Crystalfire Keep

by J. A. Cipriano

  I nodded slowly. “That’s how I feel too and, well, I really think my idea is sound. It just makes sense but …” My voice trailed off into a sigh. “What if we don’t find enough skilled players who want to give this a shot? What if the news that we snubbed the two best guilds in the game turns people away? What if we don’t have enough time to gel as a team with all these new people? What if – “

  Kayla cut me off by putting two delicate fingers on my lips. “Max, shush.” When I gave up on trying to speak through her fingertips, she pulled back. “You’re second-guessing your decision and that’s natural. A lot of the clients I work with do that, even when they know they are in the right, but it won’t help any to do that.”

  Nodding slowly, I let out a sigh. While her words didn’t completely wash away my worry, they helped grow the small kernel of confidence that led to my decision in the first place.

  “Okay, you’re right.” I frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I’m surprised the Filter didn’t step in with what you said. I mean, it’s vague but mentioning clients does sort of hint around what you do up there.”

  “Huh, that is a bit odd.” She stepped back, crossing her arms under her breasts. “Well, we did hit a Trust threshold, no thanks to me beating around the bush about Amethyst.” Rubbing the bridge of her nose, she shook her head. “That was stupid of me and I’m sorry about that.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. Considering how much I was worried about all this, I can understand why you wanted to keep it from freaking me out. I mean, don’t do it again please but …”

  “I won’t. Well, I’ll try not to.” Kayla laughed a little. “None of us are perfect.”

  “True enough. Anyway, I actually wanted to talk to you about the Trust thing before we had to pop off, before all this craziness went down.” I mentally nudged open the Promise pane of the Social UI panel. “There was something about a Promise Perk, whatever that is.”

  Kayla’s eyes unfocused slightly, the familiar sign of someone looking at the phantom screens of their own UI. “I was wondering about that myself but everything else took precedence. As long as it lets us talk more about our lives up there, anything else would be a bonus.”

  I nodded as I focused on scanning through the UI. When we had first become Promised, the pane was pretty lacking in information. It had shown our current Trust level in a simple golden bar along with the number on a one-to-one-hundred scale, with our in-game status and locations listed underneath. The rest of the section was just blank space.

  Now, another section had come to life. While the main meter and location portion took up maybe a fifth of the UI space, this new part fleshed it out to cover another fifth. There was still more than a bit of mystery ahead. What was revealed now caught my attention more than the future mysteries ahead.

  Please select your first Promise Perk from the selections below!

  WARNING: Once chosen, the Perk cannot be changed, even if your Trust drops below 25 and then rises above that point. Both you and your Promised must agree to the selection of the Perk. Choose wisely!

  There were only two choices and they were both sorely tempting.

  Gem Fusion

  Once selected, the third Gem socket of your Rings of Promise will become aligned. Afterward, that socket can only be used for Active Gems. Whenever one of the two aligned Gems is used, the champion who used the Gem will immediately add the effects of the aligned Gem to the Gem used, acting as per a Twincast Modification Gem. The Elemental Power cost of using the aligned Gem is reduced by 50%.

  That one ability could get insane. Twincast Gems usually increased the Elemental Power costs to linking two Active Gems and required lots of linked sockets in an item to use. This essentially created that effect between our two Rings. Thoughts of linking defensive and offensive moves or defensive and support moves twirled through my brain. No matter how tempting that was, I forced myself to go over the second before whooping for joy.

  Stronger Bonds

  Your bonds to the Rings of Promise are strengthened, increase the power of the three principles of Harmony. The passive bonuses of Power of Family and Power of Friendship are increased by 10% and the cooldown of Power of Love is decreased to 1 minute and the heal increases to 2,000.

  Though subtler than the dynamic power of Gem Fusion, Stronger Bonds was incredibly potent, maybe more so, as long as Kayla and I remained in the same group at all times. Passive bonuses that stacked on top of our strongest attributes were incredible and hard to find without spending multiple Gem slots, something that was already a hot commodity.

