Today's Earth date: May 8, 1992

We found the kids. They really did run all this way, and I can't believe they are still alive. They're not even coherent.

We fought what we think were goblins, but we can't decide if they were ghosts, zombies, or something else entirely.

They had the shapes of goblins, but their bodies looked incorporeal. They weren't perfectly transparent, and every part of them shifted and flickered constantly. But they weren't ghosts. I confirmed that myself with my sword. I couldn't see the meat of their bodies, but I sure felt it.

We killed seven of them. We tried asking the boys where the monsters came from, but they weren't even able to tell us their names, so it was pointless.

The only thing we could do was get them home.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

The Zeroes rented out a bar across the street from a five-story hotel, the tallest building in Iomallach other than the arena, and it was also exactly at the center of the city. Wayne and Fergus threw gold at the owner of the bar until he agreed to leave and go home. Naturally, a business owner was reluctant to leave four strangers with weapons–a lot of weapons–alone in his establishment, but the sum they reached could likely replace the entire bar and then some.

Wayne tilted a chair back, leaning against the wall closest to the front window. He watched the clouds through the sliver of an opening in the skyline. While the Zeroes checked and re-checked their gear, Sammy, Perris, and Vanilli waited. Sammy paced. Perris fidgeted with a coin trick, and Vanilli stared blankly at the ceiling.

The sun would set soon, and that's when they expected the battle to start.

Waiting gave Wayne too much time to think. He reflected on the chaos of the last twenty hours, one moment in particular sticking in his memory like a splinter.

"I gave your message to General Poltur," a guard had said, blocking the door into a guard station. "She asks that you stop meddling in Defense Force business and move along."

"This attack is for real," Wayne said. "We need to get the city ready."

"Your fear-mongering is not welcome here. We have defeated the ratmen, and if you continue to harass General Poltur, you will be arrested."

Fergus pulled at Wayne's arm. "Come on. We have a lot to do."

So the Zeroes saw to their final preparations, a plan born from a long night of strategizing.

Their preparations accounted for two possibilities: If the Defense Force welcomed their help or if they didn't. The hope was that General Poltur would take the threat seriously and accept their assistance, but she did neither. Iomallach was facing a ratman invasion, and no one but the Zeroes were doing anything about it.

Renting this bar was the final piece of their plan. They intended for the roof of the hotel to be their primary position, but Wayne wanted the fight to begin while the party was in a more secure location to set their Home Row location some place relatively safe.

Fergus, Margo, and Hector would be on top of the hotel. They could see most of the city from up there, but that advantage also came with exposure. If the hotel was in danger, Home Row would get them out clean.

Armond, Sammy, Perris, and Vanilli were the rescue team. Their job was to get as many civilians to safety as they could when the invasion started.

The hope was that the party's combined efforts would buy the city enough time to rally the Defense Force and mount a proper counterattack.

If the rats were true to their word, their attack would begin after nightfall. Though the anticipation seemed to slow time to a near standstill, the sun eventually set. Wayne couldn't see it from where he sat, but he could watch the sky change colors. When the sun had become a faint candle in the distance, overwhelmed by the sea of night washing toward it, Wayne felt his body tingle.

His entire body had the pins-and-needles feeling of laying on one arm for too long. When he looked up to share that experience, he saw that the rest of the party felt it too. They all looked over their own bodies, unsure of what to make of the sensation as its strength continued to grow. Wayne saw white hair sprouting on Fergus' bald head, but before he could say anything, his own body spasmed.

It was like grabbing an electric face but without the pain, a sudden tensing of every muscle jerking his body into strange contorted positions. Nothing hurt, but Wayne felt disconnected from his physical self in those moments. Then it stopped. Wayne felt warmer, both in temperature and in contentment.

He looked to Fergus. His friend had been replaced by an anthropomorphic panda bear, a humanoid interpretation of the endangered animal from Earth. His big eyes blinked at Wayne.

"Wayne…"

Wayne looked for his reflection in the front window. The beady eyes and wiggling button nose of a ferret stared back at him. His size hadn't changed. He didn't feel stronger or weaker. But he was no longer inside of a purely human body.

Armond was a walrus.

Hector was an elephant.

Margo was a spotted leopard.

Perris was a fox.

And Sammy was a capybara. Wayne couldn't help but smile at that one. It just fit so well.

Wayne opened his system and frowned when he read his stats.

Hero: Were-Wayne

Level: 23

HP: 306/306

STR: 40

AGI: 32

VIT: 23

LCK: 37

"Umm…" he began, knowing he should say something as the party leader but had no idea what.

"We all have the were-virus," Fergus said plainly. "When would we all have been infected? Sammy and Perris weren't in any of our fights with wererats."

