Proceed to Section Z Read online

  There are startlingly lucid details before the weapon’s butt smacks your jaw—details like the rusted rivets in its metal edges; the aged, unpolished wooden casing; the ancient red tag reading “Repossessed By The ‘Toys for Guns’ Program.” Then, impact. It isn’t so much a matter of feeling pain. It’s a matter of being pain, becoming one with pain, Steffan McPainFilledFessel, hero in crisis.

  You stagger. Ahead, there, down the table a ways, is the Regent, bellowing through the confusion. You start running toward him, blindly and half-conscious, but steadily. And you would have made it, too, if some coward hadn’t chosen that exact moment to crawl from under the table. Your knees slam into his head, while the rest of your body hurtles at, into, and onto the Regent.

  What happens next, you’re too disoriented to remember.

  “Did you see the boy?” he spits. “A single blow, and he’s a blithering imbecile. Running like a coward.”

  “Yeah,” the companion agrees. “Just like the character in that Stephen Crane novel—what was it? Rabbit Redux?”

  “Fools.” The whisper is chilled hiss, and they turn to face their leader, the man named Icer. “You underestimate adversity. One misstep doesn’t eliminate the danger.”

  They are appropriately chastised.

  You come to, but slowly. You’re lying on a chubby-faced fellow, and others are helping you up. Well, not really helping. More like choking you, actually. The chubby man looks oddly familiar. Maybe it’s the authoritarian droop of his jowls.

  Your body’s spun to face the faces of the hands lifting you to your feet. “You feeble-minded numskull! What the hell did you think you were doing?” Ah, now you’ve got it. That chubby guy was Regent Nicholas III. And these folks grabbing you—some of the Mentors, like Chief Jester Dorwin, Commander Senecalius, Prime Counsel Beffles the Philosopher, people you’re starting to remember, and all of whom look very, very angry.

  So, what the hell did you think you were doing?

  a) “Waning rhapsodic when I should have been waxing.” Proceed to Section J.

  b) “Proving that a fool and his wits are soon parted.” Proceed to Section K.

  c) “I’ve no idea whatsoever.” Proceed to Section L.

  SECTION I

  “My God!” someone screams. “It’s the Heisenbergian Cryotherapists of Ogallala!”

  You have, of course, heard of Heisenberg, whose work is haltingly studied by apprentices of philosophy, comedy, and martial arts alike. You’re a bit muddled, however, on exactly what a cryotherapist from Ogallala might be. One thing’s for sure: These particular Ogallalan cryotherapists are endangering the woman who’s won your heart.

  You stand, positioning your body as a shield for Mythanda against the incoming raiders. The first of the force reaches you, a gaunt, pock-faced man wielding a vicious rifle-weapon from the days before Last War. “You’re standing between me and my objective, boy.”

  Comedy. “My Pop’s bigger than your Pop,” you say.

  The man looks perplexed, glancing left and right in search of your Pop.

  Philosophy. “An irresistible thesis meeting an immovable antithesis,” you say.

  The man growls at you. He seems the sort who dislikes out-of-context pith.

  Heroism. You kick soundly to his groin. He falls.

  That’s about all you remember for a while. Except, of course, for being picked up by the next three assailants, jostled over their heads, and then thrown back-first, full force, atop the banquet table. Your impact is hard enough to send it crashing down. You go with it.

  “Did you see the boy?” he spits. “Trying to take all of us on single-handed. The idiot! Thinking he could win. A total idiot!”

  “Yeah,” the companion agrees. “Sort of like that Dostoevski novel.”

  “Oh, yeah? Which one?”

  “Fools.” The chill of hissed whisper makes them turn to face their leader, Icer. “You throttled the boy, true. But I notice you failed to kill him.”

  They are appropriately chastised.

  You come to, but slowly. You face a spinning ceiling and vague, swirling shapes. One of them comes into focus—the stern, disturbed visage of the Regent. Others gather as well, and you regain your senses enough to recognize them—the Mentors, Chief Jester Dorwin, Commander Senecalius, Prime Counsel Beffles the Philosopher, all looking at the Regent with nervous concern.

