Everything stops.

And everything did.

The suddenness with which all the movement, all the sound, and all of the banter ceased startled me so much that I actually jumped a little, and my panic temporarily halted in its rampage through my brain.

“Wha-what?” I stammered as I looked around. All of it was frozen except... not exactly. It was more like I had hit a pause button in some poorly made videogame and all the idle animations were still going. Nobody was moving deliberately, but they were still breathing and still blinking just fine. As though we were playing red-light-green-light, and I just yelled “red light”.

But I hadn’t actually said anything. I thought the word “stop” and everything stopped. I suppose I didn’t just think it, I also wanted it. I was willing to bet that was a part of it.

This was absolutely insane. The worst part was I was beginning to doubt this was all some strange dream. It was all too clear, all too perfect, all too coherent. My dreams had never been like this before.

I stood up from my chair and looked around the tavern, at all the people stopped in place, not moving, their eyes unseeing. Though all of the other people at my table had been looking at me before, their eyes did not follow me as I stood, so they were instead staring firmly at my breasts without really seeing. Apparently, I was shorter now, because my eyeline had changed while standing straight up. I seemed to recall Setsuka being on the shorter side, so this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did because I hadn’t fully come to terms with the fact that I was Setsuka yet.

People who had been caught mid-stride seemed to take a firm standing position, probably because they couldn’t have kept balance otherwise. I was mildly curious what would happen when I decided to unfreeze things, but I needed this moment to cool down and organize my thoughts.

One thing was clear, no matter what was going on here, panicking wouldn’t help at all. Panicking never helped in any situation. I took as much time as I needed since I could take as much as I wanted right now. At the very least everyone in this room was willing to wait for me. An unfamiliar palm to wipe away the sweat on my brow and a few long and deep breaths later I was starting to think with a level head again.

“Okay,” I said to nobody in particular in a voice that wasn’t mine at all but still very cute, “what happened here?”

For some unknown reason, I was in a medieval fantasy tavern full of classic fantasy races. I was not in my true body, but instead in the body of a real-life version of one of my Dungeons and Dragons characters, my favorite one in fact. With mental effort, I could conjure up a very clear image in my head of Setsuka’s character sheet. I could examine everything about Setsuka Yasuhiko from her ability scores to her arcane trickster spells she knew. It was fully comprehensive. Though I had no recollection of making this sheet, it came with some choices that I definitely would have made. It even had some options selected that I didn’t select the first time I made this character months ago back in the “real” world, but definitely would have selected if asked to make the character now.

There were four people sitting around my table, and I could see their character sheets if I concentrated on them hard enough. I did this as well, looking at the darkly-dressed woman and conjuring the “Syvana Grimmdark” sheet once again. I smiled a little in spite of myself, it was kind of a corny name, but who was I to judge really? My character was literally a ninja. It was fitting, if nothing else, especially since her sheet declared her a warlock that had a pact with The Great Old One. It also sounded like the kind of name an actual player would come up with.

Which brought me to my next point of note, there were D&D rules at play here. The elf woman cast a spell, an actual D&D spell, Lesser Restoration, to cure my hangover, and it worked. I wasn’t entirely sure the spell could work to cure something like that, at least not as written in the rules, but that was beside the point. All of this, combined with the setting and my starting place in a tavern led me to one conclusion. Somehow, some way, I was in a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Next on my agenda was determining if these character sheets in my mind actually meant anything or if they were just some association phantoms from an insanity creeping into the corners of my brain. I’d be able to do better to confirm that once time resumed again by actually asking these ladies to introduce themselves, but that could wait. I could at least confirm it for my own sheet right now, though.

I mentally glanced at the spells on my character sheet; I knew the mage hand, poison spray, and prestidigitation cantrips, supposedly. I felt my heart actually leap from the idea of casting something destructive like poison spray, but a tavern full of people was probably not the best place to test that one out. Prestidigitation was a much safer bet.

There was a lantern hanging from a long chain above our table in the corner. I looked at it and frowned. How exactly does one cast a spell? In actual D&D campaigns these details are usually hand-waived as some arcane mumbo-jumbo that everyone acknowledges but never details. The literal lore-friendly process is never discussed, and if it is, it’s usually purposely vague because back in the real world magic doesn’t actually work. But I was in a D&D world, now, so I actually had to think about it.

