by Dante Doom
“Fair enough,” Sang mumbled as she slowly became translucent.
“Just stick to the shadows and we’ll hopefully die quickly enough not to feel it,” Van mumbled as he walked out into the hallway. His armor clunked along as he started to descend the stairwell. He hoped that things would go smoothly, but he doubted it. Dragon Kings of the New World wasn’t particularly known for being a forgiving experience, but he needed to look like he was trying... at least enough to justify why they’d be dying at this point in the game. The last thing he wanted was Neil angrily blaming him for the problems Sang was causing.
They walked in silence, down into the bowels of the dungeon, and fortunately for Van, the Armory had a map available and it wasn’t too hard to navigate their way back to the dungeon. The NPCS were all busy searching the area. He could hear someone calling out orders.
“Uh-oh!” Van said, stiffening up as he saw a tall man wearing noble regalia pointing at a group of Orcs.
“I don’t care! Sweep the entire area and search harder! They’re somewhere, I know it!” said the man. He wore black and blue armor, and had a sword at his side. Flames occasionally burst out from the man’s hilt, but did nothing to affect him. The words Primarch Sulith appeared over his head... in purple.
Van swallowed hard upon noting the color. Primarch Sulith wasn’t a NPC, but rather a professional gamer hired to play one of the leaders of the enemy faction. He was essentially just like an actor, paid to participate in the game and act as if the world were real—making interaction far more realistic. The only problem with pro gamers was that they were very clever. Each of them had their own personalities and some were incredibly intense method actors, preferring to roleplay to the highest degree, while others were knuckle-dragging jerks who just liked to kill any player they saw in order to spice up the game. Van had met his fair share of both, and he wasn’t sure which ones he liked less.
“You there!” Primarch Sulith said, turning to face Van. “Why aren’t you searching?” It was clear already that Sulith knew Van was a player.
Van gently tapped his Amulet of Lies and felt it flash a little. “Why, sir, I was here to relieve the guard of prisoner detail!” he said, hoping to God that this player wouldn’t use meta-knowledge to screw him over.
“What detachment are you from?” Sulith asked, crossing his arms.
A dialogue box suddenly appeared
The best one, of course
I just work here
LIE (Underboss Grattics, of course)
Van selected the option enabled by the Amulet of Lies. This caused Sulith to nod. “My apologies, sir—I didn’t realize that Underboss Grattics was sending me men. Very well; please carry on and make sure you take this key in case we have to evacuate the prisoners.”
Item Acquired: Purple Key
Van tried his best not to fist pump as he took the key and pocketed it. He glanced over to see that Sang was still crouching in the darkness. Sulith hadn’t spotted her yet.
“Now then, I must continue my search for the heroes, as they will rue the day that they have run afoul of Primarch Sulith!” the man said dramatically as he walked past Van and Sang.
Van let out a breath of relief; he couldn’t believe that had worked. He’d managed to pull one over on a player. Of course, it was only because the pro gamer was a sporting kind of guy who enjoyed simulation, and not just wanton violence, that he was still able to walk straight. He didn’t bother to stick around long enough to count his fortune, though, and the two of them hustled down to the prison.
The area was still crawling with Orcs, but fortunately none of them had enough points to spot Sang or notice the fact that Van himself wasn’t an Orc. Van glanced at one of the doors and saw there was a name carved on the side of it: Grelb Arcson. It was the name of the Dwarf NPC they were looking for.
Van rushed up to it and hurriedly unlocked the door. The door swung open and the Dwarf rushed out.
“Thank you for—”
“Skip!” Van shouted, hurrying the dialogue.
“Really?” Sang asked. “You’re in a rush to get through everything!”
“No time for criticism, woman, we’ve got to go!” Van said as he rushed through the Dwarf’s dialogue.
In near on a blink of an eye, they were standing outside of the castle. “I am so thankful!” the Dwarf said. “Count me as a loyal friend for any future endeavor! Meet me in my home out at—”
“Skip!” Van said. The Dwarf immediately vanished from sight.
“Well, that worked out great,” Sang said, stretching her arms. “I can’t believe we were able to complete this quest.”
Van looked at the quest bar and saw that it was still open.
“Hmmm, you know, it was forever ago when I did this mission… I figured it would have ended by now,” Van mused.
“It’s probably lag, right? That’s what gamers are always fussing about? Lag? And nerfs? Maybe it’s a nerf,” Sang said as she began to walk away from the castle. “Look,” she said as she pointed at one of the boulders.
Van cocked his head as he looked at the boulder on the side of the hill they had been walking down. There was something strange etched into it. It looked like a constellation, but nothing that he had ever seen before. Then the rock carving slowly began to move.
“This is interesting,” Sang said as she got a little closer to it.
“Whoa!” Van said as he watched the carving contort and twist into a dragon. What was this? Some kind of new feature? A bug? He couldn’t quite understand why there was some random carving on a boulder outside of a quest zone. As he looked at the dragon carving twist and grow, though, something began to occur to him.
“Oh, wait… I just realized something,” Van muttered as his eyes opened wide in horror.
“What?”
“The quest doesn’t end until we fight the sheriff!” he shouted.
