FicWad

Part 1: Valkyrie



I awoke in a body that was not my own. It took me a few moments to realize that, however. The first thing I noticed was that I was lying on my back, staring up a clear, starry night sky. The sky was dense with stars, moreso than I’d ever seen, even camping in the wilderness. Looking slightly downward, past my feet, I saw an enormous white spire which seemed to glow for a moment, then faded. It was round, and as my eyes dizzily tracked it downward, I could see that it flared out toward the base. Then I saw my breasts.

I hadn’t had breasts a few minutes ago, I was pretty sure. What had I been doing? Right, I’d been sitting in my apartment, playing one of my favorite online video games. I must have passed out, and now I was here. And I had boobs. Big ones. Bizarre theories shot through my head: I’d been kidnapped and someone had given me breast implants as a joke or experiment; I’d had an embolism and was hallucinating as I died; I’d been drugged and my brain transplanted into another body; I was in a coma, and this was the vivid dream my mind was creating. They all seemed equally plausible at first, but the embolism and coma ones soon won out as I gathered my wits. I lifted my head, then bolted upright. Around me, hundreds of other people were doing the same. We were all naked, with our feet oriented toward the towering white spire. There seemed to be a fairly equal mix of men and women, possibly slightly favoring the men, all them built like fashion models. I looked down at my new body.

I was now a slender woman with pale skin. My body was also completely hairless. For some reason, I felt a need to touch my head, and found that I had long hair there. Just none below that. My beard was gone, and my face felt soft and delicate as I ran a hand over it. My breasts looked too large for the slender body they were on, but they looked natural, not like implants. I very tentatively touched one. It was extremely odd. I’d felt women’s breasts before--I was no virgin--but this time, my hand was much smaller, and I got the double sensation of the familiar feeling through my hand well as through the breast itself. My breast. It creeped me out.

Around me, people were standing up, calling out in questioning or angry voices. I hopped to my feet. My body felt so light. Sure, this body probably weighed no more than 120 lbs or so, half the weight of the one I had left, but there was more to it than that. I flexed my arm and touched it. The muscles were like steel cables under soft, smooth skin. That was also creepy, and raised even more questions.

Since everyone was naked--and attractive--few people seemed to feel a need to cover themselves. Instead, they were all looking around, just as confused as I was. Well, maybe not quite as confused as I was. No one else looked like they’d awoken in a body of the wrong gender. Some were pretty enamored with themselves, though. I saw several men admiring their own biceps, pecs, and abs, as well as a few women with similar pleasantly-astonished looks as they examined themselves.

Despite my confusing body, I had still been one of the first to stand up, which gave me a good view of the place I was in. There was no moon I could see, everything was lit only by starlight, but aside from a lack of color, I could see nearly as well as I could have in daylight. We were on a huge, circular field centered on the spire. My memories of football fields led me to judge that it was of a comparable distance from the spire to a wooden fence surrounding it all, beyond which were the dark forms of trees. I had to revise my estimate of the number of naked people here from several hundred to a few thousand. I was about halfway between the spire and the fence.

More and more people were standing up, and I realized that my new body was not very tall. All of the men and the majority of women I could see were at least several inches taller than me. We had been lying as close to one another as possible without touching, so as more people stood up, it began to feel very cramped. Everyone seemed afraid to touch anyone else, for which I was very glad. A man bumped me from behind, jarringly, but I caught myself with a single step, to my surprise. The force of the impact seemed like it should have sent me stumbling even in my old body. I’d read that women had up to twice as many nerve endings as men in a given area, and therefore felt pain more intensely, so maybe that was it.

“Shit! Sorry.” the man behind me said.

I turned just enough to nod to him. “S’alright,” I replied. It was a vague, semi-slurred phrase I’d picked up in my youth for use when bumping someone in a hallway. It could easily be interpreted as either “it’s all right” or “sorry” by the listener, so it worked whether or not they apologized or felt they deserved an apology.

The man was a foot taller than me and built like a Greek god. I saw him glance downward to locate my face, as he had looked over my head at first. His gaze slipped lower, then back up above my head. In the pale starlight, I couldn’t tell if he was blushing, but he quickly repeated “Sorry!” and turned away. He seemed to know the guy next to him.

I was distracted by the sound of my voice. It was soft, high-pitched, and extremely girly--not what I had expected. Of course, my subconscious had been expecting my voice, but even my conscious mind was confused, as I would have expected a lower pitch and throatier voice from a female version of myself.

This wasn’t a female version of myself, though. I’d been an overweight but solidly-built man before. This body was petite--short and slender, with delicate hands and thin arms and legs. I could feel my long hair falling about halfway down the back of my rib cage.

Oh. The realization struck me like a blow to the head. I felt dizzy, and stood stock-still to avoid stumbling into another of the naked people crowded too closely around me. I’m my character from the game.

It was then that I knew I must be dreaming or hallucinating. It made sense. I was playing Gleamheart Online when I had passed out or died or whatever, so it had been on my mind, and now I was dreaming about being my character. Except that there’d been no nudity in the game, and here everyone was stark naked. If I was my character, where was all my magical weapons and armor?

A commotion in the direction of the fence got everyone’s attention. We all turned toward it. I couldn’t see anything except the backs and butts of the people closest to me. If I was my character, that would make me about 5’2”. I’d made her as small as possible because I liked the contrast of a petite girl swinging an oversized warhammer around with one hand. Then I’d given her big boobs, because why not?

The people in front of me started moving forward, shuffling very slowly. I automatically started to follow, stopped myself, then got moving again as the people around and behind me started moving, too. I really didn’t need some naked guy bumping me from behind right now.

The field was compacted earth, with little bumps and dips indicating it had been trampled that way, not graded. The occasional leaf or other detritus crunched under my feet as I shuffled away from the spire. As soon as I thought about it, I realized that I wanted to go to the spire, not away. I could probably slip between people to move against the crowd, but that would mean rubbing up against dozens, if not hundreds, of other naked people. I did not like that thought one bit, so I kept shuffling.

After what seemed to be an hour, I began to see glimpses of the fence between bodies. It was a stockade fence--thick wooden poles driven into the ground with no space in between, and it looked about eight feet tall, with the tops of the poles tapering to points at the top. Clearly, we were all herding toward a gate of some kind. I decided I didn’t want to go through whatever gate was there. I had this petite but strong body, and it was time to use it. I began slipping past people, headed directly for the fence. I clasped my right arm across my breasts to keep them contained, and used the back of my left hand, held just below chest height, to stop people from moving long enough for me to slip last them. I focused on myself and the fence that was my goal so as to avoid thinking about what parts of men and women my body was occasionally brushing against.

Finally, I reached the fence. The movement of people here was much slower than where I had been to start. Some leaned on the worn wood. I took a tiny step back, bumping someone with my bare butt, and step-jumped at the fence, planting my foot partway up for a little boost. Somewhat to my surprise, my head nearly reached the top of the fence, and I was able to grab the sides of tapered tops. Pulling myself up was ridiculously easy. I suspected this body had the muscles of a gymnast.

I perched at the top of the fence in a crouch, leaning forward to brace my hands on a pole as well. I was suddenly acutely conscious of the fact that my groin was of a very different design than it had been for my whole life. I turned to the right to face in the direction everyone was moving.

There was indeed a gate there. People were slowly funneling through it, then fanning out across a grassy area with rows upon rows of tents. Part of the reason the movement at the gate was so slow was because people were stopping and milling around just beyond it. Some were roaming amongst the tents, but most were stalled.

I had never been one for crowds, so it was a relief to be out of it, even though I knew I was mooning anyone who looked up. People below me were calling things like “Hey!” and “What do you see?” but it blurred into the general crowd noise enough that I could ignore them. I didn’t know for sure they were talking to me, and I had no desire to chat with someone looking up at my bare butt.

The trees I had seen were about twenty feet away, thick-trunked old oaks or hickories or whatever. Broadleafs, anyway, with vines and shrubs amidst them--not something I wanted to walk through naked. The space immediately beyond the fence was grass too short to have formed seed pods, but taller than a lawn back home would have been. I hopped down onto it, landing so lightly I barely had to flex my knees because when I landed on the balls of my feet, my calves were able to absorb almost all the shock. A perfect dismount, I thought giddily. Stuck the landing!

The fence was rattling and I glanced back to see more people climbing it. I started walking quickly toward the camp, before so many people climbed over that the grassy area outside the fence became as congested as the inside. I broke into a run, taking long, light strides. I had to clamp my arm against my breasts again, but the strength and lightness of this new body more than made up for that slight awkwardness.

When I reached the crowd of milling people outside the fence, I skirted around them. There were so many that anyone coming through behind probably couldn’t even see the tents. The people at the front needed to move their butts, but this was typical group behavior, so I simply avoided them.

When I reached the edge of that crowd, I could see the tents again, arranged in neat rows. They were normal-looking tents, the kind held up by a single pole at each end with staked ties keeping them pulled taut. A few of my naked fellows were wandering amongst them. I did my best to avoid staring. I trotted down the second row--the first would be the most crowded, I figured--and saw that there were four names carved into wooden signs on each tent.

They were strange names, though, things like “Nightwraith” and “PixieGirl.” It took me a second, but I realized what they were when I saw one reading “420Dave.” Gamer tags. Well, that made sense in the context of this dream...or whatever it was.

The flaps on the tents were open, and inside each tent were four cots, each with clothing, armor, and weapons stacked atop it. Aha! My gear was in one of these tents, no doubt. There was no point in trying to take someone else’s, it probably wouldn’t fit this little body and was likely inferior to mine. I’d had some top-notch equipment in Gleamheart.

One of the things I loved about Gleamheart was that the game developers or designers accepted weapon and armor designs from the game community. If they liked your design, they implemented it into the game, and gave your character one for free. I’d had several designs accepted, some of them extremely powerful to the point they were almost unbalanced. Balance didn’t seem to be the developers priority, though. They were just looking for things which followed the rules laid out by the game’s world.

