First Login

by Kevin Murphy

  The communication between the two fell away, and Dakkon similarly contacted the three he planned to party with—Ramses, Finnegan, and Damak—who would be able to meet up within the hour to begin hunting. Hebbeson had been the one to supply the cart on their previous outing, so along with the promised chisel for Letis, Dakkon bought a cart of average size and layered its bottom with ice.

  As Dakkon walked back towards the south gate of town, a couple of players pointed in his direction and turned back to talk with their acquaintances. “What’s all that about?” Dakkon wondered. He could see another player fanning his hand as though to dismiss something untrue. Before long, Dakkon found his way to the large, rounded, half-buried rock near the edge of the city at which the four had decided to meet. Ramses was already waiting on site.

  “About bloody time,” said the short, dirty blond rogue. “It’s not a good habit to make others wait for you, you know.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Dakkon with a grin. “Did you ever get around to selling any ice on your own?”

  “Nah,” replied Ramses. “As it turns out, the thieves’ guild would rather its members didn’t attempt to destabilize the economy here—even if it’s a long shot. I ran the idea by a senior member who told me not to bother.”

  Dakkon looked pensive. “I think I’m going to give it a go.”

  “Oh really, changed your mind?” Ramses asked with a grin. “Well, the thieves’ guild telling me no shouldn’t stop you.” He waved his hand dismissively. “You’re not tied into any politics here and don’t need to play by the same set of rules.”

  “It seems odd that thieves would have stricter rules than visitors to the city,” said Dakkon.

  “Not really,” said Ramses. “Most people living in Tian range from the moderately rich to the insanely rich. That’s not how things tend to work in other places. Everyone is wealthier here because the most powerful people in the city have cultivated the social dynamics and shaped its rules. Where there’s money to be made, there are thieves—but the thieves who didn’t play along with the rules just disappeared over and over ‘til the ones who followed them were the only ones left with any sort of influence.”

  “So, the thieves’ guild in Tian takes orders from the mayor or someone like that?” asked Dakkon, happy to learn a little secret information about the city.

  “No,” said Ramses. “Well, not really. Everyone follows a set of rules for their walk of life which in turn brings them wealth from outside of the city. Thieves, craftsmen, guards—everyone. Plus, the heads of the city are more of a council as far as I understand.”

  Dakkon was surprised. “You don’t know who the heads of Tian are?”

  “No, do you?” asked Ramses. “It’s not public information because it doesn’t need to be public information. No one asks because nobody needs to ask. If the system works then it’s best not to rock the boat,” Ramses shrugged.

  The little ball of muscle and beard named Damak strolled up to the two, who had been waiting seated on the rock, from the side. They turned as he said, “My boys, I see you’ve found us a new cart.”

  “Hey Damak,” said Dakkon. “Good to have you with us.”

  “Yup,” agreed Ramses. “Always a pleasure to have a sturdy meat shield to keep them guessing while I work.”

  Damak grinned fiercely. “Just see that you drop ‘em like you did last week and you won’t have to worry about it.”

  “Now we’re only down one prim, proper, and persnickety bard,” said Ramses shaking his head.

  “Ah he’s not so bad,” Damak explained how they had spent a bit of time together. He talked about how Finnegan did, however, manage to find himself in the middle of quite a bit of trouble. Then, after Finnegan had not shown up in another 15 minutes, Damak admitted that Finnegan didn’t seem particularly punctual. Just as Ramses began to send the bard a piece of his mind, Finnegan strolled up.

  “Oh, you’re all here?” said Finnegan with a look of somewhat disinterested surprise.

  “We’ve all been waiting on your sorry hide,” snapped Ramses.

  “Ah,” said Finnegan, still clearly disinterested. “Well, I figured you’d be trapped under a bottle somewhere, so I’d have plenty of time to finish up and head this way at a leisurely pace.”

  “A bottle?” asked Ramses. “I don’t drink.”

  “Is that so?” said Finnegan. “I thought all rogues drank.”

  “No, I’m straight-edge,” said Ramses.

  “Straight-edge?” asked Finnegan, now showing a bit more interest than he had before. Damak and Dakkon looked confused about what he meant as well.

