by Andrew Novak
The First Player
a novel
by Andrew Novak
AlterGame
Book#1
Magic Dome Books
AlterGame
Book # 1: The First Player
Copyright © Andrew Novak 2017
Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2017
English translation copyright Krystal Diehl © 2017
Published by Magic Dome Books, 2017
All Rights Reserved
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.
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Table Of Contents:
Chapter One. Beta Version
Chapter Two. The Shadowslayer
Chapter Three. Service to the Dark
Chapter Four. Wolf Blood
Chapter Five. The Best Men of Maxitor
Chapter Six. Magic is Black and White
Chapter Seven. Real Life, Real Death
Chapter Eight. Light Mage and Necromancer
Chapter Nine. New Guild
Chapter Ten. History of the Person and History of the Persona
Chapter Eleven. The Necromancer's War
Chapter Twelve. Double Count
Chapter Thirteen. Great River
Chapter Fourteen. Pursuit, Boarding, and Another Romance
Chapter Fifteen. Hiji's Quest
Chapter Sixteen. The Wild Lands
Chapter Seventeen. Battle in the Black City
Chapter Eighteen. The Black Schooner
Chapter Nineteen. Egghead's Palace
Chapter Twenty. Real-Life Goblins
Chapter One. Beta Version
EVEN IN THIS desolate, mangled world, where the foundations of all things have collapsed, there were some things that endured. There still existed things of everlasting value. Whiskey, for example.
Jack had noticed the shine of bottle glass in the truck bed on a previous walk and decided to stop here, should he need the money. This is what those items of eternal value were for – to help one through rough times.
There were no longer automobiles that ran on liquid fuel and few people knew that these kinds of trucks were called pickups. Jack knew. He generally knew quite a lot about the old world because he earned his living as a Walker, which meant that he roamed the Wasteland in search of old-world treasures. If he were to be honest, though, he simply liked to travel. He always dreamed of making his way to some far-off place, where no one had been before. At least, not any of the residents of the Clusters dragging out their boring, miserable existences near the Barrier of New Atrium. The problem was that the further you got in the Blighted Wasteland, the more dangerous it became. You won't get very far...
The rear tires of the pickup had sunk into a deep hole, so the cabin had gotten stuck raised toward the sky, and in the truck bed, bottle glass gleamed under a layer of dirt and mud. Jack looked around, detected nothing new on the gray plain under the gray sky... and tossed his backpack down, pulled on tarpaulin work gloves, and got busy excavating.
He raked aside the broken fragments and tugged an unearthed bottleneck out of the caked trash, then shook off several years' worth of hardened dirt. The remnants of wooden boxes turned to dust under his gloves and the infernal flies buzzed overhead. When he had reached about halfway to the cabin, he found the first intact bottle. Jack wiped it reverently with his sleeve, gently shook it to hear the sloshing of eternal value inside, checked the sunlight... and began to dig again.
Half a day's work and his haul amounted to nine bottles. Jack stowed them in his backpack, each carefully wrapped with rags. No one traveled at night in the Wasteland – he was stuck here for the night. The cabin door, naturally, was locked. He would have to break it. It was easy, as everything here had rotted away or rusted through long ago. It was odd that the glass was intact. The driver, too. There was even a half-smoked cigar hanging between the yellow teeth of his skull. In the skeleton's right hand was a revolver, in the left – a crumpled, blackened lump. Jack wondered what the dead man had grabbed when he set out on his final journey. It turned out to be a charred banknote with a barely recognizable "100" on it. The driver had thoroughly filled up on the whiskey from the truck bed – an empty bottle stood on the dashboard in front of him. Then one last cigar, lit with a hundred-dollar bill. Then... bam.
Very carefully, so as not to disturb the driver, Jack sat down beside him in the passenger seat.
"You ever been to Alterra?" he asked the man, who died God only knows how long ago. "I bet you'd love it. Judging by the end you set
up for yourself here, you were an okay guy, knew a thing or two about games. Pretty classy, deciding for yourself when and how to die."
In front of the driver and Jack, through the thick patina of dirt on the windshield, a huge, red sun sagged toward the straight line of the horizon. The pickup was heading west when it broke down. Maybe it had been evening then, too, and the sun had shone like this on the driver's face as his lit his last cigar with the bill...
