Forever Fantasy Online

by Rachel Aaron

  She wound the magic between her wrinkled fingers like a cat’s cradle then pressed the strands into the drying mud on James’s face. When she was finished, the mask hardened into something much stronger than clay, and the colorful floating lights faded from James’s vision. He was still blinking at the loss when Arbati hoisted him off the ground using only one arm.

  “Our revenge starts with this one!” the head warrior proclaimed, holding James up like a trophy. “How shall we kill it?”

  “Drawn and quartered!” a woman yelled.

  “Stake it out to dry!” cried another.

  “Skin him alive!” screamed an otherwise adorable little girl with big, poofy ears.

  James shook his head frantically, but the mask prevented him from fully opening his mouth, so he couldn’t speak loudly enough to be heard. He was frantically kicking at Arbati’s legs in a last-ditch effort to get free when Gray Fang straightened up.

  “We will not be killing this one,” she said, dusting the dried mud from her fingers. “At least not yet.”

  The crowd roared in fury at that, but Gray Fang silenced them with a hiss.

  “I hear your anger,” she said when they’d quieted. “I would also like nothing more than to see his blood on the ground. But we know nothing of why we were imprisoned, who the players are, or if it will happen again. I have eighty years of questions this one might be able answer. We must know more before we execute him, if only for our peace of mind.”

  The other villagers growled, but Gray Fang’s word must have been law, because no one spoke again as Arbati threw James over his shoulder and carried him toward the lodge.

  “That’s enough anger for now,” Gray Fang said as James was hauled away. “We are still free this day! Go back to your families and homes. Warriors, see if there are any other players hiding in the village and bring them to me.”

  The crowd lowered their heads and began to disperse. Once they were moving, Gray Fang turned and followed the warrior into the large wooden building at the village’s center, where Arbati had already hurled James as hard as he could onto the board floor.

  “This player greatly angers you, doesn’t he?” Gray Fang said as she closed the door flap.

  “More than I have the words for, Revered Grandmother.”

  The old woman placed her hand on the warrior’s shoulder. “The Nightmare is over, my child. That is what matters. We are finally free to deal with these monsters on our own terms. A path that was denied us all these years.”

  “For how long, though?” Arbati growled, never taking his eyes off James. “I’m as happy as any to no longer be stuck in place, reciting the same foolish words about gnolls and undead to every new ‘hero’ who walks into town. But seeing this one still here makes me worry our reprieve is only temporary. How many more players are hiding in our midst? Could they bring the Nightmare back?”

  Gray Fang nodded. “Those uncertainties are why we must use this one to get answers. You have more reason to hate the players than any other in our village, but you cannot take your revenge yet.”

  Arbati’s whole face ticced at that. James winced as well. He was pretty sure they were talking about the scripted event where Arbati was captured, tortured, and if no players arrived in time to save him, sacrificed. The event had run once a day in the game, resetting every morning with Arbati back in position to hand out quests whether he was saved or not. It was one of the repeating story scenarios FFO was famous for, but now that he was facing the warrior’s thousand-yard stare, James had to wonder what it would be like to be a helpless victim of some quest writer’s plot, forced to repeat the same mistakes over and over, to feel the pain of your own death every single day.

  It would certainly explain the mix of pain and fury on the warrior’s face. In fact, the more James watched the two jubatus interacting with each other, and reacting to him, the more certain he became that this had never been a dream at all. Now that the possibility of everything being real had been breached, it felt more and more like that was the only explanation. It sounded crazy even in his mind, but if he really was here and FFO was no longer just a game, then he needed to get serious about his situation before Gray Fang made good on her promise to kill him.

  Taking a deep breath, James pulled his eyes off his captors and started looking for an exit. Like the tent he’d woken up in, the Naturalists’ Lodge was much bigger and far more ornate than he remembered. The large, open wooden building was lavishly decorated with paintings, masks, hides, and antlers. The layout was also different from how it had been in game. Before, the lodge had just been a big room where the Naturalist trainers stood waiting for players. Now, it looked like a place where people might actually live. There were sleeping rooms off to the sides for the elder and her apprentices as well as a kitchen and a small common area. He even spotted an outhouse through one of the building’s rear windows, which almost made him laugh. All those times he’d joked about there being no proper bathrooms in FFO, and there they were. He was still reconciling all the changes when Arbati grabbed him again.

