CharlesEBrown

  Carol rang the doorbell of the Hendrix house and an attractive woman who looked to be in her early forties answered. “Hello?’

  “Hi, I am Carol Bishop, I talked to Benjamin Hendrix this morning?”

  “Ah yes, the person doing some research into the history of the game. And you brought a third, perfect, as we had another canceltion; it seems the Methodist minister who usually joins us once a month will be missing this month. I’m Linda Carmichael - born Linda Hendrix.”

  “I thought you looked familiar; they used you in some of the early print ads for Dungeoneers, right? I am Malcolm Eisenstein and this is Detective Audrey Ross.”

  Linda smiled: “Detective? Fitting that the first time we have one at our table The Warden will be running!”

  Malcolm felt ready to burst at this: “Not Warden James?”

  “The one and only,” Linda replied.

  “Dave will be so jealous; about the only non-rule book he ever read was ‘Gods and Legends of the Realms’; he loved that book.”

  “Ah yeah, that was when he was sure he was about to lose Thengarian and was looking to py his first non-mage character,” Carol recalled.

  Linda’s eyes widened at this. “You said Thengarian?”

  “Yeah, that is our friend David’s character.” Carol replied

  “Hmm. Benji,” she called over her shoulder, “your guests are here, come say hi and show them around. I have to go talk to Father for a moment.”

  A slightly heavyset man with a thick gray beard, salt and pepper hair and hazel eyes that looked much younger than the rest of him walked over, smiling with his right hand extended. His voice was low and somehow both commanding and welcoming. “Hello, my new friends. I am Benjamin Hendrix, but please call me Benji, and welcome to Casa Hendrix. Follow me to the kitchen and then I will introduce you to the others. I suspect the one with the game bag is, ah, Carol whom I spoke to this morning?”

  “You guess correctly. And my friends are Malcolm and Det… ah, Audrey. She has never pyed before, so I hope you have a simple pre-gen for her?”

  “We all have pre-gens. The Warden is testing his scenario for GarrisonCon next month.”

  After adding the food that they had brought to the stuff in the kitchen and being told “everything here is public property, but if you grab one of the alcoholic drinks put a dolr and your car keys, if you drove, in the bowl by the fridge. Our other brother is a recovering alcoholic so we have a real breathalyzer on hand and will return the keys only if the driver is well below the limit.”

  After that he introduced them around - the people gathered were all the children or spouses of the children of the people who created the game and its earliest supplements. The Warden turned out to be an older man in a motorized wheelchair, with a strong voice, a mostly full head of white hair, and a T-Shirt dispying a robin on it. His grip was strong as he shook everyone’s hands and there was a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “Ah, I hear you are a new pyer?” He said to Audrey. “My body may be failing me; the curse of diabetes, I am afraid; but my hearing is as sharp as ever.”

  She smiled back: “yes, I came with my, ah, boyfriend Malcolm, to see what it is that keeps us apart one night a week,” she replied quickly. Carol gave Malcolm an inquisitive gnce and he gave the slightest nod.

  Benji chimed in at this with: “Yes, my dear, and not only will you learn, but you will learn from one of the best.”

  “Despite his reputation as a killer game master,” the voice of Jacob Cook, the son of Ezekiel Cook, the man who edited all of the earliest Dungeoneers products, chimed in.

  Another figure quietly joined the gathering, a tall, slim older man with iron gray hair, a long unkempt beard and ice blue eyes. Nobody seemed to notice him amidst the general chatter, until Benji excused himself and went over to talk quietly with him. In response to a quietly asked question, Benji pointed at Malcolm, Carol and Audrey. The old man nodded and left the room. Benji walked over to the trio: “My father would like to meet with you in his study. If you have to be back home early, he can meet now, or after the game otherwise. We do have guest rooms in case you might need to stay the night and head out early in the morning instead.”

  Malcolm was the first to respond: “If 'The Warden' lives up to his reputation we may only be pying an hour or two, so after the game might work best?”

