Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  Kris grunted, but her eyes got a thousand yard stare that told me she was reliving the terror of going from character creation to the stratosphere. I clapped her on the back, and she jumped out of her terrified reverie.

  “I’m glad you’re okay, at least. You also might want to report that fall. That’s a doozy of a bug you found, and something tells me you’re not the only one who’s gonna experience it.”

  “You’re telling me,” Kris said. “It’s a good thing these leather starter pants are brown, if you catch my drift. That fall was too fucking realistic.”

  I tried not to laugh, but it was difficult. Instead I turned away and eyed the tree line until I had my smile under control. “Enough about your soiled virtual pants. Let’s have a look around.”

  Idly I wondered if there was a map I could consult to figure out where the hell we were. And of course thinking about it was enough to make a map of the nearby area appear floating in front of me.

  Horizon never did anything like that. I had to wave my hands in front of me to activate menus floating in the air like an old fashioned 2D HUD to make stuff happen.

  Clearly Lotus was doing way more advanced stuff with the way their hardware interfaced with their software. It was going to take some time to get used to the idea of having an interface that was wired directly into my brain that could read my mind and give me what I wanted.

  The good news was I’d figured out how to access my map. The bad news was when I looked at the map there wasn’t anything on it.

  “Is this thing broken or something?” I asked.

  I waved my hand at the window like I would in a Horizon module to get it to do something. The map turned to mist as my hand went through it. Which was a nifty special effect, but it didn’t bring me any closer to figuring out why the hell it wasn’t showing me anything.

  “What do you mean?” Kris asked.

  “Pull up your map and have a look,” I said, pointing to my own map.

  “Couldn’t I just look at the one in front of you?” Kris asked. “It just appeared when you pointed at it.”

  I stared between the map and my friend. Odd that Kris could see it, but I wasn’t going to knock it. Maybe pointing to the thing was the invitation the game needed to share.

  I really needed to have a look at all the mental controls available in this game, and soon. I got the feeling I was missing out on a hell of a lot by stumbling through the game’s UI blindfolded without a fucking clue what I was even looking for until the game helpfully read my mind and provided it.

  “I must’ve shared it with you when I pointed at it,” I muttered. “Well have a look since you can see it. The thing is empty. A lot of fucking use there, giving us an empty fucking map!”

  “Duh,” Kris said.

  “Duh?” I asked.

  Kris stared at me and her eyebrows shot up. Then they wiggled ever so slightly in a move she pulled when she was pulling one over on me.

  “You seriously don’t know what’s going on here?” she asked.

  “No?” I said. “The thing is busted. This must be another bug.”

  “But it’s not a bug,” Kris said, barely holding in a gleeful little giggle.

  I put my hands on my hips and turned to face her. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe just a little,” she said. “I mean usually I’m on the other end of this. Might as well take my fun while I can.”

  “So are you going to tell me what the hell is going on here?” I asked.

  Kris tapped a finger against her temple. “The fog of war has been a thing since the original Warcraft when it was just orcs vs. humans back in the mid ‘90s and not a place to get textual with each other on Moonguard. What makes you think it’d be any different here?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a touch embarrassed at my idiocy. Of course they weren’t going to throw the whole game world map at me without forcing me to discover it first. “I guess that means we need to do some exploring.”

  I looked around the small clearing we’d landed in. Well, Kris had landed here. I’d stepped through a portal into the place. No other players appeared around us, which was a little odd. I knew enough to know that the starter area was assigned by region. I’m not sure why they did it that way.

  Either way I would’ve figured there’d be a lot of people getting their start. At least people we went to school with.

  Something told me most of the older people on our level were too busy trying to scrape together enough money to get their next fix to care much about some revolutionary VRMMO.

  This clearing still should’ve been full of people around our age who did have the time to play the game. Only there was no one sharing the clearing with us. Weird.

  Maybe the game distributed people to different starting areas within a region to avoid crowding. After all, this would feel like just another lame MMO if everyone starting out was fighting over the same ten rabbit corpses, or whatever the fuck lame starting quests the scenario designers put together that claimed to be revolutionary but ended up being variations on the same old boring MMO fetch and kill quest themes.

  At least they’d be the same old boring MMO quest themes in a world that looked fucking amazing. I wondered if the rest of the game world would be as visually sumptuous as what was on display in front of us now.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a developer had focused all their resources on making the beginning of a game look impressive, only to offload a bunch of shit on the backend where they knew it didn’t matter because the players would already be hooked and suffering from a severe case of the sunk cost fallacy.

  I thought back to some of the stuff I’d read in my History of Video Gaming class last year about games like World of Warcraft that’d focused so much on making a fun leveling experience when the game launched that there wasn’t much for players to do when they inevitably hit the level cap way faster than any of the game designers had anticipated.

