by Ramy Vance
Chapter Two
The Red Lion sat in a swamp infested with mosquitos and bathed in the amber glow of the sunset. It was a modest tavern that magically stretched to nearly triple its size on the inside. The doors opened and closed as MERCs came and went, either returning from or leaving for adventures. Members of multiple races showed up, shook hands, and shared drinks with each other.
A party composed of elves, gnomes, and humans sat outside the Red Lion, sharing a long pipe among them as they sipped on their beers. The slender elf looked outward with her pale silver eyes and stared into the marshlands in the distance. She puffed the pipe, letting a cloud of smoke drift up to the steadily-darkening sky as she hefted her tankard, which was empty. She kicked the chair of a gnome sitting behind her, knocking him to the ground.
The gnome growled, but stood and went into the tavern. He returned in a few moments with a tray of beers, dropping them down on the small patio table amidst cards and gold pieces.
The small party of MERCs continued to drink, staring off into the swamplands.
Out in the distance, it seemed as if the swamp itself had come alive and was shuffling toward the Red Lion. As the mass of moss and swamp sludge got closer, the party sitting outside the Red Lion laughed.
Slowly, the Mundanes approached. They were nearly as green and filthy as the swamp. They pulled themselves up onto the floating pathway that the Red Lion and the rest of the MERC settlement rested on.
The elf MERC laughed and offered her pipe to Suzuki. “How was extermination duty?”
Suzuki waved the pipe away, grabbed the elf’s beer, and downed the drink. “How does it look like it went?”
“I believe you owe me a beer.”
“Just tell Wendy to put it on my tab,” Suzuki muttered as he pushed open the Red Lion’s door and walked inside.
The rest of the Mundanes followed him, both Sandy and Stew in noticeably irritable spirits.
Suzuki hit his HUD and his armor disappeared, replaced by a loose-fitting cloth tunic. The dirt and muck still clung to him. He wiped his forehead and tossed the filth onto the floor.
A dwarf slipped in the pile of mud, tossing his beer into the air. Sandy reached out and caught the drink before helping the dwarf to his feet. Damn, she was fast. The dwarf laughed cheerfully. He was obviously just as impressed as Suzuki was at her dexterity and speed.
Once inside, Stew stumbled to a booth and collapsed into a seat. He sighed heavily, tapped his HUD, and looked down at the state of his tunic. He tried to wipe some of the mud off on the side of the table. “You’d think that they’d have found a way around this.”
Sandy sat next to Stew and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Magic can’t solve everything. At least we aren’t the ones who have to clean it all.”
“Who cleans it?”
“Someone lower on the totem pole than us. I’d prefer not to think about it.”
Suzuki raised his hand to catch the attention of the barmaid walking past him. “Three ales, please?”
The barmaid nodded and walked off as Suzuki leaned back and plopped his feet on one of the nearby chairs. “I don’t think that my feet have ever hurt this much in my life.”
Stew looked at Suzuki’s boots with disgust. He picked up a fork sitting on the table and pushed Suzuki’s feet away. “Someone has got to figure out a better fast travel system. This whole ‘portal one way, walk back home’ thing is not working for me. It feels like every day is leg day.”
Sandy grabbed Stew’s thigh hard under the table. “But it makes your legs look so good.”
Stew yelped and slapped Sandy’s hand away. He raised the fork and pointed it threateningly at Sandy. “My legs always look good. This is just making them tired. And thank you.”
One of the barmaids dropped off the ales and the Mundanes raised their drinks, clanking their tankards together.
No one spoke for some time, and the silence was something Suzuki was grateful for. The nightly festivities for the new recruits was turning into an endless parade, and he was getting sick of welcoming more newbs. Still, it was an indication that the war was heating up.
It meant that more MERCs were needed, which meant that there were more missions floating about. Manny, the MERCs recruiter, must be working overtime.
But there was no one new to welcome today, and Suzuki found it much more agreeable to be able to sit down without being bothered after a grueling quest.
And the quests had been grueling.
