They consulted the map and found the location. Jake whistled, shaking his head ruefully. “That doesn’t give us much time. Looks like it’s going to be on Kailt Island.”
He pressed his finger against a small, crescent-shaped formation off the coast of the main continent.
“How far?” asked Des.
“A day and a half,” said Jake, and Des groaned. Then, Jake added, “If we had horses.”
The friends stared at each other despondently for a long moment. Then Des jumped up and down, clapping his hands. “The dragon!” he crowed. “Where’d that dragon get off to?”
Jake looked around the dark night, shrugging one shoulder. “I don’t know. Besides, we only paid for the ride this far. I don’t think the Flightmaster would be too pleased with us kidnapping one of his dragons, even if we do manage to find her and convince her.”
A distant screech split the night, the unmistakable call of the dragon. Jake’s jaw dropped in shock.
“Shouldn’t she have flown back to the ravine already?” asked Des, smiling. “I think she wants to help out.”
A few minutes later, the yellow-scaled dragon emerged from the trees and approached the two adventurers with a waddling gait. Her triangular head was low to the ground, serpentine neck bent and stooped as she came near and nuzzled her face against Jake’s side. Her scales glimmered as the morning sun rose over the mountains.
The thief eyed the dragon, and then grinned. “Hey, Sunflower!”
“Sunflower?” Jake snorted. “Did you make that up?”
“Sure, why not? Now shut up.” Des turned back to the dragon, who had shifted her head to look at him with enormous, expectant eyes. “Sunflower. Do you know what I’m saying?”
The dragon yawned.
“I don’t think she talks,” said Jake.
“Okay, maybe not.” Des frowned, then tried again. “Can you take us to Kailt Island?”
Sunflower studied the two boys, her serpentine neck swiveling her head back and forth between them several times before she snorted twin plumes of smoke from her nostrils and bowed her head rapidly up and down. Then she stopped, backing up a few steps and reared up over them. Des stepped back, wondering what he’d done wrong.
“We can pay when we get back,” Jake shouted up to the dragon, taking his coin purse and shaking it in the air for her to see. “We have plenty.”
The winged lizard lowered herself back down and snorted as if to say, Well, that’s alright then. She lowered her shoulders to provide the boys easy access to the wicker-bamboo box mounted on her back.
“Told you she understands us,” said Des.
“I never said she didn’t,” Jake answered, rolling his eyes at Des’s back as Des climbed over the dragon’s scaly shoulder to reach the carriage. Jake followed him up, calculating how much time it would take to reach the island by dragon. He figured they’d be in the wicker-bamboo box for a couple hours at least. Normally, traveling somewhere was the most boring part of the game. This time, Jake was actually looking forward to the long period of inactivity. He had a lot to think over.
“How long will it take?” asked Des when they were both settled in the carriage and the dragon had launched herself into the sky. He made a point of not looking outside this time, looking straight across at Jake to ask the question.
“Two hours, maybe three,” Jake said. “We’ll get there long before the symbol appears.”
“Great,” said Des, settling back for the long ride. “What’s the deal with those? You’re the programmer. Have you figured it out, what’s making these things appear?”
Jake considered the clues they had seen so far. The ankh symbols, magically appearing at certain places and times. It seemed random, unless you had the schedule.
“It must be a recurring subroutine…” he mused quietly, hardly noticing when Des leaned closer to hear. “It only runs when scheduled, or else there would be millions of them everywhere. And there has to be some kind of pattern, some purpose to it. It’s a design, otherwise the schedule wouldn’t exist.”
“Makes sense,” said Des, but Jake wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the giant blue wall they had just left behind. What was being built behind that shimmering barrier? And was it the only one? He realized Des had asked him something, something he hadn’t heard.
“What?”
“I said, didn’t you tell me the symbol – what did you call it, an ankh? Didn’t you say it meant‘life’?”
“Yeah,” said Jake. He snapped his fingers, realizing Des was on to something. “It’s obviously drawn from the Egyptian model I made, but there were tons of other hieroglyphs in that. Why did the Prime choose that one?”
