SHRED!

Man, I’m in school again! I am Richard Rogers, but my stage name is Ricky Roxx, which everyone knows me as. I woke up like a few weeks ago as this young cat named “Par Gally”. I remember his memories and my memories at the same time. Super trippy.

Gally is a cool 15-year old kid. He’s an elven bard and he’s going to this school called the “School of Technical Studies, Haronda.” It sounds like a college, but there are a bunch of kids that go there. I remember that I went to college for like a year, and then I dropped out because of my band, Leather Katz.

That’s right! I was in a band as the lead guitarist! It was Ozzy’s 1993 tour and Leather Katz opened up for him in Los Angeles. I remember that afterparty. It was wicked! Ozzy showed us how to snort fire ants and shoot them out of his eye sockets. I also remember that he snorted other things, and he was driving his bus when I was trying to get my gear.

That’s right. I died. He Randy Rhoads’ed me. He drove the bus right into me while I was trying put away my custom V guitar and my 5150 full stack.

So now that I’m Par Gally, I have to behave like a normal elven adult, since 16 is like 25 out here, and I’m a year away from that. They’re posh, like British people (not like Ozzy), but also really smart, like those NASA scientists or something. Well, instead of space, they’re really smart with magic.

Yeah, dude! Magic! There’s magic here! I found out that when I played my lute like my guitar solos, crazy red lightning came out of the headstock. My “dad”, Par Valien, was so shocked that I was able to do that as a 16 year old, ‘cause he couldn’t do it until he was at least 20.

My “dad” is a warrior bard, born from a family of warrior bards, and one of the only families that practiced warrior bard, uh, things. I guess we were rare, since bards were supposed to be like support magic or something. I don’t know, I didn’t play Dungeons and Dragons that much. I wish I did if this was going to be my life from now on.

Anyways, there’s this cool chick called Lara Ulina, and she’s a human person. She’s 15 too, and humans don’t consider them to be adults until 18. That’s pretty normal to me, since I’m from my world of regular humans. But this world’s age culture is so weird, man. I can live up to like 300 years old, like Johnny Cash, so I’m basically a baby in elven years. But humans are like regular, so they live up to 100 years. Technically, Lara is older than me by a lot. I can’t do math, but I think that’s how it is.

So it looks like Lara and Gally had something together, maybe like a high school romance or something. She kinda backed away ever since I was reborn here, so she probably knows something’s wrong with me. She’s still cool with me, though.

“Gally, what are you doing with your lute? You know that you can’t openly use magic designated non-magic rest spots at school!” Lara yelled as I was practicing Crazy Train. It seems like no matter what I jam with the lute, it causes some magical ripple in the air.

“I can’t really stop, these fingers were meant for fingering,” I replied mockingly. “I have to keep shredding. You know, use it or lose it.”

“I’ve had it with your language, Par Gally. I don’t understand what you’re saying half the time, and I don’t have any more patience to try and understand you. Let’s just go to the guild center and do our first job and get this over with,” Lara frustratingly stated while storming away. I really pulled one of her strings.

I am doing my last year as a major in Bard Magics. To graduate, I need to help one of the big guilds with quests and write them down. Basically, I’m going to be an intern at a big company shoveling crap for the big wigs. I remember delivering pizza for the Hut and I hated it.

We went to the guild center in the school. There’s a bunch of stands with people yelling at the students to come work for them. It’s kinda like Greek Week with all of those overly perfumed frat boys trying to recruit innocent freshmen to their dick sizing competition teams. But, in this world, there’s such a shortage of adventurers due to that war in the Kingdom of Faralon, so they’ve been requesting students instead.

Lara spotted a potential guild chapter we could work for, seeing that their quests were “simple enough for a dual personality buffoon” like me, as Lara would say under her breath. These quests just needed people to find missing cats, gather healing leaves for a pharmacy, fix some guy’s broken carriage, yada yada. By the way, these are magical cars. They use these crystals that need to be changed every month instead of gas. I wonder if there are any Lambos around here.

