“Take a look for me, will you?” Jeremy stuck the staff out the doorway and twisted the skull around to look all the different directions.
Sighing in resignation, Yorick informed his student, “All clear.”
Jeremy pulled the skull back and went out into the hallway. “So, if I use my Evil Energy Bolts on undead, I’m going to heal them?”
“Only if you are partied with them.”
“So, the ones I control, I can heal them with EEBs?”
“Yes.”
“So, I could just control the first one I find and have him do my dirty work for me, right?”
“Essentially, yes. That would definitely minimize the risk, though it may slow things down a little.”
Jeremy scratched his chin and thought about things for a bit. “Really, I’m a boss, so what’s wrong with me being a boss? I’ll have employees and stuff, but unlike my dad, I ain’t gonna hafta do payroll.”
Yorick clicked his teeth uncertainly. Venturing a guess as to his student’s meaning, he said, “If you mean you won’t have to pay your undead minions, this is true of gold, but not true of mana. Each challenge level of undead that you are directly controlling will subtract 1 mana from your recharge rate. So, if you have a recharge rate of...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. If I’ve got two skeletons that add up to a CL of 1 and I would normally get two mana every ten minutes, I’ll only get one. Got it. The magic experience book thing explained a bunch of the basics like that. I was mostly talking about the hassle of running payroll that my dad always talked about when he picked me up on the weekends.”
Yorick would have bitten his tongue if he had one. What sort of petulant student would interrupt a teacher? Ah, yes, one like Yorick had been on the Earth...
As a skull Yorick could do nothing but grin at Jeremy. Jeremy grinned right back. The teenager winked at his tutor and said, “Let’s get this party started.”
***
During most of the rest of his first day, Jeremy Rogers wondered around the ruined city, exploring and collecting anything he found of use. Except for one magic glove guarded by a small herd of skellies, he did not find much. But, what he lacked in treasure, he made up for in lackeys.
At first, he had amassed as large an army of undead as he could. They followed him everywhere. It seemed like an appreciable horde of skeletons to Jeremy. He could use them to fight through the random encounters with zombies, other skeletons, and giant rats.
But, Yorick was insistent this was a Bad Idea. Pleading with his charge, the tutor had explained, “If you keep only one with you, it will gain combat experience much faster.”
“Wait, skeletons can level?” Jeremy had not even considered that possibility.
“Not exactly, but they do grow in combat effectiveness. And, the weak can become regular, and the regular can become strong.”
In a rare act of magnanimity, Jeremy admitted the skull had a better plan and took Yorick’s advice. Looking at his amassed herd, Jeremy had said, “Guess I better cut all this dead weight loose!”
Yorick had missed the joke as he rushed to stop his student. “No, no, no! Don’t just release them. Head back to your crypt and I’ll explain how you can stash them for later.”
“You’re a pack rat after my own heart, York, my dude. Let no skellies go to waste!”
On the way back to the catacombs as they walked down a hallway lined with doors, Yorick revealed the trick to Jeremy. Skeletons and zombies would stay where they were if there were no open passages available and no enemies to attack. That meant that leaving a skeleton in a room with a closed door would effectively keep it there for later.
Jeremy had put one of his herd into a room and released the skeleton from his control. Once he closed the door behind himself, the skeleton had just stood unmoving. Jeremy checked on his skeleton three times before he accepted that the trick worked. Each time he opened the door, the skeleton would take a step toward him; each time he closed it, the undead stopped.
Every new skeleton Jeremy added to a room would get attacked by the others while it was still in his party. Since he had a whole ruined city to work with, he decided to stash one skeleton per room. That was until he found a huge, ruined cellar storeroom. There, he could space them out far enough and hide them behind columns so that they would not trigger attacks from each other right away.
As Jeremy closed the storeroom door, Yorick informed him, “This will be huge once you take over a village and become a Leader. You’ll be able to come back and pack these undead into troops to fight in military battles instead of adventure combats. It will give you a definite leg up.”