“And why make it a quest for the NPCs?” added Des, his brow furrowed in thought. “In my lacrosse program, in the single player mode there are all these goals and achievements that are extra throughout the season. But the NPC teams can’t win the achievements. That wouldn’t make sense.”
“You’re right,” Jake said, thinking it over. “NPCs shouldn’t be able to complete player quests. There’s a setting that prevents a quest from being completed accidentally before we get to play it. At least, there used to be…”
Jake looked out the side of the carriage, watching the clouds float past. The sky was blue, the clouds white and fluffy. This was the world he had built, but the Prime had hijacked it. The settings had been changed, the rules altered. The Prime must be the terrible “force” from beyond Xaloria that Ryden had warned him about, but what was the point? What did the Prime want Alys and Torin and all the other “New Ones” to do?
He still didn’t know what was being built behind the Great Blue Barrier, or if there were more new features being added in other places throughout Xaloria. The Prime was changing Jake’s world, and that included the ankh symbols too, but Jake didn’t know what the changes – or the hijacked NPCs – were supposed to accomplish.
He tried to think it through again. Torin and Alys were chasing the ankh symbols. The last one had appeared in front of the Great Blue Barrier. The Barrier represented some kind of problem with whatever the Prime was trying to build. So the NPCs must be trying to figure out what was going wrong with Prime’s changes to Xaloria.
“That’s it!” Jake shouted suddenly, startling Des who had still been leaning toward him. Des jerked away, his back colliding with the bench on his side of the carriage.
“What?” he asked when Jake just sat there, eyes bulging and jaw wide open with realization.
“The quest isn’t for the NPCs,” he explained excitedly. “Don’t you remember, they kept calling Kari‘the Interpreter.’The quest is for her!”
Des pointed at Jake, grinning. The knight’s excitement was contagious. “You’re right,” he said. “That must be it.”
“And the symbols, the ankhs,” continued Jake. “They aren’t the problem, they’re part of Prime’s solution. He’s trying to change Xaloria, but for some reason it isn’t working the way he wants. So he wants Kari to complete this quest in order to figure out why, or maybe to work around the problem. Either way, if she completes the quest then Prime gets to make something new happen in the program.”
“Then we’ve got to stop him,” said Des, stating the obvious.
“Of course,” Jake said at once, but he was already distracted by a new train of thought. Prime needed a Player Character to complete his quest. That meant that Prime – and they still didn’t know who Prime was – had not been able to fully enter Xaloria. But it also meant that any one of them should have been able to attempt the mission. So why had Prime taken only Kari?
“We’re all stuck here,” he mumbled, thinking aloud. Des leaned forward again, but Jake sank back into silence. Prime clearly believed Kari knew what was wrong with the program. He must also think she could either repair the problem or show him how to repair it. So why not just ask her, instead of making up this quest and then kidnapping her to force her into traveling all over Xaloria interpreting magic symbols? It seemed crazy, and for
that matter why not just ask Jake?
The NPCs were just as confused by Prime’s plan as Jake and Des. Kari’s ignorance had infuriated Torin; he must have thought she was holding out. Alys had not agreed, assuming that Kari would provide the right answer eventually. Why would Prime’s “New One” NPCs disagree with one another – and, in Torin’s case, disagree with Prime himself? Jake remembered Alys’s confused and frightened behavior. They acted like they weren’t sure what was going on. How could a part of the program not understand what was going on in the program?
When Jake and Des showed up, Torin and Alys had both been surprised. But instead of reciting a script like normal NPCs, they argued with one another during the battle. Alys had even wounded Torin, and Jake wasn’t completely sure it was an accident. It was like there was no script, like the NPCs were acting randomly. Why had Prime gone to all the trouble of creating this quest and activating the New Ones if he hadn’t bothered to script their interactions? NPC scripting was basic stuff. Anybody who played around with VR programs would have mastered it early on, and it would take an expert to break into Jake’s program and start rewriting it from outside.