My best design had been a new type of scale armor. In the game, there were bronze medallions one could wear to boost a single stat. They were fairly easy to get, and you could wear several of them at once so long as they had the same enchantment. Most people ditched them eventually, since you would have to wear a lot of them to equal the enchantments of higher-level armor, and for whatever reason, you couldn’t wear a lot of them and good armor. I had simply turned the medallions into the armor itself. Overlapping bronze medallions had the same effect as bronze scales, except they were generally much thicker than armor scales. This would make the armor very heavy, but I figured that if those medallions were boosting your strength, you wouldn’t even notice. The developers had apparently agreed, and gave me a full coat-of-plates style suit of the new armor in-game, with 1400 medallions in it. I’d chosen to have the medallions increase my Constitution stat, which gave me more hit points and stamina. With 1400 small but significant boosts, plus the protection of a full coat of heavy armor, my character was nearly unkillable. I figured that would somewhat make up for being in the body of a small woman. I ran from row to row, scanning the signs for my character’s name, “AngelaFury,” hoping to find it before someone stole my gear.

My character had been a Valkyrie class, hence the pun in the name. Valkyries were sort of “jack of all trades, master of none” type characters, which made them great for solo play, but less useful for high-level raids where each player generally had one job only. So while a lot of people had a Valkyrie as an alt, few used them as their main character at top levels. I hated raids, they made me feel like an insignificant cog in a machine, so I played solo or in small groups, completing quests intended for much larger groups because I was, frankly, very good at the game. It was unlikely that someone would take my armor, since it was presumably made for a small woman, but I’d had a powerful warhammer and shield as well.

I’d gone through about half the rows before I found my tent. A few people had penetrated this far into the camp, but I was the first of the four to arrive at my tent. A huge shield and a battleaxe were propped against the cot, and on the cot was a pile of cloth and leather, with steel boots and gauntlets beside it. The equipment in the other piles in the tent were nowhere close to my gear from the game, so this had to be mine--I recognized the helmet as one I had designed--but the armor wasn’t quite right. Still, it was better than being naked. Leaving the tent flap open for light, I stepped inside and started looking over my gear. There was a note on it, a list of the equipment with my character’s name at the top, handwritten in large print on what I suspected was parchment, not merely thick paper.

My armor was also my clothing, it seemed, and had been designed by someone with an eye for style as well as function. I could have done with a little less of the former and more of the latter. The core of the outfit was two pieces of the scaled armor I had designed, made from enchanted medallions. Unlike my design, however, these failed to cover my entire body. A full suit of medallion-scaled armor had room for up to two thousand scales--mine had had 1400-- but these only had, according to the note, 214 scales in the top, enchanted for strength, and 268 in the skirt, enchanted for constitution.

The top piece of armor was a thick cloth gambeson--or maybe a jack, I wasn’t clear on the distinction-- covering my entire torso, which tucked into the belt of my skirt. The top half was covered in an additional layer of leather, under which the scales were sewn or riveted to the jack. Unlike a normal piece of cloth armor, this one was tailored to follow the hourglass figure of a woman, even though that gave no real combat benefit.

The helmet was one I had designed. The valkyrie helmets in the game had been rather silly, usually only protecting the front half of the wearer’s head with a beak-like half-helmet attached to a diadem, and wings or horns projecting upwards on the sides. This allowed for various long hairstyles to be visible, but it was a bad design for protection.

My version started with a simple steel cap, covering the entire top of the head. Steel caps had been the most common form of helmet for about a thousand years, so it seemed a good place to start. The wings were still attached to the sides, but now they curved down to act as cheek guards, and only projected above the rim of the cap a couple inches, making them level with the peak of the cap. I’d compromised on the beak-like part, as well, designing it as a hinged visor which looked like a normal valkyrie helm when raised, but which could be lowered to cover the parts of the wearer’s face in between the wing-shaped cheek-guards.

There was no neck guard, so I was very glad the jack included a scaled collar. There was still a gap in the back of the helm, however, leaving the lower quarter of my head, from my ears back, unprotected. I had done that as a concession to style for the game, since it left room for long hair in a ponytail, braid, or simply spilling down the wearer’s back. I would have preferred a nice full helm, but this one was gorgeously made, and apparently enchanted specifically for a Valkyrie, according to the note.

After I’d gone over all the armor, I was about to put on the jack first when I saw my undergarments--white, lacy panties and an equally lacy bra. For some reason, I had almost been okay with being a badass Valkyrie chick for the duration of this...whatever this was...but the idea of putting on lacy, girly underwear suddenly drove home the fact that I had breasts and a vagina, and therefore no longer had my usual male genitalia. I dropped to my knees next to the cot, shaking all over, hugging myself, which squeezed my breasts, calling attention to them. I felt hot and dizzy, and my vision blurred.

Fuck that! I’m not going to faint like some damned damsel. I pulled myself together, and my vision cleared. If I had to be a woman, well, a Valkyrie was the most badass kind of woman to be. I put on the underwear. The bra didn’t give me much trouble, as various cross-dressing comedies had said it would. I’d removed bras from my few girlfriends, so I was familiar with their workings. This bra was odd in that, instead of the metal hooks and loops in the back to close it, it had a pair of brass buttons which slipped through button-holes between the cups in front. Once it was on, my breasts looked even bigger, though they felt less heavy. They were at least D-cups. I really wished that I’d given my character nice, cute, petite breasts, which would have been just as attractive--to me--and far less of a burden right now.

The scaled part of the jack covered my neck, shoulders, and chest, but left my abdomen protected only by the cloth. Not that a gambeson wasn’t decent protection, but compared to a quarter-inch of bronze on top of a gambeson, it was definitely sub-par. The skirt hung from the top of my hips to a few inches above my knees. Since the scales were sandwiched between the thick cloth gambeson underneath and the stiff leather outer covering, I would have to take the word of whomever had written the note about how many scales were in each piece.

The interesting thing about magic weapons and armor in Gleamheart was that, essentially, only metal could be enchanted, but enchanted objects could touch neither unenchanted metals, nor objects with different enchantments. Nothing disastrous would happen if they did, but it would cancel the effects of one or both objects. This meant that if I wanted armor for my midriff, it would have to be completely separate from the scale top and skirt. By sandwiching the scales between two non-metallic materials, it not only made it more difficult for a scale to be lost, but also kept them from accidentally touching anything that might negate their enchantments.

The exception to the “no metals touching” rule was certain gems. When enchanted, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds could be set in metal, granting that metal the enchanted stone’s effects. This was apparently the most common way to enchant objects--simply put an enchanted gem on it. I knew that rubies and sapphires were aluminum oxides, with the color determined by traces of other metals, and emerald was beryllium and aluminum oxides. It made me wonder if aluminum metals could be used the same way as gemstones, but aluminum is fiendishly difficult to extract from bauxite without certain industrial processes, which was why it had been more valuable than gold or even platinum up until sometime in the 19th century. The people here weren’t going to be producing large amounts of aluminum any time soon.

The gem set in my helmet was a polished--not faceted--ruby clamped firmly within the steel rim of the cap, where it would sit in the center of my forehead. It looked like it had been forged into the helmet, not set like a gem would normally be. The visor covered it when lifted. It seemed to me that if the armorer had wanted to keep the ruby secured, he might just as well have put it on the inside of the helm.

My extremities were to be protected by good, but non-magical steel plate, mostly. The arm pieces were smooth and well-made, with rolled edges for extra stiffness, but instead of attaching the metal atop the padded sleeves of the gambeson, each piece had its own, fairly thin cloth liner, and the jack was sleeveless. The gauntlets would cover the backs of my fingers, but only the backs, so that when I squeezed my fingers together, there would be only leather between them. I figured that was to keep the metal from touching the steel in my weapons. I had steel sabatons--boots made from overlapping steel plates--for my feet, and full greaves which covered the front and back of my legs below the knees, with plates jutting upward to protect my knees Above that hung my skirt, leaving only a few inches of my lower thighs unprotected by metal. For that, the designer had decided to give me thigh-high suede boots to be worn under my lower-leg armor. Below the knee, the boots laced up the outside of my leg. Above the knee, metal rings had been attached over the laces, providing a small amount of protection against cuts. It only left a fairly small gap in the protection, really, but I was a bit annoyed that the designer hadn’t just given me some pants if they could not make the skirt longer. The only way to tell that the boots weren’t pants would be to see up my skirt, so it seemed a dubious choice from both armor and fashion perspectives.

I left the helmet and steel armor on the cot for now, and picked up the battleaxe. When I did, two things surprised me. The first was that the axe felt as light as a toy, and the second was that I recognised the design as one of my own that had not been accepted by the Gleamheart developers. I flicked the blade and it rang like steel. I’d owned a fair number of historically-accurate swords and axes in the other world, and knew good steel when I heard it. This was no toy, but this body and the enchanted armor made it feel like it was made of plastic and foam. The edge was quite sharp when I tested it with my thumb.

It was a battleaxe, but it was also a warhammer--or, more accurately, a maul. Thirty inches long, with a hammer poll on one side and a bearded axe on the other, it was really a sledgehammer with an axeblade attached. The top of the weapon was flat across the blade, the shaft, and the hammer poll. The axe blade was ten or so inches from top to bottom, but only the top three inches connected to the shaft, giving it a long “beard.” The blade was flat-ground, tapering steadily from the shaft to the edge, rather than hollow-ground with a sharp decrease in width near the shaft and a uniform thickness until the edge. Flat-ground blades were better for through-cuts, since they gradually wedged apart whatever they were cutting.

The head of the weapon continued to thicken as it went past the shaft until it terminated in a square-faced hammer about two inches across, covered with nine “teeth” like those on a meat tenderizer, but much larger. True to my design, though, only one of the teeth was actually a pyramid, that being the one in the center. The others were all skewed to the outside, leaving the four at the corners as cubes which had one corner ground off, leaving a triangular face at the top. The other four, at the cardinal points of the face, were simply triangular prisms with the peak at the outer edge. The design gave the hammer more “bite,” so that solid hits would be focused into nine small points instead of one large one, as I had seen in many historical warhammers. Having the teeth biased toward the outside meant that glancing blows had a better chance of biting along the edge of the teeth instead of sliding off. The flat taper would theoretically allow the axe to slice through an enemy instead of chopping into one, and getting stuck.

To that end, and because the weapon was designed for characters with super-strength, the top ten inches of the shaft was steel, ground to a diamond cross-section like a swordblade, and half an inch thick in the center. The blade and poll had either been forged as one part with the shaft, or were welded so well that I couldn’t find the seams. The remaining two-thirds of the shaft was also steel, but flat, with wooden scales pinned to it like a full-tang knife or sword. It fit the little hands of this new body perfectly.

