Expedition Newb

by M Helbig

  “I made a mistake as well. It was my job to draw off the second, though by good fortune Yary did that by accident. As always, you are being too hard on yourself, which, believe it or not, is the first sign of a good leader: caring about your mistakes. If you don’t care, you won’t learn from them. No one else saw those hylves coming either. And the only reason we survived was that you pulled the two extras off and gave good directions to the rest of us. Not to mention you figured out how to defeat that Reaper a few weeks ago. If you hadn’t done that, we might all be dead permanently. You may have your flaws, but so does everyone, especially when they first start. I have known many managers and coaches over my fifty-three years, and I know a natural leader when I see one.”

  “You’re only saying that because you don’t want the job,” I said.

  Olaf grinned. “True. But I will not be here forever. When we find Kasper, I will leave, and it will be up to you to control Alizia. I think you might be the only person she actually listens to.”

  I peeked over a nearby boulder and could now see the Rovers. They were below us and almost a thousand feet away, traveling in the opposite direction. “Where is Alizia from, by the way? I assumed with the way she talks thats she’s from the former U.S. like me?”

  Olaf chuckled. “Did Decrona not tell you? She is from here. She is an NPC.”

  “WHAT?” I covered my mouth a bit too late as the hylf pack turned and looked up. I barely managed to duck behind the rock. When I peeked again, they’d mercifully turned around to resume their way.

  Alizia and Yary had stopped and were coming toward us, but Olaf waved them off. “Decrona and I rescued Alizia in a chance encounter with some goblin slavers. Alizia was so grateful she agreed to join our group. Why do you think she stayed with Decrona for so long in spite of their opposite personalities?”

  I stared at Alizia intently. While most of the NPCs I’d encountered had been lifelike in varying degrees, none of them had come close to the realness of Alizia. The way she argued with everyone. The silly things she said. The way she drank and drank and drank. The references to things from Earth. All of that ridiculousness together, there was no way she wasn’t real . . . Then again, it was probably too much ridiculousness for a real person.

  Alizia caught me staring at her, gave me a saucy wink, and then stuck her tongue out.

  Olaf patted me on the shoulder. “I know. I couldn’t believe it myself at first.”

  “NPCs can join player groups?” I asked.

  “Yes. The majority of the time you see them as hirelings, though. There are two buildings in Highwall where you can hire them, called Mercenaries of the Sword and Rent-A-Caster, but they are rather expensive. When I looked into them, a level-one adventurer cost twenty gold a day and they took ten percent of all loot. In rare circumstances, though, like with Alizia, you can befriend one to join you permanently. There are also a few quests where they will join you temporarily. If they are in your group, they can even rez like players.”

  Alizia began to sing in that terrible, off-pitch way of hers, seeming to take great pains to make each note worse than the last. Yary laughed at first and after thirty seconds was covering her ears like the rest of us. She tried to tell Alizia to stop, but either Alizia couldn’t hear her over her own loud voice or she was ignoring her. Olaf and I activated Sprint. As soon as we got near, I grabbed him in a well-practiced maneuver and hoisted him up to clamp his tiny hands over her mouth. Alizia struggled a bit but eventually nodded in defeat and stopped the nails-on-chalkboard noise. I set Olaf back down and we breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Just my luck,” Alizia said. “Grouped with a bunch of music critics.”

  “Audiences gave her performance no stars,” Olaf said, “because they all ran screaming from the theater.”

  Alizia cracked a smile for a split second. “I’ll never get better if I don’t practice.”

  “Could you maybe practice when we’re not trying to sneak into a village full of angry monsters?” I asked.

  “I, Alizia the Prospective Bard, swear I will no longer make loud noises while we’re trying to sneak into this village and will heretofore only practice when you’re trying to sleep or talking to any beautiful women who are not currently in this party.” She winked at Yary.

  Yary pretended there was something interesting in the other direction.

  “Notice how she only swore to stop making loud noises while sneaking into this village,” Olaf said.