Nothing that the Mundanes had been assigned over the last ten days had been particularly difficult, but each quest had taken up time and energy.
Suzuki drank his beer and stared off, letting his mind drift. He absentmindedly watched the barmaid filling a dwarf’s tankard of beer. She caught his eyes, and Suzuki quickly looked away. He had been imagining pouring Beth a beer and wondering what she was drinking right now.
Sandy interrupted Suzuki’s burgeoning fantasy. “How are we doing on funds right now?”
Suzuki pulled up his HUD, scrolled to his inventory, and selected his coin purse. He checked through their collective coin stash and looked at the pending transfer. “Looks like we got enough from this haul to cover the week in room and board. We might have to take it easy on the booze, though.”
Stew coughed awkwardly and took three quick sips from his beer before he started picking at his face. “I got the booze covered. Me and Wendy worked something out.”
Sandy’s eyes widened, and she grabbed Stew by the cheek. “And what exactly is it that you worked out with Wendy?”
“Nothing, nothing. Jesus.”
“Just like nothing with you and that orc?”
Stew lifted his hands up defensively. “Nothing happened with that orc! She was trying to chop my cock off to take back for a trophy.”
Sandy pursed her lips. “So she thought you had a trophy dick?”
“You are missing the part about her wanting to give me an orcish circumcision. The most important part.”
Sandy pinched Stew’s cheek hard enough to leave a mark. “You know I’m just giving you a hard time. But seriously, how are you getting free drinks?”
Stew hung his head, still picking his face as if he would unearth an answer beneath his zits. “Dish duty for the week. Only two hours a day. She showed me the set-up. It looks horrible, but we gotta start saving money.”
Suzuki closed down his HUD and leaned back in his seat. He sighed. “Never thought that my adventure in Middang3ard would consist of being more broke than when I was home.”
“Yeah, but at least you’re not still working customer service.”
Suzuki raised his tankard. “I can drink to that shit.”
Sandy clanked her beer to Suzuki’s. Stew sheepishly looked down at his own beer.
Suzuki clapped Stew on the back. “Cheer up,” he said. “At least you can work for booze and food here.”
“Yeah, beats trying to pay off a student loan any day.”
Sandy looked over her shoulder and checked the floating chalkboard near the front of the bar. A list of meals for the day was etched on it: Erymanthian Boar Steak with a side of Hydra Eyes. Kelpie Hoof Stew. Kraken Calamari. “You guys down to split some stew?”
Stew and Suzuki checked the chalkboard behind them. “Sounds good,” they said in unison.
Sandy walked away, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll go grab it.”
Stew and Suzuki both drank some of their beer. Suzuki watched Stew, who suddenly started shaking his head as if he were reacting violently to something being said.
“Uh, Stew? You doing okay over there?”
Stew lifted a finger to his ear. “Wait. I was just talking to GB.”
“Everything okay?” Suzuki asked.
“Yeah. GB just wants to do another, you know, spell type of thing.”
“You mean, for your dick?”
“Yeah. For my dick.”
Suzuki gave Stew a worried look. “I thought you were done with that whole thing.”
“Oh, yeah. Mostly, I mean. Not like I’m super nervous or anything, but, you know, it’s nice to spice things up here and there.”
“Too much info.” Suzuki returned to his drink.
“But GB’s been really weird about it recently. Then I remembered, the dude is actually in my body. So what if he feels the things I feel? Like, what if he’s getting off on the idea of Sandy and me being…intimate?”
“That is between you and your familiar, buddy.”
Sandy sat down at their booth in a flourish of puffed robes and dropped a basket of bread in the center of the table. She eyed Stew and Suzuki, both of whom were sitting and chuckling like a bunch of schoolgirls. “What is it?”
Suzuki snatched a roll of bread from the basket. “GB’s trying to get a threesome going with you two.”
Sandy whipped around and glared at Stew. “Goddamn it, Stew, I’ve told you before. We’ll know when it’s time to have an extra sexy friend.”
