by M B Reid
“I dunno. Jira?”
The little sprite materialised in an instant.
“Why is my exhaustion score greyed out?” I asked as she turned to face me.
“Undead characters don’t suffer from exhaustion. All other characters need to sleep regularly to restore their exhaustion. Otherwise they start to suffer skill penalties.”
“What about hunger?” Logan asked her
“Undead still have a hunger meter, but it decreases at half the speed as the living. Any food will restore it, but cooked meals will restore it faster.” The sprite bobbed up and down, as if she was proud of herself for remembering.
“Thanks Jira” I said, dismissing her.
“Those are pretty sweet perks” Logan muttered, clacking a bony finger against his skull.
I had to agree with him. Not having to worry about keeping stores of food on hand all the time would make life a lot easier.
Hopefully someone would finish the main quest soon. Surely there were countless people hard at work towards it even now.
“Maybe we should hole up here for the night? Wait until morning before we go exploring” I suggested. The image of that murderous woman was still burned into my mind. I didn’t relish the thought of walking around out there carrying a torch - it’d draw far too much attention to me. Walking in the dark was even less appealing.
“It’s not the Hilton, but it seems comfy enough. We can come up with a plan, and wait out the night.” I said.
I tried to make it sound appealing, I really did. But I had no follow up sentence about the lakeside presence or the excellent view. It was a dungeon, dark and empty. The only plus side was that it wasn’t cold. Actually, now that I came to think of it I hadn’t really felt cold since logging into the game. Even when I’d taken my brief swim through the river, the water hadn’t felt cold. Nor had it been particularly warm. It had just been wet.
“Are you cold?”
“What? Um, no. I guess not” Logan didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
“I don’t think undead feel cold. It’s gotta be cold down here right? No light, no fires. But I don’t feel cold at all.”
“So?” Logan asked.
He had a point, I didn’t really know where I was going with this. Something in the back of my mind was niggling at me, as if this particular fact was critically important, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“I dunno. I guess it means we can sleep here just fine.” I answered, feeling a little stupid.
Logan shrugged in response.
“Well, if we’re going to rest here we should at least take a look around up top. Make sure no one is going to come storming down and catch us off guard.” I tried not to think about the kobolds we’d surprised in exactly that way.
“Maybe we can bar the door or something?” I turned to lead the way back to the entrance and then another thought hit me.
“Jira, are you here?” I asked, hoping the pixie wouldn’t make good on her angry threat to never show up again. I sighed in relief as she appeared.
“Do monsters re-spawn?” I asked, motioning toward the kobold corpses.
“Not at all.” Despite sounding cheerful, her curt response made me feel terrible.
“Jira I’m sorry for attacking you earlier. I was freaking out.” I felt like a dick apologising to a bunch of ones and zeros, but it still seemed like the right thing to do.
“Apology accepted.” She bobbed a little, returning to her usual energetic self.
“Is there anything else I can help with?” She asked, buzzing closer.
“How can we tell what time it is?”
“There’s a marker on your character sheet. Next to your exhaustion.”
I called up my character sheet, and there was indeed a small icon next to the exhaustion bar. It showed a semi circle with a sun on one side and a sliver of moon on the other. An arrow pointed more toward the moon side.
“Thanks Jira” I said, and the sprite gave a little bow before vanishing.
“I’m so sorry little pixie. I shouldn’t have been grumpy” Logan whined. If I had a beating heart I would have blushed.
“Fuck you.”
Maybe we’d be okay after all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The dead man only had a few dozen coins in his backpack. Logan appeared at the top of the stairs before I’d finished my search, and I pocketed the coins before he could see them. Obviously, I’d share with him as needed, but I liked the idea of having my own money.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the body - it was a virtual creation. But it was also a real persons corpse. I mean, when this character had died, his player had died as well. That seemed like it deserved a proper burial. On the other hand, Logan was a necromancer, and I’m sure he’d want to use the corpse for some spell or something.
“I dunno so much about this place” Logan said, and I knew he was talking about the dungeon, rather than the virtual world we were stuck in. He seemed to have accepted his new role in life - that of being a video game character - which seemed insane to me. Either that or he was so deep in denial he couldn’t talk about it. That’s kind of how I felt.
“Why’s that?”
“Well stabby lady for one. We can’t even lock the door, and there’s no other way out. If she comes back with friends we’ll be trapped.”
I looked at the empty spot in the clearing where the player had been murdered in front of me.
“I don’t think she’s got any friends. We’ll be safe for tonight at least. What abilities do you have?”
“Raise skeleton and null blast. Why’s that?”
“Do you need his, uh, body for the raise skeleton?” I asked, feeling like I was doing something taboo.
“Not normally. But I’m sure I can use it for something.” He said, as if we were talking about grabbing a hammer, and not desecrating a corpse.
“Should we take it downstairs?”
It seemed like a poor idea to leave a corpse out in the open, especially outside our new home. It would either send a strong anti-trespasser message, or get some town hero to come along and slaughter us. I wasn’t willing to risk either.
