by Tom Larcombe
“Bowyer/Fletcher is the name of the skill you'll want. Make some arrows out of pine or something first. Make enough that you get the skill before trying for the bow. That way you'll have a better chance making the bow.”
Eddie slapped the heel of his hand to his forehead.
“I can't believe I didn't think of that. Thanks. But now I'll have to find some thin shafts of an easy to work wood and some feathers.”
“Better than wasting the good stuff though, right?”
Eddie nodded, then stood and headed outside.
Time to cheat a little, he thought.
There was a big pile of smaller branches near the firewood. They were intended to be used as kindling, but Eddie was sure he'd seen a bunch that were the right size, or close to it, to use as arrows. As he came around the back of the bunkhouse, Lucky came trotting out from behind the firewood and followed him.
Eddie found seventeen sticks that he thought might work well for arrows, but looking all over the farm, he didn't find a single feather. Lucky followed him around as he looked, and Eddie had a thought.
“Lucky, want to hunt some birds for me?”
The bobcat cocked her head at him.
“Follow me,” he said, then headed south towards the woods.
He was sure there was some specific type of feather that would be most useful here, but he was also sure that until he got to research more of the Bowyer/Fletcher skill in game he wouldn't know what types were best. For now, he just wanted anything so he could try to learn the skill.
“Hunt me down a bird Lucky,” he said.
The bobcat just stared at him.
Eddie shook his head, realizing that he'd been making the assumption that his cat could understand him. Instead of depending on the cat, he sat down and waited. He could hear the birds in the trees all around him, but the only ones he could see were tiny. Lucky sat beside him and began to purr as Eddie scratched her between the ears.
It only took a few minutes before the birds started moving again. As soon as he saw one land on the ground, he pulled out a throwing stick. He waited, hoping to find a larger one, and soon enough several more birds came down to the ground.
As he bent his arm getting ready to throw, a larger bird made its cautious way out of a tangle of brush. Eddie slammed his arm forward and once more his arm adjusted at the last moment. The stick slammed into the larger bird and it dropped. Then Lucky raced forward, darting into the tangle of brush that the bird had come out of.
Enemy slain: Partridge (level 1)
You have earned 13 ( +3 blessing) exp.
As quickly as the first message popped up, a second one did as well, identical to the first. A moment later, Lucky came trotting out holding another bird in her mouth. She dropped it at Eddie's feet, and this time he took it.
“Thank you Lucky, that's exactly what I was after,” he said.
She rubbed against his legs, purring up a storm. She didn't want to stop so when he tried to go get the one he'd hit, he nearly tripped over her. When she realized he was trying to move, she dropped behind him again, following along.
Looting the corpses netted him five feathers and one batch of partridge meat. He was taking the corpses with him though and he was sure he'd be able to get a lot more out of them with his hunting skill.
He took the corpses back to the bunkhouse, Lucky darting behind the woodpile once they got close. Looking around he realized that there just wasn't a good place to work on them. He'd rather not do it in the dirt so he moved to the edge of the porch on front of the bunkhouse and worked on them there. Using a lot of care to try to remove the feathers without damaging them, he had a decent bit of success.
Success:
You have butchered a Partridge corpse.
You have received: Clean Partridge carcass (1), Partridge feathers (18)
Are you sure you don't want to go looking for a pear tree next?
He shook his head at the game's snark, feeble as it might currently be, and tucked the goodies into his inventory.
The process of cleaning and plucking the birds took him nearly a half hour for the first bird, slightly less for the second. The second one yielded close the same results as the first had.
Now I need to get these shafts in shape. God, this stuff is gonna be crap, I know it already, but maybe after I get the skill I'll know what types of wood and feathers to use. At least that's how the other skills worked.
He sat down on the steps and started trying to smooth the pine shafts out with his utility knife. He was still working on them a couple of hours later when the guy that had been in the fields showed back up.
“Hey, Eddie, isn't it?”
Eddie nodded.
“Your turn in the field again. We went through all of us doing an hour each.”
“Sure, no problem. Let me just put this stuff away. Hey, would you take those shavings in next to the fireplace? Probably make it easier to light the fire tonight.”
The other man rolled his eyes, but squatted down and picked up a handful of shavings.
“Thanks,” Eddie said.
He headed out towards the field and a few moments later noticed Lucky tagging along behind.
That ought to make this easy. I know she'll hunt the bunnies if I tell her to, I wonder if I can let her know it's open season on any bunnies she sees?
As Eddie was patrolling the fields, he heard voices. He was far enough away from the bunkhouse that he was sure it wasn't from there. As he looked around, he noticed movement on the road just south of the farm. He'd crossed it repeatedly as he went to the forest to the south, but hadn't given it a second thought until now.
“I need to get some more arrows. I can't believe how often they break in this game,” one voice said.
“I'm out of luck though,” a female voice replied. “I need spell components and this village is so tiny they don't have most of what I need. The trading outpost has them sometimes, but they're so damned expensive out here.”
Eddie glanced towards the road and saw a group of five people, two woman and three men. One of the women was in chainmail while the other wore robes. Of the three men, two were in leather armor, one set showing studs of metal on it, while the third wore plate mail armor with a shield slung across his back.