“So? Let him come out and fight us! We should be strong enough to take out one guy,” Sang said as she continued to investigate the rock.
“The sheriff isn’t a guy…” Van mumbled as he heard a loud roar from overhead.
“WHO DARES STEAL MY PRISONERS?” shrieked a horrific voice from above. Van turned to see a massive purple dragon flying overhead, breathing dangerous streaks of flame.
“It’s a dragon!”
“What a dumb name for a dragon!” Sang said. “Why didn’t anyone say the sheriff was a dragon?”
“it’s an in-game surprise!” Van said, “I didn’t want to run it for you!”
The roaring was immense, and they could both feel the ground beneath them shake as the creature crashed to the ground in front of them and let out a colossal roar.
“YOU FOOLS WILL DIE AT MY CLAWS!”
“Ah, crap! This was why we needed five people—not the stupid dungeon part!” Van said, suddenly remembering the end of this quest. He’d honestly completely forgotten about the ending.
“Don’t worry, I have a plan!” Sang said as she leapt back, narrowly avoiding the flames.
“What’s that?” Van asked as he looked over. She was gone. Jane has logged out of the game.
“Are you kidding me?” Van screamed as he realized she had somehow managed to hack the game so that she could leave in the middle of a fight. Flames poured down on him, but fortunately he was still wearing his armor, so he only took a few points of damage. WARNING: ARMOR CRITICAL read his display as he realized that, if he were hit by the fire again, it would completely destroy his armor.
“WHY IS MY LIFE SO HARD RIGHT NOW!!!!” Van cried out as he began to run and try to strip off his armor simultaneously, praying that the dragon wouldn’t devour him immediately.
Chapter Eleven
Sang sat with her arms crossed defiantly, resting in the conference room of the abandoned office that they were staying in. She wasn’t particularly happy with O’Hara’s decision to pull her out in the middle of a big fight. As odd as it was, Sang had wanted to continue battling with the dragon—it h
ad seemed like it might be somewhat enjoyable. She paused as she considered the prospect of what she was thinking, though. All of the pain of dealing with the loss of her partner had been gut wrenching, but with the busyness of the mission, she had been distracted. She was having fun, in a way. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel guilty over that fact or not.
As she sat in the worn-down office with the shattered table in its middle, she watched as O’Hara and Neil stayed busy writing things down on a whiteboard. They were equations and mathematics that she didn’t particularly understand. Normally she understood computer code, but this looked very different from her regular field of work.
“Thanks for joining us, Sang,” Neil said as he turned around and sat on the corner of the table. It creaked a little, but didn’t break—as she had been expecting it to.
“What’s so important that you needed me immediately? We were in the middle of an important battle,” Sang said, crossing her arms again and frowning.
“A fake battle in a fake world,” O’Hara answered as she sat down in the swivel chair opposite of Sang. “It’s not worth worrying about whether you get some fake internet points or whatever. What’s more important is that thing you saw.”
“The glitch?” Sang asked.
“Yeah, the glitch!” Neil said excitedly, pointing to a holographic display of the constellation carving in the center of the room. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” Sang said, staring at it blankly. “It’s just… you know… a glitch.”
“Is it?” O’Hara asked as she abruptly stood up and placed her hands on the table, leaning in to get closer to Sang. “Or is it something more?”
“Like what?” Sang asked, completely unsure of what was going on. She had been a little suspicious of these two for quite some time now, and knew there was something that she wasn’t being told. But what?
“Like… communication,” Neil said as he drew out a picture on the whiteboard. It was of a tall, big-eyed creature. “Tell me something, Sang, what do you think about the universe? The galaxy?”
“Huh?”
“Are we alone, Agent Sang?” O’Hara asked, leaning back and pulling up another series of strange symbols and pictures.
“Um, what?” Sang asked. Now she really had no idea what was going on.
“The reality of being human is that we are always gazing at the stars, wondering what’s out there,” Neil continued as he drew a pictogram of the big-eyed creature trying to use radio waves to reach earth.
“But we’ve wondered if whatever’s out there wants to talk to us, too,” O’Hara said.
“Wait, wait,” Sang protested, “are you guys talking about aliens?”
O’Hara glanced over at Neil, who nodded at her. “Yes,” she said quietly. “We’re talking about something like aliens. Aliens, beings from another dimension, advanced AI, something.”
“Okay, you had me when you were asking me to investigate the servers because of player-related deaths, but I’m afraid you’ve now completely lost me, and perhaps even earned my resignation,” Sang said as she slid back from the table.
“We knew you’d react that way,” Neil said, pointing to the symbols that were still floating in the middle of the table. “Until you saw some proof. Tell me, what do these symbols mean?”
Sang looked at them. She was an expert in computer language and spoke many different languages, but as she glanced at the symbols, she couldn’t figure out what they meant. It appeared to be some kind of language, it was true, from the way it was squiggled and crossed, and the gaps between the lines indicated some kind of words, but the language wasn’t anything like any she recognized. “I don’t know what that is,” she said.
