Jack blinked, and found himself standing in a forest clearing surrounded on all sides by a high, sweeping canopy of trees. A faint breeze was stirring the leaves, and various kinds of birds tweeted and flitted amongst the branches. A collection of various kinds of wildflowers grew all around Jack's feet. "It's....PERFECT," Jack thought, looking around him. After a moment, he noticed a small gap in the trees across the clearing from him, and a faint trail worn into the ground that led from the clearing through the gap and into the shade of the forest canopy ahead, where he lost sight of it. He knew the beginning of an adventure when he saw one. He lifted his newly-obtained magical axe to his shoulder, and trudged off into the woods, attempting and failing to whistle the theme song to one of his favorite television series as he entered. The trail led straight for a couple hundred feet through the forest floor, picking its away around various large trees and stones, and across a small creek about five feet wide that bisected it. Here and there, small forest animals such as rabbits and squirrels climbed and jumped and darted around the floor and trees, some of them gibbering in protest and running to their hollows as he interrupted their tasks. A short way past the creek, the forest began to thin, and the trail began to ascend a steep hill. Following the switchbacks up the hillside took more effort than Jack was used to exerting, and he instinctively braced himself for the breathless exhaustion he was accustomed to when he did much more than cook instant ramen. To his surprise, however, none came. He felt just as rested and energized at the top of the hill as he did at the bottom. So this was what not being an out of shape piece of shit felt like. Jack let out a sigh of relief. This. was. AWESOME! ["YOU LIKE YOUR NEW BODY, KID!?"] Jack screamed, fell on his ass, and nearly tumbled down the hill as Frumpkin's voice exploded inside his head. "AAAuuggh! GOD!", Jack yelled, flinching and rubbing his ass. He looked around himself, but saw nothing but trees, hillside, and one particularly perturbed looking squirrel, who was chattering at him angrily from a nearby branch. ["YES?!"] Frumpkin yelled inside his head. "STOP YELLING! YOU'RE HURTING MY HEAD!", Jack said, curling into a ball and clutching his skull like that would actually do anything. ["OH JEEZ! SORRY KID!"] Jack heard the sound of rustling, and a few clicks like someone was flipping switches and pushing buttons inside his head. ["...This better?"] Frumpkin asked. "Yes. Christ." Jack said, starting to stand. ["My bad. Last kid who tried this route was deaf as a doornail. Forgot I still had the sensitivity turned all the way up. Also, I'm in your head. You don't have to respond out loud for me to hear you. Just think it, and I'll hear it."] "Then you can hear this, then?", Jack thought to himself. ["Yep. ...You could try and sound a little less sarcastic."] "Sorry. Just still trying to get used to all of this," Jack thought. ["I'm sure. Now, what do you want to unlock as a reward first? Item, skill, or companion?"] "Wait, what? Already? But I haven't even done anything heroic yet!" Jack thought. Even he found getting upgrades this early completely ridiculous. ["Yeah, sure you have. The hill was your first challenge. You're still fat. You overcame it. Now, do you want a set of magical plate armor, lockpicking skills, or a familiar?"] "You don't think me getting rewarded for climbing a hill is kinda lame?", Jack thought. "I mean, getting rewarded and everything is great and all, but this is ridiculous." ["Why do guys like you always say that when I do things like this?"] Frumpkin said more than asked. ["Two days ago climbing that hill would have been the peak accomplishment of your week, but no, as soon as you get your wishes it's all 'oooh, look at me, I need a harder challenge because I'm too good to be rewarded for beating my previous records'".] "I mean, I'm grateful... It's just not very....heroic, I guess", Jack said. ["So, you want a more 'heroic' challenge, huh? You want me to give you a chance to 'be a hero'?] Frumpkin asked in a voice Jack would have used when talking to a small child. "Yes, please", Jack replied. ["Ooookay, you asked for it."] Frumpkin said, before adding a moment later ["...you might want to duck."] Jack got three-quarters of the way through saying "huh?" before the resounding crack of something hard and heavy smashed against the back of his head, sending him sprawling and filling his vision with stars. He instinctively tumbled, shifting his weight in the roll to spring up to his feet. He turned to see a single small, green-skinned creature wearing ragged leather and holding a large wooden club made out of an old tree branch. The thing stood only three feet tall, with large yellow eyes and comically oversized ears and features, and was currently convulsing with belly laughter. When it looked up to see Jack staring down at him with displeasure, axe in hand, however, he stopped laughing, and nervously took a step backwards. As the thing turned to run, Jack buried his newly-obtained magic axe in the back of the greenskin's head, causing it to cry out with a gurgling scream before tumbling to the ground in a heap of green blood and odd angles. Jack tried to remove his axe from the goblin's skull, only to find it firmly wedged in place. It took him far longer than seemed reasonable to get the thing removed, when he finally decided to stand on the goblin's shoulders with both of his feet and put his full weight into the pull. The blade finally popped free with a wet thunking sound, and Jack tumbled ass-backwards onto the turf at the dead goblin's feet. "Seriously? One goblin? That's what you consider a heroic challenge?" Jack thought, rubbing