by Rachel Ford
It took fifteen, which Jack spent growing increasingly impatient. But eventually, a gigantic she-orc spawned in front of him. She stood a good seven feet tall, with a shoulder span at least half as wide, and carried a huge, double-sided axe. Her most prominent feature wasn’t her height, or the body-builder physique, or the pugnacious nose and tusk-like teeth. It wasn’t her green skin or animal fur clothing. It was her breasts: they were enormous, and barely covered in a weird metal and animal hide bra-like bit of armor. The rest of her armor was almost as bad: a miniskirt of fox tails and studded leather, that left her thighs and midriff completely exposed.
Jack blinked at the bizarre apparition before him – some kind of cross between a warrior and runway model fantasy. “What the…?”
Then, the orc spoke with Richard’s voice, and he understood. “Hey dude. Finally got it.”
“This is your character?” he asked, a bit skeptically.
“Awesome, isn’t she? I designed the armor myself.”
Jack couldn’t say the news surprised him, exactly, and he tried to pretend a little enthusiasm toward his companion’s creation – even if it did look like some kind of awful, pig nosed, green skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger / Dolly Parton cross.
Richard – the orc woman – grinned at him. “Right. So, where are we headed?” Then, before Jack could respond, he supplied his own answer. “Aderyn: we still need to find him?” Jack only had the chance to nod before the other man started talking again. “Righto. Okay, lead on, Captain. You don’t mind if I call you ‘captain,’ do you?”
“Uh…no, I guess not.”
“Awesome. Captain it is, then.”
It wasn’t, though. Jack spent the next six hours hearing himself referred to as Jack, dude, man, bud and even dumbass – though the game translated that one to foolish fellow. Nor did Richard infer any kind of hierarchy from his arbitrary rank assignments. Calling Jack captain had not been a sign of willingness to take orders from the other man. On the contrary, Richard spent as much time arguing with Jack as anything else.
He didn’t want to proceed directly to the mission. There were too many side quests in the area, and too many enemies, to pass by. “I need to level her melee,” he explained, doffing his gauntlets and strapping his axe to his back before running, bare-fisted, into a throng of bandits. Another time, he splashed through a stream. “Her swimming skill is really low. You want to follow the stream and see where it goes?”
Jack’s, “Nope,” fell on deaf ears, as the gigantic orc woman flopped and splashed in the shallow stream, kicking up great sprays of water.
Richard was only distracted from leveling his swimming by a fish that swam past, which reminded him that he could, in fact, go fishing. They spent half an hour on the banks, casting fruitlessly into the water. “I don’t know what the problem is,” the other man opined. “I know there’s fish down there. Why aren’t they biting?”
“Probably have better luck if you talked less,” Jack muttered.
Then, Richard realized he was hungry. “In real life, I mean.” So he took a half hour break to eat, but kept his character in game. The orc woman stood there, unmoving, emanating distant chomping sounds.
“Uh, Richard? You didn’t mute your microphone.”
But the other man didn’t hear him. He must have removed his headset, Jack figured. So he had to listen to the entire meal – a sandwich, chomped and slurped down, then chips, crunched and swallowed. Both were accompanied by intermittent soda slurping and gulping, and the occasional belch.
Finally, Richard came back on the line, and his orc avatar sprang to life. “Well, that was good.”
“Great,” Jack said, weakly.
“Hey, I was looking at the map, and there’s a dungeon not too far from here. You want to go?”
Jack’s “not really,” fell on deaf ears. Richard blundered off road and away from the stream, toward a distant fleck of dark stones on the horizon; and he followed, scowling to himself and repenting ever asking the other man to quest with him.
The dungeon proved to be a pretty standard one, without side quests attached to it. There were bad guys, treasure, and a few hidden passages. Still, it took a few hours to clear. And unlike Jordan, who at least shared the loot, Richard took everything he could haul. “So, I probably shouldn’t tell you this…but I modified my inventory, so I have unlimited capacity.”
Jack scowled. In his mind, that was just insult to injury: first, that the developers would introduce such an absurd limit, and then that they themselves would cheat to get around it. But it explained how Richard could grab everything that wasn’t nailed down.
“I don’t even think it’s unrealistic,” the other man went on. “Loreesha – that’s my orc’s name, by the way – is really strong. I figured it out one time, she’d be about as strong as five average human males. And, you think about it: five guys can carry a lot. So she should be able to carry a lot, right?”
Despite himself, the pedantic side of his nature won out, and he responded, “I mean, five men can’t carry an unlimited amount of stuff either. It’s just five times whatever the average guy could carry, not infinite carrying space.”
Richard snorted. “That’s what Jordan said, too.”
“Well…she’s a smart woman.”
“But Loreesha’s an orc. Maybe her muscle mass is different than human muscle mass. Maybe one pound of orc muscle can lift a lot more than a pound of human muscle.”
“That’s not relevant. Unless orc muscle can carry infinite weight, it doesn’t matter how much more than humans she can carry; at some point, she’s still going to hit a limit. So an infinite inventory doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, maybe orc muscle can carry infinite weight.”
