Steel Orc- Player Reborn

by Deck Davis

“Come a little closer,” said Konrad.

  Tripp and Bee joined him by the door. Tripp felt an intense curiosity to know what was behind it, to push it open and see for himself, but he forced himself to show a little control.

  He looked at the door for clues, but there was only a tiny gap at the bottom where it didn’t touch the ground, and he couldn’t see anything. There were no smells, no noises, nothing.

  Konrad put the key on the ground. “For the duration of your apprenticeship to me,” he said, “This key belongs to you, and you only. I’m giving you free access to the parts of Old Kimby that I own, and that includes the mine shafts. You’re allowed to mine the materials you need as long as you stay within boundaries. I don’t need the guild suing me for straying into someone else’s tunnels.”

  “Got it.”

  “Arvie and his pals have been instructed not to mine for you, and not to even show you where metals are. If you so much as ask Arvie for a skin of water, Arvie will tell you to feck off. Finding materials is part of this, and you’re going to have to learn where to find them and how to get them. Got it?”

  Tripp nodded. He’d never been scared of hard work.

  Konrad tapped the door. “Okay then. Behind this door is my teaching. It used to be a test for young crafters, back when crafting was more respected. Godden, the gods bless his dwarf soul, always prized those who could create things. They were vital in him reclaiming the Reach. ”

  “Is it a library?”

  “You wish. There’s danger behind this door, Tripp. That’s why I only take on apprentices who prove themselves to me first, who are passionate about the craft, and who are willing to put their bodies on the line.”

  “That sounds a lot more dangerous than I expected the armorer skill to be.”

  “Make no mistake, this place is dangerous. There are three rooms, and it’ll take armorer, artificery, and maybe even other skills to get through them. Traps, creatures, you name it, you’ll face them all.”

  “And that’s how you teach people?”

  “I won’t be here with you, but I’ll be on hand at my shop to answer any questions and to show you stuff. As long as you don’t come asking for the answers to be put on a plate.”

  “So I can come in and out of here?”

  “Once you clear a room by solving all the puzzles, killing whatever creatures come out, and then finding the loot, the next door will open. There are two ways to leave a room once you step into and let the door shut behind you; by finishing it, or by dying.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “As sure as hogs love slop, you’ll die in here Tripp,” said Konrad. “Again and again and again. Why do you think I never take apprentices from the town? I only accept the guys like you; the ones who can come back.”

  “He knows about respawning?” thought Tripp.

  “All NPCs know it to an extent,” replied Bee. “Sometimes storylines and quests require them to know it. Other times, it’s something they’re aware of but ignore at the same time. Think of digital intelligence as a pyramid, with Boxe5 sitting at the top, me and the DFs are below, then you have quest NPCs like Konrad. Below him are the traders who don’t have much to say, and then right at the bottom are your frorargs, that kind of thing.”

  “I have a question,” said Tripp. “Why can’t you just show me how to learn skills, like most masters? Why not give me a piece of steel, tell me what to make, and I’ll practice?”

  “Knowledge alone is a one-legged stool; it’ll break the first time you try to use it, and you’ll land on your arse. You need the other two legs of the stool - intuition and application - for it to work.”

  Tripp thought he was getting what Konrad wanted from him now. “I’ll have to use the armorer and artificery skills to get through the rooms, and I’m guessing there are no signs on the wall telling me the kinds of things I’ll need to make.”

  “That’s the intuition and application side of things,” said Konrad. “Use your intuition to work out what you’ll need in each room to not only beat it, but avoid a painful death. Then apply that by practicing your skills and making whatever item it is.”

  The mention of a painful death made him wince. Tripp looked at the wooden door and saw something both ominous and full of mystery at the same time.

  It made sense; some games let you pay money and then voila, the skill was yours.

  Where was the sense of achievement? The thrill of coming up with your own solutions? He guessed there was a place for both types of skill learning, but right now, he stared at the door and felt his heart thud.

