sentience. That makes abominations.”

I sighed and shook my head, “I didn’t have anything forced on me, I am from another world. I woke up here, in this body.”

The young dwarven lass looked utterly shocked, “You are an immortal? Born as a Kobold? That makes NO sense at all. Immortals aren’t even born, they form with their bracelets. You are a kobold. You have scars.” She pointed at a tiny pucker I hadn’t noticed on my collarbone, “And you are at least a year old. And you are not wearing a band at all. Immortals cannot even exist here without bracelets. When their bracelets are drained completely, poof! They cease to exist.”

I needed more questions answered. “What do the bracelets do? Who made them? Are they required to level up?”

She shrugged a little, and answered, as she ate more berries, “I don’t know. They came from the god of knowledge, and umm.. supposedly some people don’t need them, but I don’t have any idea how they do it.” She smiled a little and held up her hands. “I am getting overfull on the berries. Thank you very much. All I can suggest is umm… find a shrine, maybe where there are other kobolds because without a bracelet most humans will assume that you are a monster and try to kill you before you eat a baby or something.”

“Unintelligent Kobolds will eat almost anything they can get their hands on, so you should stay out of villages. You also cannot speak common yet, so you cannot explain it to anyone that doesn’t know Kobold or Draconic.” she looked thoughtful. “Or you can pray to umm… the Drake, I guess? He might help you get lucky and get banded, but he’s kind of picky about who he supports.”

I could tell that our little question and answer session was ended, but she said, “I need to get into Sindaenaway today, but my name is Cassie. If you are an adventurer, I am certain we will run into each other again since we both speak the same languages… Adventurer circles are sort of tight around here. What’s your name?” she asked curiously.

“Bran,” I answered with my most common nickname. “Thank you for talking with me. Maybe next time we meet I will be able to cook something better for you than raw blackberries.” I was interested in the shrines, but there was no way I was praying to someone called the Drake. I had God, and he was God of everything, and I wasn’t going to throw him away for a local, even if it’s just a game.

She smiled at that and then asked me a very strange question, “May I identify you? I noticed you didn’t identify me, so I thought that maybe you were offended by it, a lot of people are. But it would be nice to send you a message once I get situated if you like, but to do that I need to identify you.”

I was a little skeptical but slowly nodded. “I guess so?” I told her, and then suddenly I had the strangest feeling… like something was touching the aura that showed up when I zoned. I zoned again, quickly, and saw the weirdest thing… speckles, much like the ones that glimmered in the air, only blue, were slowly receding away from my globe and into her band, joined by atmospheric speckles of much the same color. How very odd.

“That’s weird. You don’t have any stats to read, not even like a wild kobold,” she said, looking at her band. “I have an identity, I think, but all it says is Bran, because you already told me your name, and kobold because I know that, but the rest is… vacant.”

“Could you do that again? I think I saw how it was done,” I asked her curiously, and at her nod, I dropped into the zone immediately.

Her wristband sparkled for a moment, and then I saw her misty colors light up. They were much like mine, except she didn’t have an orb around her like I did. Threads of light blue seemed to pull themselves out of her aura and slipped into the band and then erupted forth in a little glitter of similarly colored speckles, which drifted to my orb, bounced off, and then returned to her wristband.

I dropped out of the zone and smiled at her a little, “Thank you, I need to head south now. I want to get as far away from civilization as I can, maybe find some kobolds or something.”

She nodded, “Thank you for the blackberries,” and bowed a little bit, and I slipped off to the other side of the bush. I wished I had asked for a waterskin or bag or something, but I had survived worse, and I had a sneaking suspicion that that blue speckle thing would become very, very important.

From the cover of the trees, I watched her head back towards the city. She seemed to be in some kind of hurry, as she moved very quickly, apparently, only hunger had driven her away from the gates. Her armor was in decent shape, as was the hammer that was strapped to her back, but the backpack she wore seemed to be nearly on its last legs, and the other gear was nearly as bad. Was that an adventurer's life? To invest everything in your gear and have nothing for yourself?

Perhaps, but it still sounded somewhat exciting. I mean, lots of people claimed to want to fight against evil, I could begin to see the game’s appeal… to be able to physically get in and brawl against what you considered evil had to be gratifying. Here, the idea of ‘good’ was probably just as nebulous and shades of gray as anywhere else, but evil? Evil wanted to kill and eat you and could be fought with hammers and magical spells.

So, talking to civilized folk was probably out of the question. Whatever language I was speaking couldn’t be understood by the locals, I looked different from everyone else and they all thought I was evil. I was underequipped, unarmed, and didn’t want to go on a thieving or killing rampage against the innocent locals, but there might be bad things out here, and I had no chance of getting decent information until I could find someone friendly to my type. Sounded exactly like Chechnya.

