"Well," Cindy started, "we condensed most of the clues Paul gave us into a story which makes some sense. However, there are some details that don't fit anywhere yet."
Sharon continued, "We believe these are clues for later in our journey, probably useful at some other time. That includes that one random phrase from Tony's note."
Rich interrupted, "Okay, so what do we really know then?"
Cindy pulled out a paper from the pile the women had in front of them. "Shall I start with the spells, Sharon?"
"Go right ahead," Sharon replied, leaning back in her chair.
Cindy glanced over the paper in her hand, and looked around the group as she spoke. "Okay, well, we figured out some additional things about the spells Paul cast last night. First, the transportation spell which Kevin witnessed.
"It appears as though it was some sort of inter-dimensional or inter-world transport spell. Essentially, Paul knew about this world and brought us here with that spell. At least that's what he made it sound like. The problem is that, we believe, no one in this world except Paul has knowledge to cast the spell again to take us back. However, he did drop a possible hint as to a person who can help us out in figuring out more about the spell, but the hint was pretty vague and not particularly useful currently.
"While working this morning, we noticed a few strange things about this new world. It appears as though time passes more slowly here than in our world, by a factor of about six. I think that explains why all our timepieces that are still running were off." She pointed to a wall clock that claimed that it was near three o'clock.
"Three o'clock?" Rich interrupted. He leaned back in his chair, looking for the sun. After a quick mental computation, he added, "Well, it looks like it's a little before noon to me."
"Why would the clocks all be wrong?" Tony queried.
"Simple physics and spatial/temporal mechanics would dictate that anything using a vibrating crystal to keep track of time would adjust instantaneously to the proper frequency suitable to the temporal universe it was transferred to," Rich replied in one breath.
The group sat in stunned silence. "So that means what in English?" Scott queried, scratching his head.
Rich laughed. "I don't know. I was making it up as I went along. I'm a plasma physicist, not a temporal mechanics expert."
Cindy cleared her throat, regaining the attention of the group. "So anyway," Cindy continued, "what specific time of day it is here isn't important to us. What we care about is that we have about twelve days, including today, as Paul indicated, to figure this whole puzzle out. That should be a decent amount of time, I hope."
"Yeah, twelve days is a lot of time," Crystal said. "We shouldn't take much more than about eight to find Paul."
"Hopefully," Cindy added. She looked over her notes again as the others crunched on their meal. "Also, it appears that this world is very similar to ours, as I'm sure you all noticed this morning. We're still in a mountain valley, with the lake and forest around us."
Sharon nodded, adding, "We believe that this is some sort of parallel world, but we're not sure on that."
"So, what about the transformation spell?" Kevin asked Cindy.
"Sharon?" Cindy directed the question to the proper person.
Sharon stood up with paper in hand. "Well, it appears as though Paul, again, is the only one who knows how the spell works and how to reverse it. Either way, the solutions involve Paul, who is obviously elsewhere."
Rich sighed. "So, what do we know about Paul's whereabouts, then?"
Cindy replied, "Nothing really. He left no clue whatsoever as to where to find him, at least no clue that's obvious. Like we mentioned at the beginning, there's a few things here which we haven't been able to link to anything."
"Okay, so we're supposed to find Paul, but we have no idea where to start looking for him?" Crystal reiterated, swinging her spoon around, frustrated.
"Well, sort of no idea," Sharon responded. "There are a pair of villages within a day's walking distance of our location. We might be able to gather some information and additional supplies there."
"Well, those towns sound like some decent places to start gathering information," Tony said, patting his stomach after his hasty gobbling of his meal. "What other information did you get from our notes?"
Sharon glanced over the papers in front of her. "Well, we drew up a rough map of the area both from the hints off the notes and from our experience of this general area."
She set the crudely drawn map on the table for the others to look over.
"It's not the most accurate portrayal of the area, but it gets you the basic idea," Cindy explained. "We're assuming that the road we drove here on still exists in this world, which it may or may not. Either way, we at least have a basic idea of our general surroundings."
As the party studied the map, Sharon pulled out the next paper from her small stack. "Besides the area's geography, we also learned a bit about its history," she said, still browsing over the sheet.
"What good is the history of this place to our predicament?" Kevin retorted.
Sharon condescendingly glanced at Kevin. "You never know when any piece of information might be important, especially in these circumstances. Even small seemingly innocent remarks can hold vital clues."
Kevin thought about that for a moment. Sharon was about to continue when he interrupted her again.
"That's a good point. I'm sorry to interject like this, but do you mind if I add a question to ponder before you continue?"
