0.2 Prologue: It All Started with a Truck

I am writing this memoir in the hope that it might find its way back home, that some future Hero might be better prepared, or in a worst case scenario and the Great Devourer finds the World of my birth you might better oppose it.

As with many similar stories, it all started with a truck.

January in Michigan can get icy. I don’t blame the truck that lost control and slammed into my car. My wife wanted to start our Christmas shopping. Yes, she often took advantage of January clearances for the next years shopping, and that is all you really need to know about her. Our daughter, Galadriel, had just turned two. Yes, I named my daughter after Tolkien’s Elf Queen, and tells you pretty much what you need to know about me. I broke my hip and required over a year to recover. The two great loves of my life did not survive.

This is not the part of my story I want to focus on.

Up to that point in my life I was a fairly typical overweight academic. The closest thing I had to a sport in High School was competitive Orienteering. I was teaching English Lit at a Community College while working on my doctoral thesis (a revolutionary take on Sir Gawain in Mallory, in my then naive opinion).

I dropped out of my PhD program and stopped teaching. I was always heavy, but became truly obese. I got a job managing a comic book store, and stayed there for 15 years. Frankly, we sold more trading card, rpg, and table top games then actual comics. We ran tournaments and dungeon crawls in the backroom. I became a pseudo professional game master, running games at local Cons. It was at a Con that I learned about the gag hidden in the User Agreement for Legends of Lorecraft.

“The User freely and willing consents to be Summoned to a distant World to Serve as a Hero of the Realm, to Fight against Incursions from Beyond, and to share their Otherworldly Knowledge and Skills.”

I was always more of a pen and paper gamer, but something spoke to me when I read the User Agreement, and soon after started playing LoL online. I had turned a hobby into a lifestyle. It was at a different Con that I had my second encounter with my nemesis. I was dressed in my typical Con getup, sort of a cross between a wandering wizard and monster hunter. Individual pieces of the costume were acquired over twenty years at RenFaires, ComicCons, and charity resale shops. A group of barely dressed girls in Battle Princess costumes were taking selfies while standing in the crosswalk in front of the Convention Centre. The truck honked its horn, the girls didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t think, didn’t choose, I just ran as fast as my almost 400 lbs of blubber could manage. The sharp pain in my chest seemed distant, as if it was happening to someone else. I don’t really remember being hit, just a bright white light, and then nothing.