by Mark C. Wade
Henry was still staring at her when she asked, “What have you done? You need to reroll this character before you waste time leveling it up.”
Henry felt the stubborn streak rise up in him that his mother always warned him about.
He asked, “Why? I quite like it.”
“Come on! You’re an octopode corrupter. It’s like the worst possible thing you could have picked. A corrupter doesn’t even have good spells. You can steal other people’s spells and disrupt their powers and abilities. This means you have to have a thorough knowledge of every power, ability, and spell in the game to know which ones to corrupt and steal in a given situation. Does that sound like you?”
Henry sheepishly replied, “No.”
Nyissa walked around his giant, flowing, tentacled body.
“And to make it worse octopodes can’t even equip weapons. So, you’re basically defenseless. Does that sound good when investigating a murder?”
Henry had had just about enough of this lecture.
“Hey. Don’t shame me. It will all work out.”
Nyissa shook her head. “Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let’s go get you to Level 3, so we can leave this starter area.”
Nyissa walked down the dirt path, and Henry tried to follow. But he couldn’t figure out how to move his eight tentacles properly to move forward. He figured out how three of them worked, and he just held the others as high up as possible to not get in the way as he slithered forward at an absurdly slow pace.
Nyissa looked back and crossed her arms. Henry could tell she wanted to frown, but she had a half-cocked smile as she watched the ridiculous movement. Henry lost his concentration, and one of the tentacles drooped forward and tripped him.
He tumbled forward and landed right on his head. The little red bar at the edge of his vision shrunk. Henry thought: great. I’m taking damage before I even fight anything.
Nyissa said, “There’s still time to reroll. There’s no shame in it.”
“I’ve got this!”
Henry wouldn’t let a little thing like having eight limbs stand in his way.
They worked their way through the forest, and Henry couldn’t believe how good it made him feel. All the colors had such vibrant saturation. The ferns were bright yellows and greens, and the tall trees were spaced with precision to allow vision in all directions.
Henry suddenly understood how people got addicted to this. He had an overwhelming sensation of safety and peace here. They designed it to make people feel like they were watching Saturday morning cartoons without a care in the world.
“Here!” Nyissa called over.
Henry was getting the hang of moving, but he still struggled to get over to whatever she was looking at.
Henry asked, “What is that?”
“A blue slime mold.”
It looked so cute and happy. The blob hopped around in tiny circles.
Henry said, “Hey, little guy.” He looked at Nyissa and asked, “Do I capture it or something? I want it as a pet.”
She shook her head furiously. “Wrong game. We’re going to kill it.”
Henry gasped. That didn’t seem humane, but what could one expect from a demonspawn?
Nyissa held her sword toward it. She closed her eyes and ever so gently tapped the creature.
A red bar appeared over its head and slid down to the tiniest sliver.
Nyissa said, “Okay. I’ve brought its health down to 1 HP. Now you finish it off for the experience points.”
Henry asked, “What do I do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone play as an octopode before. Use a tentacle. Punch it or something.”
Henry raised the tentacle he had the most control over and slammed it at the slime mold. He cringed as the tentacle made contact, expecting it to explode or scream out in pain or something.
Instead, it giggled and moved toward Henry. It started nuzzling into his blubberous body.
Nyissa said, “It thinks you’re petting it! Slap it harder!”
“I did it as hard as I could.”
“I have an idea. I have a bunch of low-level strength rings. You’re the only race that can wear more than two. Put all eight of these strength rings on.”
Nyissa led Henry through equipping items from his inventory, and he watched the strength number on his stat screen tick up each time.
Henry tried slapping the slime again, and the health ticked down to 0. It shuddered and then disappeared with a fancy pixelated fade-out animation.
A quick trumpet burst sounded in Henry’s ears, and he saw a number tick up to “2” at the peripheral of his vision.
Nyissa said, “Good. Now go do that some more and come back when you hit Level 3. That’s when you’re allowed to leave this area. You’ll be asked to make some stat choices. Your best bet is to dump everything into Intelligence for now. I have some business to take care of.”
She walked off, and Henry heard her mumbling under her breath. She must have been talking to someone else with a chat feature.
Henry didn’t like her doing secretive things like that one bit. He also had no idea what the stat thing meant. He tried to get her attention to ask follow-up questions, but she walked too fast for him.
Henry slithered awkwardly to another patch of grass under a tree and got to work slapping the slime molds with the only tentacle he could control properly.
It was boring and tedious, and Henry had no idea what people found appealing about this part of the game. He wished he could just go on a hike and enjoy the scenery.
He was starting to understand the point of this starter area, though, because the mere act of moving around and slapping these things got him much more comfortable with his body.
Eventually, the number ticked up to Level 3, and a box covered his vision, reading:
Please distribute three points among the following attributes.
Henry scanned them, and when he found the one that said “Intelligence,” he held the up arrow until it ticked up three times.
A new screen appeared:
Congratulations! You may learn a new spell.