  “Wow,” Kayla murmured. “These are incredible.” Her gaze focused through her unseen UI to look at me. “What do you think?”

  “I completely agree,” I nodded. “It almost makes me think that we can’t go wrong.”

  She raised a finger. “I’ll point out that you said ‘almost’ there and then ask why almost?”

  “Well, as much as I’d like those bonuses, the devil is in the details. For everything up to this point, gaining the passive bonuses from the Rings was a guarantee. We were going to always be in the same group because, well, there is only one group.”

  “Ah.” Kayla grinned. “I see what you’re saying. We’re looking at leading a raid group now and that’s two groups.”

  I matched her grin. “Exactly. While I might be in nominal charge, we’ll be putting the two groups together in the way that makes the most sense for success. That may not necessarily mean having us in the same group. We won’t know until we know the full raid composition.”

  She nodded before cradling her chin in contemplation. “Of course, while Gem Fusion is also obviously potent, it’s only as good as the choices we make. The Gems we need have to not only be effective without Mod Gems but work well together instead of at cross purposes.”

  “So, basically, if we want to generalize it, we have the easy choice and the hard choice.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  My grin widened. “Well, Mina, the choice is simple. When do we ever do things the easy way?”

  Kayla firmly planted her hand over her face as she started to laugh, a clean, infectious laugh that made me chuckle along with her. “Oh, Max, I want to say that you’re wrong but I can’t. You are so right it’s hilarious.”

  Smiling between the chuckles, I mentally clicked on the Gem Fusion choice. “Well, it’s worked for us so far, right? Why go against a sure thing?”

  Congratulations! You and your Promised have selected the Gem Fusion Perk!

  Another Promise Perk will unlock at Trust 50. Keep at building your relationship and don’t forget to experiment with expanding your communication!

  “And done,” Kayla announced as I closed my own UI. “It does present a good point, though. We really should try a round robin of questions and answers again but …”

  “But?”

  “How about we do it somewhere a lot nicer than this little slice of watery hell?” Her nose had been crinkled cutely for what had to be minutes but I had been too wrapped up in what was going on to notice.

  I slapped my forehead. “God, sorry, I’m being an idiot. Yes, let’s get out of here.”

  Kayla laughed again as she began to weave her Teleport spell. “Granholm is fine, right?”

  “Definitely. We’ll go to our usual spot and go over things.”

  “I love you, Max, but you do need to get a better idea of nice places to talk. Chiselmark Row isn’t exactly romantic or breathtakingly beautiful, you know?”

  Before I could file a rebuttal (not that I had one that would make any sense), she finished the spell and we were gone, whisked away in a sparkle of water and a spray of water back to Granholm. It only took a few blinks of the eye for the world to reform around us as we found ourselves for the second time that session in Granholm’s Crystal Plaza.

  I don’t know what we were thinking if we thought we would find any peaceful moment in Granholm. Even in the building, we could hear the ongoing revelry out
side. It had only been ten, fifteen minutes tops for our little negotiations in Tamiroth and the celebration of the start to Crystalfire Keep was only getting started.

  We stood there for a moment, soaking in the cheers and music before I sighed. “I bet the party’s going all the way into the Smith’s Guild.” I glanced over at Kayla. “And if we go out there, they are going to swallow us up like they did last time.”

  “Is that so bad?” she asked, more rhetorically than to me.

  “Maybe we can go back to Tamiroth before they notice us? I just want to spend some time with you and talk not – “

  A familiar Ember poked his face around the open gateway. “Mr. Shale! Ms. Kayla! You’re back!” Nahma chirped merrily.

  Kayla giggled as she poked me in the side with a long finger. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice now.” She lowered her voice to a theatrical whisper. “Remember, you promised Burnie you would do better by our fans and besides – “

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” My put-upon sigh this time was meant for laughs. “I needed to talk to Nahma anyway.” I put an arm around Kayla’s shoulders and gestured out towards the city square. “Shall we?”