  “And made that statement in the loudest possible voice,” I said.

  The First Time Ever Someone Wished They’d Packed a Gong

  I flipped Tracking on to find more than fifty hylves on it, with more appearing every few steps. Since the interface showed many identical names and only indicated direction when you individually selected one, I turned it off, as it was pretty clear they were all around us. Ominously, that happened around the same time that the area grew completely quiet, save for the sounds of our footsteps. I motioned for the group to duck under an outthrust of rocks off to the side as two Rovers approached. The Rovers passed by, oblivious to our presence and apparently more interested in fighting with each other. Their pushing and clawing made almost no noise, so I asked the group to only speak in group chat from then on (since in group chat, only the people in your group could hear what you said). I gave the signal, and Olaf turned on Sneak to begin scouting out the area.

  He returned three minutes later. “Their town seems to be no more than a collection of rock outthrusts such as this that they use as dwellings. There are no buildings I could see, let alone a gate or barrier. It would appear these hylves are every bit as savage and mindless as Laniel said. I did not see anything resembling sentries and doubt they are capable of even comprehending the concept.”

  “Well, that fixes a lot of our problems, then,” I said. “Unfortunately, with no patrols that also means we won’t be able to figure out a pattern we can exploit.”

  “Why do we care about their patterns if we plan on killing them all?” Olaf asked, still in group chat. “The quicker we kill these things, the quicker we obtain the faction we need for the key to get to Clewd.”

  Alizia rubbed her scepter against her shield. “Woo-hoo! That sounds like a call for me to go crashing in, swinging ye olde scepter about willy-nilly.”

  Yary rubbed her fists. “Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. Georgie never let me have fun like this.”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  While I’d seen Alizia do exactly what she’d described more times than I could count, I’d always assumed it was only her way of having fun and messing with us. This time a different thought crossed my mind. If she was indeed an NPC like Olaf had said, what if the AI was using her as a way to make the game harder so we’d die more? If this’d been any other game, that kind of thought would belong in the deepest depth of the crackpotiest section of the net—but in this game, where more dead players meant bigger profits for a soulless organization whose single purpose was to maximize profits, it was quite possible. Downright likely, given some of the things my dad had said they’d put in here. (You didn’t hear this from me, but the sacks filled with murderous chipmunks they gave out as prizes for last year’s Christmas event was not a bug.)

  Pyrite had long lauded in its ads that the AI that controlled the game was not allowed to directly influence it. Many of the world’s governments had even done extensive investigations to disprove that claim and came back with nothing. But what if the AI was influencing the game indirectly through proxies?

  As I searched Alizia's smiling face for some sign that she lacked a soul, I almost didn’t notice where she and Yary were headed. I barely managed to step in front of them before they got away. Strangely, Olaf was with them.

  “Right, sorry,” I said. “No, you can’t go crashing in there. We need to sneak our way in and avoid as many fights as possible.”

  “Since we need the faction anyway, would it not be better to just kill everything?” Olaf asked.r />
  “Our goal is the mayor,” I said. “The quest gives 2,000 faction if we get it done fast. That’s 400 hylves worth of faction, and from what I’ve seen in other games and what Georgius said, I’m almost positive that when we complete it, it’ll open up more quests from the mayor.”

  Olaf eyed me skeptically. “I do not see what the harm is in killing as many of them as we can while completing that goal, but I will trust your experience.”

  Yary looked to Alizia for guidance. “For once, Horus’s goal is the same as mine,” Alizia said. “If he says that’s the fastest way to free booze, then I’m gonna trust him.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I pointed to the left. “Since we just saw two hylves come from there, I think we should approach around the other side of these rocks.” I looked at Olaf and he activated Sneak, disappearing to scout ahead.

