CHAPTER 2 — Impulse Buys
STEPHANIE
THEY. TATTOOED. MY FACE. They tattooed my face!
Orcs speak perfect English—either that, or I’ve magically learned Orc. And so I heard tattoos being discussed, but I didn’t realize they were talking about me and tattoos until I was pinned down and my face was stabbed with a hand-carved needle about a million times.
I struggled. Oh, you bet I struggled. Screamed my head off too. But there was no escaping it, and ink was swiped into my needle-pricked cheeks, and then a healing salve was applied, and I was released.
Tattooed. On… my… face.
My stomach pitches as I wonder what’s happening to the two strangers, Esther and Lisa, who were playing the same game that brought me here.
THIS WAS ALL SUPPOSED TO BE A STUPID GAME!
Lisa and Esther seemed really nice. The three of us arrived alone at the Renaissance Festival.
Big groups and families were all around us, and everyone was in line waiting to get in.
I was starting to regret my impulsive decision to go to this deal at all—I’d seen the medieval faire’s billboard and taken the turn-off for it without a second thought—but when I paid to park and got out, I saw practically everyone, visitors included, was in costume.
I felt like a misfit, and by the time I stood in line, everyone in front of me seeming to have partners and friends to enjoy the experience with, I nearly stepped out of line to hightail it back to my car.
Before I could, the woman ahead of me—dressed in everyday clothes like me, thank God—turned around.
“I’m Lisa.” Then she leaned around me, and I looked behind me too, and found another lone woman, this one dressed in full costume, all black crushed velvet and shimmery taffeta, like a dark fairy princess.
“Are the three of us going stag?” Lisa had asked.
“Maybe instead, we could hang together today for fun.”
“I’m Esther,” announced the woman behind me. “I’m game.”
And then they’d both looked at me.
I’d nodded and smiled gratefully. “Thanks. I was just about to duck out of here. It’d be nice to walk around together.”
So we did. And it was great fun. That is, until we sat down to a game that seems to have done exactly what it promised: it sucked me into an alternate reality.
Which is crazy! Who would ever have believed a cheesy arcade game could do anything real?
But wait: how do I know it’s an alternate reality, you ask? Why don’t I simply chalk this up to a weird dream?
Because THEY. TATTOOED. MY. FACE.
This is real. This is definitely real. It hurt.
My hand comes up to cup my cheek—but I catch myself before my fingers can make contact, because I don’t want to touch my skin and risk irritating it. Whatever salve they slapped on me is keeping it from throbbing like it was before, and I want to keep it that way.
“I’m Namak?ga,” says the Orc lady carrying the biggest, ugliest fish I’ve ever seen.
It’s slimy gray with dull scales, and it keeps gaping its mouth open, showing off an impressive set of pharyngeal jaws.
Alarmingly, the fish flaps its tail from time to time, sending its body slapping against her, forcing her to catch it.
All the while, the fish’s gill slits crank open and closed, open and closed.
Namak?ga carries it like she doesn’t even notice, her olive green skin turning to jade everywhere the fish’s slimecoat has rubbed off on her arm. In her other arm is a burlap bag that puffs white powder when she jostles it too hard.
She’s dressed in what looks like a cotton undergown, which is eggshell-colored, with a cinnamon wool tunic fitted over it.
A length of braided leather cord fits over her hugely pregnant waist. Several necklaces drape her neck, all of them beaded with what looks like…
finger bones and teeth. They look disturbingly like human finger bones and teeth—but since this Orc didn’t know what I was, I’m really hoping her necklaces are made from something else.
Two hoop earrings that shine like polished gold weigh down her ears, which are sort of wedge-shaped, and gold bands shine in her mane of hair and on her wrists.
There’s even gold on her boots, which, although they’re otherwise pretty well-worn brown leather, they’re definitely bedecked with metal bits—coins, charms, and beads.
And as I stare at her shoes, she’s looking down at my sneakers like she’s never seen anything like them before.
She raises her gaze to mine, and I stare back, noting she’s at least a head taller than me.
One of my heads, mind you, not one of her-people’s heads.
Her people are built like Mack trucks—especially the males.
I shudder again, remembering how the Orc guys back there looked at me.
HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?!
The drumbeats are what initially drew the three of us.
