by Kevin Murphy
[You have gained a rank in Flame Lick!]
[You have gained a level in your secondary class: Evoker (Fire)! Current level: 10]
“… reports of an incredibly powerful unarmed tournament participant stomping to blow back his opponents’ defenses have been streaming in. Thanks to our amazing viewers, we’re the first to have a video snippet of one such confrontation.”
The screen transitioned to a motionless scene where a tanned man clad in white silk and large metal boots looked frozen, but fierce, suspended about a meter off the ground. His opponents were ready for whatever he could throw at them, standing three-abreast with shields up and short spears ready. Then, once the video began to play, the tanned man’s metal boots slammed down into the ground. A halo-like shockwave thundered outward, throwing the three men back and to the ground so violently that the video-taker’s view shook. The video was then paused again.
“As you can see, when the assailant stamps down, he can create some sort of air-powered shockwave which knocks his opponents into a vulnerable, prone position. The rest of this clip has been stabilized for a better viewing experience.”
As soon as the video resumed playing, the shaking was gone. Already, the tanned man had raised one foot nearly straight-above his head and stomped on the chest of his first opponent. This time there was no shockwave—the downed man absorbed the full force of the attack. The silken-garbed attacker then ignored the second opponent and, with several quick steps, rushed toward the third who had only managed to recover to one knee. With a back-handed strike to his neck, the staggered one fell prone again. The tanned fighter quickly knelt beside the body and punched it—stifling any further retaliation. Then, the tanned man walked to the final combatant whom he’d previously passed over and—rather than attacking—placed his right fist into his left palm, then gave a slight bow.
Yet another man—wearing dark gray robes and carrying an odd, ring-tipped staff—walked toward the downed body of the first person to drop. The tanned fighter looked up and toward the crowd that watched his fight, then the clip ended as the video’s recorder turned and presumably fled.
“Watching the video closely reveals that the two men who were slain had tournament sigils on their forehead, while the last man did not. It’s our current belief that this man is only interested in fighting with others who are in the tournament, so most players shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
“Woah,” thought Dakkon. The ‘unarmed’ man had definitely been his friend, Sift. “Just how strong is that guy?” Even Saden had made an appearance in the video, apparently checking the bodies for potential spoils.
“Hey Dakkon, you’re not going to believe this,” said Cline, excitedly.
“Did you see Sift, too?” asked Dakkon.
“That’s right! Did you see that?” exclaimed Cline. His enthusiasm flared.
“Yeah,” said Dakkon while shaking his head in appreciation. “That guy’s something else… I wonder if giving him those boots was a good idea.”
Cline grew a large grin. “I’d say any favor done for someone that strong is a solid investment.”
Dakkon chuckled. “Maybe, maybe not. After he saved me—then sacrificed himself to save the rest of us—I think at best the scales are even now.”
Cline looked thoughtful and then nodded at that. “When you put it like that, we probably still owe him.”
The ChronCast had generated quite a bit of interest by playing video snippets of and talking about incredibly powerful players as they began to appear. The Tournament of the Gods had already proven to be a mechanism more than capable of stirring things up, luring out some of the river monsters who had remained in deeper waters, out of the public eye.
Aside from Sift, a story about Lina had also been shared on the ChronCast—though she was clever enough to ensure that there was no video of that encounter. There were others, too. Videos of spectacular ice and lightning magic were incredibly popular on forums and the scores of social networking platforms. Some of the ice that had been magically slung about in a video from a week before was still reported to be frozen rock solid, even though the encapsulated foes of the ice user had already respawned. There was even a video that appeared to show a young man violently lagging out—teleporting backwards when he was about to be struck. In Chronicle, though, the experience was universally seamless and lag-free.
This hadn’t been the first media break that Dakkon’s group had taken, and it wouldn’t be the last. Though Dakkon and Cline had experienced it already, the others quickly learned that walking for half a day was incredibly boring. Walking nonstop for days, no matter how good one’s company, proved to be a testing and tedious endeavor. Even more so for Mina’s wolf, Jinx, which—despite being a pack animal—was eager to spend some time hunting and exploring on his own. If during a break they left before Jinx returned, the beast’s keen sense of smell would lead him back to them.
