Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

  She nodded mutely.

  "It was kind of like that. Some NumberFetch thing, something about 'TypeNew' and then 'Herald of MT'. I’m guessing that’s my Seed String. The quest told me to go to the village of Myszno in the province of the same name and find the ‘Thunderstones’. Still have no damn idea what those are."

  "Hector... I... umm..." Rin trailed off, forcing herself to stop stimming. She had worn away some of her silicone flesh, and rubbed at the bald patch on her finger as she looked up at me. "I think you were accidentally uploaded into the NPC database. But to generate a player character from that… there’s no NPC in Archemi who can raid ATHENA and create a new player, let alone assign a PC a whole new character type.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Matir did.”

  "I-I don’t think that was Matir." Her voice was high and frightened. "They can't just create new character types! They're not even supposed to interact directly with players!"

  “This one did.” I took another swallow of liquor, swaying slightly as the buzz finally kicked in.

  Rin got to her feet in agitation. “Hector, whatever you do, don't go to the Thunderstones. Wherever those are. Don't. Please."

  "Why?" The fear in her voice made me hesitate. Rin didn’t usually get worked up like this about technology. I dropped to the balcony with a thump. "I figured the game just self-corrected by generating Matir and giving me a sweet-ass quest. That’s what Temperance told me."

  “Temperance?” Rin gave me a shrewd look. “The CEO’s gynoid?”

  “Yeah. Her.” I nodded. “She told me that Matir’s appearance was a ‘contrivance of the AI’. That the game self-corrected to maintain its own lore.”

  "No, it didn’t. I know it didn’t," she insisted. "The self-correction function only applies to lore-based story conflicts. There is zero functionality for any NPC, god or not, to be able to directly change player types, player data, or to… uhh… you know, the stuff I just said. They're just normal quest-issuing NPCs. They don't have admin access, they can’t make players out of ATHENA’s database. Human Admins are the ONLY entities who could do what you just described. And only some Admins could do that, ones with very special permissions. The AI cannot do that, do you understand?"

  "But the AI did do that," I said dumbly.

  "No, it didn't." Rin's expression was haunted and hard, nothing like her usual girlish, bubbly self. "A person did. And the only person we know of with those kinds of permissions was Ororgael."

  Chapter 28

  It was at that moment that the Intoxication buff appeared at the corner of my HUD. I giggled.

  "So… what? I’m like a computer virus now?" I swayed a little as the alcohol coursed through my virtual bloodstream. +20 resistance to Fear effects, +5 to Speech, Nausea and Vertigo, yeehaw. "Boogedy-boogedy boo! I'm gonna infect ya!"

  "Hector! I'm serious!" Rin paced back and forth frantically. "Your story is almost exactly like Michael's. He reported the same repeating glitch, the same incursion of a 'presence'-"

  "Yeah, but, I didn't die a couple hundred times and go nuts," I slurred. "I got all my nuts right here. Top and bottom."

  "Listen to me!" Rin got up in my face and grasped the straps of my armor. "Michael's entire plan to take over a server was based around manipulating the dragon gods, The Nine. Okay? What if this is a backup plan of his? Or what if he actually infected Matir and the whole Baldr-Ororgael thing is a decoy? We could end up being trapped in here, with him ruling the whole world like... like Kefka, from Final Fantasy!"

  Kefka: now that was a name I hadn't heard in a while. Kefka was definitely not the kind of guy you wanted ruling anything bigger than a padded cell. It sobered me a little. Rin backed away from me and began pacing again, wringing her hands and muttering.

  "Look, don't worry, okay?" I leaned on the railing, a big sloppy grin fixed to my face. "I won't go to the Thunderstones. Not until the admins get back on."

  She nodded, still pacing. "I'm sorry about this and Karalti and... and everything, okay? She'll be okay. Just... just... umm... be patient with her, and... "

  "It's fine. I'm gonna go find Her Majesty and see if we can make up." I burped, then slammed back more apricot brandy.

  Rin didn't even seem to notice my departure. I wandered back around the warehouse, crossed a bridge, and walked back to the fort. It was much slower than flying.

