“Dude, just move,” yelled Rallek. “She can’t keep your ass alive without losing Kavan.” He summoned three small humanoid robots, which hurled themselves at the big one, attacking its legs with energy blades.
Fawkes stopped about twenty feet behind the robot and took her second ambush shot, which critted for 1150. Again, she got its attention, but darted forward before the robot could fire and send stray death into hiding slaves. She hit her Evasion cooldown, which gave her a +90% bonus to dodge for fifteen seconds. Brilliant green laser beams as thick as her arms drew glowing trenches in the metal at her heels as she ran around in circles, screaming in genuine terror at the heat.
Sometimes, full immersion sucked.
“You hit it where it hurts,” shouted Kavan, before tossing a lightning grenade at it.
The charge went off with a bright blue-white flash, sending creeping sparks up the giant machine’s legs. It twitched and shuddered in place, momentarily stunned. Fawkes’ tongue tingled with the flavor of ozone.
Rallek waved his arms, throwing energy bolts made of wires and circuitry. Upon impact, they caused muted clanks to come from the robot’s hull.
“This is BS,” yelled Nighthawk. “How is he doing so much damage? We’re almost even.”
“It’s a robot,” said Rallek in a deadpan tone. “My one direct attack spell only works on mechanical enemies. It does inflated damage because I can only hit machines with it.”
By the time the lightning stun wore off, the robot had lost interest in Fawkes. Its upper body swiveled to the right too fast for anyone to react to. One blast of its lasers put Rallek down. His ghost stood over the inert character, sighing.
Angel813 said something in Chinese. Kavan still glared at her.
“You understood that?” asked Fawkes.
“Some words are universal.” Kavan fired a burst from his laser rifle into the robot’s nose, making it vibrate and emit a mechanical growling noise.
Fawkes slipped into hiding again and scooted around for another back shot. Angel813 rushed over to Rallek, yanked a pair of glowing paddles off her backpack, and mashed them into his chest. The body erupted in a shroud of sparks, convulsing and twitching. His ghost melted out of existence. Two seconds later, Rallek opened his eyes.
The robot got tired of the constant pelting from Nighthawk and let him have a double blast, but the gunslinger remained on his feet―albeit at six percent life.
Angel813, still on one knee by Rallek, winged a flurry of heal orbs at the gunslinger.
Kavan fired another barrage from his plasma rifle; it didn’t do much damage, but the robot growled again at the taunting attack. He got an energy shield up barely in time to absorb a volley of small missiles. The string of detonations chewed through the energy shield, stripped off the last of his special armor (causing the roots holding him in place to break) and went two-thirds into his health points.
“I’m not liking this thing,” said Kavan. “Hope that princess is worth it.”
Angel813 wailed in annoyance. She sprinted over and stabbed him in the back with another syringe, then cast a spell on it that made it glow green. Kavan’s health bar raced up to ninety-two percent.
Fawkes took cover behind an empty stasis pod, her position offering a clear shot at the giant machine’s back―but she waited, watching lasers fly back and forth for a few seconds. She tuned out the shouts of her teammates, focused on the missile pod door. The instant they sprang open, she fired at the inner surface studded with rocket heads.
Her shot went true and hit for a 1,840 point critical before setting off a secondary detonation that did another 100,000 points. On top of the damage the robot had already sustained, the ammo explosion finished it.
The boss swooned around like a drunken rooster, staggered a few steps to the right, then collapsed in a smoking heap. Both of its huge laser cannons crimpled when it crashed to the ground.
Nighthawk marched up to Fawkes. “How the hell did you do 100K in one hit?”
“Shot it in the missile bay when the armored door opened.” She walked over to the hulk and pointed. “I guessed it might be a vulnerable spot. Bosses like this usually have a weak point.”
“Oh.” His irritation melted away to awe. “That’s cool.”
“Damn that thing hit hard.” Kavan stretched. “I think my armor’s getting old. Time for an upgrade.”
“You need to level up, man.” Rallek patted him on the shoulder. “That robot was level forty. A same-level tank would’ve laughed at it.”
