In the sleepy little college town of Beaville, beneath a moonlit sky sprinkled with uncounted and uncountable stars, the heavy wrought-iron hands of the old town clock rose to point to the velvet sky. Behind the close-fitted fieldstone walls of the clock-tower, the heavy, patina-coated bronze bells sonorously struck twelve...
...and in four different bedrooms, actinic bright blue-white light flared around the slumbering forms of four very different people.
When the light vanished, so had the forms it had engulfed...
* * *
There are pleasant ways to awaken, and ways less pleasant...
Finding yourself somehow transported from a calm slumber in your own bed to a wide-awake standing position in a room you'd never seen before wasn't one of the pleasant ways
For the barest instant, the four very dissimilar persons - and personalities - in the room shared a commonality as they stood stock-still in stunned silence, staring with wide eyes at the stone-walled chamber in which they found themselves, each figure's eyes locked on whatever happened to lay before them in that first, silent instant.
Chad Trimble, pale and dark-haired, his pudgy body clad in an old-fashioned white nightgown, blinked his watery brown eyes as he stared at the words carved into the wall before him.
Short, with a rangy build beneath the one-piece black leather corset-dress that served her as sleep-wear, Mikki Liebowoski was staring at a simple wooden door, the blue eyes beneath her wildly-shorn mop of copper-red hair wide in shock.
Marc Tidwell, broad-shouldered form clad only in white silk boxer-shirt, was staring at Mellisa Halle. As blonde and blue-eyed as the man who gazed at her pink-silk-pegnoir-clad body, the tall, aristocratic-looking woman looked back with an equally stunned expression.
Then the moment broke...
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Mister Tidwell...?" Melissa demanded imperiously, crosing her slender arms over her firm, high-set bust.
Marc - who, like the other three, was familiar with his unexpected companions from the local college they all attended, simply leered at 'Miss Rich Bitch', almost unconsciously picking a pose that well-displayed his massive, hard-earned musculature.
"A better question would be - 'what the fuck's going on here'?" Mikki pointed out with an indelicate sneer of her black-clad lips. Her voice drew Marc's attention to her - or, rather, to the firm D-cup breasts that threatened to spill from the local lesbian/feminist's abbreviated top.
"I think that..." Chad said, hesitantly, "...explains...."
"Shuddup, geek..." Marc sneered, instinctively - but he managed to tear his eyes from Mikki's bountiful cleavage long enough to read the engraved words:
GREETINGS: Welcome, oh unwilling participants, to Gameworld. To regain the world of your birth, the unlikely quartet which you now form must pass through the door you behold, and into the grand world of Gameworld. Here you will find yourself subject to contests of every sort, games and challanges galore. Know this, oh unhappy gamers - reality in Gameworld is not the reality of your realm. Here, form and function, memory and mind, cand be changed. These changes are the currency and the cost of each game or contest, the prizeor punishment to be faced. Changes will be each your fate, until the quartet may amass an unbroken streak of seven won games amongst the four, whence you will be returned to your own realm... exactly as you might happen to be in that moment.
"I don't belive it!" Melissa declared, imperiously, shifting a narrow, suspicious gaze to her companions. "This is a prank - and if one of you is the perpetrator..."
"I don't think it's a prank..." Chad ventured in a weak voice, silence almost immediately by Marc's glare and an angry 'Who asked ya, chubs?'
"What I can't believe is that I might actually have to... cooperate... with you three in order to get home." Mikki said, her tone making 'cooperate' sound like something you'd scrape off the bottom of your shoe - though neither she, nor any of the others, were currently shod.
"Fuck you." Marc said, succinctly. Turning, he strode purposefully to the door and yanked it open...
...to reveal what appeared to be:
Wed Jul 24 20:37:19 2002