  “Yes, straight-edge,” Ramses said in a practiced tone, then sighed. “Just like in the real world. My body is an unblemished, unbent, and honed instrument.”

  “You’re saying…” Finnegan paused for a moment while a grin spread across his lips, “you’re a tool?”

  “What?” snapped Ramses. “No. I’m a blade not-dulled by substances.”

  “So, you’re…” Finnegan nodded his smiling mug in appreciation, “an exceptional tool?”

  Damak shook his head and Dakkon cracked a smile. It was clear that Finnegan had a talent for pressing other people’s buttons.

  “Oh, shut up already,” barked Ramses. “You’re the one who showed up late. You’re the tool, tool.” Ramses was not holding his own very well in the situation.

  Dakkon spoke up early to make sure nothing got out of hand, “Now, now, now. No need to get bent out of shape. The wait isn’t a big deal.” Dakkon turned to look at the bard. “Finnegan, would you give it a rest. We’re only just getting started.” Finnegan halfway rolled his eyes and Ramses shook his head in consternation. Damak simply shrugged.

  Despite the group’s rocky reunion, once they were back out and working like a well-oiled machine, tensions alleviated. Their teamwork spoke volumes for each player’s ability. Finnegan pacified their krimmer target and the other three finished it off. Experimenting with their methods, they found that Dakkon alone was insufficient to instantly fell a krimmer. Only when both he and Ramses struck the beasts’ underbellies did they fall so quickly since they had lost the damage output of Hebbeson and Benton.

  The only reason anyone felt comfortable varying the routine to find out what worked best was because Damak never allowed the boars to turn away from him for an instant. If they tried, he would immediately bash them in their nose with his shield, using a skill which caused them to be stunned briefly, giving the rogue and edgemaster enough time to finish their job.

  The group no longer had Hebbeson with them, so Ramses auto-harvested the krimmer after each fight, yielding less than they had received before. Still, that only meant that the group needed to find another half dozen boars to fill up a cart load, which meant more experience on each outing. The smaller party number and the absence of the higher-leveled Hebbeson meant Dakkon was gaining experience at a pace which gave him hope for overtaking his friends.

  |————

  |Statistics ( ][][ ) ( ][][][ )

  |————

  |Strength: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped) ( ? )

  |Stamina: 25

  |Agility: 64 — (50 + 14 Equipped)

  |Dexterity: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped)

  |Intellect: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped)

  |Luck: 50

  |Free Stat Points: 60

  |Hit Points: 625/625

  |Endurance: 338/338

  |Mana Points: 362/362

  |Level: 24

  |EXP Until Next Level: [_____2,647/6,380 ]

  |————

  |Traits ( ][ ) ( ][][][ )

  |————

  |Appearance – 8 (Equipped)

  |Disciplined – 8— 12— 62% [______________ ]

  |Heroic – 2— 2% [_ ]

  |Hunter – 9— 42% [________ ]

  |Rider – 2— 15% [___ ]

  |Steadfast – 1— 0% [ ]

  |Stealthy – 4— 80% [_________________ ]

  |Thick – 1— 2
0% [_____ ]

  When they went back into town to report, they, four players—clearly devoid of any magic user and therefore with no healer—wheeling in a full cart load of krimmer drew attention from everyone. A player who had pointed toward Dakkon from earlier in the day did so again, and around a dozen players followed the four to ask for tips and invitations while they went to sell their bounty. When the krimmer meat, furs, tusks, and glands sold for 112 gold, the crowd surged.

  “What?” a member of the crowd asked. “How come they got so much?”

  “The meat and glands they brought are fresher than most and their furs are less tattered than average pelts brought before us,” replied the apprentice chef tasked with appraising materials whom the member of the crowd had directed his query.

  “So, we just need to kill them quickly and not mess up the furs?” asked another from the crowd. Without anyone speaking up to correct the idea, the crowd erupted into a restructuring of groups, aiming to finish off krimmers as quickly and cleanly as possible. Healers, counter to usual overwhelming demand, would be neglected in some sort of twisted image of Dakkon’s group.