  “Let’s!”

  8

  Despite all the merriment and constant distractions, we did manage to suss out a few things over our private channel. The Filter had decided to back off a little, letting us share a bunch of relatively minor facts about ourselves. Well, I suppose minor was in the eyes of the beholder. We managed to share our ages but not our birthdays, what work we did but only in the vaguest of terms, and quite a few little facts on the side.

  What it came down to at the end of the session was I now knew Mina was twenty-seven years old, her favorite color was blue, she had two pets, she was hopelessly addicted to real coffee, and she worked in the legal field in some unspeakable capacity. There was a small twinge of my old inadequacy at that, but I pushed that back. After what we had been through, she knew enough about me that if she found me lacking, she would have left.

  Besides, the utterly pragmatic part of me realized that there were some very tangible advantages to having a professional as a girlfriend.

  Nahma was more than excited to know that our little plan was moving forward as well. All in all, despite the adoring throng and crazy partiers, I actually enjoyed myself. Maybe I could get used to all the attention. Heck, maybe I could learn to love it.

  I was in such a good mood overall that I even felt confident enough in how life was going that I rose up through the deep dive early. Pulling out of the peculiar gravity of Elementalis Online and then floating through the constantly shifting spaces of the deep Internet, I finally drifted back into my own body. If you’ve ever gone into the dive, you know what I’m talking about and if not, I can only describe it as having your entire sense of direction inverted in a split second and gravity along with it. Trust me, the first couple of times make most people nauseous.

  Even a long-time user like me can have bad moments, especially with the rigors of playing a tank in EO added on to that. That was one of the reasons why I usually came out of the dive to see Roxanne’s serious face hovering over me. As the NSAF headset shut down and my nerve endings caught up to the reality of being reconnected to my own handicapped body, I was not surprised to be greeted by her voice.

  “You know, I’m glad you’re making friends and you have this big shot,” she said, “but there were a few times I considered pulling you out of the dive.” As the helmet pulled away from my head on its mechanical arm, I could see the faint frown on her face and the deepening crow’s feet around her eyes. “Your vital signs and neural activity lately have been going all over the place, as if you’ve been experiencing a whole range of emotional highs and lows that you have never experienced before.”

  I was about to say something when I caught her frown flip into a faint smirk. “It’s almost like you’re experiencing social situations for the first time.”

  “Yeah, laugh it up, Roxanne,” I said with a roll of my eyes. Adjusting my wheelchair back up to its normal sitting position with my good arm, I gave my senses an extra moment to acclimate to my sparse room. “How’s Chrissy doing?”

  My sister was enjoying an extended school vacation to recover from her latest surgery. While the arm upgrade was straightforward enough, essentially an extreme kind of plug-and-play hardware, the new voice box, life support unit, and feeding apparatus involved far more invasive surgery. While Dr. Fontaine, the head of the Fontaine Institute whose charity we all depended on to some degree, had handled the procedure personally, even the surest thing could have complications when it involved slicing up the human body and it took time to recover from that trauma.

  “She’s resting right now but doing better today,” Roxanne noted as she checked my pulse as if she didn’t trust the multiple sensors in my chair. “No signs of infection and breathing has been evening out. I think she might even be able to go back to school in another couple of days.”

  “That’s great to here. I’ll check on her in a little bit.” I smiled up at Roxanne as she finished with my wrist. “You don’t know how much of a relief it is to hear that. As for myself, I really am fine. You’re acting like I’ve ever been emotional before.”

  “You don’t say?” she snarked. “I’ve only known you your entire life, so I would think I’d know.” She rubbed her chin. “Once upon a time, you were a pretty cheery kid but after your parents passed …”

  Her sigh wasn’t just one of sympathy. Roxanne, Mom, and Dad had been an inseparable trio for as long as I could remember, and their deaths had hit her as hard as anyone. Though she had never come out and said it, I always thought she felt responsible for the accident that night, even though Roxanne hadn’t been in either car.

