by Zen DiPietro
The Heart-Shaped Chest
Adventure by Association: The Everternia Saga
Zen DiPietro
Contents
Copyright
1. The Heart-Shaped Chest
Message from the author
About the Author
Other Works by Zen DiPietro
Dragonfire Station Universe
Copyright
THE HEART-SHAPED CHEST (ADVENTURE BY ASSOCIATION, AN EVERTERNIA SERIES)
COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY ZEN DIPIETRO
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without express written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations for the purpose of review.
Please purchase only authorized electronic editions. Distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.
Cover Art by Zen DiPietro
Published in the United States of America by Parallel Worlds Press
1
The Heart-Shaped Chest
Sally Streetmonger stood patiently in front of her display of wares. Her script had reset, so she would once again go through her limited loop of interactions.
She didn’t mind. She hadn’t been designed to mind. Sometimes she envied swaggering Tilly Hightower, who got to roam the entire land of Everternia with her group of rough-and-tumble toughs. Sometimes she teamed up with adventurers and sometimes she battled them. Tilly’s loops had much more variability.
Sally, on the other hand, had never been outside of her shop. She’d never even gotten a peek outside the door. Sometimes when business was slow, she had a moment to wonder about the chaotic life that she suspected lay beyond the cozy confines of her store.
But she was important in her own way, and that was enough for her.
A group of five adventurers entered, talking amongst themselves within their private communication bubble. She could hear them, of course, but she never revealed that fact. Adventurers knew that other adventurers couldn’t overhear their private conversation, but they only assumed that the natives of Everternia—people like Sally, who were known as community members, or CMs for short—couldn’t hear it, either.
The more experienced the adventurers, the more things they tended to assume.
A Northerner dropped a heavy bundle of bound-up scrap metal on the counter in front of her. “How much for this?”
Sally reached beneath the counter for her goggles and slipped them on. They were equipped with a variety of lenses that allowed her to quickly assess the quality and value of metal and mechanical parts. “The quality is quite poor. The only thing this is good for is melting down to reforge. I can only offer you four silver.”
“My cutter broke!” the large one shouted. “My metal scraps are usually excellent or perfect condition.”
“Would you like to buy a cutter?” Sally asked helpfully. “I have several kinds. I just got in a shipment of professional-grade torch cutters, if you have the coin for it.”
The adventurer sighed. “What’s your cheapest one?”
Sally flipped open a cabinet that showed all the cutting tools she had in stock, complete with signs that gave the price for each item. “My best bargain cutter is ten silver. It’s not fancy, but it’s guaranteed not to break for ten uses.”
The Northerner grumbled. Sally noted that his name was Gnorr. What Gnorr didn’t know was that she could assess all his gear and skills just by looking at him. She could also see that he had an infection beginning in the bandaged wound on his right arm. Strange, since Northerners were a hardy folk who rarely contracted illness or infection. But Sally never mentioned to her customers what she knew about them. No doubt Gnorr would be annoyed to realize that the person he wanted to bargain with was well aware of the fact that he had twenty silver in his pocket.
“Six silver” Gnorr said.
Sally maintained her earnest expression, but internally she scoffed at Gnorr’s offer. He didn’t have nearly the charm or good looks of someone who could bargain an item down to only sixty percent of her original price. “Eight silver,” she said primly. “Last offer.”
Gnorr’s companions laughed.
“She’s not even giving you a second chance, dude,” another Northerner said. “Your charisma must suck.”
Gnorr slammed eight silvers down on the counter and Sally immediately swept the money away and replaced it with the tool he wanted.
“Is there anything else I can help you out with today?” she asked. “Do you, perhaps, have any puzzles to sell?”
Sally’s one defining characteristic was her love for puzzles. Her favorite days were when an adventurer came in with a puzzle they’d found on a quest. Sometimes they sold her the puzzle, and sometimes they gave her a tip so she’d help them solve it.
Puzzle days were the absolute best.
Gnorr said something filthy to his companions under the nonexistent privacy of their conversation bubble. Sally remained calm and earnest despite the rudeness.
The group began to leave, but one of the women, whose name was Kitria, pulled out a short sword and shoved it into Sally’s stomach until it protruded out her back.
Sally’s knees buckled and she fell to the ground while Kitria put her sword back in its sheath.
“Why did you do that?” Gnorr asked.
“I always stab her,” Kitria laughed. “It’s tradition. Right, Sally?”
Another of the men glanced at Sally on the way out. “Where’s the fun? She can’t even fight back. She has, like, one hit point.”
“I’m chaotic neutral, so I have to do some bad stuff now and then so I don’t get a penalty on my skills. Got to keep my karma up. Besides, like I said, it’s tradition. I’ve been stabbing her for two years now, ever since I bought my first short sword. Had to test it out. Then I figured, why not make it a regular thing?”