It had been a little over a week since the party set out, and they were nearing in on the city of Klith. They’d even stumbled back onto a road to travel along, though they took their break some ways off in the woods where they shouldn’t be surprised by any passersby—or so went their reasoning. That was proven ineffective when an old man wearing tattered clothes emerged from the brush to the southeast.
Dakkon and Cline’s attentions both snapped to the white-haired old man who brushed himself off while the oldest dog that Dakkon had ever seen poked a foot out of the brush that the stranger held apart for it.
“Guys!” Cline said with bow already drawn. Thanks to the unsettling display of power he’d just seen one man exhibit, his desire to fight an unknown player was at an all time low. “We’ve got some company!”
As the others stirred, the old man held up his hands, palms forward in an attempt to show he meant no harm. The back half of his dog was, for the lack of his master’s help in parting the bushes, now stuck from the waist back in the brush.
“Geez. Relax, Cline,” said Melee as her attention returned from whatever she’d been watching. “What’s the old guy going to do, rob us blind?”
“I’ve got no intention of it, young lady!” said the old man quickly, with a kooky voice that carried well despite his small stature. “We’re just passing through.”
The old man’s dog’s front half had slumped down, defeated. It’s head and paws rested on the ground while it’s backside was still caught, elevated, in the brush.
“Oh my—help out your poor dog!” cried out Mina, pointing at the stuck creature. “Dakkon, Cline—stop harassing him already!”
The old man’s eyebrows went up and he turned away from the group to help out his dog. He knelt, obscuring the others’ view, though a small flash of light could be seen. When he turned back, the dog was free, standing up, and wagging his tail.
“Sorry about that,” said the old man apologetically. “He tends to get stuck.”
“Eh, you’ve got no need to apologize to us,” said Roth with an unsure grin on his face. “Are you and your dog traveling the woods alone?”
“Hmm?” said the old man. “I suppose we are! Though that’s not really our aim or anything, it’s just a means to an end.”
“Hah, I suppose it is at that,” said Roth, visibly pleased by having a new and particularly odd distraction.
“Where are you headed?” asked Dakkon.
The old man’s eyes narrowed into piercing and suspicious slits. He stared at Dakkon intensely for just a little longer than was entirely necessary before his expression broke into a hearty smile. “To the elves, of course! Little reason to wander around in the woods if not to see elves!”
The thought of elves being intrinsically linked to the woods hadn’t crossed Dakkon’s mind, but he knew that to be the case in some games. Why not in Chronicle, too?
“So, elves are in the forest, here?” asked Dakkon.
“What? No! Don’t talk nonsense, boy. The elves are in Thelasidonna, an elven city,” said the man while shaking his head
. “If they were here I wouldn’t need to wander around, would I?”
“Hah!” said Roth again with a curious smile. “What a strange guy.”
The old man didn’t seem to take any offense to the words. “I smelled your fire and, after a bit of searching, I found that I was unacceptably hungry. Have you got any real food for an old man and his dog?”
“Real… food?” Mina’s question trailed off as though she were trying to determine what constituted any other sort of food.
Everyone glanced towards Dakkon and the small pile of twigs that he’d been idly burning one-by-one while he watched the ChronCast. He winced with the realization that he was the one who’d given away their location. “Right,” he thought. “Burning things isn’t particularly low profile…”
“Let’s see if Chef Dakkon can’t whip us all up something, too, then,” Melee said with a wink.
Dakkon had precisely no experience cooking in game, or in the real world. For that matter, he wasn’t sure if he knew the first thing about cooking. He’d seen most of a cooking television program once, years ago, but didn’t see the point in it when anyone could easily 3d print nearly anything they wanted. However, with the ball in his court, he planned to hit it back. If he was going to have the chance to watch people try to stomach something he’d made, he’d gladly throw odds and ends into a pot and wiggle a spoon around.
