For the Love of Airagos

By Shannon Muir

Destined to be a pawn in a game without even knowing it, Heather Candor grew up playing RPGs with her friend Abe and a regular group of college friends. One day he mysteriously disappeared, but tried to keep the game going as Play By Mail turns - until one day those turns also mysteriously stopped. Years later, as a freelance journalist, Heather ends up in a strange encounter with a journalistic source that leaves her pregnant and befuddled. Hiding away from the world and getting immersed in MMOGs, she's put in contact with friends old and new that start reviving the mysteries of the past. They come to learn they've been pieces in a larger game for a race from another world to come to Earth, and there's more to what's going on that meets the eye. Ultimately it takes an acceptance of love, at times lust, and destiny to stay one step ahead of those using her and do what is needed to save the present and shape the future of two worlds in this story that blends gaming and the games of interstellar interaction. Part of the SPONTANEOUS CHOICES ADVENTURES COLLECTION presented by INFINITE HOUSE OF BOOKS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shannon Muir
• Release date: Mar 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311707642

Shannon Muir

SHANNON MUIR's short stories include suspense and mystery elements such as those found in her first full-length story from Pro Se Press, CHARLES BOECKMAN PRESENTS DOC AND SALLY IN "THE DEATH OF BUDDY TURNER". Additionally, she's written short stories for Pro Se Press such as “Tragic Like a Torch Song” in THE DAME DID IT from Pro Se Press, "Pretty as a Picture" in the anthology NEWSHOUNDS, “Tropical Terror” in CRIME DOWN ISLAND and “Hidden History” in EXPLORER PULP. She’s also written the Single Shot New Pulp tale “Ghost of the Airwaves,” a short story offered in electronic format only from Pro Se Press.From her personal self-published projects, her best known titles in this area include the rural crime series THE WILLOWBROOK SAGA.In other genres, Shannon's published short stories include “Meeting the Monster” in the Emby Press anthology SUPERHERO MONSTER HUNTER: THE GOOD FIGHT and "Cover Story" in ARIA KALSAN: MYSTERIES OF THE FUTURE.Shannon holds a BA in Radio-TV and English from Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, which she considers to be her hometown. She also holds an MA in Communications from California State University, Fullerton, along with additional education in screenwriting, project management, library technician studies, and most recently a certificate earned with distinction in General Business with Emphasis in Marketing from UCLA Extension. Currently, she is working on a Masters of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University.She is married to FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY collaborator and fellow author Kevin Paul Shaw Broden. They live in California in the United States.She is a member of Sisters in Crime (national, Guppies, and Los Angeles, where she also served on the Los Angeles board for a two terms beginning in 2018), as well as the Toastmasters4Writers Chapter of Toastmasters International (where she serves as chapter Secretary), Women in Animation, and a Professional member of ASIFA-Hollywood.

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COPYRIGHT

FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS

Part of the SPONTANEOUS CHOICES ADVENTURES Collection

Copyright 2010 Shannon Muir.

Revised and Expanded Copyright 2012, 2014 Shannon Muir.

Smashwords Edition - First publication March 2014.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords or a Smashwords partner vendor and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

ALSO BY SHANNON MUIR – THE HEART'S DUTY COLLECTION

ALSO BY SHANNON MUIR – THE PHOENIX COLLECTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many people I speak to these days about gaming draw blanks and give me funny looks when I ask if they know what PBM, or Play-By-Mail gaming, means. A few can figure out that it has something to do with postal mail, but can’t grasp the mechanics of it. They can’t imagine a game played remotely before the age of email, with a set due date when everything needed to be returned to a Game Master by a set time using the snail mail system. Tabletop versions of gaming they easily get, and Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming is no problem. Somehow, for many, PBM gaming - although the natural bridge between these two concepts – somehow seems lost to history. This became the impetus for writing this book.

Since 2005, I’ve participated in an online challenge known as National Novel Writing Month, or for short, NaNoWriMo. For my first five years, I wrote more true to life stories, and won each one by completing the 50,000 word minimum. In 2010, I decided to take a different tact, to try a science fiction or fantasy novel. Given that a tenant of NaNoWriMo is the fact an author cannot write any prose beforehand – just outlines and notes – tackling either of these genres proves a problem because it is difficult to work out the unusual elements without a fair amount of pre-writing. I did do some rough notes, but in the end, for the first draft I still ended up with a lot of logic pieces to work on. I did however end up with a first draft over 50,000 words, thereby winning the competition for a sixth year, which provided the genesis for the book you are reading now. I wrote some additional material to work out backstory that appeared on Goodreads called The Fall of Airagos, which for a variety of reasons wasn't completed before this was published but does influence this final work.