Kavan frowned. “Yeah. You’re right. Guess I should be glad we have an awesome healer.”
“I swear”―Angel813 jabbed her finger in the air at Nighthawk―“if you stand in bad again, I’m going to let you die.”
“But… I lose DPS if I move.” He flailed.
“The damage meter can go to hell.” She scowled. “Dead gunslingers do zero DPS. If it’s a choice between keeping your prima donna ass up or losing the tank and all of us dying, you’re going to go down. I refuse to rip my hair out trying to keep you alive when you insist on standing in a damage patch over a stinking meter.”
“Point is made,” said Kavan, a calming hand raised. “Nighthawk will move out of fire from now on.”
Nighthawk hung his head. “Okay.”
“And by fire, he means acid, lightning, freezing… anything. Not just fire.” Angel813 narrowed her eyes at him.
He nodded.
“Wow, thanks for the rez,” said Rallek. “I didn’t think medics could restore the dead. That’s kind of supernatural.”
“Defib works if it’s been ten seconds or less, and it requires touch.” Angel813 smirked. “Stupid angels can rez you an hour later from across the room.”
“Not all auramancers are Niath,” said Rallek.
Angel813 gave him a look like he’d just said humans breathed water.
Kavan reached down and opened the glowing white loot box. “Oh, for the love of…”
“What?” asked Fawkes.
“It dropped a light armor robe.” Kavan held up a blue-grey garment with a couple of composite resin panels attached to flexible fabric. “Bonus intelligence and focus.”
“Aethermancer crap,” said Rallek. “Again. It’s like the game knows we don’t have one and keeps taunting us.”
“Why does a giant robot have a robe?” Fawkes laughed. “That makes absolutely no sense.”
Rallek shrugged. “Gotta love random loot drops. Killed a Vos Dur warlord a couple days ago, and he dropped a really femmy tiara with a bunch of Aethermancer damage boosts on it.”
“Oh, you totally should’ve worn that.” Fawkes grinned. “It would’ve been cute on you.”
He laughed, shaking his head.
“Right. Sell bait.” Kavan teleported the robe into the Stormbringer’s storage box.
The rescued slaves emerged from hiding among the boxes.
A sudden trumpet blast made Fawkes jump and draw her pistol.
Gold letters appeared in midair:
Achievement Earned - Savior of the Lost.
She poked the placard. “Saved all five hundred captives aboard the Scarlet Saber.”
“Oh wow,” said Nighthawk. “Cool! We didn’t lose any.”
“You’re welcome,” said Angel813. “Two of them kept peeking out to watch the fight and I had to throw orbs at them to make sure they didn’t die.”
“It never fired backward,” said Kavan.
“Splash damage from the missiles.” Angel813 examined her fingernails. “You may worship me at your convenience.”
Everyone chuckled.
“You should’ve gone Niath,” said Nighthawk.
“Nah.” She shook her head, making her long, white hair dance. “Too easy. I’d fall asleep.”
Siana emerged from a gap between two rows of vacant stasis pods and walked up to stand nearby with an eerily placid expression. The other former slaves crept out into the open, but stood in place looping small fidgety gestures.
&nbs
p; “Damn that’s kinda creepy to watch a hundred people all scratch the same way at the same time,” said Rallek. “They gotta work on the NPC’s idle animations.”
Fawkes opened the storage box at the end of the cargo bay, which appeared empty but triggered a quest status update. All the former slaves went from standing around in their irremovable underwear to being dressed in an array of garments from civilian clothing to armor. A few seconds later, 499 of them said ‘thank you’ at the same time. Siana, now in a set of medium armor of white and violet, stared pleadingly at the group and repeated her request for them to escort her home.
“Yeah,” mumbled Fawkes, eyeing the huge group that had spoken in unison. “Just a little creepy.”
Complex
8
The amount of gunk that could build up inside a coffee grinder over a twenty-four hour period never ceased to amaze Dakota. She perched on a chair, elbow deep in one of the big units, wiping down the chamber while daydreaming about winning ten million dollars and never having to be elbow deep inside a giant coffee machine again.