“At your service,” Dakkon said with an ingratiating bow.
“Wait, you can cook?” asked Cline, earning a shrug as a reply from Dakkon.
“Ooh, a man who can cook?” said Mina, appreciatively, while waggling her eyebrows at Melee.
“Ah, sorry Mina,” Dakkon thought. “After this experience, I’m pretty sure that no one will ever suggest I cook again.”
Dakkon made his way over to the bags of supplies that Cline had purchased. One bag solely contained various lengths of rope, including a rope ladder. Since that one was not particularly useful for his purposes, he opened the second to find a pot for making stew, bowls, spoons, and various ingredients and spices wrapped up in unlabeled linens. Cline’s surprise that Dakkon might be able to cook was reasonable. Though they had been lugging around ingredients and the gear to cook them, they hadn’t yet had a single hot meal on the road. They’d all been subsisting on a minimal amount of fruit, bread, and trail-ready dried meats. Dakkon hiding that he could cook the entire time must’ve felt like a small betrayal.
Dakkon set up the fire pit easily enough. He found two similarly-sized sticks to act as the base he’d place the pot on and filled the space between them with smaller sticks, leaves, and even moss he’d scraped from the side of a tree. He placed the pot on the two logs and filled it with water from his Dousebinders. Bending down beside his cooking setup, he used Flame Lick to start the kindling underneath the pot—and it immediately smoked up.
“Hmm, perhaps the leaves and moss were a mistake?” Dakkon wondered. With a mental shrug, he avoided the thick gray smoke while he stuffed more substantial twigs underneath the pot to give them a chance to burn. He had always wanted to set up a firepit. Now that he had the ability to shoot fire from his fingertips, it was trivial. It might even be easier for him to skip fiddling with the wood altogether, but he was happy to indulge himself by building it more-or-less how he envisioned it should be done, the old-fashioned way.
While Dakkon worked on throwing together a meal, he could hear snippets of the others talking with their newly-arrived guest. Their visitor claimed to be a simple man who just wanted to be left alone with his old dog, Laz. When asked—no, he wasn’t sure quite how old the dog was, but he was certainly ‘getting up there.’ The old man revealed that he had a peculiar name, too. He was called Gnokki, pronounced with a curious ‘nya’-sound much like the homophonic potato dumplings.
Dakkon didn’t know exactly what was in the unmarked linen-wrapped packs, and he didn’t especially care. Stew was all about mixing things, after all. He unceremoniously opened one pack after the other, scooping out or cutting off half of each and adding them to the boiling pot. Strange, foreign aromas filled the air which changed as he worked, occasionally earning him a curious look from the others that he’d simply smile at and wave away.
There was some sort of meat, for sure—though since it was unpreserved, he couldn’t be certain it hadn’t spoiled over the week plus of their trek. There were vegetables and spices that he’d never seen before. Everything else was a mystery, too, except for salt and pepper which he added liberally. More than one food parcel contained slightly-different white, gloopy blocks. They could have been cheese, Dakkon reckoned. Either way, they were going in the pot. There were even some crackers and something fishy with suction cups destined for the diverse concoction as well.
Dakkon hummed while he stirred the pot with a ladle. He thought about how nice it was of Cline to procure such a variety of supplies, but between not knowing if anyone could cook and trying to buy the wooden ladder and those ridiculous three-meter poles that they had to leave in their flight from town, they really would have been better off with more thick-skinned fruit and trail rations.
“Oh yeah, fruit,” thought Dakkon. He added some of what he was planning to eat toward the end of their break, an apple and a sectioned-off orange—and why waste the peel? He knew that ‘zest’ was used in fine dining.
After Dakkon felt he’d reached the appropriate amount of stirring over an open flame, he filled all six of the bowls Cline had brought with stew. To add a little showmanship while they cooled down, Dakkon made a table out of ice by employing his Dousebinders and a little thermomancy.
