The Real World: Doilies, Tiaras and Blood by Andrew Richey
Windwalker was a fresh-faced veteran of the Orc Wars. The only reason she was fresh-faced was that she was an Elf, and they always appeared that way. Windwalker was tired of war, tired of battles, tired of adventuring in general and tired of being tired. So what if she could kill an Orc at two hundred paces with an arrow through the aorta or surgically cut open an enemy with a sword so that his entrails spilled out neatly to form an exact replica of The Ministry of Helpfulness. Grux the Dwarf was a mountain that had been compressed into a brawling mauling hillock and then tipped over, so that he was seemingly wider than he was tall. Loyal to his friends, lover of doilies and tidiness but grumpy as a matter of pride and able to kill a man with his pinkie; a conglomerate of contradictions. Greystone the Wizard was a well-spoken, very tall and a tad bit mischevious. He preferred spells that caused gerbils to be stuck in a friends trousers than a searing hot fireball that would melt someone form the inside-out. What they all had in common was that they hated bureaucracy and their world had been buried under an avalanche of paperwork,,, thanks to the Gnomes. The actual Ministry of Helpfulness was an endless array of bureaucratic, bespectacled, nosy and annoyingly busy Gnomes who never stopped shuffling paper in a precision guided attempt at keeping everything the same as it always was in: The Capital. Time to get out of the mire of rules, and back to the Real World with its bullets and computers and private detectives?-absolutely.