Outsiders

My D&D group has a tradition where the player with the lowest level character at the end of a successful game has to pay a forfeit to the player with the highest level character. It's to discourage people from missing out on sessions as that causes a delay in leveling up. Unfortunately, I missed a session and ended up with my friend handing me his character sheet and spell list and asking that I make a story where his D&D character, a sorcerer, walks in the real world of today. I liked the premise and turned it into this series.

I've done my best to write this story in such a way that knowledge or appreciation of Dungeons and Dragons is completely unnecessary to enjoy it. Also, the lead character is a wimp at the beginning, as a slight dig at my friend, but don't let that discourage you, he becomes a badbutt once the overarching plot catches up to him.

*************

Ben Kidder stood up and stretched with a loud groan. His friends and he had just finished a long and very entertaining D&D campaign. They had been playing it every other Saturday night for the past four months in sessions that would last the whole night long. Their characters went from mere peasants in a raided border village to saviors of their small kingdom, leveling up till just shy of epic. He took a deep breath of fresh air that was pouring in through the window he had just opened and carrying away the smell of beer, pizza and Cheetos. Considering all the crap he had gone through since February, this campaign had been a much needed distraction for him.

Ben took his smartphone out of its sleeve and took photos of his character sheet and spell list. He had been playing Dungeons & Dragons, the 3.5 edition, for almost two years now and he had never before managed to reach level 19 like he had with this character, a sorcerer. He had a terrific string of luck with his saving throw rolls during the whole game and he managed to not get killed during the many side quests their characters needed to undertake to save their kingdom.

His friends talked about how Jake had tried to get their adventuring party past a locked door guarded by an anti-magic field and a pair of paladins. He had walked up to the paladins and said, "Phew, what's that stench," and collapsed at their feet, feigning a seizure. It had been a truly ridiculous thing to do, even in the context of the game, and they couldn't stop laughing at it.

"What," Jake protested, sporting a smile. "That's how a stroke victim behaves! They were supposed to pick me up and rush me to a healer and leave the door unguarded! They're fantasy cops! Cops are supposed to help you!" Everyone laughed even harder at Jake's reasoning and Ben turned around to throw his five cents' worth in, holding his character sheet in one hand and his phone, with the photos of the same, in the other.

Ben blinked his eyes open and squinted at the bright, slightly flickering light. He was lying down. He tried to sit up and felt a bit dizzy and nauseated, so he quit. He groaned in misery and tried to see where he was. He saw an elderly woman standing next to him and looking at a beeping monitor. Ben cast his gaze about and realized he was lying in a bed in an emergency room somewhere. He had no idea how he got there, but his body felt like it was the right place for him to be at, right now. The disorientation, nausea and slight pains in his sides reminded him of when he had been a kid and tried to defend the honor of a girl from his class. His chivalry had gotten the shit kicked out of him and the girl later spat in his hair and let him know his efforts had been wholly unwanted.

"What," he croaked and cleared his throat, prompting the old woman in scrubs to look at him. Her eyes looked huge behind her thick glasses. "Where am I?"

"You're in the emergency room, sweetie," said the woman, sounding like a grandmother speaking to her favorite grandchild. She reached out and patted him gently on the shoulder. "You just lie back and rest, sweetie. I'll go tell the doctor that you're awake." The woman made a few notes on a clipboard and hung it on the end of his bed as she left the space around the bed that was enclosed by hanging, blue, plastic curtains.

Ben took a deep breath and felt the pain in his sides fade away. He took another look around, seeing nothing of note, and then tried to sit up again. He still felt a bit woozy, so he gave up and lay back to await the doctor. He had no idea what happened to him and his head started to fill up with various scenarios, each more terrible than the last. Since he couldn't remember what happened and how he got to be in an emergency room, he concluded that he must have suffered a blow to the head. He wiggled his toes and was delighted to feel them moving. Just as he was going to feel up his crotch and check if everything was still there, his friends showed up, crowding around his bed. "Hey," Kurt said, "are you alright, man?"