I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to turn off the lantern and then light it again, and clearly wanting it with an outstretched arm pointing at the lantern wasn’t enough, because that was exactly what I was currently doing and it remained lit, almost mocking in its normalcy. Perhaps I needed to make it a command?

“I cast prestidigitation to turn off the lantern.” After speaking the command shakily due to the unfamiliar voice that came out of my mouth, my body began moving on its own, making strange and unusual gestures with my hands and arms. Interestingly, these gestures ended up being ninja hand-seals which I was performing at a rapid pace. I could actually feel the magical energy flowing through my body like an electric tingling sensation, it felt amazing. In addition to the movements of my arms, my lips were moving and a low mumbling was escaping them, strange Japanese-sounding words and invocations. Finally, my hand extended toward the light fixture one more time, and the light was suddenly snuffed out.

I felt my heart leap, even something this simple made me feel extremely powerful, and I couldn’t help but smile and laugh a little. I just used magic. Actual magic. Though looking at the “notes” section of my character sheet informed me of this little tidbit, “Spellcasting is ninjutsu, performed with hand-seals instead of arcane gestures”. God, I was such a weeb, now that I was literally physically doing these things that I thought would be cool for a character, I felt like a massive dork.

But when the elf used her spell, she didn’t have to say anything like a command. Granted, it was possible she wasn’t a real person like me and was actually part of this world, but there had to be a way to use my magic without speaking the command, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to fit in and properly assume my role as a Setsuka. Everyone would wonder why I had to announce what I was going to do every time I wanted to do something. Granted, if this were an anime world, I wouldn’t even have to worry about that.

For a minute or so I tried to just mimic the gestures and mumblings I had made before, but to no avail, they were too much like gibberish to memorize, and I wasn’t even sure that was all I needed to do. I sighed and stared at the unlit lantern, defeated, and then realized something. This tavern was full of them. My command never specified which lantern I wanted to turn off, but when I cast the spell, I had turned off the correct one anyway. That meant one of two things, it was pure coincidence that it turned off the correct one, or the spell, or whatever weird effect was letting me cast it, knew what I wanted. If such an essential component of using the spell wasn’t necessary in order to use the spell correctly, maybe the rest of the command didn’t have to be said out loud either.

I cast prestidigitation to turn on the lantern, I thought, and was absolutely delighted to find that my arms and lips began working on their own. Another outstretched arm accompanied by a wonderful tingling sensation and the lantern was lit again.

“Haha! Yes! It actually works!” I exclaimed happily and was surprised by my own voice yet again. It was feminine, but not in a cute way, more of a tomboyish way, actually pretty similar to Heian’s. I supposed that made sense, I was a guy in a woman’s body, after all. Speaking of which…

I looked down at my body. It was unfamiliar but damn, I was not complaining. I actually wanted to get a better view of it, because of course I did, so I wandered around in this strange “red light” tavern, where everyone was standing or sitting still, looking for a mirror. Eventually I found one, but I had to go behind the bar and into the actual home of the tavern-keeper. They had a standing mirror in their humble bedroom, tall even though the owner was a dwarf, so I got a good look at myself there.

Three things stood out to me about my appearance immediately.

Firstly, I looked exactly how I had always imagined Setsuka Yasuhiko to look in my mind, even better in some ways. My messy dark brown hair was tied into a wild ponytail, but my bangs fell over one eye in exactly the edgy way I always wanted it to. My eyes gleamed with an unnatural golden color, and a series of jagged scars were scattered above and below my left eye. My skin was sun-kissed, betraying long days of travel under a hot sun, and my general facial structure was Asian-inspired. This last detail was due to this character’s homeland being the eastern kingdom of Yoshida, a decidedly Asian-inspired kingdom in terms of esthetics. Granted, I had no idea if said kingdom, which I invented, actually existed here yet.

Secondly, damn I looked cool. I wasn’t dressed in very much, just the leather bustier, panties, a leather belt around my left thigh which had five kunai each in their own holster, a pair of tight, knee-high open-toed boots with metal plates on the tops, and a red tattered cloak with a large collar—currently slightly stained by the wine I had been sleeping in. This likely wasn’t the extent of my armor, I probably already had a room at the tavern somewhere with the rest of my gear, but this was enough to make me feel really badass. I looked like a sexy, kickass ninja babe, and I felt very comfortable in this body.

