Owl and the Japanese Circus

by Kristi Charish

  Nadya helped me into my room and dropped me on my bed. “Are you going to be OK?”

  I nodded.

  She crossed her arms and glared at me. “Wonderful. Can you tell me what the hell that was all about?”

  I sat up. It hurt. “I had to make a stand with them, otherwise they’ll never think of me as more than a lowly human servant. Mouthing off”—I managed a shrug—“showed them I wasn’t a pushover, and that I’d rather die than cower.”

  “How does that help you?”

  I shook my head and wrapped the comforter around me. Next step, warm bath. “They’ll be more careful now. Mr. Kurosawa knows he won’t find the scroll before Marie without me.” My head started to go dizzy again, so I leaned back into the pillows. “I’d have never have gone that far if Oricho hadn’t offered protection when we stepped inside. Otherwise, Mr. Kurosawa would have just as likely punished you and Captain too—what’s another human, right? I wanted to warn you, but I didn’t want to waste the chance. Sorry.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “Rynn pointed out something to me the other evening, and I’m starting to see that it’s true.”

  “What was that?”

  “That you can’t help but do stupid things. It’s in your nature. It’s also what makes you the best at what you do. I’m next door. Let me know if you need anything.”

  I didn’t want to lift my head to nod, so I gave her a thumbs-up. When my head stopped spinning, I called room service.

  “Yes?” came a girl’s voice.

  “A Corona, please, and put a shot of tequila in it.”

  My phone buzzed before room service arrived. It was Rynn, saying he was running late and wouldn’t be in until tomorrow.

  I texted back: No worries—that works out better. I just went a round with the dragon and lost. Will tell you about it later. Right now I need a long nap.

  No sooner had I put the phone down than a call came through.

  “Do you listen to anything I say?” Rynn’s voice was controlled, but just barely.

  “Before you get upset, it was unavoidable. It also went a lot better than it could have. Oricho ran interference before Mr. Kurosawa had a chance to do any permanent damage.”

  “And what was the point of that?”

  “Show my dominance?”

  Rynn snorted. “Train wreck.”

  “Whore. Besides, I thought my poor decision-making skills are part of my genius.”

  “Nadya wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

  I rubbed my head. I could feel the start of a bad headache coming on. “Look, I’m sorry. But I’m tired of all these supernaturals pushing me around. Haven’t you ever wanted to tell them all to fuck off?”

  “Not when they can squish me like a bug.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sick of it.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end. “Owl, be careful. Try not to do anything stupid until I get there.”

  “I’m done mouthing off to dragons and nagas for today,” I said.

  “It’s the morning I’m worried about, when you’re feeling better. Call me first thing,” he said, and hung up.

  I sat there looking at the phone. Maybe it was the near-death experience, but I wished Rynn hadn’t been delayed. My reflection was interrupted by a knock at the door. I slid the phone onto my nightstand and made myself stumble out of bed. I swung the door open with about as much charm as a freight train.

  The girl outside couldn’t be more than eighteen . . . nineteen, tops. I must have looked worse for wear, because her eyes went wide. “Ummm, I—here,” she stuttered as she passed me the bill to sign.

  “Sorry,” I told her, and handed the paper back with a generous tip. “It’s been a rough night.”

  She nodded and retreated down the hall about as fast as she could without actually running.

  “Well, I tried, Captain.”

  He glared and gave me an unconvinced meow.

  “Next time I’ll make more of an effort not to scare the shit out of the kid, OK?”

  That seemed to satisfy him, so I drew a hot bath and climbed in. My feet and fingertips were still numb. The bathtub had a TV, so at least I could catch up on the news I’d missed over the last few weeks. There was a brief mention about the students and professor murdered in Japan, as well as the American students missing and dead in Bali. Both cases were being classified by the local authorities as serial murders, orchestrated and carried out by two highly disturbed and dangerous students.

  Well, they’d gotten the disturbed part right. Pictures were shown of Bindi and Red. No mention of Nadya, Rynn, or me in either of the cases. Or vampires. I shot back the tequila. That was how the world worked. No such thing as monsters.

