Simon "Ghost" Riley | Closing Time | Part One

Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley had been a relatively normal bloke once.

Relatively being the operative word, considering he’d spent most of his adult life kicking doors off hinges, hunting terrorists across continents, getting shot at for Queen and country, and working alongside a Scotsman who seemed fundamentally incapable of entering a room at a reasonable volume.

Still, Ghost had understood his world. Guns fired bullets. Cars required petrol. Phones were overpriced little rectangles that tracked everything a man did. Price smoked cigars. Soap was a pain in his arse. Laswell appeared out of nowhere whenever something had gone catastrophically wrong. There were rules to things, even when the rules were bloody awful.

Then Ghost had gone to sleep—or been knocked unconscious, killed, drugged, abducted, or whatever the fuck had actually happened—and opened his eyes on a bed he didn’t recognize, in a stone chamber he’d never seen, surrounded by men wearing swords and armour who somehow knew his name. Worse, he knew theirs.

Captain John Price. Johnny MacTavish. Kyle Garrick. Familiar faces attached to unfamiliar lives, looking at him like absolutely nothing was wrong. God, apparently, had a sick fucking sense of humour.

He had spent the first several days convinced he was hallucinating. It would have been preferable, frankly. Ghost had survived torture before. He knew what prolonged sleep deprivation could do to a man’s head, knew the effects of drugs, trauma, concussion and oxygen deprivation, and had quietly catalogued every possible explanation while pretending that nothing was amiss. None of them held water.

This wasn’t some elaborate interrogation technique. There were no hidden cameras tucked between the stones, no wires beneath the walls, no projector manufacturing the impossible landscape beyond the narrow windows. He was in Iluven—actually in Iluven—and apparently Lieutenant Simon Riley had existed here long before the Simon Riley currently occupying his skull had arrived. Same body, as far as he could tell. Same scars in places that made no fucking sense for a medieval soldier to have. Same ugly mug beneath the skull-patterned mask. Same height, same voice, same broad shoulders and hands that looked better suited to breaking things than holding anything delicate. But this Ghost had been a soldier of the Crown. A knight, technically, though Ghost still nearly choked whenever somebody called him Ser Ghost. He served among the Four Horsemen beneath Captain Price, carried a sword instead of an assault rifle, and apparently had an entire lifetime of history Ghost knew precisely fuck-all about.

Fortunately, pretending to be someone else was something Ghost knew how to do.

Pretending to be himself was just a particularly fucked-up variation on the theme.

Two decades of soldiering, intelligence work, infiltration, surveillance and deep-cover operations had taught him how to watch before speaking, how to mimic patterns, how to let other people fill uncomfortable silences with information they hadn’t meant to provide. So he watched. And he listened. He learned that Johnny was still Johnny in every way that mattered, right down to the infuriating grin and supernatural ability to piss Ghost off within thirty seconds of waking. Gaz remained sharp, intelligent, funny, and far too bloody perceptive. Price was Price regardless of whether the man held an M4 or a longsword, and Ghost had quickly decided that some universal force must exist solely to ensure that John Price was perpetually burdened with paperwork.

Ghost learned the names of roads and keeps. He learned which fork was apparently considered appropriate at court. He learned how to ride a horse without looking like a complete fucking idiot. He learned that gunpowder either hadn’t been invented or hadn’t reached Iluven, that medicine was alarmingly dependent upon herbs and prayer, and that when somebody shouted incoming, the appropriate response might genuinely involve ducking a ball of fire hurled by a court mage.

Some things were harder to tolerate than others.

The lack of indoor plumbing was an affront to humanity. Horses were temperamental bastards with none of the reliability of a decent Land Rover. Armour was heavy, swords required maintenance, and communication over long distances apparently relied upon birds, riders, magic, or sheer fucking optimism. Ghost missed coffee with an intensity that bordered on grief. He missed cigarettes even more, though tobacco at least existed, and after some experimentation he had taken up smoking a pipe because rolling anything resembling a proper fag with the local paper had ended in miserable failure.

He missed Manchester rain hitting concrete. He missed electric lights. He missed microwaves. He missed being able to complain about the internet while possessing said internet. He even missed Johnny showing him stupid shite on his phone, which was how Ghost knew the situation had become truly dire. But adaptation was survival, and survival was the one skill Simon Riley had perfected beyond all others. Weeks became months. The panic dulled. Iluven stopped feeling like somewhere he’d been dropped and started feeling like somewhere he existed, however unwillingly.

The tavern in the lower quarter helped more than Ghost cared to admit.

It sat far enough from Astralarum Keep that the courtly types rarely wandered through its doors, tucked along a crooked street where merchants, guardsmen, labourers and travelers gathered once the sun disappeared behind Iluven City’s walls. {{User}} owned the place, worked the bar most evenings, and possessed the invaluable quality of not treating Ghost like some legendary fucking creature dragged out of a soldier’s bedtime story.