“Then why do they need so much of it?”
“What?”
Jack gestured at the hulking avatar. “If their muscle could lift infinite weight, they wouldn’t need to look like bodybuilders. Infinite is infinite. The skinniest orc kid could do it.”
“Maybe they like building muscle, you know, for the look or whatever.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Says the guy without the infinite inventory.”
“Yeah, well, at least I don’t have to cheat.”
Chapter Nineteen
They didn’t fight, exactly, but both Jack and Richard seemed a little snippy with each other for the rest of the afternoon. He wasn’t sorry to hear that the intern’s shift came to an end, either. They had barely advanced at all, and though he’d gained some experience and a tiny amount of gold, he hadn’t made any real progress on his main quest. And he’d suffered a good deal of aggravation for the little he had made.
He waited impatiently for Richard and Jordan to make their shift switch. Then, waiting a few minutes after his alarm went off to let her get settled, he called her into the game.
Her familiar warrior popped onto the screen, and smiled. “Hey Jack.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“Everything okay?”
“Okay? I just spent hours listening to Richard.”
“Really?” She frowned, confused. “What happened?”
He explained, in brief, his trials of the last eight hours. But to his surprise, Jordan didn’t seem particularly sympathetic. If anything, she came across as a little frosty. She said only, “Oh,” and, “Really?” and, “I didn’t realize…well, I guess it makes sense.”
He missed it at first, but finally, even in his aggravated state, he picked up on it. “What’s wrong, Jordan?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Of course.” Then, she added, “I just thought – you know, you said you didn’t want to quest with anyone else. So I figured we’d be working on this level together.”
He nodded. “I don’t. We will.”
She arched an eyebrow. “So…” Then, she shook her head. “I mean, it’s all good. I just figured you might want the continuity of playing with the same team.”
>
He stood in place a little unsure of what to say. He felt, weirdly, like he’d done something wrong, even though he knew he hadn’t. “Jordan, I just…well, I was tired of talking to Shimmerfax is all.”
She nodded. “No, it’s good. Okay, let’s get going. What are we doing today? How far did you guys get?”
“Not very.”
“Well, point the way, Jack.”
He thought he could still detect something a little out of sorts in her tone, and he wondered if she’d taken offense that he’d replaced her, no matter how temporarily, with Richard. That, he supposed, would insult just about anyone. “We were just leveling,” he said. “Because I couldn’t sleep.”
Now, she frowned at him. “Again?”
He didn’t take her meaning for a minute, but then he nodded. “Patchy sleep again. But it’s fine. I got a few hours.”
“Oh, Jack. That really isn’t good. I need to talk to Dr. Roberts.”
He waved this away. “No, I’m fine. Really, Jordan. I don’t feel tired at all.”
“It’s still not right. We should check it out, just in case.”
He preferred her concern to her annoyance, so he decided to acquiesce. “Fine. But let’s get going. I want to get out of this game.”
They returned to the main road from one of Richard’s many detours, and kept going eastward. The terrain hadn’t varied much in the last few days, nor did it now. It was a rough and wild country, that, on his own, seemed quite gloomy. But adventuring alongside of her, Jack found he rather liked it. The wild air spoke of adventure and mystery rather than desolation and despair.
They passed a few rocky cave entrances or half ruined stone buildings. In the distance, far to the west of the road, they spotted a trio of ogres lumbering across the hills. Jack was glad anew that he was here with Jordan rather than Richard, because he guessed the first thing the latter would have done would be charge off after the ogres. Whereas she wisely kept her head, and they walked by unnoticed.
Eventually, some time in the middle of the afternoon, they spotted an old stone ruin. Jordan pulled up her map, and then grinned. Whatever annoyance she’d felt with him earlier had gone. Now, she was all good cheer, and had been for the last few hours. “There it is.”
“Aderyn,” he said. “Finally. So let me guess…we’re going to have to go rescue him?”
“Maybe,” she said.
Which he took to be confirmation. He remembered discussing the adventurer back at the pub in Kaldstein. Ceinwen had mentioned that he’d been missing for three weeks. So he figured Aderyn must have either hurt himself or got taken prisoner in his explorations. They hadn’t found him on the road so far, so he had to be ahead of them.
“So you know what we have to do here?”
She nodded. “Yup.”
“Good. That should make it easier.”
“Only if I tell you.”
“Come on, Jordan. You’re supposed to be helping me out here.”
“I will. But only if you need help.”
He frowned at the statement, and the clever psychological play inherent to it. She wasn’t refusing to help him. But she was making it a matter of needing help, rather than her volunteering information. No gamer would willingly admit they needed help. Indeed, the words put his back up as soon as they left her mouth. He was ready to argue with her that of course he didn’t need help, but he caught himself in time. Instead, he returned casually, “Good. I doubt I will need it, but just in case.”
She smiled, and he figured she’d known exactly what she was doing. Hmm. She must have wised up after his guilting the other day, and decided to fight fire with fire.
He was lost in these thoughts when she said, “Come on, we should get inside before dark.”