"I guess," Ben said, comforted by the sight of friendly faces. They looked concerned, but not very frightened or disturbed, so he took some comfort in that. He guessed that whatever happened to him, wasn't all that bad, or he could see it on their faces. "What happened?"

"A fucking bolt of lightning struck you, dude," Jake exclaimed.

"What," Ben asked, squinting at Jake and wondering if this was true or some more of his Jake-ness coming through.

"It's true," Kurt said. "It just struck you, man!" Ben gave his friends a look of disbelief as they repeatedly told him he had been struck by lightning while standing in Kurt's living room. They told him how loud the crack of thunder had been in the room and then started squabbling about the details of the story of how they had rushed him to the hospital.

"How long have I been out," Ben asked.

"I don't know," Kurt said, checking his cellphone, "it's been, like, fifty-five minutes since you got struck. When did you wake up?"

"Just now," Ben said.

The doctor, a young man that looked like he should be in college with them and not treating patients already, showed up and asked Ben's friends to go back to the waiting room while he examined his patient. They shuffled away, calling repeatedly for Ben to get better soon.

"Doc," Ben said, as soon as they were out of sight, "tell me what happened! My friends claim that I was struck by lightning."

"You were," the doctor simply said as he shined a light in Ben's eyes. "Your burns are consistent with a lightning strike. What's the last thing you remember?"

"I was standing in Kurt's living room and joking around with them," Ben said. He then snorted a brief laugh. "Those jackasses are claiming a lightning bolt struck me while I was indoors."

The doctor checked under the bandages on Ben's hands, making Ben notice them for the first time, and said, "It's not completely unheard of. There are certain types of positive lightning that can zip through openings and strike an object that is indoors." The doctor consulted Ben's chart and nodded to himself. "Well, as unlucky as you were to get hit by a rare kind of lightning while indoors, you were also lucky enough to get away without any significant damage. Your burns are minor and looked more severe when I first looked at them. Your arrhythmia has resolved itself and your neurological exam is clean." He hung the clipboard on the foot of Ben's bed. "A nurse will be right over and give you your discharge papers and a prescription for a burn cream." He turned to leave.

"My discharge papers," Ben asked, incredulously. He was starting to feel really scared. How could he be discharged less than an hour after being struck by lightning?

"Yes," the doctor said and paused. "It seems that you have no medical insurance and we can't keep you overnight for observation without it." He glanced guiltily at Ben. "Sorry, hospital policy." With that, he left the screened area around Ben's bed. Ben huffed and looked to the ceiling in frustration. He had been cheated out of his college tuition money by a con artist and, as a consequence, he had to re-route his medical insurance payments into saving up for next semester's tuition. He had even gotten a surprisingly well paid summer job to try and come up with the tuition fees himself.

Going back home to his parents and telling them that he had let the first girl to ever show him any affection swindle him out of their life savings was simply out of the question. They'd be gutted. He decided not to tell them that he got struck by lightning, either. He didn't want his mother to worry herself sick over him. Or come to nurse him back to health. If she did that, Ben felt certain she'd discover his shame.

He lay back and did his best to calm down and suppress his mounting panic. "I'm not going to die tonight," he thought to himself. "If there was a risk of that, they'd keep me here, with or without insurance. They can't afford to risk my family suing them for malpractice." When he calmed down, he took careful stock of himself and was relieved to see that he was basically ok. His aches were gone and he was no longer dizzy. He had bandages on his hands and another bandage over his right shoulder blade, but he didn't really feel any pain coming from the burns under those bandages. It felt more like the itch one feels when a wound is almost done healing. He cast the sheets off of himself.

As soon as he sat up in bed, however, he felt the consequences of his injury. He felt like there were things flowing under his skin. They were flowing from his head down his body until they reached a dead end and then flooded back into his head. The sensations were strange and unprecedented for Ben, but they were not painful. He didn't feel like there were creepy crawlies running around under his skin, this felt more like there were different types of fluids, that didn't mix between themselves, and they just gently sloshed throughout his body. Ben guessed it was a result of the damage the lightning had done to his nerves. As strange as the sensations were, they were much better than having all his nerves scream out in agony and make him addicted to painkillers.