  Lotus had history to learn from, but they were also under the same crunch time that other AAA developers had been under since game companies first discovered they could chew up and spit out idealistic young coders who were willing to kill themselves, literally sometimes, for the chance to work in the gaming industry. Even if that chance was working eighty hour weeks to make sure the shaders on an obscure bit of background art no one would ever see was on point.

  “Yeah, exploring sounds good,” Kris said. “There are bound to be some noob quests around here somewhere to get us started and…”

  Kris cut off as screams rang out. I looked around in confusion and tried to figure out where the hell that sound was coming from, but there was nothing in the clearing. The trees muffled the screams and echoed them in strange ways that made it difficult to figure out exactly where they were coming from.

  “What the hell is that?” Kris asked.

  “Adding some more brown to your pants?” I asked with a wink.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said. “But seriously. What the fuck is that?”

  “I was asking myself the same thing a minute ago when I heard you screaming like a little bitch as you did your best impression of Superman minus the power of flight,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s someone else running into the same bug that tossed me into the world at a few thousand feet?” Kris asked.

  I looked up and shook my head. There was no speck up there getting larger as it approached us on the game’s z-axis. “There’s nothing up there. Whatever the fuck that is, it’s coming from inside the forest.”

  “Spooky,” Kris said, waving her arms and doing what was probably supposed to pass for a scary voice like she was telling a story around a campfire. “And fucking weird.”

  “Yeah, whatever it is, it doesn’t sound like anything good for us,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s part of the intro?” Kris said. “Like the cutscene was delayed?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I was really hoping they wouldn’t have cutscenes in this game.”
>
  “Yeah, well it sounds like one is coming right for us,” Kris said.

  She pulled her hammer out and held it at the ready. I thought about pulling out my own weapon, I hadn’t even looked in my inventory to see what they’d started me with, but decided against it. I wouldn’t bother until I had a better idea of what we were going up against.

  “I’m not too worried,” I said. “It’s not like the people who made this game are going to toss us into a scenario where we’re in any real danger. Not when we’re just starting out.”

  “You sure about that?” Kris asked. “Because their buggy code just tossed me into this game world with one hell of a fall.”

  “Good point,” I said. “But you survived that fall without taking any damage. Though that might be that their code for falling damage is just as wonky as the code for depositing people into the game world.”

  “Not comforting,” Kris growled, her eyes scanning the trees for whatever the fuck was coming at us. Assuming it was coming for us, and not a completely unrelated thing screaming through the forest that just happened to be passing through at the exact moment we were.

  Kris looked like she was about to say something else when a goblin burst out of the trees. At least I was pretty sure it was a goblin, though it was hard to tell considering how damn fast the thing was moving. It was small and green and moving fast enough that it was a blur.

  The thing looked surprisingly real and surprisingly sapient, with real terror in its eyes as it fled something in those trees. It was also moving fast enough that I worried we might be running into another bug that was putting us up against something we weren’t ready for.

  “What the fuck?” Kris shouted.

  The goblin took one look at Kris with her armor and the massive two-handed hammer out and ready for business and ran right past her. I briefly wondered if the thing was terrified of us considering how it’d reacted to Kris, but then it jumped and landed in my arms.

  Okay then. I guess it was just terrified of Kris and her hammer. Apparently I was no threat.

  “Help me! Please! You can’t let them take me!”

  Okay then. The thing spoke English. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. The game would’ve been annoying if everyone had to learn a made up foreign language to converse with the sapient creatures living in it, but there was still a part of me that was just a little shocked to hear English coming from a nonhuman creature.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I yelled.

  If this was the game’s idea of a cutscene to introduce us to the game then it was one hell of a weird introduction. Goblins were usually at the top of most lists of killable low level creatures in games like this.

  Yet the little green creature was holding onto me for dear life. As though I was quite literally the only thing that was standing between its life and death. The thing’s breath came in ragged gasps, and it looked and sounded truly terrified.

  Whatever was going on here, it couldn’t be anything good. No sooner had that thought run through my mind than the arrows started flying all around us.

  Son of a bitch!

  11

  Player Killers

  The first arrow that whizzed past my head didn’t register in the parts of my brain that told me I was in danger and it was time to hit the fucking deck lest the next arrow land in my soft noob armor wearing flesh. Mostly because I'd never lived in a world where I had to worry about people firing arrows at me.

  As far as I could tell no human had lived in a world like that for hundreds of years. Unless they took an ill-advised trip to some of the more unexplored areas of the world back when there were still indigenous tribes hiding out in those spots willing to kill idiots from the modern world who came knocking on their doors trying to spread the good news about capitalism or Jesus or whatever the fuck else they thought gave them special armor right up to the point they started doing their best impression of a human pincushion.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” Kris shouted.

  I rolled my eyes. My brain caught up with the danger of the moment and my legs went all rubbery. “Any other astute observations there Captain Obvious?”