"Treat Disease doesn't work," Armond said, his tusks accentuating the depth of his frown. He put a hand on Sammy. "Yeah, doesn't work."

"Why is Vanilli still Vanilli?" Hector asked.

Before Wayne could think of a theory, he heard a weedwhacker buzz coming from overhead, growing louder by the second. Red dots began to appear on his HUD, many of them in town. According to his radar, he should be looking at one right outside the window, but nothing was there. Nor did he see anything in the sky.

"They're tunneling!" Wayne said. "We confirm Home Row is set and then we're on."

As the Zeroes ran out of the bar, Wayne noticed the distinct lack of red dots beneath the arena. That made sense, given that the arena was empty, but not a single rat passed through? Why would that be?

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Home Row.

The party appeared back in their seats, where they had been when this battle started. With that confirmed, they ran into action. Sammy, Vanilli, and Perris followed Armond down the street. They shouted that the city was under attack and that everyone should take shelter immediately. The confused stares were plentiful, but Wayne paid them no mind. The people of Iomallach would be convinced to listen in short order.

All three football robots appeared, and Wayne told them to guard Armond.

While Fergus used Fly Me to head to the roof of the hotel, Wayne escorted Margo and then Hector with Blitz. With the panda, leopard, and elephant in position, he opened Let's Draw and hastily sketched.

"A very big, very wide, and oddly flat penis," Margo guessed.

Wayne set the four-story erection to begin building right there on the roof. Fergus and Margo stood on top of the unfinished print, the gradual growth of the plaster sculpture lifting them into the air one thin layer at a time.

Goods Storage.

"Ready?" Wayne said, looking at Hector.

Hector's big elephant ears flapped and flopped when he nodded.

Wayne summoned both of his Skycats and told them to protect Fergus and Margo with cover fire. Fergus used his staff's ability to borrow Wayne's spell and summon a third Skycat of his own.

Soulstorm™ Brew.

Wayne's consciousness exited his body as a green fart cloud. While he took to the sky in his new form, Hector picked up Wayne's body and put it in Goods Storage. Then he joined the rogue and the wizard on the Let's Draw print.

"You're a go, Armond," Hector said.

The portal closed. Though he wouldn't get to see it, Wayne trusted Armond to do his part. While the rest of the party fought off the rats, the cleric would force as many people through the Goods Storage door as he could. Sammy and Vanilli would be on the train, helping to manage the crowd, while Perris was in Vientuls with Tulip, waiting for scared refugees to pour out of the gate.

Wayne realized he couldn't hear in his gaseous form, a fact he hadn't noticed on his previous applications of the skill, but it made sense. His ears were back with his physical body, and the world he now saw was at a distance, as if his soul followed just behind the fart cloud to watch what happened.

He rose higher and higher into the night sky. World War II fighterplanes ripped out of the darkness, zipping past Wayne in an instant. Their ratman pilots chattered with glee as they released their payloads.

Rocks fell from the planes, each no larger than a fist, but from this height they would punch through roofs and people with ease.

Before Wayne could warn his party, a fighter plane flew through the fart cloud.

Suddenly, he was the one flying the plane.

"They're dropping rocks!" Wayne warned. "And I got one of their planes!"

Piloting the aircraft was easier than Wayne expected. Most of the dials on his control panel were broken, but maneuvering with the control stick and pressing the rudder peddles was surprisingly intuitive. He suspected that like Vanilli's boombox, the plane had been repaired with a combination of engineering ingenuity and magic. That same magic was also likely how the rats were able to retrofit the planes with the ability to carry and drop rocks.

Wayne pressed the fire button to see what would happen. A magic missile shot from the nose of the plane.

Summoning his hours of playing Starfox and Crimson Skies–a criminally underrated game, in his opinion–Wayne banked a hard left as he gained altitude. He caught a glimpse of a trio of planes closing in for their bombing runs. As they sped underneath him, he followed, pointing the nose of his plane downward to blast them from above.

Two of the fighter planes spun away into burning wreckage but the third escaped harm. Instead of chasing the one enemy, Wayne circled to disrupt the next pack of bombers. As he reset his position, he saw a flock approaching Iomallach from the east. Ratmen with harpy wings flapped like mutated angels, soaring over a charging army of wererats.

"Flying rats and a force heading for the east gate!" Wayne reported.

The sky lit up from Fergus' Tsu, a spell that summoned a laser to strike from the heavens. In that brief moment, Wayne also saw Fergus casting Gra to yank fighter planes off course. A few managed to recover control after the sudden change of gravity, but most succumbed to a tailspin and crashed.

