The Kid Lich Awakens

The Kid Lich Awakens 12 Will P.

Billy the Kid Lich Pt. 12

Close Call

Billy woke up to Iris's face looking down on him. She was as beautiful as ever. "Hey beautiful." Billy chuckled. It had been a long time since he'd woken up and the first thing he saw was his first love's face. Iris sobbed and smacked him, then hugged him. "Don't you ever do that again!"

Then Billy noticed Sobek's face, also hovering over him. "You were asleep for 46 hours!" he said. "What?!" exclaimed Billy. His personal record was only 16 hours, and that was after all-nighters of gaming. Immediately his mind started brainstorming explanations. Computer programming revolved around one word, how, and that was how Billy tried to solve problems.

He asked questions like: How did this happen? How can I solve this problem? How can I prevent it from happening again? How did I let this happen? The last question was the one that left scars on his soul and the answers tended to haunt him for years afterwards. Ironic, a lich being haunted by his own past, especially considering the rest of his kind's barbaric nature.

First, he considered his sparring session with Sobek. The blast of green death energy was a magical attack with a very high energy expenditure attached to it. This made it time-consuming to cast and also very taxing on the body. That alone may have accounted for 20 straight hours of sleep, but 46? No way.

He considered his dream. Like he told Cthulu, time is fluid in a dream, and typically moves slower than in real life. This must've been it. Billy had never cracked the exact math on converting dream minutes to real world minutes; that's not to say he hadn't tried. But when he used all the data points he had, each individual dream, the amount of time that it would feel like had passed in the dream never had any direct x value and formula he could apply to the output y. Y in this case being real-world minutes. He had some dreams he was in for a few weeks, others for only hours. Others still for only a day or two. After applying the scientific method over and over, especially the data analysis step, he finally concluded that dream time to real-world time had no discernable pattern.

"Your pulse was so faint. It had nearly stopped!" Iris said, sounding terrified. "It's true." Added Sobek. "I offered to watch you in shifts but Iris refused to take her finger off your neck for the past 46 hours. I opted for guard duty, since you were unconscious." Sobek was in his thinking-man's posture. Standing now, next to Billy's bed, arms crossed over his chest, and watching Billy very closely.

Billy propped himself up with his spare pillow. "Ugh, okay. One, thank you very much Iris, I don't think anyone else would've done that for me." "Hey!" "Except Sobek!" Billy added hastily. "Well, that's what you do when you love someone." Said Iris. The matter-of-fact way she said this intimidated Billy.

Billy was a powerful mage and a dedicated athlete. He knew military strategy inside-out from years of playing top-down real-time strategy games, specifically Ensemble Studio's Halo Wars. He could handle hunting down dangerous criminals, sometimes escaped convicts, and he'd stared death in the eyes many times and not only did he not flinch, he had laughed. It was the sort of laugh of someone who knew death was coming for him, but had accepted it in his heart and made his peace with it. It was a laugh filled with genuine mirth. It was a laugh that masked the fear of the unknown. But mostly, it was a laugh to mask the rage. The silent fury he carried everywhere he went, the fury he told not even his own blood family about.

But women? Nope. He simply could not do women. First, Billy was always completely oblivious as to whether or not someone was flirting with him. And, being the jokester he was, he tried to make everyone laugh, and he was pretty good at it. Secondly, Billy really just could not do the direct approach. It seems so easy: walk up to a girl and say "Can I have your number?" Ha. Were it so easy.