by Elliot Burns
As he thought about this, he heard a noise. It sent a ripple of unease through him, making the hairs on his arms stand up. He looked around him, but he couldn’t see anything. He heard it again. It was a growling sound. Not from a dog but something bigger, and it was nearby. It sounded aggressive, like a warning that something was ready to attack. It was getting closer.
Jack couldn’t see any animals nearby, and the sounds soon stopped. It was time to take stock and then get moving. He reached to his pocket for his cell, acting on impulse. That was when he realized that he wasn’t wearing his clothes anymore. He wasn’t naked, but instead his jeans and t-shirt had been replaced by a beige tunic, kind of like a set of pajamas. It was embarrassing attire, frankly, but he knew what it was. He was no longer wearing real-world clothes. Now, he was wearing the basic threads that newbies started with in RPGs.
This was fascinating, and a part of him was dying to know what the game had in store. Right now, though, back in the real world, there were more pressing matters. He had a landlord to deal with. He needed to leave the game.
There were a few ways to quit VR games, and each game handled them differently. It would just be a matter of cycling through the various ways until he found the correct command.
“Menu,” he said.
Nothing happened.
“Options.”
Nothing.
“Open command console.”
Damn it, this wasn’t working! He forced himself to stay calm. If voice commands didn’t work, then there must have been a different way to leave. He decided that the game must have worked using a physical gesture system. With that in mind, he tapped his chest, hoping a character screen or menu would appear, but they didn’t. Then he tapped his head. He touched his wrist. He started to sweat. Nothing was working, and he was getting the sinking feeling that he was trapped.
Okay, think, he told himself. If voice commands and gestures didn’t work, then there was another way. In some games, you accessed menu systems by talking to non-player-characters. NPCs, in newbie towns especially, were there to help players. He just needed to find the right one. Looking around, he couldn’t see any people.
That left the castle just ten minutes’ walk away from him. Since the castle was so close to his spawn point, then he guessed that was where a new player was supposed to go. Maybe the NPC guides would be there. He’d talk to one of them, get out of here, and deal with his real-world stuff.
As he approached the castle, he couldn’t help but think about how, back in the storage unit, he’d yearned for an escape from reality. A little break away from the decision he and Mum would one day have to make from his uncle, away from his Mum’s problems, away from college, and even an escape away from Sarah. As much as he liked her, every time he saw her it just reminded him that he didn’t dare ask her out for fear of rejection. He had wanted a break from it all. Well, he’d succeeded there, alright. The problem now was that he really needed to go back and face things, but he couldn’t.
When he got closer to the castle, he saw the walls more clearly. The stonework looked centuries old. There were five towers that rose above the rest of the structure and were capped with sharp domes. Ten feet above ground level there were openings in the stone. At first, he assumed that they were windows, but they were too small. He guessed they were there for archers to rest their crossbows on.
He heard something squawking overhead. When he looked up, he saw that it was the flock of birds he’d spotted earlier, only now, he realized that they weren’t birds at all; they were rat-like rodents, with brittle wings. A word for them popped into his head – ratters. That was the name for these creatures. How did he know that? Well, ratters had come up from time to time in Uncle Alfie’s stories. This place, and everything in it, he guessed, was taken straight from the fantasy land his uncle had written about.
Chapter Three
The feeling of being trapped in a game was much like being in an elevator. Sure, from the looks of things, this was a vast land. He could hardly call it a small space, but it still brought up tremors of panic inside him in much the same way as a cramped store room or tiny elevator did. When he thought about his body stuck in the capsule back in the storage unit, he shuddered. How had he let his curiosity get the better of his more normal instincts of staying the hell away from small spaces?
The worst feeling was that it wasn’t his body that was trapped; it was his mind. Even when your body failed, when you got old and your limbs ached, or when you broke a leg, your mind was supposed to be okay. Here, his mind was locked away from his physical body, and that made his claustrophobia worse.
The realization hit him that his situation wasn’t much different from Uncle Alfie’s. Alfie was in the care home, strapped up to a bunch of machines. Was it possible that there was a glimmer of brainpower still working in Alfie’s mind, and that the sliver of consciousness that still sparked in him was trapped inside his body?
He needed to keep it together. He wasn’t stuck here forever; he just needed to find an NPC, some friendly computer character who could straighten everything out for him. Taking a long, deep breath, he walked onto the castle drawbridge.
The drawbridge was battered by age, and it creaked as he walked over it. Twenty feet below, running in a circle around the castle, was a giant hole. Jack supposed that it had once been a moat filled with water, but it was dry now.