The weapon was so well-made that the point of balance between the hammer poll and the axe blade was in the center of the shaft. That meant when held or swung sideways, the weapon wouldn’t try to tip up or down and pull the edge out of alignment--a design feature absent from nearly all historical battleaxes. I had based my design on the medieval poleaxe, or poll-axe, as it was more correctly called, but with features of a battleaxe and sledgehammer to account for the superhuman strength of the wielders in Gleamheart. Thus, I had omitted the spike at the top which could be used for thrusting, since super-strength was wasted on a thrust which could only make a small hole in the target.

The note did not say that the hammer/axe was enchanted, nor was the shield. It was nice to see my weapon design made real, but the hammer I’d had in the game had been incredibly powerful, so it was too bad my gear wasn’t fully accurate.

The shield was massive, a kite shield or heater over four feet tall from the point at the bottom to the flat top, and well over two feet wide for most of its height until it tapered near the bottom. It was made from two flat steel plates welded together along their length at an obtuse angle to better deflect incoming blows. A third plate two inches across, running from the top to the bottom of the shield, was welded to the front to reinforce the central seam. The edges were rolled into tubes a half-inch across, with the three corners welded where they met at an angle. It was made to strap to the arm, rather than being held by a single handle like a proper kite shield. It had a loop near one edge and a handle near the other with a leather-wrapped board running in between, set at an angle instead of straight across. When I put my arm through the loop and gripped the handle, I found that holding it up in front of me or to my left side was much more comfortable that it would have been in either of the more conventional ways. It wasn’t a bad design, but it seemed crude and slapdash compared the the masterful workmanship of the hammer. I put it down before I could knock the tent down with it.

The head of the hammer--I thought if it as more of a hammer than an axe, though it was equal parts of both--probably weighed eight pounds or more, with the steel shaft adding another two or three, but just like my character in the game, I could easily swing it with one hand if I wanted. Likewise, I didn’t know how much that shield weighed, but it had to be heavier than a Roman scutum, being larger and made of steel, and those weighed over twenty pounds. Badass Valkyrie, indeed.

No one else had come into the tent, and I hadn’t noticed anyone walking by yet. Now that I was clothed, I wanted to go out and talk to the others who had been in the field with me. Clearly we were all gamers, from the names on the tents, probably all from Gleamheart. I wanted to compare notes. In the unlikely event that this wasn’t some dream or hallucination, we would want to work together to figure out what was happening.

The problem with that was that I would either have to leave some of my equipment behind to possibly be stolen, or wear and carry it all with me, which would create an uncomfortable dynamic with anyone not similarly decked-out. I decided that the best thing to do would be to suit up and try to direct people to find their own tent. Maybe my petite female body would make them friendlier to someone giving orders in this confusing situation.

I put on all of my armor, strapped on my shield, and held my hammer at the top of the handle, blade down. Careful not to knock over the tent pole at the entrance, I stepped out into the starlit night to lead my comrades on this first step of our new lives--and brought the tent down behind me as my helmet caught on the canvas of the entrance.

I cursed aloud, which startled me again when I heard my new voice. I sounded so...cute. Cussing at the collapsed tent with this girly voice sounded kind of adorable, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a man’s voice asked “Do you need some help?”

I turned to find a man--clothed, thankfully--wearing what I would call three-quarters plate armor. He had a full breastplate and backplate, but only the fronts of his legs and the outsides of his arms were armored. He wore a full helm, but had the visor up. He was around six feet tall, assuming I was five-two like my character. He had a matched pair of swords sheathed on his hips.

A dual-wielder. Ugh.

Dual-wielding was allowed in Gleamheart, but was far less practical than using a two-handed weapon or a weapon and shield. The only people who dual-wielded were players concerned solely about DPS (damage per second), or the ones who just thought it looked cool.

Valkyries were a jack of all trades. We had magic abilities that increased our own attack and defense, but could not buff others, and they weren’t as effective as the tank or DPS classes. We could heal ourselves and others, but the other healing classes had spells that were faster, more powerful and/or lasted longer. We even had a ranged attack where we could summon a javelin of pure light and throw it incredibly far, because it was unaffected by gravity, but archers and mages could fire faster, hit harder, and strike multiple enemies at once. The one thing we had that no one else did, and the thing that made us Valkyries, was the ability to resurrect fallen comrades in the middle of battle.

Cleric-type classes could resurrect fallen player and restore them to full health, but it took a couple of minutes of casting time, making it only useful after winning a fight. Valkyries could raise a player in five to ten seconds, making it useful even during battle. The rezzed players had only a minimal amount of hit points, but that was nothing a healer couldn’t fix.

As a Valkyrie, I had rezzed more than a few dual-wielding players, who had invariably then bitched at the healers for not healing them well enough, rather than considering that maybe they should try playing less recklessly. I was not a fan of dual-wielding.

“I’m fine,” I said coldly, though my cute, girly voice sounded more cheerful than cold to my ears. I studiously ignored the man as I lifted the tent back up. I’d been camping, I knew how to pitch a tent, and I certainly didn’t need help.

The man was still standing there, watching me, when I finished. I nodded politely to him and walked past him to get to the end of the row of tents we were on. I had entered the row from the outside, by the treeline, but there was a wide, clear path at the other end. When I reached it, I saw that it led straight toward the gate, and the milling crowd of naked people.

Seeing so many people in the nude was a shock. Before, I had been naked also, and focused inward on my confusion and strange new body. Now, I was looking directly at hundreds of people of both sexes, stark naked, and nearly every one of them built like a porn star. It was...disconcerting.

I persevered. Striding toward the mob of boobs, butts, and penises, I held my shield up next to my face, hoping it would focus my voice, and shouted, “Find your tents! There’s clothes in your tents, just find your name!”

The crowd was loud, but no one else was shouting. The people closest to me fell silent and looked at me, a small woman decked out in armor, shouting in a high-pitched, almost squeaky voice. They still looked confused, so I repeated myself.

“There’s clothes and stuff in your tents, just find your name!”

They got it! The twenty or so people near me fanned out down the first two rows of tents. The people further back, who maybe hadn’t heard me so well, watched them, then began to trickle after them.

The problem was that they were all going down the first two rows, which were going to quickly become crowded with people whose names weren’t on any of those tents. There were something like twenty rows on each side of the central path, with tents on both sides. If these people also had super-strength, as I assumed, they would start bringing down tents as they tried to cut between them and tripped over or pulled out the guy wires and stakes.

“This way!” I shouted, waving my shield. It almost clobbered the guy from before, the dual-wielder, as he stepped up next to me from behind.

“This way!” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth, since he had scabbards for his weapons.

Some of the people listened, and came toward us. I waved my hammer, pointing at the other rows, and people began trickling into all of them, though most still went down the closest ones. I heard some shouting in a few places, but everyone seemed to be pretty well-behaved, considering the ridiculous situation we were in.

I realized I had started to think of this as reality and not some vivid dream or hallucination. That bothered me, but I decided that whether it was real or not, the best thing to do was just to play along.

The guy next to me held out his hand to shake. “I’m Josh, what’s your name?”

He didn’t add “cutie” to the end of his sentence, but it felt like he wanted to. I waggled my axeblade, demonstrating what should have been obvious--that my hand was too full to shake unless he wanted to lose his. He let his hand drop.

“So…” he said uncertainly. “We seem to be in the video game, huh? This is crazy.”

“Seems so,” I replied. It still threw me for a loop whenever I heard my new voice. “Excuse me.” I swept past him and headed back to my tent. Now that people were moving, this guy--Josh--and I were just in the way. Josh followed me.

I was careful to duck low enough to clear my helmet when I entered the tent. I put my hammer and shield at the end of my cot and sat down, taking off the helmet and holding it in my lap. I started to cross my legs the usual way, with my right ankle resting on my left knee, but the heaviness of my skirt made me think again. Josh was standing at the entrance to the tent, still watching me, so instead of simply letting my leg fall back next to the other one, I converted the motion into crossing my knees like a proper lady. It was much easier and more comfortable than I expected, which made me very aware of my new genitalia.

I’d been completely straight before, not the least bit of attraction to men. That certainly hadn’t changed, I knew, because I’d recently had more than a little exposure to lots and lots of naked men who were conventionally attractive. Thinking about them was unpleasant, but thinking about all the statuesque nude women was quite pleasant. The problem was that my own body was extremely hot, and every thing that brought it to my attention had the effect of turning me on, just a little. I figured that wasn’t a bad thing, all in all, but it was annoyingly distracting.

“So…” Josh said. That seemed to be his way of starting a new conversation. “...which of these names is yours?” He tapped the sign on the tent.

I was tempted to lie, but realized I didn’t actually remember the other names on the sign, and anyway, what would that have accomplished? “Angela Fury,” I said instead.

“Haha, cool!” he laughed. “Is your real name Angela, too?”

Now I did lie. “Yeah.” I didn’t want to deal with telling him I’d been a guy a couple of hours ago. It might have scared him off, which would be nice, but it would definitely have been awkward, and I’d had enough of that recently.

“Cool.” Josh said, nodding. “Your last name isn’t really Fury, is it? That would just be too awesome.”

I hesitated. “Uh, no. It was just a pun.”

“Cool, cool.” Josh was really starting to get on my nerves. I didn’t want to be harsh with him because he was no doubt confused, possibly scared, and didn’t need that right now. I also figured that was at least part of the reason he annoyed me so much, since I was even more confused and, I had to admit, a little scared. I was a super-badass Valkyrie, but I didn’t exactly want to stay a woman for the rest of my life, either.

The rest of my life. How old was I, now? None of the metal surfaces of my equipment was polished enough to form a mirror. As soon as I thought about it, though, I knew exactly what my face looked like. It was the face I’d imagined when I’d made the character, based on pretty women I’d seen in real life or in pictures. It wasn’t my character’s face, that was a digital construct of meshes and textures. The face I knew I had was a real face, just like Josh’s was.

“...tag’s Kill Switch,” Josh was saying, “but I figure people can just call me Josh, y’know?”

“Makes sense,” I replied. I didn’t add anything to keep the conversation going because I couldn’t think of anything to add.

A female voice spoke from behind Josh, “Excuse me, please.” Josh straightened up and stepped back from the tent to make room for the voice’s owner.

A nude woman with darkish hair, nearly as tall as Josh, ducked into the tent. The flaps were rolled up and tied with simple bows, and this new woman pulled the bows on both sides, letting the flaps fall closed, shutting Josh out, at least visually. Without the starlight, the tent was extremely dark. I could hear the woman moving around and was about to say “hi” when her hand touched my skirt over my right thigh. I inhaled sharply in surprise and she let out a little scream and snatched her hand away.

