by M Helbig
“No autographs,” Clewd said from his position on the floor. “Nothing against you, but I seem to have misplaced my pants and along with it my pens.”
Cedra looked down to Olaf and then pointed at Clewd. “Ask your question quick.”
Not wasting any time, Olaf hopped forward and knelt down next to Clewd. “Good sir, you mentioned a person named ‘Repsak.’ My son from Earth has a character with the same name and I believe it to be him. Would you happen to know his whereabouts?”
Clewd’s head bounced up and down like a puppy. “Repsak the Burglar. You raised a good lad. Best group mate a fellow could have. Shame I misplaced him like that, but I did make amends by going back for him, eventually.”
Olaf’s face was only inches away from Clewd. “Did you find him? Is he alive? Do you know where he is now?”
Clewd slid back. “Are we truly considered alive while we’re inside a computer game? Are NPCs alive as well? What is ‘alive’?” Clewd’s eyes scanned the room, finally coming to rest on Alizia.
Olaf’s hand shook as he put his dagger to Clewd’s throat. I’d no doubt that it was taking all of his strength to keep it from moving that extra inch it’d take to give Clewd a second breathing hole. Clewd arrived at the same conclusion as his eyes suddenly focused on the knife.
“No need to get all ungentlemanly, my good man,” Clewd said. “I did find him. He is alive. Mostly. And he just so happens to be in this room. No, the real question you should be asking yourself is ‘Who’s going to stop her from killing him?’” Clewd gingerly moved his hand around the shaking Olaf and pointed behind the group. His finger finally came to a stop on the other side of the cavern.
Yary stepped in front of Shades and experimentally tapped on the force field a few times. After the fifth try, she halted and turned to the group with a smile on her face. “I found this whole new menu in the interface with all these neat skills when Georgie asked me to cure that disease. Watch this!”
Her whole body glowed with a vibrating orange energy. Every spell I’d seen in the game was composed of one or two colors. The main color indicated the class of the caster and the secondary color indicated the function of the spell, with some functions having the same color as that of the caster. Orange was one color, however, that I’d never seen in a spell.
I was about to ask about it when a wave of force knocked my head back and my ears popped. Nearly everyone’s hands were on their ears too, with the exception of Yary, though with the way she was grinning, she may have just not cared about the pain.
Her fist glowed brighter as she took another step forward toward the cowering Shades. It was then I realized she was standing where the force field had been. It was gone. Clewd was neutralized. Shades was defenseless. Yary was powerful?
Slap Fight
Olaf dropped his dagger as he sprinted toward her, barreling through players in frantic determination. “Yary, stop!”
Yary raised her fist high and then swung it down, hoping to end Shades in one final, brutal shot. The rest of the group screamed out a panicked mess of variations of Olaf’s statement that blended together into unintelligible noise. She appeared to be too absorbed in her execution to have possibly heard us, but at the last second her fist stopped.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because he is my son!” Olaf nearly tripped over a fallen high elf but righted himself and arrived in between Yary and Shades.
Yary craned her neck over the tiny gnome and stared at Shades. “He doesn’t look anything like the pictures you showed me. Didn’t you say his name was ‘Repsak?’ This thing isn’t even a player.”
Olaf tried to push her back but it was fruitless. Inspect showed her strength as ??? but I was sure it was considerably more than his 32. All the same, Yary moved back a few steps out of respect.
“I’m with Georgius’s sister, especially given the source,” Cedra said as she turned to Clewd. “Explain to us how a boss can possibly be a player. Be quick about it, or we’ll end you along with him.”
Clewd stood up and wiped himself off. For the first time since I’d known him, every muscle in his face had stopped moving. No grins. No confusion. No levity. He was all business. “Six months ago, I took a group of five into the Cathedral of Discomfort to do battle with the affable but deadly Lich Queen. In the ensuing melee, our Burglar, Repsak, became separated from the group. I assumed he was killed like the rest of my companions at the time, but later learned he was not. You see, during the fight some sort of nasty creatures in hoods appeared and began accosting my fallen friends. If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, it’s disrespecting the deceased. I managed to chase most of them off, but not before they did something permanent to our poor Holy Fist, Oskar. I wept for him as I finished the Lich Queen off.”