Luckily, due to my old world knowledge of mechanics (my old dad was a mechanic and made me work on his ‘71 Camaro all the time), we ended up finishing the carriage one pretty fast. Gathering healing leaves was kinda easy too. They looked like bud, so doing that quest was like buying from the dealer down the street from the venue and smoking it before our show. Except, instead of the dealer, we had to dig through bushes in the forest. I never wanted to be a gardener, and that’s why.

So we saved the missing cat quest for last. It didn’t sound very hard, and Lara loved cats too. Well, low and behold, it was super dangerous.

That cat was captured by a whistletree, which is a tree that can freaking move and talk. They’re usually quiet, but when they start whistling, they go on a hunt for something with magic. Cats are natural Galakion nodes, go figure. That means they’re powerful magic things, favored by God, but God is called Galaka here. So this whistletree decided that the best time to begin eating the cat was when me and Lara were climbing it. Cats are just as clever here as my old world, so the cat was fine after jumping off. That, unfortunately, sent the damn tree after us instead. The branches moved by themselves and attacked us from all around. I couldn’t use my lute since I was still climbing.

Lara is a healer, so she can’t really help much in this situation. That’s what I thought until she used her staff to break half of the large branch we were hanging on. Holy cow, she hits like Doro. We fell down like 6 feet, and I landed on the side, trying to not crush my lute. I rolled around, dodging the Evil Dead branches. Lara casted a spirit shield on me, and screamed “SHRED!”

Say no more.

I took my lute, and played Fireball by Deep Purple, and I sent a huge fireball at the tree. The whistling became a horrible scream, kinda like what the guy from Cannibal Corpse was doing, but way louder and more balls. It was hurt, but not as bad as we thought. It was angry now. We did everything we could to dodge the flaming branches. While we dodged them, it kept hitting some houses around it, lighting everything it touches on fire everywhere. I was thinking, holy cow, I’m burning random people, this was a mistake. Thankfully, I had another chance to shred.

Lara expanded my spirit shield really fast to make a gust of wind that took out some fires on some houses. The wind knocked the tree down, and I blasted Jump in the Fire by Metallica. Somehow, everytime I play a song from the old world, my magic does exactly what the song says, and the effects are insanely powerful. So playing that song ripped a fiery portal right under the tree, and it got sucked right into a pit of lava and fire. When it was fully pulled in, the portal closed as fast as it ripped open.

At this point, I had only enough power to do one more song, which is pathetic since all I do is play the first riff anyways. I played Raining Blood by Slayer (you can easily guess what that did). The fires were put out, but everything was covered in blood. As you probably could assume, some people didn’t like that on their street. We spent more hours cleaning everything up than saving that damn cat.

Thankfully, I think the people who lived there would rather have blood on their clothes than a whistletree. They signed a paper that had a huge “B” in the corner, and gave it to us.

“Thank you, young students of the great School of Technical Studies. We asked many guild chapters to aid us with this request, but to no avail. I believe that you were here to find our Sacred Cat, yes? That was a D rank quest, and you shall receive that reward as well.” This elder dude, I think half-elf, shook my hand violently.

“Hey dude, I mean, good man. I apologize for the blood.”

“There are no worries, I can clean this up with a snap of my finger.” He snapped, and the blood suddenly turned to wine. I think I know where Jesus went after, you know. The town people were laughing because they love wine, even when it was all over the place. I took a few licks myself, and the wine was really good. I only drank beer, but this was cool, too.

“My good man, we thank you for giving us the B rank document. I must ask, what is your name?” Lara really did not like to be here anymore, since her clothes were soaking from things she’d probably get yelled at for.

“My good kids, my name is Traya Argrus. You can call me Arg. If you ever need a sorcerer for your party after you graduate, I can guide you to the best dungeons.”

Me and Lara were super happy. Not only did we get a bunch of money and credits for school, but we got a new party member. 

Well, I thought we did. 

A week later, we went to his funeral. I haven’t cried in a while, but this was a good reason to.