“It’s not like I have much of a choice, is it?” I scoffed, “You guys could’ve led with that, but instead you decided you’d, what? Threaten me and hope for the best?”
“That ‘bomb’ wasn’t for you,” Larry said as he worked on one of the computers besides Ferra, “that was set-dressing for if the sonic blast didn’t manage to hit everyone.”
“Really?” I asked with a half-smile, “Because Ferra there seemed pretty freakin’ gung-ho about wanting to ‘blow us all to Hell’.”
“Yeah, well, she’s always had a bit of a flair for the dramatic.” Larry chuckled, “Anyway, what matters now is whether or not you decide to help us.”
“Exactly,” Bishop said, apparently jumping back in before he could get boxed out of the conversation again, “and it really does have to be your choice.”
“Why?” Griegs scoffed, “Why not just compel her to do what you want? It’s not like you haven’t got the tools.”
I didn’t really appreciate Griegs suggesting that they be more forceful with my quasi-abduction, but at the same time I understood what he was doing. He wanted to ascertain just how far Bishop and co were willing to go in order to get what they wanted, and if that meant putting me under duress.
“These bullets aren’t meant for her,” Bishop shot back, “they’re meant for the MPs if they decide to start firing at us.”
“All about that defence, am I right?” Griegs mocked, “I just don’t understand why she needs to be here, you guys already have enough tech in this rolling shit-magnet to run a hundred different players without any sort of latency issues.”
“Because everyone’s looking at her account.” Ferra replied, “We’ve been doing our best to steer traffic away from her, but the fact of the matter is Armelia is one of those accounts that everyone’s going to notice if it gets banned, crashed, or otherwise removed from Tarthirious.”
“That and we’re all on a watchlist.” Larry interjected, “While Kylia has the public eye, we have the government watching out for any sign of us hitting the web.”
“You seem like smart enough people,” Griegs said like it was an insult, “why not just use a VPN?”
“Oh, why don’t we just use a VPN?” Ferra replied with a voice like she had some kind of acquired brain injury, “Why, we haven’t thought of that! We shou-”
“That’s enough.” Bishop sighed with a shake of his head, “Look, we need your help, and we need it now.”
“Why?” I asked, realising only then how often I found myself saying it.
“Because this is our only chance to land a decent blow,” Bishop replied seriously, “the stars have aligned, so to speak, and we need to take the advantage.”
“And… what? It just so happens that the information you need is in Tarthirious?”
And with that, I’d finally broken his calm.
“Ugh…” Bishop groaned as he rubbed his brow with his Dr Pepper, “Like I said before, it’s easier for them to keep track of the players in real-time if the information isn’t going anywhere. By keeping it all in-house there’s less of a chance of them getting caught.”
“Kylia’s right,” Griegs said before I could respond, “having it in the game just makes it possible for anyone to stumble across it.”
“Not if it just looks like another part of the game,” Ferra let out with a groan, “seriously, were you not paying any attention whatsoever? This… list, this room, it’s not some abnormal piece of code that a rogue hacker’s gonna stumble across in some lazy Sunday perusal. They’ve covered their tracks well.”
“Still though, seems a tad irresponsible for some shady government conspiracy.”
That’s when I started to realise that this wasn’t just some rage against the machine thing for Griegs, we were going after his bosses, which meant that there was probably a very high chance that he didn’t want to be told that everything he’d been doing for the past however long had been for the wrong reasons.
“What about the MPs?” I asked, “You told me they had nothing to do with all this, so why would they be attacking us?”
“Because they’re blunt instruments,” Larry replied pointedly in no small way to the silent Griegs, “guys sitting on the top of the pile say ‘fetch’, the MP dogs go runnin’. No offence.”
“Bullshit.” Griegs scoffed, “Look, I know that it’s easier for you guys to think the cards are stacked against you, but what you’re suggesting here is… is…”
“It’s complete lunacy,” Bishop finished, “I know, I’d think that if I were in your shoes. But look at me, I am living proof that what we’re talking about is true. Now, can we please get a move on? I know it must just sound like empty words now, but there really is a bit of a time-crunch with all this.”
Bishop was starting to sound genuinely concerned, but I hadn’t the slightest idea why. There wasn’t any sign of us being followed by MPs, and the whole ride had been smooth sailing for the most part.
“We’re maybe fifteen minutes out from HQ,” Paul announced through the bus PA system, “has she logged in yet?”
“Not yet,” Bishop called back urgently, “circle around a couple blocks.”
“I’ve been circling every block we’ve driven through, they’re gonna start noticing we’re screwing with the cameras if we’re not careful.”
“And that’s only if I can keep up…” Ferra grumbled, “Look, we’re really running out of time, are we doing this or what?”
I was still a bit hung up on the what, a touch of the why, and the how, but I figured that if I got stuck I’d be able to ask for help.
Heh, I now realise that that makes me sound like a younger sibling playing the older’s best platformer for the first time.
“Alright, I’ll do it.” I said confidently, eliciting a tired groan from Griegs.
“Fantastic,” Bishop muttered before turning around and grabbing a laptop from Larry, who’d had it under his workstation, and holding it out to me, “let’s make a difference.”