  The others agreed and the game commenced. Audrey picked up the basics quite quickly and even saw through a few traps that the others had missed, when one bad decision and two bad die rolls ended Carol’s character. Another was lost before both Malcolm and Audrey lost their characters in the same combat. They were all having a great time but knew they had a long night ahead and the three excused themselves. Benji also stepped away from the table to lead them to his father’s study. “That was exciting. Not sure I would want to do it regurly, but I can understand why you guys do,” Audrey said to Malcolm. He just smiled, thanked Mister James for the game, and followed the others.

  The tall, thin man they had all briefly noticed earlier sat alone at a massive antique desk, smoking on an old and very fancy pipe. “The only vice I still permit myself. I can extinguish it if the smoke or smell offends?” He said by way of greeting.

  “Are you D. Erik Hendrix?” Carol asked.

  The man simply smiled and waved to the chairs scattered around the room. “Please sit, I suspect we have much to discuss. I take it you know Thengarian?”

  There was a moment of shocked silence, as Malcolm and Carol exchanged surprised looks and Audrey gnced between them, not quite sure what was going on. Finally, Carol responded: “We have a friend who pys a Mage, or, ah, did he make it to Grand Mage at OmegaCon?” She turned to ask Malcolm.

  “Grand Mage,” he replied, nodding.

  “Yes, our friend David pys Grand Mage Thengarian.”

  “Is his family name something like King or Wester or…”

  “West. David West,” Audrey offered, the first thing she was sure of since they walked into this study.

  The old man nodded. “Then, though he may not know it yet, he is Thengarian. Has he begun to gather the Five to him?”

  Puzzled, Malcolm asked: “You mean like the talk show?”

  The old man ughed. He had a deep ugh, loud and rumbling, that seemed to belong to a much rger man. “No, The Lost Arch Mage will gather a Warrior, a Trickster, a Healer and a World Walker to his side.”

  Malcolm said: “Well he is dating a warrior named Thellissandra, if that means anything.”

  “That was my mother's name,” their host said, wistfully. “Granted not that uncommon where I come from.”

  Silence settled in the room as what this implied sunk in. Audrey was the first to think of anything to say: “So what exactly is going on here?”

  The old man rose to his feet and walked over to one of the many overstuffed bookcases in the room. He pulled out three items. “I suspect that, at most, you have seen this second one, as it had the greatest print run?”. He set down the three booklets: The Apprentice's Betrayal, The Lost Arch Mage, and The Destiny of Two.

  “I have seen the second one,” Malcolm said. Carol nodded agreement, “but have not read any “

  “Not too surprising,” the old man said, “the first was really only avaible at OmegaCon 2 and is now probably the most valuable book we ever published, while the third just did not sell well.”

  “And what does this have to do with anything?” Audrey asked.

  The man chuckled at this. “If you had read the first two you might already know the answer.”. He took a deep breath and paused a moment before proceeding: “Before I came here, to a world of low magic to deaden the impact of my visions, I was known as Darvik Henax.”

  The name tugged at Malcolm’s mind for a second, and then he blurted out: “The lost son of Guildmaster Henax of Sulbrod?”

  Again, that ugh erupted from the man. “Luke insisted that if I wrote my dad into a supplement, I had to at least mention myself. That was our compromise.”

  “So, you are from Pyrroth?” Carol asked.

  “Yes. When I first arrived here, the first people I met who showed me kindness and were willing to help me learn how to fit in were Luke, a w student with an interest in writing, and my first wife, and mother of three of my four children, Helene. The idea of making a game based on the world I came from was Luke’s, after he introduced me to a war game that he was into. And Helene was a finance person who got us in touch with potential backers. It proved to be a good way to learn your nguage without relying on magic and proved profitable as well.”

  “This is all fine,” Carol said, “but what does it have to do with David West?”