  “I’ll leave you to it now,” said Konrad.

  “Just like that?”

  “Try out the first room and see how you feel. Just remember; each room is interconnected. Beat one, and the next will unlock. But when you let a room door close behind you, you either solve it, or you let it beat you. No going back once the door slams shut.”

  Get things right or die. That was what he was saying.

  Tripp had died once and although the pain settings of Soulboxe were a little muted, it still hurt. Not only that, but he’d gotten an EXP penalty, and the game dialogue had promised worse ones the more he died.

  Even pain and penalties weren’t enough to put him off. There was no doubt in his mind. If there was, it was only a flicker on a candle wick and the draught of his inner positivity snuffed it out.

  It was then that something occurred to him. “Can I take other people into the labyrinth?”

  Konrad sucked in his cheeks as he thought about it. “Your lovely orb friend here, yes,” he said.

  “Oh, you…” said Bee, fluttering her gold eyelashes.

  “What about other people like me?” asked Tripp.

  Konrad nodded. “Ones who can come back like you, yes, but nobody with the armorer or artificery skills. You’ll get nothing from this if someone else does all the work.”

  “Got it. One last thing,” he said. “What’s the deal with Birch Hailey, the guy I was supposed to ask about?”

  Konrad’s cheery air left, the morning-after beer flush drained from his cheeks. Tripp felt the change in the mood, as if it made the tunnels colder.

  “Birch kept hounding me to take him on as an apprentice. Bright kid, but he wasn’t like you, Tripp. If something happened to Birch in Old Kimby, there was no coming back.”

  “He means Birch is an NPC,” said Bee.

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “I told Birch that he had potential but I wasn’t taking on an apprentice right then. You know, I tried to let him down gently. Of course, my wife says I have as much subtlety as a rutting pig. Birch thought what I was really saying was ‘you gotta prove yourself to me before I’ll teach you the craft.’”

  “What happened?”

  “He paid a bastard from the thieves’ guild to sneak into my house one night and take the key to this door. Birch unlocked it and went in, thinking he’d clear Old Kimby’s labyrinth and prove himself. I don’t know how far the poor bastard got; when I went in to look for him, the labyrinth had claimed him as its own. Devoured him.”

  “It does that?”

  “If someone who isn’t like you dies in there then yeah.”

  “Wait for a second; how did you know about the thief and about Birch sneaking in if you never found his body?” said Bee.

  “Arvie and his crew saw Birch with the key. They tried to stop him, but he slammed the door shut before they could reach him. They said his screams were still echoing through Old Kimby’s tunnels for three days afterward. Then, Arvie overheard a thief talking in the Slaughterman’s Inn. A bunch of them were sitting around the table and chatting about jobs. Really brazen; not even bothering to whisper. I installed a better lock after that.”

  Tripp couldn’t believe it. Not the labyrinth itself, as he knew Boxe5’s work when he saw it. The AI must have planned this whole questline from the second Tripp had wanted to become an armorer.

  What surprised him was the sophistication of it; the comp
lex backstory webbing of Birch and how he’d concocted a plan to prove himself. He felt drawn in by it, eager to learn more.

  It hit him there and then. This was why people loved Soulboxe so much. It didn’t feel like a game.

  Forget the total immersion for a second, forget sensory experiences. It was more the skill of Boxe5, his handling of quests to suit the player. It made you feel so involved in it, so part of this world, that it was almost impossible to imagine there was a world outside it.

  His heart was pounding now with the excitement of it. He loved this feeling. Being in the belly of a mountain, with a labyrinth door in front of him and an AI weaving a tapestry of a story around him. Meeting new people, new friends, learning skills and eventually…creation.

  “I’m ready to go in,” he said.

  “Remember; three rooms to the end, where something completely feckin’ brilliant is waiting. Course, that’s a long, long way away lad. A speck in the distance. Smaller than a speck – a flea flying around a thousand miles away.”