  Another arrow landed in the ground next to me. I stared at it dumbly, though to my credit it was difficult to think of much of anything with a goblin trying its best to climb me.

  Which didn’t seem like the best survival strategy with arrows flying through the air. Moving closer to the ground seemed be better than moving higher.

  I figured it was better to be on the ground if someone was firing at us even if our goblin friend was hellbent on using me as a climbing wall. So I hit the ground and rolled, but again it was difficult because the goblin clung to me in desperation even after I hit the deck.

  “You’re going to get us both killed!” I shouted.

  “Save me!” the goblin shouted right back at me.

  Hoo boy. That yell was up close and personal, and let me tell you, the goblin’s breath was almost as threatening as the arrows flying through the air all around us.

  I did take a moment amidst all the panicked terror to appreciate the way the developers had gone all out in putting together the goblin. I was still in that stage of trying out a new game on new hardware where I was so impressed by everything happening around me that it almost didn’t register that I was in potentially mortal danger.

  Almost, but not quite.

  I noticed things other than the goblin’s unpleasant breath. Like the jewels attached to the thing’s large teeth. The way its skin felt leathery but warm to the touch. How real its claws felt digging into my skin, or how realistic the pain was as its knees slammed into my ribs.

  That felt unpleasantly like some of the times I hadn’t been fast enough to get away from some junkie in the narrow streets on the way to school and got a couple of punches for wasting their time when they realized I wasn’t carrying anything worth stealing and fencing.

  Welp. That proved pain was definitely a feature in this game, and I figured that wasn’t a good thing considering there was some asshole out there shooting at me. The goblins claws and knees hurt, but I didn’t want to know what it would feel like if one of those arrows managed to puncture me.

  “We need to get the fuck out of here!” I shouted.

  “But this has to be a starter cutscene!” Kris said. “You said it yourself. The game wouldn’t throw anything at us we can’t handle!”

  I had a sinking feeling that was wishful thinking. Something very bad was going down here, and it didn’t have anything to do with introducing new players to the game with something exciting to mix shit up and hook them before sending us off on the same old boring fetch and kill quests that’d been the bread and butter of MMO starter zones since Richard Garriott popularized the genre.

  There was a loud screech in the trees and a thump. A moment later something flew into the clearing. A wolf that looked pretty fearsome, but when I inspected it a stat sheet came up that showed it was pretty standard stuff for a starter area.

  Still, wolves weren’t supposed to fly like that regardless of their stats. They also weren’t supposed to arrive dead and filled with a bunch of bloody holes that’d obviously caused that deceased state. Which meant there was something out there doing the throwing and poking, and I really didn’t want to meet whatever the hell that was.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to be?” Kris asked.

  I had even more of a sinking feeling as I looked at the creature.

  “I have a feeling that’s the animal we were supposed to meet as part of the starter event,” I said. “And I think there’s something even nastier in that forest that just killed it and tossed it at us.”

  “Oh. Fuck.”

  “Yup.”

  The trees rustled. I got the sense there was something massive lurking in there. Something massive lurking in there wasn’t good. That meant something massive was about to come out and make our day worse than it already was.

  I’d heard stories f
rom old MMOs back when they were brand new and not the on-rails linear streamlined digital theme parks most MMOs had become these days. More specifically I recalled tales of asshole higher level players pulling dangerous monsters into starter areas to fuck with newbies.

  I wondered if we were about to be the victims of one of those pranks brought kicking and screaming into the modern VRMMO gaming era. We were in the early days of a new MMO, after all. The first new MMO with a major population to come along in decades, and the first MMO in a good long while that hadn’t had all the good exploitable bugs hammered down and wiped out decades before I was born.

  Which meant there’d be plenty of griefers looking to make a name for themselves. Asshole player killer griefers, that is. Not the good kind of griefer that I filed my anti-Horizon behavior under.

  “We’re not going to like what comes out of those trees, are we?” Kris asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “We’re about to die, aren’t we?” Kris asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Do you think it’ll hurt much?”

  I thought to the pain I felt as the goblin, still in my arms, tried to use me as a climbing tree. Then decided to lie. Kris would find out about the game’s realistic pain simulation soon enough. There was no point in making her worry too much in the time between now and when she found out how well the game’s pain simulation worked.

  “I don’t think it’ll hurt at all,” I said.

  “That’s a relief,” Kris said.

  The trees swayed, and then the things making them sway stepped out into the clearing. My mouth fell open.

  So much for seeing a bunch of giant monsters that’d been kited to the starting zone by some asshole players. Those were players stepping out of the trees, all right, but as far as I could tell they weren’t dragging any oversized monsters along with. They certainly weren’t big enough to make the trees sway like that, but then I saw a glow around one of them that, coupled with the robes he wore, made it clear he was a mage of some sort.