A young nurse came over with a wheelchair and a small envelope. She wordlessly helped Ben transfer from the bed to the wheelchair. Only after his bare ass landed on the seat of the wheelchair did Ben realize he was completely naked under the hospital robe. "Where are my clothes," he asked her.

"We had to cut them off, Mr. Kidder," she said and handed him the envelope. "These are your discharge papers."

"Yeah," Ben said, taking the envelope, "but where are my clothes? And the prescription?"

The nurse heaved a great sigh and exaggeratedly rolled her eyes at the terrible imposition of Ben asking about his clothes. "Wait here," she said and left. Ben sat in the wheelchair, feeling like a dork. The young nurse had spread the blue curtains wider and he could now see out into the E.R. A pair of paramedics wheeled a person lying on a blood-soaked gurney into the E.R. A bunch of people in scrubs congregated around them and wheeled the gurney to a curtained area not too far from Ben's. Ben watched his doctor run over and start issuing orders. It was obviously a touch and go situation with a life hanging in the balance. He had never before in his life seen anything like that, not back home and not here, either. An orderly pulled the curtain shut and obscured Ben's view of the situation. Ben wished them luck.

As impressive as the efforts to save a life just down the hall from him had been to see, Ben still felt angry at the hospital for throwing him out on his ass like this. The nurse came back with a large paper bag that she put in his lap. He opened it and looked in. "We had to cut your clothes off to determine the extent of your injuries. It's standard procedure," she said. Ben reached into the bag and pulled out a small piece of paper. "That's your prescription." She then undid the brakes on the wheelchair and began to wheel Ben out of the emergency room.

"I can walk," Ben said.

"Hospital policy," she said. Ben let out a loud snort of derision and shook his head in disapproval. He considered it very hypocritical of them to require that he not walk around while in their emergency room, but they were fine with kicking him to the curb less than an hour after he got hit by lightning. He couldn't see into the curtained area where the blood-soaked person was treated, but he could hear beeping alarms and barked orders. It made him feel very lucky in comparison. Sure, he was getting kicked out of a hospital, but he could have had it much worse.

The nurse wheeled him through the waiting room, where his friends were standing around the vending machine, joking about something. They stopped when they saw him and rushed over to ask him how he was. "Eh, I'm ok," he said and shrugged. He winced as the skin tightened over his shoulder blade. The nurse wheeled him out to the sidewalk and his friends followed. The summer night was warm and balmy.

She put the brakes on the chair and said, "End of the line." Ben twisted his neck and looked up at her. She gestured impatiently for him to stand up. Ben shook his head in silent disapproval and stood up.

"Dude," Jake exclaimed, "your ass is bare!" Ben reached behind himself and managed, despite the bandages, to grab two ends of the hospital gown to keep it shut over his ass and try to protect some of his modesty. He heard soft thuds and urgent, whispered admonitions. "Ow! Ow! Stop it!" The nurse left, taking the wheelchair back inside with her.

"Can someone, please, give me a ride to my place," Ben asked.

"Sure," Kurt said in response. He ran off towards the parking lot.

Ben turned around and faced his friends, awkwardly standing hunched over to be able to reach the flap he was holding closed over his ass. They stood in an awkward silence for a few moments. "That was a really good game," Sean said. Everyone nodded their heads and agreed.

"Worth getting fried for, too," Jake said. He grunted in pain as he received two elbows to the ribs for it. "Ow! Quit it!"

After they silenced Jake, Ben's friends reminisced at some of the game's highlight over the last few months, trying to cheer up Ben. He grinned. They did have a lot of fun. Ben hadn't been all that big on D&D, originally, but his friends were, and he played along cause he was so glad to have finally made friends when he had first come to the big city to attend college.

He had spent his childhood mostly alone. He never had much trouble making new friends. His parents had raised him to be always polite and friendly and that put his foot in the door with nearly everyone he ever met. He would make friends and then something would always go wrong. If they were girls, they'd get angry after a while, call his respectful behavior weird and start avoiding him, and if they were boys, they'd call the courteous way he talked about girls, even when they weren't around, weird and start avoiding him, too.