Taking just one skeleton with him, Jeremy set off to continue searching the ruined city for the greatest treasure of all, XP. His skeleton started off tagged as a ‘recruit.’ Then after a few successful fights, he became ‘seasoned.’ After ‘seasoned’ came ‘veteran,’ and then the last level, ‘elite.’ Once his first Weak Skeleton had fought at ‘elite’ for a little while, it became a regular Skeleton recruit.
“This is kinda like getting Pokémon to evolve, ain’t it York?”
The skull had been too confused to comment.
Going through the whole process with a regular Skeleton again could get Jeremy a Strong Skeleton. But, Yorick explained, Strong Skeletons could not become Skeleton Warriors, Skeleton Archers, or Skeleton Wizards. Those were each different monster types entirely.
Jeremy had nodded sagely. “Like Psyduck and Snorlax, got it.”
Every time Jeremy saw a skeleton become ‘seasoned,’ it made him almost wild with hunger. He had laughed a little too hard at the title at first. Through the day, he steadily grew hungrier and hungrier. He had not eaten that morning on Earth. “Nerves” about his plan at the school had distracted him. Jeremy could not remember if he had woke up hungry in the Divided Lands. But, he was absolutely sure that he was hungry now. The fourth time the ‘seasoned’ tag came up, he decided that he had to find some food. But in a city that had been abandoned for years, food was not exactly just sitting around.
To keep his mind off his hunger as best he could, Jeremy experimented with his skeletons to figure out their capabilities. He determined their physical strength (stronger than him), their foot speed (all the same), and what kind of commands they could follow (simple conditional logic). Jeremy treated it as an exercise in computer programming, a topic he loved. He told a skeleton that was doing continuous pull-ups, “Computers were so much better than people. They did just what you told them, nothing more, nothing less. Man, I loved that about them. People are messy. They’ll lie to you and trick you and stab you in the back first chance they get. Doesn’t matter how much of their homework you do for them, or how many papers you write for them, even if you’re cutting them a deal! And, they’ll turn you down for dates even though you’re the best thing that could ever happen to them. You skellies aren’t like that at all. I think I could get used to being the King of Bones here. You just do what you’re told don’t you?”
Skeleton nodded in response as it completed its hundred somethingth pull-up. Jeremy had lost count. The nod gave Jeremy a warm burst of pleasure. With a sardonic joy, he proclaimed, “You’re the best friend I could ever ask for!”
Yorick had been more worried than insulted. He definitely thought of his relationship with Jeremy as a professional one. Though in that capacity, Yorick was questioning the judgement, and perhaps sanity, of his protege. Jeremy went on with his experiments as he leveled and looked for food.
Lists of instructions for the skeletons could be three or four commands long depending on the complexity. This knowledge helped bring Jeremy’s plans into shape. Even better, his Undead Lore skill leveled up while he was doing all these trials and experiments. It was a passive skill that gave bonuses to other abilities and checks.
The skill leveling in the Game was a little confusing to him. Some skills only updated after he had slept. Others popped up tabs immediately. Jeremy was not sure what was go
ing on there. But, he had done enough experimenting with his skeletons to feel sure that the Game had a reason why it did things differently in different situations. Jeremy felt confident in the repeatability of the Game’s mechanics even if he could not explain those mechanics to anybody. Things were almost ready for him to venture out to a village and put a couple plans to the test. It was about time because he was absolutely starving. Still, he pulled together his self-discipline and made himself wait. He had business to take care of first.
As the sun was sinking behind the ruined buildings of his city, Jeremy collected a small gang of skeletons and tied them to a salvaged timber. These he sent off to Chris’s elf girlfriend, Olivia, through the trade interface.
Next, he collected another group of them. Finding another salvaged timber, he tied five skeletons onto it, and left them in a room near his crypt. He wanted more of a late night surprise feel to this next attack, so he went out and killed some time by killing stragglers for XP. Then, the last thing he did for the night was gift the tied up skeletons to the guy who was playing the dwarf. He did not pay attention to his name, some freshman or something.