“No, no, babe, that’s not what I was—”
“Nope. Not tonight. Also, I don’t trust that donkey gargoyle familiar of yours. He’s too quiet. You can’t trust anyone that quiet. Not anyone. Now, if we’re done talking about our fuck schedule, I’d like to talk about what we’re going to do about Beth.”
Suzuki nearly dropped the bread he was shoving into his mouth. “I thought you guys didn’t believe me?”
“I mean, I have my doubts. But I trust you. So does Stew.”
Stew smiled and nodded. It was a comforting sight for Suzuki. He had been worried that the two of them assumed that he was crazy.
“You don’t just jump to conclusions,” Sandy said. “Most of what you think is pretty well researched or well-founded. So if you think there’s a reason to believe that Beth is alive, we’re both behind you. What do we do from here? What’s the plan?”
Suzuki took a deep breath. The plan. It was something he’d been working on for a while, and it was still far from perfect, but now was as good a time as any to let them in on what he had so far. “What did we used to do when we were out-leveled? I mean, it can’t be a whole lot different than what we would have to figure out in Middang3ard.”
“We’d just grind.” Sandy shook her head in frustration. “Grind for skills, advantages, loot. We’d take any mission we could to find that one magical item or NPC or whatever to give us the edge we needed. Just like we’re doing now. It’d be like that time we were trying to run that golem-hunting mission. Do you guys remember that? Every time we broke into the dungeon, we’d get our asses handed to us within a couple of seconds. And the only thing that we could do was grind XP out in the valley next to the dungeon because it had a better gear-drop rate than the rest of the area. We did that for a week! Six hours a day for a whole week! But I do not want to grind here. Partly because it’s not the same here as in the game, but mostly because it’s exhausting, and it’s not getting us anywhere fast.”
Stew laughed and clapped his hands. He was nearly crying from laughing so hard. “Remember that time we had to farm blue ember crystals so Suzuki could upgrade his armor? You know, that upgrade he had a hard-on for so he wasn’t so weak against Dark Creatures? He didn’t want to give up that chest piece, but if a vampire or something touched him, he’d be nixed in one hit.”
Suzuki took another bite from his bread roll chuckling at the memory. “How did we end up getting the crystals?”
“We found this cave where they were spawning, and you did this conversion ratio to find out how many times we’d have to walk in and out of the cave for the embers to respawn. We must have walked in and out of that cave a thousand times in the first day. I ended up paying my baby sister to do it for me.”
Sandy snatched a roll, munching down hard on it. “I remember that. And then we got jumped by a horde of giant ravens—”
“A conspiracy of ravens,” Suzuki corrected.
“Whatever. A conspiracy. But Stew wasn’t even there to help. His sister didn’t know the controls, and Stew’s character perma-died.”
Stew said as he raised his tankard, “RIP Leeroy the First.”
Suzuki, Stew, and Sandy clanked their tankards together as they shouted, “May he rest in peace!”
“We could find a dragon. There have to be dragons here. And they’ve got to be loaded with a shit-ton of loot.”
“I don’t know. If we can’t handle a new zone, we probably couldn’t handle a dragon.”
Stew pinched his fingers together. “Maybe a baby dragon. A teeny-tiny baby dragon?”
Sandy shook her head as she bit down on her roll. “I am opposed to killing baby animals, even if they’re dragons. It’s unethical. Someone has to think of the whole ecosystem and shit.”
“What do you know about Middang3ard’s ecosystem?”
“I know enough about what an ecosystem is to know you don’t kill the babies. You kill the adults.”
“But who makes the babies, then?”
Suzuki waved his hands, signaling he was done with the way the conversation was going. “We could find a real dungeon.”
“Haven’t we been running dungeons for over a week? Technically what we just finished was a dungeon.”
Stew drummed a beat on the table. Then he clenched his fist and mimed two people walking toward his fist with his index and middle finger. “Oh! There’s that herd of giant man-eating hippos in the South Plains. Those things are huge. They gotta be worth some kind of XP.”
