by Natalie Grey
Metamorphosis Online Complete Series Boxed Set
A Gamelit Fantasy RGP Novel
Natalie Grey
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, December 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-601-6
Contents
You Need A Bigger Sword
The New Queen Rises
Reign With Axe And Shield
Other Books You Might Enjoy
Books by Natalie Grey
Books by Michael Anderle
Connect with the authors
From Natalie
For M and T
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
You Need A Bigger Sword
Metamorphosis Online Book One
Chapter One
“Fifteen. Dealer has eighteen.” Gracie King smiled at the man sitting in front of her. At 2AM on a Tuesday, the tables at the Torrino were not filled with either the high-rollers or anyone massively successful. This man was wearing a watch a few links too big and a jacket that had not been tailored for him, and he was clearly on the wrong side of tipsy.
Bad start.
He looked at the card, confusion wrinkling his brow, and she saw him trying to do the math in his head.
She resisted the urge to sigh. She had seen all of this play out before—dozens of times tonight alone. It began with someone looking around until their eyes focused on her table. Then they’d come sit down and give her a happy, hearty greeting. Reality would start to intrude as they considered their bet, and she could get a sense of how things would go from whether they bothered to consider the amounts before tossing the chips onto the table.
Sometimes there was a spark, a shared confidence in the way they smiled. They were here for Las Vegas, not the cards. They loved the city like she did: the absolute, unabashed opulence of it. Some of them were even good blackjack players, accepting the whims of the cards with a smile. Playing the long game.
Those patrons brightened a whole shift. It was like being back in high school, having someone you liked smile at you as they passed in the hall. It wasn’t much, but it gave you a high that lasted all day.
But most of the people who came here weren’t like that. They were like this man.
Gracie would deal and the player would go through the stages of the game, as predictable as clockwork. They would try to consider what the odds of getting the card they needed were. They would be blinded by the idea of winning. They would want to do something, not just sit and wait. They would fall prey to any number of logical fallacies, and she would watch while they lost and lost again, and kept losing until they eventually went away to try another table.
As if that would help them.
She kept the annoyance from her face, but it pulsed through her. She didn’t like people who didn’t even try to make good decisions. They came to her table, terrified of losing the money represented by those brightly-colored chips, and they almost always lost it. Then they were sad, and there was no way for her to make that better. Some days, she resented all of it.
Then again, she worked in a casino. These people paid her bills.
The man at the table looked up at her and searched her eyes for the answer. Gracie kept her smile fixed firmly on her face. After a year of working here, she knew how to make herself smile like a robot, perfectly friendly with absolutely no hints or clues. She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t make his choice for him.
They were coming to the last stage of the process, the one where people would get reckless.
“Hit me,” the guy said at last, right on schedule. He flashed Gracie a smile.
Her own did not waver as she flipped one more card over and slid it into place in front of him.
Eight of clubs, giving him twenty-three.
His smile faltered for a moment as he stared at it, then he shrugged and his smile came back, bright and now divorced from reality.
“What can you do, eh?”
“Bad luck,” Gracie said. She hated the sound of the words coming out of her mouth. She couldn’t do any more for him, not without angering the gods who watched through the security cameras on the ceiling. She couldn’t take the time to tell him that it had been the right choice, all things considered. That with so many cards in play, and partial decks, he could never assess the exact odds, but that asking for another card at fifteen had been the right call statistically.
It was just a fluke, genuinely bad luck. She swallowed.
This guy didn’t get angry, though. He tried to hide the disappointment. “Absolutely. Can’t have a bad streak forever, right?” He brought his martini glass up to drain it, realized it was already empty, and stood. “Clearly it’s time for another drink.” He winked and headed off, weaving slightly.
Gracie didn’t tell him that the nearest bar was in the other direction. He had probably just been trying to get away from the woman who’d seen him lose, and in any case, he didn’t need more alcohol. His judgment was impaired enough already.
There was a tap on her shoulder and she turned to see Matt, the manager on duty. Tim was standing next to him, ready to take the table.
“Your shift’s done,” Matt told her.
Gracie nodded. Casinos existed in a sort of endless evening, with soft, golden lighting, waitresses in sparkly costumes, and jazz playing over the speakers. There was no way to know what time it really was, and the casinos liked that. There were no clocks. Dealers weren’t allowed to wear watches, and she had learned not to try to anticipate what time it was. She simply existed until someone came to get her for a break or the end of her shift.