There were some things I could absolutely do. Stay stealthy. It was still dark, but slightly dropping temperatures implied it would be light soon. I needed to get more distance, since, based on Cassie’s presence, it seemed people in town still got out this far regularly. Perhaps she was hunting monsters when she noticed the bush? Keep my eyes open for predators and other threats. Stay close to the river. Search for something useful.

It was a shame this berry bush was so popular. It would have been ideal to set snares around. I still had a few bits of untanned leather tucked into my belt, but the scent might drive off creatures that I could otherwise catch.

Nearly an hour later and several miles south, the sun was starting to come up. I winced as the first rays of light peeked over the horizon, and found another decent fir tree with a hidden area beneath its branches. My makeshift garment was getting a bit rank, but I had cleaned it carefully, and it was still fairly flexible despite drying out. It should do me for a while as long as it didn’t get wet, or until I could get something better. I had ditched the Kobold femur sometime back since its value had lain more in being something I could use to poke trash piles rather than a weapon, and I felt a little weird about carrying a piece of the same kind of creature I was currently around like a trophy.

I had collected an armful of small, thin branches while I traveled, and set to work weaving under the canopy. It didn’t take very long, as a fish snare was a simple sort of cage, and the thing would only really work once, but I stashed it along the side of the river with a rock holding it down before returning to my temporary shelter, and then covering myself with a broken bough and a bunch of pine needles scraped from the ground. I tucked my head under the bough and managed to count trees in my head.

I realized that I was floating in gray, rising from the chaos of my normal dream state quickly, and it looked a lot like the new area I had dived into deeply into in my zone, with all the strange colors and clumps and sparkles. I was not exactly awake, but usually, when I realize I am dreaming I wake up instantly. That meant that this was not a dream, no pinching required. Not like I had anything to pinch or anything to pinch with.

Flip that, I suddenly realized I was floating in my normal, human body. I could look down and see normal human arms and legs. This was certainly an improvement over the last time, even though the zone itself didn’t seem to have any sort of sensation or temperature to it.

I saw a stirring in the mist ahead of me. The mist seemed to swirl around for a moment before it slowly gained color and depth, resolving itself into a figure of a woman. She was dressed very well by local standards, in a long dress of what looked like rich green raw silk, almost Victorian in style, with a thicker velvet bodice over it etched with golden embroidery. Her hair was black, gathered behind her head with a little round flat hat with a long brim atop her bun, and she was young, vibrantly attractive, and delicate face over a hint of white lace at her collar. On the whole, I think that her style was made for riding, as she wore long boots that peeked out from under the dress, but I was not really up on medieval fashion.

Her skin was a pale olive, with just a hint of fold at the outer corners, making her look, if she was from my world, vaguely Slavic. When she spoke, her voice was deeper than I expected, a rich, soothing contralto that probably could make her a fortune as a singer or voice actress. “Hello, Bran. You are not dreaming.” She said quietly, lacing her fingers over her middle as though she were talking at a tea party.

“I had sort of suspected that. Am I dead? Or in a loading zone or something?” I asked curiously, extreme emotion just didn’t seem to fit this place, And although I was getting very tired of getting pushed from place to place, It took a lot more than this to break my emotional control.

“No, this is actually inside you,” she answered, unlacing her fingers in order to gesture broadly around her. “This is your soulspace, although I suppose you could consider it sort of a loading zone for your mind. Everyone has one, although most people never see it because they take a band which shortcuts this space.” she shrugged a little, “Sort of a shame. I am a strong believer in creativity, and this is where a lot of creative things happen. As for your first question, that sort of depends on your perspective.”

“What do you mean that depends on my perspective?” I asked her curiously. “And who are you? I have never seen you before, so I am figuring you were not invented by my brain. You probably aren’t a fantasy either, even though you are quite beautiful, I tend to favor redheads and freckles rather than the continental look. That means you are most likely not my imagination.”

She colored prettily and smiled, but looking like she does, I bet that was as much a learned response as instinctual. “Yes, I am technically umm… sort of a demigod? Well, based on your beliefs no one here is really God, but there are a group of individuals that are ascended that help keep things running smoothly here, so I guess they fit the definition of gods as well as anyone.”

“I am still wrestling with the concept myself, but fortunately, unlike my husband, I have neither the power nor the restrictions of the major figures, so one of them asked me to come and talk to you as a favor.” She rolled her eyes a little, “Bad things are happening to my world, and you are in a unique position to help, and a god owing you a personal favor can be pretty useful.”

She smiled again, “My name is Kozmina. My husband is the god of Travellers, Rogues, Beggars, Tinkers, and pretty much all those who define their home and work as where they wind up at the end of the day. Me, my responsibility kind of begins and ends with horse breeders and riders, which is why I was considered very neutral, plus I am technically still mortal so I don’t have all those weird rules about directly interfering in things.”

