Today's Earth date: December 18, 1991

I had to make a difficult decision today. The attempts on our lives are too serious to ignore, and I can't put my love in danger. If she's near me, a knife meant for me could easily find its way to her. If they've been watching us, they already know she's important to me.

I've scratched her name out of my journal entries and told her we're leaving. I'm hoping that's enough to keep her out of danger. When all this is over and the world is saved, I can come back to Vientuls and live the life I want with her.

Merry fucking Christmas to me.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

Mudsville was a cluster of shacks built two or three feet above the ground on stilts. Several of the shacks had hooks on the front with frogs and various lizards hung on them the way Wayne had seen hunters on Earth hang deer. Other houses had bundles of what Wayne guessed were fruits native to the area.

The footpaths between the shacks were muddy and well-worn. Palm fronds and other large leaves were laid across the swampiest parts, and it just then occurred to Wayne that dry dirt would be hard to come by in a rainforest. Between the humidity and the permanent shade of the thick canopy overhead–preventing the majority of sunlight from ever touching the ground–Mudsville was likely always wet and humid.

"Those sticks look awfully bare," a wiry woman with a few gray hairs yelled as she stepped out onto her porch. She wore a loose, green toga-like dress. It was frayed and faded.

"We did better!" the brownhaired boy yelled. "Got two 'condas, ma! And some friends."

"'Conda? Really? Where–" She gasped and ran forward to grab her kids.

"It's okay!" the blonde boy said. "That's just Outlawson."

"An out-what?"

"He's mine, and he's harmless," Wayne said. "Didn't mean to scare you."

Several more townspeople ventured out to see the cause of the commotion. Most of the women were in loose dresses and the men in shorts or pants. Shirts were a rarity on the men. And every resident was hard and weathered from life in the Cuts. They followed the boys to the manacondas, slung the snakes over their shoulders, and hulled them deeper into the village.

"Would it be alright if I went with them?" Sammy asked Wayne. "I wouldn't mind seeing how they cook it."

"Yeah, of course."

The boys' mother pointed to an open area. "Y'all can set up over there. Most grass we got. Come get me when you're thirsty."

The only party members who didn't immediately begin unpacking the gear were Fergus and Vanilli. They both looked over the edge of the wagon at the exceptional amount of mud beneath them.

"You were fighting a giant snake in the mud less than an hour ago," Wayne said.

"First of all," Fergus replied, "there wasn't this much mud. Second of all, the context was entirely different."

"How best do I address this terrain?" Vanilli asked.

Even if Vanilli had never been to a rainforest, how could his world not have mud? Then again, hell was all fire and lava and such, presumably, so maybe mud was in fact unknown to him. "Try to avoid the worst of it and then make peace with the fact that you're getting dirty no matter what."

Vanilli nodded, processing the advice. "Should I take off my clothes to protect them?"

"You should not do that," Wayne answered. "We'll get them cleaned. Don't worry."

With that, the demon hopped into the mud. He made a sour face at first, but then he seemed to get over it and began getting his things off the wagon. Fergus sighed and did the same.

A few minutes later, Wayne and the Zeroes staked down cloth tarps and pitched tents, finding this particular patch of ground to be relatively dry, considering. While Wayne was helping Vanilli set up Sammy's tent, since the cook was occupied at the moment, Fergus wandered near the pair and glanced about as though he were being watched.

"Don't look now, but two shacks back on the northeast side of the village–we have an observer."

Wayne waited for what felt like an organic amount of time for him to have turned around after a conversation. He pretended to fight with a knot tied around a batch of tent stakes.

Finding who Fergus meant took him a moment. The town wasn't exactly laid out in a predictable grid format, but he eventually found the culprit. A woman about Fergus' age leaned against her doorway and was unabashedly staring. She cared neither for decorum nor subtlety.

From here, she looked compact. Not small or petite. Compact. Her black hair with thick streaks of gray was tied into a loose ponytail, and she seemed to chew on some kind of reed the way an anti-hero might chew on a toothpick.

"I don't get it," Wayne said, returning his full attention to Sammy's corner of the campsite. "You just now got off the wagon, and she's staring you down so hard that it feels gross to even enter your lines of sight."

"Women like confidence," Fergus replied.

"Yeah, you looked so confident standing at the edge of the wagon whining about dirt."

"Wayne," Vanilli cut in, "would you mind if I found us some fresh water?"

He raised an eyebrow at the demon.

"I would like the distraction. Human mating is so preposterously convoluted. I find myself understanding less about this world when I am exposed to it."

"I know at least one demon who disagrees with you," Fergus said, already laughing at his own joke.

"Yeah, Vanilli. Go for it. We're almost done here anyhow." When the demon had departed, Wayne said, "Is this really going to be the trip? You're going to plant a flag in every town we visit?"

"I am holding at a respectable two out of four, currently. You would be too if you had opened your eyes around that Penelope woman."