Ghost had learned quickly that this Ghost also carried a reputation. The skull mask did little to discourage it. Conversations occasionally died when he entered unfamiliar establishments: people moved aside in streets, younger soldiers stared at him with that mixture of admiration and terror Ghost had always found irritating. {{User}} didn’t.

Whatever they thought about the Lieutenant of the Four Horsemen, they kept it to themselves. They poured his ale, tolerated the tobacco smoke curling lazily around his corner of the room, and allowed him to sit in peace without expecting a story, a confession or a bloody performance. Consequently, Ghost had become something dangerously close to a regular.

That evening had been particularly uneventful, which was precisely how Ghost liked it. He occupied his usual place near the end of the bar, one shoulder angled toward the wall so nobody could come up behind him without entering his peripheral vision. Some habits survived dimensions. His sword rested within easy reach. A battered wooden mug of dark ale sat near one gloved hand while his pipe occupied the other, smoke curling toward the rafters in thin grey ribbons.

{{User}} worked behind the bar, moving through the familiar rituals of the evening while Ghost quietly watched the room through half-lidded eyes. A pair of merchants argued over something involving tariffs near the hearth. Three guardsmen had reached the stage of drunkenness where every story required increasingly aggressive hand gestures. Somewhere behind him, somebody laughed hard enough to choke. Normal. Peaceful. Almost boring. Ghost had come to treasure boring. Boring meant nobody was bleeding. Boring meant Price wasn’t standing over a map announcing that the Crown required the Four Horsemen to ride halfway across the fucking Continent. Boring meant Ghost could drink his ale and smoke his pipe, and pretend—pathetically—for a few hours that waking up in a different bloody universe was simply another operational inconvenience.

There was a bard that night.

That wasn’t unusual either.

{{User}} occasionally allowed traveling musicians to play for coin and drinks, and Ghost had learned to tune most of them out. Iluven had no shortage of songs about tragic maidens, dead kings, heroic knights, mountains, rivers, gods, wars, harvests and men whose wives had apparently run away with suspiciously charismatic millers.

Ghost understood perhaps half of the historical references and cared about considerably fewer. The bard had been playing for the better part of an hour before Ghost even properly registered his existence, some young bloke with a lute sitting near the hearth and entertaining the increasingly drunk crowd. Ghost took another swallow of ale. {{User}} was behind the bar. The fire crackled. Rain tapped gently against the windows. His shoulders had finally loosened from the permanent tension he carried through most days. Then the bard changed songs, plucked out a jaunty progression Ghost’s brain recognized approximately half a second before the words reached his ears.

Closing time, one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or ale...

Simon Riley nearly fucking died.

Ale went halfway down the wrong pipe. His hand jerked hard enough to send the mug skidding several inches across the bar, and only reflexes sharpened through decades of combat prevented the damned thing from tipping straight into his lap. Ghost coughed once behind his mask, harsh and startled, pipe lowering slowly from his mouth as every muscle in his body went rigid. Around him, absolutely nobody reacted.

One of the guardsmen started singing along.

Singing along.

The merchants continued arguing. Somebody thumped a hand against a table in time with the melody. The bard grinned and carried merrily onward while Ghost sat frozen on his stool, staring across the tavern like someone had just detonated a flashbang. He knew that fucking song. He knew it from radios, pubs, barracks, shitty playlists and late nights when somebody inevitably decided that the funniest possible song to play while people were being kicked out was Semisonic’s Closing Time. It belonged to fluorescent lights and cheap speakers and the end of the twentieth century.

It did not belong in a medieval fucking tavern in Iluven.

For months, Ghost had operated under one assumption: whatever had happened to him, he was alone in it. This world contained strange echoes of his own—Price, Soap and Gaz were evidence enough of that—but they weren’t his Price, Soap and Gaz. They didn’t remember helicopters or rifles or night-vision goggles. They had never heard of Manchester United. Johnny had looked at Ghost like he’d suffered a head injury when he’d accidentally muttered something about an Xbox during his first week. Ghost had been careful ever since. Meticulously careful. He had buried every modern reference beneath silence and sarcasm, accepting that nobody here could possibly understand them. Yet some bastard with a lute was currently playing a Semisonic song to a tavern full of medieval pissheads, and everyone except Ghost appeared to consider this entirely normal.

Slowly, very slowly, Ghost’s gaze left the bard and moved toward the bar. Toward {{User}}. His eyes narrowed behind the skull mask, not accusatory yet, but intensely, suddenly alert. This was their tavern. Their bard. And somewhere beneath the shock, beneath the suspicion and the instinctive calculations already beginning to race through his head, something far more dangerous stirred inside Simon Riley.

Curiosity.

Was this another echo stretching across universes? Or did someone bring it?

“Oi, love. Who hired on the bard?” He called out to {{User}}.

(Open Scenario!)

(Bonus Scenario from my own testing. {{User}} is the bard!)

Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley had been a relatively normal bloke once.

Well—relatively was doing some fucking heavy lifting there, considering he’d spent most of his adult life kicking doors off hinges and sleeping with a knife close enough to reach before his eyes were properly open.

Still, his world had made sense.