Sharon sighed. "Like we don't have enough questions already. But sure."
Kevin paused to collect his thoughts. He stared off into infinity as he posed the question that was giving him a lot of trouble. "What is Paul's motive in this whole incident? I mean, why did he do this? Why did he teleport a bunch of his friends to a strange world to face life or death situations in the guise of a game? It just doesn't make any sense to me."
There was a silence as the party thought about that question. Doug was the first to offer a hypothesis. "Perhaps he's insane?"
"Or, more appropriately, maybe he's crazy and trying to get back at someone?" Crystal's voice had a spiteful tinge to it and her glare out of the bay windows would have been intense enough to burn a hole through the glass. The Richter students stared at her, disturbed by this sudden change in her demeanor. She sighed, softening her gaze.
"Perhaps I should explain. Us role-players had joined up at the request of Paul early in the school year, because he had a campaign he had just finished. So, we all played. It was a fun, well-thought out campaign, and the five of us: Paul, Rich, Sharon, myself, and Preston, who couldn't join us, became good friends and ended up playing more of Paul's games.
"Well, thanks to the inspiration I was getting from our campaigns, I started working on my own. Eventually, I brought it up to the group, and the idea was well-received. Everyone seemed to enjoy it when we played it. In fact, Preston and Sharon both mentioned that it was possibly a bit better than any of Paul's."
Rich and Sharon nodded in agreement. "We ended that one about a month ago. Crystal's an even more amazing storyteller than Paul," Rich explained.
Crystal continued. "So, I think he was naturally envious. It was about that time that he started working hard on this campaign. I'm just wondering if this is revenge for that campaign I made up?"
Rich shrugged, not convinced of the argument, "Probably not." He stroked his chin before offering his suggestion. "My guess is that he thinks this will get us involved in the story a bit better."
"That could be, but did he have to do it this drastically?" Lisa argued. "He didn't strike me as the sort of guy who would do something like this to his friends."
"That's true, in a way," Rich said, partially thinking aloud. "But I wouldn't put it past him."
Kevin, who had been listening to the others, but was still lost in his own thoughts, added his own spin to the hypotheses. "The reason I brought this up is that, in retrospect, he almost seemed to have planned this out in advance. This wasn't some sort of rash decision. You said, Sharon, that sometimes seemingly innocent remarks can be vital clues, right? I recall a few snippets of conversation I had with him which seemed weird to me at the time, but make sense now if we assume that he had premeditated this the whole time."
"Yeah, I know what you're talking about, now that you mention it," Rich said. "When he first came up with this idea, seemingly out of the blue, as Crystal mentioned, he seemed to be struggling with something pretty deep about the workings of the campaign. I offered to help him with it, but he flat out refused, which was strange for him. I had helped him out on previous campaigns we had done, and he seemed to have enjoyed and used my advice and comments in those cases. But he didn't want me knowing what was going on with this one. I took it at the time that he wanted to keep it secret because it was one of those campaigns that's spectacular and would be ruined if it wasn't secret. Now it's beginning to seem like he wanted to keep it secret so he could get away with this."
The group went silent again. Kevin broke the thoughtful silence, saying, "I'm sorry for bringing that up, but it's been bothering me all day. If we knew his motive a bit better, it might help us out a lot more."
"True," Sharon replied. She paused, glancing at the paper in her hand. "But that requires that we find him first, which brings us back to our current topic.
"What little of the history of this area we know might be important," Sharon continued. "This area has only been recently settled. There is no unifying government in this area, so each town governs itself. Apparently, a few years back, an evil king tried to take over this area, but was defeated by a powerful wizard and banished forever. That wizard sounds like the person Paul was referring to that might have some clue about the big spells Paul used on us. Other than these little snippets of history, we don't know too much more."
"Okay, so what should we do now that we know this?" Kevin asked.
Cindy responded. "Well, we really still need some more information before we can really find out anything about Paul, including his location, motive, and anything else."
"So, you two seem to be suggesting that we visit those two villages for information?" Rich asked Cindy and Sharon.
Cindy nodded. "And we should do it quickly too. Twelve days may seem like a lot of time, but when you have to walk most of the distances, twelve days is very little time."
"Walk?!?" Kevin exclaimed. "Can't we drive?"
Sharon replied, matter-of-factly, "The cars weren't teleported here with us, unfortunately. Also, there are almost no roads out here, so a car wouldn't be much help even if we had one."
"Hmm, good point." He looked visibly annoyed, but shrugged it off.