After Jeremy’s trade vortex closed, he admitted to Yorick, “I’m actually tired out, man. I thought I was going to spring my next plan now, but I’m completely exhausted. Where’s the Red Bull in this world?”
Yorick just stared blankly at Jeremy. The necromancer’s question might as well have been in Goblin to Yorick. After the tenth or twelfth time that Jeremy had sprung some incomprehensible idiom on him, the Warlock’s Skull had decided to pretend like he had not heard whatever ramblings of a madman his student has spouted this time.
Jeremy tried again. “Coffee? Tea? You know, something to make me peppy, give me energy, let me Game all night?” Wistfully, he added, “Maybe take the edge off of my hunger pangs?”
Yorick recognized the word ‘tea’ and tried his best to answer. “Ah! The human lands beyond this city have access to tea by trade with places further south. If I had taste buds and a stomach, I would appreciate some good tea. What a shame I was assigned this form instead of a living creature like others.”
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t knock the undead. It has got to be nice not to feel any hunger or pain anymore, right?”
“I still long for things. Not food, really. And, things still hurt. Memories in particular.” Yorick fell silent as a tombstone.
A long stretch of quietude ensued where both the skull and the man were lost in their own thoughts. It was interrupted by Jeremy’s stomach gurgling. He blurted out, “So, there’s no energy drinks around here?”
“Not in the city.”
“I’ll just ask to be certain. There are no restaurants here? No place to get food?”
“No. Only out in the villages where the farms are.”
“Fine, I’m going to sleep perchance to dream about MickeyD’s. Tomorrow, we’ve got to take over some place that at least has tea. Preferably, sweet tea. And if there’s a place that has bacon, I’ll build the siege engines myself.”
***
Since Yorick did not need sleep, he had spent the night perfecting a plan involving a pig farm outside the largest of the villages next to the ruined city. When Jeremy woke up well before dawn the next morning, Yorick explained the plan to him.
Wasting no time, Jeremy had fetched a Strong Skeleton from a closet-sized room nearby, and they were out of the city gates while it was still dark. The skeleton was at the ‘seasoned’ tier of experience. That ‘seasoned’ title made the thought of seasoned ribs came to mind. Jeremy wiped the drool off of his lips on the purple sleeve of his robe.
“Are you sure that it will work on a pig?” Jeremy whispered hoarsely to the skull on the end of his staff.
“Do pigs have muscles?” retorted Yorick. The skull could not believe how frustratingly self-confident and questioning of others his teenage charge was. When the soul playing Yorick had been on the Earth, there was no such thing as a teenager. You had been a child or an adult. This boy seemed unable to decide which one he was and which one he was going to act like. If Yorick had had a neck and a tongue, he would have shook his head and tisk-tisk-tisked.
“Yeah,” Jeremy conceded. “I mean they’re fat, but they’ve gotta have muscles underneath there, right? Like offensive linemen? What if the guards come out?”
“They won’t unless you keep asking questions until the sun comes up. Oh, and if they do, run for it.”
“Fine, let’s do this.”
Looking up at village walls only a hundred yards away, Jeremy poked the Yorick end of his staff around the corner of a stone pig sty. Jeremy waited for his ‘tutor’ to do his thing.
“Pigor Mortis!”
Jeremy got ready to come around the corner, but stopped. What had he said?
Yorick was chuckling to himself.
“What’s going on?” hissed Jeremy.
“Sorry, couldn’t help myself.” Yorick stopped chuckling and corrected himself, “Rigor Mortis!”
Jeremy popped around the corner, his seasoned Strong Skeleton right on his heals. Jiggling the latch, he managed to open the gate to the sty quietly. The non-paralyzed pigs grunted and moved away from the newcomers. One pig stood frozen in place like a pig statue.
“Come here, Porkers! You’re going to be my new best friend for about five minutes till I figure out how to make you into breakfast burritos.”
