Paradise Clash: Bounty Hunter

by L. E. Price

  Another Woody Sez sidebar drew Jake’s attention. “All the newbie towns are named for the founding designers at SDS, and the tasty grub at Dutton’s tavern isn’t a coincidence. Jeff Dutton was in charge of most of the prototype sensory code, working hand in hand with Amos Beiler — and unlike our hero Amos, Jeff still does occasional interviews.”

  Jake ran his finger over the block of text, highlighting it in yellow. He tapped out a quick note in the margins: “Who is Amos Beiler? Why no interviews?”

  “SDS spared no expense when it came to immersion,” Woody wrote, “and even brought in world-class chefs to design some of Paradise Clash’s cuisine. Ever notice how much the NPC proprietor of the Crystal Plate in Vangelis City resembles firebrand chef Guillaume Boucher? Not only is he modeled after the real guy, the beef wellington is Gillaume’s exact recipe! You can get that dish for two hundred bucks at his real-world bistro in Paris, or pick it up for a cool eighty-five gold in Paradise Clash. And of course, the virtual version doesn’t have any calories. Save room for dessert!”

  Characters modeled after real people, place names offering homage to the game’s designers…even the map of the world seemed like an elaborate nest of references and inside jokes. A conspiracy theorist could have a field day here.

  “Eva,” he said, “do a grid search. Find web pages cross-referencing ‘Paradise Clash’ and ‘conspiracy theory.’”

  “Eight hundred and sixty-seven pages found. Would you like to add further criteria?”

  Maybe later. Instead he replied, “Eva, new search. Find web pages cross-referencing ‘Paradise Clash’ and ‘drumming man.’”

  “No pages found.”

  Jake sat in silence. He sipped his coffee.

  He hadn’t misheard Cybele, and he hadn’t imagined it. She’d warned him about the drumming man and sent him away with a kiss on his cheek. If it had happened to someone else, anyone else, they would have talked about it.

  “Eva, cross-reference ‘Paradise Clash,’ ‘Cybele,’ and ‘kiss’.”

  “Nine thousand, three hundred and thirty-two references found. Would you like to add further criteria?”

  He knew an empty lead when he saw one. Whatever had gone strange in that virtual temple, whoever had made a computer-animated character go off-script, the message was for his ears alone. Why? He wondered. On a whim, remembering his talk with Woody, he said, “Add additional criteria: ‘fan art’.”

  “Sending results to your tablet,” Eva replied.

  His eyebrows went up as he scrolled through picture after picture. And kept going up.

  “Eva, what is ‘Rule Thirty-Four’?”

  “A search indicates that ‘Rule Thirty-Four’ originates from early Internet forums, prior to the advent of the full-immersion grid,” she replied. “The rule is: ‘There is porn of it.’”

  This wasn’t helping. He closed the art tab and went back to hitting the books.

  * * * *

  Two and a half hours later, fueled by more coffee and a bowl of some cheap corner-store ramen noodles, Jake felt like he was getting a basic handle on Paradise Clash. No idea how much of it would help him in his search for Trevor Kensington, but at least he knew how to navigate the basic terrain — five beginners’ provinces arranged like the points of a star, connected by airship lines to Vangelis City at the heart of the map — and he could speak some of the lingo like a native. He thought he could, anyway. With the clock edging past five and his meeting looming, it was time to find out for certain.

  He stepped into the bathroom (“Woody Sez: treat each play session like the start of a long road trip. Even if you don’t think you have to go, go.”), then made himself as comfortable as he could on the sofa. He flicked the rocker switch on the game deck and it whirred to life, connection lights flickering from amber to green one by one. Then he clamped the magnetic disk to his implant. Midway down the cable, in easy reach, a plastic box offered a single, final button.

  Jake closed his eyes and hit it. When he opened them again, he stood alone in the pine barrens.

  No time to play with the wolves. The sky grew darker by the minute. He held Woody’s compass, sighted east, and started walking. He took two steps and nearly tripped over the weighted balls of his new ‘signature weapon’. Cursing under his breath, he finally managed to double the rope and sling it over his shoulder, letting the bolas sway against his hip as he hiked toward civilization.