The clouds kept floating past, as did the minutes, and Jake continued to ponder the confusing evidence. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he didn’t feel the exhaustion creep over his body. He slipped into a numb stillness and closed his eyes for just a moment. He was startled awake by the carriage jolting. The dragon had begun her descent toward Kailt Island.
Sunflower glided in for a gentle landing on a broad swatch of green just inland from a sandy white beach. Jake and Des clambered down from the dragon’s back and peered around at the deserted surroundings.
“They haven’t arrived yet,” said Jake, yawning and stretching. He was still trying to wake up. “Let’s take a look around before they do.”
Overhead, the dragon snuffled and bounced her head at him. Jake looked up, remembering his promise to pay for the trip. He supposed Sunflower would wait for them and take them back to the Flightmaster. He wondered briefly how much all these trips were going to end up costing him. Oh well, he thought, it’s fake VR money anyhow.
“Don’t worry,” he told the dragon, patting the leather pouch on his belt. “We won’t forget.”
Apparently satisfied, the dragon snuffled again – emitting twin plumes of faint smoke from her nostrils – and turned to wander down toward the beach. Jake and Des watched, bemused, as she waded into the gentle surf. The dragon rolled over at the water’s edge, letting the waves crash over her hide with obvious pleasure.
“There’s something you’ll only see in Xaloria,” Jake told Des, still proud of his program. Now he just had to make sure it stayed his.
The two boys got back to work, quickly scouting the spot. The immediate area was a wide, flat pad of thin dune grass which Des pointed out was the size of a football field. The beach was behind them, on the other side of a bunch of large, dark-colored boulders that shouldered together to form a natural wall separating the wind-blown beach from the greener interior of the island. Gaps in the wall appeared at random intervals, allowing access to the shore. Scattered tropical trees hung their branches overhead, heavy with juicy looking fruits. Creeping vines climbed their trunks or snaked over the ground in an overlapping weave that made for treacherous footing. The foliage provided plenty of shelter for a variety of brightly colored birds and small mammals which chattered excitedly and peered at the strange intruders curiously from the shadows.
“Where do you think the symbol will appear?” asked Des, scanning the lush vegetation.
“The two we’ve seen so far have both been on rocks,” Jake said, turning back toward the beach and the wall of enormous stones. Each one must weigh twenty tons, easily. Many were decorated with piles of smaller stones and other objects arranged on top of the larger boulders. “Probably over there.”
“I guess we wait,” said Des. He pulled out his bow and shot down a red piece of fruit from a nearby tree. He retrieved his prey and returned to Jake. “Want a bite?” he asked. Des flopped himself down in the grass and tore into the juicy fruit. Jake took a piece and his taste buds danced at the sweetness. How long had it been since he had eaten?
Jake remained standing as the two finished their meal, studying the wall of boulders. A plan formed in his mind and he shook his head at Des, starting out across the field. “I have an idea,” he called over his shoulder. “We’re going to set a trap for Alys.”
Des perked up. “I like the sound of that,” he said.
“Find some sticks,” Jake instructed. “And pick some more of those fruits. Bring everything over to that wall. And hurry, there’s not much time.”
“You got it, Coach,” said Des.
While Des went to work, Jake approached the rocks. A quick survey revealed that one wedge-shaped boulder formed a ramp on the back for easy access to the top. Jake mounted the wall and gathered up the loose stones and pebbles, sparing a brief moment to wonder who had decorated the boulders and whether there was any significance in the piles.
When he figured he had gathered enough of the stones, Jake found one of the boulders with a smooth, vertical surface facing the field. Sitting down on top of the boulder with his legs dangling over the smooth side, Jake started to sort through his collection of smaller stones until he found one that suited him. The rock was flat and oval shaped, about the size of a dinner plate.
By now, Des had finished gathering sticks and fruit. He scrambled up the slope to sit down near Jake, depositing his own collection beside the knight’s. “How are these?” he asked.