“Neither do we, but we’ve been able to figure out it’s a language,” O’Hara said. “Appeared seven weeks ago, in a glitch. One of our less ambitious agents was trying to track down a human trafficker in-game and ended up coming across this. He thought it was odd and sent it to our department for translation, hoping that it was some kind of secret code to allow him to get free stuff in the game.”
“That slacker accidentally found something more than human,” Neil said. “We can’t decode it. Interestingly enough, those symbols aren’t found anywhere else on this planet. And trust me, we did the research.”
“So, what?” she asked, shaking her head. “It’s probably some kind of stupid secret code made by the game company. It probably says ‘Drink your Ovaltine’ or something.”
“That’s what the higher-ups thought. Then a few people died in the game… so we might have taken a little bit of some creative liberty to get this investigation put together,” Neil said, grinning.
“So, you’re meaning to tell me that this is a rogue operation? Does Frederick know about this?” she asked.
“Frederick was the guy who put this together. It was me, him, and O’Hara’s plan,” Neil explained.
“Alright, this is a bunch of crap!” Sang angrily protested. “You brought me in believing that there was some kind of a serious investigation going on, and now I’m finding out it’s just so we can play X-Files?”
“It’s more than that,” O’Hara said. “There really is a threat here. Those deaths were hidden and hushed up. Draco refuses to talk about the symbols and bugs despite the fact that there are plenty of forum bug reports talking about them. The cover-up, the symbols, the way Draco has been so hidden. It’s all connected somehow.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sang asked. She had to remind herself she wasn’t in-game; she had felt her hands subconsciously grasping down to where her longsword would have been. It was a weird moment, but she let it pass.
“Well, this sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Neil asked.
“Yes—yes, it does.”
“And would you ever have agreed to this if you had known this was the plan?” O’Hara asked.
“Never.”
“Right,” Neil said, shrugging. “So, you were the best of the best in this field. Greatest hacking and cyberterrorism operator we’ve ever had. If anyone was going to be good at this job, it was you. So, we kind of, sort of, completely lied to you to get you invested in the job.”
“Really? You’re not even going to try and smooth it over somehow?” Sang growled.
“Look, we’re a clandestine agency dedicated to doing all sorts of shady stuff; we set up third world dictators, hack foreign governments, steal nuclear codes and assassinate those that oppose us, so why the hell do you think we’d be so honest and nice?” O’Hara said.
“So now you’ve got a choice here. You can stick around and keep doing the mission, following our lead and learning everything there is to learn about these aliens, or you can take your marbles and go home,” Neil said. “The problem now is that, if you go home... well, you’re abandoning a crucial mission in the eyes of the CIA.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sang asked. “This is manipulatory and… and incredibly unprofessional!”
“I acknowledge the fact that what we are proposing to you is crazy,” O’Hara said. “We didn’t bother sharing this information, up until now, because we didn’t have any viable way to convince you that aliens were real and worth investigating. Now that we have enough information, we can share it with you.”
Sang froze. “You can prove this?”
“Indeed, we can,” O’Hara said quietly.
Sang felt her heart skip a beat. Both of the agents wore grim expressions. Neil quietly moved over to the holograph display and fiddled with the controls. Another picture hovered in front of them. It was a rock of some sort, but it was shifting and moving uncontrollably. The strange symbols emerged from the rock again and a small face emerged alongside the symbols. Then came a voice: “Iiah vveerr,” it said. The sound of the voice was almost terrifying... it was somewhat hoarse , and sounded as if it were from a broken radio. It repeated the words over and over again, for almost three minutes straight.
“What is that?” Sang asked quietly.
&n
bsp; “We think it’s trying to say hello,” Neil said.
“At least we hope it’s saying that,” O’Hara said. “This is the whole point of it, Sang. We’re not here to play X-Files; we’re here to play Men In Black. The truth is that we don’t know what these things are, what they want, or why they’re using some kind of video game to make contact.”
“My money is on the fact that they connected into the servers remotely and mistook the game for being our actual world,” Neil said.
“Regardless, if these creatures are friendly, then we need to know as soon as possible.”
“And if they’re not?” Sang asked.
“Then we gotta kill them, I guess,” Neil said. “I mean, once we get confirmation of the whole alien thing and we can disclose this to the President without being shoved into a nice padded cell, we’ll figure it out from there. This is all about scouting and getting information. After we get sufficient data, we can call it quits until we can get some instructions from our higher-ups.”
“And they’re just going to believe us?” Sang asked.
“Believe it or not, but we have an official charter on alien activity,” O’Hara said. “Don’t blab about it until you can prove it, but if you can prove it, do it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that was Eisenhower’s thoughts on the subject,” Neil said.
Sang glanced at the strange recording and back to her colleagues. It was all too much to take in, but there was some curiosity in her. It wasn’t like she’d be able to walk away from this anyway. If she did, she’d be in major trouble with Frederick, and probably end up being charged with some kind of crime.
“Alright, fine,” Sang said. “I’ll keep playing alien detective, but we better find something.”
“We’re going to,” Neil said.
“And what about Van?” Sang asked. “Does he need to know?”
“No, absolutely not. Learning this kind of thing as a civilian is what earns you a trip to the desert where you get to dig your own grave.”