They noticed him staring and the man in leather without studs waved mockingly as they walked down the road.
“Stupid farkin' NPCs out here in the Meadowlands,” the man said. “No quests, nothing worth taking, why is this area even here?”
“I heard,” the man in the studded leather said, “that this was going to be a starting area at one point, but it kind of got left by the wayside and never developed.”
“That's stupid, you'd need a decent sized town for a starting area, they've just got this tiny village we're headed towards.”
The man in the studded leather shrugged as the adventurers walked out of earshot.
There's a trading post somewhere near here? Eddie thought.
He heard a quiet whimper and looked down at Lucky. She was crouched by his feet, trying to make herself as concealed as possible from the road.
“What's wrong girl?”
The bobcat whimpered and stayed crouched until the adventurers were out of sight along the road. Once they were, she stood back up and her mood brightened. She dashed off along the rows of crops, then came running back. She repeated the process several times before Eddie gave up and followed her since it looked like she was trying to get him to do that.
When they reached the far end of the fields, he saw some boundary posts a little farther out past the fields. There was also a small structure right in front of one of the posts. It stood maybe waist high on him. The area immediately around the boundaries and the structure lacked the tall grass that surrounded it.
As Eddie stepped out of the tilled fields and towards the posts, several bunnies burst out of the tall grass, racing away from the fields. Instinctively he grabbed a throwing stick and threw. At the same time Lucky went chasing
after one of the other bunnies, bringing it back a minute later and dropping it at his feet.
He dismissed the experience notifications and picked up the corpses, looting them. Then he kept moving out towards the structure. When he got to it, he realized that he'd found the shrine he thought Paul had built here. Inside the small stone structure was a wooden plank with a high shine to it that had obviously been treated with something to keep it from weathering. Atop the plank was a wooden statue of a cat with the same shine. The interior of the stone structure had been dyed green somehow, he couldn't tell how but the stone was definitely green.
So, that's the shrine, he thought. I guess it affects the entire section of claimed land that it's in or something. Otherwise it would be more central.
Another experience notification caught his attention and he turned to see Lucky carrying back yet another dead bunny. She dropped it at his feet, then trotted off again.
He turned back to the shrine, trying to determine if there was anything special that made it an actual shrine as opposed to just a small display, but had no luck trying to figure it out.
When he stood up, Lucky was nowhere nearby. He scanned the area and found her digging furiously in the soil about a hundred feet away.
He whistled and caught her attention, but when he patted his leg, she went back to digging. Slightly taken aback, Eddie walked over to her, but stopped dead when he was about ten feet away.
She was digging at the edge of a hole in the ground. There was a beaten path leading out of the hole, towards the fields. The grass was trampled flat near the hole and tiny paths lead out of the trampled section, all branching out towards different sections of the field.
A bunny warren? he thought. That would explain why Lucky's digging there, if she was chasing one and it ran back into the hole...
His thoughts wandered off track as he looked back at the shrine. Then he looked at the hole again. He quickly pulled up his buffs list as well.
You must be kidding me. If the shrine has effects like the buff, than the rabbit warren is breeding at a higher rate than normal. Then she gave me the buff and they started breeding even faster.
He groaned out loud.
Not gonna tell Ross about this, he thought. I'll just get Karl to help me and we'll get this taken care of.
A glance at the sky told him there were a couple of hours of light left.
[group chat: Eddie – Hey Karl, I need some help here.]
[group chat: Karl – What is it?]
[group chat: Eddie – I think I found the source of the bunnies and why they're being such a problem also.]
[group chat: Karl – Cool, finished quest here we come. What do you need?]
[group chat: Eddie – Hit the tool shed, see if there's a shovel or a pick or something to dig with. Lucky's trying to dig it out but it's going slow.]
[group chat: Karl - Where are you, I'll be right there.]
[group chat: Eddie – Far end of the fields away from all the buildings.]
[group chat: Karl – OMW]
Karl got there about ten minutes later, carrying both a shovel and a pick. Eddie explained the situation to him, showing him the shrine and the suspected rabbit warren close to it. Lucky was still digging away, sometimes. She'd dig for a few minutes, then stop and lie down for a while before starting again.
Once Eddie and Karl started digging with their tools, Lucky sat back on her haunches looking satisfied, her attention focused on the hole.
They were trying to open up the tunnels from the top, making good headway on the entry tunnel, when Eddie heard Lucky yip and a moment later felt a blow to his leg. It felt like someone had thrown a rock at him, hard.
He glanced down and saw a bunny in the tunnel they'd just exposed, but this one was nearly twice as large as the ones they'd been killing, and there was a blunt knob of horn on the top of its head.
His health counter flashed in his vision.
You've been struck by a critical hit, damage X2
Health: 6/10
What the fuck? he thought. Evaluate.
Nubby (male):
Type: Animal
Level: 2
Armor: 10
Health 20 (+/-)
Attack: ?
You are currently unable to obtain more information about Nubby (male) with Evaluate.
