by Deck Davis
He smiled at a joke he hadn’t spoken aloud, one that only he would find humorous in any case. He knew that he couldn’t go on anymore.
So now, he watched the sand trickle from the hourglass and land softly in a heat on the bottom. He decided he wouldn’t pull the lever again.
What was the point? Five chimeras would come next time, and he couldn’t fight five beasts with one hitpoint.
As the last grain fell, Gallo knew that whatever happened next would be worse than any chimera. He was ready for it. He was ready for the Tower of Windborne to add him to its list of victims.
He hoped he’d done better than most people, at least. Nine rooms wasn’t bad, was it?
The last grain fell. The hourglass was empty.
This was it.
And then the oval door opened.
Gallo blinked in surprise as he saw that he had conquered the room. The hourglass had been the answer, but Gallo had been battling to keep it full. Maybe the lesson here was to let time pass.
Excitement exploded in him like fireworks. He rushed out of the room and into a hallway where, just like after every room, he found a treasure chest waiting for him.
CHAPTER 6
Tripp had seen ruins in Soulboxe before, but nothing like this. Thinking about ruins conjured images worn-away stone temples, and tombs where kings rested.
The Windborne ruins were alive.
Much of the area around Windborne was dominated by the Bone Plains. Instead of grass there was a sea of bones, sturdy enough for thousands of players to walk through. They gave off a musky scent of age.
The ruins were made from giant bones, except more like dwellings of bleached bone. Most of them were buried under a spread of glowing red moss. The moss writhed and squirmed, making the whole place look like it was a living creature. There was a heat in the air, humid like a jungle. The whole place gave him a sense of foreboding.
Location discovered: Windborne Ruins
Quest Updated: Investigate Windborne Ruins
Ah, you made it. Now that you’re here, why not take a look around?
Etta seemed fine. She stormed ahead of him, stopping at the foot of a bone ruin that rose thirty feet into the air. It was skull-shaped, with red moss covering it. Tripp didn’t want to meet any creature with a skull like that.
“The stick-in-his-ass librarian said we’ve gotta explore this place?” she asked. “Nothing else?”
“I told him the phrase we found above the tower door. He didn’t recognize it, but he said he had a feeling we should check out the ruins.”
“NPCs and their feelings. I can’t tell you how many quests start with my gut says you should go explore that incredibly foreboding place.”
“You’ve quested a lot then?”
“Sure. That’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Not really. People play Soulboxe for all sorts of reasons. The first time I played, it was because I got hurt and needed to keep my mind occupied while they stuck me in a regrowth pod. I didn’t come here to quest, even though I got wrapped up in one.”
“What did you do?”
“Make stuff. Craft. Create weapons, armor, all kinds of things.”
“You do know that you can do that in real life, right?” said Etta. “You could be a blacksmith…fletcher…candlestick maker. Surely the point in a virtual world is that you do the things you just can’t do in real life. Like, I can’t storm a goblin nest and wipe out the horde in real life. At least, not unless I’ve been doing this whole life thing wrong.”
“Well, sure. Escapism is a big part of it. Maybe I could learn to make swords in real life, but I couldn’t artifice them. I couldn’t forge magic into the steel and make a sword that spits fire, or a shield that camouflages whoever holds it.”
“You can do that?”
“I leveled up my artificery and got to choose a specialty. I’m an artificer inventor now. I don’t have to settle with whatever weapons the game throws at me. I can just imagine a magical effect, and then figure out how to create it.”
“You know…I have a few weapons in my inventory that could use pepping up. What do ya say?”
“Sure. Let’s figure this out first, though. We’re not going to be the only ones who asked Franek for help.”
“So, we just look around? See if anything pops out?”
“There has to be something around here. A way of translating the phrase.”
They headed deeper into the ruins so that the bone structures and red moss were all around them now. Tripp couldn’t explain it, but he got a mystical feeling. A sensation of time, of years gone by, of history hanging heavy in the air. People, or creatures, had lived here once. This had been a civilization of bone, but something had wiped them out.
When they reached the center of the ruins, Tripp caught sight of something. It was an altar set in the very center, a series of bone steps that curved ten feet into the air, with a pulpit at the top.
“Here,” he said. “See that?”
“There’s a book on the pulpit,” said Etta.
“A lonely book left in the middle of the ruins? I think we found what we need.”
“You go take a look,” said Etta. “I’m gonna explore some of the bone dwellings and see if there’s any loot lying around. Never pass up an opportunity to loot, Tripp. Lucas always says that Soulboxe rewards a curious mind.”
“Lucas?”
“My brother. I don’t mean to name drop, but he worked on the game for a while.”
“Worked on it? He created it! You’re Lucas Coombs’ sister?”
“That’s the way people usually think of me, yeah. Lucas Coombs’ sister. Not Etta Coombs. Kinda tiresome having your identity tied to what your older sibling does.”
“Etta, I know Lucas. He’s a friend…kinda. He must have told you about me.”