his tail-bone as he stood up. ["One? Oh no, there's more than one."] Frumpkin said. ["...Speaking of which, head's up."] Jack looked up just in time to have a large log collide end-first with his face. He folded over, holding his face with both hands and hurling obscenities into the air. ["Tried to warn ya. Anyways, there's about 30 more. I'll check in again when you're done, or dead. Whichever comes first. Good luck!"] Frumpkin said, putting a sing-songy trill on the last two words that made Jack want to punch him square in the face. Jack blinked away the tears in his eyes from the impact, and glanced around to see himself surrounded by a dozen or so more goblins, each one laughing and snarling in equal measure. A couple of them spoke to each other in some kind of guttural language he didn't understand, and one called up loudly towards the tree canopy, where Jack saw over a dozen more taking aim at him with more large, rough-hewn logs. "Hey, uh, Frumpkin…? I, uh, take it back. I'm good with being rewarded for the hill climb now...", Jack thought. There was no reply, and Jack had a sudden wave of panic sweep over him. What on earth had he just gotten himself into? He had less than a second to contemplate the thought before he found himself rushed by a dozen goblinoid forms wielding large clubs and nets. He closed his eyes and swung his axe in front of him in a wide arc, hoping beyond hope that he managed to hit something. He felt a faint sense of relief as he felt the blade collide with something soft, and heard a goblin voice scream something that he assumed was a stream of obscenities. He opened his eyes just in time to see several clubs swinging at his head at the same time. He panicked, and threw his axe arm up to deflect the blows. As if by magic, he managed to deflect each strike with ease, and as if on auto-pilot, followed each up with a strike that split the goblin who'd thrown it clean in two. For a moment, he felt actually quite proud of himself. Then the first log collided with his spine. And then another in the shoulders. He managed to somehow blindly predict the third and dodge it, only to step right into the path of the fourth so that it landed square on his right foot. He howled in pain, grabbing at his toes as he hopped up and down on the other foot. He swung at one of the other goblins with his free axe hand, clipping the creature's nose off and causing it to squeal in pain as it fell backwards behind two others. He set his foot down and turned to swing behind him, but found the blade swung wide as the goblin immediately behind him ducked the blade, giggling as it did so. It sprung up from its crouched position and threw the net in its hands at Jack's face. Jack tried to sidestep, only to walk directly into the path of another net which managed to drape and wrap itself around his axe and arm. He went to shrug it off, only to find another cover his head. As if on cue, all three of the nets cinced tight around him as if laced with a drawstring, strapping his arms to his sides and cinching tight around his head and neck. Jack struggled to break free from the nets, but as he tried to rip himself free, something wrapped around his ankles, tripping him to the ground where he impacted with a painful thud to the sound of more goblin laughter. As soon as he fell, half a dozen of them were on him, wailing on him with large wooden branch clubs, which despite being wielded by tiny creatures hurt like hell. He thrashed about, half out of an effort to break free of the bindings, half out of a desire to stop getting hit with sticks like some sort of dork pinata. Then, perhaps jarred by his circumstances, or the twelvth blow to the head, he remembered he could use magic. Jack imagined his body swelling in size, doubling or tripling in scale, breaking the nets and bindings on him and making the goblins small enough to stomp on. As if on cue, a random word popped into his head, and he blurted it out with all of the force he could muster. "Toxoplasmosis!" With a strange tickling feeling inside his bones, Jack felt a surge of magical energy rush through his entire body, and suddenly, all at once, his body shrank to one third its original size, slipping him completely free of his bindings all at once, and turning the once tiny goblinoids into hulking green-skinned monsters. Fuck. Jack realized what had happened just in time to roll out of the way of a goblin club that was now that size of a large tree compared to him as it came crashing into the ground, and stumbled to his feet just in time to leap out of the way of another. As he ducked another tree trunk, he had just a moment to reflect on what had happened, and why things had gone differently than he expected, and then suddenly realized that he had absolutely no idea how to get back to regular size. For all his luck, he'd be stuck a pocket-sized fat kid in a Space Invaders shirt forever. He reflected just a little too long, and suddenly found himself flying through the air from a club blow that less struck him, and more picked him up and flung him like a golf club performing a line drive. He sailed wildly through the air over several goblin heads, their big toothy grins laughing up at him as he hurtled through space like a badminton birdie. As if on cue, one of the other goblins jumped up and swung his club up at Jack, knocking him flying backwards with a resounding crack that knocked the wind out of Jack's chest and sent his head spinning. Jack knew he had to do something, but about the time he started to get his thoughts in order, he was knocked back flying the other direction as the goblin attack devolved into a resounding game of Jackminton. Jack was grateful that the blows didn't hurt as badly as he expected, either as an advantage of being a lot