  “You’d make a great motivational speaker, you know that?” said Tripp.

  “I can teach you the standard stuff every armorer within a thousand miles can do. Or, I can teach you real skills. It’s your choice.”

  “I’ll take the real stuff.”

  Konrad smiled. “That’s the answer I wanted. Now, in every room in the labyrinth, there are tokens. You’ll get more or less of these depending on how you solve the rooms and certain…choices… you’re gonna have to make. Come and see me at the shop, and I’ll exchange tokens for skills that I’ll teach you.”

  “So I’ll need to figure out what skills I need myself?”

  “And learn a lot of them yourself, too. The token skills will be bonuses – the stuff most armorers and artificers don’t know. You might need ‘em when you get further in the labyrinth and things get hot.”

  “This is a lot to take in. I need to go check it out it for myself.”

  Konrad shook Tripp’s hand. “I’ll be seeing you after you die. try to last longer than it takes me to walk back to my shop.”

  As Konrad’s footsteps grew softer behind him, Tripp stared at the door handle.

  Quest Received: Navigate the 3-Room Labyrinth

  You were warned about Konrad’s unconventional way of teaching, and you became his apprentice regardless. You don’t learn, do you?

  Now you must complete your apprenticeship by navigating Konrad’s labyrinth in Old Kimby. Each room will require new skills, and completion brings rewards of loot, experience, and yet more skills.

  Reward: A secret reward from Konrad.

  When he opened the door fully, he saw what looked like a stone platform with a separate platform thirty feet across from it. On that side there were four squares etched into the wall, like windows but blocked off by sheets of black rock.

  There was a sour smell in the air. Cinders, maybe? A fire pit? It was stuffy enough to come from a heat source; it was like standing close to a bonfire, and he felt like his hair would singe.

  The wooden door slammed toward him so fast that he had to jump back to avoid it whacking him in the face. With the room hidden behind the door again, he took a second to slow his pulse.

  “Wow. The labyrinth doesn’t have much patience for indecision,” he said.

  “Konrad said that when you go in, the door will shut behind you and then it’s either you solve the room or you die. I guess you either go in, or you don’t.”

  “We know that this is Konrad’s eccentric way of teaching me the armorer and artificer skills, or putting me in situations where I’ll have to choose what skills to learn myself, right?”

  “Beats having lines of code shoved up your ass, which is the DF equivalent of learning.”

  “It’s flawed logic, the way I see it. I can’t know how to solve the puzzle before I know what it is, because I don’t have the skills already. That means the only way I’ll scope it out is to go in, take a look, and then kill myself to leave the room. Essentially, I’ll have to die at last once in every room so that I can work out what to do.”

  Bee furrowed her brow inside her orb. “Maybe we could check the library?”

  Tripp couldn’t take his eyes off the door. An idea was coming, but it was reaching him in small doses, like he was a kid being spoon-fed inspiration by his brain.

  “Let’s try this,” he said.

  He opened the door again, and this time he counted the seconds in his head. It took longer than he’d expected, and when it slammed shut again, he turned to Bee.

  “That was 21 seconds. That’s how long the door will stay open before I go in the room.”

  “What does that tell us?”

  “That you’ll have some leeway to swoop into that room for me, scope it out, and come back. I can at least get a little intel without committing myself to death.”

  “Ooh, good thinking. Open it up again.”

  Tripp pushed the door open and let Bee fly by his head. She went all the way across to the end of the room and then turned in a circle to get a view of everything.

  He didn’t like the look on her face. It was surprise, maybe. Fear? He hoped not; if something scared Bee, it would have to be pretty gruesome.

  “Five seconds left,” he called out to her.

  “Coming.”

  She started to fly back through the room. She’d only got halfway when the window-like blocks of darkened stone on the opposite platform opened.

  Tripp saw shapes in the black of the alcoves. People, perhaps, or at least figures of some kind.