  The Regent is kneeling beside an empty, toppled chair, Mythanda’s chair, blood trickling down his forehead. He regards you weakly and says, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Yeah,” Chief Jester Dorwin joins in testily. “We’d like to know that ourselves.”

  Yes, what the hell did you think you were doing?

  a) “Leveraging my deductive impact!” Proceed to Section J.

  b) “Keystone copping the coup de main!” Proceed to Section K.

  c) “I’ve no idea whatsoever!” Proceed to Section L.

  SECTION J

  “Swell,” Chief Jester Dorwin grumbles, leering at you through his only good eye. “Your trainin’ certainly saved the day, McFessel.”

  There is rapid movement by all three Mentors, and you’re disoriented. You’re aching worse than after any training session, and you’re wondering how the band of cryotherapists managed to escape without losing a single member of their attack force.

  You stare confused at Mythanda’s empty chair.

  “They’ve taken her,” you hear the Regent say as Militia Commander Senecalius lifts him from the floor. You rush to grip the Regent’s other arm, just to help, just to get involved with the flurry of activity, and it happens to be the arm (you learn immediately) that suffered a compound fracture in the attack. Once the Regent’s screams subside, he looks at you, squinting. “You were sitting right beside her, boy. Wasn’t there anything you could do to stop them?”

  Commander Senecalius sniffs. “The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once claimed that every dog has his day,” he quotes dryly. “Obviously, this was not such a day for our dog McFessel.”

  The reproach stings you, especially since you feel you deserve it. You release the Regent and wander dazed to where Prime Counsel Beffles is gently tending the slain bodies of the other apprenticeship graduates. He looks up when you approach, his eyes filled with stunned remorse.

  You crouch beside him, gazing at the dead. “It was so quick,” you say pathetically. “My God, so fast. I don’t even know what a cryotherapist is.”

  Beffles smiles sadly, wisely. “Shut up, you useless little shit. Fuck off and let us do our jobs.” You stand to leave. Beffles jumps to urge you on by cuffing the back of your head. “Listen,” he yells to the other Mentors. “We’ve got to go after them. Now, before the trail’s cold.”

  “I shall dispatch units of my swarthiest thinkers,” Senecalius decrees.

  “No. Beffles is right,” Chief Jester Dorwin says. “We gotta go, too. Includin’ him.”

  “McFessel?” Beffles protests. “What the hell for? You know what you get when you cross an irradiated donkey with a pile of its own turds? This asswipe!”

  “Leave the jokes to me,” Dorwin growls. “The fact is, it’s our fault this happened. That includes McFessel. Do we gotta piss away more time arguin’ about it?”

  “No, no, indeed not,” Senecalius replies, sounding thoughtful. “There was confusion. We were surprised. Perhaps young McFessel can still redeem himself if he helps us find ...”

  “My daughter,” the Regent feebly finishes the phrase.

  Beffles is disgruntled, but concedes. “All right, maybe Senecalius is right,” he grumbles. “Pull together my gear and some provisions,” he orders you.

  “And if you would,” Senecalius adds, “gather the same for myself and Jester Dorwin, Asswipe.”

  “Right away!” you say. Another chance. An opportunity to save Mythanda. “We’ll bring her back,” you say.

  The Regent regar
ds you again, his jaw clenched with emotion. “Will you?”

  You swear that you will.

  Proceed to Section M.

  SECTION K

  The Mentors stare at you as you give your response ... the most unnerving stare coming from the single eye of Chief Jester Dorwin. “A real comedian,” he sneers. “Your fellow alumni are really laughin’ it up.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. The other graduates lie motionless on the floor. You try to imagine the chortles they’d be giving, were they still breathing.

  You sure can keep them in stitches, can’t you?

  “Why did they take her?” the Regent asks. Blood trickles into his eyes, forcing him to blink. “She never did anything wrong, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Senecalius affirms gently, applying a bloodied rag to the Regent’s wound, ignoring his own.

