The man was standing in what I’d think of as a judge’s robe, but it had huge white buttons down the front in three rows with white lace between each one. Around his neck was the oddest collar I’d seen in a long time. It was one of those stiff lace old-timey things that were white with a black edge and stuck out about six inches. It looked like it would keep anyone from looking down. Somehow he was still looking down his nose at me even with that thing to keep him from moving his neck.

Before I could say anything to him, he started to speak in a sing-song manner. “Bozo, I want you to understand that this is all quite abnormal for you to be here again. Something happened, not sure what, and now things need to be fixed, and so you’re here,” he continued.

“There are rules, and those rules shouldn’t be broken or even appear to be broken. As it stands, those rules have been broken somehow. Your class and race shouldn’t be. I have brought you here because I’m going to try to fix you.”

I looked at him with a slightly slack jaw as he had just started talking without me even getting an idea of who he was or where I’m. I also was in a slight shock as to who he was and why he called me bozo, and said that I was here again.

He then spun in a fast circle, reached his arm out and grabbed me by the shoulder. I felt his firm hand squeeze me. “Let’s see how messed up you are to see if I can fix you before we move forward,” he said. I felt a slight drain on my mind.

I went to speak, and he cut me off again. Both by speaking and shaking his finger back and forth.

“This is a mess; I know that when you left, you were a Drakon warrior and a proper champion at that! Now, look at you, a wild human Enchanter! Who has heard of such a thing.” He then started muttering as he looked at the space in front of himself, as he kept squeezing my shoulder.

He pointed at a chair, “Go sit and this TIME don’t get up or touch anything. You moved my things last time you were in here and I couldn’t find where you put my favorite snow globe for a whole day.”

I went and sat down in the high-backed leather chair he pointed out. I was oddly compliant, which made me kind of unhappy. I wasn’t pushing to know what was going on or why I was only doing as I was told. I had questions that I wanted to be answered, but I just seemed to be okay with waiting.

He sat down and pulled up a stack of papers and started going through them while I waited. When I tried to ask a question, he would hold up his right hand with just one finger up and shake it slowly back and forth till I closed my mouth. It took him a little over thirty minutes to look through all the papers he had before he spoke again.

“Everything is in order on my end, filed correctly and submitted correctly. However, you’re just not in the system. Well, you’re in the system as Bozo, but Bozo is not connected to you, Arn, anymore and Bozo is just not even out there. Not as a body, nor as a soul and you’re a body and a soul but not in the system and not connected to anything that came through the gate. You are broken and I don’t know how to fix you. I can’t send you back out through the gate and then bring you back since there is nothing here to tether you and you were paid for so you have to be here. Unless…”

He looked off in the air for a moment and then pulled out a piece of paper and started to write. After a few moments, he took the page and folded it and then set it on fire with a candle. Soon after, a piece of paper appeared in front of him. He unfolded it, breaking three seals on it as he did, and he read slowly, shaking his head back and forth.

He got all serious and the happy go lucky slightly odd vib I was getting from him vanished. He smoothly spoke as he stood. “Well it does appear that the one that paid for you doesn’t want to pay again, nor does he want a replacement as he said you were what he wanted and he didn’t want to spend the time looking again. He also said it would make a fun song. So that means since I can’t just get rid of you we have to compensate you.”

I looked at him for a few moments as he walked around the desk, trying to figure out what he meant by I was paid for and that this would make a good song. In the mellow state that I was in, I just did not fully understand everything that was going on. The man asked with a snippy tone, “Well do you want that compensation or should I go back and tell those with the rules that you felt everything was fine and didn’t need anything?”

“No, no!” I almost yelled out to make him stop. I wanted whatever was being offered to me as it was more than I had. I had no idea who this guy was, but I’d take a hand out and perhaps some help.

“Well since you don’t want anything I’ll drop you back and we don’t ever have to talk about this again. I’m sure that you’ll be as happy as me if this whole issue was put behind us.” The man rambled out at me with a great big smile.

“I meant no, don’t go back and say I don’t want the compensation. I want the compensation. Please let me know what it is.” I said as calmly as I could to the slightly odd man.

He snorted, skipped around his desk and pulled out another set of papers and burned yet another message.

“Fine, let us see what the Pantheon has chosen for you.” He said with a slight chuckle.

After a few minutes of us not speaking, a small box appeared in front of him. He opened it and looked in, and his face drained of all color. Then he sent off another letter and got another response. Then another one and another. A scroll appeared in front of him, and when he read what it said, he convulsed in pain.

With a great huff, he reached into the box and pulled out a golden chain and on this chain was an opal that had to be at least two inches around cut in an oval. He reached his hand toward me and said, “This is The Necklace of Cores, if you treat it right and feed it, then it will provide you with cores.”

He then sat on the front of his desk and sighed, and said in a stiffly angry voice, “The other part of this compensation that the rules seem to demand would be to offer that you may ask me questions in accordance with how the system works and with what you should’ve already known but somehow don’t know about the world in general. There are some things that I may not tell you. However, I’ll answer your questions as the rules let me. Because I’m busy with my other duties, and this is just because YOU can’t remember and because you somehow broke the rules, there is a rule around how you’ll ask your questions. If you don’t follow this rule, then I’ll not be able to answer your question because I’ll not be able to hear your question. I am, after all, busy. If you wish to ask a question, then before the sun goes down, you must yell, ‘Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question.’ Do you understand?”

I took a deep breath and asked, “So let me get this right. To get answers from you, I need to yell my questions and you’ll answer?”

He shook his head from side to side. “No! You must yell before the sun goes down, ‘Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question.’ You then ask your question, and only one question. Then when you go to sleep that night I’ll answer your question for you.”

“Okay, so first I yell, Sam, I have to talk with you, and then I ask my question,” I asked again, not believing for a moment I’d to do this whole “I beseech you” crap.

“No, Arn what I’m giving you is an incantation to reach me and ask your question. Any deviation from this will make it so it doesn’t work, and then you’ll have wasted your try for this day.” Sam grumbled out at me.

“Okay, can I get that written down in English so that I can have it and I don’t mess it up?” I asked as I dropped my shoulders in defeat.

“Well I could give it to you written down in English but since you’re a wild human you can’t read so that will not help you much. I’ll give it to you as a spell to cast and the system will help you do it correctly each time,” Sam said with about as much emotion as a frying pan on a wall.

“Thank you, Sam, that would be nice,” I responded as dryly and defeated as I could.

Sam drew himself up straight and yelled, “The Great and Mighty Greeter Sam! Not, Sam.”

I nodded thanks to him and asked, “So are you able to make it so I can read?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not? I already can read, just this system thinks I can’t”, I pushed back.

“Rules were broken when you were made and because of how they were broken I can’t change you. If I could change you I’d make it so that you were Bozo, the Drakon warrior. However, I can’t,” The Great and Mighty Greeter Sam responded.

With that, he laughed dryly, and out the door I went. I’m not sure how he knocked me out of his study without touching me or how I ended up flying back a good thirty feet without landing hard, but that is what happened. The door flashed out of existence with a huge bang that sounded like an M80 in a mailbox.

I scrambled to my feet, expecting to be attacked by the dogs. I heard barking nearby and growling.

The barking was from the other side of the river, and they were running away. Likely scared by the loud sound. I didn’t know if they would be back to try to eat me, but I had a feeling that the few left would find a way to mess with me in the future. Dogs remember things like the beating I gave them, so it was likely I was on their hunt on-scent list.

I looked around at my surroundings and didn’t see any immediate danger. I quickly hung the necklace around my neck and stuffed it into my tunic. I looked up at the sky and yelled, “Great and Mighty Sam, I the lowly Arn Beseech you to answer my question.” Then in a normal voice, I asked, “what does this necklace do?”

I still felt almost muted in my brain. There was an odd icon in the of my HUD but I didn’t have a clue what it meant. The only thing I understood with it was the count down from 30. After a little while it had dropped down to 27.

“Hmm, must be minutes,” I said dispassionately.

I started hiking upstream again, looking for a place where I could set up for a while and work on some skills. Not sure what all I wanted to work on, but I knew that I needed to somehow beat the dogs, and so to do that, I would need better reach.

About half an hour passed before the odd icon vanished and my brain kicked into high gear. I got hit with a flood of anger and a good bit of fear all at once.

“Who the hell was that guy! And what did he mean that I was bought?” I yelled.

Then I spun around looking for danger. I had my spear point down and I was looking everywhere. I had been looking around when walking but my brain had been all foggy.

“Had to have hit me with something to make me more compliant.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “That guy seems messed up one moment, happy and dancing like Wonka, then angry like an ex-girlfriend. He said I had been there before. Thing is I don’t remember it so that must have been part of the time I am missing.” I said as I shook my head.

I knelt down and let the feeling wash over me. Most of the time I was kind of unfeeling. Most emotions for me were learned responses. I didn’t tend to react unless it was a strong issue and then it was alway a strong reaction. I didn’t like my brain messed with. I hated being out of control.

“Got to get going, Arn” I said as I rose to my feet and headed up-river.

I was also checking the river on my right for crossings as I hiked, and I never saw a good place which made me very happy. I ended up having to cross a tributary stream by climbing up and over some car-sized rocks and jumping from one to the next, which also kind of pleased me because I knew the dogs would have a hard time going up if they were over here and the water in this area was narrow and swift, so it was acting like a moat.

It was about two hours till sundown when I saw what I’d been wanting from the start.

I smiled and said, “Well, if that ain’t the most perfect looking place, I don’t know what is.”

There in front of me was a waterfall that appeared to be about a hundred feet tall if it was all one fall. This thing was stair-stepped into five steps. The first step up was only about four feet off the river bed, then it ran back another twenty feet or so to the next step, which was another ten feet or so feet and then back another maybe ten and up another thirty, and then it backed up about fifty feet to maybe ten feet up and another thirty feet back and then the big one of another fifty or so feet in drop. It was grand; it was huge and was mostly perfect.

On my side of the river, there was a slop that went up and out of the gorge, and as it went up, the slope got too steep for much of anything to climb. That being said, there was an area to the side of the waterfall between the third and fourth step that looked like it was higher than the waterfall and growing things. I saw trees and grass, some bushes too, but the slope never got over to the area.

While the waterfall had five steps, not counting the bottom or top, the land to the sides was different. On the far side, the wall went straight up. There were a few little areas that jutted out, but it was mostly a rock face that looked like it was the full hundred feet or more of the falls. On my side, things were different. The first landing, which is where I was trying to get to, was only about thirty or forty feet from ground level. There were large rocks that jutted out to make climbing up much easier. The tallest climb I’d have to do was about ten feet.

I started my way up to the landing to see if it could be my new home for a while. It couldn’t be forever since I wanted to find people and have a life that wasn’t barefoot and stranded. I also wanted to see what I could do to learn to read in this place.

It took about a half-hour from the time that I saw the falls until I was up to the plateau. The trees off to the side were just a little higher than the water. It looked like that if it flooded here, then there would have to be at least another four feet of water in height coming over the falls to reach the same elevation as the trees were on, and they stood a good fifteen feet away from the river.

Pulling myself up into the copse, I saw right away that I would like it here. The little plateau was just about 300 feet wide and between twenty-five and fifty feet deep. It was kind of a pie-shaped rise with the narrow side to the slope and the wide end facing the water. The slope-side was about a 15-foot drop to the ground as this place jutted out from where the slope would be. It meant the only way to get to this spot was to climb either up or down, which made me very happy. On the backside was the stone wall, which went up another ten feet to another ledge. I quickly jumped down to the waterfall level and went and looked in. Sure enough, there in the water, I saw some trout.

It seemed like this was the best day I had here. The dogs were unable to get me. I had fish and enough trees that I should be able to make some sort of shelter tonight. I started looking for a place to bed down. The back of my new yard hit the rock wall and went up about eighty feet on about half of it.

In my yard, I had several evergreen trees in a clump near the slope side, and from there, I saw some other hardwood trees nearby. I also had a fair number of scraggly cliff bushes and trees right on the edge. Near the back wall, there was a huge stone and a scattering of smaller ones around it. I figured that a section of the cliff broke off and fell down.

Night was coming on quickly, so I didn’t have much time to make my shelter that would come tomorrow. It might even be an all-day thing.

I went over to the evergreen trees; they were mostly fir, and so did the great thing where the insides all die out because of lack of light. I cleared out enough of the branches that I wouldn’t hit my head, then cut off some to make my bed. I ate my dinner and racked out.

As I settled in, I got the leveling message that I’d been waiting for.

By your actions today

You have increased your level in

Climbing (level 3)

Natural Shelters (level 2)

Hiking (level 2)

Tracking (level 3)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Running (Level 3)

I was looking forward to my first answer from Sam, but before I fell asleep, which is when he should answer me, I wanted to take a look to see if I could find what he did to me.

Level:0

——

Name: Arn

Race: Wild Human

HP: 20

SP:30

MP:40

Defense:1

—-

Primary Class: Enchanter*

Secondary Class: Linguist* (Ancient Languages)

—

Strength: 14*

Dexterity: 12*

Intelligence: 8

Willpower: 9

Vigor: 10

Vitality: 10

*Wild Humans have a plus 3 to strength

*Wild Humans have a plus 2 to dexterity

*Wild Humans have a plus 2 to all survivalist and warrior class skills

*Wild Humans have a negative 3 to all Language skills and can not start as the linguist class

*Wild Humans have a negative 1 to all Magic class skills due to low intelligence and cannot start as a enchanter class because of linguist issues

*Wild Humans all start out illiterate

—

Racial skills

Spear 1**

Survivalist 3**

Tracking 3**

Primary Class

Enchanting 1

Script* NA

Ink Making 1

Etching 1

Power Imbuing 1

Socketing 1

Secondary Class

Ancient Languages* NA

Non class skills

Hiking** 2

Climbing** 3

Primitive tool** 0

Natural Shelter** 2

Spear Fishing 2

Primitive cooking 4

Herbalism 0

Stone Knapping 1

Staff 4

Taekwondo 10

Running 3

Snake handling 0

*Due to Wild Human starting restrictions of being illiterate this skill can not advance until Intelligence is higher then 12

** Racial Bonus for Wild Human, effect levels of all Survivalist class and warrior class skills plus 2

Spell/Level/Mana cost/ Cast time

Communication spells

Beseech a greater knowledge** 1/50/45 seconds

**Once per day powered by sunlight

While I was looking over my info trying to see what changed, I fell asleep. That night, Sam didn't answer anything in my dreams.

I dreamed again of another life.