  The four said nothing. They had no intention of giving up the information yet. They were succeeding in sowing the seeds, but the longer they had exclusive access to the higher rate of pay, the better, as far as they were concerned. They walked back out into the forest and continued grinding, repeating this process until night fell and the stalls closed down for the day.

  The four agreed to meet up again early in the morning, when the appraisal stalls re-opened, but for the night they would go their own ways. Dakkon walked down to Letis’s stall location and, although it was unpainted and unadorned, it already had six large troughs each filled over half way with water.

  Letis wasn’t around, but Dakkon decided he should give freezing a trough a try. Until now he had never attempted to freeze more than a palm-full of water. Would it even be possible? He wasn’t entirely certain.

  Dakkon utilized his Condense and Hotspot skills to create a small point of intense cold in the center of one of the troughs. He concentrated on the point, pouring in his mana and transforming it into frost. The expanse was rapid. In seconds, freezing water bowed the center of the trough’s wood, cracking it, and spilling the remaining water on the ground. By the time Dakkon had realized what was going wrong, it was too late to stop. One receptacle was out of commission, and he had only managed to freeze about a fourth of the trough’s water.

  “Wow,” thought Dakkon. His ability to turn water into ice was quite a bit more advanced than he had suspected. He stared at the broken trough and contemplated what this could do for him. “I can definitely find a use for this in combat,” he thought. If he could do the same with heat, causing someone to erupt in fire would be one hell of a nasty surprise.

  Dakkon decided he’d give his skill, Condense, a more thorough evaluation soon, but for now he needed to figure out how to freeze the water without breaking every trough. He experimented with a few different methods and decided that the easiest way, which didn’t immediately drain him of his mana, was simply to create three small, condensed hotspots along the bottom of a trough and supply them with much less mana than on his initial attempt. Dakkon found that the more mana he poured into a cold, condensed hotspot, the more fiercely it froze, and he assumed that a similar effect would happen for a fiery one. There didn’t seem to be a cap on the amount of mana he spent, either. He suspected he could just dump it all in, if he wanted to. At the end of Dakkon’s experiments, he was left with five large troughs filled with ice plus one which he had broken.

  The curiosity of what he would be capable of when using heat instead of frost overtook him. Dakkon regenerated his mana to full, walked a safe distance away from Letis’s stall, found the stump of a tree, and designated a small area in the center to be the focus of his heat-based hotspot. Then, he held his breath and—all at once—poured every bit of mana he could into it. The sensation of using all his mana at once left him feeling thoroughly chilled, even though he was creating heat. The stump’s center glowed red like an ember, then a single, piddly flame rose no higher or wider than his pinky finger from the wood.

  Dakkon was displeased. Had anyone been nearby to see the thermomancer’s abject disgust painted so clearly on his face, they would have felt a tug of empathy for his woes—or they’d laugh. Dakkon gazed upon the miniscule flame which he had created and disavowed it. He couldn’t be seen trying to defend himself with that, or he’d become a laughing stock. Dakkon wouldn’t abide by that. It was too early to completely disregard the ability, though. Once condensed, the utility of his freezing hotspot had surprised him. He was sure that the fiery version could be applied practically. It must be difficult to focus, for instance, with a red-hot iron in the eye, and who wouldn’t turn to face a sudden, sharp burning sensation on the back of their shoulder?

  The thought of a hot coal anywhere on his body sent a shiver down Dakkon’s spine. It would be a cruel trick, but it ought to be effective. The real challenge would be figuring out how much of his mana reserves it would take to be an effective distraction. It was something he would have to devote some time to figuring out.

  Dakkon decided he would sit around and wait for Letis to show up on his own, providing him with the time he needed to test how to best use his condensed hotspots. First thing first, he’d need to know exactly how damaging and distracting his fully-powered miniature, remote fire poker could be. In the absence of any nearby test subjects, Dakkon gritted his teeth, placed a hotspot on his arm, and condensed it—pouring in all his mana.

  [You have burned yourself for 30 damage. Remaining HP 620/650]

  [Like a moth to the flame, you seek a goal no matter the price. You have gained a rank in Thick!]