The paralyzed pig did not move, but that was the point. Jeremy and his skeleton each took one end of the pig, and they picked it up and carried it out of the pen like it was a sofa on moving day. Around the corner they went, and Yorick was forced to speak up.
“You’d better shut the gate behind you.”
“Why? I don’t care if their pigs get out, do I?”
“Well, if this works and you want any more bacon, you kind of want those pigs to still be there, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter to me, but if you care so much about the poor pig farmers here...” Jeremy sniggered as he went back to shut and latched the gate.
They carried the pig two hundred yards. It seemed to Jeremy to be about two hundred miles. The skeleton did not seem to care. Jeremy was happy his minions did not get tired. “Probably don’t even have a Stamina stat. Pretty useful fact.”
The eastern sky brighten as Yorick recast his paralysis spell on the pig multiple times over those two hundred yards. They finally reached their destination as the first red limb of the sun pierced the horizon. Struggling, Jeremy and the skeleton brought the pig down the slope of a little wooded gulley with a stream at the bottom that ran between the village and the ruined city.
Jeremy tied off the pig’s snout hoping that it would muffle the brief noise he was expecting. He tied the rest of the length of scavenged rope to the ankles of the pig and over a sturdy branch.
“Skelly boy, yo-ho-ho and hoist the main sails here.” He handed the rope to his skeleton, and the minion tugged up until the pig was awkwardly hanging two feet off the ground. It was strange because the pig was still paralyzed in the same posture it had been when standing on the ground. It made it hang at an odd angle.
“Here we go, Yorick. You’re going to take the paralysis off on the count of three so that I can not crit it. It has to bleed out, I know that much from watching videos on the internet of this sort of thing.”
“Have you never butchered an animal before?” asked Yorick amazed. “Were you wealthy on Earth?”
“We had enough, especially with my dad’s child support payments on top of my stepdad’s fat paychecks. But, nobody killed their own food where I was from. Everybody just went to a store or fast food place and bought it.” Jeremey answered this absentmindedly as he sharped a salvaged butcher’s knife one more time.
He did not even realize that the question implied that Yorick was familiar with the Earth or even that Yorick had been alive on the Earth before. Jeremy was still under the delusion that he was in some sort of simulation or hyper-advanced video game despite the expla
nations about the worldgame. Without the Crimson Man from the Cafeteria standing right in front of him, his mind had been free to explain him, and all the metaphysical Truth that he implied, away.
“On the count of three, OK?” Jeremy got into position by the pig.
“Do you mean when you say three or you’re going to say three and then I do it on the next beat in time with the count?”
“Ugh, when I say three, OK?”
For some reason, killing this pig seemed more difficult for him than the murder he had planned for the kids in the cafeteria back on Earth. “I must be getting soft,” he muttered, “Soft in the head.”
“One, two, three!”
The skull released the spell and Jeremy brought the knife up to the pig. But the instant the blade touched the pig, there was an audible DING!
You have acquired the Butcher Skill.
Jeremy the Novice Butcher harvests the pig with 12% efficiency.
You receive 15 lbs of meat.
The pig simply disappeared and turned into a ham and five chains of sausage links. The meat fell onto the leaf covered ground. Jeremy stared at it in shock.
“That is not nearly as much food as I had expected. A lot less messy to get, too. Gonna be honest though, it is a lot more than I had a minute ago. Wish I had buns for those brats...”
Jeremy scooped the meat up into his inventory pouch. He piled a full load of firewood onto his Strong Skeleton and headed back to his hideout in the ruined city to have a little breakfast feast.
* * *
By the middle of the morning, a well-fed Jeremy and Yorick had come up with an idea to really mess with Chris again. He was definitely awake from his twenty-four hours of being dead. This plan would really wack him.
The group of skeletons were tied to the log and waiting for the trade vortex to appear. Yorick was just double checking some things before Jeremy put the coin in his mouth.
“You’re absolutely sure that there is no way the rope will break while I’m on the other side? I don’t think I’ll be able to convince him to send me back if I get trapped.”
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