"Well, then, if we need to do it quickly, I say we split up into two groups and each take a village," Crystal suggested. "We do that tomorrow, and meet back here the day after to discuss our findings and plan our strategy after that."
"That sounds like a good idea, Crystal," Rich agreed.
"So, does that sound like a good plan?" Sharon asked the rest of the party.
After general agreement, Kevin asked the next question, "So what should our groups be?"
There was a fair amount of debate about the groups, who wanted to be with whom and what kind of mixture of abilities and talents would work best in the smaller groups. After a few minutes of debate, the groups were settled on.
"So, Rich, Crystal, Lisa, Scott, and Doug will head toward the forest village toward the northwest. And Kevin, Cindy, Tony, and myself will check out the village on the other corner of the lake," Sharon reiterated.
She looked around the group, noting the occasional nod of agreement.
"So, we'll leave tomorrow morning a little after sunrise," Cindy added. "When you get to the village, pick up some supplies, most importantly food fit for travel, and make sure to get a lot of information. The information we get from these towns might end up being our only hope to get back home in time."
"Sounds good," Doug replied. "What other information did Paul give us?"
Sharon and Cindy went on to explain some of the other tidbits of information they had extracted. There were a lot of snippets about the general area, which wild berries and plants were safe to eat, and other survival tips. But there was still Tony's strange sentence that didn't make any sense to the group, so they ignored it for the moment.
"Well, that's all we have," Sharon told the group, shuffling lightly through the stack of papers they just went through.
"Very interesting," Kevin said, mostly to himself. Addressing the group, he added, "So, now we have a plan. Anyone up for watching some videos for the rest of the day? I have a few that I --"
"Um, Kevin," Sharon interrupted. "In case you haven't noticed, we don't have any electricity here."
"Yeah, that would make video watching a bit difficult, now wouldn't it?" Tony added.
"I didn't think all that through before I had the idea. Oh well." Kevin crossed his arms and pouted slightly. "And I had myself so psyched up too."
"So, what should we do for the rest of the afternoon?" Lisa asked the group.
"Well, I say we practice a bit more," Rich suggested. "We're probably going to need our fighting abilities decently well honed pretty soon."
"That's true," Crystal added. "So, let's take the rest of the day and practice."
"Practice? What for?" Kevin complained. "So we can get all sweaty without any showers working?" He walked into the living room, sitting heavily down on one of the couches. "I've done enough of that practice already." He closed his eyes, ready to fall asleep.
A few moments later, Crystal's voice above him forced him to open his eyes again. "You and I have some unfinished business to attend to. You're going to practice whether or not you like it." Her sword was mere inches from his nose. Kevin chuckled nervously, noticing that some of the others were standing behind Crystal, cutting off any path of escape.
"And what if I still refuse?" he queried, uncomfortable with his current position.
Crystal removed the point of her sword from Kevin's facial area, sheathing it as a evil smirk crawled across her face. "If you refuse, you get to take a cold bath," she replied, pointing to the lake visible behind her. Doug, Rich, and Scott, who were part of the group behind Crystal, smiled evilly.
Kevin sat up, taking a deep breath, glowering at the group surrounding him. "Well, Ms. Teacher," he growled under his breath to Crystal, "shall we start?" Crystal followed him out the deck door.
Rich chuckled to himself. "Is he always this much fun to pick on?" he asked Scott.
"Yeah, but normally his tongue's a little quicker," Scott replied, a bit of concern in his eyes as he watched Crystal and Kevin begin sparring. "But, he's probably just adjusting to his new role."
Lisa rushed out the door, grabbing Scott by the arm as she passed by him. He stumbled forward, barely keeping up with her. "C'mon partner! You're my next partner," she told Scott.
Kevin, without losing his position against Crystal, added as they passed, "You mean Scott's your next victim?"
Okay, he's fine, Scott thought as his feet desperately tried to keep up with Lisa's brisk pace.
Cindy and Sharon, after cleaning off the table, started toward the deck door. Rich was on the deck, watching the others beginning their various practice routines. As the pair of women passed, he reached out and lightly grabbed Sharon's shoulder. Sharon looked back toward him, curiousity evident in her gaze.
"You wanna practice some magic together?" He looked almost sheepish asking the question. Cindy took the subtle hint and walked over toward Kevin and Crystal to watch them spar.
Sharon cocked her head to one side, somewhat confused by the invitation. After a quick moment of thought, though, she nodded. Pointing out to the island, she queried, "Shall we move to a better place then?"
Rich smiled and nodded. "Sounds good to me."