“Hello, Kozmina,” I stated rather plainly, doing a sort of half-bow, which was more challenging than you might think since there didn’t seem to be much in the way of local vertical or gravity. “I have never bred horses, or ridden them except when I was a kid at a fair, but it is a pleasure to meet you. Could you please tell me what you mean by dead depends on my perspective?”

She paused, looking thoughtful, and then a little uncomfortable, “Well, I cannot tell you exactly because you will not believe me, but,” She paused again, clearly trying to figure out how to tell me something I had already figured out.

I held up my hand to stop her and said, “Allow me to make a guess based on available evidence. Somehow I died, or was badly injured, or was snatched from my home, dragged here, and stuck in the body of a kobold. This is some kind of VR game, so maybe I was downloaded into it, or my body is stuck someplace in a coma or permanently plugged in.” I sorta let my history of fanatically reading science fiction and fantasy books fly.

She nodded, “Very good perspective. Not complete, but with your current knowledge, close enough.” She looked thoughtfully at me. “That’s why I am here. Your soul is here, which brought you to our attention, but if you try and use a band, it will destroy your connection and you will be really dead dead. So… our hands are tied in some ways, but I have been asked to give you a tool, and let you figure out what it means and how to use it yourself.”

“This is not a false world. You probably are already well aware that the level of reality here is impossible in an illusionary world. An illusion would probably warp your senses so that you don’t notice all the inconsistencies rather than making everything around you utterly real. Your thinking would be shallow and warped, or you would break out of it.”

She continued, “this is a real world. However, creatures from this world managed to connect to yours and create a conduit for people to project themselves. As far as I know, they have convinced the people in your world to send their spirits here under the fiction that it is a game. They use the bands to create artificial bodies to temporarily house their souls, and send them out as adventurers.”

She sighed, shaking her head slowly, “You don’t have a ‘real’ body lying around somewhere. I am sorry, but a temporal magus snatched your body out of the time stream just before you were slated to die, and then a nasty little gnomish necromancer yanked your soul out, put it into a non-sentient body, and then sent your dead body back to your world so that no paradox developed.”

She beamed, clearly trying to soften the blow. “but you are still alive, and based on what you told me, you will have zero problems figuring out how to use your new body, and you will learn what we need on your own soon enough. I have already given you a blessing, which is within my power as a demigod of travelers, and I have one more tool I can offer, besides assuring that someday you might be able to become human again.” Her smile was enchanting, and she looked rather excited. I could see why she would be a god’s wife, and her reassurance was at least somewhat comforting.

“So…” I said, “What tool exactly were you planning on giving me?” I asked her, crossing my arms.

“Information, nothing more. What I have already given you, what you have figured out for yourself, That is all you need, and all I can give you.”

I shrugged, “Okay, thank you then. Are you planning on coming and seeing me again, or is this your way of closing the ticket?”

Kosmina looked confused, and then suddenly seemed to get the reference. “Oh, like a help request. Umm… I guess you could say that I am closing the ticket, but we have a watch list on you, so if there’s some way I can help without violating the rules, I will work on it. This wasn’t my idea, though, I am smart but the one who came up with it is way smarter than me. I just… umm… work here?”

I nodded, okay, she was a helpdesk, not a coder. I could work with that. “Then should I assume that my ability to put in bug reports is limited?” I asked her curiously.

She shook her head, “We are taking this allegory too far. There’s no way to put in bug reports. There are no errors in the world other than what people do and natural laws, just like your home. If something weird goes wrong, most people pray about it, but we already know that you won’t pray to the gods of this world, and that is okay.”

“If something goes wrong, you need to try and work your way through it yourself. We have plans, but if they don’t work out plans can change. We will help you if we can, but mostly our hands are tied in ways I cannot even begin to describe.” She held up her hands, “I am also going to have to tell you and go because you are more clever than we expected, and if I stay here talking any longer you will get something out of me I cannot afford to tell you, and it could break everything.”

I nodded understandingly. “Believe it or not, That’s not the first time I have been told that… Anyway, thank you for the blessing, and thank whoever you are doing the favor for. And please let them know that while I won’t pray, I am open-minded enough that I would welcome them for a social meeting whenever they can untie themselves.”

She smiled and nodded, “That invitation was perfect. I will pass it along. Are you sure you haven’t verbally sparred with a god before?”

I shook my head, “No, I was a sailor. Officers are pretty sure they are gods, though. You learn the dodges.”

She nodded and lifted her hands. “The only thing I can add is a riddle. Where you come from there are united states. Sometimes, what you say in one state means something entirely different in another.”