“No, we’re thinking about this all wrong. You remember what Fred said? The whole XP thing doesn’t work like that here. It’s not like we level up and suddenly get more HP. We have to get more proficient in combat, but it’s not going to change our chances at survival. We need to actually get better at this, like we’d have to on Earth.” Suzuki put down his tankard. “However, actually improving our skills is going to take a shit ton of time—time Beth doesn’t have. So our best bet is upgrading our gear.
He stood and ran his hands through his hair. Suzuki started to pace, something he did when he was trying to figure out a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution.
“I mean, think about it. Our HUDs can’t possibly know how good we actually are at swinging a sword, and since we haven’t input any plans of attack, it must be making its calculations on whether or not our gear can stand up to what’s there. We don’t need to be focusing on getting better at fighting, we need to be focusing on getting better gear.”
“Well, we can’t afford better gear,” Sandy responded. “All of our money is going to paying our bills.”
“Yeah, that is a problem.”
Stew looked down at the bottom of his empty tankard. “VR was so much easier than this. At least the real Middang3ard has good beer!”
Suzuki nodded as he finished his beer. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar shape hobbling toward him—a stout dwarf with a wispy white beard and fiery brown eyes. Milos. The dwarf was using a pair of crutches to walk, and both of his hands held a beer. How he was using the crutches without hands was a mystery. The Mundanes sighed as Milos approached them.
Suzuki raised his hands as if he could ward off Milo. “Not now, Milos. We don’t want any more quests from you right now.”
Milos plopped into the seat next to Suzuki and forced his way into the Mundanes’ booth. He placed both of his beers on the table and belched loudly. “I didn’t come here with a mission for any of you. Not after the last one. Flooding an ancient crypt that you were just supposed to clear out? I lost money because of you three!”
Sandy shrugged. “You said to get rid of the rats. We got rid of the rats.”
“I didn’t think you were going to flood the damn place. You were getting rid of those rats so some researchers could come in and study the place. Do you know how pissed off they were when they showed up and all those mummies were soaked to the bone? No, I ain’t got nothing for you three right now.”
Stew pulled out the measly pouch of coins the Mundanes had collected from the quest. He tossed
it onto the table, drew a dagger, and pointed at the pouch. “Not that it matters anyway. We’re not getting anything from any of the quests you give us. Hardly any money, and even worse loot.”
Milos looked at them, confused. “If you guys are looking for better loot, you should be trying quests and not missions.” He spoke as if he were reading from the Middang3ard 101 Handbook.
“What the fuck is the difference?” Stew growled.
Milos leaned in and twirled his spindly beard. He plopped his feet up on one of the empty chairs and groaned loudly as he adjusted his feet. His pain did nothing to disseminate his aura of smugness. “You don’t know the difference between a mission and—”
Sandy absentmindedly levitated a few bread rolls and flicked one at Milos. “No, Milos. We do not know the difference between a quest and a mission. Will you please explain to us with your all-knowing wisdom what the fucking difference is?”
Milos glared at Sandy, the fun obviously taken out of his explanation. “The differences between the two are numerous. First and foremost, missions are broad, easy-going little shindigs that can be taken care of by the least experienced adventurers. Think of them as entry-level jobs. You can do them. I can do them. But it would make more sense for you to do them since I have the experience to warrant spending my time in other more interesting venues. You could say that it would be a waste of my time. Quests, on the other hand, are generally much more specific, require a shit-ton of know-how and offer larger rewards. They’re generally assigned by veteran MERCs who see that you have the skills to get the job done or are invested in your personal growth, much like I am invested in you three.”
Suzuki watched Milos suspiciously, the dwarf squirming under the pressure of his judgmental gaze. “Then why do you keep giving us shit missions?”
“As one of the purveyors of the Shire, I’ve got a backlog of missions.” He chuckled. “Better you than me. Besides, not everyone wants to wake up at the crack of dawn and go fight a pack of undead rats.”
“A dead-chief! You know, like a mischief but dead!” Suzuki shouted. “So let me get this straight. You’re pawning those missions off on us because they’re beneath you?”