Yary’s eyes widened at the mention of the hooded creatures.
“A fine story,” Cedra said. “But what does this have to do with this boss?”
Clewd stared at Cedra. “With patience like that you’ll never get into a good guild, dear. I was getting to that. Repsak made a wrong turn sometime in the chaos of the fight. As such, he didn’t die with the rest. Even with his maxed-out Sneak, he was eventually spotted by an eagle-eyed Eagle Eye. The mob along with five of its closest friends ganged up on him in a most unsporting fashion, but just as they finished him off a stranger arrived. A stranger in a hood.”
“A Reaper,” Olaf cried.
Sadness lined Clewd’s face. “So, you’ve heard of them. Yes, one of those odd beings who arrive over fallen corpses and suck the life out of them.”
Cedra’s jaw dropped. “Those are real?”
“Our group fought one of them a few weeks ago,” I said. “An acquaintance of ours managed to kill it by drinking a Resurrection Potion and then letting it try to suck his soul.”
Clewd’s eyes brightened. “If only poor Repsak had known that little tidbit at the time. But fortune had not abandoned him completely. Newcomers arrived. These ones friendly. They cast a Resurrection spell on him immediately, which killed the Reaper in the process. It was a second too late for him, however. There wasn’t enough of Repsak left to bring back . . . at least as a player. My best guess is the Lich Queen’s respawn timer ticked off at the same time, and the system became confused and merged them together. Tears of joy were shed as a brand-new baby was born to the world of Sun & Shadow Online. One unlike any before. His name was Shades. Is he player or monster? No, he’s something in-between.”
Olaf turned toward Shades. “Son?”
Shades looked up. His eyes took on that faraway look players got when they were using Inspect on someone. “Olaf . . . Dad, is that you?”
Olaf tackled Shades and embraced him in a big hug. “My boy! I thought you were dead, but you live. We’ve been looking for you for months. We spent all of our money to come in and find you, but it was worth every penny. I would have spent a thousand times that to know you are safe. I—I have to tell your mother and Therese that I found you. They came in here to look for you too.”
Blue tears rolled down Shades’s black form. If there’d been any doubt that he was a person before, it was gone. “I wish you hadn’t, Dad. You worked so hard to save that money. You deserve a good retirement. Still, I’m so glad to see you.”
No one spoke a word for several minutes as the two embraced and wept. When they finally parted, no one seemed sure of what to say next until Georgius finally opened his mouth.
“I guess that means raid over,” Georgius said. “Should we finish up here or back at the guild hall, Boss?”
Cedra pretended she had something in her eyes as she rubbed back the last tear. “The hall. Even naked, I have no doubt that Clewd will find a way to kill us all if we stay within a hundred miles of him. After we port the raid out, I want you and Noradine to go back and loot all those trash mobs in that tunnel.”
Georgius saluted crisply. “Sure thing.”
Cedra turned around and addressed the raid. “Is there anything else anyone
needs to get done before we leave?”
Yary raised her glowing hand. “I’d like to finish off the boss, please.”
Alizia waved at her and smiled. “Yarykins, you’re adorable as always, but even I of the legendary short attention span heard Olaf say that the boss is his long-lost son. No amount of shiny, shiny loot is worth killing a real-life person for—did I really just say that? Horus, you’re really starting to rub off on me.”
Yary lowered her hand. “Oh. So the raid’s not going to kill him, then?”
“No, we don’t permanently kill real people for loot.” Cedra turned to the grinning Clewd as he inched toward the door. “Though we do occasionally kill people temporarily in proactive self-preservation.”
