Imagine the world of your favorite MMO, a visually stunning place where you can create a character to your perfect specifications and go on endless quests and adventure with your friends. Think about how far and away your avatar can be from the real you, whether they’re taller, or older to bestow an appearance of sagely wisdom, or a different gender, or something nonhuman entirely. Now imagine that MMO where you went on all those deadly and dangerous quests is a real world and you, you’re locked inside that avatar being you created.
Welcome to Pendulum Heroes.
Seeing as this is my first and ongoing fantasy adventure novel series, I thought it fitting to create its own page. Long time followers, those of you who found me through one of my short stories and those that found me by sheer Internet coincidence, welcome. Here’s where you can get a quick introduction to the characters and world of the four book Pendulum Heroes series.
So What are Pendulum Heroes?
Let’s go back to that MMO world for a second. It’s beautiful, yes, but it’s also very dangerous. Magic lives here. Humans, who are only one of the four major races that govern this world, try to guide and control magic from Seat Esotera, the gleaming towers of the Hierophane. Analogous to scientists and engineers on Earth, the mages of the Hierophane have developed methods for dealing with some of their worldly threats using magical means. One of their best weapons is the Rift Pendulum, which allows eager and willing volunteers with inordinate power to charge headfirst into near suicidal missions, quests that anyone who values life expectancy would surely balk at. These “volunteers” are gamers, people who are wholly unaware their actions impact a living world. More to the point, these gamers are also unaware that every now and then a hiccup may happen with the magic of the Rift Pendulum, trapping them in an instant in a game turned real in bodies they were just playing at when they created them. Our story starts with four average guys who were just looking to play a quick game when the pendulum broke.
Let’s meet the guys.
Melvin Morrow. A moment ago he was a sixteen-year-old, math hating drum major. Now he’s Zhufira, a cocoa brown warrior maiden from the Khermer tribe. She is a severe threat on the battlefield, a one person army with her silver bastard sword. Also severe is her fashion choices, as the Khermer aren’t much for clothes. When Melvin finds he’s the one currently wearing a chainmail steel bikini and not much else, he’s understandably no longer a fan.
Jason Streible. Melvin’s best friend goes from being a sixteen-year-old nerdy game junkie to being tall, lithe and not at all human. He is now aian, a race of gray-skinned beings whose keen eyes are autonomically always moving. Jason made a male archer named Cephrin, and as any game nerd worth his salt, tweaked the stats in the character creation phase to the nth degree to ensure his archer was the best archer who ever arched. That said, he gets his arm chopped off within seconds of getting stuck on this world. I told you there was danger out there. He’ll have to learn to adapt… unfortunately adaptation isn’t something you can invest experience points in.
Richard Bates. Rich met Melvin and Jason through the game and goes from fifteen to fifty in an instant. Now he’s Razzleblad, a mage with gray robes and even grayer hair and beard. He’ll come to learn that he, as all gray robed mages, can cast spells of nuclear proportion. Unfortunately, when our story starts he doesn’t know a lick of magic because all the flowery, foreign words that are associated with spellcraft he treated as flavor text to the game. And when he finally does learn how to cast spells, he’ll wish he hadn’t.
Mike Morrow. He’s Melvin’s twenty-four year old big brother who goes to technically being Melvin’s little brother when he gets transformed into a four-foot high megrym. Megryms are lizard-like creatures that look like a cross between a gargoyle and a bat without wings. Mike doesn’t play these kind of games and only played this one time when his brother begged him to be the fourth man. Not taking it seriously, he created the little megrym Knuckleduster and named it Ballztowallz. Now that it is serious, he’s fortunate to have the skills and training given to him by the Army and early years in streets Melvin never had to experience.
The four of them are trapped in this world. Now they have to get out. The mages can help them but only if they agree to do one final quest.
This is the beginning of the Pendulum Heroes series. Click the link to get the book. I’ve also created a Facebook page, which I’ll update quasi-weekly with new tidbits and details of this cool new world and the characters. It’ll be the place to go to have discussions about what you liked and what you didn’t. I invite you to join the conversation, like it, share it with your friends.
It’s time to discover a beautiful new world full of magic, mischief and mayhem. So what are we waiting for? Together, let’s start the quest.
fictigristle 