The West Wing meets the Avengers How does politics deal with people often citizens who are suddenly gifted with special powers, and an extra set of memories. Magic has started working! But it's not legitimate magic. Not the magic of Merlin or the powers of psychics. Instead it is the magic of a "silly" game. A Role Playing Game called Warspell and other games like it. The sort of games played with oddly shaped dice and little lead figurines by even odder people. And now not only is this silly sort of magic working, but the oddballs who play the games suddenly have special powers. Some of them are gifted with combat, or other skills. Others can do magic. They're riding magical horses through the sky or healing the sick in the name of false gods. They say they've merged with a character they played in one of their games. But is that really true? Have they merged, or been possessed? To the Merged, things look a bit different. Suddenly, with no warning, they have the memories of a whole other life. Not a game life, a real life with a real mother and father, real friends and enemies. For many, even most, a life filled with violence and pain. Yes, they have skills and abilities, but those abilities were learned and earned in a hard school. Yes, they are changed, but anyone would be when they suddenly had a whole other life added to their own, But they are still themselves. Aren't they?

Lady Jane Alexander should be a monster with no control at all over its desires. A blood-sucking corpse, animated by pure evil. But The Merge went both ways. Now Sir William Deforest has the memories of Bill Goldman, a school teacher who played WarSpell with his friends, and those memories tell him that Lady Jane Alexander may still be Lady Jane. Suffering under a terrible curse, but still Lady Jane. Sir William's certainty in the righteousness of his and his friend Alen von Helsing's cause as vampire hunters is challenged by the knowledge The Merge brought, but that's nothing to what it did to Jane Alexander. In a moment she went from a very young vampire living on the blood of rats in the sewers of Paris into a moderately healthy young woman who knew that she needed to eat and who could once again feel her body as her body. All because she Merged with Alice Blake, a sixty-two-year-old nurse who had read the Vampyre Compendium IV cover to cover. As she remembered her fellow gamers' casual dismissal of the fact that she was still alive, Jane became one ticked-off vampire. She was going back to Londinium to have words with Sir William and Alen van Helsing. Words, and maybe a snack.

When the Merge happened, the world as people knew it and the world of the WarSpell role playing game got completely tangled up. That opened millions of fantasy worlds to explore, sure—but it didn't do anything for space exploration. There was no spell to take someone to the Moon or Mars in the rule books. And to make things worse, early attempts showed that magic worked differently in space than on the surface of the earth. Disastrously different, as a rule. Still, if someone can figure out how to do it right, the magic of WarSpell has the potential to change space exploration from something only governments and billionaires can do to something that the rest of the human race can take a crack at. Not to mention the possible fortunes to be made in extraterrestrial magic and technology But even with WarSpell magic, getting into space isn't going to be cheap—and it's not safe at all by fussbudget NASA standards. There are roadblocks in the way. Some put there by nature, some by the supernatural, some by good intentions, and others out of spite and greed. So if the hardscrabble, by-their-bootstraps outfits are going to have any chance to win the orbit prize, they're going to have to risk losing their lives along with their shirts. Or blouses and bras.

A WarSpell novel, in a world where war ships are just starting to make the change from ballistas to cannon that use a magically created gunpowder. Tensy Teasdale is forced by financial hardship to give up her studies of magic and join the Kingdom Navy as a midshipman. It's a hard life for her. While women have been serving in the Navy for decades, not everyone accepts them. It's even harder if you're a studious introvert who incurs the ire of a brute of a senior Midshipman who's just failed his Lieutenant’s test again. And that's just the first of Miss Midshipman Teasdale's misadventures. After that, she has to deal with a Merged mugger who's learning how to deal with this world, an elven carpenter who's considered worse than a necromancer because he works with the dead bodies of trees—not to mention the shell and shot of battle on the high seas. And if she survives all that, there's the politics of the Admiralty Court to deal with… Hornblower meets Martin Padway in a WarSpell gameworld. Miss Midshipman Tensy Teasdale is a new middy in the kingdom navy. She, like Horatio, doesn't start out well and things go downhill from there. Pete the Cudgel Banyan is a thief and a bully with little thought beyond his next beer, next lay, or how unfair it was that he wasn't born the son of a lord. As a pressed man, his lot may be even worse than Tensy's, because the first officer is a sadist who wants everyone broken to the navy. And Pete's the sort to die in the breaking. Pete's rebellion offers Tensy a chance to—if not win—at least take her tormentors down with her. Tensy makes her play at Pete's Captain's Mast and Pete determines to take his lashes like a man. Enter Peter Bradley, a mechanical engineer who played Pete Banyan years ago in a game of WarSpell. As the 21st lash falls, Pete's heart stutters and would have failed, but Peter Merged with him. Leaving Peter Banyan hail and healthy to take the last three blows of the cat. And that was just the beginning. The Captain wanted them both off his ship ahead of any sort of investigation. The ship they end up on has its own problems and they all get shipped to Amonrai and the Merged Peter with his knowledge of chemistry knows a much cheaper way to make the wizard’s powder that is used in the cannon.