by Kyle Vauss
“We’ll do it tomorrow night,” he told his men. He smiled as if he loved the sound of his own voice. “I’ve convinced Father to log into my stream and watch me get the achievement. He doesn’t understand what an accomplishment it is, but he will soon.”
“You’ll always be a loser,” said Gabber, pulling on the bars of his cage.
“And soon you’ll be dead, you little imp. Enjoy your sleep tonight, because it’s the last one you’ll get.”
That was it, then. He was going to do it tomorrow, and his father was going to watch him. For the briefest of seconds, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He was so desperate for his father’s approval, that he’d do anything.
Then the dregs of empathy I felt vanished. I pulled up my social screen, and looked at my friend list. The list still showed that I had zero friends, but there was another field next to it.
[Pending friend request – Loria Snapstaff]
I did something that I’d never done before. I looked at Loria’s friend request, and I clicked accept. Then I brought up my message screen and started to compose the text. The wizard had betrayed me and Gabber had been captured, but I wasn’t alone. I knew a certain illusionist who would help me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The air started to whirl as if a mini tornado was hovering on the spot. The movement grew large and finally, colors streamed in. I saw the purple of a robe, the red laces on pointy-tipped boots, and the pure white of a sapphire fixed to a staff. And then long ribbons of red hair, sparkling under the glow of the sun.
Loria Snapstaff took full form in front of me, rubbed her eyes, then stretched out her arms.
“Bloody hell,” she said, rubbing her head. “Fast travel is a bitch.”
“Thanks for coming, Loria.”
“You took your time,” she said. “But what’s up? Why the change of heart? Need a quest buddy?”
For the next twenty minutes, I explained everything that had happened so far. From meeting Gabber, helping him through the marshes, Ulrip Caverns, and the betrayal in the town.
Loria hadn’t stayed still for a single minute of my story. Sometimes she’d sit, but then barely ten seconds later she’d be back on her feet. It was as though since she was in a wheelchair outside of the game, she couldn’t bear to sit still when playing.
“What a nasty git,” she said, when I had finished.
“Who? Crawford, or Dagnor?”
“Both. I play wheelchair basketball, and there was a guy on our team who never passed the ball. One match, the final of the state cup, I was clear through and waiting for a pass. What did he do? Took the shot himself.”
“Did he score?”
“Missed by a country mile. I fixed him, though. Next time we played, I loosened one his wheels before the match. He tried dribbling forward, and his wheel came off and he fell on the floor. You should have seen his face.”
“Loria, that’s horrible.”
“Oh, relax. Just because we’re in wheelchairs, doesn’t mean we’re made of cotton wool.”
Now, she sat with her staff stretched out across her knees. She looked different from when I’d last seen her. The robe was new, and the strips of blue light that ran up and down it indicated that it had a mana regeneration effect. The white gem on her staff was a focusing crystal. It was a common item that could increase spell intensity and duration. All in all, she looked like she’d done some levelling up and then spent her money wisely.
“I mean,” she carried on, “Crawford, I can kind of understand why he’s a jerk. Who doesn’t wish their mum and dad were proud of them? And if his father is the kind of ass you say he is, I guess he’d be hard to please.”
“I’d almost feel sorry for him if he weren’t planning on killing my friend,” I said.
“Dagnor though, he’s the real git here. If he wants to play as a wizard, all he should do is start as a new class. What’s all this sentimental crap about wanting to keep his character? Pah.”
I nodded. “Trust me, there’s nothing I want more to wipe the smile off their faces.”
“You could have messaged me,” said Loria. “Before you went to Ulrip. You knew I wanted to go there.”
I shrugged. “I know. And I’m sorry. It happened pretty fast.”
Suddenly, Loria’s face changed. When I looked at her new expression, I realized she was capable of a wrath that was scary.
“What’s your problem, Tamos?” she said. “It’s taken you days to add me as a friend, and you’ve only done it because you need me for something. Would it have killed you to just be nice?”
I scratched my head. I looked around, wondering if there was an exit somewhere. There was something staring right at me that I didn’t want to confront, but Loria was going to make me turn my head to face it.
“Come on,” she said. “I’m waiting. Tell me what the heck your problem is, or I’m leaving.”
I walked over and sat down next to my inventory bag. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll explain.”
And with that, I told Loria about Sarah and Baxter. I explained about the problems we’d had, and about how I got home to find that she’d left me and taken my dog with her. I explained how none of her friends or family would tell me where she’d gone. How Sarah had never bothered to contact me to give me any sort of closure.