She nodded. “I suppose I better be honest. I watched all the Godden’s Reach feeds. It was like a movie or something. And I thought you were pretty cool.”
“Thanks!”
“Don’t let your orcish head swell up; you’re ugly enough as it is. But it’s not exactly an accident that we met at a tower.”
“You’ve been following me?”
“I’m not a stalker, Tripp. I was in the area, saw you, and decided that if anyone was going to figure a way into the tower, it’d be you.”
“Then you must have known about my artificery already.”
“Sure. My mom taught me something when I was younger. See, I didn’t have loads of friends growing up, but she gave me advice. She said, let people talk about their passions. They’ll start to associate you with things they’re passionate about.”
“Sounds a little manipulative.”
“I prefer to think of it as social hacking.”
“Well, Etta Coombs, I feel like we’ve finally been introduced.”
“A pleasure. Now go check out the pulpit so we can get out of here. I can feel a change in the air.”
While Etta ducked inside a bone house shaped like a giant’s ribcage, Tripp climbed the altar steps. There was indeed a book on it, this made from a leathery material that looked like…
“Found anything?” called Etta, standing in the ribcage doorway.
“Yeah, the book. It’s weird. I think it’s made from skin. Looks like it, anyway.”
“Does it smell like skin?”
“That’s a weird thing to ask. What does skin smell like?”
“Orc skin smells terrible,” said Etta. “No offense.”
He grinned. “Offence taken.”
Etta leaned back against the bone house now, sinking into the covering of blood-red moss.
Tripp opened the book to see the pages covered in red writing, the ink an unmistakable crimson. If the book was indeed made from skin, then it didn’t take much guessing to work out where the ink came from.
The book itself seemed to be a language dictionary. It contained thousands of words translated from one strange language, into English.
�
�Looks like I can work out the phrase,” he called. “Just give me a minute.”
“No proble-” began Etta.
And then she screamed.
The red moss had started to spread outwards from the ribcage dwelling. It had latched onto her, working its way over her armor and her hairy arms, neck, and face.
“Tripp!”
In the second it took him to dart down the stairs and draw his flail, the moss had almost covered her completely. It finally spread over her mouth, drowning her screams.
Etta was gone now, replaced by a minotaur-shaped coating of blood-red fungus.
He charged over to her. He was about to start tearing the fungus away, when something surprising happened.
The fungus spread out from her to her left and right, and then smashed together to form two identical copies.
Now, there were three minotaur shaped blobs of fungus.
As Tripp ripped the fungus away from Etta, he saw moss slither from her copies, creating more of them. Mercifully, each copy became smaller than the rest. The twelfth moss-minotaur was only as tall as his knee. It looked cute, actually, despite its warning grunts and stony scowl.
He tore at the growth until he saw her hairy face and her nose with the golden ring through her nostrils.
“What the hell?” she said, then gasped for breath,
He freed her arms and then her legs, leaving piles of moss on the floor.
“Tripp…” she said, pointing.
Tripp turned around to see that the clearing was filled with moss-covered minotaurs. At least two dozen of them.
And they didn’t look particularly welcoming.
While some blocked the pathway out of the ruins, others advanced on him and Etta. Some snorted, others growled.
“Think we can fight our way out?”
“Unless you speak moss-minotaur, I don’t see we have a choice.”
“But the book…”
“You get it, I’ll distract them.”
“It’s fixed to the pulpit.”
“Then we are, as Lucas would put it, more screwed than a lady of the night in a port town.”
Tripp couldn’t argue against the wisdom of her words. The next few minutes were a blur of moss-minotaurs attacking them. Etta slashed with her sword, Tripp swung his flagellation flail.
At first, his Defenseweave armor absorbed the damage he took and converted it to health. Soon, they were completely outnumbered. His steel couldn’t keep up, and his artificery succumbed.
Etta was the first to die. Out of desperation she tried using her paladin magic to cast a healing spell. This left her vulnerable, and the minotaurs scratched and clawed her to death. It was the first time Tripp had seen a healing spell cause someone to die.
He held out only a minute longer. With two dozen moss minotaurs crowding him, there was no way out, no way to avoid their savage blows.
He killed two of them with his flail, before the sheer number of hits he took drained his health bar empty.
CHAPTER 7
He awoke just outside the ruins, glad that he had set his respawn point there. Etta was already waiting for him, concentrating on something. As Tripp watched, her weapon kept changing in her hands. It went from a silver sword to one with a blue hue, to an axe, a spear. She must have been searching her inventory for an appropriate blade.
A notification hovered in front of him as smoky text. It gave him a message that he’d had too many times to count, each time stinging just as much as the last.
You have died!
You have died at the hands of the ancient Windborne moss. Try not to do it again.
Penalty: Chance is a fine thing, but not for you. For you, my friend, chance is something of a bitch. For the next hour, you will attract bad luck.
As if dying wasn’t enough, players got penalties for the pleasure of doing so. This was a symbol of one of the tenements of Soulboxe, one of the key principles the devs had set in place.