  He made a gesture that indicated he was getting there but not there yet, before resuming his speech: “My brother was an expert swordsman. No special skills or anything, just really good with a bde. He wound up with a party of adventurers who raided Viltrask Keep. He took as his share of the loot, a book that he could not open, called The Legacy of Five. I was a boy almost in my teen years and found it amongst the stuff of the brother I practically worshiped.

  “Unlike my brother and the rest of his band of treasure hunters, the book opened for me. Opened and vanished after pouring a dizzying array of information into my young brain. Information that took the form of prophecies.”

  He paused to take a long drag on his pipe and a sip from a gss at his side before resuming: “the visions I had were manageable at first. Confusing but able to be controlled. Over a period of months, however, they became worse, to the point where it was feared they would drive me mad. One of my brother’s friends knew a Magister who cimed to have visited other worlds and took me to him. He heard my story and said I was likely doomed unless I could go to a world where magic was diminished and get my visions under control. An artificer he knew understood the secret of making portal stones and they used one to send me here, on my sixteenth birthday.

  “For five years, I seemed cured of my mady, and had learned to fit in. We started our company just after my twenty-first birthday.

  “However, shortly after that, while working with Luke and the rest of our growing team, I found the visions returned. Not as vivid or chaotic, but they did. However, I also discovered that if I wrote them down, they would fade from my memory. When Luke saw my notebooks full of them, he came up with the idea for our first ‘multi-generational’ adventure series, where the core adventures would be set decades apart, with the assumption that the pyers would create new characters for the first one, The Apprentice’s Betrayal, py the same characters near the end of their careers in The Lost Arch Mage, and their heirs - students or children - for the finale.

  “We also decided to use them to py-test two new css ideas, the Trickster in The Apprentice’s Betrayal, and the World Walker, who would actually be needed to bring back The Lost Arch Mage.”

  “Still not seeing where this connects to our friend,” Carol interjected.

  “I think I am seeing a pattern, but we are missing key pieces, I think,” Audrey added.

  “You are quite perceptive. Perhaps even… hmm. Well long before I came here, another had fled to this world, but he fled political strife. He was called Aldorus and was the Arch Mage of the Great Western Kingdom.”

  “The kingdom that fell to internal strife and set up foundations for the political map of the game setting,” Carol commented.

  “Yes, you are seeing some more of the pattern now, I think,” Hendrix replied, sounding a little impressed. “Aldorus fled with his wife to this world and had two children - a son shortly after arrival and a daughter a few years ter. From those children were born more generations, until now, when Thengarian was born of his bloodline, I believe under the name of David West. I bet he only pys spell casters, right, and the only one he was able to keep alive was named Thengarian?”

  Malcolm’s eyes goggled at this: “absolutely true.”

  “The first story happened about twenty years ago, as a Magister was betrayed by an apprentice who then formed an alliance with the King of the Dead. This apprentice was also a World Walker, able to not only move through the hidden paths between realities, but able to lock people into worlds with a thought. A person who is locked to a world can only ever leave it through a full Prismatic Gate - something only an Arch Mage can create safely - or with the aid of a World Walker. My vision, and the story, then jumped ahead to what is now the present day but was then the future, as he hid out for a while, then was arrested and brought to trial for his crimes. He escaped to a world with limited magic, the world the Lost Arch Mage was in. That is the second chapter, the one your friend now lives through.”

  “So, you are saying you knew how this was going to happen?” Carol asked.

  “Oh no; I saw several potential paths. In fact, that was part of what was driving me mad and forced me to come here; the fact that I never knew which visions were going to happen and was beginning to be uncertain as to what was vision and what was the world around me. We wrote in as many paths as we could, with options for the pyers to go down any one, merge a few, or even come up with their own route. The st book may not happen, depending on a lot of variables - or it might have led to a fourth that I had a faint inkling of.” He paused to take another drink and smoke his pipe some more, before pushing the three books across the table. “Take these. Read them. They may help you prepare, or to warn your friend. And I have additional copies. I suppose I could autograph them for you?”

  Malcolm was already looking through one of them and noticed something: “Mister James edited these?”