As the flying rats descended on the city, Fergus and Margo shifted their attention from the planes to the winged rodents.

The party had extensively debated this part of the plan the previous night. With no way of knowing what direction the ratmen would attack from, what defensive position made the most sense for the Zeroes was not obvious.

By the time they reasoned through all of the possibilities, they narrowed their choices down to two. They could hope they pick the right gate to guard so Fergus could use Hellbomb Blast on an approaching army. Alternatively, they could centrally locate Fergus and Margo to definitely give them clear lines of sight against flying enemies.

Iomallach had a Defense Force that knew combat and siege defense, but they had never fought an army with an airforce before. Wayne's party had the best tools for addressing that threat, by far. Centrally locating their ranged party members made the most sense when all things were considered.

When the flock of rats passed over the city like a dark storm cloud, Wayne was absolutely confident they had made the right decision. While Fergus and Margo shot again and again at every ratman in flight, many of whom fired back with arrows of their own, Hector deflected missiles from strafing fighter planes and flying ratmen alike.

With Hector the elephant guarding Fergus the panda and Margo the leopard, the ratmen couldn't get through, not before the Zeroes put them down.

Red dots were everywhere on Wayne's radar, but he only saw a few more planes coming around for their next attack. He dipped low to get a better look.

Rats burst out of Iomallach's streets like bees fleeing a hive. All over, the city seemed to boil, its surface bubbling and popping again and again as more rats escaped from their tunnels. Dozens smashed into the hotel, sprinting to the roof to eliminate Fergus and Margo.

The plaster penis was nearly complete, however. That high in the air, none of the ground forces could harm the Zeroes perched at the tip. A few of them ran around the base while another jumped onto one of the smooth, blocky balls. One rat drove a knife into the plaster and used it to pull himself up.

The other rats took inspiration from that, many of them needing only their claws to begin their climb.

"Coming up the shaft!" Wayne warned.

Margo leaned over the edge and rapidly sank arrows into their foreheads while Hector watched her back.

"The rats are opening the gates from the inside," Armond said. "Our defenses are already in shambles."

Wayne turned hard to scan the whole of the horizon. "I only see rats at the east gate so far."

That wasn't the worst news Wayne could have reported. The rats inside the walls were already wreaking havoc, sure, but if their forces weren't coming from all angles, with some grit, Iomallach might still be able to keep the army outside from getting in.

In Wayne's mind, that also meant this was the bulk of the ratman army. Given their usual tactics, he knew the rats would attack every gate at once if they could. The fact that they didn't suggested that they lacked the numbers. Attacking all the gates simultaneously would thin their numbers too much, so they concentrated on a single gate.

Diving to assist in the defense of the east gate, Wayne saw that the soldiers firing arrows from the wall were all various breeds of dogs, most some version of a smaller breed like a chihuahua or a Jack Russel terrier. The townsfolk he saw fleeing were animals too. There was a yak, a giraffe, and a beaver.

The were-virus had afflicted the entire city. Every human within the walls had turned.

But there was nothing to be done about that right now.

Wayne flew the fighter plane down toward the ratmen rushing the east gate. He peppered the crowd with Magic Missiles and narrowly dodged a return volley of fireballs from a unit of wereratgoldfish.

Banking for another pass, he noticed something strange. The ratmen at the center of the force all looked inward and bent over. The rats were digging. They didn't stop until a blow from below sent many of them spinning through the air.

Emverdoo labelled the new arrival "denmother Scylla" before Wayne saw what it was.

The creature had the lower half of an octopus, like Ursula from The Little Mermaid, and the upper half of a ratman denmother, her udders running the length of her stomach across ratman fur and onto octopus flesh. She was far bigger than the previous denmother the Zeroes had fought. If the first was a wagon, this denmother was a parade float in an uppity neighborhood filled with people with too much money and too much time.

Her milk sprayed in every direction. Where it touched ratmen, it seemed to enhance them, making them more fierce and more aggressive. Where the milk touched anything else, it burned like acid.

"Get ready to go Home," Hector warned the party via Voice.

Before Hector could finish, denmother Scylla revealed another type of attack: the tips of her tentacles shot lasers. Wayne never had the chance to evade. His fighter plane exploded in the sky.

Wayne woke up on a train car. Sammy the capybara was gently guiding people through the open Goods Storage door and down the train to the Vientuls Quick Gate. A few of the civilians looked injured, but Wayne didn't see anything exceptionally grisly. Plenty of cuts and a few broken bones, sure, but no one looked on the verge of death.

"Home!" Hector called.

Home Row.

The party appeared back in the bar.

Margo took a moment to catch her breath and said, "Luke's here. He's a golden retriever now and went after the denmother."

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