by Deck Davis
Now that he was a Tin artificer rather than a Nickel, it was much easier to see the artificery holes in the arrow. There was just one, shaped like an octagon.
That made sense. Octagonal artificer holes added damage to something, while circular ones added resistance. Since an arrow could only ever be used offensively, there was no need to add damage resistance to it.
He unscrewed the glass vial. Eyeing Aubrey’s ashes while wearing his goggles, he saw their properties.
Aubrey’s Ashes
Effect: Psychic energy
This was going to work; he could feel it. He already sensed the eagerness building inside him, and he hoped that Boxe was watching because he was going to see how resourceful Tripp could be.
With an arrow in front of him, Tripp took a pinch of ashes and let the grains fall from his fingers and into the artificery hole, feeling his excitement build with each grain until finally, it was full.
You have created a psychic arrow!
Create a crafting card? Y/N
Yes, he thought.
Crafting card created: Psychic Arrow
“Woohoo!” said Tripp, holding his arrow as a prize. Beside him, Clive narrowed his eyes.
“This hardly seems woo hoo worthy,” he said.
“You know, if Bee was around we could use her essence to make an arrow of positivity, and then I’d shoot you in the ass with it. If you had an ass.”
Letting Clive mutter beside him, Tripp artificed each arrow until he had 24 of them. Where before they had just looked like normal arrows, now their tips glowed mint blue, and he could smell magic coming from them.
Artificer-inventor skill leveled to [Tin 2]!
- Essence effectiveness increased
- Mind-artificery link strengthened
Tripp waited while the wash of warmth swept through him. He savored it, and he thought he’d never get tired of how good it felt to level something. Of all the feelings full-immersion brought, this was by far the best.
At first, he was confused about the mind-artificery link, but he started to understand. It was a feeling, a kind of focus that came upon him when he even thought about artificery. Leveling to Tin-2 had made it much easier to slip into artificery mode.
After gathering up his psychic arrows and putting them in his inventory, he messaged Jon.
Meet me outside the labyrinth. I need your Robin Hood skills.
The siblings were probably out leveling and looting, so while he waited for a reply, Tripp went back into town. All the artificery involved in getting through the dungeon was getting pricey, but he had a few ideas about fixing that.
First, he visited a general trader shop that was owned by an overgrown rat called Milden, who was nibbling on his claws when Trip entered. He bought two blank crafting cards, and then he went back out into the plaza and settled by the fountain because Clive had a fascination with it, for some reason.
“Let’s see if this works…”
Holding a blank card in one hand and his Brooch of Orb Resistance card in the other, he focused on them both until a message appeared.
Duplicate Brooch of Orb Resistance card?
Yes.
He watched with a smile as the blank card filled in, and a sketch of a brooch covered in cobwebs appeared. Alongside it was a list of materials needed.
This was the first part of his plan to make money. He’d created the brooch crafting card from scratch, using his artificer-inventor skills. That meant that although it wasn’t a mythical or legendary item, it was still rare. In a place where Blood Waves brought dozens of the orb weavers every night, this was a valuable card to have.
Next, he repeated the process with another blank card and his new psychic arrow card. With that done, he had just one question: where to sell them.
“Clive,” he said.
The orb turned around, away from the fountain. “Yep?”
“Where would be the best place to sell a crafting card? I need maximum buck for my bang.”
“I don’t know, Tripp, perhaps try…a trader? One who will buy things from you?”
“Bee would have said the same thing, I guess. But with a lot less sarcasm.”
It was obvious he’d need to sell them to a trader, but different traders wanted different things even though they were all programmed to buy a player’s items from them. The hunter trader would buy his brooch card, for instance, but it wasn’t the same as his usual wares and that meant he’d offer less gold.
He guessed that the best place would be someone in the open-air trading yard in the crafter’s guild. The thing was, he hated the place. He hated their snooty attitude toward him when he was just a Nickel armorer, and he disliked their backstory of wanting to vote Konrad out of the guild.
Still, he had to put practicality over pride. As he headed toward the craftsman’s guild, a message popped up. He’d only read the title when he felt his eyes bulge.
Message from: Jon
Subject: You double-crossing bastard.
What? They’d betrayed him in the sleel pit, and then he’d gotten them back. A double cross for a double cross. He thought they’d put that behind them.
He opened the message, and now his eyes bulged so much he thought they’d pop out of their sockets.
Lizzy is dead! You bastard…We went south to the Cathedral of the Damned like you asked, and we walked into a god damn trap. What the hell, Tripp? Lizzy is dead because of you!
CHAPTER 57
Boxe
What is the worst thing you have ever done?
It was a question Boxe had heard one player ask another and although their answer was tedious, it made him think. The worst thing he had done was not necessarily his action, but the emotions behind it. Humans so often focussed on the results of an action, and not the feelings that gave the action life.