  There was no throwing over the shoulder this time. The warrior simply tossed him onto the rug in the middle of the ring of pillows at the lodge’s center. Gray Fang took a seat on one of them, arranging her graying tail across her lap while Arbati took the pillow directly in front of James. He expected them to get right to his interrogation, but surprisingly, neither the elder nor her warrior grandson said a word. They both just sat on their pillows, staring into space as though they were searching for something he couldn’t see.

  “I guess the others aren’t coming back,” Arbati said at last. “I’d hoped that when the land returned to normal, they’d reappear, but…”

  “We’ve been free for less than an hour,” Gray Fang reminded him, pulling a long-stemmed pipe from inside her robes. “It’s too soon to give up on our vanished families yet. Perhaps they’ve respawned somewhere in the world and are still making their way here.”

  “‘Respawned,’” the warrior repeated, lips curling in a sneer. “I wish you would not use the players’ words, Grandmother.”

  “There’s no other way to say it,” Gray Fang said, lighting her pipe with an ember from the nearby brazier. “Our language has no words for what they did to us, so we must use theirs. It’s the only way we’ll get answers.”

  “But we know so little!” Arbati cried. “Lilac is among the missing! The questl—” James thought he heard “questline,” but Arbati struggled for another way. “The situation with the gnolls that started with the Nightmare might still be happening. If that’s true, then my sister is trapped in the middle of it.”

  “We can know nothing until we have more information,” the elder said, her gentle features growing savage as her yellow eyes slid to James. “We’ll start with this one. The mask seals its magic, but I saw this player in our village many times during the Nightmare. It was level eighty then, as powerful as they get.” She smiled. “It will know things.”

  James’s ears pressed flat against his head. He certainly didn’t feel powerful with no weapon, no armor, and the mask binding his spells, which he couldn’t cast anyway since he was still desperately low on mana. All he had was his white linen undershirt and the leather pants that all jubatus characters started with by default. He didn’t even have his backpack. He didn’t even have shoes.

  Growling, Arbati rose from his pillow and prowled forward, drawing a long knife from his belt as he leaned down to peer into James’s face. “Can it speak through the mask?”

  Gray Fang nodded, the bone beads of her headdress clacking together, and Arbati frowned. “Perhaps it doesn’t understand us anymore?”

  “Try English,” Gray Fang suggested, causing both James’s and Arbati’s eyebrows to shoot up.

  “How did you know I can speak the players’ language?” the warrior demanded.

  “Because no family of mine would be stupid enough to stand surrounded by the enemy for eighty years and not learn something useful,” the e
lder replied matter-of-factly.

  Arbati made a huffing noise and turned back to James. Given all the talk of talking, James was pretty hopeful about finding a diplomatic way out of this. Or at least, he was until the cat-warrior casually stabbed him in the leg with his knife.

  “Ow!” James cried, wiggling away. “Stop, dude! I understand you!”

  A look of supreme disappointment crossed Arbati’s face, but at least he pulled the knife back. “What is your name, player?”

  “James Anderson,” James said automatically, struggling into a sitting position.

  “Lies!” Arbati hissed. “I know you! You are the Naturalist known as ‘Heal-a-hoop,’ and you have squatted in our village for the last eighty years!”

  “I’m not lying!” James said frantically. “James is my real name. ‘Heal-a-hoop’ is just the name of this character. It was supposed to be a joke!”

  Arbati’s scowl deepened. “A joke?” When James nodded, the warrior crossed his arms over his chest. “Explain.”