smaller, or as a result of one of his wishes. After a dozen or so swats back and forth, the goblins appeared to grow bored of the whole experience, and one of them swung up a net rather than a club, catching the now tiny form of Jack inside it and wrapping him up in it well enough that he couldn't move. The goblins, their target now trapped and incapacitated, set off down the trail in the direction Jack had been heading, several of them breaking out into baudy, tone-deaf songs that grated on Jack's hearing. He wondered aloud to himself if the singing wasn't somehow even worse than the beating. The remaining goblins carried him for some time down the trail, up and down several rises and valleys, before the goblin in front squawked something in their harsh language, and the group stopped suddenly. Jack, from his limited and immobile vantage point, saw as several of the goblins nearest to him rushed to the front of the line, drawing their weapons and shouting things to several others, who followed suite. He listened closely as several of the goblins shouted ahead of him, their voices raised in a tone and timbre that told him they weren't trying to be friendly with whatever it was they were reacting to. Then, for the first time coming to the new world, he heard another voice using words he recognized that wasn't Frumpkin. It was a woman's voice that sounded sweet enough, but with a distinct edge to it that simultaneously aroused and frightened him. "That's far enough, snotlings." The voice said. Another voice, also female, spoke up immediately after in a tone softer and higher than the previous, "please just leave our farm. we don't want any trouble." Jack was about cry out, when he heard one of the goblins near the front speak up, using common speech for the first time. "Fuckk...ovff... vred... bvitch...", it said, seeming to struggle to get the words to come out correctly. The first female voice laughed loudly for several long seconds. "Make me!" She said. What happened next went by so quickly Jack barely had a chance to mentally register it before it was over. He heard several of the goblins yell, heard the clank of armor as they charged away from the group and towards what Jack guessed was the direction of the new voices. Then, immediately afterwards, he heard several faint swooshing sounds, each followed by the sound of metal grinding against metal, the wet splat of something hard colliding with something much less hard, and the loud gurgling shrieks of goblin voices that told Jack what the something soft probably was. The remaining goblins, including the one holding the net that held him trapped, rushed towards the direction of the rest of their brethren, dropping Jack and the net in the process. He immediately set about trying to struggle out of the net when he heard the softer voice say something in a sharp, jagged sounding guttural language he didn't understand, and sent the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Then, without warning, a large explosion of blue fire erupted a short distance from him, blowing him and the large wad of netting he was wrapped in a dozen or so feet away to the sound of roaring flames and goblin screams. Even at a decent distance away, the heat from the fire was so intense Jack was sure it'd singed his eyebrows and neckbeard clean off, and he had to cover his eyes against the intense brightness. After several seconds, he was finally able to free himself from the large netting wad, climbing up on top of it and looking in the direct of the now dwindling flames. The ground surrounding them probably twenty feet in every direction was charred black and smoking, and he could see, and unfortunately, smell, the numerous charred twisted shapes that he deduced were probably his previous captors of the last several minutes. Then, after another moment passed, the blue flames finally dwindled out, and through the smoking haze, he could finally see the bearers of the female voices he'd heard earlier. There were three of them, not two. One, standing closest, was decidedly the tallest and largest of the three, dressed in a kind of lightweight looking armor and standing to the ready in some sort of combat stance with what looked like a sword in her left hand. By some strange trick of the light, the skin of the largest one looked as red as a ripe strawberry, with a wild shock of orange-golden hair that stood out from her head and appeared to have several things weaving through it. To her left stood the second figure, dressed in loose-fitting grey and white robes tied around the middle with a blue sash embroidered with gold thread, and holding a long staff or rod in her right hand, her left hand held closed close to her chest. Her skin looked denim blue, with dark blue hair the color of a blueberry pulled loosely to one side, where it hung down past her shoulder. He blinked several more times, looking back and forth between the two of them as the haze continued to clear. No, he wasn't going crazy. Their skin was really those colors. The third was by far the smallest of the three, and hidden mostly behind the second one's robes, which she appeares to be clinging on to. While it was difficult to see much of her at this distance, she appeared to be a child of seven or eight years of age, with reddish brown skin and messy looking orange and gold hair that partly obscured her face. While he wasn't sure of the brightness of the idea of getting their attention, Jack figured anything had to be better than being a captive plaything for a bunch of goblins, and anyone who didn't like goblins, based on all of his years of playing games and reading fantasy novels, were probably good. Or, at least, not completely bad. He threw up his hands, waving them frantically around. "Hey! Over here! Heeeey!"