Yary’s face deflated as she took in Cedra’s words. She gave a slow nod before the energy covering her body flared back up. Her face showed nothing but sorrow as she pivoted to face Olaf. “Then, I guess this falls to me. I can’t let a thing like that survive. I’m sorry, but this has to be done.”
Her fist connected with Olaf’s before he even registered what was going on. Olaf’s chest collapsed like a balloon with a hole in it as he landed hard against the wall. The way his body went slack made me think he was dead until I noticed the debuff float over his head. Stunned for twelve minutes? How?
Thankfully, there were other people to take his place before she got to Kasper. Alizia let out a panicked, barely comprehensible Shout. I didn’t know you could target groupmates with it, but it worked. Yary spun ninety degrees and stalked toward her friend. Alizia raised her shield in front of her on shaking hands. I readied a Regrowth, but we both knew she probably wouldn’t survive long enough for it to land.
Cedra stepped in between them. “Stop this at once! Recruit, I order you to stand down. I don’t care who your brother is. When I say we’re done, we’re done. Leave that boss and everyone else in this raid alone.”
Yary stared up at Cedra. “Sorry, but I can’t. Don’t you know what he is? That’s no boss, ma’am. It’s a Reaper. For the good of everyone, that thing has to die.”
Alizia laughed. “Yarykins, you obviously misheard Crazy McNoPants. He said Kasper was killed by a Reaper, not that he is one.”
Yary shook her head. “I heard him fine, Alizia. He said Kasper was being sucked dry by a Reaper at the same time a rez was cast on him, and then he came back half-person, half-something. But that’s where he guessed wrong. Kasper didn’t come back as half-boss; he came back as half-Reaper. If he was going to merge with something, which’s more likely, that he merged with the thing next to him that was also dying at the same time or a random thing thousands of yards away?”
Alizia bit her lip. One of her fingers mimed a certain reproductive act until she had to stop to start counting on her fingers. She eventually looked back to Yary and shrugged. “Horus, you’re on. My Logic skill is still at -137 and I think this problem requires at least a 2. Which thing do you think Kasper got squished together with?”
I tried Inspect four more times on Shades but it came back as all ??? again with the exception of his race. Cedra and Georgius had the distant look in their eyes that I’d seen when people used Inspect on me. When they didn’t say anything, I assumed their results had come back the same. We’d have to figure out this problem on our own.
I didn’t know much of anything about shadowmen from my limited adventures in this game. They weren’t a stock fantasy race like an orc or an elf that I could pull anything from other games or the myths and legends that they were based on. I had seen a few similar beings elsewhere but the only lore I could recall didn’t really help. In Swords, Spells, & Scales, shadowmen were the remnants of souls who became trapped in our world after a spell went wrong—a pretty apt description for what’d happened to Kasper—but that didn’t answer the question of what he might have merged with.
Yary pointed at Kasper. “Liches are undead, and the undead use dark magic. Shades seems to be made entirely of dark stuff; however, that’s where the likeness ends. He doesn’t have a lick of bones or rotting flesh on him. Sure, ghosts and specters are undead too and are intangible like he can sometimes be, but there aren’t any of those in the Cathedral of Discomfort. Reapers, on the other hand, are always intangible. And when you look inside their capes, they’re about the darkest thing out there.”
“She’s convinced me,” Georgius said as he moved up next to his sister. “And there isn’t a lick of brotherly bias in that either.”
Cedra scratched her chin. “That does match the bits and pieces I’ve heard about Reapers, but it’s all from third- and fourth-hand sources, at best.”
“I personally like a lot more proof before I casually murder a real person,” Noradine said.
“And while you’re waiting for that proof, how many other real people will this creature kill?” Cedra pointed behind her as Kasper tried to squirm away. Georgius drew his sword and blocked him in.
“Even if half of Shades is a Reaper, the other half is Olaf’s son,” Alizia said. “That would make him a quarter Olaf, and a quarter Olaf makes him . . . a bigger number more times than just about anyone I know. If you add that all up, it’s more than enough to easily hold off even the worst Reapery thoughts.”