She cleared her hands for the cameras, took the tips from her lockbox, and made her way quickly through the tables to the end of the room, Matt at her side.
“Have you thought about it?” he asked her.
Gracie tensed slightly. “No.”
“You should,” Matt insisted. Tall and relatively good-looking, he wore his dark hair just on the edge of being too messy for a dealer. “I know you’d make a ton in tips. We never get complaints about you.”
She hated this. Gracie swiped her card at the door to the back hallways a
s she gathered her courage. “I meant, I did think about it. No.”
Matt tipped his head back and sighed. “Come on, Gracie. You’d be making so much more, and we’re short-staffed—”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I just…don’t want to.” Gracie gave him a nod and ended the conversation by force, slipping through the door and leaving him behind.
She walked quickly to her locker, annoyed. A few weeks ago, Matt had come to her to ask if she would consider taking some shifts as a cocktail waitress. Nicer uniform, he’d said with a laugh. He gestured at the white shirts and silk vests the dealers wore. Better than this atrocity.
It was hard to argue with that. Sparkly and glamorous, the dresses the cocktail waitresses wore were quintessentially Vegas, part of the glamor that had drawn Gracie here after she finished college. She wanted to wear a sparkly dress as a patron, though, not as a waitress. When she was working, she liked the relative anonymity of her mandated plain hairstyle, understated makeup, and distinctly un-sexy uniform.
She didn’t want to be bringing overpriced cocktails to already-drunk patrons, not with all the comments and catcalls she could expect.
It was late, and she should go straight home, but after that last client and Matt’s disappointment, she decided to head to one of her favorite places on the strip: the Bellagio fountains.
Even this late, the air was warm. She’d stripped off her white shirt and vest, leaving the tank top underneath, replaced the black slacks with jeans, and swapped her black work shoes for flip flops. She looked up at the lights and listened to the music and laughter and the wind rustling in the trees, and felt her tension melt away.
She stood and watched the fountains for a while. This was what she liked most about Vegas: stately grandeur mixed with unabashed glitz. I know it’s too much, the whole Vegas Strip seemed to say. That’s the point.
Gracie had chosen Vegas on a whim, moving here after she finished college while her parents demanded to know exactly what she was planning to do with a statistics degree in Las Vegas, of all places. Gracie had told them she’d figure it out. Then, after interviewing at a bunch of soulless offices where they murmured things about “depreciation” and “client experience,” she’d taken a job as a dealer on a lark.
Okay, and a little bit to piss off her parents.
Whatever, it was working out fine. Mostly fine. Not entirely fine, but she’d find a way to make more money that didn’t involve calling them and admitting she’d been wrong. She gave one last smile at the fountains, smiled, and headed back to her car.
Her apartment building was one of the first in a planned development, so it was a jarring mix of a fairly nice building on an empty, dusty lot with a lot of construction vehicles and steel girders. Gracie parked in an unoccupied patch of dirt near the building and headed up, taking the stairs two at a time.
She smelled Vietnamese food as she came into the apartment. “Alex?”
“In the living room,” Alex called back. Thirty-five, he had moved to Vegas three years ago to get over a divorce and had been fully committed to the bachelor lifestyle ever since, eating mac and cheese directly out of the saucepan and playing video games until he passed out in front of the tv. When Grace poked her head into the living room, he waved her over. “I got a ton of food. You hungry?”
“Always.” Gracie kicked off her flip flops and came to sit cross-legged on the couch with him, pulling a container of spicy noodles toward her. “Why do you always get chopsticks? We don’t use chopsticks.”
Alex shrugged, his mouth full of food. “How was work?” he asked a moment later.
“Shit, same as always.”
“Your job is shit because you’re such a bleeding heart that you want to help all the people who suck at playing blackjack.”
“I am not a bleeding heart, and they’re not playing blackjack,” Gracie said, annoyed. She took a bite, barely chewed, and gulped it down. “They’re playing ‘casinos.’ They just think they’re playing blackjack. That’s why they lose.”
Alex nodded contemplatively.
“This is good,” Gracie said after a moment. “New place?”
“Opened near my work,” Alex said. He was employed at an upscale accounting firm, helping the rising stars of the casinos to hide their wealth every April. “Hey, so I was thinking about the VR headset.”
Gracie groaned.
“It would be so fun,” Alex cajoled. “Come on! It’d be so fun.”