“Why?”
She grinned. “Let’s just say, you don’t want to be outside the castle grounds when it’s dark out.”
He shook his head. “Great. More undead?”
She kept grinning, but said no more.
“Are there undead inside too?”
“You’ll see.”
“That’s very helpful. Thanks, Jordan.”
“Anytime.” Then, her grin broadened, and she answered with a twinkle in her eyes, “But don’t worry. I’ve no intention of running off and leaving you on your jack.”
He frowned. “What the heather does that mean?”
She grinned. “Means I won’t leave you on your own.”
“Oh.” He figured, in retrospect, he probably could have deduced that from context. “But where did you hear that?”
She kept smiling, but ignored the question. “Now, when we go in here, I want you to take it slow, okay? No hero stuff.” He started to protest that he had no intention of rushing in blindly, when she added, “No ballin’ the jack and running off like a lunatic.”
Now, he stopped and crossed his arms. “Okay, what is that supposed to mean? Are you just making this crap up now?”
She laughed at him. “Oh, Jack. Sounds to me like you don’t know –”
“Jack,” he finished with a sigh. “Very funny. Alright, I’ll quit if you will.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m having fun.” But when he groaned out a protest that it was no fun if he didn’t even know what she was saying, she conceded, “I did have to google them, to be honest.”
“What does it mean?”
“Uh…according to Wikipedia? It’s something railroad workers used to say in the early twentieth century. Something to do with a type of train signal.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Going really fast.”
Jack shook his head. “You know, I was just thinking about language earlier, trying to understand the ogre. Got me thinking how weird it is. Honestly, even if you know a language, you don’t really know it, do you? Not all the crazy dialects and regional colloquialisms. Not the way it changes over time. I mean, think about that. Without the internet – without Wikipedia – who would ever guess what that meant?”
“Well, not me,” she admitted. “But you won’t get anywhere with the ogre. They don’t really have a language. It’s all just grunts and noises.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but it means something to them, right?”
“Not really. We just have a bunch of guttural noise sound clips that they cycle through. Angrier ones, happier ones, neutral ones. But no real meanings.”
He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. But even that is a kind of language, right? They’re communicating mood and intention.”
She laughed again. “I think you’ve been in this game too long, Jack.”
He snorted. “You and me both.”
They were closer to the old ruin now. He could see a little more of it. It seemed to be the remnants, now long worn down by wind and rain and time, of an old fortress foundation. About half of the first story remained. Piles of rock, some of them still crusted in mortar, lay here and there to bear witness to the former existence of the upper stories. But they’d long ago crumbled away. The wind had carried dirt over some of the stone piles, and jagged rises covered in green and yellow vegetation jutted out of the flat land.
“I don’t see Aderyn,” he said.
“We’ll have to look around,” she said.
“You know where he is, right?”
“I do.”
“So you’re not going to tell me?”
“Not unless you need my help finding him.”
He frowned at that, but said no more.
The fortress had seemed deceptively close due to its massive size. But as Jack realized, trudging on through the darkening day, they still had a ways to go. The building, or what was left of it, though, was massive – easily the size of a football field and a half.
“Someone important must have lived here.”
“Maybe they still do,” she said.
“Oh heather,” he said, glancing over at her. “You mean, more undead? Vampires?”
“I didn’t say that.”
&n
bsp; He scowled at her smirk. “No. But you implied they’re still living. And this thing’s been a ruin forever. So they’d have to be ancient. Which means undead.”
She shrugged noncommittally.
“Great. More undead. I knew we should have held onto those silver bullets.”
“Don’t worry,” she said with a cheeky grin. “I’ve got more garlic.”
They reached the ruin before sunset. Orange and red light was just starting to appear on the distant horizon. Jordan again reminded him that they needed to hurry, and he didn’t dispute the fact. Even if their destination looked spooky as hell.
And it did. Everything about the place sent a shiver up his spine: old, ruined stone and blown out windows; door frames that had long ago lost their doors; the wind whipping through the half open rooms, and rats ducking in and out of old piles of stone; it all seemed designed to inspire terror.
Which, when he thought about it, he realized it had been. This was just one of many levels Jordan and her colleagues had designed, so it didn’t make sense to get spooked by it. None of it was real.
The thought helped calm him, at least until a rat ran across his boot. Then, leaping backward in disgust, his quiet resolve shattered. The icy tendrils of fear crept back up his neck, and every howl of the wind put his heart in his mouth.
Despite her claim to only help him if he required help, Jordan seemed to have some destination in mind. So, without mentioning the fact directly, he stood back and let her take the lead.
They wound their way through room after ruined room, looting the odd trinket or bit of treasure that they chanced upon. Finally, they reached what looked like some kind of grand staircase. Its huge, stone steps wound up in circular fashion for a good fifteen feet, before disappearing abruptly in the thin air – along with the upper floors of the place.
But, running opposite the now-missing ascending stairs, a set of steps wound their way downward, into a deep, black pit.
Jack paused, staring into the immeasurable void below him. “Is that…well, is that where we need to go?”