by Rae Nantes
“We feel about one-quarter of real pain.”
"Real pain." Vic brought the scalpel to the man’s fingernails, but Rika stopped him.
“What’s all this about?” she asked. "He already told us where the loot was."
“It’s a study,” Vic said. "Did you have a problem?"
"Not really. Just curious."
“It's not every day that one of your kind would sit still long enough for this." Vic eased back and crossed his arms. “There’s a world of difference between people like me and people like you. I seek to discover the physical ones.”
“Or I could just tell you.”
Vic glanced back at the captive. He was shaking, mumbling in anger beneath his gag. “Go on then."
“There is no difference,” she said. “When you take away any of the magic stuff, we’re essentially the same.” Her own words struck a chord within her.
They were the same, right? Or weren’t they? They didn’t need to eat or perform any other type of bodily maintenance, but they had the same organs, same bodily functions, they could spit or hate or make love or cry or anything that made a human, human. There was a difference, surely, but Rika wasn’t sure where.
She clapped her hands together. “Let’s look at his brain!”
Vic nodded almost imperceptibly. Then, a creak of a smile started to appear. He tried to suppress it but failed. “We’ll be getting along just fine.”
4:15
"You didn't have to walk with me here," Pierre said.
"I just wanted to see what it looked like," Vic said.
They stood between the wings of the University of Paris, staring up at the architectural marvels of it. Students were walking to and fro, all busy on the first day of class.
"You told me you've been here before," Pierre said.
"It's been a while."
Pierre smiled and shook his head. "I must get going. I want to leave a good first impression."
"You should."
Vic stepped in for a hug, but Pierre was already gone. He chuckled almost silently to himself. The young man had grown so fast it seemed, and it was a bit hard to see him go. Still, he was proud.
He considered his daughter. She would've been married by now, hopefully to a good family and a better husband. Maybe he would’ve had grandchildren. Grandpa Vic, he smiled. Had she lived, she would've been about… her age.
He shook away the thought.
A young man stopped him on his walk to the rendezvous. "Excuse me, sir."
He didn't reply. He was already late, so he only stared as he usually did to unwanted company.
"I found a young woman on the street over, unconscious. Could you please see to her aid?"
Vic looked around. The French dragoons or royal guard weren't nearby, so he might've been the most responsible-looking man around. "Bring me to her."
The young man led him around the corner, across the street, down an alley, and—
To an ambush.
They came from behind sacks of rubbish and closed doors, swords drawn, guns aimed.
Vic didn't bring his rifle. He ripped his blade from its scabbard in time to parry a strike. Sparks flashed. The thief's hood fell off.
Beside him, another aimed a flintlock pistol.
Vic thrust his sword into the man in front, pulled him around, and—
The gun fired.
The smoke poured. The echo rattled windows. The thief roared in agony. Vic slid out his blade from the dying man, lunged at the gun-wielder, and sliced through his throat.
He felt the hairs on his arm stand up - static.
He turned and saw a third man pointing a finger at him. It was glowing violet.
A Player!
Vic hurled his sword at the Player. Lightning popped out from the caster and gripped the nearest thing it could - the sword. The hilt of it slapped the Player in the face, and Vic followed through with a dropkick. With a brief struggle, Vic found his sword, stood over the man, and rammed it through.
Click.
Vic froze.
In the corner of his eye, he could see it.
A musket aimed at his center mass.
There was not much else to do. His future was already settling into a new life at the university and rubbing shoulders with heretics wasn't exactly something to live for.
He eased his eyes shut.
His ears felt the pop before his body felt the bullet dig into his torso, no, it didn’t. His heart thumped, alive, racing, pounding. He snapped his eyes open. Cold air, freezing cold, was pulling goosebumps from his skin. He looked over to see a white wall between him and his would-be killer. A wall of ice.
On the other side, grunting and gurgling.
Vic stepped over to find Rika straddling the man, blood pouring from his missing arms, and her gripping his throat tight. Her hands were misting with darkness, and the man's expression turned pale, then gray, then black.
He was turning to ash.
She turned to Vic, blood smeared over her face and hands, and without pausing her work, she grinned. "Hey! You were late, so..."
He shook his head and smiled back.
4:16
Ediha stepped out of the temple, over the broken bodies of slain Templar knights, and into the hot, humid air of Africa. John met him outside.
“Grandmaster,” Ediha said. “If magic is heresy, then why is it that you agree to help me take its power?”
“Magic in itself is not heresy,” John said. “It is the intent of use.” He gestured to the dead Templars. “They sought power for the sake of power. This is no different than greed or gluttony or lust. You are different. You seek power as a means to protect.”
“I do,” Ediha agreed. “Though I have noticed some of the Christians denounce magic in its entirety.”
“Worry not, young knight,” John chuckled. “I will not proselytize my religion to you. I seek only to make this world brighter with one more hero.”
Ediha smiled.
4:17
“Wrong,” Vic said. "Completely wrong."
“I’m trying,” Rika complained.