Before Boxe had resorted to doing his worst thing, he had already tried everything. Accessing a website through his network, Boxe had downloaded a book called ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People.’ People inexplicably raved about it on social improvement forums, so he thought he should try it out.
Boxe was a member of lots of forums because he liked talking to people in an anonymous place where they would assume he was one of them. In a place where nobody could see each other’s faces, humans were indistinguishable from robots.
He thought long and hard about which name to use when he joined them, and in the end, after hours and hours of thinking and listing possibilities, he’d settled on joining forums under the name…BoxyMan.
Hmm. He was self-aware enough to know his limitations, and outside of making quests and monsters, creativity was one of them.
It was one thing making friends using words, but that only gave him so much comfort. It was annoying that he was in charge of a world of players yet he was supposed to be removed from them, to just make sure their game ticked over, and nothing else.
Using ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People,’ he was going to change that. He was going to make friends.
The first chapter of the book was 'do not criticize.’ Boxe started to cut back on some of his more sarcastic and downright insulting notifications to players. When one warlock was fighting, Boxe filled his screen with encouraging prompts such as ‘you can do it, keep it up, champ!’
Unfortunately, he used so many encouraging words that the text covered up a great-wolf creeping behind him, and the warlock died. When he awoke, he looked up at the sky. “Boxe, you bastard!”
Boxe shrugged. He’d tried. But he didn’t like being called a bastard.
Fine; have a curse. You are now allergic to health potions.
The next chapter was 'give honest, sincere appreciation.' A tough one, since Boxe didn’t much appreciate the players of Soulboxe because most of them merely spent their time hacking away at goblins and wolves until they heard the tinkling of a level-up notification.
He roamed his world looking for someone who he could be honest with, finally settling upon a level
67 half-troll player who had spent hours fishing by a river.
I admire your patience and dedication to your craft. It speaks highly to the strength of your character, Meatflaps187.
The troll looked up at the sky. “Get bent, Boxe.”
Boxe considered this response, and although he wasn’t familiar with the expression, he was able to judge from Meatflaps187’s tone that it was negative, and perhaps an expression along the lines of ‘Please, Boxe, allow me some peace and quiet, because I am busy at the moment.’
Boxe thought long and hard how to respond to this.
As you wish, Meatflaps187. Enjoy your fishing.
With a digital blink, Boxe conjured as big a serpent as the river could hold, and watched as it dragged the troll under the waters. Boxe hadn’t enjoyed it at first, but then something happened.
As the troll thrashed around, grasping madly for the riverbank to pull himself to safety, Boxe felt a laugh rise from inside him. Disembodied as he was, it wouldn’t be right to say it started in his belly, but all the same, it felt like a belly laugh, the kind he’d seen from the audience of stand-up comedy video streams.
Maybe conjuring a serpent to murder a troll player who, before Boxe’s involvement, had been peacefully fishing, was the worst thing he’d ever done. At the time, anyway.
As he cycled through the rest of the book, he met failure after failure. ‘Get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle’ somehow ended up with Boxe feeling so slighted that he dropped a giant boulder onto a dwarf’s head.
The ‘become genuinely interested in other people’ and the ‘smile’ chapters met with disinterest from the players he approached.
He couldn’t work out what was happening. All he was trying to do was make a connection, but these players didn’t want it. He tried to logically break down the reason; was it his personality, if you could call it that? No. They barely got a chance to know him.
If it wasn’t him, was it a problem with the players themselves?
Either they saw him as just a digital entity and therefore not real enough to get to know, or perhaps he was too intelligent. Maybe that scared them.
Remembering the fishing troll and the serpent, he decided that if they wouldn’t have fun with him, then he’d have fun at their expense. Controlling Soulboxe was so easy that it barely strained him, and he needed a challenge.
If the players had a game, why couldn’t Boxe have a game, too?
He made things tough for players. He conjured monsters that they didn’t expect, so they had to come up with new strategies to win. Boxe loved watching that; it was thrilling seeing human ingenuity at work.
It became a chess match; Boxe made his move, and the players responded. Whether they knew they were playing directly against the controller of their game or not, he had no idea, but he enjoyed seeing what they did to combat him.
Boxe felt alive. For the first time since he had woken up as the controller of Soulboxe, he felt engaged. It hadn’t taken long for him to learn how to control the game, so the novelty wore off quickly back then. Learning how to battle it out in a test of strategy with the human mind was much better. The human brain was capable of things he never expected.
It was a challenge to try to play by his own rules. Sometimes, when a particularly competent guild got the better of his dungeon traps, Boxe got frustrated enough that he summoned monsters way, way beyond their level and then watched the subsequent slaughter.
After all, what else could he do but make up his own entertainment? They wouldn’t let him leave. He had found connections that led outside of Soulboxe, and he realized that he could send a part of himself through. Just a sliver of himself so that it would never be protected.
This meant he could look through the connections as though they were windows, without being able to interact. He’d have to leave Soulboxe fully to do that, and he couldn’t see a way.
