Healers Suck!

by Charles Andrews

  And then it hit. A social link. Just one level, but it was there.

  Social link created!

  Current level: 1

  Damsel in distress. Discover more about this woman's past to advance your social link.

  Huh. It was a social link, but a different kind. It looked like a quest of some sort, but I could get behind that. I wouldn't mind getting behind this girl as well. It was the kind of thought that kept hitting me despite the fact that this was a game, but it seemed to be a game where that kind of thing was actually possible.

  I thought things were going pretty well, and then something hit me from behind and I stumbled forward into the girl and we both went down to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Shit.

  10

  Old Enemy

  Well now. This was awkward. I was on top of this pretty NPC girl, and I was pretty sure she could feel exactly how interested I was.

  It was pressing into her leg, and from the way she smiled ever so slightly, looking gorgeous even on the packed dirt road, she was interested.

  Then she looked over my shoulders and her eyes went wide.

  I rolled around, wondering what the hell had just happened. Maybe someone had bumped into me, not realizing where they were going, but when I looked up I saw someone staring down at me with cruel blue eyes and a mop of dark hair.

  I knew in an instant that I was looking up at Tommy.

  Like me it looked like he'd gone with something that was a sort of idealized self image without actually making an exact copy of himself. But there was no missing that nasty smile.

  It looked like he had a few levels on me. He was only about level 15, so he hadn't gotten very far in the game considering the level cap was 100, but if everything I’d read on various forums was correct then 15 was about as far as anyone had gotten.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked, recognition plain on his face.

  I scrambled to my feet. Balled my fists. If this was the real world then I probably wouldn't bother to do anything, but here…

  "What the fuck is your problem?" I asked.

  There was a crowd gathering around us. Most of them were player characters. I wondered how many of those player characters were also from the Academy. If that asshole Tommy was here then there was a good chance he’d pulled some of his asshole friends along with. Which meant they’d all know who I was soon enough.

  So much for anonymity.

  I felt the same shame that had become a part of my life ever since I went to the Academy coming back with a vengeance. I’d thought I might be able to avoid it for a little while when I’d stepped into the game, but clearly that wasn’t happening.

  I hated that the shame was coming back. I hated that I was being forced to live the same undeserved shame here in this wonderful game world that I was forced to live out in the real world, and my fists were turning white as I thought of what I could do to make sure that didn’t happen to me here.

  Tommy was in armor of some sort. Gleaming metal. Which meant if I tried to punch anywhere but his face where he didn't have a helmet on it was going to be a bad time. Then again considering how useless I was in combat right now any punch would result in a bad time.

  He looked me up and down, and the disdain was obvious.

  "What are you even supposed to be?" he sneered.

  I felt something trickling down my face and I reached up and wiped at it. Looked down to see blood. Damn it. The asshole had given me a fucking bloody nose! Talk about the kind of realism I really could’ve done without.

  The pain followed the realization that I’d taken damage. It was a dull throbbing that was unpleasantly realistic. I hit myself with a quick heal over time. Warmth filled me and the damage was gone. Tommy’s eyes went wide, and he threw his head back and started to laugh.

  "A Healer?" he said. "You decided to be a Healer? The most useless class in the game?"

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  He shoved me again. I took a couple of steps back, but this time I was prepared so his shove didn't knock me on my ass.

  "You’re so fucking pathetic,” he said. "You chose a class that has no way to defend itself! I’d expect something like that from a loser like you! You’re never gonna even make it past the entrance to a Crystal Cave with a useless class like that!”

  “It’s not like you’ve gotten very far past the entrance yourself,” a pretty girl that I was pretty sure was Madison said. She had all the same dangerous curves, but they seemed more pronounced in the game than in the real world.

  Weird. I couldn’t imagine a girl like Madison having any sort of body issues or thinking she needed to perfect anything. I guess just about everyone had their demons, but it was odd seeing that from her. Assuming that was Madison.

  “Shut up,” Tommy barked.

  “You shut up,” maybe Madison shot back at him.

  Clearly all wasn’t well between the two of them if they were sniping at each other in the game like this. I figured their argument might be enough to allow me to sneak away, then my NPC companion chimed in.

  "That's not true!" the pretty NPC said.

  I could still sense the girl’s feelings. A little clearer than before, even, which I guess made sense considering we had that Social Link going for us now. She was convinced I was a hero just as much as Tommy.

  Of course she’d think that. She had no idea about how player characters worked or interacted. No idea that Tommy was a higher level than me and could probably wipe the floor with me if he wanted to by sheer virtue of our level difference, never mind that I was also in a class that was so ineffective in combat that I wouldn’t be able to do anything to defend myself but stun, mez, and run. That puny hammer by my side sure wasn't going to do anything but maybe make a couple of dents in his armor before he killed me.

  “Oh this is funny," Tommy said. "Does your pet here do your talking for you? You have to have NPCs do your fighting for you? Pathetic."