It seemed that no matter how well Ben behaved, he never managed to hold on to a friend for more than half a year. All during his childhood, he never had more than two people he counted as friends at the same time. By the time he was a senior in high school, he was his generation's only loner. Every single socially awkward kid managed to get into one clique or another, but none held a place open for Ben. He wasn't shunned by anyone, but no one considered him a close friend, either. He didn't mind it all that much. Most of the people in his home town were single-minded bores, as far as he was concerned.

When he came to college, he didn't know anyone and that made him nervous. He met Sean on his first day and they started running into each other that first week in various classes so they sat down for lunch one day and got to talking. Sean had been really into D&D since his high school days and, when he assembled his D&D group, Ben joined up, mostly out of curiosity. He got the hang of the game's rules in a jiffy and started to enjoy it. For the first time in his life, he found himself part of a group and not just half of a temporary duo. He loved it. Especially since there was no talk of "bitches" during their hangouts.

"I can't wait for the next game," Ben said. They all fell silent at that. The school year was over and everyone except Kurt, who lived in this city, was going home for the summer. Ben was going to miss them terribly. He was also staying in town to work and avoid facing his parents and letting them know of his shame, but just Kurt and him were not going to play D&D. One against the Dungeon Master made no sense.

"As soon as classes start in the fall, we're meeting up at Kurt's place and doing a campaign I'm working on," Sean said. Everyone nodded and grinned. They talked a bit about what kind of enemies and challenges Sean was going to put in his game and stopped when Kurt drove up with his car.

"Well," Sean said, "looks like it's time to go! I'll take these assholes back to the dorms in my car. Kurt will take you home. What's left of your phone is in his car." Ben grimaced at hearing that. His phone had been expensive. He had only bought it last summer, when they were splitting up and going home, so he could keep in touch with them. His life up until then had been cellphone-free, despite the fact that he was very savvy with electronics. He simply hadn't had that many people he could call. Since he came to college, that changed completely and his phone had more than a hundred numbers in its memory.

The guys avoided shaking Ben's hand, as it was bandaged, and then changed their minds about patting him on the back, too. They waved, promising to stay in touch during the summer.

"Kurt," Jake said, "Ben's gonna put his bare ass on your seat! You better get that car fumigated!" Jake got a clout on the ear from Sean for that comment and the rest dragged him away, saying goodbye to their friends.

Ben rummaged around in the paper bag and found his shredded pants. He lay them over the seat and plopped his ass on it. "You didn't have to do that," Kurt protested.

"Oh, yes I did," Ben said, closing the door. "I'm not gonna sit my bare butt on your seat." Kurt laughed and started to drive Ben to the house he had rented for the summer. He knew where it was, since he and the rest of Ben's friends had helped Ben move there last week. It was a dilapidated shithole in a bad suburb of town, but it was the only thing Ben could afford if he was going to save up the money for tuition in the fall.

The drive was silent, for a few minutes, and then Kurt said, "That was a crazy ass accident tonight, bro." Ben looked at Kurt askance. His tone of voice was weird. At 25, Kurt was five years older than the rest of the group. He had not gone to college originally but, after he had spent a few years working lame jobs under the thumb of incompetent bosses, he realized that higher education was the way to go, so he saved up some money and enrolled. He rented an apartment in town and held down a part-time job and was invariably the host of their little D&D games as every other member of the group had a dorm mate that could not be easily persuaded to let them play the whole night long. Kurt didn't mind hosting. The guys would bring beer and snacks and never made a mess of things. Yet, the older boy now seemed nervous, somehow. "Weird shit. Unpredictable."

"Yeah," Ben said, noncommittally.

"No one could have seen it coming," Kurt said. Ben looked at him in confusion. "You know, it's not something you can plan for, or, or, or take measures against." Kurt took his eyes off the road, for a second, to give Ben a meaningful look. Ben had no idea where Kurt was going with this. "You know what I'm saying?"

"Actually, no," Ben said.

Kurt shook his head in displeasure and sighed. They drove on in silence for a few more minutes. "Your accident happened in my house, man," Kurt said. "Don't sue! I can't afford to pay you anything! I'm barely making ends meet as it is."