by Brian Simons
The elf glanced over at her, expressionless. Coral was tired. She had spent too long toiling away in that mine and knew it must be the small hours of the morning by now.
“I don’t want this, you know,” the elf said, still staring at Coral. “That’s why I was trying to back away from the battle.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Elves are creatures of light and life, not death and destruction. I don’t want to storm the mountain unprovoked. Our people don’t want to threaten the ogres and attack the humans. We certainly don’t want to stay separate from our dark brothers and sisters. The queen has driven so much hatred into the world.”
“Then why do it?”
“She used to be a powerful life mage. Now her power is unparalleled, but she still wants more. She has eyes on us all. If we disobey… the punishment…” The elf turned away from Coral for the first time. “And Ze cannot survive this. Not indefinitely.”
“Survive what?”
“No, I’ve said too much. The weariness must be getting to me. It’s impossible to sleep in this position.”
“Is that why the forest is diseased? Because something is wrong with Ze?”
“I can’t say any more. She’ll know.” The elf’s eyes darted around the room, as if he thought there might be an invisible spy waiting to report back about him. “Perhaps there’s something else I can do though. Do you still have my bow?”
“I can’t give you your weapon,” Coral said. She would not be fooled so easily.
“Of course not. Keep it. It’s a good bow. I can teach you a special skill, one that Archers like me know, but which you seem to lack. Perhaps it will help you in your fight against the queen.”
“Go on,” Coral said.
“Prepare an arrow,” he said, “and focus your mind on the hottest thing you can think of.”
Coral followed his instruction. She closed her eyes and envisioned the electric griddle at the Wilkersons’ diner. Her boss, Darrell, always had something sizzling away — eggs, hash browns, grilled cheese. The one time she had brushed too close she burnt her hand pretty badly.
She felt her arrow get warm. Her eyes shot open. “Is this going to catch fire?” she asked. “Are you hoping your ropes burn off?”
“No! I don’t want you to aim that thing at me anyway. You’d singe the skin right off of me. Aim at the wall or something.”
Coral closed her eyes again and thought of the griddle. Grease popped and hissed as food cooked and burnt. Droplets of water and grease danced and split apart. She released the arrow and it shot straight into the wall. The arrowhead melted its way into the rock. The shaft alone was visible, sticking out from the wall.
>> Congratulations! You have unlocked Hot Shot. Your previous shots were lukewarm at best.
The skill took 10 MP to use, which wasn’t bad. If Coral were an Archer by class, she might be able to unlock higher tiers of the skill and pay more MP for a stronger version.
“Excellent!” the elf said. “Keep practicing!”
Coral drew her bow and watched the arrow heat up. It turned a brownish color that Coral was sure should be red, but for her broken visor. It grew white hot before she released it into the rock wall. She released nine more arrows that way. Each one was hot enough to melt a hole into the mountain.
>> Congratulations! You have improved your Hot Shot ability to 2. +2% to maximum heat.
“I’m out of MP she said.”
“Good,” the elf said and kicked its feet off from the floor. He swung from the ceiling like a tetherball headed for the rock wall behind him. His small elf foot landed on the tip of one of Coral’s arrow shafts protruding from the wall, and he kicked up, hurling himself toward the ceiling. He spun as he flew through the air, dislodging his rope from the ceiling hook.
Coral reached behind her for another arrow, but it was too late. The elf plowed a shoulder into her stomach and breezed past her with his arms still tied behind his back. Coral writhed on the floor for a few seconds, the wind knocked out of her. A debuff icon appeared above her head of a person’s head turned sideways, blowing a large puff of air out of its face.
By the time she recovered, dwarf guards were rushing down the corridors. They must be chasing after the elf. She doubted they’d catch him. He moved so quickly, and he wasn’t weighed down by armor like the guards were.
Coral got to her feet and wound her way back through the mountain to the mine.
“Did he talk?” Sal asked.
“Oh yeah,” Coral said. “He said whatever’s going on, Ze may not survive it.”
“How did you get him to say anything?” Daniel asked.
“By letting him escape,” Coral said, bowing her head in shame. “He tricked me.”
“Elves can be manipulative,” Sal said. “The AI that runs the game knows whether something is going to convince you to do something wrong. Don’t feel bad for getting hijacked.”
Sybil kicked a pile of rocks by her feet. “You need to stop being so gullible all of the time, Coral. This world is not your friend. These NPCs are not your friends. You can’t just take it all at face value. Forget it, I’m going to bed. You know it’s three o’clock in the morning? But we stayed awake because we had a job to do. And since I didn’t blow it, I deserve some sleep.” She vanished in a thin puff of smoke.
“We should all sleep,” Daniel said. “We all deserve it.”
Coral logged off right away. She sat up in her bed and swung her legs over the edge. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry, or if her eyes were just sore from tiredness.