  “Y’ouch, damn it!” Dakkon exclaimed unwittingly even though he had been anticipating the experience. Despite the low damage dealt for the amount of mana he spent, the pain was extraordinary. It felt as though he had driven a nail into his arm, salted the wound, then cauterized it closed all in an instant.

  It was clear that he wouldn’t need to exhaust his full mana reserve in the future to mete out a painful distraction. Dakkon decided that now, since he knew the approximate peak conditions of his skill for the moment, he would work up in intensity until he found a difficult to bear strength. Once he knew that, he could adjust the intensity for his intended target. After a couple hours of regenerating mana, then expending it in various tests, Dakkon found that the optimal size was about the same as the cherry ember of a lit cigarette. At that size, Dakkon only needed to spend about a sixth of his mana to create a sensation so unpleasant that his target would, without a doubt, try and tend to it immediately. Still, he decided that he’d use a fourth of his mana in a real fight to be certain of the effect.

  The frost version of his condensed hotspot, by contrast, didn’t seem even remotely practical for combat. Since it could freeze water rapidly, he assumed he could freeze wet ground to create a slick surface, but when he tried using it on the skin, it proved to be surprisingly ineffective. Dakkon had no idea why something which could freeze enough water to splinter wood in the blink of an eye wasn’t able to cause more than mild discomfort to his skin. He wondered what would happen if he tried using the ability on his wet eyeballs, but decided to save that particular experiment for a later date, when he had a different lab rat to experiment with. It was when this grim thought was passing through Dakkon’s mind that he heard a banging noise from the direction of Letis’s stall.

  Dakkon headed back toward the stall and saw Letis bent over and working on the broken trough with a hammer in his hand.

  “Hey there, Letis. What’s cracking?” asked Dakkon.

  “Cute,” said Letis. “If you want to break my stuff, it may be more discreet if you didn’t use your funky cold magic to bust things open with giant ice cubes.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Dakkon. “But you seem handy enough with a hammer.”

  “I
just built a wooden stall,” said Letis pointing to the somewhat shoddy construction with his hammer. “That’s about as far as I’ll get with woodworking. There’s no way I’ll be able to make this trough hold water again, but we can put crushed ice in it.”

  “Speaking of which,” Dakkon pulled the promised chisel out of his bag and held it out to Letis, “here’s your chisel.”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted,” Letis said glibly as he snatched the offered tool, shaking his head.

  “There’s a silver lining to that broken trough. I now know how to quickly prepare our ice for sale,” said Dakkon.

  “Let me guess,” said Letis, with a sarcastic tone, “you freeze, I chisel.” Dakkon was beginning to think that the construction of a stall may have been somewhat of an undertaking for Letis, but that couldn’t be helped now that it was built and done.

  “I meant how I should go about freezing the water,” said Dakkon. “But, yes. You chisel,” Dakkon grinned.

  “You know,” began Letis reluctantly, “there’s bound to be a merchant in town who will sell ice at a price that will make this whole endeavor meaningless.”

  “Ah,” said Dakkon. “But when the players see our successful group paying top dollar for your special, deluxe, and indeed—premium—ice, I’m sure they’ll follow suit.” Dakkon’s grin broadened mischievously.

  “Your avarice knows no bounds,” said Letis with a sigh. “The worst part is, you’re probably right.”

  “Of course I’m right,” said Dakkon. “I’d pay for it too, if I were in their position. Why gamble hours of time away with cheap, regular ice when you know the premium stuff will work?”

  “Any idea how much we should sell it for?” asked Letis. “The ice, that is.”

  “Let’s try selling based on cart capacity,” said Dakkon. “For a cart of about this size,” Dakkon gestured to his small-to-medium-sized cart, “we got about 120 gold for a load of krimmer goodies. That’s something like five times what they were otherwise worth. Even if you charged 60 gold, we’d have made a profit of about two and a half times what we would have otherwise made, right?” Dakkon waited for Letis’s nod of agreement before he continued. “When we show up to purchase ice, offer us a price of 60 gold. We’ll make a show of handing the money over gratefully.”