One tent flap flew open, and Josh shouted, much too loudly, “What’s wrong!?” In the light, I could see that the woman was now sitting on the dirt floor of the tent, across from me, up against the cot, her knees pulled up against her chest.

“C-close the flap, you perv!” she shouted back at Josh. He dropped it hastily, and we were in the dark again.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I didn’t know you were--I didn’t see you when I came in. Sorry.”

“S’alright,” I replied quietly. Her voice was deeper than mine, more like the pitch of most women I’d known. Mine was more like a teenager’s. “Um, you may want to open the flap, anyway. It’s hard enough to see in here with them open. Or open a back flap.”

“Oh, good idea!” the woman said brightly. I heard her shuffle-crawling toward the back of the tent. One, then the other of the flaps there opened. She shoved them harder when they started to slip back down again, but after a few failed tries, she just rolled them up and tied them as the front flaps had been.

The tents were a dirty white, so the new woman was silhouetted against the canvas of the tent behind ours. I caught my breath as her soft, perfect curves stood out in the starlight, and squeezed my legs together unconsciously.

I looked away. “Can you tell which stuff is yours?” I asked. Mine had been easy, the only cot with a shield, hammer, and Valkyrie helm.

“Mine?” She sounded puzzled. “Are they assigned to us?”

I realized not everyone had come to the same conclusion I had about the equipment, nor possibly even the conclusion that Josh and I had both reached, with the connection to Gleamheart. “I, uh, I’m pretty sure, yeah. The stuff on my cot was pretty similar to my gear in the game, and it fits perfectly.” My clothing and armor had plenty of room for adjustment, so it would have fit just as well if I were several inches taller ir thicker, too, but it was easier than explaining that I had designed half of my own equipment.

“I think…” the other woman trailed off. A few seconds passed. “Oh, here it is. This is definitely mine.”

I glanced up and could see her holding a tunic or gambeson up to the light. It rattled softly, so it was maille, but it wasn’t translucent, so it was probably scale rather than chain. I watched as she started to put it on, then realized she was missing a step.

“Wait! There should be underwear, too,” I advised.

“Oh.” she said, and pawed through the pile on the cot. “Oh, yeah. On the bottom, of course! Because that makes sense.” She didn’t sound too angry, despite the sarcasm.

I half-watched as she put her underwear on. The rest of the tent was too dark to hold my attention, so I kept glancing at the other woman despite my attempts not to.

I cleared my throat. “I’m Angela,” I said. I supposed that was my name, now. For now.

“I’m Kate,” she said simply. She was putting on the armored tunic, now.

“Ah,” I said dumbly. There was a long pause as she fumbled with the armor. In the awkward silence, I spoke again. “I was going to say ‘nice to meet you,’ but this situation is so fucked-up, I don’t know if that’s true.”

Kate laughed, the sound muffled at first because the armor was covering her head. “Yeah, it really is. You said ‘the game’ earlier. Did you mean Gleamheart?”

I nodded, realized she couldn’t see that even if she was looking, and said “Yeah. I was playing it, then I was here. Well, in a field of naked people, anyway.”

Kate laughed again, but it was more subdued than before. “That was fucked up. Why were we all naked? And why couldn’t they have at least separated us by gender?”

Kate said “they,” but we really had no way of knowing if someone had done all this. It was the most logical conclusion, what with the camp and signs and handwritten notes.

Outside the tent, the general sound level was increasing as more and more people wandered down our row, some finding their own tents and greeting their new roommates. The clank of and jingle of weapons and armor grew more frequent, and there was rustling crash followed by men cursing loudly.

“What was that?” Kate asked, probably rhetorically.

“Tent collapsed,” I said.

“Wh--really? How can you tell?”

I smiled wryly in the dark. “I’ve heard it before.”

Much of the chatter and jingle had stopped when the tent collapsed out there. Now it resumed. I heard Josh’s voice nearby saying, “Someone knocked down their tent, no biggie.” I wondered briefly if he’d heard me, recognized the sound from my earlier clumsiness, or had simply seen it happen. Then I decided I didn’t care.

The front flap opened again. Kate inhaled sharply, probably about to scream at Josh again, but the newcomer was another woman. She paused, bent over to see into the tent.

“Um, I’m, uh, PhoneyPucker?” Kate and I both waited for more, but that seemed to be it.

Kate spoke first. “Well, get in here! Quit showing your ass to everyone outside!”

The new girl--PhoneyPucker?--ducked inside. I decided to step out and read the other names on the sign. While I was doing so, Kate directed the new girl to find “her” cot and gear, saving me the trouble and awkwardness.

My name was second on the sign. Above that was “FonyPucker--” ah, I get it!--and below it were “Starfire” and “SweeTaffy.” Inside the tent, I heard FonyPucker say her name was Sarah. I ducked back inside.

“...and that’s Angela.” Kate concluded her introduction. “She got here first and told me about the undies.” Sarah was was sorting carefully through the clothing on the cot across from Kate’s. Her nude body was every bit as voluptuous as Kate’s was, but it was easier not to watch her because now I could focus on a clothed Kate, who was sitting on her cot, struggling to put on her boots.

Sarah found her underwear and started putting it on. “Thanks. I wouldn’t have found it until I’d put the other stuff on.” She was talking to me, apparently, since Kate didn’t reply.

“Sure,” I said awkwardly, wondering if I should look at her when I spoke. I did, and saw she was facing away from me, pulling on her panties.

I looked at Kate. “So which name are you, Kate?” I started pulling off my gauntlets to get more comfortable.

“I’m Starfire.”

“I see,” I replied. Character names were unique in Gleamheart, but variants were common. Any number of avatars could be named Starfire, for example, if they added a number or other letters. I wondered if whomever had made the signs had omitted such extraneous letters and numbers, because I hadn’t seen many on the signs. Sarah and Kate chatted, complaining about the nudity, the long wait to get through the gate, and the confusion. They had been fairly close to me when we all woke up, it seemed, but I didn’t recognize them. I’d been too focused on myself and on not looking at other people to recognize anyone, really.

That raised the question, though, of how the tents were organized. Apparently we’d been sorted not only by gender, but also by location. Our row was about halfway through the camp, and we had all been about halfway to the center of the field.

I realized that there weren’t enough tents here for the number of people on the field, which implied that there were multiple camps, and therefore multiple gates. What if people had gone through the wrong gate? They’d be wandering around naked in another camp, trying to find their tent--and their clothes--where there wasn’t one. If, like me, they hadn’t even realized there were multiple gates, they could be lost all night.

With my gloves off, I noticed by feel that there was a soft wool blanket draped over the cot. Inspired, I stood and pulled my blanket from under my helmet and gauntlets. It turned out that there were two blankets, as I discovered when the second one fell in a crumpled heap at my feet while I was crudely rolling the other around my arm. I tossed the second blanket on my cot and set the rolled one beside it to roll up the second one. Tucking both under my arm, I said, “I’m going to look for SweeTaffy. She might be lost. Watch my stuff.” I ducked out of the tent without waiting for a response.

As I’d expected, the paths between rows of tents were getting crowded with armored men and women. A few poor stragglers were wandering naked among the people who had found their--or someone’s--tent and equipment. I called out “SweeTaffy!?” blending the two component words into one, the way it was written on the sign. “Anyone here named SweeTaffy?” I walked toward the central path that connected all the rows of tents. At every second tent I passed, I shouted for SweeTaffy again.

The naked people were now outnumbered by those of us with armor, which had changed the demeanor of both groups. Women were now covering their breasts, and some of the men were hunched forward, covering their groins. Some of the men in armor were openly, or at least un-subtly, ogling the nude women. I approached one such woman, holding out a blanket.

“Here,” I said. “You’re not SweeTaffy, are you?”

She took the blanket, shaking her head. She wrapped it around herself like a bath towel rather than draping it over her shoulders. “I’m Pale Moon. Thanks so much.”

“No problem.” I spotted another naked woman and approached her with my second blanket. I ignored the men partly because I didn’t want to interact with a naked man, and partly because a naked woman seemed more vulnerable, and therefore in greater need of coverage.

The second woman wasn’t SweeTaffy, either, which left me with a dilemma. I was out of blankets, now, so should I go back to my tent to appropriate SweeTaffy’s and maybe Sarah’s and Kate’s, or did I press on without blankets to offer to naked people? Or, I supposed, I could appropriate blankets from other tents.

I looked around, and saw that my idea had caught on. People were handing blankets to all the naked people around, male or female. It had happened so quickly that I figured I must not have been the only one with the idea, and I just hadn’t noticed before.

I didn’t see Josh anywhere. He’s probably pestering some other poor woman. I missed a step, then caught myself. Other woman. I was starting to think of myself as a woman, already. Before, it had just been a sort of confused blur in my mind. I knew I was physically female, but had been holding onto my maleness in my own head. I realized that the change had occurred when I’d put on my armor. Now that I was a Valkyrie and not a man trapped in a naked woman’s body, I found it easy to play the part. Gleamheart had been a role-playing game, after all.

I reached the central path. Rather than calling out the awkward name, I decided to just ask any nude women I saw if they were SweeTaffy. There was one such woman directly across the path from me, hugging her chest and looking around, deciding where to go next. I glanced behind, me, saw a man holding four blankets, and snatched one with a quick “Thanks!” I ran across the road and gave the blanket to the woman there. Even in my armor, I still felt lighter here than I had in my own body.

That woman wasn’t my missing tent-mate, either, but she was extremely grateful and gave me a hug, which I returned awkwardly because my chin was at the level of her breasts. Armored men and women were wandering from row to row, now, carrying blankets. I was glad others had thought of that, too.

Before long, no one was naked on the streets, which made it much easier to ask people’s names. Only a few women looked confused by the weird name, the rest had picked up on the gamer tags on the signs. I noticed that other men and women were asking for people by character names as well.

I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. Instead, I had more energy than I’d ever had in my life. I had a light body with powerful muscles, and my armor was boosting my stamina as well as my strength. I felt like I could do this all night.