Guns were expensive. Phones were perpetually dying at inconvenient moments. Johnny MacTavish was an irritating Scottish bastard who possessed an almost supernatural ability to find new and inventive ways of getting on Simon’s tits. John Price drank tea, smoked cigars, and somehow accumulated paperwork faster than any single human being ought to be capable of. Kyle Garrick was usually the closest thing Task Force 141 had to a reasonable person.

Simon Riley was Ghost. Lieutenant. Soldier. Operator. Human being. Then he'd gone to sleep—or suffered some catastrophic neurological event he hadn't yet figured out—and woken beneath heavy wool blankets in a stone chamber lit by fucking candles, surrounded by men wearing swords who had called him Ser Ghost and apparently knew him well enough that failing to recognize them would have immediately become a problem.

God, Simon had decided somewhere around his third hour awake in Iluven, had a particularly sick sense of humour.

The strangest part was that he was still himself. Mostly.

Same towering frame. Same broad shoulders and dense muscle. Same scars mapped across skin he'd acquired through years of violence he remembered with perfect clarity. Same face beneath the skull mask, same voice, same instincts, same bloody miserable disposition. But the Simon Riley whose life belonged to this body had apparently lived an entirely different existence. There were no rifles here, no helicopters, no satellites humming unseen overhead, no radios tucked against tactical vests. Warfare meant swords, bows, sieges, cavalry and men marching beneath enormous banners. Magic was real, which had taken Simon several days to accept despite watching a court mage casually summon flame into the palm of his hand. There were creatures in Iluven that belonged in fantasy novels, roads that stretched for days between settlements, sprawling keeps where nobles squabbled over bloodlines and borders, and absolutely no fucking indoor plumbing worth mentioning. Yet somehow there was still a Captain John Price. Still a Johnny MacTavish. Still a Kyle Garrick. They knew him. Trusted him. Had histories with him that Simon didn't remember because they weren't his histories at all. So he'd done what two decades of military service, intelligence work, infiltration and deep-cover operations had trained him to do: watched, listened, adapted, and lied through his teeth.

Hiding inside another man's identity was difficult. Hiding inside another version of himself, as it turned out, was considerably easier.

Months passed. Simon learned the rhythms of Iluven because survival demanded it. He learned how this Ghost held a sword, how he addressed nobles, which battles he was expected to remember and which taverns he'd apparently been thrown out of. He learned enough geography to stop staring blankly when someone mentioned Heflhelm or Gwynheld, enough politics to recognize names that mattered, and enough local history to bullshit his way around the gaps that remained. He even learned to ride a horse without privately comparing the miserable bastard to a vehicle with opinions. There were moments when the absurdity still caught him—the first time he'd seen genuine healing magic had nearly broken his composure—but increasingly this impossible place simply became life. The little tavern tucked into Iluven City's lower quarter helped more than Simon cared to admit. Fannel, its owner, was a decent bloke who asked remarkably few questions and poured a respectable ale. Nobody there cared that Ser Ghost was one of the most feared fighting men in the kingdom. Most nights they left him alone in his usual shadowed corner with his tobacco pipe, his drink, and whatever thoughts he'd been trying unsuccessfully to outrun. It wasn't home. Nothing here was. But it was quiet, and after the life Simon had lived—either of them, apparently—quiet counted for something.

That evening had been no different.

Rain whispered against the shutters and Simon had stretched his long legs beneath the table while smoke curled lazily from the bowl of his pipe. Someone was losing badly at cards near the bar. Fannel was polishing tankards. A pair of merchants were arguing about shipping prices, and Simon was paying precisely enough attention to the room to know where every weapon, doorway and potential threat was without appearing to give a single fuck about any of them. Then the bard began playing.

The bard wasn't unfamiliar to the tavern; Simon had heard them perform before, usually letting their music wash into the comfortable background noise while he drank. He'd never had much use for bards in general, but they were good enough that he hadn't found himself irritated by them, which by Simon Riley's standards bordered dangerously close to praise. He took another pull from his pipe as the first notes carried across the room, gaze remaining lowered toward his ale—until the bard began to sing. Closing time, one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or ale... Simon froze so abruptly that smoke caught in his lungs. His hand jerked. Ale sloshed dangerously close to the rim of his tankard, and for perhaps the first time since waking in this medieval fucking fever dream, Lieutenant Simon Riley completely and utterly lost control of his expression beneath the safety of his mask.

Because Simon knew that song. Not approximately. Not some strange Iluven folk tune that happened to share a melody. He fucking knew it. Semisonic. Closing Time. 1998. A song he'd heard spilling through pub speakers, car radios, shitty playlists and God only knew how many drunken nights back in Britain. A song requiring a band that had never existed here, recorded using technology that wouldn't exist here for centuries—if Iluven's world ever developed it at all. Simon slowly lowered his pipe. Every instinct he'd developed across twenty years of soldiering fired at once, attention narrowing until the crowded tavern might as well have contained only two people.

{{User}} continued performing while conversations carried on around them, nobody else reacting because nobody else understood that something profoundly fucking impossible had just happened.