  Olaf continued to communicate with us through group chat, which had the added benefit of being audible from a greater distance than normal speech. He stopped us several times right before we ran into a hylf. The first time, Olaf had to Sprint back to help me keep Alizia from charging it. As easy as a lone one would have been to defeat, the risk of the noise alerting the rest of them was too great. Alizia only stopped struggling after Yary asked her to. Miraculously, we did not have the same argument on any later encounters. I wasn’t sure what the two of them had talked about but was beginning to think that Yary had maxed out her faction with Alizia by saying the right things (and with the way they kept giggling whenever they looked in my direction, it was probably about me).

  I thought all was lost when one of the hylves wandered into us from a direction Olaf had missed, but just as it opened its mouth, Olaf appeared behind it and ended it with a quick combo of Flanking Attacks to the throat. We were fortunate it was one of the weaker ones. Every few minutes, I flipped on Tracking and eventually the mayor appeared. We followed the arrow to a wide, flat area surrounded by a circle of rough rocks that seemed to be their communal eating and social area.

  At first, I thought the area was an odd, natural occurrence. On closer inspection, I could see the regular, mostly uniform gaps in the stone. I was beginning to think this place was made and not natural. Now I could see faded murals in a few places, mostly behind the area near the mayor, cementing that opinion. I was fairly confident the primitive hylves hadn’t made them and suspected the place to be an ancient ruin. There was the possibility that the hylves had made this themselves long ago but their society had devolved, or some powerful wizard or god had cursed them. I made a note to ask Laniel more about these creatures if we saw her again.

  Apparently at random, the hylves would stop what they were doing and begin fighting, sometimes a one-on-one duel with the rest forming a circle to watch while making very little sound. Or a group would single out another and brutally beat and scratch it to near death. The only time I did not see them fighting was when they were eating. That seemed to only occur in the area behind the mayor. The mayor stood at the center next to a blonde hylf I would’ve assumed was a high elf, if not for a small patch of fur on the ridge of her back and her apelike posture. Despite the large number of the primitive, violent monsters, they did everything while hardly making any noise.

  “Whatever you do, Olaf, do it slowly and as quietly as possible,” I said, still in group chat.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to quietly do what some of those things are doing,” Alizia said. “The rest of them are acting like me when I don’t water down my rum with healing potion. Or when I do water it down. Or when I’m completely sober. Has that ever happened?”

  I was about to quip that she had to have been sober when she was born; I barely caught myself. She was an NPC, so she hadn’t been born at all. She’d been created by some programmer . . . Or could NPCs be born after the game went live? It’d been going longer than I’d been alive, so two NPCs could’ve made her the old-fashioned way.

  “Horus, I must say if you and Olaf are this off your game, making up comebacks to openings like that, I shudder to think what’s going to happen when we get into combat.” Alizia shook dramatically.

  Yary laughed.

  “I am busy scouting,” Olaf said. “Do not distract me. And I am quite confident you have not done what those two to the right are doing, no matter how much you have had to drink.”

  The group’s heads craned down to see two hylves who’d previously been engaged in a duel switch to something that would’ve had the highest content warning available on the net. Immediately after their duel converted into that, the circle of onlookers evaporated and went back to whatever it was they’d been doing before.

  “I don’t even think they have a name for that position. Oh my God! That can’t possibly fit in—” Alizia pretended to cover her eyes in horror while leaving a hole between her fingers big enough for me to see her entire eyeball.

  Yary was so transfixed in horror that she didn’t see the two hylves approaching to her left. I tried to pull her back behind the large boulder, but she was barely out of reach. One of the hylves stopped a couple of feet away with one ear perked high in the air and started aggressively poking in seemingly random directions. As we readied our weapons, they stopped, turned their heads toward each other, and then carried out a conversation in low yelps. When their conversation stopped, they began casually striding forward on their knuckles, almost walking straight into Yary before I managed to pull her out of the way. They continued moving without turning back and left the area.

  “What was that about?” Alizia asked.

  I shrugged. “Maybe they mistook Yary for one of their own?”

  “What!” Yary said, thankfully still in group chat.