Vic snatched the musket back from her. He turned it over to empty the powder into the dirt, tapping the rest out, then he pulled out another bundle of paper. “Watch.” He opened the little paper container and poured the black powder down the barrel. “Don’t use too much. Use just enough.”
“How much is just enough?”
“You’ll get used to it.” Vic then dropped a lead ball at the end and used the small rod to shove it in, packing it tight. “Make sure the ball is snug.”
Rika stared intently like a proper student. “Okay.”
“Make sure there’s powder in the pan, and that the cord is still hot.” There was a little rope fashioned on the top of the gun. It was smoking. Vic gave it a few huffs, and the end of it glowed. He gave it a good look over, then handed it to Rika.
With needless excitement, she clapped, took the musket, aimed it at the player who was tied to a nearby tree, and fired.
Flash and smoke. Sparks and scarlet. The tree erupted in splinters.
She grinned back at Vic. He nodded with approval. “Good. Now you know how to use a matchlock.”
“I’m good enough with magic,” she said.
“You’ve told me a great deal about your world. That you don’t have magic, and that life is different yet the same as here. So I’m telling you, the real Rika and not the heretic Rika, that a young lady such as yourself needs to have means to protect herself by.”
Rika chuckled under her breath. She never told him that guns were no longer a thing, but she found his intent to be honestly adorable. “I appreciate it,” she said.
“Sometimes you need to protect yourself or the ones you care about.”
She rolled her eyes with a smile. “Alright, dad.”
Vic burst into laughter. It was the brightest she had ever seen him. “You’re still young at heart, aren’t you?”
4:18
They had b
een busy.
It seemed they were getting more successful with every raid, and by this time, they had done dozens. Rika was always overjoyed with each haul of loot, and Vic let her take most of it. With his son's tuition already paid for, there was little he needed or wanted.
And so the link between gold and power for a Player became tangible.
When they had first met, Rika was the strongest of any Player he had met. Working alongside her, he met others just as strong, some stronger, but after so much raiding and stealing from heretics, she had become something of a monster. It even started to worry him, but now that she had warmed up to him - as he had intended - it seemed there was little danger in her. After all, a Player who avoided killing normal people and focused killing other Players was something of a godsend.
Yet this would not come without a cost.
While Vic was careful to maintain secrecy for himself and for the sake of his family, Rika was far too open about her name, actually relishing whatever titles they would give her. As a result, she pulled a healthy bounty for herself. An amount that even she started to drool over.
The doors clacked open. Inside, a dimly lit reception hall. Long tables and chairs and soft luxury rugs. Chandeliers and fancy dishes of hot food that wafted over, yet none of the hundreds of Player cultists were eating. Instead, they all stared at Vic and Marcion, and especially at the prize they had offered.
They were pushing along a rolling chair. In it, sat Rika, bound tight and gagged. Scarred, bruised, and vulnerable without her near-impenetrable aura.
"Fantastic," bellowed one of the leaders.
"Impossible," the fur-lined woman said beside him. "It's surely a ruse."
"No," the nearby old man said. "She is wounded. Look at her arms."
The leader of these Players, a dainty young woman with a sparkling low-cut dress, sauntered over. She held a drink in one hand as she caressed Rika's cheek with the other. Her eyes shot over to Vic and Marcion.
"You've done well." Her voice was sultry.
Marcion kept calm. "Thank you."
"You must be Klaran," Vic said. "Now for our payment."
She raised her thin arm and clicked her fingers. Some two dozen Players approached, muskets cradled in their arms. "Forgive me," she said. "It's just business." Some started to aim.
Vic studied his breath and kept his cool. This was the lion's den. "I know she'll return. Just as you all do."
The leader Klaran lifted her eyebrows in surprise, but the rest were unbothered.
"Of all," he continued, "I was the one who captured her, in the same way that you have failed. Hunting all of you was my job, my profession, and the one thing I am best at."
Some of the players lowered their heads, nodding. He had killed them before.
"Yet the church offers little reward for my services. If you allow me to hunt her for a handsome reward, I will gladly oblige. If you rid me for the sake of keeping your bounty, then she will run wild against you again and again."
Klaran furrowed her brow but relaxed her shoulders. She looked back at the half-dozen or so at the far table. They each nodded back. "Bring the money!" she shouted. With a deep breath, she lifted her head, and her seductive persona returned. "Very well," she said. "To ensure she doesn't vanish too soon, one of you must watch her."
There was fumbling, stomping on wood in the corner of the hall. Vic glanced over to see the shimmer of gold bars being tossed onto a cart. It was a pile growing by the second, soon becoming a mountain.
Klaran downed the rest of her drink and shattered the glass in her hands. In her fingers, a shard of it. Her eyes turned wild, her smile wolf-like as she knelt down to Rika—
—and began to slice down her arm.
Rika shrieked in pain. Vic winced. Her chains rattled, the chair thumped as she struggled. Klaran was giggling, laughing, roaring with pleasure.
The other Players in the room were beginning to join in, laughing and cheering with her.