“If it’s that fun, you’ll be playing it all the time, and I’ll never get a shot.”
“Aha! I thought you might say that.” Alex looked triumphant.
Gracie froze, her fork halfway to her mouth. “Oh, no. That was a trap, wasn’t it?”
“One hundred percent,” he agreed cheerfully. “Metamorphosis Online is sponsoring a buy-one-get-one-fifty-percent-off deal right now. I figure if we went halfsies on that…”
“So, now instead of paying fifty percent for a VR headset I didn’t want, I’m paying seventy-five percent for a VR headset I don’t want?” Gracie raised an eyebrow and finished the piece of chicken. “No way.”
“I always forget you can do math.”
“Dude, it’s why you chose me to be your roommate.” Gracie and Alex had both gone to Harvey Mudd College and majored in mathematics, although several years apart. That connection had gotten her a room here when Alex had a list of applicants as long as his arm. Despite the twelve years between them, they got along well. Gracie never harped on him not to put his socks on the floor, and he didn’t give her crap for preferring to spend her days in sweats rather than dresses.
They also had a mutual agreement never to ask each other where their lives were going or what their aspirations were. It was too depressing a topic, and they both got enough of that from their parents.
Alex grinned. “Okay, tell you what. I’ll front the money, and if you like the headset, then you’ll pay your seventy-five percent.”
“Deal.” Grace reached over and shook on it. “What’s Metamorphosis Online?”
“The game I was telling you about.”
“You tell me about a lot of games. Give me paper and dice any day.”
“You say that, but how long has it been since you actually played D&D?”
“I haven’t found a good group here.” Not that she hadn’t tried, of course, but it was hard to find one where she could just be one of the guys. Eventually, Gracie had given up.
“Metamorphosis Online is the one where they pay you to play it,” Alex reminded her.
“Oh, right.” Gracie took another bite and gave him a look. “They pay you if you get to a high enough rank.”
Alex shook his head, holding his fork up to make a point. “Or if you do a first-clear—you know, when your guild is the first one to clear the new content each month—or when you—”
“Alex, you know this is a trap.” Gracie groaned and let her head thump back on the couch. “It’s not real! They’ve got all these finicky little rules, and they make it super-complicated to figure out how much you make. You know you’re not going to make your money back.”
“Whatever.” He gave her a look of great dignity and began sorting through his container, pushing the vegetables aside with his fork. “Man, this stuff is tasty, but they really stiffed me on the chicken. Anyway, it’s still a fun game.”
“Uh-huh.” Gracie gestured meaningfully to the racks of game discs. “And it’s such a shame you don’t have any of those.”
“I am telling you.” Alex jabbed a fork at her. “You will love the VR headset, and you will love Metamorphosis Online. I’ll pay for the first month of that, too.”
“Eh, why the hell not? We’re down the rabbit hole anyway.” Gracie settled back on the couch and harrumphed, staring down at her food. “I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow.”
“I feel ya.” Alex took a mouthful of food. “Hey, maybe you’ll make enough at this game that you don’t have to.”
“Maybe I’ll sprout wing
s and fly up your butt.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that one through.” Gracie grinned and downed the last of the noodles. “Okay, Call of Duty. Come on.”
“You hate Call of Duty.”
“Yeah, but now that I’ve started learning it, I have to get good. It’s my pathology.”
“You have a long way to go,” Alex quipped.
“Yeah, well, I’m calling it.” Gracie gestured broadly as if she were a presenter. “Tonight’s the night I don’t get stuck in any corners.”
“Good luck,” Alex said doubtfully.
Chapter Two
The headset was there when Gracie got home from work a few days later. So was Alex, and he was practically vibrating with excitement.
“Don’t you have work?” Gracie called to him as she stuffed her work clothes in the washer and started it. She swore and fished out her silk vest just in time. “Son of a—that would have sucked to buy again.” She caught sight of Alex in the corner of her vision. “Did you know they charge a hundred fucking bucks for one of those if you— You’re not listening, are you?”
“The game,” Alex said. His hands were palm-up, fingers cupped as though he were offering a prayer up to some god of pixels and game mechanics. He gave her a pleading look. “Come on, you have got to roll your character.
“I have got to eat,” Gracie said, using the tone she would use for a stubborn toddler. “If I do not, I will kill you violently.”
“It would be worth it to know I’ve brought another fine soul to the world of Metamorphosis Online.”