  Your stomach lurches as you realize that Mythanda is no longer in the hall.

  “We’ll get her back, your Excellency,” says Beffles, who holds his left arm tenderly. He turns from the Regent and scans the room until his eyes, somewhat begrudgingly, come to rest on you, the only other person standing. “Well? Make yourself useful.”

  You move to go, but then stop. “I’ll do better this time,” you swear.

  Beffles looks at the corpses strewn about the room. “I sure as hell hope so,” he says.

  Proceed to Section M.

  SECTION L

  “I’ve no idea whatsoever!” you reply. “What did you expect me to do?”

  “The right thing,” Chief Jester Dorwin answers. “It’s that simple.”

  “They’ve taken her,” the Regent says, more to himself than to anyone else. “They were going to take me, but they didn’t.” He looks up at you. “Why did they do that?”

  You shake your head. You knew that you’d fail your duty to someone by choosing in the manner you did. You knew that. But why doesn’t anyone else understand it? Did you want other people to suffer because of how you chose to react? You know you didn’t. But that doesn’t help matters. It never has helped.

  “Someone’s got to go after them,” say Prime Counsel Beffles the Philosopher. “Now.” The Mentors look at each other, at their wounds. Beffles nurses a sprained left arm. Senecalius struggles to keep himself upright, his left ear now nothing more than bloody pulp. They all look at you.

  “Gather gear and provisions for a hasty expedition,” Commander Senecalius orders you.

  “But—”

  “Yeah, we know, you’re a fool,” Chief Jester Dorwin says, looking you up and down with his one good eye. “But it don’t look like any of the other apprentices will be helpin’ us much.” He gestures to the other bodies in the room. Near the steward’s body, one of the graduates lies with his face to the floor, his neck bent at an improbable angle. In the far corner, another student is curled in on himself, motionless, his dead hands still clutching the sticky, saturated fabric covering his stomach. Either one of them could have been you. But they aren’t. So why don’t you feel relieved?

  You’re alive and didn’t die a hero.

  Good going.

  “We’ll bring her back,” you say.

  The Regent regards you, his jaw tight with emotion. “Will you?”

  You swear that you will.

  Proceed to Section M.

  SECTION M

  The Mentors are arguing about which way to go. Dorwin says north, believing the north to hold a logical climate for cryotherapists and considering a showdown on a glacier to be rife with comic possibilities. Beffles contests for the south, preferring the irony of battling out-of-clime cryotherapists. And Senecalius says west, claiming that a path toward the wastelands of the Radiation Ridges (formerly, and redundantly, known as the Rocky Mountains) would be the subtlest stratagem of a cunning enemy.

  All you ever really wanted to do was sit and read. That’s how life was before all this, and it was fine with you. But you were forced into choices. You were trapped by a decision tree. And whenever you managed to make up your mind, there was always another choice.

  None of them is working out so well yet.

  You hate these fucking text adventures.

  All right, yes, there’s supposed to be conflict. You’re supposed to take false steps. But in the end, you should be able to resolve those mistakes, to backtrack a little, to emerge victorious, reassured of the youth-inspired fiction that all conflicts can be resolved and that a life well selected is a life well lived.

  Your name is Steffan McFessel. Three years ago, your father forced you to make an apprenticeship decision, and now you can’t even remember what your choice was among the limited options. Military skill? You’ve taken plenty of beatings. Philosophy? Your mind is a sophistic post-War muddle. Comedy? You’re the punch line, every time.

  Even your choice of Mentor hasn’t mattered. Here you are, now, questing with all three of them: Prime Counsel Beffles; Chief Jester Reginald Dorwin; Militia Commander Senecalius. There are other parties out searching for the Regent’s daughter, of course. But this is the party, the group the Regent holds responsible for the assailants’ success in kidnapping Mythanda. This is the party that had damned well better bring her back.

  You believe that. Because you’ve learned something no Mentor has ever tried to teach you. You’ve learned that all your possible paths are means to an end. The true end is true love.

