The Arena

by Drew Seren

  “Sent you here, did they?” The little man gave a sly laugh. “There seems to be a good number of you. Are you all in need of my services, or just one?”

  “Just one of us,” Horc said. “Me. I have an axe I need worked on.”

  The Enchanter huffed. “An axe? Do I look like a blacksmith?”

  Horc shook his head and unslung his axe. “No, sir. I’ve already had the axe sharpened; what I need is to have it re-enchanted.” He held the axe out flat in his hands, presenting it to the little man.

  “Re-enchanted?” The little man stepped close and peered at the axe. “Ah yes, the Axe of Gnoll King. Not a really powerful weapon, once all its charges are used up. Had one in each crystal didn’t it?”

  “That’s it exactly.” Horc nodded.

  The Enchanter turned away. “Nothing I can do for you. Gnoll work is shoddy. Once it’s used up, the crystals aren’t stable enough to recharge. Now if Dwarves had made the weapon, then it could be revived. You don’t happen to have any Dwarven weapons on you, do you?” He turned back and studied the group for a moment. “No, nothing of Dwarven make. Elven, Human, and”—his eyes widened and seemed to glow in the soft shadow of his robe’s hood—“a Procyan Death Dagger. Very nice piece.”

  Tufkakes glared at the Enchanter. “Nobody touches my dagger. It’s a family heirloom.”

  The Enchanter waved him off. “It’s always very hard to get a Procyan to part with their weapons, particularly Procyan Thieves.”

  “I’m a Rogue, not a Thief.” Tufkakes puffed his chest out and stood straight.

  “Semantics.” The Enchanter turned and started walking into the light. “There is nothing I can do for you unless you come back with a better weapon.”

  Horc was torn about what to do. He wanted to pursue the little man and demand a better answer but doubted that would help. The Enchanter was an NPC, and the odds of physical violence accomplishing anything were minimal. Not to mention that IRL he wasn’t prone to beating people up to get them to do things for him.

  He sighed. “Well, I guess this was a waste of time. Let’s hit the trail and find our way to the coast and see what we can do about locating Steelmaiden and Slasher.”

  “Are you giving in too easy?” Tufkakes asked.

  “Not exactly,” Horc said and marched up the stairs, hoping the next time they needed to get information out of an NPC it would go easier. The thing was that Halfworld had already proved that there weren’t many things that went easily in the game.

  10

  The road leading from Dustbinnia to the coast was made of hard-packed sand and about as wide as a horse-drawn card A fair number of NPC travelers were trudging down the way, coming from the coast with wagons of fish, cloth, salt, and other goods, obviously bound for Dustbinnia and beyond.

  “I think this is the most sign of trade I’ve seen in the game,” Horc said as the party stepped off the road to let a cart laden with sturdy barrels go past.

  “Yeah, it’s like they’re rolling out a lot of updates while we’re in here playing,” Tufkakes agreed, turning to watch the wagon as it continued on its way. “I wonder what’s in those barrels and how hard it would be to pinch one.”

  “Since they don’t register when we study them, impossible to tell unless we actually get our hands on one,” Baladara replied. “Which I don’t want to take the time to do. We need to catch up to Slasher and Steelmaiden and see what’s going on.”

  “Do you guys actually know them IRL?” Tufkakes turned and they all continued walking down the road, which was a lot easier than going through some of the deeper sand that lay a few feet off its edge.

  “No. Well, we know Slasher’s one of the big wigs in the LA office,” Horc said, resisting the urge to stop and get the sand out of his boots. “Steelmaiden’s from the Dublin office, so we’ve never met either.”

  “But we’re wasting all this time trying to get to them.” Tufkakes shook his head. “Doesn’t really make sense.”

  Horc took a deep breath. When he stopped and thought about it, there did seem to be a slight flaw in their logic, except he wasn’t about to leave their friends, in game or not, to whatever fate they were suffering, if they were suffering, and he had no way to know one way or the other. “They’ve been standing by me while I’m stuck in this game. I don’t think Steelmaiden’s logged out at all. I know Slasher did talk with his wife and made arrangements at the office. We can tell something’s wrong on the server, so I owe it to them to be there for them like they’ve been here for me.”