When Dakkon had placed the others’ bowls on the table, he turned to them with a grin. “All right, guys, bon appetite!”
The hungry travelers swarmed the table. Dakkon sat away from the others near the cooking pot, blowing on his stew and observing from a safe distance. He couldn’t poison them with just this, right? It had been quite a while since any of them had had a proper meal, and if their initial reactions were anything to go by, there still might be some time yet.
“Oh, gods that’s awful…”
“Such strong, intermingling flavors.”
“No… No. No! No!”
“It’s making my eyes water.”
“The consistency’s like squid and oatmeal!”
“How can any one thing be so bitter?”
“Can food make you sick in game? I think I feel sick.”
It had been a good idea not to dig in right away, Dakkon realized as he set his own bowl on the ground beside him. He’d be having fruit again today.
All eyes turned to him briefly before they scrambled for their respective canteens. Mina licked her sleeve to try and forget the combined sensation of soggy crackers mixed with suction cups. Melee and Roth passed a red bottle of something strong and alcoholic back and forth. Cline couldn’t stop spitting.
Their visitor, Gnokki, just watched in abject horror. He had, apparently, been more cautious than the others and decided not to try the stew right away. After a moment of watching the others squirm to forget what they’d just experienced, the old man shrugged, and took a spoonful.
“Boy, that’s foul,” he said, glaring over at Dakkon. “But food’s food, I guess.”
The others gazed wide-eyed at the old man, then Mina looked over to the traveler’s dog.
“Oh no, poochie, don’t eat that!” Mina shrieked.
Sensing some movement to his side then hearing a *thunk*, Dakkon turned and saw that contents of the bowl he had set down were spilled out over the ground, with the old man’s old dog—Laz—laying on top of them.
“Uh oh,” thought Dakkon as he nudged the unmoving dog, nervously.
“OH MY GOD, DAKKON!” Mina yelled. “You didn’t!”
“Now, now, young lady,” said Gnokki. “No need to get worked up. Laz is old and likes to lay down from time to time.”
The old man walked over to his dog and stooped over it, moving the bowl away. After winking at Dakkon, he placed a h
and on the back of his dog’s neck and a flash of the same, blue-white light he’d used before had Laz standing up in no time.
Laz’s upper lip curled, and he barred fangs toward the then-overturned bowl. He growled and barked twice.
“Wow,” said the old man. “He doesn’t usually show that much energy. He really didn’t like that stew of yours.”
“Haha…” said Dakkon, a little weakly. “Sorry about that.”
Mina, however, seemed very relieved.
“I’ll never ask you to cook again, Dakkon,” swore Melee. “I promise.”
“I know you won’t,” Dakkon said. “Anyone want seconds?”
At the suggestion, Cline began to spit again, as though he’d just tasted a lingering trace of the vile stew.
“On the bright side,” said Roth, “if we ever need to take down a boss monster we have a new secret weapon.”
“Uuu,” Melee whined barely audibly to herself. “Why was it so creamy?” She took another swig of the red bottle in an attempt to distance herself from the experience.
Dakkon doubted that his culinary exploits would go unpunished.
The old man walked back to the table, and took up his spoon, preparing to eat another bite.
“Woah, no need for that, old man,” said Roth. “We’re near to a city, so supplies aren’t so tight. I’ve got some extra rations you can have.”
The old man let out a relieved sigh and set the spoon back down. “I was really hoping one of you kids would say that.”
\\\
Gnokki stayed only briefly beyond his meal, as he had a long way to go to reach the elven city of Thelasidonna, despite Mina’s protests that he should take a detour to the nearby Klith given how poorly he was supplied. In the end, the old man proved more stubborn than sensible.
The break had been just the thing for their road-weary party. Leave it to a brush with culinary death to get blood pumping. When Jinx finally returned from his hunt, Mina was thankful he had missed any opportunity to try the dubious stew. The remainder of the trip would likely be spent coming up with interesting—and properly malicious—ways to get back at Dakkon for his stew debacle.