  Should have taken the crossbow, he thought.

  Nothing moved in the brush — he was lucky or maybe the wolves were sleeping, lost in computer-scripted dreams — and he emerged to find a worn dirt road about a hundred yards east of the tree line. Night came on fast, painting the sky in long streaks of azure, with a curtain of pinpoint golden stars to light the way. Ten minutes along the road, the warm glow of a lantern-post marked the edge of a farm. A sackcloth scarecrow sagged from its wooden frame and stood silent watch over a field of watermelons. The scarecrow might have chased away the digital scavengers, but it didn’t deter the two men standing in the middle of the field, far from the edge of the lamplight.

  Curious, Jake skirted the dark side of the field and got a little closer. One of the men, tall, with a conical hat decorated in red and white stripes like he was half-wizard, half-barber’s pole, was scribbling furiously in a notebook. The other, a shorter man in leathers dyed midnight blue, held up a brass device that resembled an old sailor’s sextant.

  “Two inches to the left,” the tall man said. His partner moved the sextant and he scratched down another note. “See? This is the spot. Straight down the middle.”

  “I think we’re wasting our time.”

  The tall man lifted his quill. The feather brushed his forehead, just under the curving red brim of his cap.

  “Have I been wrong yet?”

  “That’s not—”

  “Have,” the tall man repeated, slow and stern, “I been wrong yet? Look at the seam. This is the exact spot where the texture brush repeats. That puts this spot at the edge of a sixty-four by sixty-four terrain chunk. The sea dragon always manifests at a multiple of sixty-four.”

  He might as well have been speaking Chinese, as far as Jake was concerned. He needed to cut across the field and he wasn’t going to get past without being noticed, so Jake went with the direct approach. Dried-up vines rustled under his boots as he stepped closer, coming into plain view with a genial smile and open, empty hands.

  “Evening, gents—” Jake started to say. He was cut off by the butane-torch hiss of blue flame igniting in the tall man’s clenched fist. His partner whirled, startled, and his sword whistled from its sheath.

  9.

  Jake held his ground, hands still open and easy. Still smiling, but the warmth drained from his eyes like the first night of winter.

  “No need for that,” he said. “Just passing through.”

  The short one gave an uncertain glance to his partner. The man in the conical hat studied Jake for a moment, looking him up and down, then nodded. He flicked his fingers and the blue flames guttered out. The other kept his sword drawn but let it dangle in his grip, pointing its honed steel tip at the dirt and tangled vines.

  “Shouldn’t sneak around like that,” the swordsman said. “People might make assumptions.”

  “What kind of assumptions?” Jake asked.

  “The kind that can get you killed.”

  “Considering there’s two of you and one of me,” Jake said, “if I had the notion to do anything unfriendly right now, you’re probably right.”

  The man in the conical hat nudged his partner with his elbow and nodded at Jake’s outfit.

  “Easy. He’s new.” He turned to Jake and spoke a little louder. “Haven’t seen you in these parts, stranger. What names are you known by?”

  Jake’s name froze on his tongue. He remembered all of Woody’s admonitions about roleplayers, and how people came to Paradise Clash to get away from the real world. “Jake Camden” didn’t sound like a very fantasy-world n
ame. Not sure what does, though, he thought. All these names feel like somebody mixed alphabet soup with the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  “Jac…ius,” he said. “Jacius of…Cam’s Den.”

  “Cam’s Den,” mused the tall man. “Not familiar with it. Must be a far realm indeed. Welcome and well-met, Jacius. I am Magnolto, and my overcautious companion is Rolen the Blue. You’re a lucky man, walking alone from the west. Those woods at your back are infested with displacer wolves.”

  “I found that out the hard way,” Jake said. “Have to admit, they gave me a good workout.”

  “You. Fought displacer wolves.” Rolen’s sword slid back into its sheath with a whisper of steel on leather. “With that gear. I find that hard to believe.”

  Jake’s fingers dipped into his belt pouch. He took out one of his trophies of the hunt, the ossified wolf eye, and held it up between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Seeing is believing.”