  What is heroism, after all, except a quest to win the heart of a helpless maiden by saving her from an evil force? And what is comedy but a quest to win the love of an audience, the devotion of the crowd? And what is philosophy but love of wisdom, love struggling to embrace the Entirely Other to nurture self growth, self concern, self love?

  You’re drifting, boy. Snap out of it. You’ve found your calling, now get on with it. Start the chase. Find the girl. Win her love. And have done with it all. It’s your destiny.

  What does your party do?

  a) Head east. No one else has proposed it, and, damn it, you’re solidly self-determined now. Proceed to Section N.

  b) Head north. A cryotherapist is likely to take Mythanda toward chillier zones. Proceed to Section O.

  c) Head south. Irony may be trite, but it’s predictable. Proceed to Section P.

  d) How can you know which way to go without any clues? Proceed through Sections N, O, P, and Q in order.

  SECTION N

  After some deliberation, you convince the Mentors to proceed easterly. Though they aren’t thrilled with the decision, they all agree that it’s the fairest, since one Mentor’s choice was not picked over that of the others’. Besides, if something goes wrong, they can blame you.

  Three days pass, and you find yourselves outside of Utterly Busted (previously “Broken”) Bow, Nebraska. You’ve seen very few people in your travels, and those you did meet knew nothing of cryotherapists, Hegelian or otherwise. It is at this point that you are set upon by a band of scraggly bearded folk wearing penny-loafers and a hodgepodge of alma mater sweatshirts. Perhaps they can help ...

  “Hey, guys, stand and deliver!” one of the more unkempt men says, brandishing a rust-tinged sword. “Or be pricked pretty nasty twixt spleen and spine.”

  “This is a joke, right?” says Mentor Beffles.

  The wise, despotic philosopher is answered with the impact of a sword hilt to his skull. He gurgles and falls unconscious to the ground.

  “Groundling!” the unkempt man bellows. “You’ve got the balls to dare scoff at the Laureates of Utterly Busted Bow?”

  “For certain they do, brother grad student,” one of the assailants answers for you. “Let’s slay them anon, so that we can, like, wallow in rueful angst for such a bad deed.”

  “Forsooth, dude, stay thy hand,” the leader of Laureates answers. “Let’s assay our victims first, ‘cause even in time of certain death, the human mind can hit on new wisdom. Now. You.” He prods Chief Jester Dorwin with his sword. “D
efine, as you may, a poet.”

  “Pansy,” Dorwin says. He joins Beffles on the ground.

  The man moves to Senecalius. “A poet?”

  “Ah,” the Commander says, “an individual who composes verse that is characterized by a condensed use of language more vivid and intense than ordinary prose.”

  “Textbook. Trite.” The Commander falls down, clutching his stomach.

  The man now stands in front of you. “And you?”

  You eye the armed men around you. They all look exceptionally eager to be angst-ridden at your expense. Your situation is desperate. But not hopeless.

  You reach slowly, thoughtfully, down to the ground, grasp a handful of pine needles, and show them to the Laureate. When his eyes fix on them, you throw them in the air and punch him in the nose.

  The glade falls to silence. The Laureate dabs at the blood trickling from both nostrils.

  “Dudes, I must ponder this,” he says, and he and his cohorts disappear into the surrounding wood.

  You attend to the Mentors as they regain their senses. They are more than impressed with your handling of the situation. Regardless, they decide that a change of direction may be in order, lest they repeat the encounter.

  Proceed to Section O.

  SECTION O

  A week of your journey passes, and you travel north after a brief false start eastward. You search in vain for any sign of paths taken by Heideggerian cryotherapists. Surprisingly, the Mentors’ attitude toward you has begun to soften. You’ve faithfully prepared all their meals, laid out and repacked their beddings each night and morn, scrubbed their laundry every other day, saved them from a roving band of mad Poet Laureates, all the sorts of things expected of a good apprentice-squire. This morning you cross to the north side of the Dismal River and survey the periphery of Nebraska National Forest. The party holds a strategic conference directly in front of a sign reading:

  NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST

  300 YARDS TO EXTREME PERIL