He crossed the drawbridge and stepped into the castle. The first room was a kind of indoor courtyard. The floor was made of grey stone, and it had been smoothed over by years of use. The ceiling was thirty feet above, and birds nested in the crevices. There were doors all around him, but no map to indicate where they led. The room smelled of dirt and age; a chalky smell, like a blackboard had been wiped and the dust still lingered in the air.
“Helloooo?” he said. “Anyone here?”
As he thought about what to do, he heard a noise. It seemed to be coming from deeper in the castle. It was a person grunting something, but Jack couldn’t make out the words. He focused and narrowed the noise down as coming from the north. There were two doors on the north wall. So, which one should he pick?
He walked closer, and the noise was unmistakably coming from the left door. He walked through it and followed a cramped stone tunnel that smelled of mildew. He emerged into a vast room with stone walls. There was a large, oval shaped window was on the north wall, but a crust of dirt covered the glass and stopped the sunlight getting in. This made the place look like a crypt, but it wasn’t the darkness that made him pause. In the centre of the room, he saw the source of the noise; a man was crouched on the floor with his eye just a centimeter away from the stone, as if he was looking for something.
The man wore a coat that looked like it was made for him at a time when he had more muscle, but it was much too large for him now. He had a shaved head, and where his hair started to grow back, it was grey. A coat of ash-colored stubble lined his face and jaw. If Jack had to guess, he’d place him to be in his fifties. He certainly had the protruding gut that seemed obligatory for most middle-aged men. He was staring intensely at one particular part of the floor. When Jack approached, he couldn’t tell what he was looking for.
“Excuse me, buddy,” said Jack. “I’m looking for a game guide, or someone like that. Anyone who can open the menu system for this thing, really. I don’t suppose that’s you?”
The man glared at him. “Karu’t ven var,” he said.
“Sorry? Do you speak English?”
“Asano tarum!”
The man pointed at the stone floor repeatedly. Jack joined him on the floor. He couldn’t work out what he was trying to say. Had he lost a contact lens or something? It was obvious that the man wouldn’t help him until he found whatever he’d misplaced, so Jack decided to assist.
He put his hand on the floor and touched the stone. It felt like ice against his palms, and the surface was rough. As he pressed down fully on it, the stone seemed to warm up. A light spread across it, faint
, yellow, and tracing around the edge of the square. It gathered in one corner and flashed across the whole surface. The flare hurt Jack’s eyes, and he put his hands to his face. When he lifted his hands away, he was surprised. This part of the stone floor had transformed into a door. It was still the same color as the rest of the flooring, but now it had a gold-colored handle in the center.
Jack reached out to grab it, when the man pushed him out of the way. A flash of anger passed through him, but it faded as he watched the man pull on the gold handle until his face flushed red. The man took a strange contraption from his belt. It was a rectangular metal device that had tentacles writhing from it. He pressed the metal against the door, and the tentacles latched on and made a sucking noise, like a plunger. The man pulled, but nothing happened.
The man looked at Jack. “Asano tarum!” he said. This was the second time he’d used the phrase, and Jack wondered what it meant.
He heard growling again. It sounded the same as the noise he’d heard outside the castle, except it sounded closer. He looked around, but couldn’t see anything except the man, who had a pile of discarded devices next to him now. Despite his efforts, the door was no closer to opening.
Jack would have loved to have sat and watched the man get pissed as he failed to open the door, but he felt that he had to see what was hidden under it. He gripped the gold handle. Bracing himself and tensing his muscles, he started to pull. The door flew open so quickly that he fell onto his back. Feeling triumphant, he turned to the man. “Maybe you should try working out,” he said.
The man seemed annoyed that Jack had succeeded where his contraptions had failed. He picked up the tentacled-tool, spoke a few growled words in its direction, then threw it across the room.
There was an opening in the floor now. Jack saw a dark mouth that led to the depths of the castle. There were cracked stone steps that seemed to spiral down, but it was too dark for him to see where they went. His common sense fought against a tugging sensation in his mind. It felt like a hand was gripping him and trying to drag him forward, down the stairs. A feeling deep inside him told him that he had to go down these steps.
“This seems pretty fucking smart,” he muttered to himself, as he stood up. “Just wander down a dark flight of stairs into a dungeon. This is all going to end well.”
The staircase was pitch black at first, but whenever he put his foot down on a step, it lit up for a few seconds. The steps kept a residual glow, like lamps dimmed down to their lowest settings. He followed the staircase down into the bowels of the building. As he went further, he heard footsteps behind him. The old man must have followed him. He turned around. “You okay up there?”
He heard the old man walking toward him, but couldn’t see the steps glowing under his feet. It was only when he was close enough to smell his musky odor that Jack could sense him. It was weird that the steps lit up for Jack, but not the man.