People were wonderfully well-behaved. I didn’t see any women being accosted by men, and arguments were sparse and kept to words alone. This seemed to be a pretty good group of people to be stranded with in a strange world. It was definitely a strange world. I couldn’t find the dippers or Orion’s Belt among the stars; they would have been easy to spot where I had been, back home in the United States. I wasn’t familiar enough with flora to determine if the trees were species from back home, and the U.S. was a big place, anyway. They didn’t look alien, though.

The horizon was beginning to glow, and I still hadn’t found SweeTaffy. Very few people were on the streets without armor, now, and those few all had blankets. Maybe she found the tent on her own. I was heading back to my tent when I ran into Kate. I hadn’t recognized her, partly because I was ignoring people in armor, and partly because I’d only seen her in dimmer light before. And, I had to concede, partly because I was bad with faces.

“Angela!” Kate called. I nearly walked right past her before I realized that she was talking to me.

Right, I’m Angela. “Hey, Kate. Did SweeTaffy ever show up?”

Kate shook her head. “Sarah’s guarding the tent. I figured I’d come looking for you and our missing roomie.”

Kate had a thick bundle under her arm, wrapped in a blanket. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Blankets,” Kate answered. I nodded.

“I’m going to check the other camps,” I said, deciding at that moment to do so. “She’s probably in one of the ones to either side of ours.”

Kate looked confused for a moment, but caught on quickly. We started walking toward the gate and the towering spire at the center of the field where we’d awoken. I realized that I’d completely forgotten about the mysterious building as soon as I’d found the camp. I’d been focusing on the little problems--clothing for myself and others, and the missing roommate--as a way to deal with a situation too strange to adjust to all at once. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same.

The gateway had no actual gate, I saw as we approached. It was just a way to funnel us into our camp, not any sort of barrier. The preparations for what had happened were pretty elaborate, despite the crude housing.

“I’ll go left,” I said to Kate when we reached the gateway. I’d just assumed we would split up, since our missing roommate had to be in one of the two adjacent camps. Kate nodded and handed me a blanket from her bundle, and we split up.

The field was not entirely empty. There were a few people in armor wandering around, some going between camps like Kate and I, and some headed toward the spire. There were even a few people at the base of the spire already, just milling around, as if waiting for something.

There were also numerous naked people still on the field. A few were walking with purpose, probably searching for their tent in another camp. A couple of those had blankets, but most did not. Even more common were people of both sexes sitting, kneeling, or lying on the field. Some were up against the spire, more against the fence, and others were randomly strewn around. When I focused on a woman nearby, lying on her side, curled into a ball, I could hear her sniffling.

Unable to ignore her, I approached the crying woman cautiously, unsure of what to do. She didn’t react when I drew close, but it seemed that her sniffles were quieter, now, so I suspected that she knew I was there. I draped the blanket over her. She pulled it closer around herself, but said nothing. I started to walk away, toward the gateway next to mine when the woman said, in a small voice, “Thank you.”

I stopped and turned around, unsure of what to do. Should I try to get her on her feet, to find her tent and her clothes? Leave her there? Ask if she was SweeTaffy?

The last seemed necessary. It might be her, and wouldn’t I feel stupid if I left her here and she wandered into our tent later?

If she had been here since we all woke up, overwhelmed by the insane situation, she wouldn’t know about the camps, much less the signs and the gamer tags on them. I sat down cross-legged in the dirt, a few feet away from the woman. Too late, I realized I should have tucked my skirt under my buttocks. That wasn’t something I was used to doing. Now my butt and my lacy white panties were in the dirt. Oh, well.

“I’m Angela. What’s your name?” I asked. It was getting easier to remember my new name.

“S-Sophie,” she replied hesitantly, still curled up on the ground. I couldn’t see her face from where I was, only the lumps of her hips and legs beneath the blanket.

“Hi, Sophie,” I said, awkwardly. “Um, have you been here this whole time?”

Sophie didn’t answer. After a moment, I realized she might have nodded or shaken her head, but I couldn’t see it. I stood up easily, pushing upward with my crossed legs. I surreptitiously reached under my skirt to brush the dirt off my butt as I moved to sit in front of Sophie’s face. This time, I tucked my skirt under me when I sat.

Sophie’s face was under the blanket, so all I could see was dark hair. I decided the answer to my previous question was unimportant. “Hey, Sophie? There’s tents and clothes and stuff, if you want. Or you can stay here. You can keep the blanket either way.” I wondered if that was the wrong approach. Should I have been more firm? Lifted her to her feet? I could just pick her up. She’d probably feel light as a feather.

After a minute or so, Sophie sniffled. “I’d like some clothes.”

“Okay,” I said softly. “Let’s go get you some clothes.” Sophie didn’t move at first, so I stood up, then knelt next to her, touching the blanket over her arm. She stirred, so I lifted her to her feet. She wasn’t light as a feather, but she was far from heavy.

Sophie fiddled with the blanket, trying to hold it closed when it wasn’t draped evenly over her shoulders because she had been lying on her side. I grabbed the top edge of the blanket and pulled it back, off her shoulders, then wrapped it around her chest like a bath towel, as Pale Moon had done hours ago. Sophie lifted her arms, but I had to tuck the blanket into itself for her to make it stay. She had smaller breasts than most of the women here.

Despite their awkwardness, my new breasts were only about average, from what I’d seen. Several were smaller, but there were quite a few with even bigger boobs than mine. I’d yet to see anyone as short as I was, though. Sophie was a few inches taller than me, too.

I looked at the gate I’d come from, and the one I’d been heading to. We were slightly closer to my gate than the other. Maybe Sophie was SweeTaffy after all.

“Hey,” I said somewhat hesitantly, “this may sound weird, but did you use the name SweeTaffy online?”

Several seconds passed, then Sophie blinked. “What?”

I sighed, then explained about the tents, the signs, the names, the armor and weapons, and the apparent link to Gleamheart. Sophie took it all in with a confused look, but when she looked me over, with my armor and leather, it all seemed to click.

“Oh!” Sophie exclaimed. “Oh, I see. No, I’m not Sea Taffy. My character’s name was Thistle.”

“Ah,” I said, disappointed. “Well, I need to look for SweeTaffy, but if you want, I can help you find your tent first. It’s probably in the camp through that gate.” I pointed at my camp.

“No, it’s okay,” Sophie/Thistle said after a moment. “Go find your friend. I’ll be okay. Thank you for the blanket.”

I nodded and turned to walk toward the other gate, glancing back once to make sure Sophie was moving toward the one I’d come from. She was, so I stretched my legs, walking quickly, then broke into an effortless run. Just as I reached the gateway, I heard someone call “Angela!”

Looking toward the sound, I saw Kate in her scale armor, with another woman draped in a blanket. They had both shouted my name together, probably after I’d failed to respond to Kate shouting alone. Kate waved. I guess she found SweeTaffy.

I trotted toward them, my sabatons clanking softly with each stride. It felt good to run, now that my breasts were restrained. It still felt very strange to have breasts, just as it felt strange to feel the cool night air on the bare or lace-covered skin beneath my skirt, but the way I could move so effortlessly almost made up for it.

Kate and the other woman had been about halfway between the other two gates when they called me. They walked while I ran, and we all reached the gate at the same time. In the growing predawn light, I could easily see twelve other gateways, evenly spaced around the field, and there were likely two more obscured behind the base of the spire. I did some quick math.

There were five cross-streets in our camp. Each cross-street had tents facing it on both sides, with six to each side. That meant half the camp had sixty tents, for 120 in total, each tent holding four people.

Now the math got less quick. Kate was saying something, but I held up a finger. Four times 120...fourteen camps…

“Six thousand, seven-hundred and twenty!” I said aloud.

Kate looked at me as if I were insane. “What?”

“Sorry, I was figuring out how many people are probably here, if all the camps are the same size.”

The other woman--SweeTaffy, I assumed--spoke. “That’s a lot of people! This is so weird…”

Kate nodded agreement, but got us back on track. “This is Taffy, a.k.a. SweeTaffy. Taffy, this is obviously Angela.”

Taffy. Was that really her name? And who’s asking, “Angela?” Taffy held out her hand to shake, revealing a leg and hip of a slimmer body than most I’d seen. I shook hands lightly. I had no idea how strong anyone else here was, nor really just how strong I was. A firm handshake might have been disastrous. I nodded as we broke the handshake. I turned to walk back to our camp, and Kate followed, putting Taffy between us. A man in a blanket was coming out of the camp as we went in, another poor soul who’d ended up in the wrong camp, it seemed.

We passed dozens of people in armor on the way to our tent. People were gathered into small groups, some chatting lightly, others huddled together as if plotting. It was nearly dawn, the sky was bright and rosy on the other side of the spire. Now that we’d found Taffy, I was out of little problems to distract myself with.

Not quite. There were 6,720 people here, and I hadn’t seen any food, water, or sanitary facilities in our camp. Even for the 480 people in our camp, that was going to be a problem very soon.

We reached our tent. Kate went in first and I motioned Taffy to follow. Kate was introducing Sarah to Taffy as I entered.

“Check under all the other stuff for your underwear,” Kate warned. “They like to hide it there.” No one bothered to ask who “they” were. We all knew who it meant, and were equally clueless about their identity.

The back of the tent faced the sunrise, so the tent was much brighter, now. Kate’s hair had turned out to be red when we met up again by the gate. Not the coppery “red” of a ginger person, but an unnatural dark red, like someone with light brown hair who had dyed it. Sarah was platinum blonde, I thought, though the rosy light made it difficult to be sure. Taffy had dropped the blanket on her cot and dug out her underwear. Like mine, it was lacy, but hers was black. It looked better against her olive skin than white would have.

Taffy was nearly as skinny as I was, but her hips and chest were wider than mine, and her arms and legs thicker, less spindly-looking. Her hair was just neck-length, and pure black.

I pulled a strand of my hair in front of my face. As I’d expected, it was a rich brown, just as it had been on my character in the game. My character had had a pony tail, though, and something to tie my hair back had not been part of the gear on my cot. I looked again, then realized anything light like that would have been flung off when I’d pulled the blankets off. Looking on the floor, I noticed that Taffy had several items under her cot. I leaned down to look under mine.

Ah. Beneath my cot was a satchel, some kind of leather belt, probably a strap for the satchel, a cloth sack, and two waterskins. I dragged it all out. Taffy had gotten her underwear on and was figuring out how to don her armor.

Everyone in Gleamheart wore armor. There were no silly robes or the like for “caster” classes. Nothing kept a caster from wearing armor up to full plate. Many weapons precluded the use of shields, but everyone wore at least a gambeson, and almost always something else over it. Taffy had chainmail.