"We already talked about this. She was way too young. I had like twenty five years on her, maybe more."

"I know, I know," Fergus said, letting the mirth drain out of the moment. "And no, I don't intend to make this journey a string of dalliances. Would I turn down a nice evening with a lovely lady? Never. But I'm not pursuing it on purpose. I can't perform in this humidity anyway."

Wayne rolled his eyes.

"Seriously, though," Fergus said, his tone shifting away from playful banter. "I've been a bachelor for a long time, and you can't help but get to the point where you start searching yourself for defects. Why do all of my university friends have wives, children, and grandchildren, yet I've not come close to getting married?"

"I understand." Turning forty as a bachelor had given Wayne similar thoughts, and those feelings got worse the more he struck out on dating apps.

"It feels good to be wanted, especially at my age. That's all it is, and I don't think it's wrong to enjoy that."

"Okay, now I feel bad."

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Good."

As the sun began to set, an older gentleman with an eyepatch and a bit of a limp came to retrieve Wayne and the Zeroes. He was skinny except for a paunch as round as a basketball, over which the drawstrings of his pants were tied. He had no shirt and no shoes.

On the way across town to the cooking site, Wayne got an unofficial tour of Mudsville. Most of the homes were more or less the same, except the few that belonged to specialists of some sort. The town smith had an anvil and forge, for example, and the tanner had a whole mess of lizard and snake skins hung and stretched.

There were also dozens of broken wagons, all in various states of decay. Some looked like they had been neatly parked next to a house with the intention of being fixed. Others looked like they had been left where an axle broke, turning them into strangely shaped shrubbery as the jungle quickly reclaimed that patch of ground. The townspeople just walked around and paid them no mind.

For the most part, everyone was friendly. Wayne caught more than a few side eyes and suspicious glares, but as soon as someone heard they had saved two of their own and brought the town dinner, their moods swung swiftly. Several people threw an arm over Wayne's shoulder and talked to him like his party was a batch of distant cousins who came to visit.

The more of those conversations he had, the more Wayne realized how big of a deal the manaconda kills were to the folks of Mudsville. The manaconda meat would feed the whole village for six days, Wayne was told. The Cuts were rich with life of all kinds, sure, but hunting and gathering in this jungle was still a challenge. Six days of guaranteed food, for free, made Wayne and the Zeroes instant celebrities.

So, when they arrived at the cooksite, the townspeople greeted them with cheers, smiles, and a glass of the town's liquor, a clear liquid that seemed dangerously potent. Armond couldn't promise Wayne that healing magic could save him from alcohol poisoning or restore his vision if he went blind. The rest of the revelers were doing fine, though, so Wayne wasn't that worried.

The cooksite itself was in a mostly clear area to the east of town. The townsfolk did all of their butchering, cooking, and smoking well away from the shacks to give predators fewer reasons to enter the village. People still cooked their own food in town, but when they did, they were diligent about safely discarding any leftover scraps.

While Wayne had made camp, the two manacondas were sliced into segments about two inches thick and then speared on a spit to roast over flame. The air carried the aroma of spicy chicken, but Wayne couldn't tell if that was from the meat itself or from how it was prepared.

As Wayne settled into his own wooden chair, a surprisingly sturdy piece of construction along the lines of an Adirondack chair on Earth, a tall, long man approached Wayne with a massive rub under his lip. Two familiar boys followed him.

He stuck out his hand, and Wayne stood to shake it.

"Wanted to thank you for what you done for my boys," he said. "Manacondas all the way out here? Doesn't happen. I figured they'd be safe from the rats during the day, but two manacondas? Hoowee."

"Rats?"

"Yessir. We got a night patrol now to keep them from gettin' the jump on us. It's only been a few weeks of that, and folks are gettin' worn out. Not been good for our meals either. Some of the best froggin' is at night. Just don't see enough of them in the day to feed your family."

"How are the rats getting through the coral?" Wayne asked. "Actually, how do you guys manage to work around it?"

The man laughed. "Don't worry. We get cut up like any one else. Ain't nothin' magical about us. Growin' up here makes it easier to learn the land is all."

"Is that what the rats do?" A plate of steaming manaconda meat appeared under Wayne's nose. He accepted it.

"Those rats don't know shit about the Cuts. You can hear 'em coming from a long ways out. They don't even try bein' quiet."

"And the coral?"

The man shook his head and turned to the side to spit. "They lose a good few on the way in. Makes for an awful smell for a few days, but enough get through that we got to be on our guard."

Wayne shivered. Running headfirst into a coral reef sounded like an awful way to go.

"Some of the boys believe a few of the rats use magic to keep from gettin' cut. The important ones. Like the tribe leaders or whatever."

Wayne was about to ask after leads on ruins to explore when the boys' mother appeared behind them. She put an arm around each of her children but addressed Wayne.

"You really the Zero Hero? From a whole different planet?"