I could see the bright sunlight right through the bed of pine needles concealing my head as I opened my eyes and the dream ended. I felt good but somewhat hungry. I tried to sneak a glance only to realize that my eyes, while able to pierce the night amazingly well, were practically blinded by the glowing light outside of the canopy.

So I had time to think. Two states, different meanings. It was no secret that a word like ‘dumplings’ meant something entirely different in California than it did in West Virginia. In Appalachia, a dumpling was a lump of dough you dropped into a stew to make thick biscuits, and in California, it was vegetables and meats carefully wrapped with an egg roll wrapper. Hell, English in England and English in the States was so different that we had a joke about how the UK and America were two States separated by a common language.

Did it have to do with standing in two different places? Or was she referring to real life as a ‘state’ and this place as another? I had always loved riddles and logic puzzles. A Cowboy rode into town on Saturday, stayed for three days, and then left after church Sunday. How was that possible? It took me less than a second to figure out that ‘Saturday’ was the name of the cowboy’s horse.

I kept trying to adapt, under the fir’s drooping foliage, to the bright light, but it was miserable, my eyes didn’t seem to want to adapt to the light. I was going to need to wait here for a while until the sun wasn’t directly overhead and take advantage of the forest’s shade, but I kept working over the problem.

State of mind? State of rest? State of being? State of existence? Did I have more than one state?

Why yes, yes I did.

I started considering the language that I had been speaking with the dwarf girl, Cassie. It had felt like I was speaking one of the languages that I had learned naturally and actually thought in, like Spanish or English. Arabic was different, in that while a lot of it was natural, much of the terminology, especially for complex military concepts, required that I mentally translate the words used into English or out into Arabic. I didn’t ‘think’ complex thoughts in that language.

I whispered “I went to school to learn architecture” Out loud. Very quietly. It FELT like a native language, but when I listened to the words they were laid out differently and was only two words. It sounded different, more sibilant, and ‘I went to school to learn’ came out as a single word that meant “I was trained by scholars” which followed the term for “my architecture skill”. MY skill was a very different word from the general term for a skill someone could learn, although they had a similar sound. The language sounded both precise and contextual… and I could see how a simplified form, consisting of meaningful hisses and short grunt-words, could be used to train less intelligent kobolds to obey commands.

I was somewhat surprised that my recollection of Cassie had her speaking the language so clearly… many of the sounds would be difficult for a creature without a lizardlike mouth to pronounce clearly, and you would have to hear very well to note the subtle differences between some of the words I had used. I probably never could have spoken or understood more than a pidgin form of it if I were still in my human form.

Speaking of human form, I know this world had ways of changing races or transforming. If I were truly stuck here like the digitization volunteers in their digital worlds, I would find a way to regain my form. That was a vow I took very seriously.

So, basically, when I spoke a word, whatever translated my words outwards took my meaning and then assigned the word appropriate to that meaning. I know my zone is inside of my own mind, so I wondered what happened if I tried to speak a word inside of my zone? Not move my lips at speed, but just mentally ‘thought’ the word.

Dropping into the zone was getting easier the more I practiced. Here, it wasn’t just a stress response, it seemed to be an actual way to access my own will and mind, or at least the outer layers where I made decisions. It felt more and more like the process of meditation my sensei had described, or perhaps like the concept of ‘lucid dreaming’ I had briefly explored while I was dating a girl that was interested in it.

I quickly dropped into the zone, ironically the pine needle scent seeming to help me concentrate-relax without falling back into a sleeping pose. This time, I tried to completely screen my body out from the zone sensation, not wanting to make impressions or interact with the world while in the process.

This time, I felt like I was fully enclosed by my zone. It felt HUGE with only my viewpoint and my ‘virtual’ body, the human body I remember, here. Without my physical body, I could see and feel things I had never noticed before.

The mist that drifted through the space seemed to be composed of bands and streamers of color. They were blended and overlapping, making the overall color blend into a white rather than darkening. The sparkles and blotches that faded in through my ‘shell’ were also everywhere but seemed to drift towards my center.

My center looked like a tangled, snarled mess of strands of color, much denser than the streamers in the air. I could not see where one strand ended and the other began, but it was like a tangled ball of yarn in the very middle of my aura shield, and even with the reality that every colored strand gave off its own light, I could not see or penetrate to catch a glimpse of what lay within the ball, unlike the bits of information I could gain from the smudges.

Was that what ‘magic’ was? Or soul? I really needed more information and was a little worried about experimenting with the core of my being. But I could figure out what a word meant in a different ‘state’. I spoke the English word ‘magic’ and noticed that certain parts of the drifting cloud around me seemed attracted to the concept, lighting up. Interesting.

Then I thought of the word for ‘magic’ in that language that Cassie and I were speaking and my mind seemed to explode.