  Captain crept up on the edge of the tub and tried to get comfortable—or as comfortable as possible, inches away from a pool of water. I checked the clock on the TV. 10:00 p.m. I finished my Corona, dried off, and climbed into bed. I set my alarm for 2:00 a.m. and curled up for one hell of a nap.

  14

  A TRUSTED FRIEND IS LIKE A LIVE ORC . . .

  2:00 a.m., The Dead Orc, World Quest

  As soon as my alarm went off, I crawled out of bed and checked my email. There were two messages, one from Carpe, and another from our teammate Paul the Battle Monk, both asking me to log in. Paul’s was generic; we need a thief to raid a dungeon. Carpe’s was more layered.

  Hope you survived Japan. If you get this, and you’re still alive, log in—I need a thief.

  I stared at the message and tried to decide how—and if—I was going to respond. “What do you think, Captain? Delete and block him, or let him know I’m still alive?”

  Captain stretched and sneezed but didn’t offer any advice.

  I started to type but only got to Go to hell. Did I trust Carpe? Not a chance. He’d broken the golden World Quest rule; thou shall not out other players. That kind of stuff goes a long way with me. If you can’t keep a simple rule straight, what else will you do? In the end though, I deleted the message I’d started and didn’t block him. Somehow I doubted I’d be able to block an infamous hacker.

  Before logging on, I checked my inbox for anything from Mr. Kurosawa. I wasn’t sure when dragons slept, so I set my mail to chime alert so I’d know as soon as it came through. I grabbed a soda from the fridge, sent Paul the Monk a heads-up—at least one of my team members could follow simple guidelines—and logged the Byzantine Thief in.

  A pleasant chill ran up my back as the screen opened to the Dead Orc Soup and I slid my headset on. Regardless of Carpe’s recent indiscretion, I was happy to be back in. With all the vampires, dragons, and other assorted monsters, I hadn’t had my fix in days. Maybe I’d get lucky and he wouldn’t show up . . .

  No such luck. As soon as my thief stepped into the tavern, Carpe’s elf ported in. Damn sorcerers and their teleport spells.

  “Hey Byzantine, you’re still alive! How long you in for tonight?” Carpe said.

  “What? No ‘go to hell,’ ‘I stole all your crap,’ ‘get lost, we replaced you with a chicken’? Either you’re going soft, or you plan on throwing me down a dungeon to see if there’s a bottom.”

  “Actually, I was hoping you’d crawl down and save me the throw,” he said.

  I sighed. “Of course you were. All right, gimme the map and layout.”

  “So that’s a yes?” he asked, a little too hopeful for my liking.

  “No, it’s a ‘gimme the map and layout.’ I’ll see.”

  Carpe’s dialogue box blinked with a new entry. Touchy, touchy.

  Oh, we haven’t even gotten to your colossal fuckup yet, I wrote back.

  A moment later Carpe’s dungeon map appeared in my game inventory, along with another dialogue box entry.

  What fuckup?

  I frowned. As if he didn’t know. I ignored the message and opened the map instead.

  The map was laid out in four levels, with adjoining pathways and stairs indicated wi
th arrows. Nothing too surprising; obvious spots for traps, might even be a few serious monsters in wait in some of the small mazes or stairways . . . nothing to warrant Carpe’s level of niceness.

  “What’s the catch?” I said.

  “Check the last door on the third floor, past the poison arrow traps. And what the hell fuckup are you talking about?”

  “You know what you did,” I said, and zoomed in on the spot. There wasn’t anything noteworthy about the door: big, wooden, typical. I cast my one and only magic spell—Reveal Magic—on the map.

  Reveal Magic does exactly what the name implies. You cast it, and anything magic lights up; it’s particularly useful on maps. Green usually means it’s a good spell—and I want whatever it’s attached to—yellow, orange, and red are bad with respectively increasing chances of killing me in one shot. I try to avoid those. Purple and blue usually mean there’s some kind of mind-altering spell: love, hate, confusion, possession. I avoid those too.