  I was most of the way across the central parade ground when my eagle eyes snagged on something on one of the walkways between buildings. I went and put my back to the nearest cobblestone wall, falling in beside a couple of soldiers playing dice, and zoomed in on the parapet.

  It was Karalti. She was still polymorphed, and she was talking to Lorenzo fucking Soma.

  I scowled, watching as the towering Count leaned toward her and handed her a wooden box. She accepted it hesitantly, looking up at him as he beamed with anticipation and motioned for her to open it. My eyes narrowed as she cracked the lid, gasped, and drew out a large, ridiculously expensive-looking, gaudy gold and black opal necklace. My eyesight was keen enough that I could pick out the brilliant rainbow flash in the egg-sized stone at the center of the design.

  The pleasant buzz of the alcohol evaporated. I straightened up, watching and waiting for her to hand it back to him and tell him to shove it... but she didn't. Instead, she broke down with a delighted laugh, and held it up to the torchlight, then turned back to him to say something I couldn’t hear. The huge man smiled benignly and took the necklace when she held it out to him. She then turned her back to him and swept her hair up. My temples began to pound as Soma leaned in and lay the necklace around my dragon's neck. He was close enough to smell her hair, and I saw him do just that before Karalti ducked and stepped away from him. She looked tense, even as she tried to stay polite. He nodded, smiling, and put his arm up against the wall. Blocking her.

  A cold rage like nothing I'd ever before felt descended over me like a lead cloak. The wind picked up, making the torches on the wall to either side of me and the gambling soldiers begin to gutter and flicker. Karalti stopped trying to wrap up with Soma and stood up straight, her head erect, eyes wide. When she looked over to where I'd been, I was already gone: using Jump to land on the breezeway of the gatehouse, then boiling past the stationed guards into the fortress, and away toward our quarters in the Eastern Tower. I Shadow Danced right through a startled maid, who dropped her pail of water with a shriek of terror as I stormed to the door, flung it open, and almost tripped over my girlfriend. Suri was stripped down to supple leggings, wrist wraps and a halter top, and was mid-pushup. Sweat ran down her dark skin to pool on the floor. She had a full-sized wooden chest lashed to her back with rope. Her routine exploited the fact that money didn’t weigh anything in our Inventory, but had weight in containers in the outside world. She was probably pressing close to two hundred and fifty pounds on top of her own bodyweight.

  “Hector?” She looked up. "Are you okay?"

  "I just came back here to drop off some stuff," I said stiffly, throwing my pack on the bed. "And then I'm going to go and beat the shit out of Soma and throw him off the top of the Wall."

  "Uhh." Suri finished her press and knelt up. The rope and chest both creaked. She unequipped them, and they vanished from her body. "Do you need a hand? What did he do?"

  "I just watched him give my emotionally vulnerable, hormonal, frustrated dragon a really fancy gift, then immediately creep on her." I took up the Spear and checked the edge on it, then my armor. The Raven Suit had taken a beating on the battlefield, and was at 63% durability. If I didn't fix it now, I'd have to take it to an armorer.

  Suri stood up and padded over to me as I furiously ransacked my pack for the Armor Repair Kit I needed. She sat down beside me, and lay a hot, calloused hand on my now-bare shoulder. "Hector."

  "What?" I turned on her, teeth bared.

  Suri gently pulled my head forward, and pressed a dry kiss to my brow. “Let her handle him."

  "Handle him? Suri, she can barely handle
herself.'" I brushed her off, took the kit and the first piece of armor, and began to fix the seams and scuffs. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely follow the minigame directions. "She was already worked up after the meeting-"

  "I know. We talked."

  I glanced up at her sharply. "You and Karalti?"

  "Yeah. Came in here to find her sobbing her eyes out on the bed." Suri was flushed from exercise, her muscles pumped, her cheeks carrying a soft rosy glow. “We worked through some of her feelings. I got her up and moving, exercising... it helps. You’re right. Since you and I got involved, she’s been hormonal and pent-up, and she didn’t know how to do anything about it."

  Heat rose in my face. "What do you mean, she didn’t know how to ‘do anything about it’?"