My interest in Play-By-Mail gaming is more than academic. My father first became active in PBM in the 1970s while in the Navy, and by the age of ten, I became fascinated with what Dad did with all those folders and colorful hand-drawn grid maps. He played several games but in one of them, Dad had a number of tribes in the game and let me unofficially adopt one of them – the Cockle people – who promptly built Javin, the first city to provide education to the barbarians! Word is this didn’t bother the Game Masters in the least, and they found it rather amusing. Ah, the mind of a ten year old. I took a hiatus from PBM during my teen years after trying some other games that didn’t quite click with me. All that changed in late high school, when I came downstairs to find my father poring over a new rulebook with a robot on the cover. It turned out to be a battle-bot style arena game I played for many years. Today I still play PBM, but have turned my hand to trying historical role play. Instead of a science fiction future, this PBM game focuses on trade and warfare in a rather evolving alternate past. It's very much more by the book, and not as ripe with creative outlets, but I enjoy the challenge. Meanwhile, I also heavily play one favorite MMOG where I enjoy interacting with friends around the world.

I also credit PBM with giving me my first opportunities for publication. I started fictionalizing my games and making characters come to life in short stories. With the knowledge and permission of the company, these stories were published first in the print magazine PAPER MAYHEM for which I was paid in free copies, and later for gratis in SABLEDRAKE magazine online to finish the arc. Every story carried a disclaimer letting people know these were written with the GMs permission. Even my father, who wrote for years before me as a game reviewer for all of the industry magazines (PAPER MAYHEM, FLAGSHIP USA, and GAMING UNIVERSAL) and the inspiration for me to try to get published, even tried his hand at fiction for PAPER MAYHEM at one point. I felt honored that the person I admired so much wanted to now emulate me.

FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS is my first full length novel with science fiction elements, though it is largely set on present day Earth. When I wrote it during NaNoWriMo I classified it as fantasy, but the complexities of the alien civilization in the story led me to reclassify it as science fiction. To me, this book is both an exploration of a near-forgotten piece of gaming history, as well as a look into the games that the members of the human race play with one another. It also contains the elements of women struggling with passion and taking chances that are hallmarks of my SPONTANEOUS CHOICES style of books.

I hope you enjoy the journey.

Shannon Muir

Glendale, California

March 2014

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DEDICATION

To the love of the game.

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PROLOGUE

My name is Heather Candor. When they say truth is stranger than fiction, it's no joke. I've come to learn that my future changed my past, in order to shape my future. I'm a journalist but still can't process the facts.

I'm told that as some future sort of space explorer she crashed landed on some distant, future world and caught the eye of the King of the country where she landed. Even after losing his throne, he found her and they formed a secret society called the Order of the Arrow dedicated to trying to restore order on that world. The planet, eventually unified under one ruler after ongoing wars, would come to be known as Airagos.

I also knew the planet Airagos, but in a very different context.

Yet it would turn out they were one in the same, as I would struggle to learn and accept.

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CHAPTER ONE

He'd always been the Dungeon Master.

I just realize, looking back, how much I never questioned it. I don't remember any more if he always just volunteered, or if we just always figured after time after time that the time he would be and handed him the materials. He always wove the story as we rolled our twenty sided dice and determined if we lived or died in dungeons deep in stories of old. I still remember when we laughed and cursed and cried at each other over at someone's house or another. They were like family to me, my own parents having disappeared tragically young while I was in college; they found their car abandoned in a forest with no signs of foul play. We came together in college and stuck together in person for at least three years after that, practically an inseparable bunch.

As for me I always played a bard. I chose her more for the fact that bards are the tellers of tales, and I see myself as a teller of story, not because of the role that bards play in a quest group - guess it's a good thing I never was much of an offensive player. I'd hand painted her piece myself, back when I'd first been learning how. Though not my best work. I always stayed kind of attached to her. Though most of my figurine painting leaned toward the dark colors, this bard stood with blond hair and gold lute in bright greens and blues against the coming darkness of the game's story. Now I wonder if the other figurines' color schemes come from the fact I painted them after he left.

We tried to hold it together for a while back then after he left town, using the postal system. It worked for about a year or so after he left. He'd modify some dungeon he designed to be able to be done as Play by Mail, with strict due dates. Yet, it wasn't the same. The camaraderie, the togetherness we'd felt around the table, just wasn't there the same way in paper form.

