Story Summary:

Del landed somewhere on the Sword Coast seconds before dying, with only the clothes on her back and a few now useless items in her purse. When confronting the reality she was now faced with, she realized she was going to need to start her life all over again in a world she was only slightly familiar with. With no skills worthy of a life in Faerun, she must somehow relearn how to survive.

When she finally does so, however, her world is turned upside down once again as she is pulled into a battle of a lifetime - a battle she's fought before, but in a video game. Forced to run into familiar faces, retracing steps in a story she's played before, Del struggles to maintain her facade. Her companions can never find out she's done all of this before… and that she knows all possible branching paths the adventure could take them on. Can she keep her secrets to herself?

Story starts about 8 years before the events of BG3, but only covers a couple chapters before resuming at the start of the game.

Chapter 1 - Just An NPC

When Del finally arrived in Baldur's Gate, she thought she would feel differently. Excited, nervous, awed. But she felt none of those things. If anything, she felt a deep resignation that seemed to permeate into her very bones. Yes, she had made it, after two whole years of working her butt off. The only thing that stuck with her, though, was that it had been two whole fucking years.

Two whole fucking years ago, she landed in Toril. A portal had opened up beneath her moments before she was hit by a car while walking across the street at a red light. When she fell into Faerun somewhere outside Athkatla, she didn't know if she was dead, in a coma, or hallucinating.

Two of those could have easily happened after being hit by a car. The other one would have needed some very strong drugs - drugs she didn't remember taking. Or maybe she was driven to psychosis. But even crazy people have lucid days. Two years was definitely too long for a hallucination. Two years was also a long time to be in a coma. She should have woken up by now, or at the very least, been taken off of life support. And, if she was dead, turns out the afterlife is modeled after the table top game of Dungeons & Dragons.

This would have been funny at one point.

Not after two years.

All that that time had done was solidify that whatever Del was experiencing was very much real and she probably was never going to find her way back home. She had to make something of her life, here and now. She needed to be stronger. She needed to be someone besides the person who fell from the sky those two years ago. She needed to adapt. And this was a lot to ask of a normal human being from the planet Earth.

Her world didn't have magic and monsters; at least, none that she had ever found, and she was woefully underprepared for this one. She never considered herself special or having any talents. She did a handful of things well enough. And at the time, that had been… well, enough.

But not here.

Toril, as a setting, in a game, was wild and fantastical and beautiful. However, she had only experienced it as a person playing a character who always superseded her normal human self. Hells, she never even played a human character. She was always picking an elf, or a tiefling, or a gnome. And they always had magic, or were amazing with a bow, or turned into an animal, because why wouldn't you?

She had done a handful of tabletop campaigns with some friends and played a single video game based on this world. She thought she knew enough to survive it, maybe even enjoy it. But Toril, like any world, was not perfect, and she was just a normal human, with no magic, and no special skills. She was cannon fodder. A no name NPC.

Which is why Del found herself standing just outside Wyrm's Rock in Baldur's Gate. Clutched in one hand, she held a recruitment flier for the Flaming Fists, the city guards. She had debated with herself her entire journey here on whether this really was the route she wanted to take, but it wasn't like she had a lot of options. Most of her money was gone, having been used to pay back her bond so she could leave Athkatla behind. She had nowhere to stay. After weeks on the road all she wanted was a real bed and warm food. And they could teach her to fight. She had nothing to lose.

Taking a deep breath, Del walked into Wyrm's Rock, a shroud of confidence falling over her face.

Luckily, there was one thing she had learned long before arriving in Faerun that had helped her survive this far. Fake it til you make it. And she was going to fake it until she could prove to herself she was strong enough to survive on her own.

Del did survive. Joining the Flaming Fists was the best decision she had made since she came to Faerun. The recruiter had eyeballed her, uncertain. Not that she blamed them.

Even after two years, her accent was still noticeable. She never thought she had one before, but apparently it was obvious to everyone here and it was not an accent that any of them had heard before. She was pale from spending most of her days inside, never venturing outside for very long. Her hands had some calluses, but they were mostly from holding instruments - most of them she still couldn't play worth a damn, even after two years. And her hair might have looked a bit of a mess.

When she first arrived her hair had been a bright red. Her previous employer leaned into it and had a hairdresser maintaining it even as it grew longer. But her last appointment had been months ago. She had been traveling alone on the roads, sleeping on the ground, hiding in the brush to avoid monsters. She hadn't brought a comb with her and she hadn't looked in a mirror in a while. She probably looked half mad.