  Tufkakes looked at the road and rubbed his big pointed ear for a moment. “You’re a good man, Horc. Not many people would worry about others like this. Most would say it’s just a game and they’ll be able to log out at some point.”

  Greensleeves shook his head. “That’s the point. They might not be able to, at least not without help. Something’s up with the AI. We need to find them and see what’s going on, then maybe we can figure out what Rick and the other developers need to do to get them back to right.”

  “Besides, they’re both in pods, not just VR gear. They’ll be having a lot more pain due to that. For all we know they’re being tortured,” Baladara chimed in. “I don’t know if Horc bothered to tell you, but the motto of this group is, ‘Friends don’t leave friends to die in a dungeon.’ They might not be in a dungeon—”

  “That we know of,” Horc added.

  Baladara shot him a dark look. “I was going to say that. But they’re obviously in a predicament, and we need to find them. If it’s too much for you, then we can let you go from the party and you can chase down that wagon to see what’s in the barrels and then figure out where you can pawn your loot.”

  Tufkakes shook his head. “No. I really think I lucked out when I failed to pick Horc’s pocket. You guys are a good bunch of people. I actually wish I knew you all in real life. You’d be good friends.”

  It felt like he jabbed a knife in Horc’s gut. Sure, he had a couple of people from work, like Mike—Baladara—who he hung out with from time to time, but there weren’t any he was really close with. Most of his friends were in games, but because of the way his favorite game Galactic Explorers worked, he didn’t need to make friends there either. He might not want to have a partner or roommate underfoot, but sometimes it might be nice to be able to sit around and enjoy the company of people the way he was doing in Halfworld. He knew if he wasn’t having so much fun, he’d be worried to death about what was going on with the pod and his life hanging in the balance. When they got out of the game, he wanted to hang out with Mike more, and maybe he’d make an effort to travel a bit and meet everyone else IRL.

  “I like to think we’d be good friends outside of the game too,” Greensleeves added with a smile.

  “Okay, when we get out of here, we get Total Immersion Systems to pay for all of us to have a luxury vacation somewhere,” Baladara quipped. “How about Disney? We can hang out and have real life adventures too.”

  “We’d have to bring the families if we did something like that,” Greensleeves said as they topped a rise and looked out onto even more rolling desert dunes.

  “Not if we tell them it’s a corporate thing,” Baladara said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Lisa, and I wouldn’t be suggesting this if she wasn’t asleep right now, but sometimes I need more down time from her and the kids than just escaping into a game.”

  “You didn’t tell us that she’s watching everything we do,” Horc said, suddenly feeling a little awkward at having a voyeur observing everything they did. Then when he thought more about that, he realized that the company had Miranda, their occasional guide and tech support agent, and Rick, and probably a whole lot more people paying attention to everything they did to make sure he didn’t get himself killed by accident.

  Baladara shrugged. “Since I’m still on gear, I’ve got everything routed to the main viewscreen in the living room so she can enjoy too. She’s not big into playing games, but she really gets into some of the graphics an
d likes watching me play. Every so often she wants to drive and I let her, as long as it’s not during something important.”

  “You know that’s a little weird sounding,” Tufkakes said. “If my kids were still at home and watching me play, I’d get majorly uncomfortable. But then if the kids were still home, I never would’ve been able to afford the pod, or been able to put it in one of their bedrooms.” He grinned mischievously.

  “A wife is a lot more intimate than kids are,” Baladara said. “I’m not sure I’d want my kids to watch me killing rabbits, squirrels, and wolves.”

  “You had a rabbit quest too?” Tufkakes asked.

  Baladara shook her head. “Nope. We started off with pigs. The squirrels were just to help get more points. Horc didn’t want to do the squirrels.”

  “Too easy and just seemed a bit too redneck to just run around killing sweet little innocent squirrels.” Horc still didn’t like the idea of attacking things that didn’t come at him first or didn’t have red letters above their heads.

