Meet the PCs...

"Oh, my god," I say, staring around me with what I'm very much afraid must be an utterly stupefied expression on my face. I recognize this place, all right: a barren stretch of desert with a huge, incongrous black pyramid jutting out of it a very short distance away. I've never been here before, by any reasonable definition of the words, but it's bizarrely familiar, anyway. Yes, we've arrived in the Torg universe, all right. I know this, because this setting, this situation, are straight out of a game I experienced as a player. And Inquirer knows it, too, because she's the one who GM'd the darned thing! Indeed, landing at this particular place at this particular time seems to have greatly tickled her funny bone. Well, at least this time I have the consolation of knowing that she's probably experiencing the same weird feeling I am...

I might want to stop and discuss the matter with her, but there's quite clearly something else that needs dealing with first. The goons in front of us don't even seem to have noticed the TARDIS' presence... Well, the Pharoh never did seem to manage to hire especially intelligent and perceptive shock troopers. They just keep whaling away on the robotic dog as, propelled by a tide of quickly-rising anger, I charge through the doors, Inquirer hard on my heels. Dammit, that's my dog! Well, OK, my character's dog, but he was very, very attached to it, and so was I, in a vicarious sort of way.

I fire off a quick burst of magic -- I've got quite good at this particular spell, I think -- and the goons immediately fall over, happily a-snooze. The robot, considerably dinged up but still in one piece, barks twice (or rather, says "bark!" in a recorded human voice) and immediately plods over to a raised concrete surface sticking out of the desert sand, climbs up onto it, and begins pawing at a trap door set into the top.

I follow it. "Move over, Fluffy," I mutter, pulling the trap door open. In the dimness below me, I can see several figures, many of them crouched in fighting stances. "Uh, hi." I call down. "We're here to rescue you! Hold on." I find a ladder nearby and lower it down. One by one, the weirdly familiar figures begin to emerge.

First out is a somewhat frail-looking elderly man with a huge shock of white hair, wearing a huge, padded white lab coat over clothes that are decades out of date even by the Nile's 1930's standards. It's Professor Bernard, my Player Character (inherited from a previous game, which started well before I ever met Inquirer). And Inquirer's right, it is a lot like meeting my counterpart, Ragan, who I created (or so I believed) for an online Addventure game. I thought I'd made this guy up, too. Standing face-to-face with him is just far too weird. It's true; after a decade spent with the Doctor, I've grown quite used to time travel paradoxes, but I doubt I'll ever be entirely comfortable with the stranger elements of alternate realities...

The rest of them follow: A young woman wearing a skimpy harem costume that she looks very much out of place in (doubtless because they made her put it on the first time she got captured in this adventure): Ellie, the heroic Nile girl the Professor tends to think of as his sidekick. Next, a scrawny guy in a robe: Caleb, the Ayslish mage. He's followed by a reptilian humanoid: Talok, once a savage lizard-man, currently fighting the good fight in the fantasy realm of Aysle. Then Amiti, a Nile magician with a slightly furtive look about him. He's followed by a craggy-faced guy in a rumpled suit: Jacob Nebbs, a psychic currently on detached duty from the United States Army. And lastly, a bald buy in the robes of a Buddhist monk: Yoshi, a martial artist of frightening ability.

"Thank you!" says Ellie. "Thank you so much! Uh... Who are you?"

"We're... friends," replies Inquirer, smiling.

"Are you Storm Knights?" asks Talok. "Storm Knight" being the Torgian term for those who fight the High Lords. Well, more or less.

"Um, sort of," I say. "We're, uh... Well, we're from a different cosm. Several different cosms, actually." "Cosm" is the term used here to refer to alternate realities, alternate Earths, so this is actually the simple truth. "We're here to help." They look at us suspiciously for a moment, but seem willing to accept this, at least for the moment.

"Never mind that," says Caleb. "Have you got anything to drink? It was all hot and dry in there!"

It's pretty darned hot and dry out here, too. Now I understand why we left Aeryn and Gilina up on Moya with Jothee. Inquirer had said that where we would going would probably be too hot for the Sebaceans, and she was right. It must be well over a hundred degrees here, more than hot enough to send their species into a heat-induced coma. "Dunno about beer," I say, "but it's much cooler in the TARDIS. Come on. We'll go discuss things..."

1. And so, in we all go, before any more bad guys decide to show up.

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