No, she couldn't blame the recruitment officer one bit. However, they accepted her anyway. She signed some paperwork, was assigned a cot, some clothes, was given food and had half her hair chopped off, all in one day. At the end of it all, she fell asleep in a room full of twenty strangers, all newer recruits like her, and for the first time, she felt warm, sated, and somewhat happy.

She was managing to survive on her own terms. She could be nothing but grateful. At least, until the next morning when training started.

She thought her lessons and duties in Athkatla had been hard, but nothing prepared her for this. Her hands had been smacked so many times for playing chords incorrectly, her posture corrected with a cane whenever it failed to sail through a dance gracefully enough, her ears had rang with admonishments if she hadn't been pleasing enough to the eyes of her patrons or if she hadn't been demure enough. But learning to become a soldier overshadowed all of it.

They drilled with heavy metal swords and heavy metal armor first thing in the morning. Her arms and legs ached by the time they switched to wooden swords with leather armor and had to fight each other. By breakfast she was always covered in welts and bruises. Sometimes a bloody nose, if she was unlucky.

After that it was practice with bows and crossbows. Then they had to stand in formation and listen to one of the officers yell at them about the ethics of the city guard or why the Flaming Fists are the best. She usually zoned out around this time of day.

They would soon move on to doing more drills and that was followed by another lesson, usually having to do with the process of arresting someone, or how to catch a criminal that's on the run. Day in and day out, over and over and over again.

It was rough, until it wasn't. Del got stronger every day. She gained weight, gained muscle mass. She did alright fighting in heavy armor with heavy swords, but she was better with a crossbow and a dagger. Her whole group was soon out on the streets putting that training into practice. They were given simple duties, at first. Crowd control for events, guarding prisoners, patrolling the streets.

Once they finally graduated to being full fledged Fists some of them started training with magic. Del had been unsure if she was even capable of magic, considering she hadn't been able to practice it before coming here. After all, Athkatla had not been a place known for nurturing magic users. In fact, you could say it would have had the opposite effect. Not that it mattered. Turned out she was a dud through and through when it came to magic. She had to rely on scrolls. That was still better than nothing.

She should have been ecstatic, having come from a world where magic didn't exist, but it was lost in the mire and muck of her continued desire to become a person who would thrive in this world. It wasn't enough and she must continue to improve no matter what.

Del was maybe a year into being a Fist when she realized that maybe things here were not that great. Despite being part of a group whose main goal was protecting the city, she realized that maybe they took taking care of the city a little too far. She thought the citizens would take priority over everything, but that just wasn't true. If you weren't rich or powerful, they didn't care as much, so that left a lot of the people of Baldur's Gate vulnerable.

Frustrated, Del would take to the streets when she was off-duty and end up patrolling on her own, unsanctioned. She had saved up enough money to buy a lighter sword and a set of daggers for her personal use and it was on the streets of the lower city that she became truly apt at using them.

She fought off robbers, chased away brigands, escorted drunkards safely home, had a few kind words and a few pieces of gold to offer those down on their luck, and even killed a murderer after he was caught in the act. She had meant to take him to jail, but… he decided he didn't want to come peacefully. At first, she had been sad, but it wasn't long after that she had to kill again in order to save someone else's life. Some sacrifices were worth making. And she was good at it.

Soon, she started taking odd jobs outside of her work. She was fighting with her superior officer more and nothing was changing. People were dying who didn't deserve to die. The poor were getting poorer. The Flaming Fists were definitely prioritizing people of power and wealth and she couldn't ignore it anymore. She needed an exit strategy. So she put herself out there as a mercenary for hire.

The jobs started off simple enough. Escort missions, delivery of sensitive items of various natures that needed to be kept under the radar, killing giant infestations of rats, finding people that didn't want to be found, etc.

Finding the work had been tough. She wasn't part of any group and people were hesitant to hire an unknown. But she took some of the more risky jobs. She snuck into organizations as a spy, learned to disguise herself, her voice. She became an assassin, as well, but only agreed to jobs once she confirmed her target was worth the blood on her hands. She had been approached by the Zhentarim and the Guild after her escapades had started to become a bit more renown. But their ethics didn't align with hers.

Then one night she came upon a group of ghouls. They were after a teenage boy who probably was out unbeknownst to his parents and had happened upon them while taking a shortcut through the cemetery. She found him just in time. A few moments later they were all dead and she had only a small scratch from the entire encounter. That boy told everyone who would listen to him. Soon, others would call on her to help with their monster problems. She took the money if they could afford it, but did pro-bono work for others if they couldn't.

The real problem with monsters is that they also prey on the weak and defenseless. Monster killing wasn't her most lucrative business, but the murdering and spying more than made up for it. It paid the bills so she could continue to help those in need.

She might still be an NPC, but at least now there were people who knew her name. And that was enough for her.