Jake scrounged through the sticks and fruit, nodding. “These will do,” he said, and chose a few medium-sized branches. “Do you have an extra bowstring?”
Des took a length of twine from his pocket and handed it over. Jake tied the bowstring to one end of each stick, then laid the sticks on top of the boulder with the untied ends hanging down over the flat side. Holding them steady with both hands, he turned to Des and indicated the oval rock with a head nod.
“Grab that rock, and put it on top of these sticks. Put it far enough out that it will fall if we pull out the sticks.”
Des placed the rock as Jake described. As soon as he let it go, the whole thing teetered and began to tip over the edge. Des grabbed the rock quickly before it fell and repositioned it. This time he kept his hand on the rock, looking at Jake.
“That’s fine,” Jake said. “We’ll put a couple other rocks on top of it to hold it still.” Letting go of the sticks, Jake grabbed up some smaller stones and stacked them on the oval rock. “That should do it,” he said, and Des let go of the oval rock. It didn’t fall.
“I’ll get down and see how it looks,” offered Des.
“Good idea. I’ll test it while you’re there.”
“Okay.” Des hurried down and stood below, staying well back from the flat rock face and the dead-fall trap. He eyed the construction skeptically. “Hey Jake? It’s kind of obvious.”
“Maybe if we get some of those vines…?”
Des looked down the wall. “Yeah, some of the other rocks have stuff growing on top. We could probably do something like that. Okay, go ahead and test it.”
Jake tugged at the twine. The sticks slid back toward him – but so did the pile of stones on top.
“It’s not going to work!” he said, frustrated. “The whole thing just moves.”
“Turn the sticks around so the string faces out,” said Des, moving closer to the wall so he didn’t have to shout. “Then pull to the side so they spin instead of sliding.”
Jake reset the trap in the new position. Des scrambled out of the way. This time when Jake pulled the cord, the two sticks rotated instead of sliding. The back ends slipped over the edge and the oval stone plummeted to the ground with a loud thud.
“Perfect!” shouted Des. “That ought to knock her out long enough for all of us to get away.”
Working together, they quickly rebuilt the trap and p
iled several of the largest stones on top of the oval plate for good measure. Des collected some of the vines and a few clumps of long, frizzy brown moss. The boys draped the vines and moss along the edge of the boulder and over their falling rock trap. When they were finished, it looked like a natural outcropping.
“That’ll do for the mousetrap,” said Jake, dusting his hands in satisfaction. “Now for the cheese.”
Gathering up the fruit, Jake climbed down and came around to the vertical rock face beneath the trap. Dropping all but one of the fruits on the ground, he drew out his sword and carefully sliced the fruit into two pieces, handing half to Des.
“Help me draw the ankh on this rock with the juice,” he said.
“How’s that going to work? Even if it doesn’t dry, Alys still won’t see it.”
“Sand,” said Jake, smirking.
Des blinked once, then grinned. The two quickly smeared the sticky fruit juice in the shape of a large ankh on the stone, reaching as high as they could to be sure it was visible. Once the juice was in place, Jake removed his helmet and ran through a gap in the stone wall to the beach. After he filled the helmet with sand, he came back and set it on the ground. The boys scooped their hands in and rubbed the sand carefully into their improvised glue, reapplying the sticky juice and adding more sand until the five foot symbol stood out in sharp contrast to the flat stone wall beneath. Standing back, they inspected their handiwork.
“Think she’ll go for it?” asked Des.
“All we need is for Alys to walk over and check it out,” answered Jake, unconcerned. “We just have to make sure Kari isn’t caught in the trap with her.”
Des nodded, then looked for the nearest break in the wall of boulders. “I’ll hide down between the stones so I can keep an eye on Alys…just in case it doesn’t work.”
“Sounds good,” agreed Jake. “I’ll be up top, pulling the strings.”
“How long?” asked Des.
“Display System Time,” Jake commanded, looking up at the sky. The digital readout faded into brief existence, displaying the time. “Twenty-eight minutes until the real one shows up. They should get here any minute now.”
Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel Page 15