Seven Feet of Silver: Five Things About Being Seven Feet Tall

I'm not going to be able to explain this to anyone who wasn't there, but I'm going to try anyway, because if I don't write it down I'm going to lie awake replaying it, and I have work in the morning.

I was a holy warrior tonight. Sir Theron. Seven feet of silver armor and a greatsword blessed by light, and I don't mean I pictured it, I mean I was it — I looked down and the hands were mine and also enormous, and the floor was a real distance away. Kael built a world and then he put us inside it, and I have spent the last hour trying to find the edge of how much that meant to me and I haven't found it yet.

Here's what I can get into words.

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1. The armor had weight

That's the thing nobody warned me about. I expected it to look real — Kael's stuff always looks real. I didn't expect it to weigh something. The pauldrons sat on my shoulders. The gauntlets creaked when I closed my hands, this specific leather creak, and I swear on everything it was the exact sound of the gloves we tried on at that renaissance fair junior year, the one where Marcus got us kicked out of the archery range.

I asked Kael about it after and he got shifty and changed the subject, which is how I know he did it on purpose. He layered that sound by hand so it would land in the back of my memory without my permission. He'd never admit that. He doesn't have to. I heard it.

2. I went all in and I'm not embarrassed

Okay. I did the voice. The big one. Sworn to protect, but his eyes hide a broken vow — I said it in the voice, the grandfather-Liam-Neeson one that Marcus mocked me for a whole month over, six years ago. It came back tonight and I let it, because the second the armor rendered I was gone, I was all the way in, and a man who is all the way in does the voice.

And nobody really mocked me. Marcus opened his mouth and then didn't. Maybe because the cave was already filling up and there wasn't time. Maybe because they could all feel it too. You don't make fun of the guy who's praying when you're in the same church.

3. I am, apparently, a war god

I rolled a natural twenty on the brute. Twenty plus my Might, twenty-three total, and Kael's world answered it — the cave shook, the walls came back with the sound, and my blade went through a man's shoulder and the blood sprayed like a bad horror movie and I yelled "I'm a war god!" at the top of my lungs and meant it.

I have never been a war god. I'm the guy who checks the exits. I carried Kael home from a party once and never let him live it down gently. I am careful for a living. And for one swing in a cave that doesn't exist, I was huge and dangerous and the world flinched when I moved, and I understand now why Kael spent eleven months on this. He wasn't building a game. He was building a place where his friends get to be the biggest thing in the room for a night.

4. Marcus stabbed me. Twice, basically.

I want it on the record that Marcus rolled a one, tripped over his own feet, and put his dagger into my leg. His own team. The trickster, ladies and gentlemen. I roared, I called him an idiot, he yelped "sorry, big guy," and honestly it was perfect, it was us, it was every game night we've ever had except this time I could feel the shin.

Which — yeah. You feel it. Not a lot. A sting, a four out of ten, Kael swears it never goes past a six and a six is a stubbed toe. Angela designed it that way on purpose, back in the day: enough to make it matter, not enough to ruin your week. It worked exactly like she said. It made the whole thing count. A fight you can't feel is a screensaver. This was not a screensaver.

5. We were all in one place

This is the one that's keeping me up, and it's not even dramatic.

All five of us. In one place. At the same time. Doing the thing we've done since we were kids with cardboard dice screens, except the screen was gone and we were in it. Lena perched on the edge of her chair with her hands in her sleeves. Angela pretending the healing staff didn't matter to her, and I caught her shoulders drop when it rendered, so it mattered. Marcus with his feet on a stool, flipping that dagger. Kael in the corner doing his narrator bit to a camera that isn't there.

We don't get all five in a room much anymore. Jobs, distance, the way life sands the edges off a friendship until you're down to a group chat and good intentions. Tonight we were all the way back. All five, in armor, in a cave, mad at each other about the rules.

I checked the exits out of habit. They were right where Kael promised. So I stopped checking, and I let myself have it.

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So — when's the next one

That's the only question I came out with. When do we do it again.

I'll play the one who stands in front. I always do; it's the only role I've ever wanted in any world, real or otherwise — the big body between my people and whatever's coming. Tonight whatever was coming was five bandits and a flock of cursed rubber chickens, and I'd stand in front of those again in a heartbeat if it means another night where all five of us are in the same place at the same time.

Kael, if you're reading this — and you read everything — thank you. I won't say it to your face. You wouldn't know what to do with it. So it goes here.

Start where we started — at a table that turned into a tavern, with the four people you'd carry a mile sitting close enough to touch.

This is the world of Overlayed Echoes — a near-future LitRPG about found family, the masks we wear for the people we love, and the weight of being the one who holds the story together. Progression fantasy with a beating heart and a knife behind its back.