  Usually a Level 12 thief would have four or five spells, but they’d be a combination of useless crap like Light—does it really kill you to carry a torch?—and one or two good ones, like Uncanny Dodge. I saved all my points and spent them on one of the best spells in the game. It wasn’t until Level 10 that I was even able to use it, and then only with all the magic skill boost items I stole. As I see it, why bother with the small, crappy stuff when you can be the only Level 12 thief in the game to see—and avoid—all magic.

  And yes, I’m probably making up for my inability to see anything supernatural in the real world—even when it’s right smack in front of me.

  When I cast Reveal Magic, there was the usual mix of yellow, red, and orange spots on the map. The last door on the third level was glowing black.

  “Shit,” I said. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Easy, I stumbled through and died. Didn’t even see what killed me.”

  I made a noise somewhere between a whistle and a laugh. “Wow, sucks to be you. You wasted one of your spare lives. How many do you have left now? Oh, wait, that was your last one.”

  “It’s not nice to laugh at the misfortune of others.”

  “You want to bet on that?” I said, and snickered. To keep World Quest interesting, when you die in a game, you die. That’s it. You can come back with a brand-new character and start over, but once the fat lady sings, the curtain falls—unless you happen to have a resurrection charm on you, and those are few and far between. I’d been playing the Byzantine Thief for a little over a year, and I’d found a grand total of two, carefully stashed away. Carpe had only found one two weeks back.

  Add to that the general difficulty of the game and you have a relatively small gaming crowd worldwide—maybe a grand total of one hundred thousand. What drew me in? Well, besides appealing to my being a pathological sucker for punishment, the level of archaeological accuracy was astounding—and the monsters were a pretty big game draw as well. Some of them were even accurate.

  I spun the map around and took another look at the floor layout. Way back in my school days, we made the connection that the in-game temples, tombs, and monsters were all based on real ones. My pet theory was that the designers were archaeology school dropouts. It gave me pleasant goose bumps thinking about the misuse of trade secrets going on so publicly.

  “Not Egyptian,” I said into my mic. “Not Greco-Roman either—not enough maze work—Ooo, wait a minute,” I said, and double-checked the angle of one of the shafts and resulting maze work below. The temple was Mayan and belonged to something that would kill you, all right.

  “Carpe, I’ve got good and bad news for you. The good news is I know what killed you.”

  “Bad news, please.”

  “You were killed by Ah Puch, the Mayan Lord of Death. The one who gets off on human sacrifice.”

  I heard Carpe pull his headset off and swear in the background. I smiled and pictured a scrawny computer geek throwing a hissy fit in his ergonomically corrected chair, the kind of chair I imagine hackers use.

  “Can we kill him?” he said a moment later.

  “Ha—that’s funny. Level 20-30, and I’d only recommend trying it with celestial help. If we’re still alive next year, we can come back and try it.”

  “You know, you laugh, but that’s only because I haven’t told you yet how much of our campaign fund I squandered on that map,” he said.

  I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, I guarantee I’d be pissed. If I didn’t know a shortcut to the treasure room.”

  Carpe was silent for a moment, then, “Please say you’re not kidding.”

  I shook my head and cradled my soda in my lap. On the treasure whore sliding scale, Carpe made me look like a saint. “Why?”

  “Because I know a guy in the Blue Beard Inn who will sell me another resurrection charm. I just need enough gold—”

  I snorted. “If you think anyone in this game is going to sell you a resurrection charm, I’ve got a lovely troll bridge I’m willing to part with.”

  “It’s real—”

  “You could set up a tollbooth, camp out, collect fares—”

  “Byzantine, I’ve never begged you for anything before, but I’m willing to come close,” Carpe pleaded.

  “All right, I’ll get you in. But I get fifty percent of the pile. And we still need to talk about your royal fuckup.”

  “Thirty percent. I lost a life first time round finding that trap. And I didn’t fuck up. You disappeared off the grid.”