  “Our new friend has some skills,” Magnolto said. “And what brings you out into the farmlands? Looking for more challenges to test your mettle?”

  Jake couldn’t miss how the two men transformed in the presence of an outsider. Before they knew anyone was listening, they had been firmly out of character. At least Jake had to assume that discussions of “texture brushes” and “terrain chunks” weren’t part of the game. Now, though, Magnolto’s voice had gone sonorous, his gestures broad, playing the part of an accomplished wizard to the hilt.

  “On my way to Dutton,” Jake said. “I’m looking for a friend of mine, haven’t seen him in a while. By any chance, either of you familiar with a man named Trevanian Kess?”

  The partners gave each other a look. Rolen’s hostility gave way to a look of concern. His forehead wrinkled as his eyebrows went tight.

  “We…haven’t seen him either,” Rolen said. “He’s been gone for almost a week now. Where do you know him from?”

  “Other realms. A far realm.”

  Woody’s guidebook taught Jake that ‘other realms’ and ‘far realms’ were used as synonyms either for the real world, or for a different game. Roleplayer shorthand, used to acknowledge the universe outside Paradise Clash without breaking character. Rolen and Magnolto shared another sidelong glance. Rolen’s jaw worked and he nodded, like he’d just chewed on Jake’s answer and decided he could swallow it.

  “If you see him,” Rolen said, “ask him to get in touch with us? He has a way to contact us in the far realm.”

  The far realm. They knew him outside the game. Jake wanted to press them for more, but he wasn’t sure how to do it without stepping out of bounds. This was going to be a problem. Jake had navigated strange subcultures before, out in the real world; getting answers off the beaten path usually just came down to learning the lingo and showing respect to the locals. Easy. But as “Jacius of Cam’s Den,” he couldn’t even openly acknowledge that they were all playing a game here. Language and etiquette were a pair of weighted chains, slowing him down. He’d have to puzzle this out.

  “I’ll pass it on,” he said, relenting for now. They wished him a good hunt. Then they fell silent. Neither man spoke as Jake walked away. By the time he looked back over his shoulder, the field and the two companions were nothing but blots of shadow in the gathering dark.

  He doubted it had anything to do with Trevor — he didn’t hear a lie on their lips, when they said they hadn’t seen him — but Jake was curious about the conversation he’d stumbled into. Talking about textures, math…were they studying the architecture of the game itself?

  “Codex,” he said under his breath.

  Neon letters sizzled in the corner of his vision, offering an encyclopedia of the monsters he’d battled. In this case, one lonely line reading “Displacer Wolf” and a vast canvas of empty space.

  “Codex, reference ‘sea dragon’.”

  Lines of lit gasoline formed a big red X. No such monster.

  * * * *

  Jake had only been in Dutton for three minutes when he realized how wrong it was. From a distance, it looked like a storybook painting come to life, with thatched rooftops and soft yellow light shining from low peasant hovels. Silent, sleeping fields surrounded the pastoral village, with one long and wide street snaking through its heart. Signs painted on dangling plaques of wood advertised a leather-worker’s shop, a tailor, a greengrocer. The faint scent of saffron and spice drifted from the cracked doorway of an alchemist’s workshop, and on one corner, glowing coals in a blacksmith’s forge warmed the night air. Shops offered all the essentials a novice adventurer could want, and then some.

  But where do the people live? He thought. For a village of this size, there were barely more homes than stores. The grocer sold traveling provisions, dried and salted for a long journey, but hardly offered anything an actual resident would live on — and despite all the farmland dotting the gentle green slopes outside Dutton, there was nowhere for farmers to sell their crops. Beyond a plow, sitting in the corner of the blacksmith’s shop like a piece of set decoration, there was no hint that the smith crafted mundane goods like horseshoes and nails; just a dizzying variety of swords, maces and shields, displayed on his walls like a killer’s emporium.

  All the lovingly placed details of village life boiled down to set decoration, window-dressing to sell a convincing theme-park version of an actual town. He wondered if the locals’ houses were even modeled on the inside, or if they just sported fake doors plastered over empty boxes like a movie soundstage. Jake watched a plump white cat chase a mouse across a peasant’s weathered porch. Half a minute later the same cat chased the same mouse, their pursuit locked in an endless loop.

  The distant sound of laughter and faint music — real, now, not scripted — drew him further up the street. The double doors of the Dented Chalice stood open to the night. The warm orange glow of a hearth-fire and the aroma of savory stew reached out and pulled Jake inside like a friendly hand.

  Inside the Chalice, a party was in full swing. Bodies packed the room from end to end, filling the rough-hewn wooden tables, dancing on the flagstones before the tavern’s massive hearth. A musician, dressed in a floppy jester’s hat, perched on a table’s edge and played a lute like a madman. The tune sounded vaguely familiar, something Jake had picked up on a pop radio station, but the notes and tempo were twisted just enough to pass for a medieval jig. Squatting beside him, a massive man with the head of a bull was rapping out a percussive beat by slapping a dented tankard of ale against his horns.

  Jake eased his way through the churning crowds and took the lay of the land. He spotted the local power-players in a heartbeat. Those were the four adventurers sitting at a rounded table of their own, off in the far corner of the tavern. A perfect circle of open space stayed clear around the table’s edge as if their very presence was a propulsive force, pushing the other patrons away. The four conversed in low tones, dour, pensive. Their apparent leader, from his body language and how he was holding court with his back to the wall, was an impossibly pretty man in his early twenties. He wore his hair in a long, black glossy sweep, and a brooch shaped like the petals of a scarlet rose adorned his satin cloak.

  As he hunted for Woody, Jake kept his ears open, catching snatches of conversation from the clamoring din.

  “…said the Lollers are planning a raid tonight. They’re getting nervous, they’ve got to know their time is running out. Even the Stoic Balance are against them now.”

  “Well, if they show, I’m out of here. I don’t need that kind of frustration in my life.”

  Jake noted the odd names, taking everything in. Another discussion turned his head as he passed.

  “…I really think I can make a go at it. Look, I can rent a market-row stall in Vangelis for five platinum a week. If the armor market doesn’t crash, I can make that back in three weeks of crafting, and everything else is profit.”

  “If. And if the rent doesn’t go up. That’s a lot of risk and you’ve got to buy a ton of raw materials up front. Look
, before you do anything crazy, talk to Prentise. Nobody knows the merchant game like she does.”

  “Maybe tomorrow. She’s over there talking to Lomax, and she does not look happy.”

  Jake turned his gaze to a woman draped in the furs of a nomad. They weighed across her shoulders and adorned her hunting-leathers in twisted strips, making her look like an exotic and bedraggled bird of prey. A rustic bow dangled from her back, along with a quiver of wickedly barbed arrows. Her sharp nose wrinkled as she jabbed her finger into a burly man’s chest.

  “Four key fragments. You promised me.”

  He spread his hands wide and gave her an awkward smile. “Hey, Merisaude got here first, okay? She doubled your offer.”

  “That’s not how this works. You gave your word, and I came all the way to Dutton just to make this deal. Now I’m out the airship fare and I’m going home empty-handed.”

  “C’mon, Prentise, you’re taking this a little too seriously—”

  “I am. I take people breaking their word and backing out on a deal very seriously.” She clicked her tongue. “But hey, you want to do business with the dusk elves, knock yourself out. You keep trashing your own reputation like this, eventually Marisaude’s the only person who will do business with you. And then you’d better get ready to bend over and take it up the ass, because there’s nothing Merisaude and her pals like better than screwing over the desperate and needy. I’m trying to give you some good advice, Lomax. Take it. It’s free.”

  Jake didn’t know the woman, but he liked her style. He was thinking of walking up, seeing if she knew Trevor, when a heavy hand clapped his back. Woody was next to him, flashing his tombstone smile and hoisting a tankard. Foamy ale splashed over the rim and down onto the sticky flagstone floor, smelling of roasted chestnuts.

  “You made it!” Woody said. He shot a look at the weighted leather balls draped over Jake’s shoulder. “And…you took the bolas. Crap. I should have warned you.”

  “I figured there weren’t any bad choices.”