They thudded from tinny speakers in a beat reminiscent of that popular movie franchise about a board game that transports its players to other worlds and dangerously different places.
Intrigued, we left the Renaissance thoroughfare and entered the Jumanji-esque’s booth, where the drumbeat was accompanied by an unfamiliar soft rock song.
“This is Huey Lewis and the News,” Lisa had said. Then at our blank looks, she’d groaned. “‘Do you believe in love?’”
Esther had shrugged. “Sure.”
“No—that’s the name of this song,” Lisa insisted, horror coloring her voice as she pointed up at the top of the booth where the music was being piped from. “Aww, geez. How old are you two?” she’d asked with a bracing, comical wince.
I’d grinned. “Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-eight,” Esther said.
Lisa sighed theatrically and flounced to the middle of the booth, where a medieval-themed arcade game practically took up the whole space. “Kids! I’m chaperoning kids!”
“We’re hardly kids,” I pointed out.
“I could be your mom!” she’d pretended to sob, and climbed into the arcade seat.
Laughing, we’d joined her, squeezing together and staring up to see what we were playing.
ZULDANA, the text read on the grainy game screen. A game where you can choose your very own epic romance. To begin, enter a token and select the romantic reality you wish to experience.
We’d all swung our heads over to see a token dispenser.
“Hang on, I might have quarters,” Lisa said, twisting and digging in her purse.
“Umm, that’d take a lot of quarters,” I noted.
Esther’s lips twisted. “Eesh. Five dollars per token.”
Lisa stopped rifling in her purse and gaped. “Wow! Inflation really jacked up on arcade games since I was a kid.”
After dropping in our preciously-bought tokens, I’d laughed out loud with my new friends as we gazed at our playing options:
We could become a princess who needs to unite three warring kingdoms.
We could turn into a beast who must win the heart of her one true love to lift her curse.
Or we could join an Orc family and learn the ways of their realm.
Leaning forward, I’d looked politely at my temporary companions. “Rock, paper, scissors on who gets to play Beauty and the Beast?”
Esther had shrugged. “I want to be the princess.”
My eyes went to Lisa.
“I freaking love Beauty and the Beast,” she’d said. Her eyes had said I will take you to the mat for this.
But being that I myself am a huge fan of the Beast tale, I’d held my fist over my palm. “Rock…”
She won with paper. She selected the beast option, I took the join-the-Orc-family, and Esther grabbed her princess quest.
And then we all disappeared.
In the dark behind my eyelids, I heard the game’s drumbeats sound in my ears like a herald before a voiceover announced, “In the Orc’s kingdom, you shall join a handsome husband. Your Objective: become intertwined.”
The next second, I blinked as the fiberglass seat I was sitting on changed to a rough wooden bench—and I was no longer stationary. My body was rocking side to side as the whole bench swayed.
Beside me, Lisa and Esther were gone. In their place was…
an Orc. There were Orcs on both sides of me, and across from me—massive orc men.
All of them with tiger-sized canines jutting up from their bottom lips, and they were sitting as real as you please, wearing brown woolen garments and defeated expressions.
We were crammed into a cart, all of us in chains.
Horse hooves clopped steadily over cobblestones—and through my unpadded bench, I could feel every uneven paver the cart wheels bumped over.
“What the heck is this?” I’d demanded, looking around, unable to explain how this could even be possible: I was suddenly immersed in an entirely different world.
“This,” the driver of the Orc cart said, turning around on his seat, his two huge horses plodding ahead without him needing to keep his eyes on their big shifting butts, “is a ride to your beheading.” And he looked absolutely serious.
That’s when I’d started yelling.
Then the whole slave, wife, or headless lottery happened, and now I’m suddenly under consignment to an Orc. A lady Orc, who said something about what now?!
“Did you say you’re going to give me to your husband?
” I ask her, stumbling over a root, necessitating her to pause, because we’re joined by a length of braided jute string that’s tied around my wrist and hers.
We’re taking a worn but narrow footpath through a very old forest—giant trees with sprawling, curling, knotted roots, and trunks so big around it would take three people to hug around them.
Three human people, that is. It would probably only take one Orc man. The size of those guys’ bodies is unreal...
And did she really say she wanted to marry me off to one? Her—her husband? Excuse me: WHAAAAAAAT?