“We all have bad days,” Daniel said.
Coral jumped to her feet. She had forgotten that Daniel was still in her house.
“So you let the elf escape. The dwarves were going to lynch him. I’m the reason two NPCs got killed yesterday. It’s a complicated game.” He walked over to her and braced his hands on her upper arms. “But you play it well. Don’t let today get you down.”
Coral nodded, but she wasn’t sure yet that she believed him. Everyone else guarded the elf for their two hour shift, no problem. In the span of 10 minutes she had not only let him escape, she provided the toehold he needed to leap to freedom. She should have realized it was the game that was playing her.
“What’s this?” Daniel said, reaching down and picking up her visor. “It broke?”
“I stepped on it by mistake,” she said. “Add that to the list of dumb things I’ve done recently. Now I can’t see red anymore in the game, it’s always rust brown.”
“Can you get a replacement?” Daniel asked.
Coral shrugged. “The first one was free, but I provided my social security number to get it. Replacements cost something. It’s not worth it, I’ll manage.”
“Ok,” Daniel said, walking back toward Coral’s parents’ room. “Good night.”
Coral closed her bedroom door and opened her laptop. She hadn’t told Daniel that she saw his eyes open while playing, but it was still bothering her. She found one thread on the message boards that said, “visor blinking red while my friend plays.”
In it, there was a video of someone lying on a bed with his Travail visor on. It was an uneventful video for the first minute. Coral thought she might have been duped into clicking on a bad link. Then the visor lit up red. It faded away, then lit up again. Coral started that part of the video over again to get a better look. The person’s eyes were closed, but the visor blinked away, five times before it stopped.
Coral wondered what the reactions to the video were, but she could barely keep her eyes open. She bookmarked the thread so she could read it later and climbed into her bed to sleep.
17
Hector jolted awake to the sound of his cell phone ringing. He scrambled to get the phone up to his ear before the voicemail kicked in. It was his special ringtone, for work emergencies.
“Hello?” he said.
“Is this Hector Pérez?” a gruff voice said on the other end of the phone line. It was 5:45 a.m.
“Yes,” Hector answered.
“Domin Ansel here. Do your people monitor the message boards?”
Domin was the President of Arbyten, Inc. And the CEO. And a few other important titles. Hector was always amazed that such a large company vested that much responsibility in one person. Domin, no doubt, thought of himself as the company. He certainly seemed to say and do whatever he wanted.
“I have a dotted line to the people that manage that function of the website, why, sir?”
“People have noticed their visors blinking red. I want all trace of that removed. Every video, every discussion, every whisper,” Domin said.
“Red? I’m confused,” Hector said.
“Some idiot developer wanted a force quit mechanism put in place so we could snap people out of Travail if we needed to remotely. Do you remember that?”
That idiot developer had been Hector. Domin didn’t tend to remember the contributions of the people that worked under him though. “I do remember that,” Hector said. “We developed a safety feature that would let us log players out of Travail Online. A few bursts of blue light through the visor would disconnect a player from the game if the retinal pattern matched the safety pattern.
“It’s only effective when the light actually enters the eye, so we instructed the nanotech to open players’ eyes periodically. That way, we could just send the blue light signal through until they opened their eyes and they would snap out of the game.”
“Something’s gone wrong with it and now it’s blinking red,” Domin said. “We can’t have players panicking. Shut it down.”
“The blinking?” Hector asked.
“Wake up, Hector. The blinking isn’t a problem. Don’t waste company resources on the blinking. Shut down the chatter online. I want it off the boards before I get into the office or you’re fired.”
Domin hung up. Hector went to his computer. He’d have to scan down the company hierarchy to see who was responsible for the message boards, but first he wanted to see what Domin was talking about.
18
Daniel stretched out in the large bed he woke up in. He hadn’t been home for two nights in a row, and he realized he didn’t miss it. He didn’t miss his mother coming home at strange hours after she walked home from the track, penniless. He didn’t miss the cold when the heat went out. He didn’t miss the empty refrigerator. Not that Coral’s house was some opulent palace. It was small, and there wasn’t much food, but it was warm, and the curtains were pulled aside to let the light in.
The smell of eggs lured Daniel down to the kitchen. Coral slid some sunny-side-ups onto a plate with a piece of plain toast. “It’s not much,” she said, “but it should hold us for a while.” They ate in silence. Coral looked like she had something on her mind, but Daniel didn’t want to delve back into yesterday’s mistakes. Today was going to be its own challenge.
They logged in and found Wenda waiting for them in the mine. She had a blue pickax in her hands. “Always letting the bad guys get away,” she said.
Behind her was a slightly shorter man with a thin build. His eyes were a little too big for his small, bald head. He seemed to be hiding behind Wenda’s stout frame. Wenda said something that Daniel didn’t understand to the man.