“After that, I wasn’t really in the mood for company,” I said. “So, it’s nothing personal.”
She gave me a sweet smile. She walked over to me. I thought she was going to sit next to me and give me a hug, and I told myself I’d just have to play nice and take it.
Instead, when she stood over me, Loria gave me a soft slap on the face. “You need to get off your arse. You can’t just go through life never being close to people just because of some ignorant cow. One person screwed you over, but it doesn’t mean everyone else will.”
I nodded. “Two people, actually,” I said. “I’m adding Dagnor to the list.”
“You know what I mean, though. The world doesn’t end with her. You’ve already made two friends.”
“Two?”
“Gabber,” she said. “And me.”
She was right. After Sarah left, I’d stayed away from people, never wanting to get friendly with anyone. I told myself that it was because people would always let you down, but now I realized it was something else. The reason I acted like I did, was because I wanted to preserve the pain. If I was in pain, I didn’t have to move on. If I was happy, I’d have to force myself to forget about Sarah and my pal.
I stood up. For the first time in a while, I was burning with energy. I started pacing around. I wasn’t going to let Crawford kill Gabber. I didn’t care what it took; I’d do it. It meant that I might not be able to sell my shadow walker. I needed to get to level 10 and choose a new, powerful skill if I was to have any chance against Crawford. I was going to lose money here, but it didn’t matter. I had to do it.
“So, here’s the plan,” I said.
Loria put her hand to her head and saluted. “Ready for orders, sir!”
“Knock it off. Listen up. Crawford is taking Gabber up there tomorrow night,” I said.
I pointed to the east, where a hill rose thirty feet, then levelled off into a kind of platform. Some had built a construction on top of it which looked like an altar. There were four pillars that supported a dome-shaped roof. In the center of the construction was a slab of stone.
I checked my map and it showed the building as the only piece of player-killer territory for miles. I wondered if that was why Crawford had chosen to kill Gabber here. He wanted to be able to attack me if I came to rescue him.
“He’s going to kill Gabber there like some kind of Aztec priest,” I said. “But we’re going to free him before that happens.”
“How?” said Loria.
“We’ve got all day to think on that.”
“And what then?”
“After that we need to go free some goblins from a respawn point not far to the northeast. It shouldn’
t be difficult, especially if we do it at night. It’s non-player killing territory, though. We can’t physically force any players there to leave the goblins alone.”
Loria put her hand to her chin. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve got something that’ll help.”
“After that,” I said, “Gabber needs to get back to his clan.”
“So, we’re going to help him take it back?”
A strange emotion struck me, and I couldn’t quite place it. Was it sadness? Whatever it was, I tried to shake it off.
I took out my map, and I dragged my finger all the way north until I was pointing off the page. “We can’t,” I said. “Gabber’s clan is here.”
“That’s not in player territory.”
I nodded. “NPCs have backstories that cover lands way beyond in Infarna. Gabber believes his goblin clan is north. So, all we can do is escort him to the northernmost part of the map. After that he’ll go, and we won’t be able to follow.”
“Won’t you be sad to leave him?” she said.
The stupidest thing, a thought I didn’t even like admitting to myself, was that I would be. But if Gabber was as real as I thought he was, then I couldn’t stop him. He yearned to take his clan back, and I had to let him.
Loria studied the map. “Going so far north is going to take us into player-killer territory you know,” she said. “Crawford will be able to hurt us, too.”
I nodded. “That’s why we’re going to spend today levelling up, while I think of a plan to free Gabber.”
They were brave words, but I wasn’t sure how much weight was behind them. The fact was that other than using Shadow Form and trying to slip up into the altar unnoticed, I was out of ideas.
The problem was that Crawford had already placed two of his neeves at the bottom of the hill, and two mercs in the middle. I could get up there unnoticed, but there was no way of getting Gabber without running into trouble. I needed a clever way of doing it.
“Ready?” said Loria.
I nodded. “Let’s level up for a few hours. Hopefully something will come to me.”
We stayed in the same general area and walked until we came across NPC mobs. We killed fat-bellied trolls, hunch-backed creatures with lizard heads, and lots of four-legged spider-type -things with giant horns on their heads. It was a fertile place for levelling up.
As an illusionist, even if she was only level 8, Loria had spells that made my Minor Illusion look silly. She could not only copy one object, but several, and her holograms were durable enough to take a few hits. This proved invaluable when we were faced with more than a few enemies, since it let us distract them while we attacked from behind.
A couple of grinding hours later, and I reached level 10.
Chapter Thirty
“Took your time getting level 10, didn’t you? There’s not much to do around here. I’ve read all my books twice. Front to back, then back to front.”