Sally lay on the floor with the specter of death hovering over her, waiting patiently for them to leave so that her loop could restart. Kitria was telling the truth. When Sally had seen her enter, she knew she’d be getting stabbed by Kitria that day for the three hundred and sixty-seventh time.
There was no escaping such things. She was only Sally Streetmonger, after all.
Sally liked new adventurers the best. Newbies took the time to look around and to ask lots of questions. The longer someone had been around Everternia, the less they saw. They already knew every surface and color inside every common area, and could enter her shop, do their business with a few quick commands, and be out again in less than half a minute.
Newbies, on the other hand, wandered around, looked at absolutely everything, and asked her questions most people didn’t bother to.
Newbies were interesting because they hadn’t yet become bored with what Everternia had to offer. They still had that mix of wonder and determination that Sally always found so exciting.
For most of their questions, though, she had no good answers. She had very little backstory to speak of, and wasn’t the kind of community member who could do cool things like issue quests. She served a specific purpose, and once the newbs figured that out, they would begin zipping in and out of
her shop at the speed of light, too.
But it was always nice while it lasted.
“Can I sell this?” a brand-new adventurer named Essley asked. She held out an apple, which had fallen from the big tree at the town square. They could quench an adventurer’s hunger for a little while, but weren’t good for anything else.
“What would I do with that?” Sally asked, as she always did of the offers of things she couldn’t accept.
“Then how am I supposed to get money?” Essley asked, clearly frustrated. “I need to buy a map so I can get somewhere to make money, but how can I get the map to make money when I don’t have any money to get the map?”
Nobody had ever asked Sally about money like that. It sounded like a riddle.
“Maybe there’s something else we can forage to sell,” Essley’s companion Darthrok suggested. Like her, he was brand-new to Everternia.
“I love puzzles,” Sally said. Usually, she said that line when someone offered her one for sale. Her conversations, up until this point, had always been entirely formulaic. Now, for some reason, she wanted to use some of her puzzle dialogue with Essley and Darthrok.
“What does that mean?” Darthrok asked.
Sally wasn’t sure if he was asking her or Essley. In either case, she had no available response. She repeated, “I love puzzles.”
Essley put a hand on her hip. “Maybe she’s hinting that there’s a puzzle out there we can find to sell her so we can get the map. If I’d known how hard it is to start out as a mercenary, I might have become a maker instead. I was tempted to try botany or forging but I thought mercenary work sounded more fun.”
There was no way they’d find any puzzles until they gained ten levels of experience, but Sally had no words to tell them that.
Kitria swaggered into the shop with a huge wooden trunk on her shoulder. She slammed it down on the counter and said, “Sell parts.”
Sally immediately put on her goggles, riffled through the assortment of gears, wires, hinges, and flanges. There were also a few parts for a steam engine, but they were badly worn. She swept the parts behind the counter and replaced them with the maximum amount of coin they warranted without even giving Kitria a lower offer first. She didn’t want to deal with bargaining today. She wanted to think about puzzles and the two new adventurers. The sooner Kitria went away, the better.
Kitria pocketed the money. “Nice. I must have picked up a charisma bonus.”
She unsheathed her short sword, and Sally belatedly realized that she should have bargained with Kitria after all, in order to give the newbies a chance to get bored and wander out. Instead, they were standing motionless, staring at the mercenary in awe.
If they got in Kitria’s way, she’d gut them too, and just as easily. They’d lose their meager belongings and have a rougher time trying to establish themselves.
Fortunately, they simply stared in shock when Kitria ran Sally through. As Sally lay on the floor, Kitria strutted out of the shop.
“What was that?” Essley shouted. “Why did she just do that?”
Sally wanted to tell them not to worry about it. As soon as they left, she’d regenerate and be fine. She didn’t have the words to say that, though. She wished she could reassure them.
For the first time in her existence, Sally felt that her place in Everternia was too small, and didn’t fit. It pinched.
She didn’t like it.
“Can we help her?” Essley kneeled next to Sally and made a terrible attempt to apply first aid.
“I don’t think so. Assess her,” Darthrok said. “When I look at her, I see the specter of death.”
“You’re right. Well, that stinks.” Essley scowled. “Why would someone kill a harmless CM like that?”
Darthrok shrugged. “For some people, that’s what’s fun. It’s just a game.”
“I guess.” Essley stood. “Seems stupid, though. I hate bullies.”
As they left, Essley said, “Sorry, Sally Streetmonger. When I’m bigger, maybe I can keep people from being jerks to you.”
Sally wondered why Essley would want to do that. The young adventurer had said she hated bullies, so that must be the reason.
But Darthrok had said this was just a game.