"Decide for yourself, when and how you die," Jack repeated, uncovering a bottle. "It has a lot of class."
He planned to deliver most of the whiskey to a merchant for a very nice sum of money, but he did open one bottle. Took a drink. He felt a pleasant wave of heat slide down his throat... and reached for the glove compartment.
"Hey, brother, I see I wasn't wrong about you!" Jack declared, pulling out a small console tangled in thin cables. He had to set aside his bottle so that he could carefully fish out the sensor gloves and blocky goggles, which were fitted with a plastic ring that wrapped around the head. "You were one of the originators! In the beta version of Alterra! I'd heard that it dated back to before the catastrophe, that we inherited it from you, our ancestors."
Jack almost reverently tried on the antique VR headset, fiddled with the sensor gloves, and carefully wound up the cluster of long sensor cables. It was a pretty unwieldy system. Nowadays, the console to enter the virtual world looked much more compact. The batteries had obviously run down. He decided to recharge the device and try to enter Alterra from the pickup driver's account. However, it could only be charged in his trailer and then... And then he could try to enter Alterra from the driver's old account.
"If you left any unfinished business, buddy, I'll try to finish it," he promised the dead man. "It can't be that fate accidentally brought us together. Nope. This is a quest line that someone thought up, up there."
Jack took another sip, his eyes narrowed at the red rays of sunset and thought: this guy brought all the most important things – whiskey and Alterra. Fantastic choice! The only choice. Definitely things of everlasting value.
* * *
All the next day, while he walked across the gray plain, Jack wondered what the late pickup driver could have left in Alterra. When the Gendemic began, it destroyed everything – daily life, culture, laws... and Alterra. Civilization survived on a few small, safe islands. Those like New Atrium. Evidently, it was to one of these splinters of the safe world that the driver was trying to escape. He brought with him only what was most important... but never made it to his destination.
Gradually, life of the survivors adjusted, namely when the alpha-citizens of New Atrium restored Alterra. They even allowed the omegas, the residents of the ghetto, to log into this wonderful world. But in the restored Alterra, just like in real life, the alphas had far more opportunities. The driver had seen a version of Alterra, where everyone had equal rights, where all the joys of the virtual world were equally available to everybody.
The Blighted Wasteland were behind him, and the Clusters of the ghetto stretched out before him. Walking through the slums, Jack could barely restrain himself from running home, so he could leave this filth and try to dive into Alterra, not through his own avatar, but through another older character – a sort of granddaddy of the virtual world. And all the while, he had to constantly look this way and that because these areas were rotten to the core.
Admittedly, even the most bat-shit crazy creeps didn't bug Jack, as a rule. That he was one of the veteran drifters was enough to scare off the riffraff. Jack took deliberate care to look menacing. Husky, slouching, with a shock of sun-bleached white hair sticking out from under a wide-brimmed hat and his face covered in scars... and, of course, a large, formless canvas cloak with dirty, frayed flaps. You could hide anything under that kind of cloak.
Today, Jack only once noticed a group of teenagers, who had stopped as he approached and begun to whisper. Dangerous guys – too puny to fight. These guys might use any dirty trick to bring you down fast, with the first hit. It was enough that he held back a step and stuck his hand under his cloak. The little suckers scattered like cockroaches. Jack liked this cloak. It always worked like a charm.
Here were the trailers, scrapped together from the trash of dilapidated buildings, iron containers, tangles of thorny bushes, and above it all – an intricate web of cables. In the distance, the shining towers of New Atrium stood, petitioned off from the poor Clusters by the unassailable Barrier wall. The fortress of the alphas, masters of Alterra.
Near his own hovel, Jack was met with another delay. When he emerged from the cluster of trailers, his neighbors came pouring out, complaining over one another that every night, Phil, after smoking his fill, would holler and scare the children. Jack internally screamed. So many obstacles on the path to important things! But he preferred to maintain good relationships with these women. They looked after his home in his absence, meaning that they scared suspicious drifters away from the trailer. It was better than any pack of guard dogs. He would have to deal with Phil, who, of course, screeched that he was singing very quietly and that he just couldn't control himself when performing. In Alterra, he was a famous bard. When he sang before crowds of critics, they all loved him – but those old geezers knew nothing about art...
