by Holly Lisle
And then I realize that this can’t be what I’m doing today, because I have to find out what the philosopher discovered, and nowhere on his list was Get Bigger Breasts or Learn What Makes Women Go ‘Whee!’
With real regret — and a promise to myself that I will play this game on my own time someday — I select male.
I leave the body mostly stock. Muscle up a little, make one thing bigger because, well, I can. Give myself a clean-shaven face and short hair rather than the long beard and long hair of the stock character.
Pick the first clothes that show up on the screen. Brown shirt, heavy blue pants, pointy-toed boots, vest, big-brimmed hat. The game recommends the Leather Chaps as a protective gear upgrade, and states that those are included in the Gunslinger Moon add-on.
I select them, and they appear over my pants.
I receive a gun, and instantly find myself in a shooting gallery where I learn how to use it.
I receive a horse, and appear in an outdoor paddock in which to ride it, and find myself in a quick tutorial on what things are called. Saddle, bridle, spurs, reins.
The horse, it turns out, is a member of that vile tribe of enormous monsters that threw me to the ground and left me in the dirt. Not a close relative, though. That horse had been big and glossy and fast. And a real bastard for dumping me and running away. This one is shorter, slow, scruffy, skinny, and I’m guessing really old. It moves like it’s tired. And bored. And it looks at me like it hates me.
I ride it in a circle around the paddock, learning to make it turn left and right, go and stop, and stay where I put it. When I want to park it, I have to drop the reins on the ground, which I’m told is called ground tying, which annoys me because nothing is tied to anything, but apparently if I pretend the horse is tied to the ground, the horse is willing to pretend that, too.
Well, it’s a game, right?
And then I’m given the option to play the tutorial mission: Rats in the Barn.
Before I can play the tutorial mission, I have to select a game name, and save my character.
I look at the game’s “Suggestions for Historically Correct Old Earth Cowboy Names,” and name my character Hunter Studly.
Chapter Six
Hunter Studly
Words flash in the air in front of me: Rats In the Barn. Beginning mission now.
“Hunter Studly,” Retha says. “In your first mission, you will learn to identify enemies and shoot moving targets, earn cash, buy things available in the game world, and make decisions that will affect your character’s ability, personality, and ethics system for the rest of the game.
“Your Ability rank is scored by how skilled your character is at important game skills: Ridin’, ropin’, trackin’, shootin’, earning cash, campfire cookin’, and makin’ whoopee.
“Careful use of each skill with a successful outcome will automatically level up that skill.
“Your Personality rank is determined by whether your actions are Kind or Cruel, Funny or Nasty, Honest or Lying, Reasonable or Unreasonable.
“During missions, you will be presented with options, not always binary, and you will have to choose from the options presented or make up an option of your own. The outcomes of your choices will form your character’s personality, and will determine how other characters, both friends and strangers, react upon meeting you and upon getting to know you.”
“Your Ethics rank is based on the outcomes of situations in which your character must make difficult choices. Your ethics will result in your character’s Reputation, which can be Heroic, Brave, Good, Neutral, Bad, Cowardly, or Dastardly.
“If you discover you have made a mistake that would cause your character to become someone you do not wish to play, you can say Restart Mission from Beginning. You will lose all progress you’ve made on the mission as well as any items or money you have earned in the mission to that point, but you will also remove all changes in your abilities, personality, and ethics.
“Finally,” she says, “at any time you can request a replay of this tutorial, ask me for more help, ask me for no help, or call up the game menu. Are you ready to begin?”
“Yes,” I say.
The mirror and the dusty room disappear, and I am standing on a wide street of packed dirt. To my left and right are shabby wood buildings fronted by covered, raised wooden boardwalks. Each building has a sign above it, and most of them mean nothing to me. Farrier, Bank, Dry Goods, Saloon, New Missions, Post Office, The Happy Madame, Rooms.
New Missions is right beside me on my right. I walk over, find the door closed and padlocked. A note hangs on the door.
You haven’t kilt the rats in
the barn yet, sonny.
Come back when yer not
so goldurned green.
— Snarky Bitterman
“How do I find the barn?” I mutter, and Retha’s voice makes me jump.
“The first objective of the game is to explore the area in which you start out and meet the people around you. In role-playing games, you receive missions from Non-Player Characters, or NPCs, and return to them when you have succeeded to collect the rewards they have promised you.”
The disembodied voice has got to go. “Am I going to have trouble getting you back again if I request ‘no help?’” I ask.
“No. Just say my name, or ‘I need help’ and I’ll give you any level of help you request, including cheats should you specifically ask for them.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. “Thanks, Retha. No help.”
And just like that, I’m alone in an old town in the midday heat. Horses stand in the streets, ground tied in front of rails and long thin boxes full of water. Behind them are the covered boardwalks and the buildings.
The place is mostly quiet, but I do hear music coming out of The Happy Madame.
According to Retha, I’m supposed to meet the locals, and Bashtyk Nokyd has named The Happy Madame as something important to his plan to free slaves.