It was too close to him for him to use his throwing sticks so he willed his staff out from his inventory. While he was doing that, the Nubby launched itself at him again, striking him in the leg and almost catching his knee. His health counter flashed again, this time in an orange color.
Health: 4/10
He was trying to compare the Nubby to the Bunnies he'd been killing, but realized that since the bunnies were such easy kills he'd never even bothered evaluating them. Giving up on that idea, he swung his staff at the Nubby, trying to keep it away so it couldn't hit him again. It didn't work very well, the Nubby sprang at him while he was recovering from a swing, striking him in the ankle this time.
It hurt, badly, and Eddie could barely keep his feet. His health counter flashed again, the numbers an ugly red.
Health: 2/10
“Hit it with the pick or something,” he called out to Karl, slightly panicked by his drop in health.
“I'm on it,” Karl said.
A moment later Eddie saw Karl's feet on the other side of the Nubby. Eddie swung and scored a solid hit on the Nubby, who hopped back, almost onto Karl's feet. The next thing Eddie saw was Karl's pair of sticks he'd been working on. They whipped down towards the ground, both of them impacting on the Nubby. The Nubby made a painful sounding squeak and went still.
Enemy slain: Nubby (level 2)
You have earned 33 (+8 blessing) exp.
“What the hell?” Eddie cursed, “Lucky, where were you?”
An identical experience message added itself to his panel.
The bobcat came over to him, another corpse in its mouth. This time Lucky looked a little worse for wear and Eddie noted that the corpse she was holding was another Nubby.
“This zero level bullshit has to go,” Eddie said furiously. “I just almost got killed by a damned rabbit. And really, Nubbies? These developers need to work on their creativity.”
Karl just chuckled gently.
“Dude, calm down. We got the experience. This is probably a lair type of thing. Those would be the warrior types or guards. But if it is a lair, there will be something even bigger in there at the end of it, the Boss.”
“I know how lairs work, I'm just pissed at all of this,” Eddie said.
“Well, I think we better lay off of this for now, maybe go back to it tomorrow morning?” Karl said.
Eddie pulled up his health bar, noting that he'd healed a single point so far and was at three of ten.
“Yeah, probably a good plan. Another fight like that and I'd be dead or unconscious.”
He picked up the corpse Lucky had dropped as well as the Nubby they'd killed.
Loot, he thought.
Each of the Nubbies provided a pelt, larger than those from the bunnies, a chunk of meat nearly twice the size of those from the bunnies, and a Nubby horn. He pulled a horn out from his inventory and looked at it.
“Any use for these?” he asked Karl.
“Let me see one.”
Karl wrapped his hand around it and found that the horn was just slightly longer than his fist, protruding on either side.
“Yeah, I can work this into a handle on one of my Kali sticks, if I can figure out how to do it.”
“Here's another one then, you can do both if you figure it out. We got a couple of larger pelts and some meat too.”
Eddie tossed the second horn to Karl, who caught it and tucked both into his inventory.
“Let's get out of here before we get ambushed by another Nubby,” Eddie said.
~ ~ ~
Chapter Nine
Aaron looked over his shoulder at Mr. Greenshaw who stood there, hovering over him.
“S
o, what have you found?” Mr. Greenshaw asked.
Aaron looked back down at the lines of code in front of him.
“Someone is doing unauthorized experimentation with Long Term Immersion. They're experimenting on these individuals that are experiencing the anomalies. Something about the code they're using is hogging CPU cycles on the server running the zone the individuals are in, maxing the CPU for that server out. If Freyja, I mean the AI watching over that area, hadn't snapped them out of it, they would've crashed that server. The server would've passed the tasks on to another one when it crashed and we could potentially have had a domino effect take out all the servers for the world.”
“In English boy,” Mr. Greenshaw said.
Aaron sighed, he thought he'd already simplified the explanation enough.
“Someone hacked us,” Aaron said, “they stole our code, and changed it somehow. They're experimenting with the changed code live in Light Online and causing instability in the servers. There is a possibility that the altered code could crash the game.”
“So, fix it!” Mr. Greenshaw demanded.
“Find me where they're hosting the changed code and I can try. I can't even trace their code right now. It's not on our machines.”
“So, go talk to these individuals. The ones you claim are the experiment. See what they can tell you, they can at least give you the physical location of their real bodies, right? Get me that address and I'll get some men over there to find out what's going on, maybe find that code you want too.”
Aaron sighed heavily.
“Yes sir, Mr. Greenshaw.”
~ ~ ~
Eddie gave up, he could barely keep his eyes open any longer. He'd managed to whittle down five of the branches he'd gotten into arrow shafts. He'd yet to try to attach any fletching, but he needed to sleep. He just wasn't sure that he could take the dream again if he fell into it.
Freyja's been keeping a close eye on us, so I'm sure if that happens again she'll wake me, he thought.
He crawled into bed, looking forward to however much sleep he could get. They'd discussed it among themselves and the six farmers had decided one hour at a time in the fields was a bad plan. Now they were doing four hour shifts, and each person would take one a day. Eddie's next shift wasn't until late afternoon tomorrow, so he had plenty of time to sleep.