Some people would say ten mil wouldn’t be enough to stop working. She thought those people were stupid. They’d probably burn it all on fancy cars or a giant house, and wind up homeless in four years. Nope. Not Dakota. If she won, she’d take her two-mil cut, or however much remained after taxes, and stick it in the bank. The interest would have to come close or even beat what she got paid now; she’d spend only what she needed to cover rent and bills. She had no need of fancy swag. No longer being chained to a day job would be enough.
“Someone’s happy today,” said Blake.
“Huh?” She pulled her head out of the machine and looked back at him.
He had a blender jug in each hand, both dripping from being washed. “You’re humming.”
“Oh. Didn’t notice.” She grinned. “Yeah, I’m feeling optimistic.”
“Nice.” He nodded and continued walking over to add the jugs to the stack of eight others. “Hope whatever it is works out for you.”
Yeah, me too. She sighed. “It’s a long shot.”
“That contest in the game of yours?”
“I found the item that starts the mission and got all happy until I figured out that it’s pretty easy to find it. The mission itself is impossibly hard.”
“Ahh.” Blake waved his hand about. “It’s like those call-in contests with radio stations. I don’t think they’re real. My whole life, I’ve never gotten anything but a busy signal when calling them.”
“Oh, ye old man of what… twenty four?”
“Not yet, hon. I’m only twenty-one.” He struck a pose. “Don’t rush me into the grave just yet.”
She laughed and pulled a formerly white towel out of the machine. “Ugh. This machine is the devourer of towels. This is the third one and it’s still coming out like I soaked it in brown paint.”
Blake tossed her a clean towel. “Don’t obsess. The dust is just more coffee. You don’t have to get the hopper immaculate as long as you’ve de-gunked the teeth.”
“I guess.” She put the grinder module back in and hopped down from the chair.
Blake zipped over to deal with a drive-through customer while she grabbed a large sack of coffee beans and refilled the machine. That done, she resumed her place leaning on the counter and staring at the empty room. Between 2:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., the place tended to be dead, though today, she dealt with a scattering of drone orders.
Her brain couldn’t let go of the prize mission despite the astronomical odds of actually winning. She kept thinking back to the message in the data pad that mentioned a strange star system with three suns. Via her smartphone, she hopped on the web and started searching. All the posts she found appeared to be people asking if anyone had seen a star system like this, but no one had. Then again, if someone actually did find it, why would they post about it? That would be helping nineteen million other people chase down a prize that you’d gotten one step closer to. No, if anyone had already located that star system, they’d been smart enough to keep it quiet.
“Grr,” she muttered.
A few people did post the message in the data pad naively asking for help figuring it out. She read it over and over again, but other than referring to a three-sun system where the center one had a blue tint, it offered no additional clues other than a string of randomness at the bottom.
…GYA4865505052454957ZGH32FZR7090555552455156GHR…
After almost an hour of staring at it, she started to wonder if the apparently meaningless line was the real clue. Excitement surged in her blood. She hunched over the screen, staring at the text, more convinced than ever it might have more importance than some ‘flavor text’ illustrating a communication link failure.
She plugged in her headphones and called Eric.
“Hey, babe. What’s up? You still at work?”
“Yeah. I was just thinking about that mission. Can’t find anything about a three-star system.”
“I dunno,” said Eric. “I’m starting to wonder if CSI announced the prize as an advertising gimmick and they don’t really want to have to actually give the money away.”
“Still, I’m trying.”
Eric muttered something too low to make out. “Yeah, well. If anyone found it, it’s not as if they’d share. Pirates don’t give away their treasure maps.”
“Right. So I was staring at the text in that datapad. I think that random string at the bottom might not be so random.”
“What do you mean? They put that sorta thing all the time at the bottom of text messages that get cut off.”