I took a drink from one of the waterskins. It was water, but with an unpleasant undertone of something. I capped the mouth of the waterskin and opened the sack. It was full of food. An entire wheel of some sort of cheese with the rind still on it was the largest, but there were several hard biscuits, two entire onions, and what must have been a pound of jerky. Not feeling particularly hungry, I set the sack aside.

The satchel was attached to a belt, which was rolled up around a sheathed knife, thank goodness. A knife was a basic and essential tool, especially when camping, and I hadn’t been looking forward to trying to use my axe for everything. Inside the satchel were several small items, including a pair of red ribbons. I spent the next several minutes trying to tie my hair back in an acceptable ponytail. It had to be high enough to clear the collar of my armor, but low enough to sit below my helmet. On top of that, it was hard to get it centered properly and keep it in place while I tied it up. I’d never had long hair, so this was all new to me.

All three of my tent-mates were going through their bags and satchels as well. Taffy now wore tights and a long maille hauberk. There was padded armor under the hauberk, of course. Her leather boots sat next to her cot.

I finally got my hair tied back. Taffy was braiding hers effortlessly, a black ribbon held in her teeth. It suddenly struck me that I was sharing a tent with three extremely attractive women. All of them looked young and pretty, if not beautiful, while under their armor they all had gorgeous bodies. Meanwhile, I sat here in an equally-attractive woman’s body, wearing lacy undergarments and a skirt. At that moment,I was almost glad that I couldn’t get an embarrassing erection.

Sarah’s bag was an actual backpack, rather than simply a large belt pouch. She let out an exclamation of surprise, and we all looked at her. She was holding a scroll which had been in her pack, partially unrolled.

“What is it?” Kate asked.

Sarah sounded uncertain as she said, “It’s...a letter...from the people who brought us here?”

Taffy and I glanced at one another at the same, time, our eyes meeting, then we both looked quickly back at Sarah.

“What does it say?” Kate asked impatiently. I could see her barely restraining herself from snatching the scroll.

“Here, you read it!” Sarah thrust the scroll at Kate, who took it clumsily.

“Just read it aloud,” I suggested. “Then we can all hear it at once.”

“You take it, then,” Kate said, holding it out to me. It trembled visibly. We had all been avoiding the big picture, the mystery of why we were here and who was responsible. Now, it looked like we would have answers, even if we weren’t ready for them.

I stood and leaned far enough to take the scroll. It was hand-printed in English, and by a very meticulous hand. Taking a deep breath, I began to read. With my new and still-unfamiliar voice, it was easier to dissociate myself from what I was reading.



Dear Heroes,

Welcome to the world of Gleamheart. Or more accurately, welcome to the world on which Gleamheart was based. We call it Geamhlúrt.

As in the game you all played, humanity in Geamhlúrt is reduced to living on a few islands, as the rest of the world has been overrun by monsters. That is why you are here.

For years, we used the game of Gleamheart to gather ideas for tactics and weapons to be used by our own powered heroes. It was so successful that we were able to take back our islands and send an expedition to the Continent to defeat the superbeasts there. You knew them as raid bosses. Unfortunately, none of the heroes returned.

Now, with too few powered individuals, we are in danger of losing all of the progress we had made. So we summoned you.

By pulling your souls from your world to ours, we were able to create far more powered heroes than we could have from our own people. Instead of a few dozen, there are thousands of you here, now. If you absolutely must return to your world, there is a way to do so if you can gather the materials needed, for we have spent all of what we have to bring you here. No amount of pleading or threats will change that. As in the game, you will have to quest for what you want.

We hope, however, that you will decide to stay, fight for your fellow humans, and make this world yours. You have great power here, if you choose to use it.



There will be meetings inside the white tower at noon. If you were a guild leader in the game, come to the North side of the tower. If you found equipment that you designed on your cot, come to the East side.

We did our best to make sure that everyone we summoned would have a body they would be happy with. After all, your minds designed them in the game, and shaped them here, as well. If, however, you find yourself now the wrong gender, come to the South side of the tower. Anyone else with questions or problems may wait on the West side, and we will do our best to help you.

We apologize for bringing you here without your permission, and hope that you will forgive us, here, in our most desperate hour.



We all sat silent for some time. Outside, the still night air was giving way to a gentle breeze, rustling the tent. Around us, we could hear others reading the same scroll, or talking loudly about it. Apparently, several other tents had not found their copy until they heard me reading ours. I suspected that a fair number of people had found it already, but had not shared the information. The people I’d seen waiting at the spire made more sense, now.

Taffy took the scroll from me, to reread it silently to herself. To occupy my hands, I picked up the leather strap that I had thought was the shoulder-strap for the satchel. It clearly was not, now, since the satchel was simply a large belt pouch. The strap was several feet around, much too large to be a belt, though it had a buckle. It had an iron hook on one part, and what looked like a sheath for a large, curved dagger a couple of feet away. The sheath was not for a dagger, though. It was more of an L-shape. Once I looked at it closely, I knew what it was.

I picked up my hammer, and fitted the head into the sheath. If it hung head-down on my back, the hammer would rest in the sheath with the axe blade completely covered. The handle would go in the iron hook. Getting it out of it carriage position would be fairly easy, but putting it back without removing the strap would take practice.

Holding my sheathed hammer and the belt with my satchel and knife, I stood up. My tent-mates looked at me.

“I’m going to the tower,” I said firmly.

“Oh, you’re a guild leader?” Sarah asked.

I shook my head, my ponytail an unfamiliar weight as it moved. “I designed this helmet,” I said simply, flicking it with a finger.

“Ah,” was all Sarah said.

As an afterthought, I scooped a handful of jerky from the sack and put it in my satchel, then picked up one of the waterskins. I ducked out of the tent with my hands full, put on the belt and the hammer carrier, looped the strap of the waterskin over one shoulder, and reached in to grab my helmet. I decided to put the helmet on, rather than carry it, for it made an awkward burden. If someone wanted to steal the rest of my stuff, they were welcome to it.

Once I started walking, I found that I needed to adjust the belt and hammer-strap to keep them from bouncing annoyingly. While I was doing so, Sarah called my name from behind.

“I’ll come with you,” Sarah said. Her hair was bright pink and orange on the side facing the dawning light, and as I’d guessed, a silvery blonde in shadow. Her padded gambeson fell to just below groin-level and had sleeves It was dyed a dark grey which was probably supposed to be black, as were her tights. The color contrasted nicely with the polished steel of her armor: a back- and breastplate made of overlapping plates for flexibility, and half-plate on her arms and legs. If she had a helmet, she’d left it in the tent

Sarah also had a polearm nearly seven feet long, which must have been difficult to get out of the tent, even with a leather cover over the blade. She carried it with ease as she trotted to catch up with me, but its weight still forced her to lean to the side to counterbalance it.

I nodded. “Sure. Are you going to a particular side of the tower?”

Sarah shook her head. “No, I just want see what’s happening. And keep you company.” She had also brought a waterskin and her pack, I saw.

I nodded again and resumed walking with my belts fitted correctly. Sarah fell into step next to me, using her weapon as a walking staff.

“So you’re a Valkyrie?” Sarah asked/stated as we turned onto the road leading to the field and the spire.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “What are you?” I realized too late that the way I’d asked the question could have sounded defensive or terse.

Perhaps it was my cute, girly voice, but Sarah didn’t take it that way, fortunately. “I’m a Lightmage.”

“Ah.”

Lightmages were one of the healing classes, alongside Lifemages, Paladins, and Valkyries. They usually had weak attacks, but could buff the weapons and armor of themselves and their comrades, and only Lifemages had stronger healing abilities. The more attack-class mages were Darkmages and Deathmages, though even they were not all offense, as they could dispel debuffs like poisons and curses. Elemental Mages, called Elementals, were pure offense.

The only real reason casters had weaker attacks in Gleamheart was because they tended to put more points into their magic ability, making it more powerful and giving them a larger pool of magic energy--mana--to draw from. In theory, a caster like Sarah could be just as tough and strong as a dedicated melee fighter, but her magic ability would be so weak as to make her casting abilities nearly useless.

There was a trickle of people heading toward the tower. It was only now dawn, so the promised meetings were around six hours away, in all likelihood. I wondered if I would need to go to the south side before or after the meeting on the east side for the weapon and armor designers. With Sarah with me, I would be embarrassed to reveal that I was really a guy, having shared the tent with her and the others in their nakedness.

Well, if they ostracize me, I’ll get by. I was used to being a loner, and, really, I barely knew these women.

As we were entering the field surrounding the spire, there was something akin to an explosion off to our right. We turned and saw that a small section of the fence about a foot across was on fire. Four people in armor were chattering excitedly nearby.

“I guess someone decided to try out their magic,” I said, half concerned, half amused. Nearly everyone on the field seemed to be staring at the excited little group. The fire was spreading upward from where it had started. An armored man wearing red and black gestured with his sword, and an ice spike shot out to stick in the charred wood. It had no effect on the fire. Finally, all four of the group ran over to the fence and put the fire out with their waterskins. Crisis averted.

Now that the fireball had gotten my attention, I noticed the shouts and bellows of other people testing their new bodies. One woman or lithe man leapt thirty feet straight up, a feat that even I was not strong enough to match. She/he landed with flexed knees and seemed uninjured.

The field was huge, probably three hundred yards in diameter, including the hundred or so feet taken up by the flared base of the spire. There was plenty of room for horseplay for now, with only a few people doing it. Most of the people were clustered around the spire.

From our perspective, the sun was rising behind the spire, which put us on the west side. That meant I was headed for the opposite side of the tower. I decided to turn left and go around it clockwise, so that Sarah, on my right, was closer to the spire and I would be shielding her from any stray fireballs or whatever coming from further out. I almost regretted leaving my shield in the tent, now, but it really was huge and awkward.

Very few people were carrying shields, I noticed--probably for the same reason I had left mine behind--but everyone was armed. Those with long polearms like Sarah’s simply set them down or leaned them against their shoulders or the spire. It was the people with scabbards on their hips who seemed to have the most trouble, bumping people and sitting on their own weapons. Many had looped their weapons belts over their shoulders. Few of us were used to carrying long weapons on our hips, but staves and packs were more familiar.