  James looked down at the rug, scrambling to think of how to explain a pun involving a toy that didn’t even exist in this world to a giant, angry cat-man. But while most of him was now convinced this was all real, the hope that it wasn’t hadn’t fully died yet. There was still a chance he had Leylia’s and this wasn’t some bizarre real version of FFO at all. For all he knew, Angry Cat there was actually a police officer trying to restrain a crazy person in a park, which meant James still had a shot.

  “Look, dude,” he said, trying to sound calm. “I’m hallucinating real bad.” His voice choked. “If I’m making any sense to you, can you please take me to the hospital? Or call 911? Because I need serious help.”

  He finished with a pitiful look, but Arbati seemed angrier than ever.

  “More lies!” the cat-warrior roared, grabbing James by his shirt. “You seek to deceive us so transparently, demon? You claim madness, yet you plainly speak the language of Wind and Grass. Now tell us who and what you are before I make you bleed!”

  He brandished his knife to finish the threat, but James could only gape at him.

  “Wait,” he said at last. “You mean I’m not speaking English right now?”

  “What do you mean?” Gray Fang asked, her yellow cat eyes sharp. “You haven’t spoken anything but our language since you appeared.”

  James fell back on his heels, replaying her words in his head—the slippery, beautiful, foreign-sounding words he hadn’t even realized he was saying until she’d pointed them out—and he knew Gray Fang was right. They weren’t speaking English, and James had no clue what that meant for any of them.

  Chapter 3

  Tina

  Tina didn’t have a clock in her vision anymore, so she wasn’t sure how long it took her and SB to finish the skeletons off, but it felt like years. When her giant metal boot finally crushed the last skeleton knight’s head to powder, the first thing she did was whirl to look at the unnamed human player who’d been killed at the start.

  Or what was left of him.

  The body had finally stopped bleeding and was now lying pale and limp at the edge of the broken road. His severed head had stopped a few feet away, resting beside a small pile of rocks like a discarded ball. From his robes, Tina guessed he was a Sorcerer, but his generically handsome face looked like every other male human model. Without nameplates, she had no idea which of the raid’s Sorcerers he was, but the image of his vacant eyes frozen wide in shock and pain was something Tina didn’t think she would ever be able to get out of her head.

  “Fuck,” she said, voice shaking. “This is bad. This is really bad. That guy looks hella for-real dead.”

  Sheathing his silver swords, SilentBlayde put a hand on her arm. “Are you okay, Tina?”

  “How can I be okay?” she snapped. “He’s dead, and it’s my fault. I’m the damned tank! I was up, I had my shield, I even had the monsters in front of me, and I just…” Her voice broke, forcing her to stop and take a breath. “I fucked up,” she said at last. “I hesitated, and his life slipped through my fingers. I don’t even know his name.”

  “It’s not your fault,” SB said. “There was a lot going on, and you pulled it together quicker than anyone else. You’re the reason the rest of us are still alive. No one else could have handled a Dead Mountain patrol without any healing.”

  “We have to get him a rez,” Tina said desperately, looking around at the still-unconscious raid. “His body is still here, which means he didn’t revive at the graveyard. A healer might still be able to get him up.”

  She didn’t have much hope of that. The fight had been long, and the Raise Ally spell had a six-minute window. After that, you were just dead. In the game, that meant you were forced to respawn at the nearest graveyard or shrine. Now…she had no idea.

  “Let’s get a healer and try,” SB said, kindly not mentioning the fact that it had been much longer than six minutes. “David barfed up the potion I gave him, but my other pan elixir worked on Anders.” He reached up to rub his battered shoulder. “We could both use healing anyway.”

  Tina nodded and turned to yell at the cleric she’d seen earlier, but he was no longer crouching behind his rock. When Tina looked around to see where he’d run off to, she saw something that made her blood boil.

  “What’s wrong?” SB said when he saw her murderous expression.

  Tina didn’t answer. She just shot to her feet and charged down the gray stone, hurdling over the downed players toward the only one who was moving.

