Stories from the Verse
by Bryant Andrew Stevens
In the years since I first entered the verse--back when I built Umak Tek on the orange grassy plains of NagaWorld--I've crossed the paths of several
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other travelers, and heard their stories. I have elsewhere told pieces of my own story--excerpts from my journals, giving bits of my own experiences as a verser. But I've always been a teller of tales, and the tales of some of the others have been far more interesting than my own--at least to me, since I lived mine, but only imagined theirs. (When Bilbo Baggins said adventures make one late for dinner, he was so right: there are exciting and memorable moments which are grand to remember 
and thrilling to hear, but these are held together by miles of trudging through the mud--sometimes literally--to get to those places. The adventures of others are always exciting, because they leave the dull parts out of the story in the telling.) So I thought I'd take the time to describe the adventures of some of those whom I have come to call friends, called friends largely because they are the only people I'm ever likely to see again after I say goodbye.
If you're already confused, you might wish to check out the information about the Multiverser role playing game at the Valdron web site. This new addition to the world of RPG's has a flexibility I've never before seen in a game system, and makes it possible for the same characters to have many different adventures in many different kinds of worlds--as these stories, taken from actual game sessions, demonstrate.
The first verser I really met would be Michael. That's not strictly true--when I arrived in NagaWorld, Paul and Annie were there, and they are indeed versers, people who have lost their home world and live out in the multiverse; but Paul and Annie always stayed not merely in NagaWorld, but generally pretty close to the truck--in a sense, I built Umak Tek around them--so they had few stories of their own. Dylan, of course, I knew first--he's my son. And he did find me in NagaWorld before I met Michael; but he knew less than I about where we were and what was happening. Michael had been in the verse for years--counting by the date of the accident which had taken them out of their homes, he was the first person in the verse of anyone I ever met, or anyone they knew about. But he's quiet, and I don't know many of his stories.
I do catch up with Dylan from time to time, but I'm his dad, and I don't know whether he always tells me the whole story. I've also met most of the earliest versers--Pete Adams, Dan O'Malley, Mary Fitzgerald, even Whisp and Dog--and I've taught a number of younger versers, including John Landar, James Del Greco, George Andrews, Bill Brighton--as well as my other boys. I've seen some of their accounts of what happened to them (and maybe you'd enjoy reading their versions); but I heard about them from other sources myself, and sometimes I have a different slant.
So I'm going to tell their stories, as well as I can in the order that I heard of them--after all, when you bounce from universe to universe, the sequence of events which happened in different worlds means nothing except in relation to before and after in your own consciousness. I remember that in one world, I ran into Henry in the late 1990's, who insisted that I was his teacher, Merlin; it was much later that Merlin was my teacher, and later still when I found the young Henry in the 1300's, and took him on as a magician's apprentice. But that's my story, and you can read about it in other places. These are the stories of others in the verse--here for your enjoyment...
I've also appended a file of papers which have come to me from various worlds, detailing the adventures of certain other versers whom I have attempted to identify with some success. These I have sorted by source rather than by character, but have noted to whom they belonged to the best of my ability. You may find these of interest as well.
Verse Three, Chapter One, The First Multiverser Novel
Stories from the Verse Main Page
The Original Introduction to Stories from the Verse
Read the Stories
The Online Games
Books by the Author
Go to Other Links
M. J. Young Net