Thirdly, damn I was sexy. I was quite fit with well-defined muscles and features, all of which contributed to a very athletic frame. This was a testament to Setsuka’s above-average dexterity and constitution, both at 16 and 14 respectively, but flexibility and swiftness was obviously a priority over raw power, as my strength score was sitting at an unimpressive 9. While her breasts weren’t as large as the other women at the table, they were still big enough to be substantial. My best guess as to their size was roughly a large C, but again, I knew basically nothing about cup sizes.

And then there was the package. A detail that I had always secretly added to this character in my mind, but never committed it to writing even on the sheet itself. It would have been an awkward and unnecessary detail to add given the nature of the campaigns I was in and the other players who were in them. At the moment, this package was covered only by my leather panties; anyone who looked could see there was a bulge there, but the material was thick enough to not provide actual detail.

I kind of wanted to see the detail, though, not just of the package but of the whole body. I worked for a few minutes to remove all of my clothes, noting with interest that I evidently kept my coin-purse inside my top nestled against one of my breasts. It was weird to think of them as “my breasts” given that I never had any before. It was also kind of nice, though. Either way, I was now naked in front of the mirror, and damn, did I mention I was sexy? Now I could see the cute brown nipples that topped my breasts, and I could see the full flaccid length of my penis. This latter appendage was slowly but surely rising at attention now, and I discovered that it was bigger than my real penis. This was a fact that made me simultaneously proud and not proud at all, which was a baffling dissonance.

I suddenly remembered the feeling of the elf groping my chest earlier, I remembered actually kind of liking that feeling in spite of the hellish confusion I was experiencing at the time. Curiously, I brought my own hand to my chest and gave one of my breasts a squeeze. A delightful rush spread through my body as I experienced both the joy of feeling such a soft and amazing thing, and also felt the sensation on the other side of that equation. This was all to say that I really liked it, and the temptation to masturbate with this new body was very great. However, I had more important things to worry about right now, namely what the hell was even happening.

After replacing the clothes I had taken off, I decided I was ready to face the elephant in the room. When I mentally ordered everything to stop, why did that work? I stepped back out into the tavern; everyone was still where I left them in all of their original positions. Perhaps I could pause the world to make it feel more like a D&D game, so I could have as much time as I needed to think about my actions before I did them. That didn’t quite feel like the right answer, though.

To an outside observer the scene may have looked fairly comical, a short ninja woman stroking her chin was standing directly in front of the barmaid, a curvy woman who was slightly taller, and staring directly into her cleavage. I briefly wondered who this barmaid was, she was pretty cute. And as if summoned by that thought, something appeared in my mind that snowballed a change in my entire perspective on this situation.

A stat block. Specifically, a stat-block for this barmaid, her name was apparently Katherine.

I blinked. Then I looked to the bartender, an affable-enough looking dwarf who needed to stand on top of a stool to reach the bartop. A stat block appeared for him too, his name was Gorn. I looked to a few others and found stat blocks for all of them were available to me.

That was not something a player in a D&D campaign should be able to do. I mean, certainly anyone with the Monster Manual could know what a monster’s stats were and some DMs wouldn’t even consider it cheating to look during a session as long as the player didn’t use that knowledge without making the appropriate checks. But to know NPC’s names and stats just by looking? I understood seeing the sheets of the “players” at the table; it was painfully obvious they were meant to be the other party members and character sheet sharing was a thing sometimes. But everyone else?

I turned to look back at the barmaid, focusing once again on her stat block. I noted the presence of a small pencil symbol in one corner. That symbol could only mean one thing; I could edit this stat block.

I could edit Katherine.

Experimentally, I tried it, mentally “clicking” on the symbol and then changing her charisma from 11 to 12. The modifier even went up by one. It worked. I actually edited her, and the effects were immediately noticeable, even in this state of suspension. Though nothing physically had changed about her, she just seemed to be more… magnetic. I wanted to like her, just by looking at her.

I then noted with interest that there was a section titled “DM Notes”. Now I came to a very important crossroads. Being able to see everything about an NPC was one thing, even being able to change stats was one thing, but if I was able to actually edit something explicitly labeled for Dungeon Master use only, there would be only one explanation. I added the line, Lets girls grope her, enjoys it. And then my mind was blown yet again as the note became a part of Katherine’s stat block as part of a brief bio section.

I wasn’t just inside a game of Dungeons and Dragons; I was running the show. I was the Dungeon Master.