Leaving Mundania Read Online Free Page B

Pratchett’s
Discworld
books, the granddaughter of death. The rat in her arms was the Death of Rats, another character from the series. Verva, of course, had never seen any of these people before and was confused about where she was.
    Two men in street clothing also sat at the table with their buttons on. One was rather rotund, and from talking to Molly I knew he played a sentient tree that had recently been turned into a human. The other, very slender, man wore a limp white T-shirt and round glasses. He told me that I didn’t have physical form and that I wouldn’t until I chose a house. To illustrate his point, he moved his staff toward my head and told me that it went right through my body as if I were air.
    Then he put his fist on top of his head and said, “You see a tall man with a staff in swirling brown robes.”
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    He returned his fist to his head. “You see a tall man with a staff in swirling brown robes.”
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    He explained that that was what I saw when I examined him, despite the street clothes he wore. As I soon learned, putting a fist atop one’s head signified an out-of-character remark, as did crossing index and middle fingers and holding a hand aloft as if taking an oath. Many Avatar characters also covered their buttons to go out-of-character, or OOC. Out-of-game, or OOG, was the preferred term for this in other games.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” he said, back in-game.
    â€œVerva,” I said.
    â€œGod bless you,” he said, as if I had sneezed. He laughed. Verva glared. Evidently she didn’t appreciate jokes about her name.
    With that brief introduction out of the way, the table turned its attention to the frizzy-haired woman, who talked about her fright and wanted to know where her pup was. By asking questions about her world we established that she was a werewolf who had popped into the Nexus during some sort of chase.
    I was next on the agenda. It was like a game of twenty questions. Did I suck blood? No. Did I make giant machines? No. Did I come from a world that had magicians? Yes, but they were charlatans, I think. Was I a princess? Definitely not. I was a detective, for chris-sakes. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The melancholy elven princess character in need of rescuing was a well-known trope in the larp world, and most players found her tiresome. Was my world called Earth? I thought it probably was. Did I remember how I got here? Well, I was investigating a crime, and the last thing I remember was an explosion. They, the others, the villains, had gotten me. Oh, everyone nodded,
they.
Who were they?
    Lucky for me, I didn’t have to explain too much. Many Avatars new to the Nexus suffer “Nexal amnesia,” a condition that is both plot point and character device. Noobs could selectively remember theirorigins, which allowed new players, or old players with new characters, to take some time to develop a backstory.
    After a half hour or so, I was ready for the action to start. Weren’t we supposed to go on some sort of adventure? Everyone remained seated, exchanging small talk in the personas of their characters. It was like a cocktail party where I wasn’t allowed to talk about the articles I’d read or the movies I’d seen because, of course, Verva hadn’t read or seen anything from the twenty-first century. Over the course of the next hour, I began to realize that these kinds of conversations helped develop character. As the Avatars talked with one another, they swapped stories about their past or about past adventures inside the Nexus. It took me some time to realize that these tales must be partially improvised. When someone asked me whether I had tommy guns in my world, I was flummoxed. Did I want to come from a world with gangsters or not? I hadn’t considered Verva in these terms before.
    Over the course of the evening, I discovered that Verva liked logic and