Henry shouted, “Nyissa! I need help!”
He looked around, but she was nowhere to be found.
Henry wandered the area a bit more until he saw her leaned up against a tree, still chatting away to an invisible person.
He tried to sneak up to hear what she was saying. The movement was much smoother now: almost normal walking speed. He realized he’d be able to move faster than a hard sprint by a human if he got all his tentacles working together.
But then he tripped and let out a loud, “Ooph!”
Nyissa quickly ended her conversation and turned to Henry.
Henry asked, “What spell should I pick?”
“What are the choices?”
“Drain, disease, and curse.”
Nyissa thought for a moment. “Probably disease since you have no real way to deal damage yet. Drain just drains MP, so other casters will have a harder time casting spells. And never, ever pick curse. It just lowers a player’s luck, and there’s a theory that luck doesn’t affect anything in the game. No one knows for sure, though.”
Henry said, “Got it.”
“Now, let’s get going. We’ve been in this starter area for too long. It gives me the creeps.”
She swung her giant sword over her shoulder, and Henry slithered along next to her as they left the forest.
Chapter 5
The scenery quickly changed from a sparsely populated forest to a wide-open fantasy land. Henry wasn’t one to quibble about consistency, but the cross between fantasy and sci-fi was a bit disorienting.
On the one hand, two large planets filled half the sky: one red and one yellow with rings. The sight made Henry nauseous. He felt like the planets were on the verge of crashing into the atmosphere and killing them all.
Little spaceships zoomed by overhead, and a high-tech tower rose nearby. The scene looked like it had been li
fted from the cover of one of those classic, pulp sci-fi novels from so long ago.
On the other hand, Nyissa had her large sword, and Henry had magic. Moreover, dragons shared the sky with the spacecrafts.
It was like a nerd had thrown everything they loved into one gigantic world without considering how to make it a coherent experience.
They passed some offset caverns. Dark clouds hovered over the entrance, raining in a single, localized area. A bolt of lightning fell to the ground, startling Henry.
Henry asked, “What’s that?”
Nyissa was getting visibly annoyed by all of Henry’s questions.
She said, “That’s the entrance to the Dungeons of Doom. It’s an infinite roguelike zone. Never go in there. It’s the only place with permadeath in all of Eburnean Passage.”
Henry laughed. “It’s like you’re speaking another language. I have no idea what roguelike or permadeath means.”
“It means what it sounds like. If you die, then you’re dead forever.”
Henry gulped.
Nyissa shook her head. “Not like that. I mean, you’ll have to start a new character to keep playing. Normally, if you die in the game, you just have to wait an hour to come back with all your equipment and levels and stuff.”
They continued to walk. Henry had no idea how far this place was.
Another strange entrance appeared on the opposite horizon.
Henry pointed and asked, “What’s that?”
Nyissa smirked. “You just never let up. That’s the Sandworm Lair. It’s an area filled with sand and giant sandworms try to eat you.”
Henry was proud of himself for finally understanding.
He said, “Oh! Like Dune.”
This time Nyissa asked, “What’s that?”
Henry scoffed. “You’re kidding. You know all this other stuff, but you haven’t heard of Dune?”
To be fair, Henry didn’t get the hype. When the sixth movie remake came out during his college days, he went with some friends to see it. He thought it was quite good, but was it really worth six remakes of the same exact movie?
Nyissa asked, “I take it there are sandworms in it?”
Henry laughed, and they continued their journey.
The scenery changed much too quickly for what it looked like. He realized that distances were made to look grand and vast within the game but were not all that far apart. It was clever of the game makers to have breathtaking views without having to spend a ton of time to traverse empty scenery.
Soon a new building came into view. They changed directions to move directly toward it. The giant building sat on a vast grassland. The perfectly manicured front lawn swayed from a breeze, and Henry held out his hand to see if he could feel it.
Nothing. The illusion was purely aesthetic.
A large circular driveway made of packed gravel led to the front door, but Henry doubted there were any actual cars in the game. He’d seen just about everything else so far.
Nyissa said, “This is the Grand Manor. It is home to the largest guild in the game: The Guild of Fallen Shadows.” Nyissa paused to let that sink in. “I know. It probably sounded cooler in their heads when they came up with it.”
The building looked exactly like Henry imagined something called “The Grand Manor” would look. It had a classic boxy, red brick frame. Windows covered the whole front in three neat rows. Several chimneys rose across the structure.
Henry imagined it could house a hundred people easily.
They worked their way to the front door. A sign hung above the threshold that read: If you will not die for us, you cannot ask us to die for you.
Nyissa swung the brass knocker, and Henry was shocked at how loudly it rang out. It had to be amplified, but who knew how physics operated within the game?
A tall, slender man came to the door. He had pointed ears and wore a red and white robe. The man gave Henry a disgusted look.
Nyissa said, “Hello, Aeden.” Her tone had soured.