"Yeah…"

"The men are all chickenshits, and won't ask you," she said. "Do they got drinkin' games where you're from? Would be much appreciated if you could teach us one or two."

"You don't have drinking games here?"

The woman sighed. "Of course we do. They're askin' for new ones."

"Right."

For all the potential topics someone could broach to a traveler from another world–medicine, science, mathematics, technology–Wayne rarely fielded questions relating to those topics. That was due, in part, because he knew very little about anything useful. Penicillin? Alternating current? Astrophysics? He could contribute maybe one introductory line to a Wikipedia page on any of those topics, but then it would never get past the editors.

Of what Wayne did know, well, the people here were a few eras of tech away from being able to appreciate the full glory of his Excel skills. To his surprise, however, his poor education and limited survival skills rarely come up.

The average person wanted to know about harmlessly dumb stuff like games, jokes, and food. Of all the things an other-worlder could potentially provide, Wayne felt more like a dick joke missionary than anything else.

But drinking games. Yes, Wayne knew a few.

None of the names would be the same, so he ran through a list of brief descriptions to get a sense of what culture was like in Mudsville.

Beerpong, quarters, flipcup, and a game along the lines of cornhole–they knew all those. Wayne briefly considered teaching the game Never Have I Ever, but decided against it.

In that game, the goal was to make a statement that got everyone to drink but you. So Wayne could say something like, "Never have I ever been to Europe." He had never been and knew that his friends had. As a result, they drank.

Oddly, Never Have I Ever inspired complete and utter honesty in its players. When the Never Have I Evers inevitably turned to weaponizing your friends' secrets against them or saying the most messed up thing you could think of just to see if anyone copped to it–things got ugly. That game had ended so many relationships over the years, and those were just the ones Wayne got to personally witness.

In one case, the prompt was "Never have I ever cheated on my boyfriend or girlfriend." One of the girls at the table raised her hand like she had no choice. Her and her boyfriend? They had been together since high school and had only officially dated each other, so the math of who she cheated on specifically wasn't difficult. That's how she broke it to him. In a drinking game. In front of a bunch of other college kids.

Wayne could not, in good conscience, do that to this world.

But he struggled to think of other viable drinking games. Most of his ideas required the Earth-standard 52-card deck, making them useless here.

Then it came to him: Stump.

Wayne dated a girl who had rural family roots. On one occasion, he went to one of her friend's houses for a party, and they lived in the country. The country country. The "I've seen nothing but 'clean fill wanted' signs for the last forty minutes and not a single gas station" country. Getting to the farm took an hour of backroad-driving and navigating roads that weren't on GPS.

When they arrived, Wayne found a group of men standing around a stump, each enjoying a Coors Light 'cause if you're a Miller Lite drinker you best get the fuck off my property right now. The stump was waist high with the diameter of an oil drum and wasn't actually rooted in the ground. It was a cross section of a felled tree chosen for its ideal drinking game height.

Five people were in the game, and they each had a nail directly in front of them that was "their" nail.

Going counter clockwise, they took turns with a claw hammer. Nothing was special about the hammer. It was the same generic claw hammer that every dad in America had in their toolbench.

The objective: Pound your opponents' nails flush with the stump before they do the same to yours.

The twist: Each player gets one swing a turn, but prior to that swing, they must toss the hammer into the air so that it flips at least once. When the player catches the hammer, they have to immediately swing the hammer into the stump. No catching and pausing. No catching and winding up a little bit farther to tweak your aim. When you caught the hammer, your hand had to go down, immediately.

Every "clean" hit on your nail required you to take a drink. If your nail was driven flush–not bent, had to be straight down–you had to finish your drink.

It was some of the most fun Wayne had ever had. It was also wildly irresponsible. Drunk adults throwing hammers with a bonfire and a barn floodlight as the only sources of light went mostly how you would expect. No one died, but nearly everyone ended up with scratches and bruises from botching a swing and accidentally punching a nail-covered block of wood.

The people of Mudsville were skeptical at first, but one good swing was all it took to get them hooked. Wayne quickly found that his system stats were an unfair advantage, however. Earth Wayne successfully hit a nail maybe one of out of four turns. This Wayne could hit and drive a nail all the way down with one swing, every time.

So he stepped back and assumed a coaching role, which was more fun in many ways.

At some point in the night, Fergus came up next to Wayne and handed him another glass of the mystery booze. "You know what I've noticed from exchanging games with you?"

"What's that?"

"No matter what world they're from, so many of them are unbelievably stupid. 'Stump?' Even the name is dumb, but people buy into the concept completely for some reason. It's like life is more fun if we all agree to be the sillier versions of ourselves and share an asinine pastime."

"Do you think that's a bad thing?" Wayne asked.

Fergus shook his head vigorously. "Not at all. There's something beautiful about dumb fun that I am just now realizing I should appreciate more."

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