  “Yes, he did. Was the st thing he did before falling on his sword, metaphorically, and quitting instead of having to fire a quarter of the workforce as requested by the people who bought out my share and downgraded Luke’s position to ‘lead designer' due to a poorly written part of our charter “

  “Well, I'll see if I can get him to sign it for David; it will not be as good as getting him to sign his ‘Gods of the Realms’ but we did not bring that,” Malcolm said, rising from his chair.

  “‘Gods of the Realms'?” the man who had once been Darvik Henax said. “Why don’t you take my copy; it was the first book I had no direct involvement with, so everyone signed the copy they gave me. Send me David’s copy and take mine to repce it “

  “Your own copy? Are you serious?” Malcolm replied in shock.

  Again, that ugh. “Rarely, but in this case yes, very serious. And you might want to read a few sections of it, Cyrannon the Entertainer and Bel-Shar, Guardian of the Ways to start,” he said, taking the book from the shelf and handing it reverently to Malcolm, who seemed to be in awe of it.

  “Now, I am an old man who needs his rest, so you had best go chat with the others for a bit and then head home. Do not tell anyone what I have given you or what I have said, except Thengarian, er, David, himself. And read. Not just what I have given but anything. Reading expands horizons as much as travel. And remember, Destiny does not py favorites and loves to throw curve balls.”

  “Thank you, sir, for everything,” Malcolm said, offering his hand. The old man shook it gdly.

  “Yes, thank you very much for all of this, and I will see to it he sends you David’s copy as a repcement for this one, even if we have to bring it in person,” Carol added.

  “I would like that, but I have a feeling you will not be given a chance while I still draw breath. It was an honor and a pleasure to meet all of you, especially you,” he added, looking right at Audrey. “You are quiet and perceptive and remind me in many ways of the sister I left behind so many years ago. Keep these troublemakers in line, and be careful, all of you. Now I must bid you a good night.” He took one more puff of his pipe, drained the gss he had been sipping from all evening, and swiftly left the room by a side door.

  They all remained where they were, with Audrey and Carol still seated, Malcolm standing and holding the four books.

  Finally, Audrey spoke first. “We should probably get going. This is, of course, completely insane, but also far too real, right?”

  Carol stood up at this. “Absolutely, on all counts. Put those books in my bag so the others will not see them and have questions we cannot answer,” she added to Malcolm. Malcolm handed her the books and offered his arm to Audrey to help her ease out of the chair she was still seated in.

  She accepted with a slight ugh, “thanks, it was softer than I had expected and did not want to let me go.”

  “I can understand that,” he said as their eyes briefly met but she quickly looked away.

  Carol looked like she was literally biting her tongue as she put the books in her bag and walked over to the door. She opened it just as Benjamin walked up “ah, good. Everything is breaking up for the night, and I wanted to see if you folk were ready to say good night.”

  “Yes, and thank you,” Carol replied. “We got a lot of the history of the game we were looking for and met two living legends in the bargain. All in all, a great night!”

  “I am gd to hear it, and the general consensus is you three are welcome back any time, just check first as some weeks we do board games or py other systems instead. And occasionally we meet either at a barbecue pce down the road or the library three blocks over instead.”

  They all thanked him for the invitation, spent some time thanking and saying goodbye to the others, and then headed out.

  Malcolm and Carol chatted casually as she drove. Audrey remained quiet in the passenger seat until they were almost back at the highway. She then said: “Carol, do not take the on ramp and turn left at the next light.”

  “But this is the way home? Okay,” she replied, noticing an odd expression on the detective’s pretty face.

  As they approached the light, Malcolm pointed to a building they passed and asked nobody in particur, “wonder if that was the barbecue pce Benji mentioned?”

  “If you can time it so the next light hits red while you are under it, that would be ideal,” Audrey said.

  Carol grinned and did exactly that.

  “Now gun it and head back to the highway, and… oh no! Just as I thought, two blocks from the Hendrix pce we picked up a tail and they just ran a red light to keep us in sight!”