I walk over, hearing my spurs jingling with each step, smelling dust and dry heat and animal waste, a smell I know well from my years in a PHTF village. When I step onto the boardwalk and feel the cooler air beneath the shade, I take a deep breath and sigh.
It’s surprisingly pleasant.
The doors to The Happy Madame are painted bright red, and they look like they swing on hinges, but there’s a note hanging on the right one.
Darlin’, ‘round here
you pay to play.
Come back when you’ve got
some money, honey.
— Miss Dolly Boombah
“What do I have to do to actually play this game?” I growl.
And this time, no voice answers me.
I grin. I have successfully navigated my way to talking to myself in a Senso game.
Flush with my success, I walk down the street and start trying to open doors. I’m playing the game.
Turns out, the Farrier building is a barn with stalls and shelves and big bales of hay and a big open space in the middle.
Turns out, the farrier, the guy who makes horse shoes and things out of metal for the townsfolk, has a problem with rats.
Turns out he wants me to come back after dark and shoot them all, but he also wants me to be careful because he thinks there might be something else in the barn.
He’ll pay me one gold coin per rat.
“But you can’t take a lantern in there,” he tells me. “Because light will scare them off, and they’ll just come back later.”
If I find something else, either living or dead, he may pay me for that, too.
So I come back after dark, and the inside of the barn is a black hole that makes my skin crawl. But as I step inside, there’s enough moonlight to let me see.
A pair of eyes glows bright red, and something snarls.
Red glow, I discovered in the intro, is an enemy.
I shoot between the eyes and the glow disappears. To my right I hear another snarl, and then to the left, and I
shoot, and shoot, and shoot, backing as I do, trying to get clear of the barn, because the gun only holds six bullets, and it reloads slowly.
I do the necessary wrist snap to reload, and something bites me hard just above the knee, and I scream in pain, and keep shooting.
I’m out of the barn now, in the street, and the remaining rats — I lose count and stop trying. There are a lot of them, each of them lean and mean and knee high as they stalk toward me, growling and hissing and snarling.
I shoot, shoot, but they charge and overrun me, and there’s a moment of terrible pain.
And I appear back at the barn door. The moon overhead is bright.
I’m shaking. I cannot believe how big the rats were, or how vicious, or that they seemed to be working together.
One of me, I think. Somewhere between seven and a hundred of them.
If I do the same thing I did the first time, I’m going to get the same results.
I study the barn. There’s a ladder that goes up the outside to the roof.
There was, I recall, a faint pale glow of moonlight coming in through the back of the barn.
The advantage of a gun, I recall from the game tutorial, is that it allows the player to use the strategy of staying out of reach of enemies.
On the barn floor is in reach of enemies. My first game death demonstrated that. Be out of reach is my objective.
I climb the ladder.
There’s a hatch in the roof. I open the hatch. There’s a small shelf I could climb onto and use. Occupying the shelf is a rat that’s looking right at me. The red glow of the eyes warns me.
But it’s just one rat, it takes up most of the shelf, and the other rats are all below, milling around on the barn floor and various platforms.
I shoot the rat, drop onto the platform, kick the rat to the barn floor.
The other rats attack it and start eating it.
I shoot them, reload, shoot them, reload, shoot them.
There were fourteen on the floor, plus the one I’d killed on the shelf.
Bright white letters appear in the air in front of me.
You have killed all the rats. Use save point?
“Use save point,” I say.
Progress saved.
Off to my right, something makes a low, rumbling sound. This isn’t a hissy little rat snarl. This is something big.
I look around, and on a shelf level with me and halfway across the barn, I see two big eyes blink, glowing yellow.
Green glows mean friendly. Red glows indicate enemies.
Yellow glows, I remember, are neutral. They could become friends, they could become enemies.
The farrier has offered to pay me for anything I kill.
But… yellow means whatever that thing over there is, it could become a friend.
I realize my hands are shaking. Those eyes are big and far apart, and the next sound the creature makes is a low, rumbling growl.
Yellow. The eyes are yellow.
I remember that I have one portion of Uncooked Meat in my pack.
I pull it out, and throw it in the direction of the eyes.
With a limping motion, something big goes after the meat.
I hear crunching. And then the eyes look at me.
They’ve turned green.
The big shadow moves slowly down to the barn floor and starts eating the dead rats.
After a moment’s hesitation — well, several moments — I find a ladder inside that lets me climb down to the floor of the barn, and make my way down to discover what sort of friend I’ve made.
I’m lucky I don’t die of fright. I’ve seen cats. There were cats on the PHTF world where I grew up. They killed rats.
The creature I’ve befriended is to cats on that PHTF world what the game rats are to the real rats I remembered.
Standing on all fours, its head comes up to the middle of my chest. It studies me, not blinking, then closes its eyes and butts me in the chest with its head.