“This is Dorbly,” Wenda said. “He don’t speak human, so just go on and ignore ‘im.”
“Pretty,” he said, pointing at Coral.
“Thank you,” Coral said, “you’re not so bad yourself.”
Daniel wished she wouldn’t encourage this guy. Watching Coral flirt with a dwarven stranger was the last thing he wanted to do this morning, even if she was just being polite. They had to get up to Hiber Camp, and then up the mountain to find Hiber himself in order to advance the new quest Daniel had received from the Mayor.
New Quest: Hiber Nation
Hiber Mountain, and the dwarves’ main city, Hiber Camp, are named after an ancient creature that lives at the top of the mountain. For centuries, the dwarves have tried to rid their home of his pernicious presence.
Reward: Kobold Steel Armor (full set) and 100 bars of gold.
If they were going up against the elves, Daniel would need better armor, as would the rest of the team. If he split the gold with them, they could either cash it out or spend it to upgrade their weapons and armor. They were still gathering intel on what the elf threat really was, but so far he had a nice report prepared for the Regent.
Quest Update: Do or Diardenna
You observed the elf army amass their forces.
Pending report to the Regent:
(1) Bridges and other infrastructure around Travail may be compromised.
(2) Disfigured forest creatures with abnormal strength may plague the forest, mutated by Diardenna’s diseased magic.
(3) The elf army is led by a Level 48 Tactician named Quinnick.
(4) Elves launched an assault on the dwarves, possibly to conquer their mining sites.
Reward: Dependent upon quality of information provided.
Dorbly ran forward and grabbed Coral’s hand. It looked like he was squeezing pretty tight. “Leave her alone, Dorbly!” Wenda yelled. She swatted at him with her free hand. Dorbly flinched, but didn’t let go.
“It’s ok,” Coral said. “He’s not bothering me.”
Wenda threw her free hand in the air and walked away. She disappeared into the back of the mines.
Soon Sal and Sybil arrived. It was noon. Hopefully everyone was in a better mood after sleeping.
“Who’s ready to go to Hiber Camp?” Daniel asked. Everyone nodded, but no one seemed too enthusiastic. They climbed twenty sets of steep stone stairs in stairwells lit only by a single torch per level. It was a dark and quiet trip. Daniel was especially impressed with Sal, who kept pace with the rest of them despite his added weight. Sure, he was sweating buckets, but that was par for the course for his ogre friend.
Eventually they reached a large landing that opened to the outside. Another smooth stone arch served as an exit from the mountain’s internal warren of corridors and stairwells and led to the bright outdoors.
As Daniel’s eyes adjusted, Hiber Camp came into focus. The city was a series of small houses and shops, all built on top of each other with some kind of white clay. It reminded Daniel of the rowhomes so common in Philadelphia. They were built in one row along a crevice in the mountain’s slope, leaving just enough room for a road in front of them. Stairs led from the ground level doors to another set of buildings built on top of the first, like a city atop another city.
Hiber Camp was populated almost exclusively by dwarves, causing Daniel’s little group to stick out. They were greeted with long hard stares and pedestrians that refused to step aside to let them pass. Daniel led the way through the bustling street, hoping to avoid any conflict with Mayor Hammergeld’s people.
After ten or so blocks of small, tightly packed houses and shops, the buildings stopped. A sign at the end said “To Hiber and Summit.”
“In all the years the dwarves have hated this creature Hiber,” Coral said, “they couldn’t find a way to get rid of him?”
“I guess not,” Daniel said. “Which makes me wonder how we’d possibly do it. But we have to try, right?”
“You said there are 100 gold bars in it for us?” Sybil said.
“If we succeed,” Daniel said. “Dorbly,” he said, “this is the end of the line. You need to stay here.”
The little dwarf looked up at Coral. “Stay,” she said. She leaned over and patted him on his bald head, then pointed him back toward the camp. He jogged away without protest.
Climbing the mountain’s path got more difficult as the air got thinner, but they pressed on. Another stone arch sat in the distance, the entrance to some kind of cave. “That must be it,” Daniel said.
As they approached the arch, the lunacy of this quest started to set in. They didn’t know anything about this monster other than that the dwarves hated it. The Mayor hadn’t given them any special insight. Dwarves didn’t seem t
o like humans, ogres, or elves, which made Daniel wonder if this was a setup.
If it were, it was especially frustrating that Daniel still bore a Dishonor debuff. How long would that last?
“Everyone stay en garde,” he whispered, “and quiet. If anyone says retreat, we get out as fast as we can without leaving anyone behind. Got it?”
Silent nods indicated assent. They took a few steps into the cave and stopped.
There was no need to track down the monster, no worry about delving into a deep dark cavern from which they couldn’t easily escape. The cave was shallow, and mostly filled by a giant, terrifying beast.