  Greensleeves started laughing. “Dude, you don’t know squirrels IRL, do you. Nothing sweet or innocent about them. Total varmints. But I’m with you. I can’t handle just whacking them as I walk along. I like bigger, stronger prey.”

  Tufkakes shook his head again. “You guys aren’t like most of the gamers I’ve met and that’s a good thing.”

  Horc smiled to himself as they continued to hike along the road. They’d been lucky and fallen in with a good group. He hoped Slasher and Steelmaiden were okay. Even if he didn’t know them IRL, they had quickly become friends.

  Coconut Springs waited for them as they topped the last dune and spotted the coast, a lot closer than they’d been expecting. The seaport was only slightly larger than Tragiczan had been. There were a number of tents and huts that seemed to circle out from where the docks met the beach. But before the party could get there, they had to traverse a long winding trail down a fairly steep cliff.

  “I think someone needs to explain geography to the game designers,” Tufkakes said as they worked their way down the steep switchback. “If this was real life, I don’t think many of those wagons would be getting up the hill. Way too steep. Haven’t they heard about coastal plains? Sure, there are sea-side cliffs, but this is a bit extreme.”

  “Maybe if they built a bigger beach, the town could be larger,” Horc said, as he noticed the number of smaller dwellings that seemed to come out of the face of the cliff. He wondered how far into the cliff the city went and wished he would have time to explore it.

  “Or that right there might be a reason to keep everything small.” Greensleeves pointed toward the ocean. A huge dorsal fin rose out of the water, it was easily fifty or sixty feet tall.

  “Is that a shark or a whale of some kind?” Horc peered, but from just the fin, couldn’t tell for sure.

  Greensleeves shook his head. “Don’t know. Extremely large for either.”

  “Doesn’t have a tail following it,” Baladara said as she shielded her eyes and peered across the small harbor. “Probably a whale of some sort.”

  Horc turned from the water and stared at her. “And how do you know that?”

  Baladara lowered her hand and shrugged. “Don’t remember exactly, probably one of the cartoons my kids are always watching. Lots of strange facts thrown around on those things and you never know if it’s right or wrong.”

  “And since this is a game, it could be either,” Tufkakes finished for her. “I just know I’m not swimming in that water. No way, no how.”

  “I agree.” Horc shook his head and resumed trudging down the slope. “I’ve seen one-too-many giant shark movies to even think about swimming. Hopefully we can find a boat to wherever it is we need to go.”

  “When we get back to flattish ground, I’ll check with Rick and see if he can pinpoint us a local,” Greensleeves said, trailing Horc.

  “We’re going to have to do something nice for him when we get out of this game,” Horc said. “Since the wiki is still crap, he’s our lifeline.” Horc hated wandering around with little idea of where they were going. He was so used to established games that had full wikis and, in some cases entire books dedicated to how to play the game, Halfworld was proving to be a challenge in finding their way around and knowing what to expect from things like dungeons. He was trying to do his part and add to the wiki when he got a chance in hopes of helping other players out.

  “When we hit the beach, let’s empty bags while Greensleeves is checking in,” Baladara suggested. “That way we’re ready to roll once we know where we’re going, and what it’s going to take to get there.”

  “You two go find the vendors. I’ll stay here with Greensleeves while he checks with Rick.” Horc waved the other two toward town.

  Without another word, Baladara and Tufkakes headed on through the tents and huts.

  “Thanks for hanging back with me,” Greensleeves said as he walked off the path and leaned up against the granite cliff they’d just made it down. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”

  “No problem.” Horc leaned next to Greensleeves. “The wolf and I will be right here.”

  As if responding to Horc talking about him, Horc’s wolf companion came over, sat in front of him and whined.

  “What’s up, boy?” Horc asked and glanced at the wolf’s health bar, just to make sure he didn’t need to be fed.

  The wolf pushed his head into Horc’s hand, just like a real dog would.