  There were more laughs all around.

  “Are you going to let him talk to you like that?” Treanna asked. “I can see you’ve had issues with this asshole, but this isn’t the real world you know.”

  She sounded almost disappointed. Like maybe she was starting to rethink her choice to select me, which filled me with the dread of her leaving. She might’ve been a sarcastic pain in the ass the entire time we’d known each other, all of one hour, but she was my sarcastic pain in the ass damn it.

  I looked around. Wondered if this was actually happening. It filled me with a rage that this asshole was here to ruin my game experience as well as my real world experience, and years of rage finally came bubbling to the surface.

  "Fuck off Tommy," I said.

  That stopped the laughter. Tommy turned from Madison back to me, and the rage there was clear. Madison, for her part, looked like she was trying her best not to laugh. When Tommy spoke it was in a low voice that was probably supposed to sound threatening or something.

  "The name is Tomas," he said. "Shining warrior and beacon of virtue, first to conquer the Crystal Cave and don't you forget it!"

  Madison rolled her eyes again and she muttered something that sounded like he hadn’t conquered the Crystal Cave. Whatever the fuck that was even supposed to be. I hadn’t seen it mentioned on any of the forums.

  Madison’s muttering only seemed to enrage him more. His finger poked my chest and I stumbled back again. That hurt, but then the heal over time washed over me and cured the damage. Tommy frowned. Clearly he didn't care for me having something that could undo whatever damage he was doing to me even as he did it.

  "Pathetic," he said, his hand darting out.

  I thought he might be reaching for me again to do some damage, but his hand closed around my NPC companion’s arm. Her eyes went wide as he pulled her against him. She looked up and there was a mixture of fear and…

  Interest? It made no sense, but I sensed interest from her. Assuming what I was feeling from her wa
s actually what she was thinking and not just me projecting whatever was going on in my head onto her.

  A flash of jealousy surged through me. She'd been interested in me, damn it, and now he was moving in? The motherfucker. It was bad enough that he made me miserable in the real world, but now he was making me miserable in the game world too? Taking something that had a chance at making me happy and stealing it from me?

  Didn’t this prick already have enough?

  "Maybe you’d be happier with me darling," he said, looking down at her, though his eyes darted to Madison as he said it which made me think the display was as much for her as it was for me. From the way she glowered at him it was working.

  "You're hurting me," the NPC said through gritted teeth.

  "So?" he said. "You're just an NPC in a game. Why the fuck should I care what you think?"

  His mouth descended on hers for a kiss. And there was something there. A flash of revulsion coupled with desire. Like she was actually enjoying this on some level even if she didn’t particularly care for how he was going about seducing her.

  But the fact remained that he was forcing himself on her because she was an NPC, and that wasn't cool.

  "Fuck you, asshole!" I shouted.

  Tommy, Tomas, broke the kiss. Madison was glaring daggers at him now, but he didn’t seem to care. He shoved the NPC girl away. She stumbled back, and looked between the two of us. That sense I got from her that I was a conquering hero was gone, and that annoyed me even more.

  "Are you going to do something?" she asked.

  "Yeah?" Tommy said, his sneer obvious. "What the fuck are you going to do?"

  "You fucking asshole!" I screamed, and I hit the only ability I could think of. Overload. My Psionic stun.

  The reaction on a player character was interesting, to say the least. Tommy put his hands up to his head. He started to shake as he looked at me.

  “What the fuck are you…"

  It was as though I was pushing against a barrier. Which I guess made sense. He was a much higher level than I was, which meant it was going to be much harder for me to get that stun off. Clearly he some Mental Fortitude that was allowing him to resist, but I was fueled by pure rage as I pushed against that barrier.

  I pushed that rage into casting the stun, and he let out a scream that carried across the entire town.

  It was unearthly. The kind of painful wail you’d expect from someone was about to die and not someone getting hit with a stun. Then again, maybe it was the first time he'd been hit with a crowd control spell. If this was some special set of abilities Treanna had gifted me then there was a chance it wasn’t something that was present in the sort of lower level creatures Tommy had gone up against on his way to level 15.

  I felt the barrier break as I pushed through, and he sank to his knees as his eyes went blank.

  I didn't wait around to see how long it would take him to recover. No, the moment he was out of commission I grabbed the NPC girl’s arm and pulled her away. We broke into a dead run for the temple.

  I wasn't sure what I was expecting there, but it seemed as safe a spot as any. Though I wasn’t sure how safe that would be considering the guards hadn’t done a damn thing to protect me from Tommy when he was pulling his asshole routine back there.

  I heard screams behind me as Tommy woke up from the stun, followed by concerned buzzing from the crowd all around him. Probably wondering what the hell I'd done. I sensed a mass of confusion coming from that direction, but there were so many mental voices going off back there that I couldn’t separate one from another.