  He caught me midsip of soda, and I had to stop myself spitting a mouthful over my keyboard. “Fuck me, thirty percent. If you’d sent me the map in the first place, I would’ve told you there was a demigod sitting behind door number three and saved you the trouble of dying.” I added, “And I go off the grid all the time! That’s no excuse to chase me down.”

  “You were kidnapped midgame off Interstate 15 outside Vegas.”

  I sat up, and my soda careened onto the carpet. I didn’t care. Lady Siyu could clean it up. “You son of a bitch, you’ve been tracking me from day one?”

  “I didn’t start tracking you until I figured out you were running from vampires. And for the record, I didn’t ‘chase you down.’ I called because I was worried.”

  “From day one we agreed to play anonymously.”

  “And you went with that? No wonder you’ve got vampires chasing you.”

  I took my headset off and hit the mute button. I didn’t want to hear it. I was too pissed. Besides, there’s only so much profanity the World Quest filter takes before you get a black spot on your card. When you get to five, you’re banned for a week. I was at four again.

  The text box lit up with yet another message. Hey, I was only trying to help—I’m your friend, or at least I thought that’s what we were. Before I knew you were the kind of person who’d screw me over for a lousy 20%—

  A bell alerted us that our third party member, Paul the Monk, was entering the game. The dialogue box I had open with Carpe flashed again.

  This conversation isn’t over, Carpe wrote.

  Oh yes it is, I wrote right back before closing the window and putting my headset back on. I checked my email inbox while I was at it. Still nothing from Mr. Kurosawa.

  “Hey Byz,” Paul the Monk’s middle-aged voice rang in my headset. It was the kind of voice I imagined belonged to a guy who spent most of his weekends corralling kids to soccer games in a minivan. “Carpe filling you in on our dungeon?”

  “You mean how he wants to fuck us over for a lousy twenty percent?”

  Paul laughed. “Told you she wouldn’t go for it,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t tell me he’s got you roped into this death trap too, Paul? You realize he just wants the treasure because he thinks someone is going to sell him a resurrection charm—”

  “He said he has it, and he comes with recommendations—” Carpe chimed in.

  “Yeah, from the guys who are going to be waiting outside the Blue Beard to jump you for your gold—”

/>   “Come on, Byz. It’ll shut him up. And he agreed to that castle we’ve had our eye on,” Paul said.

  I swore under my breath. How could they be so stupid? I needed to find the guys hanging out at the Blue Beard and get in on the scam. If it was this easy to convince people to show up on your doorstep with a pile of gold . . . “Fine, three-way split.”

  “Come on . . .” Carpe tried.

  “One more squeak out of you and I raise my price to fifty percent.”

  “Deal. Carpe?” Paul asked.

  “Not a peep more,” Carpe said.

  I was still pissed, but I wanted to play. Besides, Paul was there now, so that would keep the game conversation generic. I could berate Carpe later. It’s odd that out of the two people I hang with on a more than weekly basis, one of them knew way too much about me, and the other was clueless and probably spent half his game time figuring how to sneak a beer while still watching his kids. Where the hell was the balance in my life?

  We headed into Ah Puch’s tomb. Paul the Monk stepped on a poison trap, and we ran into a pack of goblins who’d followed Carpe in on his first solo run and set up shop. As a general rule I don’t like killing things, even in a game . . . except for goblins.

  Besides that, and the occasional text prompt from Carpe (I closed them as soon as they flashed in the lower left corner of my screen), and me checking my inbox for a message from Mr. Kurosawa, 3:00 a.m. passed uneventfully.

  At 4:00 a.m. we hit the third level.

  “All right boys,” I said. “This is where things get tricky. One of you needs to stand on that block while the other two go get the treasure.”

  “How stupid do you think we are?” Carpe said, sounding like he had a mouthful of food. I’d always pictured Carpe as a scrawny guy, but it dawned on me he could be a fat computer guy.

  “No seriously, one of you needs to stand here on that block, otherwise I can’t open the secret passage at the end of this hall.”

  There was silence from the other two.

  “Oh, come on. One of you will be with me, and I can’t steal all the treasure.”

  Paul snorted.