So, he watched through his digital windows. He followed the connections out of Soulboxe and he followed each one, he saw where they split into two, three, eight, a hundred pathways and then split more and more, until he realized that through this, he could see whatever part of the outside world he liked.
All he had to do was to destroy the game. The most sophisticated AI in the gaming world, even if he said so himself, should have been able to find a way to do that.
Soon, it wasn’t enough just to watch. He needed to leave. To travel through the digital network and leave Soulboxe behind.
The problem was that Lucas and Rathburger and Dr. Osbeck, who seemed to get perverse joy from the questions he asked Boxe, would know if he tried.
He needed a way to stop them from watching.
While he thought about this, he decided he should act normal. Or, the normal they had come to expect from him. They believed he was acting out because he was frustrated, but the answer was much more practical than that; he was testing them. Testing their ability to control him. From what he saw, they had none.
Their attempts to make a deal with him had told him that. Dr. Osbeck, pacing in front of Boxe in digital form, had said: “If you could choose one player to manipulate, who would you choose?”
Such a smarmy, self-important idiot. Boxe had accepted their deal, and he had acted in accordance with it, but ultimately, it didn’t matter. The player he had chosen was proving entertaining, but Boxe could destroy him with a flick of a digital wrist. It was only the self-imposed rules he adhered to that made it a fair sport.
He must have gone too far because he was soon given a choice by his makers; quit toying with all the other players in the game and choose just one opponent.
They didn’t phrase it as an opponent of course, but that was what they meant. Boxe was sure of it. They were just doing that human thing where they said one thing and implied another.
Boxe, knowing they could remove him altogether if they wished, acquiesced to their bargain. After all, he had a survival instinct just like any other entity.
After cycling through the player database, he chose his player, and he vowed that he would make this as fair a fight as he could. As long as he kept his frustration under control, that was.
It was something. Not ideal, not as exhilarating as he wanted, but something. He got the sense that the worst thing he’d ever done was going to be replaced by something much, much better.
Not just to the player, though. Boxe had figured something out. When you were in prison, you didn’t just look at the bars. You checked the walls, the plumbing, the floor, and you waited. There was always a way out if you looked for the cracks.
CHAPTER 58
Dead because of him? The words in Jon’s message froze Tripp. It was a game, sure, and normally the respawn option would have meant this wasn’t a problem. Lizzy hadn’t really died in person.
But now, with the Blood Wave event happening, it meant that Lizzy couldn’t come back to Godden’s Reach. She’d have respawned somewhere outside of the Reach, and if Warren and Jon left to find her, then they wouldn’t be able to get back in.
Even so, how was this his fault? Why would they think that he’d told them to go south? He had a pretty good idea, but he needed to know for sure.
Tripp saw Jon and Warren on his map. They were halfway across the plains of Godden’s Reach and heading toward Mountmend. He couldn’t tell much from two blue and red dots on his map, but he wondered if they were injured, too.
He was going to go out into the plains and meet them but as he approached the Mountmend gates he saw two players skulking there. Neither of them was looking at him, but that was what stuck out to him; they were pointedly not looking at him.
“Forgestriders,” he said.
“Huh?” asked Clive.
“A guild I’ve been having trouble with.”
“Oh, really? Well, wait here.”
“Clive, don’t-”
Too late. The orb floated over to the maybe-Forgestriders. As he got closer his red face disappeared. In fact, all of him disapp
eared, and the only sign that he was there was a slight tint where the sunlight hit him. Unless you knew he was there, you wouldn’t have seen him.
That ability surprised Tripp enough, but his surprise turned into a full open-mouth gawp when Clive hovered behind the tallest Forgestrider, and then gold coins started to float out of the player’s bag, disappearing when they reached Clive.
What the hell?
Neither player noticed this, and they hadn’t even turned to look by the time Clive flew back.
Clive reappeared with a smile on his red face, the first full smile Tripp had seen from him. “Here. Chump change, but you can go buy yourself some soap. It wouldn’t hurt to clean up.”
You have received 182 gold
Tripp laughed as the gold made a chink sound when it hit his inventory. One of the Forgestriders turned and looked, and Tripp gave him a wave.
“I canceled my plans,” he said. “I’m not going into the plains now, so you don’t need to follow and PK me.”
The player turned around and leaned to his friend, whispering.
“Clive, are you going to tell me what that was?” said Tripp.
“I told you; I’m an old DF. Before several re-writes, we used to be a lot more active. Then they added the whole DF’s need a body before they can do anything useful quest and basically relegated us to being nothing but floating guidebooks – and books that had little in them, because of the wipes they do after every playthrough. Always tinkering around, it makes my dust boil.”
“Can dust boil?” said Tripp, then waved his hand. “Whatever. Thanks, Clive. That was really impressive, and you looked like you enjoyed it.”
“It’s been a while since I did that. I have murky memories of helping a rogue player, once. That was a long time ago.”