The Only Game In Town [Adventure]

Joy was sick and tired of fighting people. Every single time he went to a little town to ask about the "land of the free" there would be some new shmuck waiting for him in the center of town. The two of them would exchange the same insults as usual and then they would have what was supposed to be an epic showdown.

The problem was, after something like fifteen epic showdowns they're just not that epic anymore. Joy found the entire thing to be getting monotonous.

But it was better to be bored than dead. He had yet to lose a fight against one of these mercenaries and he figured that his opinion on the blandness of these exchanges would drastically shift if he were to be killed by one of them.

Joy had also not killed any of his opponents yet. He knew that it would make everything a little simpler. He knew that there was a band of fifteen merry men and women that he had beaten the crap out of following him because he had refused to kill them. But it felt wrong.

His mind kept wandering to that forgotten space where he had bashed another man's skull in. Ian's crumpled head flashed in his memory and the visceral hate and pain ran through him. But he didn't like the rush he had felt, he didn't like the feeling of life running through his hands. He wanted to go back to when everything in his life had just been fun and games.

But that wasn't something that could happen. Joy had let the cat out of the box when he started trying to decide what right and wrong looked like, now he had to deal with the consequences.

Joy felt the thoughts leave his mind as he wandered into the next town in his path. It was a town just like the rest, it even had a man standing in the center of the village with his arms crossed.

He had mousy features and a pain of thick glasses on his face. He looked vaguely familiar, there was something itching in the back of Joy's mind as he looked at the opposing man.

"Who are you? I can't seem to place your face?" Joy walked up to the man and put his fists up, expecting the fight to begin after the regular bantering.

"Joy, we worked together on the Frozen Continent. I even saw you at the Knight Games, are you really so quick to forget me?" The man's voice was not as nasally as Joy expected. It came out in a lovely baritone. But it was too familiar. Joy could feel the name of the person sitting on the tip of his tongue.

"Walker, Wren, Wyatt… no I got it. It's Wes!" Joy remembered him from the journey through the Frozen Continent. His help had been instrumental for some reason during the reconnaissance portion of the trip.

It hit Joy all of a sudden and he tried to say, 'oh, you could make things go silent.' But nothing came out of his mouth. Joy realized he had fallen for the greatest trap that he used against all his opponents. They always let Joy use his powers, which was a foolish thing to do. Now, he had done the same thing with Wes.

But Wes had used his gift to turn the average village surrounding them totally silent.

Silence wasn't normally an issue for Joy, but there was one thing about silence that was bad in this specific situation. Joy tried to initiate a game, but found that the words were not spoken, therefore the activation conditions for his game could not be met. He was royally screwed.

Joy knew that he had just been outplayed. There would be no special magic to save him in improbable ways today. But everyone always seemed to forget that Joy loved the games, but he didn't need them. Life was serious and Joy could be serious as well.

Joy stepped towards Wes in a threatening manner, his raised fists flashing out in a quick one-two punch. Each punch shattered a different lens on Wes' glasses, causing bits of glass to crunch into his eyes.

Wes screamed and red flooded Joy's vision. He saw back to that day, pieces of skull lodged in his knuckles, pain and power flowing through him. It was too much to handle.

All at once Wes fell to the ground in a mess and Joy joined him in oblivion.

___

Joy awoke to the sound of men running around. He felt his back resting on a soft bed, and he was in a cool home. The summer heat was being held at bay by some gift and the room he was in made him want to snuggle beneath the covers and go back to bed.

But Joy decided to get out of bed and start moving about. As he got out of bed he observed the room around him. The walls were new; this house had been constructed very recently. Furthermore, there were no personal artifacts in the room. It felt more like a safehouse rather than somewhere a person could actually live.

Joy walked along a very soft rug to a window where he observed all the mercenaries he had refused to kill over the past weeks. They were walking around the town, screaming for him to "come out, come out, wherever you are."

He did not particularly want to come out. Joy would even say that it sounded like a bad idea. He felt shivers running down his back as he moved away from the window slowly.

In front of the angry mob was Wes. He had bandages covering his face and he was yelling with reckless abandon. He was calling for the rest of the group to set the town on fire to bring Joy out of hiding.

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Now that his attention was brought to it, Joy wasn't quite sure how he had ended up in this little house. All he remembered was punching Wes in the face and passing out next to him. He was certainly missing a few key points of information.

Joy decided that there wasn't too much he could do to alleviate his curiosity or keep the town from being burnt to the ground from the room he had woken up in. So, he left his room and wandered through the rest of the home.

Much like the room he had woken up in, the entire building was undecorated. The walls were smooth, without the typical wear and tear of a building that had been lived in for years.

'There's nothing ominous about that,' Joy thought to himself as he started doing jumping jacks. As much as Joy claimed to be a free spirit, he wanted to be a good person.

This was a random village in the middle of nowhere. No one had asked him to come and visit this little town. So, it felt incredibly unjust for him to let this place be destroyed simply because a couple of angry guys came here looking for Joy.