“We should take it downstairs” I rephrased.
It took several minutes for us to haul the corpse down the staircase and into the room with the kobolds. Hopefully the cold air of the dungeon would keep them from decaying too rapidly. Otherwise the whole place would stink something terrible. I silently cursed Logan again, this whole undead thing was turning into a complete disaster.
“What are we going to do tomorrow?” He asked, oblivious to my frustration.
I’d already given this some thought, so the answer came easily enough.
“We need to find more food. I’ve only got enough to last me through tomorrow, and you’re probably the same. Of all the shitty ways to die here, starving has got to be right up there.”
Logan cursed under his breath. He can’t have thought about food yet, which made me worry about what else I might have missed. Food and shelter were the first things we needed to get under control. The dungeon had its problems - the lack of a second exit being a major one - but we could reinforce the door. We were surrounded by trees after all, and I had a woodsman's axe. Without nails or anything, we’d be barricading the doorway at best, but at least it was something.
Food was the bigger problem. Without a bow I didn’t think hunting was going to be very likely. Hell, we didn’t even start with any money. Even if one of us was dumb enough to risk going into town we wouldn’t be able to buy anything. That left thievery or foraging, and for the first time I could remember I had decided not to play a sneaky thief-type character. So, foraging it was. Hopefully this undead corpse of mine would at least be resistant to poisonous berries. With the way our luck had been so far it was almost a certainty that anything we foraged would be inedible to the living.
Logan piled the kobold bedding together to make a human-sized bed and lay down. The undead race might not ha
ve an exhaustion stat, but he was clearly feeling exhausted. I was pretty tired as well. It turns out that getting yourself trapped in a videogame is a mentally taxing activity. There were a million things we needed to work out. Starting with how we would get our next meal, and ending with how the hell we were going to get out of this damn game. No matter how hard I tried my mind couldn’t keep all the thoughts moving in the same direction.
I climbed the stairs one last time and closed the door, jamming a few of the torches against it. If someone opened it in the night we’d hear the torches clatter, at least that was the theory.
I returned to the bottom of the steps and sat down. One big perk of being undead was that the cold stone steps didn’t bother me. I wasn’t sure if the virtual reality immersion rig was incapable of expressing that sort of discomfort, or if it was an undead trait.
I convinced myself it was a racial bonus. This dead body came with so many disadvantages, I needed to find the silver linings where it counted. I’d barely started mentally moaning about all of my life problems when I fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Some lookout you are” Logan laughed as I jerked awake. I’m sure if I had working bowels they would have emptied themselves.
“Fuck you” was all I could manage.
He laughed and scraped one bony finger across the stone wall beside him once more. He looked like he’d been awake for a while, long enough to brush the dust off his robes and sneak past me anyway.
“Seriously though, we probably need to do better.”
He didn’t need to continue his sentence. I’d been at the foot of the stairs. I’d screwed up, and I wasn’t going to try and argue that. If someone - or something - had come down those stairs last night we could have had a replay of the kobold situation on our hands, only we’d have been the kobolds.
“Yeah. My bad. We should secure this place a little today.” I got up slowly, expecting my muscles to protest the hours I’d spent in an awkward sleeping position. I actually felt pretty good. It seemed like dead muscles couldn’t cramp.
A small icon hovered at the edge of my vision like a glowing glyph. As I focused on it my character sheet opened up, showing the icon with a little description.
Well rested: Health and Mana regeneration boosted by 20%.
It didn’t have a countdown timer for when it might expire, but I wasn’t complaining! A free bonus for doing something as simple as resting, I could get used to that. I picked up the axe that had slipped out of my sleeping grip, then followed Logan as he led the way upstairs.
“I thought undead couldn’t sleep anyway” I mused.
“I checked with Jira about that. We don’t need to sleep, but we still can. Looks like it gives a bit of a buff as well.” He fell silent after that, until we reached the surface.
“I had a bit of a look around before I woke you” Logan began.
“There’s not much around. We’re close to the river, so we’ve got fresh water. But there don’t seem to be any berries or anything around. The trees here all look pretty dead.”
His mention of berries made my stomach rumble, and a quick glance at my character sheet showed that my hunger had indeed dipped into its last twenty percent.
“We’re pretty damn closed to Whiteridge as well. We might want to head toward the forest” Logan continued, pointing in one direction. I couldn’t see anything through the trees, I literally couldn’t see the forest for the trees, but I trusted he was pointing the right way.
“How close?” I wondered aloud.
“Probably a half hours walk, if that.”
Damn, I thought we’d covered more distance than that yesterday. If a pitchfork wielding mob was going to head our way, half an hour didn’t give us any time to prepare. Maybe he was right about fleeing further toward the forest. On the other hand, this was a known quantity. We’d cleared out the monsters, and it was a fairly secure spot. Who knew what might lurk in the forest?