Jack didn't say anything, just bent down and very pointedly picked up a rusted reinforcement rod. That did the trick. Phil changed his tune at once and began to moan that he'd try to restrain himself and sing a bit quieter.
He finally managed to shake everyone off and make it to his own trailer. He needed to eat, organize his equipment, clean the revolver from the pickup... but Jack just couldn't wait any longer. He hooked the strange device up and stared at the blinking light indicating that the batteries were charging.
The driver had been a simple fellow – the password to Alterra was written in marker on the plastic case of his console and retinal identification hadn't existed then. The camera set in the old headset didn't have that option. Not that way anymore...
While the console buzzed back to life after its decades-long sleep, Jack untangled the sensor cords. A different person wouldn't have been able to figure out this antiquated mess, but Jack was a Walker. He'd seen his share of all sorts of strange things and could imagine the thought processes of the people who had lived before the Gendemic.
The sensor gloves were obvious, and the old console also came with several sensors on cords, the longest of which attached to his ankles and others like a belt, circling his chest. It was a lightweight analogue to a virt-suit that was sensitive to the player's slightest movements and transmitted it into the form of a full-fledged virtual character.
Jack placed the sensors and put on the VR goggles. The console was ready for operation. A prompt appeared requesting him to enter a personal code and Jack typed in the string of letters and numbers that were written on the case. Finally, another prompt popped up addressed to Andrew Vigo, the character name of the console's previous owner.
"Nice to meet you, Andrew," Jack mumbled. "Let's see where you left off."
* * *
Andrew Vigo had left off in the dungeon of a dilapidated temple. Or maybe a palace. At any rate, the developers had had something massive and pompous in mind. It was a spacious vaulted room with columns and buttresses, built from inky black stone, and completely empty. No furniture, no signs to show what the cellar had been used for before the building above it collapsed. It was indeed destroyed – sunlight pierced through a huge hole in the dome.
Jack loved new places. Loved open spaces, the distant horizon... but he also loved all kinds of unconventional dungeons. If he had his way, he'd travel all over Alterra. For the moment, though, the only continent known to omega-players was Stoglav. However, it was huge, as even Jack hadn't discovered all its areas, not even close. His dream was to discover a new land. They had to be out there, somewhere. Fit a ship, fill it to the brim, gather a team, and set off into the uncharted virtual expanses... maybe he didn't need
anything else to be happy.
Wonder how long it had been since someone visited this place? If it survived since the oldest versions of the game... perhaps, it was some kind of isolated location that could no longer be entered or exited? Or maybe just the opposite and the dungeon was standing right under everyone's nose. However, it was so neglected that it was of no use to anyone. Alterra was huge, after all, and there were many nooks and forgotten places.
Piles of stones, the fragments of broken columns and carvings, had crumbled inside, evidence that the outside walls had been demolished from above. Something large and powerful had broken into the dungeon and created the enormous hole. The pickup truck where he had found Vigo's final refuge could have easily fit through that gap.
Attention!
This version of the game is out of date. Update download in progress!
Update download in progress!
Update download in progress!
The character froze and the image of the basement was obstructed by static. He would have to wait. Jack used the time to check out the weapon and equipment slots. Andrew had reached level twenty-four and, it seemed, made a career as a warrior and adventurer.
"Twenty-four. Not much by today's standards," Jack mumbled. He had already reached level thirty-three himself and planned to keep going. "But who knows what kinds of resources there were in your time? Maybe by those standards, you were pretty awesome."
He had a lightweight helm and chain mail armor with some defense bonuses, nothing special. A bastard sword in the weapon slot... and a dagger. That dagger was the most interesting of all. In virt, it looked completely black, both the handle and the blade. When Jack drew it from its sheath, a murky haze flowed around the blade, as if the weapon were emitting a stream of dark mist. Conversely, it seemed to glow. The dagger radiated darkness around itself just like a candle emitted light. If he looked at it for a while, an info window would appear: