Healers Suck!

by Charles Andrews

  "This is all in your head," she said. "And you're not going crazy. At least no more so than any of the other meat bags who play this game!"

  I licked my lips. If she was going to be in my heads up display then I could see this game getting very distracting very fast. I'd heard of ancient malware that featured women dancing around on computer screens, usually a vector for their computer to get infected with all sorts of wonderful viruses that came out of the former Soviet Union and environs all around, and I found myself worrying that I'd somehow inadvertently done something similar, only with my brain being on the line rather than my computer.

  As far as I knew there wasn't any antivirus software that could be used to rid my brain of a program that didn't want to go. It suddenly occurred to me that computer systems that could tap directly into someone’s brain meant there was the potential for some dangerous new developments now that software had the potential to literally hijack that brain.

  The sorceress shook her head and laughed.

  "Nothing like that," she said. "Consider me your interface with the game. I'm a lot more pleasing than reading off some tooltips, right?"

  She thrust her ass out and her chest forward. Her lips took on a pout. It was a little weird watching her floating in the middle of the air like that, but whatever. She was right. It was a nice view.

  "I thought you'd think something like that," she said with a wink.

  I blushed as I realized that yeah. This was an artificial intelligence that not only knew how to work it, but she also totally knew everything I was thinking about her as she worked it. Which was an odd situation considering I couldn’t do the same with her.

  Not that I was sure I’d even be able to understand what she was thinking if I could tap into it. It’s not like I had any clue how to read machine language or binary or whatever the fuck it was they used to string her brain together and make her into something that looked and breathed and talked like a real woman.

  Well, almost like a real woman. I’d known some ladies who liked to show off like she did in private, but the whole hypersexualized thing she had going for her wasn’t like any girl I’d known on the flatland. She definitely wasn’t like any of the girls in the elevator.

  "So do you do this for all the guys, or am I just lucky?"

  She shrugged. "Do you really want to know the nitty-gritty of what's going on?"

  "Actually, yes," I said. "Sort of. If it's not a problem."

  She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Here I am putting on a show for you and introducing you to the greatest videogame ever created and all you care about is how the sausage is made? Then again I suppose the fact that you’re that kind of person is why I was intrigued in the first place.”

  I arched an eyebrow. She was intrigued? I wondered if this was something that happened to everyone who played the game, or if I'd somehow attracted the interest of one of the artificial intelligences that inhabited this game world and pulled her out of her usual haunts. Though even as I thought it that seemed impossible.

  Surely whatever was happening here was something that happened to everyone, right? Wasn’t that the whole point of massive online games? Everyone gets the same experience while the game world makes them feel like they’re special despite the fact that they’re generic fantasy hero number 8472 to go on a “unique” world saving quest that day alone?

  "The game generates a scenario for everyone in character creation," she said. "But the AI who assists that player with character creation has the option of following a player into the game world if they want. Though it doesn't happen with everybody."

  I frowned. That was sort of an answer, but at the same time not really.

  "So what about everyone else who joins the game and is capable of playing a magic class? How do they figure stuff out if you’re not around to help?”

  She shrugged. “Another AI will be generated for them. And that AI will get to decide whether they want to join those new players on their journey or not. The circle of electronic life continues."

  "Right," I said. "So where do we go from here?"

  Suddenly my artificial intelligence, I realized I hadn't even caught her name, was standing right in front of me in full size glory. The fact that she was still in the same revealing outfit she’d been wearing before wasn’t helping things, and the fact that she was pressing that same outfit against my body really wasn’t helping things.

  She moved her hand around to my backside and gave my butt a squeeze. Which had the added benefit of pulling me against her down below, which in turn meant something very hard was pressing up against her. Her eyes went wide as though she was surprised, though I couldn't imagine why she’d be surprised. With what she was doing to me that was a natural reaction.

  "Oh my," she said. "You certainly are happy to see me, aren't you?"

  "A dead man would be happy to see you," I said.

  She winked. "There are some parts of this world where the undead run rampant where you might get to see something like that if you play your cards right."

  I rolled my eyes. Talk about taking me out of the moment. That was about the least sexy thing I could imagine, but then again her body pressed against mine was enough to counteract that mental image. Mostly. Sort of.

  My hand moved around to her backside, unbidden. I figured if she was going to do it to me then I’d enjoy a little bit of fun myself, but something stopped me.

  I thought about everything she’d said during character creation. Things that made it seem like she wasn't in the mood for a player who got too handsy. Hell, I had the distinct feeling that part of the reason why she was here with me right now was because I hadn't gotten handsy with her when I had the opportunity, and so I stopped.

  She cocked her head to the side, and then smiled. I got the feeling I'd just passed a test. Though it was a difficult test considering the way her hand moved down and pressed against my cock. It was pure pleasure, and I found myself wondering if I could get off in the game.

  It was something I wouldn't mind discovering with her, but I used an almost monumental strength of will to stop myself from doing anything too stupid.

  "Good boy," she said, and then she was back to her old self. Which is to say she was only a few inches high hovering in front of me with a smirk that said she’d enjoyed that.

  I really wished I could figure out whether she’d enjoyed that because she was interested in yours truly or if it was simply that she’d enjoyed teasing me. I figured it also said something about how out of practice I was with the ladies that I was having trouble figuring out how to interact with a sexy AI that seemed into me.

  “Y’know it occurs to me that I don't even know your name," I said, feeling ridiculous even as I said it, but reaching for any change of subject.

  "You can call me Treanna,” she said.

  "Treanna,” I said, rolling the name around in my head and pushing down on the pained memories that came up when I thought of that name. "That's a pretty name."

  "It should be," she said. "After all, I plucked it out of your head!"

  I frowned. Treanna had also been the name of a girl I dated on the flatland. Before I was sent off to the elevator. I’d broken up with her because I thought it was the right thing to do, which it probably was, but it wasn’t all that pleasant having a reminder of that even if it was a name I liked.

  "Right. That's still going to take some getting used to,” I said. “And I’d appreciate it in the future if you ran it by me before you hit me with things that dredge up potentially painful memories.”

  “Got it,” she said. “Don't feel too bad. The whole world is getting used to a game that can rummage around in their heads right now. You're in the opening chapters of a new cyberpunk epic for humanity! Isn't it awesome?"

  "Something like that," I muttered, not sure how I felt about having an AI being able to rummage around in my head, but knowing that ultimately humanity was probably going to do the same thing we always did when there were tech related privacy v
iolations that had to happen to make digital life more convenient: deal with it and try not to think about the implications too often.

  "Right," I said. "So what do we do now?"

  She shrugged. "It's your game. You do what you want to do, but if it were me the first order of business would be to find a quest hub or something to get a feel for the game.”

  "Right," I said. "A quest hub. Well let's get to it then."

  I looked around the clearing, and then I saw what I was looking for. Smoke rising off in the distance, and conveniently enough there was a path leading out of the clearing towards that smoke.

  Obviously whoever designed this starting area wanted me to head towards that probable town in the distance, so I figured I’d oblige them.

  “Let's go find adventure," I said with a grin.

  6

  Boar Ass

  "This isn't what I was talking about when I said we should find some adventure!" I said.

  Something poked me in the ass. Not something I'd ever been into, thank you very much, and it really wasn't pleasant when it came from a monstrously mutated boar creature that was squealing as it chased after me and did its best to kill my ass.

  "Well I'm sorry," Treanna said, a touch of exasperation coming to her voice. "But I thought I made it clear when I signed you up for this that your class wasn't going to have any offensive abilities!"

  Another poke at my ass. A health bar flashed in front of me showing I'd lost five hit points. Which probably wouldn't have been a big deal, except for the fact that I only had about a hundred hit points to begin with, and that thing had already poked me in the ass a few times.

  My health bar was in the yellow, about at the halfway point. You do the math, but that was really uncomfortable, and getting poked repeatedly in the ass was not my idea of a good time. Even if I didn't judge anyone who enjoyed that sort of thing.

  "How was I supposed to know that would include not being able to kill something from a starter zone?" I yelped as I got hit yet again. “Everyone is supposed to be able to kill stuff in the starter zone! That’s why they call it a starter zone!”

  "Well I'm sorry!" she said. "You have ways of taking care of these things though!"

  "Excuse me if I'm a little too busy to…"

  Then I realized what she was getting at. This was a game, after all, which meant I had abilities. If I wanted to escape from this boar motherfucker then I needed to figure out a way to use those abilities, even if I couldn’t actually fight the damn thing!

  I thought of my abilities and a toolbar appeared in front of me. Translucent so I could still see where I was going, which was a good thing. The last thing I wanted was to run headfirst into a tree or something and knock myself out while a starter zone boar had its way with my character.

  Chances were if something like that happened I wasn’t going to wake up.

  "Okay," I said, yelping again as my health went down to 45% and I was gouged in the ass once more, which caused me to add a little bit of speed. "Time to see what the hell I've got on this thing."

  I scanned my options. There was an attack ability, but it involved using a paltry little onehanded warhammer. I didn't even have a weapon specialization. The thing could only do between 1 to 5 points of damage per second, which wasn't a hell of a lot.

  The boar behind me had at least 200 hit points, twice what I had, and I could look at that math and figure out things weren’t going to end well for me. There was no way that dinky little warhammer was going to be able to reduce that boar’s HP before it straight up murdered me.

  So I looked to the magical spells I had on offer since clearly physical abilities weren’t going to do it. There were a few available, but none of them looked particularly useful to my current situation. I had a heal, as well as a heal over time. The heal might be useful for prolonging my torment, at least. The only problem was…

  "This is going to hurt," I said through gritted teeth.

  “You're going to get hurt no matter what," she said. "So you might as well do what you need to do to stay alive, right?"

  "If you're trying to be helpful it's not working," I said.

  I stopped. Started casting the heal. Stopping unfortunately had the added effect of causing the boar behind me to slam into me and knock me to the ground, but at least the heal kept right on going. It looked like Crystalia operated on the principle of attacks merely delaying spellcasting rather than interrupting it entirely.

  The bar moved across the screen telling me how long it would be until the spell went off, and I watched as my hit points went down even faster thanks to the boar having easier access.

  "Great!" I shouted my frustration at the world. "You're saying this thing hits for more when it's on top of me?”

  "I think you of all people could appreciate how good things can get when someone else is on top!" Treanna said.

  I rolled my eyes. Here I was about to get killed by a boar savaging me while there was a smartass AI hovering to the side looking hot as ever and making smartass comments that did absolutely nothing to save me from my impending doom.

  Just fucking great.

  The health bar went down every time the boar hit me, and then continued its slow march across the screen. This was going to be close. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. Waited for the inevitable and wondered what it would feel like going through the death animation in a game that was attached to my brain.

  I’d heard rumors that the people who developed Crystalia had actually hooked up their device to people who were on the verge of death so they could properly simulate it. There were other people who said that was just a bullshit urban legend, but whatever. If that was the truth and they actually did something like that, well it would be freaky to go through the process of actually dying without dying.

  Warmth washed over me, and it couldn't have come a moment too soon. I looked at my hit bar and it replenished. Not all the way, but enough that I was back in business. That heal certainly took its time in coming, but once it was there I was glad for it.

  Of course there was still the minor annoyance of the boar on top of me savaging me. I also found myself in a situation where I could replenish my health bar, but the cast time took so long that there was still a very real question of whether or not I’d be able to kill this thing before I ran through all of my mana pool trying to survive. Damn it.

  "Is there anything I can use to survive?"

  Treanna crossed her arms and jutted her lip out out in a pout. "I thought you were better than this!"

  "I'm just asking for advice!"

  "I can't tell you how to play the game," Treanna said. "All I can do is tell you what you can do with the abilities you have. You haven't checked out everything yet, after all."

  I looked at the rest of my toolbar. And I saw something that was unlike anything I'd ever seen in a healer character before. Not that I'd been big on playing healer characters before. I always liked my magic users to do a little bit of damage, and so it was understandably a bit of a change to suddenly find myself as exposed as a baby.

  "Now this is more like it," I said as my eyes ran over some of the other spell options available to me.

  Psionics. She’d mentioned something about psionics earlier. The whole hybrid class thing. That meant brain stuff, and as I looked at these spells it looked like they definitely had the ability to mess with someone's mind. There was nothing offensive in here, not strictly speaking, but there was still stuff that might be useful.

  Overload: Enter your enemy's mind and blow it. Causes a cascading overload in their mind that lasts for a duration of several seconds depending on level and resists.

  Relies on: Caster’s Mental Fortitude and mana pool.

  Resist: Mental Fortutide

  Well then. It seemed like it would do something to my enemy, so I fired off that ability as I looked at the pig, and weird shit started to happen.

  The pig froze. Like one moment it was getting ready to really give me a bad fucking day, and t
he next moment it was hovering over me mid-snarl, paused in the motion of gouging me again, and boy was I glad it’d taken a pause for the cause. Those tusks really fucking hurt considering the realistic pain simulation they had in this fucking game!

  "What the…"

  I barely had a chance to get that out before there was another scream from the pig and it started to gouge me with its tusks all over again.

  “Ow! Motherfucker! What's the fucking point of that if it doesn't…"

  Right. It said it right there in the tooltip. It only lasted for a couple of seconds. I was lucky enough that the thing stopped, but my health bar was rapidly depleting again. I looked at my healing abilities and noticed that the heal over time was an instant cast. So I hit that and felt little spurts of warmth hitting me as the spell ticked away every second.

  So now we were in of the middle of a fight between whether that heal over time or the boar’s tusks were going to win in the tug-of-war over my hit point pool, and I knew which one was going to ultimately win if I didn't do something about this soon.

  "Okay," I said. "I have to think about this…"

  Only thinking was difficult with a monster attacking me. I forced myself to concentrate on my spells, and that's when I saw it. Mesmerize. I pulled up the tooltip.

  Mesmerize: Causes an enemy to fall asleep for a 5 seconds. Duration increases or decreases based on caster level and mental acuity.

  Relies on: Caster’s Mental Fortitude and mana pool.

  Resist: Mental Fortitude.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what all those things meant, clearly there were some terms I was going to have to look up to make sense of my abilities, but the practical upshot seemed to be that I could get this boar off of my ass for the moment so I figured I’d fucking take it.

  "Now that's more like it!” I said. "Mesmerize!"

  The spell landed, and it was almost comical the way it suddenly closed its eyes in the middle of yet another attack and fell over, snoring loudly.