I don't know if he noticed it eventually too, because one day all our turns came back with Return to Sender - No Forwarding Address in big yellow stickers from the Postal Service. No explanation at all, just everything over and done with a clean break. I didn't open the envelope with that Play by Mail turn, but I saved it like a treasured prize, too afraid that whatever was inside might break my heart but too afraid to let it go. Others did open their letters and all had turns that read the same effect - party trapped in a magic bubble appearing to freeze time. The difference this time, unlike the other turns, was that no turn sheet was provided for a response.

Had he simply grown tired of being the Game Master and needed a break? Were greater things going on in his life and he needed to put this on hold while he figured them out? None of us in the group knew enough about him to know what might be the case. He'd always just been the master we relied on.

After that, the rest of us slowly began to drift apart over the next three years. Some married, letting family board game nights try to fill the emptiness of what we had. Others turned to drugs and booze to fill their happiness, feeling nothing could replace it. Some of us stayed in touch, others fell totally out of communication. I became one of the latter as my life became my job and my job became my life.

And what filled my time, you ask? I went on to become a writer, who originally and hesitantly got into playing massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs, if you will) as part of my job. It brought up old feelings and memories of being with him. It made me wonder what happened to him after all those years. Even so I couldn't bear to open the envelope I'd locked away like the memories within my heart.

I stumbled through life, lost and alone. For years, it worked pretty well, until relatively recently. I'd been on assignment and agreed to meet a contact at a bar. In many ways, I was at one of my life's lower points, and agreed to a job with a second class rag that looked into some lame sounding story about all the residents of some apartment building being abducted by aliens and replaced with doppelgangers. If I hadn't been so desperate to pay the rent, I would have turned my nose up at this story – and also very likely turned down the catch with getting my lead.

The man who I met at the bar met every bit of the tall, dark, and handsome cliché. He looked like he'd walked out of some trashy book. Part of me became very intrigued by his mystery, but I struggled to stay the consummate professional.

Heather Candor, I said, introducing myself to him and extending my hand.

Colonius, he said in return, taking my hand in far less of a professional handshake and more resembling the way a seducer takes the hand of a potential lover. I wondered what sort of background that he might come from. The name sounded Italian – Roman specifically – but his build didn't conjure up the same image.

We took a table and ordered drinks. He asked for a beer and I just requested some water refreshed with cucumber.

Colonius gave a grunt as the bar waitress walked off.

We are in a bar. Should you not drink?

I pulled out my digital recorder as well as my tablet. I always liked to take notes in case my interview recordings might fail or get erased.

Thank you, Colonius, but I am on the job.

Colonius supposedly lived at the apartment complex, but got out just as the first supposed odd issues transpired and relocated to Los Angeles. When I asked what he did, Colonius kept dodging the issue. He kept turning things back to the story I was investigating. On and on went the questions, with me constantly down writing notes.

I rarely reached for my drink. It remained refreshing but still seemed to have more than just infused cucumber in it, but I enjoyed it immensely. However, I began to find it harder and harder to focus. Suddenly, I didn't remember anything at all.

Hours later, I woke up in a strange bed in a motel, fully clothed. It turned out to be Colonius' room.

You passed out, he explained. I brought you here to rest, since I did not know where to take you.

Still feeling slightly woozy, I couldn't get over the discomfort of being alone with a source in some strange motel room. So I gathered my things, called a cab, and went home. Later, when I went back to play my recording, it came up blank, proving why I always plan for backup. However, my notes puzzled me as well. Very detailed to a point, they just suddenly stopped, though a growing incoherence could be followed. I didn't know how much sense I could make of any of it.

What I got was useful, but not enough. I stalled with my employer saying my unnamed source provided some interesting leads, but I would need to research further. There wasn't enough to base an article on, which was true. Then a couple weeks later came a mystery I couldn't figure out. Continuing to not feel well, I went to my personal doctor, and based on her personal line of questioning ended up being tested for pregnancy.

It came back positive. Heather Candor, who never had a boyfriend or one night stand in her life, would be having a baby. The only possible father was the mysterious Colonius who now completely had disappeared after seeing him that night. Yet nothing about my encounter indicated we'd ever been intimate.

My employers would never understand. I knew nothing would be able to help me save face with my employer for getting intimate with a potential journalistic source, which is exactly what everyone would assume if the facts came out. I felt enormous guilt and shame. Therefore, I wrote them saying I had been unable to uncover anything and that personal issues would require me to step away from the project.

I believe it marked the first time that I,