I was back in the white-walled room with Bolzar. This time, though, I had been prepared for it. It hadn’t been a shock when the air around me started to shimmer and the Infarna plains disappeared. Bolzar was sat on the table, in the center of it, cross-legged. He had books strewn all around him.
“You’d think it’d be confusing reading a book backwards,” he said. “But it’s actually interesting. Rather than a hero with a flaw who becomes better by the end, you have one who starts out great and then gets progressively worse.”
I took a step forward. Was this an act? Some kind of script used by the devs? There was no way that Bolzar just sat in here and waited for me to level up.
“Yeah,” he carried on. “I read The Exorcist backwards. It’s a completely different story. It’s about a couple of priests who suck the Christianity out of a girl, gradually turning her demonic.”
I walked over to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down. The chair started to regenerate my HP. Bolzar didn’t move away from the center of the table.
“Are you going to sit in a chair?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m good here. I’ve found my Zen.”
Bolzar’s face was covered by a rough looking beard. His fingernails looked like he’d been chewing on them.
“Are you okay?” I said. “You don’t seem great.”
He shook his head. “When they plucked me out of Ikiele and reprogrammed me here, they didn’t give me a full memory wipe. I can still remember my wife back in the newbie village. She’ll be carrying on as normal. Only, they would still have needed someone to run the merchant shop with her, so now she probably has a new husband.”
That struck a nerve. Although the methods were different, both Bolzar and I faced the same problem. We’d both lost someone.
“Come on, buddy,” I said. “Do a good job here, and they might send you back.”
“I’m just a spare part, Tom,” he said. “An NPC they ship around wherever they like.”
I was about to console him, when I stopped. I had the overwhelming feeling that something wasn’t right here. It was something I’d thought about the last couple of times I’d seen Bolzar, but it hadn’t properly clicked into place.
The thing was, Bolzar was an NPC. As such, he was supposed to be ignorant of game mechanics, except in rare occasions. For example, if he was a guide NPC who had to show newbies where to go.
Bolzar was the opposite, though. He constantly talked about the way things worked. He referred to ‘the game’ and to ‘the devs’. It was almost as if he was self-aware of both the game, and his role within it. That was impossible. Something was wrong here.
I stood up and moved away from the table. “This is all bullshit, isn’t it?” I said.
He looked up. “What?”
“You, the story about your wife, the customer feedback. What’s going on here?”
I looked around, as if I’d suddenly see monitors on the walls with people watching me. Instead, the room was just as bare as before. “Who am I talking to? Who are you, Bolzar? Are you a Dev? Another player?”
Bolzar straightened himself up and climbed off the table. He pulled out a chair and sat in it.
“Clean me up please,” he said, looking at the walls.
In a second, his beard was gone, his hair was combed, and he was dressed in a shirt, trousers and tie. He folded his hands across the desk and smiled at me.
“We should have picked somebody less perceptive for this,” he said. “Please, Tom, take a seat.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“Take a seat, and I’ll explain.”
I walked over to the table and sat down. With my stats already full, the recuperative effect of the chair didn’t have any effect.
Bolzar clapped his hands, and a bundle of documents appeared in them. I recognized them straight away. They were the Infarna terms and conditions.
“Are you aware of how Infarna was developed in the early days?” asked Bolzar.
I shook my head.
“A programmer named Henry Bolzar had an idea for a fully-immersive game. He even patented the technological concept for it. The only thing he didn’t have, was enough money to make it. Even a non-VR game costs millions of GD to develop. You can imagine the cost of making something like Infarna.”
“I figured it had private backers,” I said. “After all, it’s made for profit.”
“It did,” said Bolzar. “And it still does. But in the beginning, it was backed by the government. They gave Henry seed money, on the condition they could have access to the game for research purposes.”
This was all getting a little too Orwellian for my liking. I wanted to get back to Loria. “How do I come into this?” I said.
Bolzar folded his arms. “Infarna pulls data from your social networks.”
I went to say something, but Bolzar held a hand out.
“Before you say anything,” he said. “Remember that you signed-”
I sighed. “Yeah, that I signed for it in terms and conditions. Can we please get to the point?”
/> “Okay, Tom. We’ll get straight to it. Infarna is being used by the government to trial psychological therapy. It's thought that an immersive game can be used to heal mental ailments in a non-harmful environment.”
I leaned forward. “Okay…And me? Where do I come into this?”
“An automated social network search of our players highlighted two posts made by you, Tom.”
“But I hardly use social networks.”