He carried on walking. As he took another step, he felt something splash over his face. He took a sharp breath. His face felt cold, as though he’d walked through a waterfall, but when he put his hand on his cheek it felt dry. Behind him, the old man had stopped. He tried to take a step forward, but something prevented him. It was as if there was some kind of invisible barrier.
“There’s nothing there,” said Jack. He reached out and touched the old man.
“Rere um va,” said the man. He tried to step forward, only to be met by the invisible field again. “Asano tarum!” he said, using the phrase for a third time.
“I guess I’m the only one who can go down here for now,” he said. “Just sit tight, I won’t be long.”
Something was strange here. Well, all of it was strange, but the last few minutes defied any sort of explanation. The door had only opened for Jack, not the old man. Then, there had been some sort of forcefield that allowed Jack to pass, but it stopped the man. Was it a trap? He didn’t have much choice, he had to go on. He followed the staircase down another three twists until he came to a room.
It was small and dark like a crypt, except for a dull glow on the stone walls. He couldn’t locate the source of the glow, but it helped him get a sense of what was in the room. There was a wooden table pushed against the west wall with a thick book resting on it. Across from the table and book, in the centre of the room, a square block of stone protruded from the floor. The top of the stone was square-shaped and divided into quarters, but one quarter chunk of it was missing. He sensed there was something special about this raised stone, but he couldn’t tell what.
As he stared at it, a tremor shot through him. It was so forceful that he lurched forward. He lost his balance and fell to the floor. Something inside was pulling him again, trying to make him move. He looked across the room and saw the stone block.
Touch the stone, said a voice.
He heard the words in his head, but he knew that nobody had actually spoken. He felt drawn to the raised stone by some magnetic force. Just like with going down the staircase, he felt like he had to crawl over to the raised stone block. It was as if it was the most important thing in the world.
He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t. His head throbbed. He focused on the stone and began to drag himself across the room. Inch by inch he went, the dust from the floor clogging his throat and making him cough. Finally, he was in front of the stone. He felt sapped of energy, like he could just flop down and sleep for a month.
Touch the stone, said the voice.
“I’m doing it, God fucking damn it. Just hold on a sec.”
He raised his hands. At the same time, he didn’t know if he was raising them, or if some force was making him do it. All the same, he knew he had no choice. He reached forward and placed his hands on the stone. Smoke started to rise from the floor, before swirling in the air. Soon, it started to form letters in front of him.
Kingdom Stone Activated!
The stone began to shake. A glow spread across its surface, and it started to heat up. The glow intensified until it seemed like it covered all of the stone, except for the missing quarter of it. Suddenly light flashed out from it, blinding him with its pure white. He knew that his eyes were open, but he saw nothing but the white light.
Then it faded. The light receded into the stone walls and floor like water running down a plughole. Smoke appeared in the air in front of him and then started to form words. They hung in midair and stayed there for him to read them. Welcome to Royaume, Lord Halberd, they read. Then, following his welcome message, even more text projected in front of him.
Name: Jack Halberd
Level: 0
EXP toward next level: 0%
Hitpoints: 100 / 100
Stamina: 100 / 100
Mana: 100 / 100
Attack: 5
Defence: 5
Speed: 5
Skills
Skill 1 – Empty
Skill 2 - Empty
Skill 3 - Empty
Skill 4 - Empty
Weapon Proficiencies
Empty
Kingdom Stats
Flek: 196
Population: 25
Population Morale: 28/100
Soldiers: 0
He’d seen hundreds of character screens before, so he knew what he was looking at. Some parts of it were familiar; experience points, hitpoints, stamina. Some needed a little more explanation, but he found that if he focused on one section for long enough, an explanation appeared. He reviewed each one in turn.
Skill List – There are hundreds of skills you can learn in Royaume. Each skill will increase in level through use, granting you additional powers related to it.
Weapon Proficiencies – Although you can use any weapon, becoming adapt with one or two particular weapons will grant extra combat moves.
Flek – This is the currency of Royaume.
Population – The number of people living in your kingdom.
Population Morale – Your population morale reflects how your people feel about you. The better they ar
e disposed toward you, the more likely they are to carry out your orders.
Soldiers – The number of soldiers in your army.
Note: Your character screen can now be accessed by touching your chest.
It seemed that by touching the kingdom stone, he’d gained access to his character screen. That meant that the stone was a menu, of sorts. Relief flowed through him. Finally, he could get out of here and sort things out back home.
He walked back over to the stone. The three pieces of it were still glowing. When he touched one of them, nothing happened. He touched another part and got the same result. Finally, he jumped on the kingdom stone and stomped up and down it, willing a menu to appear. His heart sank when he realized that it just wasn’t going to happen.
He needed air, so he moved away from the glowing stone and left the room. The spiral staircase felt stuffy. As he rushed to get to the top of it, he passed the old man on the way.