Colonel Grey Connor was having a bad day and it didn’t look like it was going to get any better. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes in hopes of relieving the pressure that was building there. I have enough headaches to deal with, he thought, I don’t need a migraine as well. He exhaled deeply and looked back at the notes in front of him. Ambassador Forrest had given him four separate tasks in as many minutes, the movement control officer had called to say that all seven of the rotator flights had been shifted one hour behind schedule, and the Afghan Minister of Defense wanted to see him later that afternoon. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet and his day was turning out to be a challenge. Well, he thought, at least no one is shooting at me.

His day had started out routine enough, meetings with his office staff, a short update briefing to the Ambassador, more meetings with agency heads. In the past five minutes he had taken three phone calls that were going to change the course of his day, and he hadn’t even begun to check email yet. Who knew what wondrous challenges lay waiting within that helpful box on his desk? There were times when he really wished that email hadn’t even been invented yet. How much simpler life would be. He looked out the window of his third floor embassy office and caught a glimpse of two birds, hawks perhaps, making wide circles under the rising sun, coming at times, within meters of him. They flew close enough that he could see the outlines of several golden brown feathers, but his mind immediately twisted the image. He smiled as he imagined them to be golden dragons, circling each other over the peaks of Ered Glemor, far above the routine of normal life, and literally worlds away in his imaginary Thraveon.

He felt himself slipping into the nexus. How easy it would be to just let his mind wander there. More and more often he found himself sliding easily from this world of protective vests and improvised explosive devices, IEDs, to one of his own creation. Thraveon. The game world and system he had created as a young man more than twenty years before. How many friends had joined him there for a few hours, or a full day, or that glorious three day weekend gaming extravaganza a few years back. How many hours of excitement and thrills had he led his friends through. Now, stationed here in Afghanistan, he used his imaginary world as a crutch.

Grey had always had a wild imagination and a fairly vast talent for telling stories. He would look around the room, or the shopping mall, or at the world around him, and his eye would select several objects at random to weave into a story. Within moments, what he had seen in the real world would instantly become something different, sometimes something very different and extraordinary in his imaginary world of Thraveon. Now, more than twenty years after this game had begun, Grey’s mind contained the descriptions and details of every map, every kingdom, every mountain, and every major character in his world. All his creations, all his children, he could mold them in his mind at will, and change them as necessary to meet the needs of whatever group was gaming with him at that moment in his life.

With no gaming group at his disposal in the embassy, he had begun to turn to Thraveon for his own amusement and in difficult moments. He hated flying in helicopters, was adverse to certain roads known to be littered with IEDs, and abhorred boring meetings absolutely. When those instances occurred, as they did too frequently, he would mentally identify a few objects or people in the real world and use them to craft a portal that opened the nexus into Thraveon. Just a few minutes in his imagination and all his mental wounds were healed, all his fatigue drained away, and his spirit renewed.

Most recently, he had begun to post blogs on a personal website, describing the manner in which he created his world, and although he surprised himself by doing so, openly discussing the nexus. He had never shared that part of his mind with anyone before. Certainly, his friends knew that he had created a game world and that he had a decent imagination, but he wondered if any of them had ever guessed that the world of Thraveon was made completely and wholly out of the fabric of the real world around them. Life was the raw material and his mind the factory that churned out imaginary places and politics, monsters and maidens, heroes and wizards. How many former bosses in real life had Grey turned into one-eyed ogres or evil wizards or foul giants? Too many to recall really.

Colonel Grey Conner chuckled to himself at the thought. How many of his colleagues thought him to be a serious soldier, a professional to be emulated, an officer to be looked up to? If they only knew the truth, he thought. He had enlisted in the army because he had procrastinated too long to be accepted into any colleges or universities. Once he learned that he tolerate any pain the drill sergeants dished out by slipping into Thraveon, he found himself mistakenly being labeled “tough,” and “resilient.” He was promoted rapidly to sergeant.

Soon discovering that enlisted men actually have to work for a living, whereas officers get to sit unmolested for hours at a time thinking “big thoughts,” Grey took the tests that would get him into Officer Candidate School and away from a life of hard work. His plan had backfired somewhat as he found that once people believed that you were “tough” or “smart” or “hard-working” they expected behavior that would allow them to continue believing it. So when he was assigned to a unit he worked as efficiently as he could all day so that he could have his evenings and some weekends free to let his mind run free.

He had graduated first in every class of every military school he had ever attended, not because he was motivated to be the best, but because he wanted to get back to his game as quickly as possible. Labeled a “good student,” he spent more than twice the number of years as most officers attending military schools for advanced training. At the same time Grey learned, those who tested out of a subject at the beginning of a block of instruction were given the time back to use at their discretion. Grey studied hard the night before every pre-test and was given a lot of discretionary time. The sooner all requirements were completed, the sooner he could be back inside Thraveon.

What he never quite realized was that the real joke was on him. The years of work and creativity and imagination that he had put into building Thraveon, coupled with the years of study he done to get out of classes had actually made him a fairly knowledgeable and creative officer as Army officers go. He was always concerned that his colleagues and supervisors might learn the true nature of his lack of military motivation, so he tried to be as friendly as possible with those he liked, to build consensus when he could with those he didn’t, and to take care of his subordinates so that they would take care of him by getting the job done. What he didn’t know, or failed to see, was that these behaviors and attributes created an aura of leadership that made others look up to him in good times and tolerate him in bad. For all intents and purposes, he was being what the Army expected him to be.

