"I don't understand any of this."

  He stiffened. "Really?" He bent low to look me in the eye. He encompassed my face with his titan's hands, turning me left and right for inspection. He drew back my eyelid, or tried, but was too meaty for the fine motor control that required, so I just opened my eyes anyway. He grabbed my necklace. "Then maybe you are not him. But you have the, ehh... hmm." He dropped the beads, a chorus of clicks back against my chest. "Para-for-nel-ya."

  "Not who?"

  He didn't seem to hear. "If you really don't know, look. Yes, sort of, in a way, we are all Arthrem. Me, very much so. You, just a little. Not really much. But if you want to find him, look around."

  I looked around. Silent bleachers sat under the cold orblight in the walls and ceiling. Caviar burbled on the table. Chicken legs steamed.

  I shrugged, a miniature version of the gesture he had performed. A pale, frail imitation.

  "Okay. Then look up there." He gestured to the great big series of windows that the auditorium was horseshoed around. Something was different.

  There was a dim, distant firelight. Two hands, each bigger than a house, were clawing the air, twisting. A flicker of orange showed me a glimpse of tattoos. They were identical to mine, or more accurately, identical to the barbarian's. Glacially slow, they twisted and began to flex in the dark of those windows. Fingers like industrial piping threaded together. Knuckles cracked, reverberating with each pop through the room, rumbling more food off the table and bass vibrating my stomach. This wasn't a window. It was a viewport.

  "Is time. He is awake."

  Drawn to the great windows, the barbarian squeezed past me and the table, sending me back a couple of steps and sliding it with a honk against the stone tiles of the floor. A pork medallion splapped to the floor. It wouldn't have lasted three seconds in my house, ferried down the gullet of a Pomeranian with an excess of attitude.

  He stood beneath the expansive glass in silence. I joined him, with the growing sense that I was not going to like the reason for this enigma.

  In the dim light of the window, a bit like the glow of a movie screen, he mimicked the motions of the monstrous hands beyond the glass, clawing the air, examining the rugged and tattooed knuckles with she symbols of the slain. Above, it was as though his own dirty fingernails and cracked knuckles were amplified to cosmic size, the trick of some uncanny mirror.

  Inexorably, I suppose, I did the same. They were not the same hands. Mine were worn, perhaps, but not beat up, cracked and calloused. The tattoos matched, although mine were much faint, older, the dermis changing its mind and trying to shed them like clothes that had gone out of style.

  I felt but did not understand this connection. They say a triangle is the strongest form; I must admit some thoughts about trinity that passed across my mind bordered on the blasphemous before I remembered that there had also been a woman who shared our features.

  Well. A woman who had taken my wounds upon herself. Teo, you profane madman. What kind of weird religious imagery did you concoct for this D&D session?

  The barbarian inhale through his nose and sort of slapped the sides of his thighs before indicating the enormous scene beyond the glass. He grinned like a child seeing his dad do something manly and grown-up. No--more like seeing a cooler, older brother, exulting in unattainable coolness.

  "I do that when I wake up, too," the barbarian beamed. "I wonder if he hocks loogie, first thing." One hand disappeared out of view, and the other moved two fingers close to the viewing glass, jsut out of sight beneath it. Theworst sound I have ever heard happened then--like a giant vacuum sucking a viscous ocean out of a tight space. And although it came from the scene above us, it echoed below us, far below. A tectonic rumble in the sub-sub-sb-basement, maybe.

  The glass tilted forward, with a glimpse of huge feet over the side of a bed, so worn and torn and covered in thick natural hide that they almost were their own boots. A lake of snot and saliva, the sight of which will haunt me for the rest of my life, ejected into view from just below the glass, gleaming in fractionally slow motion as it power-washed the filthy prison floor.

  "God," I whispered.

  The barbarian nodded. "Yes," he whispered back. "Well, only kind of. But, sure. Basically."

  "I got here and... I thought I was the guy," said my mouth, ejecting unapproved words in a regrettable sequence. "But then I saw you. And I was like... that's the guy, for sure. Then I saw..." I waved back toward the hallway at the top of the stadium seating, and realized there were half a dozen, and wasn't sure which one I had come from. "...her, the lady. Connie, you said? And I was like, well, she might actually be the guy, maybe a little less so."

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  "Mmm-hmm," said the barbarian, taking this all in stride.

  "Then I saw that," I said, pointing at the screen. "And now I'm thinking that's the guy. And we're little, uh... little bits of the guy?"

  "We are all the guy," said the barbarian. "Me, definitely. Her, somewhat. You, not a lot, but... it counts." He burped nauseously, as though this idea revolted him and endangered his full stomach.

  "Arthrem," I whispered. Slowly, I found myself staring at the side of the barbarian's head. "But then, who are you?"

  His eyebrows did something annoyed and a little pitying. "I just tell you this." He sniffed. "You of all people should get it the first time."

  "Me of all...? No, but, what's your name?"