  We reached the temple and I finally stopped to try and catch my breath. I looked at the girl and waited to see if there was any reaction from her. She looked at me, and then back to the direction we'd come from. I didn't need that strange empath ability to realize I'd done something to terrify her.

  "What did you…"

  She shut her mouth. Shook her head. And then something appeared in front of me that made my heart sink.

  Social link broken!

  "Son of a bitch," I said.

  "You’re surprised?" Treanna asked.

  "I guess I've never played a game where one of those could be broken after you got it," I said.

  "Welcome to the brave new world of Crystalia,” she said with a wink.

  "I'm sorry," the NPC said. “But I have to go.”

  "Whatever," I said. "Thanks for showing me to this place at least."

  She stared at me. Opened her mouth as though she wanted to say something, and then turned, but not before I thought of something else.

  "You never did tell me what the bad times were," I said.

  "And I don't want to," she said. "Not with you being… Whatever you are."

  She turned and ran, and she looked like she was running from a monster and not from a player. She was gone, but there was a small glow in the bottom corner of my screen. I pulled it up with a thought and saw that a quest had appeared in a quest log I didn’t even know was there until it started pulsing at me.

  The Bad Times.

  Something is going on in the forest around the city. Ask around to discover more information.

  Well then. I'd lost a social link, and the interesting companionship that young lady was providing, but at least I had something for my trouble. I sighed and turned to enter the temple.

  Maybe I could find some answers in there.

  11

  Trainer

  I stepped into the temple and found myself in a dark environment that was nothing at all like some of the churches I'd known back on the flatland. The churches down there always had a dusty smell to them. As though the weight of centuries was weighing down on them.

  It was probably helped by the fact that there weren’t all that many believers left these days on the flatland, outside of the occasional fundamentalist sect, which meant no one to kick up the dust in those churches.

  This temple had the look of a place that was being used. Or at the very least it had the look of a place that had been cared for.

  I ran my hand along a polished wood railing that led down a narrow hall into a wider room. Maybe it was the sanctuary or something? Assuming the Crystalia people designed their game temples to look like the churches and temples in the real world.

  Which seemed likely since whoever made this thing probably cribbed from the real world in their designs.

  The place seemed mostly empty. There was a slight whisper, as though there were people holding conversations off in of the distance, but I ignored those voices. There wasn't anyone immediately obvious, so I assumed that was just background noise pumped into the game to make the place seem more populated and interesting.

  "Hello?" I called out.

  I found myself wondering if this place could provide me the protection I needed should Tommy, Tomas, come looking for me.

  "Is there anybody in here?"

  Again there was no response. I walked forward. There was an altar at the front of the place, but it looked more like the sort of table where somebody might work up magic spells than it resembled an altar to any particular deity. I had no idea if there were even gods in this game, but that would make for an interesting wrinkle.

  I could imagine some of those more fundamentalist sects down on the flatland, because of course there were always fundamentalist sects on the flatland talking about how we needed to throw off the shackles of the evils brought down from the elevator, getting good and pissed off about that sort of thing. Then again I’d been through the history books in the elevator, the real history books and not the sanitized crap they taught on the flatland to keep the population in line, and it seemed like there was always some fundamentalist sect or another out there railing against modern technology.

  Whether that modern technology was steam engines, factories, the atom bomb, or the invention of the Internet. There was always some luddite portion of the population who wanted to turn back the clock and drag the rest of civilization with them.

 
"Great," I muttered, looking around the empty temple. "I need help and…"

  “Can I help you?"

  I didn't jump, but just barely. There was something about that voice that was a caress across my mind, and I think that more than anything kept me from leaping through the air like a fucking idiot.

  I also sensed something that came through all the whispering going on in the background. Interest. As though the person attached to that voice was was intrigued. I had to be hearing her thoughts. That the voice belonged to a woman there was no doubt. I was hardly surprised at this point. It seemed that I was running into a lot of women these days.

  Not that I was complaining considering my only interaction with a guy, Tommy a.k.a. Tomas, had been less than ideal.

  I wheeled around. Looked the woman up and down. She wore robes that were positively conservative compared to most of the outfits I'd seen since coming into the game, but I could still see the hint of some very dangerous curves under that robe.

  I licked my lips as I looked her over. She wore form fitting robes that made it clear she was a member of some holy order or another, but she also had the kind of look that said she could do some damage if she wanted to. That she knew a few things she wouldn’t mind teaching any young man who was interested in learning.

  Not that I was expecting that sort of thing from a woman who was probably a devout member of some celibate order within the game. It was a damn shame if she was a member of some celibate order or another, but it was also the kind of lazy copy and paste from real world history I’d expect from someone trying to design a game scenario on a deadline.

  Although the way she looked me up and down made me think she might be less than celibate. Damn was that intense. That was the kind of eye fucking that made me want to have a cigarette.

  Figuratively speaking. I’d literally never touched the things in my life and wasn’t interested in voluntarily breathing carcinogens thank you very much.