  Horc grinned and stroked the wolf’s head. “You really are just like a real wolf, aren’t you? It’s really cool how much detail they put into you. I can’t just keep thinking of you as a wolf, from now on, you’re Wolf. I know it’s unoriginal, but hey, I’ve never had a pet IRL and that’s just easy for now.”

  A chill went through Horc as the green text over his companion’s head changed to Wolf. The AI was listening to him, or maybe because he was talking to Wolf, he was talking to it too. He shook off the feeling and for several minutes stood there, stroking the wolf’s head, while a couple of wagons reached the base of the cliff and started up the winding incline. The NPC drivers shouted at their horses and oxen, driving the animals hard to get to the top of the cliff.

  “Okay.” Greensleeves straightened and blinked. “They seem to have been stationary for a while now. Looks like they’re on an island due west of here.” He pointed out past where the creature with the gigantic fin was still patrolling the harbor. “We’re going to need to get a boat. Rick said if he wasn’t in the middle of a major discussion with the other programmers about the AI errors, he’d come and give us another ride.”

  “Wait a minute—” Horc’s pulse raced. “Errors? As in more than one?”

  Nodding, Greensleeves headed toward the pier. “Yeah. Seems our two party members aren’t the only players missing in the game. Since it’s just partied people who are reporting a problem, the game designers aren’t sure if there are more people affected or not.”

  “This doesn’t sound good,” Horc followed Greensleeves, trying to remember where he’d seen Baladara and Tufkakes disappear to. It had been into a hut past the last tent. If there were people disappearing in the game, that could spell major trouble for Total Immersion Systems if anything bad happened to them.

  “It’s not. Rick’s going to try to give us what help he can, but right now, it’s all developers on deck to try to get this sorted out.” Greensleeves pointed to where Baladara stood in front of a hut. “There they are.”

  “Okay.” Horc followed him over. There weren’t the crowds of people, both NPCs and players they’d encountered in some of the other cities, but Coconut Springs wasn’t that large either. Horc tried to pay attention to the people around him but didn’t see any players at all. When he stopped and thought about it, he hadn’t seen any players since Dustbinnia and worried they’d wandered too far from the areas other players had already been in. Somehow being the first to explore a place didn’t make him feel that wonderful, not when they still weren�
�t sure he’d survive if he died.

  “So, what’d you find out?” Baladara asked as they drew close enough to hear her.

  “We’re looking for a boat to Lone Palm Arena,” Greensleeves replied. “They’ve been static there for some time now.”

  “Lone Palm Arena?” Tufkakes came out of the hut, wiping his hands and grinning. “Doesn’t sound like a really friendly place.”

  “It’s an arena, and it shouldn’t even be open to players yet,” Greensleeves said. “I think that’s part of what’s got Rick and the others worried. Sure, there are NPCs there, and there are boats from several places, including Coconut Springs, but so far, no players have received quests to go there.”

  “So, there’s no reason for Slasher and Steelmaiden to be there,” Horc surmised.

  “Right. Something odd is definitely up, and if we’re going to find out what it is, we’re going to need to go there.” Greensleeves looked past Baladara. “Give us a minute to go in and empty our bags and we’ll be ready to find a boat.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t we go figure out where the boat leaves from while you two take care of your stuff?” Tufkakes offered. “Shouldn’t take you too long, as long as you don’t get him too confused.”

  Horc stared at the Rogue. “Too confused?”

  Tufkakes took Baladara’s arm. “You’ll see.”

  Deep lines crossed Baldara’s face, and she just shrugged. “See you two on the pier.”

  “I really hope Tufkakes didn’t do anything to this vendor,” Greensleeves said quietly as they entered the thatch hut by pushing a red, heavy, sand-covered blanket to the side.

  Horc followed close behind with his wolf at his heels. “I wonder if things like that are going to be one of the hazards to having a Rogue in the party.”

  “Depends on how well it’s played.” Greensleeves didn’t say anything else as he walked over and woke the Goblin clerk up. He was pretty deeply asleep and Greensleeves had to pinch his long green ear to get a response out of him. Once he was awake, he dealt with them quickly and they left the shop in a couple of minutes.