He turned away from the window and glanced back at the notes on his desk. Prepare to brief the Congressional Delegation - CODEL, request an office call with a new Deputy Minister, request some information from the Norwegian Defense Attache; it was going to be a busy day. He moved his notebook across the desk as he turned in his chair to begin checking email and noticed the remains of a broken pencil on the edge of his desk. He briefly recalled stepping on it last night while leaving, but he thought he had picked it up and thrown the pieces in the trash. Now, the longest part of the pencil, with the point still intact, looked like an arrow from…STOP! Grey blinked and shook his head. He had work to do. Thraveon would have to wait. He admitted a slight concern that he was having greater difficulties keeping his two worlds separate. It was just a pencil, ordinary in every way except for the slight greenish corona that encased it and…greenish corona? Grey blinked again and looked harder at the pencil fragment. It still glowed a subtle luminescent green.

“I’ve been playing too many computer games,” Grey said out loud.

“Did you say something sir?” asked his Operations Coordinator from the next room. Chief Andrew Rhodes was an Army Warrant Officer, a good one, very professional, and very attentive.

“No Chief,” Grey called out, “Just talking to myself.”

“What did I tell you about that sir?” Chief Rhodes answered. “The girls don’t like guys that talk to themselves.”

“My wife likes me just fine Andy. You stop worrying about me and I’ll stop talking to myself,” Grey quipped.

“You stop talking to yourself, and I’ll stop worrying about you sir!” Andy replied. He stuck his head in Grey’s door. “I’m going to go grab a soda sir, you want anything?” he asked.

“No Chief, I have to watch my figure. The girls don’t like guys with big guts!” He looked at the Warrant Officer’s bulging waistline and smiled.

“Ouch! That was a low blow sir! Guess I better make it a diet soda!” He chuckled as he departed the office.

Grey closed his eyes and reached for the pencil. It was just a pencil, nothing more. He opened his eyes. Just an ordinary, number two yellow pencil. An ordinary, number two yellow pencil with a corona of green light emanating from every facet! He threw it at the wall and watched, amazed, as it stuck like an arrow in a target. It vibrated slightly for a few seconds then stopped, but it still glowed green. Grey turned in his chair and began to rise, then stopped suddenly and sat back fully to stare at the over-sized map of Afghanistan on his office wall. Every province had been shaded in a different color by the mapmakers, but Helmand Province in the South of Afghanistan was clearly glowing green. He stared at the map a second then looked around the office completely. His coffee cup, his protective vest, his boots… all glowed green.

What could it mean? A virus? A biotoxin? Maybe he should ask Chief when he returned. No, that would be asking for a whole round of crap. Maybe he was just tired. He had been out very late the night before with the Spanish Attache, maybe this was some bizarre after affect of eating too much Manchego cheese and drinking too many sangrias. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

The nexus never came like this; bright green and glowing with light rushing past him on all sides. It was normally a subtle shift of his imagination from the real world to his fantasy world, completely controlled by his conscious efforts, not a stomach wrenching race on a twisting roller coaster of green strobe lights. This was not normal. He felt the room begin to spin and wondered if he had in fact picked up an infection of the inner ear. He had suffered these vertigo effects before during a sever bout of Dengue fever. He could feel his heart racing and thought he could hear himself gasping for breath. He was about to vomit. He leaned forward and reached out for his office trash can as he opened his eyes, afraid that he might hit his head on the desk in front of him.

As quickly as the nausea had come, it vanished, though he could feel a cold sweat on his forehead as he took in his surroundings. He was in an inn, one he knew well, an ale-filled mug sat before him on a thick oaken table. He closed his eyes to return through the nexus, but the ale called to him. He picked up the mug and drank deeply.

“Oakheart Stout,” the dwarven innkeep called to him, “your favorite. Just be sure to be paying me this time.”

“Stonefist!” Grey exclaimed, happy to see an old friend, in spite of the confusion of the moment. Grey had taken the aging dwarf out of action several game iterations ago and made him proprietor of the Spilled Chalice Inn in Southern Dirlon. Once a great dwarven warrior and in-game companion to players in Thraveon, he was now relegated to waiting tables and passing on the occasional rumor to those who happened to enter the Chalice. Grey looked up at Stonefist, who seemed to be busy cleaning up a mess from the evening before. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, Stonefist. I hadn’t planned on visiting, I just…”

“O course you didn’t lad. If ye had planned to visit, you wouldn’t be sitting at my table in breastplate and boots now would ye?” The dwarve pointed at Grey and raised his eyebrows. He let out a loud belly laugh. “Chasing the ladies at Mare’s End were ye?”

Grey looked down and realized he was wearing nothing but trousers, boots and a breastplate of polished steel. Where were the rest of his clothes? He never entered the nexus like this. Something was definitely wrong. He closed his eyes and willed a shirt, a tunic, a belt and money pouch. They came easily, though no one seemed to notice.

“I’ll never understand why I can see you all the time and others only sometimes lad,” Stonefist said.

Grey looked at him with discomfort. They had been through this a dozen times before. Now was not the time.

“Let’s just say I have special powers, shall we?” Grey asked.

“Obviously,” Stonefist replied, eying Grey’s new clothing. “You staying long this time?”

“Actually, I have to leave right away,” Grey said, flipping a silver coin from his pouch towards the dwarf. Stonefist caught it, bit it, and placed it in a bowl on the counter. “See you again soon old friend.” Grey said. He closed his eyes and willed himself back through the nexus. He felt the mental shift, began the slide from fantasy to reality and sensed that he had come back into his frame of reality, a simple passage he had made thousands of times before. He sighed relief and opened his eyes.

“I thought you were going back,” Stonefist said. “Did ye want another ale perhaps?”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Behind the Screen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.