She nodded, not that he could see. “Yeah, I know. But… that’s a great way to hide something by putting it in text everyone will dismiss as being there only for flavor. People are all scrambling to find the three-star system but that could be a total misdirection thing. What if this string is the real clue?”
“Hmm. Hang on, let me pull it up.”
She stared at it. The middle part stood out to her. ZGH32FZR. The string had three letters in the beginning, GYA, and three letters at the end, GHR. Hmm… that’s weird. What if―she gasped with realization. “The letters are formatting!”
“What?” asked Eric.
“There’s three letters at both ends and in the middle surrounding 32.” She shifted her lips back and forth while thinking. “32 is an ASCII space. Maybe this is two values separated by a space. The alphanumerics in this string are placeholders or separators. Ignore them, look at the numbers?”
“You think they’re using ASCII code?” Eric laughed. “Babe, it’s 2031. Who would bother whipping out an ancient set of character codes.”
“A company with ten million bucks on the line and a habit of making Easter eggs about ancient computer games. That’s who.” She grabbed a napkin and a pen and wrote down the string. “You said CSI was going to make this a bitch, right? Who in their right mind would even think of ASCII codes?”
“Language, please,” yelled Hal from the back room.
“Sorry,” shouted Dakota while jotting down numbers. Ignore the GYA. 48 ASCII is a 0. 65 ASCII is, umm, capital A. 50 is 2… twice in a row. 52 is 4, 45 is a period, 49 is 1 and 57 is 9, then more letters. “Eric, does 0A224.19 mean anything to you? It almost looks like coordinates or something.”
He remained silent for almost a minute before blurting, “Holy shit you’re right! That matches the format for a grid reference to the star map. Or at least half of one. Where’d you get that from?”
She explained the translation while continuing to jot down the rest of the string.
“Damn!” said Eric. “The string is a map reference. Wow I’m rusty as hell with ASCII.”
“Aren’t you a programmer?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
He laughed. “No, I do tech support. I haven’t even looked at ASCII since school. Let me pull up a chart.”
“No need. I’ve finished. I was right. The letters are just spaces to separate the ASCII codes. It’s 0A224.19 FZ774.38
.”
“Okay, the star map,” said Eric. “It’s numbered by X/Y axes starting at 01, counting up to 09 before going to 0A through 0Z, then 10, 11, 12 etcetera to 1A, 1B and so on. 0A is the tenth row down from the top. FZ in the X coordinate is almost all the way on the right side, so we’re looking at going pretty much to the far southeast corner of known space.”
“Long ride then…”
“It’s worse. That’s the home area of the Kazalor.”
She cringed. Player characters could choose them as a race, but if many people did, they didn’t often travel far. Fawkes couldn’t remember ever seeing a player-character Kazalor. However, they turned up often enough as hostile NPCs. Their society emphasized strength and warfare. They walked erect on two legs but had four arms, each with three fingers. Tough, alligator-like hide covered them from head to toe. The average Kazalor stood close to seven feet tall with wide shoulders. Most annoying of all, their gemlike eyes reacted to heat as well as visual light, making them the most difficult race to hide from.
While not ‘evil’ per se, they had a highly aggressive nature and used combat to solve even the most trivial of problems. Not to mention, they tended to regard humans as an inferior species, akin to the way a person might regard a talking dog. Dealing with them in large numbers would not be fun. If Axillon99 had been reality, even ten million bucks wouldn’t have been enough for her to go anywhere near their home world. She’d rather die than wind up as an alien’s ‘pet human.’ Of course, enslavement never happened to player characters in a video game. Also, death in a virtual world didn’t hurt much, and didn’t last long.
She squealed and bounced on her toes.
Blake stared at her.
Dakota pointed at him. “Erase that sight from your memory. I did not just squee like a tween.”
Blake tilted his head.
“I mean it!” She stomped her boot.
“Fine, fine. I did not just see a little girl receive a unicorn for her birthday.”
She glared at him. “I did not squee that loud.”
Blake wandered off to the back room, whistling to himself.
“So, okay. Don’t email this to anyone. We’ll share with the group the next time we’re all online.”
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