“Hello, Nyissa. What do you want? You’re banned from these grounds, ever since, well, you know the story. You were there.” Aeden gave Henry another once-over. “What the hell is this? Your new pet?”
Henry was beginning to think he was the only person with a non-humanoid character.
Henry said, “I’m Henry Gallagher. I’m investigating the death of Zane Wolmark.”
“Not interested.”
Aeden started to shut the door, but Nyissa held her hand out to stop him.
She asked, “What do you have to hide?”
Aeden said, “Nothing.” He pointed to Nyissa and said, “She’s the one you should talk to. It’s obvious she did it.”
Henry said, “Why don’t we take a walk? You can tell me why you think she did it.”
“Anything to get away from her. She killed my best friend.” His voice cracked. Henry almost believed it.
He perked up at the words “best friend.” He wished he’d been filled in on this history a bit before now. Nyissa held up her hands in defeat and walked away.
Aeden and Henry set off in the opposite direction.
Henry needed to get him talking to try to catch him off his guard.
“Why don’t you just tell me about your relationship with Zane?”
“First, his name wasn’t Zane in the game. It was Pickles4me. We just called him Pickles.”
What the hell is with these names?
Aeden continued, “He joined the guild relatively early. I started the thing, so I was always the leader. We always had each other’s back. You probably don’t know this, but our founding value was Loyalty. Every guild has a founding value associated with it. The members then get bonuses related to that. In our case, that meant things like stat boosts when in a group. Or when one person sacrifices themselves, they can do a special skill.”
Henry said, “Okay… I feel like you’re not telling me something. It was all happiness and unicorns, and then you woke up one morning to the news that he was dead?”
Aeden continued to walk, and he didn’t say anything.
When he spoke, it came in a sudden outburst.
“She’s evil! She’s trying to pin this on me. He was my best friend. I would never do something like that.”
Henry hated that this was all happening inside this game world. He couldn’t get an appropriate read on Aeden’s mental state. The fact that he fell back on the “best friend” line for the second time made Henry suspicious.
That was what guilty people did. They came up with one excuse and then fell back on it when pressured.
Henry said, “I’m going to hear it from people whether you tell me or not. It’s going to be better if you just tell me the story from your point of view, so it doesn’t get skewed by people who want to take you down. Let me put it this way. Would you rather I hear it from Nyissa or you?”
Aeden took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
He began, “Okay. Zane ascended to near the top of the leaderboard. It was clear he wanted to get to number one. Someone like Nyissa might say he wanted to take over the spot of the guild leader. But to do so required going through the Eburnean Passage.
“I wanted to test his loyalty. I was going to let him do it once he passed the test, but I told him that he couldn’t do it. He was supposed to just say ‘okay.’ He would prove that he put loyalty to the guild over his own personal greed. But that’s not what happened. He decided to leave and go off on his own.
“Our whole guild took a major hit when he left. The other part of the guild system is that when someone breaks the founding value, the whole guild suffers penalties. Some of the lower level players decided to leave because the penalties weren’t worth it for them. That caused more penalties, causing more people to leave.
“In the end, we were left with just a handful of people. It was embarrassing and frustrating, but I would never hurt him over it.”
Henry believed him. It would be extreme to kill someone over disloyalty in a game. But then
again, Henry had been investigating murders for over a decade. People had killed over pettier disagreements than that.
Henry tried to shake Aeden’s hand, but when he reached out, he realized it was a tentacle. He’d gotten so used to this new body already, that he’d forgotten how odd it was. Aeden understood and shook the tentacle anyway.
Henry said, “Thank you for your time.”
They parted, and Nyissa ran up to Henry.
She said, “See. It isn’t it obvious he did it?”
“No. There’s weak motivation, sure, but it doesn’t seem enough.”
“What did he tell you?”
Henry recounted the story to her, and she frowned.
She said, “That’s not everything. They were roommates in real life. He had access to Zane’s VR gear.”
Henry said, “The police obviously don’t think that’s enough to charge him. He just doesn’t have enough motive.”
Nyissa sighed heavily. “That’s because the police are morons. They know nothing about the game. Aeden is nowhere near the top of the leaderboard right now. But if Zane hadn’t betrayed the guild, Aeden would be in first place. The million dollars would basically be his. The motive isn’t disloyalty; it’s money.”
Oh.
Things were getting interesting now. Aeden had motive and means.
Henry said, “People keep talking about this Eburnean Passage. I know it’s the name of the game, but it sounds like a thing in the game, too. What is it?”
“You could think of it as the end of the game. It’s an extremely difficult gauntlet of challenges. If you make it through, you basically become a god in the game. Only a handful of people have ever done it.”
Henry said, “Let me guess. You’re one of them.”
“Yup.” Nyissa pulled her sword off her shoulder and jumped into the air. She flipped twice and did a few flashy moves with the sword before landing in front of Henry. She held the sword out and said, “I got this from it.”
Henry couldn’t really feel it, having no hands and all. He was beginning to hate this stupid body, but he couldn’t admit to her she had been correct about it.