They’d created Soulboxe because they wanted a game where a player could do almost anything. Become whatever mage they wanted to be, learn how to master any weapon they liked.
With choice, had to come consequence. Actions meant nothing if there wasn’t a consequence, whether positive or negative. It made everything you did feel more valuable.
Tripp was on the receiving end of a negative one now. It wasn’t all bad, though. As well as his death notification, he got another.
You have leveled up to level 23!
- HP Increased
-Manus Increased
- 5 lootpoints gained [Total: 55]
Please choose a stat to add [1] attribute point to:
Power [3]
Mind [7]
Technique [12]
He eyed his attributes. He was conscious that he’d neglected the power stat, which governed a player’s combat ability. He used to have a digital friend, Bee, who constantly begged him to allocate his points to power. Yeah, Bee loved death and destruction. Despite her blood-thirsty tendencies, he missed her a little.
His focus had been on the technique attribute, which influenced crafting skill improvement. Since his main aim in Soulboxe was to make legendary weapons and armor, it made sense to boost technique.
A more experienced player taught Tripp that the mind stat was just as important for crafting. See, when you were crafting something, you had to give it complete focus. Tune everything else out. Concentrate only on your materials, and what you were trying to craft.
The mind attribute, as well as governing mage spells, let a player concentrate better. Ignore what was going on around him and be at one with his crafting.
Remembering this, Tripp loaded his stat point into mind and boosted it to 8.
Etta faced him now, having settled on a sword with a curved blade almost like a hook. It had thin streams of orange flame burning on it.
“What penalty did you get?” she asked.
“Something about bad luck. Probably like murphy’s law; anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. You?”
“I haven’t died in a while, so I guess Soulboxe is going easy on me. I got a minor speed decrease.”
“Going easy on you? Could that be because your big brother created Soulboxe, by any chance?”
“Hey! I haven’t gotten a single thing from Lucas. Not in the game, anyway. He offered to twist a few arms and let me start as a level 90 paladin, but I said no. I want to work for everything from scratch.”
“My mistake. I respect that.”
“I guess we better head back in. At least we’re ready for them this time.” She held up her hooked sword. “I got this by beating the Glass Dungeon. It sets things on fire when I hit them with it. I figure moss is flammable as long as it isn’t too wet.”
“That’ll help, but we need to plan a little better. There are still too many of them. We need something else.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Give me a sec.”
Tripp had learned that when things got tough in Soulboxe, it wasn’t because your enemies were too strong. It was because you weren’t approaching the problem properly. That was a lesson taught to him by Konrad the dwarf. Konrad had overseen Tripp’s adventures in a puzzle labyrinth in Godden’s Reach.
Now, faced with 22 moss-made minotaurs, the answer wasn’t to just go back and try the same old thing. He needed to use his skills.
He didn’t have time for more sophisticated artificery right now. He was sure that at any minute, another party of would-be tower goers would get here. Maybe they’d be higher-level players, and they would have better equipment and spells. He couldn’t let them get to the book first.
He thought about it, and then he formed something of a plan.
“Neither of us are stealth-based,” he said. “So sneaking is out. But we need time to use the book to translate the phrase.”
“Right. We have to kill the moss mob.”
“Etta, I don’t think we can do that. There are just too many. Luckily, we don’t need to
kill them, we just need to buy enough time for one of us to translate. That means…”
“One of us is the unlucky dope who gets to take a beating while the other reads a book. I’m guessing you have our respective roles in mind already.”
“You bet. But I can make something for you so you don’t die as quickly.”
She sighed. “Okay. I’ll take a death for the team. What can you do?”
“Let me see your armor.”
She removed her metal chest piece and leather shoulder bracers and gave them to him. Tripp set them on the ground in front of him.
“Looks like someone’s coming,” she said.
Damn it. Far across the bone plains, the silhouettes of four players stuck out against the horizon. There was no doubt they were headed this way.
“Better hurry. This shouldn’t take long. Can you go to the edge of the ruins and grab some of that disgusting moss for me?”
As Etta headed toward the ruins, Tripp strapped his artificery goggles over his head.
Wearing his goggles always reminded him of Konrad, a dwarf who had a weapons and armor shop in Godden’s Reach. Konrad had taught Tripp a few things about making weapons and putting magic in them. Or at least, he’d guided Tripp toward learning the skills himself.
Either way, Tripp had come to regard Konrad as a mentor, and then a friend. That was a strange concept, given that Konrad was an NPC character. The idea that a digital entity could stir friendly feelings in you was hard to grasp. Tripp still wasn’t sure how he felt about the sophistication of Soulboxe. After all, he’d seen what could happen when an AI had a breakdown.
Wearing the goggles, Tripp stared at Etta’s armor. He didn’t just see her metal armor now. Instead, he could see something that non-artificers wouldn’t even know he was there.
Set in the middle of the chest plate were four indentations. Two were circular, and the others were octagons.
This was the basis of all artificery. No matter what insanely powerful effects a weapon had, they all came down to the circles and octagons. Only artificery goggles would let you see them.