  Suri uttered a testy sigh. “She didn’t know how to jerk it, Hector. So I taught her.”

  I nearly stabbed myself in the back of my hand with the very sharp [Awl] I was holding with the other. "You... what?"

  Suri squeezed my shoulder. "She was horny as shit, Hector, and feeling a whole lot of guilt about not being able to suppress her jealousy. The problem is, whenever you’re horny, so is she. She never felt comfortable talking about it, so instead, she’d bottle the frustration and the guilt and explode.”

  “So, you’re saying… she isn’t actually jealous of us?” I tilted my head, confused.

  “She is. But not because she wants you to fuck her. You just happen to be her favorite person in the whole wide world, the source of her safety and comfort and the only pleasure she’s known. She knows you’re not into her that way, but she’s full of piss and vinegar and hormones, and was too embarrassed to tell you.”

  "She never tried reaching down and fiddling around? I mean, isn't it like... obvious?" The little holographic mini-game directions flashed, waiting for me to make the right gestures to suture new leather through the holes punched in the armor.

  "No. She didn’t. Turns out no-one ever talked to her about the feelings she's having, other than to tell her she shouldn’t be feeling them.” She fixed me with a bemused glare, crossing her arms.

  “Look, the last time she went into a jealous rage, she nearly killed me. Besides, I never thought my character class would entail walking my polymorphed dragon through the ins and outs of her ins and outs, okay?” I bent back down to the crafting game, trying to erase the visuals from my mind. “…Did it help?”

  “Dunno. I just gave her some pointers. She was planning to go give it a try by herself tonight."

  “I always knew I’d be a shitty parent.” Fighting the urge to stab my own eyes out, I laid the needle down and rubbed my face. "Fuck, I had no idea. I never got a birds and bees talk."

  “You didn’t?” Suri gave me a curious look.

  "My parents were… uhhh… let’s just say ‘conservative’." I shrugged. "They wanted me and Steve to focus on our studies. We weren't supposed to date. Any questions about sex we had were shut down. Beating off was a fast track to hell and sex was something we weren’t supposed to have until we found a nice Korean girl and settled down. Anything we wanted to know, we had to figure out ourselves. Guess where we learned?”

  “No idea.”

  “Porn. Where else?” I spread my hands. “I was a virgin until about two months ago. I have no idea what Steve did, but I know he wasn’t married. Dealing with Karalti is like… I literally have no framework to cope with her like this.”

  “Then roll with it. Special-K is just having to grow up fast. All you have to do is reassure her that everything she’s going through is normal, and that she can make mistakes and learn from them. She made it pretty clear to me tonight that she wants to get a handle on herself and her feelings and get over them. And seriously, you don't have anything to worry about with Soma."

  The anger crawled back in. "But if he creeps on her..."

  "If he creeps on her, let her handle it and back her up when she does. Support her choices and let her lead the fight. That’s how she’s gonna build confidence, but you have to let her do the work.”

  I fumed in silence.

  “If Soma is a smug ass to you about this, that’s one thing,” Suri said. “But if you got up right this very moment and went and thrashed him, she’d never forgive you. And you’d set her back, maturity-wise."

  "And what if he hurts her?" I clenched my jaws together, stabbing the awl down with hard, angry motions of my hand. "What if he tries to..."

  I trailed off, realizing exactly how dumb that thought sounded. "Wait. No. She's a fucking dragon. Never mind."

  Suri's lips quirked at the corner. "Yeah. She's a fuckin' dragon, and she'll have his balls on toast if he pushes her too hard. And then we’ll thrash whatever she leaves behind."

  I chuckled. "It just occurred to me that when I said I was going to throw him off the wall, the first thing you asked me was do I need a hand. And then you asked me why. Now I know I love you."

  "That's like the definition of love, isn't it?" A sly grin spread over Suri's mouth.

  I finished stitching up the last piece of armor and focused on it for a second to verify it was back to 100% durability, then put it back into my inventory. Then I anxiously reached out to Karalti. She wasn't at the Fort, but had gone somewhere up high not too far from the Prezyemi Line. That meant she was back to her normal scaly self. The noise coming in over the line was no longer black with grief. In fact... quite the opposite.