  “That’s not—What I meant to say—I mean because you’re an elf and they—well, some of them look kind of like elves but in a crude, cursory way. To a primitive mind like theirs, I can see how they might . . . You’re very pretty?”

  Alizia facepalmed and laughed at me.

  Olaf let out a squeak in group chat. “I tripped on something. Oh, my goodness! It appears to be a severed arm. I managed to roll and not make too much noise but Sneak dropped. There are at least five of them nearby and—Do not come for me. Just let me die. It would be suicide to start a fight in here.”

  My eyes darted around. I found Olaf on the edge of the circular area, about one hundred feet away. As much as it pained me, he was right. There were at least twenty hylves between us and him, with perhaps three times that amount nearby. However, despite him being directly in the line of sight of about five of them, none reacted in the slightest.

  Several tense minutes later, Olaf was able to activate Sneak again and disappear. As I turned away in relief, I noticed the mayor had grabbed the blonde hylf and was gesturing wildly toward where Olaf had been.

  “Olaf, move as far away from there as you can,” I said. “Use Sprint if you have to.”

  Olaf chuckled nervously. “As if I have not already. Did one of them discover me? I did not see any of them move toward me.”

  The blonde yelled something in their yelping language, and most of the hylves rushed toward the spot. Several of them bumped into Olaf on the way, but with the amount of jostling and shoving in the crowd, none seemed to notice that he was neither a hylf nor going in the opposite direction. A very bedraggled Olaf arrived back at the group a few minutes later, and I tossed a Regrowth on him.

  “Glad to have ya back, Laffy,” Alizia said. “But now you’ve shaken the beehive and they’re swarming. No way even this awesome, well-oiled, cheese grater of a group can fight through all of that. Buuut if you want me to try, I will. Just give the word, and I’ll crown them with my awesome scepter.”

  Olaf was still shaking, and he let out another nervous laugh. “You do not oil cheese graters, Alizia, and I do not think you crown someone with a scepter, you use your hands. Well, I suppose technically you could, but—”

  “Yup. That’s what I was going for, and I personally happen to like my chees
e covered in oil, so there!”

  “Focus, people,” I said. “No, you can’t charge into that mob, Alizia, and I think we need to pull out of here for a while until they settle back down. It’d be impossible for even Georgius to fight through that.”

  Yary raised her hand.

  Alizia snickered. “You don’t need to raise your hand to say something, Yary, unless you need to use the can. I have a hall pass for that if you do.”

  I stared at Alizia. There was no way references like that could be coming from a computer. She couldn’t be an NPC. But then again, back when I was ten, Dad had said they were working on some very realistic NPCs to make the game more immersive. The real reason was Pyrite wanted players to become more attached to NPCs so they’d take more risks to save them or complete quests for them, which would usually result in death and the loss of money. And Alizia did like to pull us into unnecessarily dangerous situations . . .

  “What is it, Yary?” Olaf asked.

  “The mayor guy left with that elf-looking thing. They went that way.” She pointed to an opening a couple hundred feet to the north, away from the frenzied crowd.

  Alizia patted Yary on the back, almost knocking her over. “Well done, not-new-Deccy. If you keep this up, I’ll come up with a better nickname for you.”

  “You could just use her name,” Olaf said. “It’s Yary in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Too long. Never remember it.”

  “Could you guys focus, for once?” I moved to the north. “Let’s go.”

  Alizia saluted me crisply. “Aye, aye, sir. Would you like us to go in any particular direction?”

  I gave her a withering glare.

  She recoiled. “Normally a look like that’d encourage me to go as far away from you as possible, but seeing as we have a new recruit, I’ll be a good sport and follow you just this once.”

  Almost immediately, we ran into two Hylf Workers, which we easily dispatched in under a minute. We got into a couple more fights a few minutes later and managed to avoid another by hiding behind a rock. We were saved from alerting too many other packs, as the sound of our fights paled in comparison to the cacophony coming from the main area.