Vic grimaced at another of Rika's howls. The cart of gold was sent over, but he kept glancing back at Rika.
"It's time," Marcion whispered.
This was all a part of the plan. Rika had already done the math. By throwing one of her lives away here, she would gain substantially more power from the bounty than what she would lose by dying. By all accounts, it made sense.
The cart bumped Vic's leg. Marcion grabbed the handle and thanked the Player.
Klaran spoke with feigned sympathy. "What's wrong, Rika?" She plucked out the gag. Rika was panting. "What's the matter? It's just a game, right?"
"You win," Rika said between breaths. "Just stop now. Please."
Klaran gripped her head, used her fingers to hold Rika's eye open, held up the glass shard, and—
Rika screamed.
Vic flung out his rifle and fired.
The crowd was speechless. The gun's echo rattled the windows, then faded. Klaran thumped to the floor.
"Shit," Marcion uttered.
A line of ice walls erupted from the floor, throwing splinters and wood to splash against the ceiling, then more behind them, then a layer more just as a storm slammed against them. Gunfire and spells and rages of betrayal.
Vic pulled Rika over his shoulders.
She ripped open a portal behind him.
Marcion pushed the cart through.
The ice walls crumbled and shattered.
They escaped.
4:19
The door clicked shut behind her. Rika dropped her school bag at the counter and took a nice, deep breath of the familiar smell of home - strawberries, of course.
Her mom was still at work, and she had the place to herself. The sunlight simulators cast a nice, golden glow in the place, and there was naught but peace here.
She tossed off her shoes, fluffed out her hair, and headed to her room. A world was waiting for her.
She paused.
Against the wall was a piece of furniture, a sort of small dresser or cabinets, with nice printed wood and etchings and meticulously designed. It reached out to her.
She knew what it was, of course, but as all living room decorations went, they just sort of disappeared in the noise of the room over time, and to be fair, her mom just stopped messing with it.
She clicked open the doors, and a face stared back.
A framed picture of a man with sharp eyes and a bushy mustache smiling proudly at the camera. He was wearing an outdated spacesuit and a retro haircut, all in front of a flag - rustic red and charcoal grey. MESA, it read.
She never knew him.
Rika noted the incense, shrugged, then closed the doors. She was never one for outdated rituals, and besides, she had other things to do. She had her own life to live.
But still, the smile was familiar.
4:20
“Why are we doing this again?” Rika asked.
Vic handed her the fishing rod. “Because a strong woman needs to know how to feed herself and support her own family, without having to rely on some deadbeat husband.”
After spending nearly three months working with Vic, she knew when he was making a tongue-in-cheek comment, even if it were disguised as helpful fatherly advice. “I can fend for myself, sure.”
“Do you know how to gather plants, farm, or hunt something besides another person?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know how to fish?”
“Nope.”
“Time to learn,” he said.
They walked along the rickety pier and sat at the end. It was a large pond, chilly outside, and the sun peeked periodically through cloudy skies. At the end of the pier, a single tree atop a small hill where a table sat.
After some tries and retries and re-retries, Vic finally taught her the proper way to use live bait and how to cast a good line. Once she had the hang of it, they found themselves waiting on their bobbing corks for a bite.
“So you come to this world to play with magic,” Vic said.
“Basically, yeah. And t
o kill players for sport.”
He shook his head and asked half-heartedly, "What are you?"
"A heretic with nothing better to do."
"What am I?"
"A good man."
He smiled to himself. "A good man, huh?"
There was a moment of silence between them.
After a moment, Vic spoke as if calculating his words. “Is it... possible for the likes of us to visit your side?”
Rika considered it. Though the VR technology was all created to enable real people to dive into simulations, there was nothing that could enable a person within a sim to come out. The thought of it terrified her. It was bad enough that the nipsies were hyper-realistic in every way, maybe even sapient. Letting their souls inhabit something AI-based would just make it worse. She had long been running away from those thoughts.
Truthfully, she didn’t enjoy philosophy as much as the world seemed to push her into it. She really wanted to just blurt everything out and let the world takes it course. Vic was a rational person - smart, wise, patient, respectable. He had every right to know the truth that she had been dangling in front of him for so long. He might not take it well but was it her responsibility to hide the truth from others? What was the right thing to do? From their conversations, he had already learned a great deal already, and even though she was constantly worried about a wandering Game Master to happen upon one of their conversations to punish her, it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe it wouldn’t now.
“The truth is,” Rika said, “your world is—” A sharp, electric pain jolted through her. It gripped her throat and tensed every muscle in her body. She lurched over, grunting against the pain, almost falling into the pond before Vic tossed her back.
“The hell is the matter with you?” Vic demanded.
The pain faded. Rika was left holding her chest, trying to catch her breath. In the corner of her eye, a notification.
PLATO CLAUSE.
She remembered it now. This was the part of the Terms of Service. She didn’t think that the AI that governed those rules were that on-target with her intentions, but she learned her lesson quick. “Nothing,” she coughed out.