  “Well, I guess in the end of it that your mom was right after all.” If Dr. Fontaine had been in the room, she would have been staring daggers at me for referring to her so familiarly.

  Roxanne blinked at me in surprise. “Okay, I don’t follow you on that one.”

  I smiled as I rolled my wheelchair out from under the NSAF stand. “She always said that NSAF therapy would help fix my problems and it has … just not in the way she would have wanted.”

  Roxanne got a chuckle out of that as she pulled out her tablet, no doubt updating her daily records. “Yes, Director Fontaine would be steaming if she heard that. To think that a vast, interactive social situation, game or not, could work better than her own hard-headed ideas was something she could never consider.”

  “You know, she’s not constantly watching you. It won’t hurt to actually call her by her name or even, you know, Mom or Mother or something when you’re not on the phone with her.”

  She scoffed at that. “I’m not so sure about – “

  The sudden, sharp tones of the phone in Roxanne’s overstuffed medical ‘utility belt’ cut her off and made me start a bit.

  “As if to prove my point,” she muttered as she tapped at her tablet, answering the call through it as opposed to fishing out her phone. I decided that silence was the better part of valor in this case as Roxanne put on a stony demeanor and focused on the screen. “Good morning, Director Fontaine. What can I do for you today?”

  While I couldn’t see Rosemary Fontaine on Roxanne’s screen, I could clearly hear her cool professional voice. “Let’s dispense with the formalities. I wish to speak to Mr. Kincaid specifically.”

  Roxanne eyed me sidelong but I had nothing to offer her. I was as surprised as she was that Dr. Fontaine was looking for me, more so because I would have thought she would know all my online contact information. It wasn’t as if she was one of those old people who couldn’t adapt to the times and it wasn’t like I didn’t have a number on the communications network. Maybe it was some kind of power play, a way to put down her daughter, or maybe it was something else entirely.

  I wasn’t the only one thinking that. “I don’t mean to second guess you, but wouldn’t it be easier and more, well, private i
f you were to call Max directly?”

  “I don’t believe I have to explain my reasons to you, Roxanne.” Wow, such a concession, using her daughter’s actual name! Yes, that was sarcasm of the highest order. “Let Maximillian have your tablet and please let us speak in private.”

  Roxanne’s face screwed up with frustration but she kept enough of her cool to look over at me and ask, “Do you want to do this, Max?”

  I took a deep breath and mulled it over for a moment. While I might not want to play whatever games Rosemary wanted to, she simply had too much power over my life, heck, everyone’s life. From Chrissy to Wynona, we were all under the doctor’s thumb to one degree or another.

  “Sure,” I nodded, holding my hand out for the tablet. “I’ll do it.”

  Roxanne frowned a little deeper but relented. “Fine. I even promise not to eavesdrop on my phone.”

  As she handed me the tablet, Dr. Fontaine added one last prod. “Yes, no one likes noisy people and there might be consequences if you did, Nurse Fontaine.” As always, there was no overt malice in her voice, simply that cold, matter-of-fact bluntness that was the root of her charm or lack thereof.

  Fortunately, I had the tablet now, its front-facing lens focused on me so that Rosemary didn’t see the rude but completely warranted gesture Roxanne made in her direction. “I’ll be out in the main room, Max. Come out when Director Fontaine is finished and we’ll have lunch, okay?”

  I really had to commend her self-control. Sure, I had put up with my fair share of Rosemary’s attitude over the past decade but Roxanne had it far worse than I did.

  “Okay,” I nodded. “Thanks, Roxanne.”

  She gave a final nod, her lips pressed into a thin line of restrained frustration at the situation, before going out through the automatic door into the main room of our humble abode. With that, I turned my full attention to the thin, deeply lined face of our ‘benefactor’.

  “What can I do for you today, Doc?” Maybe I was being too casual from the start but it was the nickname I had used with her since I was a kid. It wouldn’t hurt to pretend this was something normal, even when it obviously wasn’t.