  Before he could get a better look, he saw four bolts smash into Bee, piercing her orb. Sparks shot in the air, and her golden dust burst out of the orb like a bag of exploding flour, sprinkling out through the room.

  He had to stop himself from running in. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t change it, so instead, he watched as the cracked pieces of her orb fell out the air, and then Bee was gone.

  With the display over and the room silent, the door slammed shut.

  CHAPTER 29

  Years ago, when Tripp’s parents shook their heads when he asked for a dog, cat, or even a gerbil, he’d decided that if they wouldn’t give him a pet, then he’d make one.

  So, he drew a picture of a schnauzer dog and called it Yuri, and that was his buddy. He and his paper pet were best buds, and they did everything together. Nothing wrong with that; sixteen years old was a rough age.

  He’d only been six, of course, not sixteen. But that weird year of his life had taught him one thing; it was possible for have real, genuine feelings for something that didn’t exist, evidenced by the sadness in his heart when Rory, his older brother, had flushed his paper schnauzer down the toilet.

  Asshole.

  Even so, Tripp wasn’t prepared for the swell of feelings that hit him as he stared at the closed door. Could orbs like Bee die? Had he heard that happen on a player’s stream before?

  He was getting a nagging feeling that it might be permanent, that this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.

  If he’d sent Bee in there to die…

  Now would have been a great time to have a tutorial menu system. If only Lucas and the other devs didn’t despise things like that with a passion. They believed that the more menus a player had to see, the less they were immersed. As such, NPC characters had taken the place of menu systems in Soulboxe. Players who paid for a higher-tier game pass got DF guides, like Bee.

  And Tripp had just seen his DF get exploded by arrows.

  “That’s room one? Konrad really isn’t playing around is he?”

  He wasn’t going to get any answers standing there. The best place to check was where he’d set his own respawn marker. If Bee was there, great. If not, he was going to have to figure this out.

  Thinking logically about things lulled his mind from a furious sprint into a walk, and so he headed out of Old Kimby and through Konrad’s shop until he was outside.

  He could hear the sound of furious hammer
ing from the adjoining work studio. Every few clangs of metal were met by grunting from the dwarf. Smoke churned out from a chimney on the roof, the charcoal mist seeping up toward Old Kimby and then higher, rising until it met the sky.

  Tripp left the shop and studio behind him, winding his way to Mountmend’s crowded plaza, through a warren of side-streets, and finally to the entrance gates.

  By the time he got there, he was tired and nervous, and he glanced around for signs of Bee. He saw an armored paladin player walking beside a bard, he saw rogues tiptoeing over the pavements as though they thought they were sneaking despite the presence of half a dozen nearby players making stealth impossible.

  “Come on, where are you, Bee?”

  She wasn’t going to show. Somehow, he’d managed to screw things up enough that he’d lost his guide orb. A heavy sense of doubt plunged into him.

  Soon, a shape swooped toward him and then Bee was there, whole and smiling again, right where Tripp had set his own respawn marker when he’d come back to the dwarf town.

  He felt the corners of his lips raise up, and he waved at her.

  “That was quite the experience,” said Bee.

  “Are you okay?”

  “A little shook-up. I don’t know.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m sore, exactly, but it’s like I can still feel it. My casing shattering, feeling my essence fall down.”

  This was new; he hadn’t expected that Bee would be programmed to feel something like pain.

  “I feel bad,” said Tripp.

  “Are you kidding? After experiencing that, I’m the one who has been a jerk. Always telling you to get into fights, to try to kill sleels. It was okay for me when I could stay out of range. I didn’t know it’d feel like that when you die.”

  “If I’d known what was in the room, I wouldn’t have sent you in.”

  “That was the whole point,” said Bee. “It wasn’t your fault. I just…I tell you what, Tripp; I have the herbalism skill, and I have 3 slots left to unlock. I’m going to use one of them on healing skill.”