This turned up in the estate of our client (you know, the rich looney one), it looks like some sort of drug induced "autobiography". His bequest insists that we publish it, but fortunately not how. What do you think the best way to go with it is, as a fictional book, or what a well-known loon truly believes to be a true story from his life?
Odyssey to the Great Beyond
(or, My Travels With Fabio)
(or, There and Back Again)
Part I - The Adventure Begins
I figure the best way to tell this story is to start at the beginning, go through to the end, then stop. The only question is, where is the beginning? Actually, the first thing I should say is that this is all completely true. I know I have something of a reputation as a liar, I like to make up stories and claim they're true, but this one is for real, I swear.
I guess it all starts with David Chappell. I met him when he returned to North Carolina to go to Duke, after finishing his masters at Stanford. I got back into role playing games with adventures he created, after a lapse of about 5 years from the last time I'd played. After a couple games, he created a new campaign, which would be a continuing adventure, rather than just the one shots we'd been doing. The first surprise when he assembled the group was that we would be playing ourselves in this new game. The second surprise was that he was not David Chappell, but rather a person who knew David, and was assuming his identity for a time. His features then changed into a person who, for lack of a better description, looked like an elvish Fabio. He then told us to gather the belongings we would wish to take with us, and led us out the door of his/David's apartment. Our group, consisting of the not-David unit, Joe, Michael, Dean, another David (David Sakell), and myself, walked out of the apartment, and into a different world. We didn't notice it at the time, but Michael didn't make it through with us, we were too busy looking at the shadow world that the person previously known as David Chappell had brought us to. I really can't say much more in the way of description than that, it was just a world of shadow and darkness.
Chappell led us to a meeting with the Shadow Lord, ruler of whatever dimension we were in. While on our way there, we kept noticing shadows trying to sneak up on us that we kept at bay with flashlights. Our guide bribed the Shadow Lord with some kind of magic light so that he would grant us safe passage through his realm, as long as we disturbed nothing (take only pictures, leave only footprints, I thought). The Lord then left us then, and not-David explained that our purpose in this realm was to obtain a self-contained shadow,for a purpose that he would not go into at the moment.
He then left us to wander around on our own, at which time our group debated getting back through the dimensional portal and going to Pizza Hut. We decided to continue on, however, and found a massive sundial, casting a shadow without a light source, a shadow that remained constant even when we shone our flashlights at it. David (the real David (Sakell), not the not-David) and myself unwisely decided to play with the gnomon of the sundial. First he disappeared, and then I, not learning anything from his example, also disappeared. We found ourselves in a dark place, devoid of all sensation, while our comrades tried to figure out how to get us back. That problem was solved when we automatically reappeared after a fixed span of a few minutes.
While we had vanished, the Shadow Lord had put in a second appearance, and after our return, he showed us the location of the self-contained shadow, and then agreed to take two of us there (all for light bribes, one must carefully spell out what one wants when dealing with a shadow lord.) Dean and myself agreed to go to the site where the shadow was.
We were transported to a far away site (probably thousands of miles according to the positions of the stars.) We saw a dead tree with what was left of a rope tied around one limb, and a shadow flitting around on the ground. After amusing ourselves by chasing the shadow around with our flash-lights, and cutting down the rope, we noticed a somewhat bare spot under the rope, that the shadow was attracted to. Our theory was that the shadow was that of a hanged man, that was bound to this spot, probably by his remains. We herded the shadow away, and began to excavate the spot with my Swiss Army Knife. I got down to the point where I hit some wooden planks (the going was very slow), when we were pulled back to where we started. It seems our companions got panicky, and had the Shadowmeister pull us back (for another flashlight). We explained our situation, got a crowbar from the toolkit David had retrieved from his truck, accessible through the shadow realm, and went back to the tree.
We quickly finished digging up the bones, piled them together, along with the shadow, who wanted to stay with them, and paid the Shadow Lord for transport back. We paid one final tariff for leaving the realm with the bones and shadow, and went back through David Chappell's apartment door, into a large hall full of doors and birdbaths, where Michael said he'd been waiting for us for 5 minutes.