  "Well... ah... it seems Karalti's taken your advice on board." I tried to cut the link and got to my feet, cheeks flushing with heat. I turned back to look at Suri. She was leaning back on her hands with her knees drawn up onto the edge of the bed, her skin still gleaming like burnished copper from her workout. “I… uhh…”

  “You might need to do some touching of your own.” She gazed up at me from behind a lock of brilliant red hair.

  Hunger slid up through my body. I froze like a snake, drinking in the sight of her. The way the soft doeskin leather hugged her legs, the lean, corded muscle in her arms, the soft, heavy swell of her breasts against the stiff fabric of her halter top. “Is the lady suggesting something?”

  "She might be." Suri shifted her knees, loosening her stance on the bed. “I’ve been working through some shit. And I liked what I saw at that meeting.”

  "Liked what you saw?"

  She sucked on one of her teeth, her eyes dark with promise. “Watching you shut down Soma was pretty hot.”

  Somewhere not far from here, my dragon gasped as she was surprised by pleasure: a thrill of discovery that passed through the Bond like a note of music along my nerves.

  I stalked toward Suri. She shifted back along the covers, gasping when I darted forward and caught her by the knees. She was strong, but I was fast. I slid my hands down the insides of her thighs, gripping them all the way up. Slowly. There was an energy between us, a very different energy to the last time we’d tried this. “My… self-control is not fantastic right now. Karalti’s ...um... doing her thing. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Maybe I want you to.” A swallow rippled down the front of Suri's long throat.

  Fixing her gaze with mine, I massaged my thumbs up along her thighs until they were almost at her groin, waiting there. “How do you want this to go?”

  She was unable to tear her eyes away from mine. "I want to say rough. As rough as you're willing to do it. Maybe more than what you're willing to do."

  "But?"

  "I don't know if I can deal with it being as rough as I want it to be." A tremble passed through her legs, vibrating against my palms.

  The smell of her was in my nose, part perfume, part arousal. Even as my instincts bayed at me to tear her clothes off and hold her to the bed, I stopped squeezing and let my hands rest on the inside of her thighs. " Tell you what. Pick a word. And if you say that word, it stops. Make it something dumb, something you normally wouldn't say."

  She laughed, briefly, and finally looked down and away. "Okay. 'Eggplant'. That's a pretty dumb word.
"

  "Right. If you say eggplant, that's the stop button. If you feel like you can't handle it, you tell me, and we slow down."

  Another nervous laugh. "That works."

  She nodded. My mouth began to water as the frustration and the lust of the last month reached critical mass. Whatever she saw in my face made her gasp, then again, louder, as I knocked her knees apart, thrust a hand up through her hair, and pulled her head back against the bed with it.

  "Yeah. I’m okay." She writhed underneath me, her breath coming in short pants.

  I pinned one of her wrists down with the other hand, breathing hard. Her neck was exposed, the pulse jumping rapidly under the skin. "You sure?"

  Suri glanced at me, lips parted. Her eyes were as wild as a pinned deer's. "...Yes."

  "Good. I’m gonna keep asking you." I murmured the word against her skin, just before my teeth clamped down on the side of her throat.

  Suri cried out in surprise, pleasure, and a little pain. I held her with my jaws, roughly unlacing her halter top. Her breasts spilled out against my palm, smooth and hot. I left off her neck to bite my way down over her collarbone, her chest, then her nipple. She bucked up into my mouth with a sharp cry, clutching the sheets with her one free hand. I had to let go of her to strip her, and she lifted her hips as I rolled her pants down and off. I started on mine before I once more remembered that I could just unequip them.

  A warm, sweet rush flowed through my body. The empathic rush of Karalti's pleasure. I groaned and roughly pushed between Suri's thighs. She arched her head back, gasping.

  “You okay?” I whispered.

  Her lips were hot against my ear. “Please.”

  She was wet to her knees. There was no warmup, no foreplay... I bucked all the way into her, shivering at her cry of mingled pleasure and pain.

  “Yes.” She breathed the word before I could ask. “Yes… harder.”