Armelia: Chapter 37
After making sure I was good and comfortable with a surprisingly good set of headphones in this foldout desk-chair thing next to Ferra, I’d plugged Armelia in, logged in, and gotten to work.
It was strange returning to Tarthirious, especially when the real world had just decided to go ahead and get all interesting, but I was also more than happy to start detaching myself from reality again.
“Can you hear me?” Bishop’s disembodied voice asked as I awoke in some barren field next to a rather large cliff face that blocked the sunlight from me.
“Loud and clear.” I replied, remembering that I’d recently died only when I saw my naked body, “You couldn’t have ported my gear over?”
“Not without rousing more attention than we want,” Bishop said, sounding more than a little annoyed that I seemed more interested in superfluous crap than completing his mission, “now, you’re looking for a section on that cliff with a sigil on it. Should look like a piglet.”
“A piglet sigil?” I scoffed as I saw Shadow-Stal galloping over towards me, “Tell me again how no one’s stumbled across this?”
“Trust me, when you see it, you’ll know why no one has.” Bishop replied, sounding somewhat amused with himself, “You’re going to want to jump up on your horse, it’s about a five-minute ride along the cliff from where you are.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice.” I said before climbing up on Shadow-Stal who, weirdly, seemed really happy to see me, “Where’s Fluffy?”
“It looks like your snake went into dormancy following your death.”
I went to tell Bishop that I wasn’t talking to him, but then stopped when I realised just how crazy that would make me look.
Summoned Miss Fluffy-Scaleskin.
“What was the purpose of that?” Bishop asked as Fluffy plopped down on a patch of dead grass I started galloping in the direction he’d told me to go.
“No reason, just like her company.”
“Fair
enough.”
From there things stayed silent for a while, which was actually surprisingly hard considering I had become accustomed to having little, private chats with Shadow-Stal on rides that lasted more than a minute, but I didn’t have to deal with the difficulty for long.
“Stop.” Bishop ordered coolly, “You’re there.”
Not wanting to muck about with getting Shadow-Stal close to the wall, I dismounted and started looking for the sigil Bishop had told me about.
“Where is it?” I asked as I scanned the wall for any sign of the piglet, “I’ve looked all over this thing and I’m not seeing anything close to a pig.”
“What did I tell you?” Bishop replied with a voice that showed he was clearly proud of himself, “Thing’s hard to find. You’re going to have to crouch, take two steps right, then walk right at the wall.”
After deciding to not mock the fact that he’d wasted precious time, I did what I was told, stopping when I reach the wall, “Now what?”
“Don’t stop, keep walking.”
“What, am I gonna platform 93/4 this bitch?”
“Just do it.”
I wanted to take another jab, but stopped and again did as I was told, discovering something that was pretty freaking rare in Tarthirious.
“Am I clipping through the wall?” I asked as I ploughed my body into the cliff face, revealing the hollow 3D object that was the massive rock’s interior.
“That you are,” Bishop replied, “look down, you should see the sigil on the ground. Well, where the ground should be.”
“Found it,” I said as I looked down and saw the piglet, “what should I do now.”
“Just keep walking until you see a prompt.”
It seemed like a futile task, but after a few seconds I finally saw a little interaction prompt that was almost invisible against the blue background of the unoccupied space.
Piggy-Bank Lock 1 Activated.
Enter Code:
“It’s telling me to enter a code,” I said after taking the risk and taking my finger off the W key, “what’s the code.”
“Hold on,” Bishop said after Ferra had muttered something I couldn’t hear over the headphones, “three, three, two, seven, four, four, one, nine, zero.”
Piggy-Bank Password… Accepted.
Welcome.
“Okay, so this is when you’re really going to pick up the pace.” Bishop said as the rocks in front of me parted and revealed a dark corridor that Fluffy immediately slithered into, “Run until you hit a wall, then stop. Larry, gimme a sitrep on the MPs ac-”
Bishop’s voice disappeared from my ears before he could finish his sentence, undoubtedly because he’d deactivated his microphone.
It’s funny that, I was sitting not three feet from him, yet I couldn’t hear him without his say-so.
“Couldn’t hear a gunfight with these things,” I chuckled as I started running into the corridor, not taking the regard for safety that I normally had, “now, let’s see where this ends.”
It took me at least a full minute of running to reach the end of the corridor, which got cramped mighty quickly after Shadow-Stal and Fluffy decided that they both wanted to stand directly beside me.
“Bishop?” I asked hopefully as I stood in front of the blank wall, “Bishop, are you there?”
I hadn’t heard from anyone in the time I’d been running, and I’d actually started to get somewhat concerned, especially when I’d been splashed with some Dr Pepper.
That being said, I hadn’t taken my eyes off my screen for a moment, and it was only when unfamiliar light started to glare against my screen that I noticed something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Kylia: Chapter 9
As I pulled my headphones down over my neck, the sounds of gunfire greeted me, and I started looking around desperately, only to discover that the black glass, which I’m sure was once bulletproof, had been shattered and cracked to Hell.