Puzzles were a type of game too.
Sally loved puzzles.
“It looks like you gnawed these off with your teeth. I’m afraid I can’t offer you much for them. Fifty copper.”
Sally had a few funny lines, and the one about cutting leather hides off with teeth was one of her favorites. She was glad to use it with Kitria.
Kitria was not so glad. “Fifty copper? These are all excellent and perfect quality.”
Technically, what she said was true. The pelts had been taken with great skill, and an even better knife.
However, Sally suspected that the knife had been stolen from a younger adventurer who had lucked into a quest. She could tell by looking at Kitria that she had never gone on that quest. What was more, Sally had spotted that exact knife two days ago on a cheerful doctor.
If the knife used to take the skins had been stolen, then Sally could devalue it greatly because stolen goods could be difficult to resell. The pricing laws of Everternia were beyond Sally’s control, but she could use her own discretion within those parameters.
“Looks like your luck isn’t so good today,” Sally said. She usually used that line when it came to puzzle-solving, but it seemed to fit here.
Kitria let out an aggrieved sigh and opened a channel to her adventuring party via the gadget hidden inside her coat. “Hey Jams, meet me at the tavern. I need you to check me. I think someone put a hex on me. Bloody botanists!”
She heaved the bundle of hides back over her shoulder and turned to leave. “Oh. Almost forgot.”
She grabbed her dagger and stabbed Sally in the heart.
She dutifully fell to the floor and twitched a few times before going still.
As soon as Kitria stepped out of the shop, Sally rose to her feet.
She began humming and wiping down the spotless counter with a rough cloth. She’d keep doing that until someone entered and triggered her loop to begin again.
As she hummed and cleaned, she thought about recent events. If she could take lines of dialogue out of their original contexts, could she also pull individual words out of the lines and form them into new sentences?
She mentally compiled all of the words in her dialogue.
“Is there anything else I can help you out with today?” she said aloud, using one of her standard greetings. “Do you, perhaps, have any puzzles to sell?”
Carefully, she pulled a few of the words together into a new order.
“Do you sell?” she asked experimentally.
Oh, wow! That worked!
Excitedly, she tried again. “I can sell puzzles.”
That wasn’t true. She could buy them, or she could help solve them, but she couldn’t sell puzzles.
Or could she?
She glanced at the puzzles in the cabinet—the ones she had bought from adventurers.
Try as she might, she couldn’t go to the cabinet and open it. She could only keep humming and wiping the counter.
She wasn’t an adventurer. She didn’t have free will. She could only operate within the confines of her construct.
She stopped. Someone was about to enter. She could feel it.
Essley arrived, wearing a new coat and a belt-worn holster for a flintlock pistol. She’d reached level ten already. She must have worked really hard.
Sally asked, “Is there anything else I can help you out with today? Do you, perhaps, have any puzzles to sell?”
“Hi, Sally. How are you?”
She didn’t have a response for a greeting like this, but she liked how Essley acknowledged her. Other people didn’t do that. They acted like she was a table or a chair.
Carefully, she put some words together from her dialogue bank.
“Today my luck is good,” she said.
“Oh?” Essley seemed interested. “Why’s that?”
“I have puzzles to sell.” Technically, Sally wasn’t sure if this was true. She did have puzzles and she did sell things, but could she sell a puzzle?
“Really? That’s new. Is this a quest?”
Sally had nothing to say about quests. She stared at Essley wordlessly.
“How much for a puzzle?” Essley asked.
Sally was overjoyed to realize that she could answer. It was a common line she used when a character had really good charisma. “For you, five silver. But don’t tell your friends.”
“Why so cheap? Is this a trick?” Essley wondered.
Sally had no response available to address the possibility of tricks.
“Okay, I’ll try it.” Essley put the coins on the counter. “But if this is a booby trap or something, I’m going to be mad at you, Sally.”
Sally hoped she wasn’t setting Essley up for disappointment. She’d accepted coins in exchange for a specific item, and now she could only wait to see if she could supply that item.
She reached for the cabinet and extended her fingers toward the puzzles.
It worked. She could touch them. She passed over the first two, small-reward puzzles, and went for the big, heart-shaped one. The one that gave a significant intelligence and experience boost.
She put it in front of Essley. “Don’t tell your friends.”
Essley paused. “It’s kind of weird for you to say that again.”
Sally searched for something to say. “What would I do if your luck is good today?”
“Are you trying to tell me something?” Essley stared at her. “Are you…” her voice dropped and she glanced around quickly. “Are you a GM right now? Is this some big game event about to start?”
Sally didn’t entirely understand what a Game Master was, but she’d heard adventurers speak of them in hushed tones, so they had to be either really good or really bad. Maybe some kind of deity or demon.