There were only a dozen people waiting on the East side of the spire. I had seen no entrances. The spire flared out quickly at the base, so there was plenty of sloped white stone for people to sit or lie on to stay out of the dirt. I picked a spot that was as close to the eastmost point as I could determine, not knowing our latitude. It was a fair distance from anyone else, which was a bonus. I sat down, tucking my skirt under my hips and stretching my legs out in front of me, crossed at the knees.

The skirt wasn’t the most comfortable thing to sit on, being made of overlapping metal discs, but the inner layer of leather was thick enough that it was still more comfortable than putting my almost-bare backside directly on the stone. The sun had gotten above the horizon, but was still obscured behind the trees beyond the fence.

Sarah was more social than I was, it seemed, and was leaning on her staff, chatting with some of the others waiting here. They were almost all guys, I noticed, so Sarah and I stood out. The one exception was a cute, rather mousy-looking brunette woman wearing undyed leather with brass studs, probably a brigandine with steel plates under the leather. She sat near the middle of the group, with a bow and quiver of arrows next to her.

“Oh, no, I never designed anything,” Sarah was saying. “I’m in the same tent as Angela.” She gestured to me as I was removing my helmet. I looked up and waved sheepishly. One of the other guys got up and sat down a few feet from me.

“Hey, I’m Adrian,” he said in a friendly tone. He did not hold out a hand to shake, just gave a little wave. “I was RaidFury in the game.”

I waved back. “Angela. AngelaFury, actually.”

One of the other guys came over, standing so that he, Adrian, and myself made an equilateral triangle. “Did you say you’re AngelaFury?” I nodded. “I thought I recognized that helmet. I saw it on the forums when it got implemented in the game. Didn’t you come up with the Fusion Armor?”

“Uh, yeah, that was me.” These guys paid attention to who made what, apparently. I had only ever skimmed the other submissions, never noticing the names, and I didn’t post on the forums.

Adrian had been lost until my armor was mentioned. “That was you? That stuff was so OP, I couldn’t believe they put it in the game.”

The standing guy hadn’t introduced himself yet. “It’s really hard to make. You need hundreds of medallions of the same type. Or like a thousand for a full suit.”

“Mine had 1400,” I agreed. “But I got it free because I designed it.”

The standing guy laughed. “Damn, girl.”

Sarah had wandered over, along with several more of my fellow designers. Adrian caught them up on our brief conversation.

“So is that the armor you’re wearing?” A third man asked.

“Uh, no.” Why was I hiding it? “Not quite. Apparently they didn’t have enough medallions for a full suit, so it’s just the top and the skirt,” said, gesturing.

“Kick ass!” said the man who had recognized my name. He sat down on my right side, closer than Adrian had sat on my left. I stopped myself from scooting away. “How many is that? What stat do they boost?”

“Uh, a couple hundred. Strength and Con,” I answered

Adrian spoke up on my other side. “You must be really tough, then. Have you tested it?”

“Huh?” I said, perplexed.

By way of answer, Adrian pulled out his belt knife, a simple iron thing with a single edge, just like mine. Like in a movie, he grabbed the blade in one hand and jerked it out with the other. When he opened his hand, there was a thin line of blood across the palm, but when he wiped it away, there was no cut.

“Oh!” I said. “No, I haven’t tried that.”

“You should,” Adrian urged. “It’s pretty cool.” He smacked the blade against his bloody palm several times, failing to draw any more blood. “We’re like superheroes.”

“Maybe later,” I temporized. To my relief, Adrian dropped the subject.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of pain, and I really did want to see how tough I was, now, but it would require either cutting my face or removing one or more pieces of armor, not to mention that it would draw even more attention to me. That was too much effort.

The fact that some people knew me was embarrassing, considering that I was in the wrong body. The letter had implied that gender mix-ups could be fixed. What would people think when AngelaFury was suddenly a man? Not that that would stop me from changing back. It’d just be more hassle.

None of those present had a Valkyrie character, so I passed some time by showing them my helmet. More people trickled in, and everyone wanted to examine everyone else’s equipment. No one else made such a big deal about my armor.

My fanboy was named Alessandro, apparently. It fit with his dark complexion and black hair and beard. He got excited when I mentioned that my hammer was my design, one that hadn’t been implemented in the game, and wanted to see it. As I had expected, drawing the weapon was easy--I simply grasped the butt of it, behind my right shoulder, lifted it out of the sheath and swung it up to get the handle out of the hook. It was only easy because I was so ludicrously strong, of course, since swinging a sledgehammer with one hand, by the very end of the handle, would have been difficult even for a very strong normal person. While Alessandro examined the weapon, I removed the strap so I could easily resheathe it.

The sun rose higher and more and more people arrived. In the end, there were around fifty of us waiting on the East side of the tower, though a few were just there with someone, like Sarah was. Sarah had sat next to me, between me and Adrian. She was closer than Alessandro, but it didn’t make me uncomfortable. In fact, part of me wanted to scoot closer and sit hip-to-hip with her. She was just so beautiful…

A section of the spire’s base suddenly vanished, and it was the part Sarah, Adrian, Alessandro, and I were sitting on. We all fell a couple of feet, landing on the same hard white stone we’d been sitting on, but now flat and level with the surrounding earth. Both Sarah and I yelped, and I blushed at the girlish squeak I’d emitted.

We all hopped easily to our feet and turned to look at the spire. There was now a door of what looked like silver set into the side of the spire where the building got tall enough to hold a full-sized door. Someone had painted words on the door in black, reading “Approach and state your name.”

I sighed. This was so annoyingly cryptic. Why couldn’t someone just come out and lead us inside?

Alessandro, being one of the four closest people to the door, stepped forward first. He stood before the silver door and said loudly “Alessandro Gomez.”

Nothing happened. I was temporarily distracted by Alessandro’s mix of an Italian first name with a Spanish last name. Shouldn’t his name be Alejandro?

Alessandro repeated himself. Adrian stepped up and tried. His last name was Jones.

Ah. I stepped up and guided Adrian aside. He looked surprised, but made way.

“AngelaFury,” I said in my chirpy new voice. The door vanished. I hesitated, and Alessandro slipped past to try to enter. The door re-materialized in time for him to run into it face-first. I laughed aloud, then smothered it with my hand over my mouth. Don’t be rude.

Alessandro rubbed his nose--he was uninjured--and gestured to me like a gentleman showing a lady to the door. I strode toward the silver door, and it vanished just before I ran into it like Alessandro had.

Inside the spire, I’d half-expected to be able to see all the way to the top, but the ceiling only got higher for a few feet before it topped out at around fifteen feet. Chandeliers hung from the white stone ceiling, glowing with their own light. The floor was the same stone, but mostly covered by mismatched rugs.

I was in a waiting room. Around the room were benches slapped together from sawn planks. Their legs were shorter sections of the same planks, braced by even shorter sections cut at an angle to fit against the leg and the bottom of the bench. I was just stepping forward when sunlight streamed in from behind me. By the time I looked back, the door had closed itself, but now Alessandro stood where I had just been.

I moved forward quickly, not wanting to hold up anyone trying to enter. There was an actual, wooden door on the far side of the room. I went over to it, and pulled, then pushed, on the iron staple that served as a handle. It was locked. I took a seat on the bench immediately next to it, crossing my legs.

One by one, the other designers entered the room. They formed a bit of a traffic jam in the entranceway, but all then moved to sit or stand around the room. One of them prodded a chandelier with his poleaxe. When the steel spike touched a dangling, glowing orb, the light went out, revealing a glass or crystal ball. As soon as the spike stopped touching it, the light resumed.

People were still trickling in occasionally when the door next to me opened. I’d sat opposite the hinges, so I got the first look at one of our...kidnappers? Benefactors? Supplicants? All of those were accurate to some degree. She was a middle-aged woman wearing a dark blue pantsuit, and holding a clipboard. She looked every bit the office worker or secretary, with glasses and her blonde hair tied up in a bun. Seeing such a normal-looking person after nothing but armored gods and goddesses was as jarring as her clothing.

It seemed to have the same effect on the others. All sounds of chatter and movement stopped, and everyone stared.

“Thank you all for coming,” the woman said. “If everyone will take a seat, we can begin.” As shocking as her appearance was, her accent was even moreso. It was a perfect New Zealand accent.

Gleamheart had been developed by a New Zealand company, I remembered, so the accent made a sort of sense, but there were still many unanswered questions.

The woman introduced herself as Dawn Sutherland, and began to call roll from her clipboard. No one began shouting questions or demands, as I would have expected. Dawn’s appearance and businesslike demeanor were so normal that everyone was either too confused or too polite to take the initiative. By the time a couple of people had called out “here!” to Dawn’s roll call, simply following suit was the easiest thing to do.

As with the door, we were listed by our gamer tags, which made the roll call all the more surreal as Dawn rattled off names like “Poopybutt” and “Jizzwiz” with a straight face. Most of the owners of such names looked embarrassed as they responded, probably regretting their puerile humor.

The names weren’t in alphabetical order. Most of the people present had been called before I heard my name. I raised a gauntleted hand as said “Right here” quietly, since Dawn was only two feet away. She acknowledged me with a glance and a nod, and called the next name, RadioactiveMan.

A last few people had trickled in during roll call. Dawn got their names and marked them off.

There were barely enough seats for everyone, given how bulky we all were in our armor. The majority of people present were men, as well, whose muscular bodies were even bulkier still. Several people sat on the floor to have more room.

There we all were, lounging around and calling out “here!” like kids in grade school, while decked out in armor and holding deadly medieval weapons. I tried to smother a laugh and it came out as a giggle, making me blush at its girlishness.

Dawn dragged a podium through the doorway and into our room. Apparently we were meeting here. From the trouble she had with the simple wooden podium, Dawn lacked the abilities of the rest of us. She closed the door behind her and stood behind the podium.

“Have you all read the welcome letter?” she asked. There was some confusion, so dawn produced her own copy and read it. When she had finished, the room erupted in questions and some angry-sounding protests or demands. Dawn simply waited it out. To my surprise, no one got violent or rushed Dawn or the door. I’d been prepared to block any such attempt. We would get no answers from a dead woman.

For the next several hours, Dawn answered questions and elaborated on the letter and why we all were here.

The short version was as the letter had said: we were in Geamhlúrt, on which Gleamheart had been based. We had been summoned as reinforcements against the innumerable monsters trying to invade from “the Continent” because all--or nearly all-of the natives with powers like ours had disappeared hunting the “superbeasts” on the Continent.