Joy figured he could either win spectacularly against the group of mercenaries or he could go out in a blaze of glory. Either way he would get the respect of the townspeople and that would be a good thing.

With one final huff, Joy burst through the front door of the empty house and into the street in front of the lingering crew of mercenaries.

A smile crept across his face as various looks of fear and rage mingled in haphazard crew. With a flourish, before anyone could attack, and more importantly before Wes could put up his silencing bubble, Joy yelled "do you all want to play a game?"

A collective groan spread through the entire audience as a mysterious voice spoke in their heads. "The game is 'My dad can beat your dad.' Do any of you need the rules explained?"

Shrill voices cried out "yes, please!" As the mercenaries started lingering, waiting for the rules for the game to be explained.

Joy was a little confused. The game was a classic of the playground, but not really something that would be easy to beat a massive crew of mercenaries with.

'Well, I gave it my best shot… gotta go,' Joy thought as he started hightailing it out of the village. He gave it a solid fifty-fifty about whether he could outrun the entire group of men and women following him, but what's a man supposed to do?

A whoop sounded from the band behind him, and they started tearing after him. Joy could only assume that meant that they found the rules to his game were favorable to them.

The sound of pounding feet approached Joy from behind. He knew that he was not moving as fast as he should. There were probably some gifts in play, but he couldn't remember the gifts of every person he had fought over the past weeks. Now it no longer seemed like a such a frivolous thing to remember and seemed much more like the precipice over Life and Death.

Joy's mind buzzed like a bee as he tried to find the solution to this problem. He was horribly outnumbered and horribly outmatched, so he had to play to his strengths.

As Joy ran, he leaned down and snatched a few large rocks off the ground. With a smart pivot he faced his pursuers and started throwing the rocks with deadly accuracy. The rocks bounced of skulls and caused a few men and women to collapse to the ground.

Too few. He needed something bigger.

But he had lost too much momentum, and the vicious gifts were sapping his will and strength. Someone seemed to have a gift that seemed to take away his strengths and Joy was unhappy to be feeling this sickly.

Joy threw a weak punch at the first of the mercenaries to approach him. It bounced off the woman's head with a reverberating gong. Pain flared through Joy's fingers. Instead of trying that painful tactic again, Joy snaked an arm around the woman's throat and locked her into a rear-naked choke.

The woman bucked this way and that, flailing into her comrades while Joy held on for dear life.

As Joy knew the final moments of her consciousness were fleeting, something interesting happened. Joy heard the woman rasp, "my dad's stronger than your dad."

In an instant the woman had disappeared and a different one of the mercenaries had appeared in front of Joy. Joy spotted the woman out of the corner of his eye. She was rubbing her neck and looking back at Joy with vehemence.

Joy was screwed. His tactics had failed, and he was surrounded. These people may have been annoying on their own, but they were professionals nonetheless and Joy had boxed himself into a corner with them.

Without seeing much choice, Joy decided to risk everything in a final gamble. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain, the best type of gambling there was.

As the circle of mercenaries grew ever closer Joy squeaked out a question, "my dad is stronger than you dad?"

With an audible Whoomph Joy disappeared, and in his place was a dragon. Beautiful red scales glistened in the sunlight and power exuded from its presence. Joy had reappeared on a close hilltop, and he was truly impressed by the sheer power of the being.

"Hey… Can I get the game explained to me?" Joy asked the invisible moderator of his artifact.

"Fine…" the voice begrudgingly responded. "The game My Dad Is Stronger Than Your Dad is simple. If you ever say the phrase, you will have your position swapped with one of your allies. For this game, your allies were designated as the helpful people who saved you after you passed out fighting Wes."

That answered some questions. But it didn't answer the most important one. Why was there a dragon fighting all those mercenaries? And how had a dragon saved him after he had passed out?

With impeccable timing, the former princess Dahlia walked out from behind a tree. In one hand she held a grimoire that Joy knew was filled with spells from Magic. She moved with utter confidence, but Joy felt nothing but contempt for her.

In a flash, Joy closed the distance between himself and the princess, memories of a dragon flying away from a battle where he needed them. Joy thought of the pain that had been wrought in the world because she had run away. Joy wanted nothing more than to hate her.

But she looked just as lost as he felt. His boiling rage guttered out and the fist he had raised unconsciously fell to his side.

"What are you doing here?" He asked the princess.

"Hiding from my brother. I saw you out in the village square and decided that saving you might be worth the effort. What has our new king been up to?"

Joy looked off into the distance where the red dragon had finished up demolishing its opponents. Not only had they been defeated, but none of the mercenaries had been killed. Every single one had been incapacitated and awaited the judgement of Dahlia.

Joy needed allies, desperately. Maybe these two could make a good addition as he looked for this fabled land of the free.

"Your brother is trying to become a god by consuming humanity. Then he plans to overthrow the gods in an act of human defiance."

The moment hung in the air. Dahlia had a good poker face, but he could feel her considering his words.

Finally, she responded, "I guess we have a lot to talk about."

"I guess we do."