“Agreed,” I said. “And how do you know so much about the Reapers? According to my acquaintance Nyytro, only he and a few upper-echelon people within Pyrite know much about them, and even then, it’s not much. I mean, Cedra is the leader of one of the top guilds, and she barely knows anything.”
Yary winced. “I ran into a Reaper once by chance and it ate my dad. Ever since, I’ve made it my mission to learn everything I could about them to wipe them off the face of this world, so no one else would ever have to lose their dad like that again.”
Georgius lowered his sword and turned back. “You found Dad? And then he died? How did I miss this? We’ve only been apart for a total of a day and a half since you came in here.”
“Umm, it happened on that half day when you were on that raid and I didn’t tell you because it was too painful.”
“Too painful? That’s not—what?” Georgius’s sword clattered to the ground.
“And another thing,” I said to Yary. “No offense, but up until a few days ago, you were a completely inept player, yet now you’re better than most of the players in this room. I’m assuming that since these people made it through the screening process to get invited to a raid with a top-tier guild, that most of them have an unusual level of skill. That’s quite the turnaround for only a couple of hours of training from an NPC, along with a few tips from me.”
Alizia smiled at Yary. “Great job—wait! I’m mad at you. I’m mad at Horus too for changing the subject.” She shook her scepter at me.
“What I was getting at is that she wasn’t nearly as inept as she seemed early on,” I said. “She just used several skills that neither of the other Bruisers here used, both of whom are higher levels than her.”
“Yeah,” Nibble said. “I spent weeks reading everything there is to know about Bruisers and all three sub-classes before I picked Brawler. None of them get a magic shield breaker until level forty.”
Yary grimaced. “Ohh. You noticed that? Well, this game is really hard, and I don’t have all my normal abilities, so it took time to figure out the new ones.”
“You mean like figuring out that you’re not a Light Mage?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I never had to worry about my class before. Thanks for showing me that. But I did figure out how to trigger rare events on my own, like awakening Ulinnia and that buff from Fistbeard. We were having such a hard time, I thought we’d need them. I really had to get here. The new boss and his shadow powers sounded like exactly what I was looking for. It turned out I was right. Sorry about leaving you guys, but the raid seemed like a faster way to get to this guy.”
“And why were you looking for this fella?” Alizia asked. “I already worked it out, like my super-smart role model Horus did, but thought we’d be nice and explain
it to some of the slower kids like Cedra and anyone who happens to be reading the novelization of this later.”
“And banned from all future guilds in any future games as well as any novelizations of those guilds,” Cedra said.
Yary sighed. “About a year ago, the big boss came into our office yelling about some new thing that he called Reapers. He’s a real mean guy, but what he said was even scarier than any curse words. Those things could kill people in the real world, and the programmers couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I couldn’t imagine how awful that would be for the players and what their deaths might do to all of their families and friends, but he only cared about the lawsuits and the money. He told us we had to drop everything and figure out how to stop them or he’d fire us all. It took us almost a year, but we finally figured it out. Then, just as we closed in, the glitches started and our special powers stopped working.”
Alizia’s head bobbed slowly. “Got it. Could you draw pictures for Cedra’s sake? She seems really confused and I want to be extra nice to her so I can get into her sweet guild.”
I sighed. “Yary’s a GM.”
Alizia gave me a stupider face than normal.
“It stands for Game Master. They’re Pyrite employees inside the game who police it. Mostly, they stop people from exploiting bugs or exploiting intended features to make a lot of money, but they also assist players who get stuck and do other helpful things sometimes too.”
Georgius’s face drooped. “So you didn’t come in here to spend more time with me?”
Yary winced. “I needed to prove to the other GMs that I wasn’t a screwup. Everyone knows that the top guilds have the best sources of current information, but they also hate GMs. And then one day I happened to overhear a woman mention that she was going into the game to play with her brother and that he was in the Knights—I’m really sorry, Georgie, but this is all for the best.” Her fist glowed again and she turned to Kasper.