  He actually turned to face me this time. He crossed his arms in some overt disappointment. "Can't you tell?" I had a suspicion, but a thousand little Level 2 Nags couldn't pull it out of me in that moment, so desperate was my need to hear him actually confirm it. He smiled broadly again, crooked teeth, maybe too many. Freeing one hand, he made a fist and flexed in the classic beach jock display of biceps. To his credit, his muscles leapt to attention like soldiers, the main ones extending beyond my expectation. It was like he was a sentient leather sack warapped around a series of boulders. They shifted on command.

  "I am Strength."

  "You... represent strength? Arthrem's strength?"

  "I am Strength." He waved at the biceps with his free hand, as if to say, Can't you tell? He punctuated this with a little left-right-left pectoral bounce.

  "You are Strength," I repeated, as though saying it out loud would help convince my own brain, reinforcing it auditorily for whatever lobe was in charge of not having any of this until there was serious evidence. "And Connie is...?"

  "Constitution," he shrugged. "But name is too long."

  "That... kind of checks out, in a way."

  "I am so glad," said Strength, clearly over this conversation. He turned back to the windows.

  "You're attributes. You're... ability scores." He did not respond. The small lake's worth of saliva was bursting into a crown-shape splash against the floor. Strength was counting the rivulets before it went "off-screen," so to speak, and the giant turned his view back to his surroundings. The firelight was from torches beyond dark iron bars. This was a classic prison.

  You awake in a prison...

  "We're not in prison," I said. "I'm not in prison. Arthrem is in prison!"

  "It seems so."

  "And we're in Arthrem?" The granite bleachers, the hallway arches, the auditorium and all that might lay beyond--was it all part of Arthrem? Some inner workings? It couldn't be physical, right?

  Once, on a field trip to one of those local theme-parks-slash-zoo type places, our class rode a simulator ride that was really just a big rectangular movie theater on hydraulic joints. The movie that played was about us shrinking down for a journey--not quite a Fantastic one--but entertaining enough for kids of our socioeconomic status, for the seven or so minutes over which the ride took place. It zapped us into the blood stream, of course, the most convenient way to travel around a person's body when you are micronized. As we chased some equally microscopic intruders around this poor patient's body, we were treated to an edutaining tour of all the major systems one might find early in a fifth grade health class textbook. I am still scarred by the thought of being in a tiny spaceship inside some guy's lungs, dodging the little stalagmites and stalactites and trying not to bump into them (as though there were any danger of the scripted CG video having any variation in how it turned out) to avoid being coughed back out into the science lab.

  But pen-and-paper RPG heroes are not the same as you and me. They are made of math, paragraphs, spreadsheets, and imagination. If we want to be really literal about it, they're made of a few neuron circuits in a brain. The most sensory manifestation of Suresh's warlock, for example, would be the feel of the pen in his fingers, the one he used to fill out the character sheet. Or, maybe, the portrait he would inevitably commission on Fiverr a few weeks in when he was feeling it.

  Not flesh and blood. Not lymph nodes and dandruff and retracting irises. Not large intestines and small intestines and the things small intestines lead to.

  Strength and Constitution were not molecules, not organelles, not physical. And neither was a slightly too-thin guy in robes and beads with a spectral lantern and a floating staff made of light.

  "Who am I?"

  It was like asking one's hypothetical stepdad who is watching a hypothetical TV. I mean, I guess. My stepdad hated watching TV. Strength grunted.

  "Where do I fit into this? Am I... one of you? An attribute of Arthrem?"

  He made an involuntary guttural noise, one of those back of the throat sounds, a small scale version of the tectonic loogie-hocking from the screen, earlier. Disgust?

  And then it dawned on me. I was thin, fast, and had defeated a couple of nags before, if memory served. "Oh shit. I'm Agility, aren't I?"

  "I think you are wanting to say Dexa-terity," he scolded. "And no. Not by the long shot."

  I frowned. Most people don't notice their own frowns, but I felt every bit of this one. "Damn. Are you sure?"

  "Quite certain."

  "So then... Dexterity exists? Where is he?"

  "She is not here. Your guess, ehhh, good as mine. I cannot get a hold of her."

  I wondered if barbarians--Strength, rather--trafficked in double meanings.

  "So she's somewhere."

  "She is, you know... never where she is supposed to be." Yep, that's affirmative.

  "Charisma?"

  He shook his head. "No. And if you were, you'd be more annoying, I think."

  Thanks?

  "Okay, so then... what's left? Oh," the realization fell on me like a shaft of light. "Intelligence. I'm Intelligence, aren't I? That explains the lantern. Illumination."

  This genuinely amused Strength. "You are big brain, hmm?" There it was. Classic nerd persecution. Was it wrong of me to think I kinda figured as much? "No, it's been a while since we heard from Intelligence."

  Well, I didn't like that sentence very much.

  "Why? Did something happen to him? Her? Them?"

  He shrugged and watched the windows. "Intelligence is dead. Is quite sad, really."

  "That can happen?" Dead? What did this mean? Was my D&D character brain-dead?