  Her target was “Fishface,” the white-robed ichthyian Cleric she now recognized as her guildmate, Anders. He’d been a babbling mess the last time she’d seen him, but he must have pulled himself together, because he was now all the way over at the far edge of the staging area, kneeling over an unconscious jubatus Naturalist. A female Naturalist with an impressive chest, which Anders had just finished ripping open her silk robes to grab.

  He was pressing his webbed hands against the catgirl’s exposed breasts when Tina bulldozed right into him. He bounced off her shield like a pinball, flying through the air before crashing into gray dirt a dozen feet away. He hadn’t even managed to lift his head before Tina was on him again, grabbing the bastard by his robes and hauling him up until his webbed feet were dangling two feet off the ground so she could yell in his face. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Ow!” the fish-man cried, pawing at her armored arm with his slimy, webbed hands. “Jesus, Roxxy! Even in my dreams, you’re a bossy bitch.”

  “This isn’t a dream, asshole!” Tina screamed, shaking him. “You were about to molest someone for real!”

  The fish-man rolled his bulbous eyes. “I hope this isn’t gonna be one of those dreams where I keep getting interrupted and never get to have any fun.” He turned to leer again at the half-naked jubatus. “Let me go, would you? I want to get back to business before something else gets in my—”

  Tina punched him hard with her free hand. The Cleric gasped in pain as her fist connected, but he still didn’t look at her. Instead, he closed his eyes, rocking back and forth in her grip.

  “Okay, me, don’t panic,” he muttered. “This is just an unruly dream. Ignore her, and she’ll go away.” He waved his webbed hands at Tina. “I banish you bad parts! Only good dreams for me!”

  Tina stared at the fish hands waving in front of her face. It was all so weird, she didn’t know what to do. She was still boggling at the guy when SilentBlayde ran over.

  “Roxxy, what’s going on?” he asked, standing on tiptoe to stare at the fish-man dangling from Tina’s hands. “What are you doing to Anders?”

  “You should ask him that,” Tina growled, catching SB’s eyes before looking back at the half-naked female player splayed by the roadside.

  For a moment, the Assassin looked confused. Then his pale face went even paler as he realized what must have happened. “That’s NekoBaby,” he said, voice shaking.

  Tina’s eyes grew wide. “Shit, for real?” She h
adn’t even recognized Neko. Like the fish-men, all the cat-girls looked the same to her without their nameplates. Now that she knew who he’d gone after, though, it only made her angrier.

  “You fucker!” she yelled, shaking the Cleric. “You did that to one of your guildmates! A fellow Roughneck!”

  Her angry voice bounced off the hills, but the fish-man just waved his hands at her faster.

  “SB,” Tina said through clenched teeth, “can you go cover NekoBaby? I’d do it, but my cape’s gone to the same place my helmet vanished to.”

  SB nodded and darted back to the road, pulling off his crimson half cape to cover the exposed form of NekoBaby. The fish-man, Anders, cried out in dismay when the cat-girl’s form vanished from his view, and he turned on Tina in a rage. “No fair!” he cried. “That was mine! I was finally having a happy, sexy dream, and you ruined it!”

  He lashed out after that, smearing his slimy webbed fingers frantically across her face like he was trying to scratch her eyes out. Tina leaned away from his flailing hands in disgust more than defense.

  “Poor Anders,” SB said quietly, looking at the fish-man in pity.

  “Poor Anders nothing! Dude’s a total creep! Ugh, and here I thought I knew the guy.”

  “What he tried to do was horrible,” SB agreed. “But please don’t be too hard on him. He has Leylia’s Disease.”

  Tina’s copper eyebrows shot up. “Anders has Leylia’s?”

  SilentBlayde nodded. “We’ve all had lucid dreams of the game. Remember when the Deadlands first opened and we played for seventy hours straight?”

  Tina winced. “I had some weird episodes.”

  “So did I,” he said. “Now imagine having those weird episodes all the time, including when you’re awake, and you can’t snap out of them no matter what you do. That’s what it’s like for people with Leylia’s.” He gave Anders a sad look. “Poor guy has serious trouble telling what’s real on a normal day. Can you imagine how bad he must be freaking out now?”