Apparently it was easier to pull people’s minds/souls from another world/dimension/universe/whatever and create superpowered bodies for them than it was to give a native those same powers. It made no sense, but then, nothing about the situation made sense.

Dawn had grown up in New Zealand, on our Earth, the daughter of scouts/explorers/emissaries from Geamhlúrt. The original Geamhlúrtans had decided not to try to reveal themselves after seeing our world, for numerous reasons, some selfish, some altruistic. I had to agree that doing so would have been a bad idea, for the Geamhlúrtans, if no one else, since they would have been treated as insane.

The known geography of Geamhlúrt was similar to Earth’s to the point of being nearly identical. Geamhlúrt itself was technically the name of the islands we were on right now, not the whole planet. Those islands sat near the southern pole, with the nearest landmass--the Continent--over two-thousand kilometers away, where Australia would be on Earth. Dawn used metric measurements, being from New Zealand, but I’d never had trouble understanding or converting metric in my head, despite growing up with the Imperial system.

Despite the distance, monsters from the Continent managed to cross the ocean to Geamhlúrt, and constantly had to be fought back and eradicated, just as in the game. Except that now we were expected to do it in person with real weapons, not behind a keyboard on a computer.

The reason we designers got a special meeting--or class--was to explain or re-explain how magic items worked, here, so that we could potentially come up with more. All of us had created something for the game that had been tested successfully in combat on Geamhlúrt, so hopes were that we would be able to do so again now that we were here.

Besides the rules about metal and gems most of us already knew, Dawn explained the actual process of enchanting, which involved casting, forging, or etching a symbol into the item while thinking really hard about the magic effect you wanted. She didn’t put it in those words, but that was what it boiled down to. On our equipment, the symbols were generally covered, where they wouldn’t get damaged, such as on the tang of a sword beneath the hilt, or inside a helmet or breastplate, under the liner. Gems worked the same way, only much harder to etch, but multiple gems with different effects could be placed on the same item, something that was impossible with metals alone. Dawn used my helmet as an example, saying the helm itself was enchanted, the symbol inside, under the lining, while the ruby added a second effect. The symbol increased the defense of the helmet, giving it a sort of force-field that had to be breached before the steel took any impact. To my great relief, this field covered the parts of my head left uncovered by the helm itself, including the top of my neck. The ruby, meanwhile, somehow enhanced my Divine Spear ability--the one that let me summon and throw a weightless magical javelin.

All of the best magical equipment had been lost with the expedition to the Continent. The items we had were the ones left behind, or used by normal soldiers, with a handful crafted specially for us. Everyone who’d been summoned had at least one enchanted item. It seemed a little unfair that I had three, and all were pretty powerful, but I wasn’t going to complain.

As for the summoning itself, Dawn explained that our minds had to be in the right mindset when we were summoned, so only those of us who were actively playing Gleamheart at the time of summoning were here, now. We had all been selected beforehand, as the signs and personalized equipment had suggested, but several hundred had not made it. Instead of the 6,720 they had chosen, we numbered a well under six thousand.

A second, smaller summoning had taken place on the other major island of Geamhlúrt, attempting to bring over 2,400 new heroes. It had been successful, but the exact numbers were unknown so far. As the letter had said, the summoning had consumed all of the materials and reagents the Geamhlúrtans had to travel between worlds, so a few people, like Dawn, who were from Earth, were trapped here just as permanently as we were. Dawn and those others had left their lives and the only world they knew to come to Geamhlúrt before us and act as intermediaries, because the people of Geamhlúrt spoke a language that was nothing like any on Earth. Another good reason not to shoot the messenger.

As designers, we were expected not only to come up with new designs to be crafted, but also to find ways to combine existing items for greater effect. I gathered that the enchanted items we had designed and now wore or held were a sort of bribe to help elicit more enthusiasm from us. The best way to get more magic items, including more powerful ones, was to explore the areas on the coast where monsters landed frequently, retrieving items from fallen soldiers, or, when we were powerful enough, to do the same thing on the Continent. Just like the game. We have to level up our skills and our gear in the easy areas before moving into the tougher ones.

Snacks in the form of fruit had been brought in by a man after the first hour of the meeting, along with clay pitchers and wooden cups for water. Like the stuff in my waterskin, the water in the pitchers tasted strange. Someone identified the taste as diluted wine, which Dawn confirmed. Evidently cutting water with one-fifth as much wine was standard practice in Geamhlúrt. I hated the taste of alcohol and never drank it back on Earth, but for now, I apparently had no choice.

When we were out of questions and the meeting broke up, the door opened to reveal that it was dark outside. We had all been awake since midnight the previous night when the summoning had occurred, and were starting to feel it, despite our superhuman bodies. Our brains still required sleep, it seemed.

For that reason, I was more annoyed than surprised or curious when Dawn asked me to stay a bit longer, and motioned me through the door she had entered from. I followed her anyway, and even picked up the podium for her. After setting the podium aside, I followed Dawn to a small conference room with a table large enough for up to eight people. To my surprise, the man from before--a servant, it seemed--brought in a plate of cold meats, hot vegetables, potatoes with butter, and a pitcher of water-wine. I started eating, leaving it to Dawn to explain why I’d been singled out. She had food, too, I saw.

After taking a long drink, Dawn spoke. “AngelaFury. I want to apologize to you.” I stopped eating and met her eyes. “Most players have multiple characters, usually of both genders. When they were summoned, their minds selected the attributes of the character they were playing, or of the character they most identified with. We used the information from your account profiles to avoid selecting anyone who only had characters of the wrong gender. Very few ended up a different one, like you did, and most of those were people who wanted to change sex. Transgendered people.”

I cleared my throat. “I see.”

Dawn took a deep breath. “I was my personal decision to summon you, knowing that you would end up the wrong gender because you had only the one character. I was in charge of managing the player-designed equipment, so I was familiar with your work and decided that you were too valuable to pass up. You would not have been summoned, if not for me, because you didn’t match the conditions we used to select people. I understand if you’re angry with me.”

Surprisingly, I wasn’t. Dawn had given up her life to come here, same as I had, though she had volunteered and kept her original body. On the other hand, I now had superpowers.

“I forgive you,” I said, a little stiltedly. It would have been a lie to say “it’s fine” or “no problem,” but I wanted Dawn to know I wasn’t going to hold a grudge. She’d only done what she thought was her duty, and I couldn’t fault her for that.

Dawn relaxed visibly, and finally took a bite of her food. She was probably afraid I’d kill her. It would have been easy to, even without my hammer, but she had confessed to me, anyway, in private, where no one would see or interfere. A brave woman.

“We can change you,” Dawn continued in a milder tone than I had heard from her. Now that she was no longer speaking to a large room, or confessing to someone who might murder her in a fit of rage, I suspected I was hearing her normal voice.

“We have the materials to...re-summon any of you,” she continued. “If you are prepared for it, you can probably ensure that you return with a male body.”

“And these materials are different from the ones used to bring us here,” I raised an eyebrow pointedly, “or send us back?”

Dawn nodded. “They are, whether you believe me or not. They are, in fact the same ones needed to make a normal person into a powered one.”

“So for each of us who switch to a new body,” I deduced, “you can make one less powered hero from the natives?” Dawn nodded.

I ate while I thought. Now that I knew I could switch back to being male, did I really want to? It would be awkward with the people who already knew me as Angela, but I could deal with that. On the other hand, I’d been male for nearly thirty years. This was my only chance to be something else, and curiosity niggled at my attempts to decide.

Dawn spoke again. “There is one more thing to consider. Valkyries are always female. Every hero with the abilities you have has been female. We don’t know what will happen if you switch. Most likely, you would be able to take another set of abilities along with your male body. Possibly, you would retain your Valkyrie abilities, and be the first male in history to have them. It’s also possible that you would lose all your powers, or even end up in a body identical to the one you had on Earth.”

“I see.” Another reason not to go back to being male. In fact, it was my own focus that determined my body, Dawn had said. If I were really determined to be male, the slight possibility of losing my powers wouldn’t matter. My very hesitation might make it more likely that something would go wrong.

Plus...I kind of liked this body. It was cute and sexy. Being attracted to yourself wasn’t a bad thing, and could be a good thing in some ways. Same with being a lesbian, which is what I essentially was, in this body. Sure it might be harder to find a partner, but not impossible.

It felt a little dirty to consider that if I kept my body, I would undoubtedly sleep, change clothes, and probably bathe with other women. I’d be like a voyeur, spying on them. On the other hand, that was something gay people of both sexes had to deal with, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen my share of naked women on the internet.

I would have to deal with guys hitting on me, no doubt, but I didn’t see that being a problem. I was small and female, but unlike women back on Earth, I was in little danger of being intimidated or overpowered by a forceful guy who couldn’t take no for an answer. This is being female on easy mode. It felt kind of unfair to be a man in a woman’s body without having to deal with the same problems as other women. Of course, the same was now true of the other women who had been summoned.

Dawn had said that they had selected equal numbers of both genders, but it appeared that more men than women had been successfully summoned. That figured, since the criteria for being summoned had basically been to just be online, and we guys tended to put more time into games. Even with the uneven numbers, though, this was going to be an egalitarian society, since bulk and mass and testosterone had no effect on someone’s physical abilities.

I’d been a feminist for years, even as a man. The lack of female characters in fiction annoyed me, and I always hated it when someone less competent got a job over someone better, regardless of gender. But, as a man, I hadn’t done a lot to fix those things, either. I’d worked in a sexist company and promoted a woman to a position previously held only by men, but I’d still worked for that company, and if I’d been a woman, I wouldn’t have been in a position to promote anyone, regardless of my abilities.

Well, whatever. I was a woman, now. It was time to decide, and the reasons to stay a woman were drowning out my desire to return to the safe and familiar state of malehood.

“I’ll stay as I am,” I decided.

Dawn looked surprised, but nodded. “If you change your mind, it will need to be soon. We will be using up the materials quickly. Though you can always go questing for more, if you really want to change.”

I nodded. “Sure, just like people can get the stuff to go back, right?”

Dawn nodded firmly. “Exactly.”

“And so you get our service whether we want to serve or not.” I smiled thinly, wondering how it looked on my new face. “You guys are ruthless. I approve.”

Dawn blinked, then laughed loudly. “You may be right to stay female,” she chortled. “You make an excellent Valkyrie.”