I shuffled out of my chair in an attempt to get out of the firing line and sat on the wet and sticky ground beneath my desk, “What’s going on!?” I called over to Griegs, who’d apparently been entrusted with his gun and one of the SMGs.
“MPs found us!” he shouted back from where he sat crouched down beside me, before popping back up and firing out through the broken window.
“Here!” Bishop yelled from somewhere right as a hefty black vest hit me in the face, “Put it on!”
It took me a second to figure out that it was bulletproof and not just some weird fashion thing, but I put it on straight away regardless, “Are we okay!?”
“As long as I can keep the phones jammed, yeah.” Ferra groaned, prompting me to look over to her and see that she was still sitting at her computer, but had taken to clutching her stomach with one of her hands while the other typed frantically, “Anyone got anything to drink!?”
“I’ve got some rubbing alcohol!” Larry joked from the back of the bus, “You could mix it with some of that Dr Pepper of yours!”
“Eh, ‘fraid MPs went ahead and started executing the good Doctors,” Ferra chuckled past a seethe of pain, “how’s the situation back there?”
“So-so,” Larry laughed, “but it could be a whole lot-”
Larry didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence, a burst of gunfire ringing through the back of the bus and sending a splatter of red so far that some of it landed on Griegs.
Everyone fell quiet for a few seconds after that, until Ferra decided to kick me in the leg and growl “Get in there and keep working.”
I was still in shock, but that quickly waned as I remembered my duty, put the headphones back on, picked up the laptop, and went back to work.
Armelia: Chapter 38
I still wasn’t sure what to do, but I didn’t think that Bishop would be all that receptive to my requests for a walkthrough.
And then it hit me.
Without wasting another second, I walked through the wall and, to my surprise, discovered another, piglet-shaped sigil.
“There’s another sigil!” I shouted before pressing the sigil, “What’s the code?”
Piggy-Bank Lock 2 Activated.
Enter Code:
Ferra, with as much strength as she could muster, lifted my headphones, unleashing a barrage of gunfire to sound in my ears, and muttered “Alpha, one, three, tango, tango, four, seven.”
Piggy-Bank Password… Accepted.
Welcome.
“Thank you,” I replied, doing my best to sound sympathetic as I caught a glimpse of Ferra’s bloody stomach, “where to from here?”
“Avoid the blades and you’ll be fine.” Ferra struggled out before pushing my headphones back over my ears.
“Blades?” I asked as the wall in front of me lifted up, “What… oh, those blades.”
Armelia: Chapter 39
“If Indy can do it, so can you.” I muttered to myself as quietly as I possibly could, ignoring the sharp turns and hard braking Paul was pulling off as we struggled to avoid the bullets of the MPs.
Dying wasn’t an option, I thought anyway, but as I watched the disk-shaped blades slide in and out of the walls of the tunnel that clearly turned and stopped in a dozen different places I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit concerned.
And then what felt like a tiny but incredibly strong punch in my back spurred me forward, and I started rolling and running, leaving the entirely too terrified Fluffy and Shadow-Stal behind.
“Shit!” I exclaimed as I barely managed to jump over one of the blades that had just popped out.
“Be careful,” Bishop said as calmly as he could through my headphones, “you only get one shot at this.”
“Really?” I asked, bounding off one of the corners and going left down the next section of the tunnel, “Because I thought that the super-secret government ‘Piggy-Bank’ would be one of those things that you get as many cracks at as you like.”
“Smart arse.” Bishop coughed back before letting his microphone go dead
and me go back to work avoiding the spinning blades of death.
“That’s a girl,” I murmured to myself as I rolled under a blade and neared the end of what I hoped was the section, “one more blade and you’r-”
I really wish that Bishop had warned me about the drop-off.
Armelia: Chapter 40
After letting out a little yelp following my painless tumble onto what I can only assume was a pile of moss, I got up and saw that I was in some underground cavern, complete with a massive lake.
“Uh…” I droned, blocking out the pain in my back as best as I could, “Bishop? Where do I go from here?”
“Swim.” came his quick, if not slightly pained reply, “Swim straight to the bottom. It’s going to look like you’re drowning, but I assure you’re not.”
“Is there gonna be another code?” I asked, trying my best not to sound like I was preparing for Bishop to meet his end before I reached the bottom.
There was a few seconds of silence, followed by a wet cough, “No more codes,” Bishop spluttered out as I was hit with another bullet, which seemed to have significantly more force behind it than the last, “you get to the bottom that’s it. Find the sigil, it should be glowing, then get to the room, I… I’ll get the rest set up for broadcast.”
I didn’t wait around another second before diving into the underground lake and swimming downward as fast as my arms and legs would allow me.
It took me a full three minutes to reach the bottom, during which time I panicked about fifty times about a drowning that clearly wasn’t going to happen, then another thirty seconds to find the final Piggy-Bank sigil.
“You ready?” I asked hopefully.
No response.
“Bishop, are you ready?”
Kylia: Chapter 10
I’d barely heard Paul yell “Hold on!” before we’d smashed through something hard at high speed, the only reason I wasn’t thrown around like a bloody ragdoll being that Bishop had dived on me at the last second, slamming the laptop shut in the process.
Legends of Tarthirious: The Complete Collection Page 67