“Lets see if we can find some food today. If there’s nothing nearby we can move tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s just that woman…” Logan trailed off. He didn’t really need to finish the sentence, I knew where his mind was going. If she was truly as insane as she’d acted, she could well be trying to incite a mob within the town already. She knew where we were and if she could turn the NPCs against us it could spell real trouble.
“You’re right. But we can probably lock this place down a bit. Maybe see if we can get through those seals?”
It felt like there must be something more to find in this little dungeon. After all, it had been specially marked on my map. So far we hadn’t found anything that warranted recording for future reference. I took a seat in the middle of the clearing and fished a loaf of bread out of my pack. It had started going a little stale, and still tasted rather bland, but the nourishment made the world of difference.
With breakfast - and the majority of my food - done with, I decided it was time to properly start the day.
“Lets have another look around for something to eat. After that we can try secure the dungeon, sound like a plan?”
Logan winked at me. “About that ‘securing the dungeon’ bit. I’ve got a bit of an idea.”
“And?”
“I’ve got a raise skeleton ability. The skeleton is pretty weak, but I can’t see anything about an expiration time. So it might stick around until it’s killed.”
That changed everything. Giving us an extra pair of hands could make all the difference if we got into another brawl. At the very least, the skeleton could guard us while we slept.
“Dude, that’s awesome!”
“Right? I kinda forgot about it during everything yesterday” He gave me a sheepish look. Yeah, if he had skin he’d definitely be blushing right now. That made me feel a bit better about my own stupid mistakes thus far.
“There’s another axe downstairs. Maybe you could get a skeleton to start chopping down some trees or something? That’d tell us how long it can stick around for at least.”
Logan nodded, a grin plastered across his face. It was a gruesome sight.
“Yeah, okay. Do you wanna look for some food then? I’ll summon it and see if I can get it working.”
Logan turned and disappeared down into the dungeon before I could agree. I wasn’t sure why he was trying to keep it a secret. Maybe he had some sort of performance anxiety, and didn’t want me to see him trying out the spell for the first time. I also kind of suspected he really didn’t want to go on another futile search for food, and I couldn’t really blame him. I trusted him when he said he hadn’t found anything, but I wanted to get a better idea of the lay of the land. If I could find some food that’d just be a bonus, and something I could rub in his face. Master survivalist over here.
The trees didn’t unnerve me now as I walked through them. The morning sunlight cast them in an almost cheerful mood. They weren’t dead skeletal trees, they were just hibernating, ready to spring back to life when the time was right. As I got closer to the river I started to hear it gurgling as it rushed past. Everything was very serene this morning, as if the game was trying to convince me that being stuck here wouldn’t be so bad after all.
I spent a few hours exploring the woods and memorising the paths to and from the dungeon. The trees were sparsely spaced, so almost every direction gave a clear line of sight. If we erected some barriers between the trees we’d be able to break up the ways that people could approach. Hell, if we had the time we could construct a big wooden maze leading in to the dungeon at the centre. We could definitely slow the approach of anyone that wanted to do us harm. Our big problem was that we only had one escape route - and that would be going straight through the enemy.
Maybe I was over-thinking this whole thing. Surely if Whiteridge was going to raise a mob to come after us they’d have done it by now. Maybe there was something in the code of the game that prevented the NPCs from leaving town? Maybe we were fretting about a lack of security when we weren
’t likely to be attacked at all.
The murderous woman worried me though. Even if the NPCs couldn’t leave town, she seemed like she might come back one night and try to kill us off as well. Or worse yet, she might find other players to turn against us. No, with her out there we were wise to act paranoid.
I returned to the dungeon a few hours before midday. Logan was supervising as a child enthusiastically swung an axe at a nearby tree. As I got closer I realised it wasn’t a child, it was one of the kobolds we’d killed yesterday.
“Awesome work dude!” I congratulated him.
“Turns out there’s something called ritual casting. I had quite the chat with Jira” He smiled, clearly proud of himself.
“The normal summon skeleton ability is really different. Its designed to fight - it only lasts a couple of minutes, and my mana takes a few minutes to regen.”
“Right, so it’s pretty useless for non-combat stuff?”
“Yup. This little fella should stick around until he falls apart though.” Logan smiled, and I suddenly saw the father in him. I imagined that was exactly how he looked at his real newborn. Well, with a human face hiding his skull.
“So what’s the difference?” I asked. He was bursting with pride, and I knew he’d leap at the chance to explain.
“Rituals take longer to cast, consume ingredients, and cost a lot more mana, but they can last for a lot longer. Almost any spell can be cast as a ritual. If you do a spontaneous cast it doesn’t last for long, but doesn’t require any ingredients. I’m not sure exactly how much of a difference it makes, but Jira said it was based on how much mana you spent on the ritual, and the quality of ingredients. For example I need corpses, the fresher the better.”
“Cool” I said. Logan seemed to deflate a little when I didn’t massage his ego any further.
“You didn’t find any food?” He asked, a glimmer of hope in his empty eye sockets.
“Na. Looks like we might have to head into town.”