He wasted a few more precious seconds flailing away with his hand at empty air, then found he could open the pull down menus by staring at a tab and blinking. The stat menu seemed rather complicated. Some stats were derived from others. Reaction time depended mainly on both agility and dexterity, but also on intelligence, and at some point he had put a few extra points into reaction time to boost it further. Lines showed the connections, but he didn’t have time to figure out the exact formula right now. 40 seconds left.

He almost put more points directly into reaction time, but at the last moment put one directly into intelligence instead. That improved his reaction time a tiny bit. More importantly, if you weren’t intelligent enough to avoid continual fights you would get in serious trouble. At least in real life, but not necessarily in an RPG.

Something told him to at least look at the other menus before spending his remaining points. He seemed to have skills in an awful lot of weapons, some of which he could not even remember what they were. What was a phase sword? Or an editor gun?

He could spend points on some exotic weapon like a boomerang or slingshot. If he actually learned it that way, it would prove this was an RPG. Except he was missing so many memories he might have already known it.

Some of the other skills looked interesting. If he’d been in school, spending a point might have been a painless way to learn calculus or nuclear physics. Lockpicking and hotwiring cars might actually be more practical. They were available too, but he kept looking.

Disadvantages? That was a funny menu to see here. It turned out that he was actually being given the option of buying off part of two disadvantages. He had Memory Block (Human) and Memory Block (Eightfold), both of which were ten point disadvantages. At that value they had to be pretty formidable.

Abruptly Joey noticed the timer had turned red, and was now at four seconds. Hastily he bought off one point worth of each memory block, hoping it would be worth it.

Immediately he remembered a few scattered scenes from his court martial. He couldn’t remember what he had been accused of, but he knew he had left the marines with a bad conduct discharge. He had done some hard time as well, though he couldn’t remember how much. A few more scattered images of his childhood. He had been a badass fighter, but also a gamer and a lover of mmorpg’s.

Also, there were even stranger images, that his brain could not quite hold. He remembered being an Elder, an energy creature that might live practically forever, and required no food because it subsisted on useless cast off fragments of the consciousness’s of the minds of embodied intelligences. Yet since they were immortal, overcrowding developed, and the need for new worlds.

How could he have been both? He dismissed the two fancies, perhaps equally false. Joey looted the two bodies, finding nothing but forty dollars, the Magnum, and a few extra bullets. They were not even carrying any ID, or any hint as to why they might have conspired to attack him.

Too late, it occurred to him that looting the bodies wasn’t the action of an innocent man. He should have called the police instead. Looting bodies worked better in online mmo’s than it did in real life.

He hadn’t really wanted to call the police anyway though. With so much of his memory missing, he could even be a wanted criminal. And the police weren’t going to help him with all this strangeness. At best they would have him institutionalized, held in one place for whoever had sent his killers.

He knew where he wanted to go. The Riverfolk were gathered in an old mansion on the bad side of town, built when that part of town was shiny and new. Despite all their differences, together they would … well he couldn’t quite remember their common goal, but they would know who and what he really was. He was certain, yet not entirely at ease about it. Where but with the Riverfolk would his enemy dwell?

Yet he had no other realistic choice. As an ex con with no money, a bad conduct discharge, and missing memories he wasn’t in a good position to find a job. To the Riverfolk House he would go.

He knew the way, and that it was in walking distance. That made the house his only practical choice.

When it came into sight, it could have been just a large sprawling mansion built when this was still the good side of town. Although it was getting dark, second glance still showed that it was in better repair than any of the buildings Joey had walked past. Other than that the house looked ordinary. The guard who stepped out to challenge him as he walked up the walkway towards the door seemed to come out of nowhere.