I stagger a little, but the move isn’t aggressive. It’s friendly. I carefully touch its head, and it sighs. I scratch behind its ears. It … purrs, if the sound of mountains grinding against each other could be called a purr.
You have made an ally, the Giant Cat. Save progress?
“Save progress,” I say. “Then exit game.”
Chapter Seven
Hunter Studly
I’m back in Bashtyk Nokyd’s quarters.
Hirrin and Tarn are both asleep on cots. A third empty cot awaits me.
I’m tired for real, I’m hungry for real, and according to Retha, my next step after completing the introductory mission is to request a Play-Together game.
I need civilization — a good, sturdy cot, civilized reconsta, and a shower before I go back to the giant rats, the giant cat, the grumpy, bony farrier, the little gun, and the slow, mean horse.
I collapse into the cot without any of those things, and awake to Tarn poking me in the ribs.
“What?” I mutter.
“You were in that unit all day,” he said. “How could you be tired?”
“I’m tempted to send you in,” I growl. “I got killed once yesterday. My progress board says Killed and eaten by giant rats. You want to trade places?”
He’s looking at me to see if I’m joking. I can see the moment when he realizes I’m not. “People do what you’re doing for fun?”
“I haven’t found a fun part yet,” I say. And then realize that isn’t true. I beat the rats by outthinking them. That was fun. And I think of the giant cat purring and butting his head against my chest so I could pet him. Also fun.
I don’t say that, because all of a sudden I’m really happy I ended up with the work no one wanted. I don’t want to trade places with Tarn, even though he might have a better chance of finding something important than I do.
I want to go back in and find out what I get to do next.
I rush through food, debate skipping the shower, then shower because if I don’t my roommates will eventually start to resent me, and go back into the game.
Retha greets me. “Welcome back, Hunter Studly. What game would you like to play?”
“Cowboys Versus BEMs,” I say.
“Would you like to create a character, return to the most recent save, earlier saves, a replay, or a play-together. You must complete your intro mission to join a play-together.”
“I finished the objectives,” I say.
And before me, the objectives appear.
Rats In the Barn. Mission Progress:
Kill the Rats — COMPLETED
Deal with the Mystery Creature — COMPLETED
Secret Bonus Mission: Befriend the Mystery Creature — COMPLETED
Turn in bounties to Farrier — INCOMPLETE
“You can see the status of your missions at any time by saying, ‘Show me Missions,’” Retha says.
“Thanks, Retha,” I say. “I need to go back in to turn in my bounties, then, and after that I want to start the play-together you recommended.”
And I find myself standing in front of the farrier. It’s daylight, a few townspeople are walking on the boardwalks, but nothing much is going on.
The giant cat is standing on my right, and fifteen rat tails hang from my left hand.
The farrier says, “You did very well. You get fifteen gold pieces for the rats. They got big this year, didn’t they?”
“They did,” I agree.
“And you found out what else was in my barn.” He looks at the cat. “I have a healing salve for three gold that will heal him of the rat bites that have crippled him. Or I can buy him from you for thirty gold. If he were healthy, he could keep the rats out of my barn.”
I look over at the cat, remembering he was limping the night before. He has bites all over, and he’s thin.
I think about selling him to the farrier, but then I remember him butting my chest with his head, and how much I liked his purring.
“I’ll take the salve,” I say, and pay the farrier.
Salve appears in a little glowing box to my right marked Inventory - (To close inventory, Say Close Inventory)
“To use the salve on the cat, say, ‘Use salve on cat,’” the farrier tells me. “And if you find another giant cat or a giant kitten that needs a rescue, I’ll pay you full price,” he says. “Thirty gold for either one”
“I’ll keep an eye open,” I tell him.
And in front of me, the words appear:
Mission added: Cats and Kittens - 30 gold, Farrier
I say, “Use salve on cat.”
The cat is instantly healthy and glossy. Pretty good salve, I think.
* * *
Rats In the Barn - 15 gold — COMPLETED
Secret Bonus Mission: Heal the Giant Cat -3 gold — COMPLETED
As I read the words, the town and the street freeze.
“Do you still wish a play-together to help you find the answer to your questions?” Retha asks.
“I do,” I say.
And glowing words replace the image of the town.
Joining…
Player…
In…
Progress…
And suddenly I’m sitting on a smooth rock on baked dirt with a hint of sunlight creeping up the horizon.
The smells of coffee and what I’m guessing will be remarkably good Baconsta fill the air. The big cat, curled up next to me, yawns, stretches, and rubs his head against my chin.
“Howdy, pardner! I’m Long Tall Ted!” To my left, a man hunkers over the fire, tending coffee and a skillet.
Over his head, there’s a floating blue dot and the words Long Tall Ted.
He grins, his eyes crinkling, his smile somewhat difficult to see behind his thick broom of a mustache.
He’s young and lanky, and he radiates a happiness that I’m starting to understand. “Glad you showed up,” he tells me. “I’ve been alone out here for a while. Be nice to ride out with a partner again.”
“Your name is floating over your head,” I say.