And I was pretty sure I'd seen this goblin before. The goblin smiled and gave me a wink before turning to Torian.
"What seems to be the problem here?" the goblin asked.
"Get out of the way goblin," Torian said, pulling his sword away with a schwing and pointing it at the little guy.
Torian didn't seem to realize the kind of trouble he was in. I looked around and saw diminutive figures armed to the teeth moving in. Diminutive figures who looked like they’d love an opportunity to take out their nonplayer character frustrations on any player character who gave them a convenient excuse.
"Come now," the goblin captain said. "Are you sure you want to take that sort of attitude? It might be better for you to move along. You know combat is forbidden within the city limits."
The goblin’s eyes glinted. The unspoken promise there was that combat was forbidden, but the goblin would be more than happy to engage in a bit of combat if Torian was stupid enough to give the goblin an excuse. Not to mention there was the little loophole in that rule that combat seemed to be forbidden only if someone was stupid enough to get caught fighting or attacked someone who had PVP immunity.
"You don't tell me what to do, and this lowbie certainly doesn't tell me what to do," Torian sniffed.
Torian continued to make bad decisions. He brought his sword around, only this time he brought it down towards the guard captain as he yelled to his guildmates.
"Attack them! We're not taking this from our servants!"
43
Discretion, Valor, etc.
The major flaw with Torian’s plan was none of his buddies seemed inclined to provide any backup. He turned and stared at them as they refused to move. Glared, is more like it.
All those Horizon Dawn guild tabards that’d looked so intimidating moments ago looked a hell of a lot less intimidating now as they stood scratching their asses and staring at Torian while not making use of all the weapons they’d been so lovingly feeling up moments ago to add to the intimidation factor.
Heck, some of them were in the process of melting back into the crowd where they wouldn’t have to worry about the goblins coming for them.
"What are you doing?" Torian growled. “I said attack, and that means you need to…”
That was the only thing he managed to get out before he was tackled to the ground by a group of goblins. You wouldn’t think a goblin would be big enough to take down a human, but with the way they dogpiled on him they had no problem felling him like a massive gleaming plate tree.
They all raised their swords and it looked like they were about to end Torian when a sharp bark held them back.
"Wait!"
The goblin officer walked over. I was pretty sure this was the same guy who’d saved our ass the first day we were in the game. Which made sense if his patrol was the immediate vicinity of the Nilbog town circle.
The goblin shook his head. Like he was disappointed in Torian for doing this, though the rapacious grin he wore showed he was anything but disappointed at the opportunity to mess with Horizon Dawn’s numero uno.
The whole look would’ve been comical with the way the goblin’s ears twitched this way and that if it wasn’t so damn serious with all those goblins poised over Torian with their swords ready to end his digital life the moment that goblin officer gave the word.
“I wonder if we can take his stuff if the goblins kill him,” Kris muttered.
I glanced around in a slight panic to make sure no one had heard that, then realized she was talking in party chat which meant her words were for us only. Though to be fair that was exactly the kind of idiot thing she’d say out loud to piss someone off because she knew it’d piss them off, and damn the consequences.
“That’s a good question,” Keia said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone killed by the guards to know whether or not that’s possible. If they’re killed by a monster then a loot chest drops that they have to recover, but are the guards treated like common monsters or something different?”
“I didn’t see anything about it in any of the research I did,” I said. “Though I was more interested in crafting stuff and some of the political structures in the game.”
“Political structures in the game?” Kris asked with a snort. “Fucking nerd.”
“Quiet,” Keia said. “This shit is getting good.”
“Do you want some popcorn?” I asked.
“If I could get some then yeah, I’d totally go for it right now,” Keia said. “Now hush and listen to the nice goblin officer.”
“You’re about to make a serious mistake,” Torian growled at the goblin.
Torian’s weapon hand twitched and his massive sword clanged against the cobblestones, but otherwise he wasn’t able to move said weapon hand since there were currently three goblin guards piled on his arm holding it down.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you in on charges of disturbing the peace," the goblin officer said. He got down on his knees, which brought him level with Torian now that the idiot was vertically challenged with a group of angry goblins on top of him. "And I'm afraid that since you not only attacked citizens, but also a captain of the guard, we’re not going to be able to accept a fee this time to make all of this go away.”
“Don’t be ridiculous," Torian said. "There's always a fee you'll take. You’re goblins."
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about what constituted a nasty racial slur in Lotus. All I knew was there were a lot of game writers who liked to take real world situations and use them as shorthand in game situations like this.
It was a storytelling crutch as old as video games with a plot more complicated than “jump on things that get in your way.” Take a little bit of racial tension in the real world, slap a fantastical or science fiction veneer over the whole thing using whatever race is the underdog in said setting, and suddenly you had cruise control for the appearance of depth in a narrative even if it was less impressive if someone knew what they were looking at.
Which is to say the cultural and racial subtext was there, bright and clear for anyone who had an interest in postcolonial criticism of society’s slow and grinding descent into technological ennui, but most people in the game were too busy killing monsters and gathering loot to notice or care about the hack writing.
I got the feeling that saying someone was “just a goblin” in reference to accepting money to make a problem go away was a pretty nasty racial slur against those goblins. Not because of any inherent nastiness in what was being said so much as because Torian was the one saying it and he sounded pretty pleased with himself.
He was totally the type who’d toss nasty terms like that around without much thought for how those terms might get the shit kicked out of him when the underclass being insulted by those slurs was currently piled on top of him with a whole lot of cutlery aimed at bits of his anatomy critical for the maintenance of life.
From the way the goblins’ eyes narrowed, not to mention how several of them moved their swords down just a little, just enough that the captain had to bark at them to cool their jets again as the points on their blades scraped against his pretty armor, Torian was closer to death than he could possibly imagine.
It seemed a touch odd that the guard captain would tell his guards to cool their jets considering we were in a fantasy world where, as far as I knew, fixed wing aircraft hadn't been invented, let alone jet propulsion. Though what was a bit of anachronism between friends in a world like this?
That had me looking towards the airships moving over the town and wondering, not for the first time, whether or not it might be possible to make something like jet engines a little less anachronistic to the setting.
"I'm afraid in this case there are some things that go beyond money," the goblin captain said, a rapacious grin spreading across his face even as he spread his arms and shrugged in an apologetic gesture that was anything but.
"Bake him away, toys," the guard captain said, grinning as he made an ancient referenc
e that pulled me out of the immersion again. Someone in the writing department was clearly a fan of late twentieth and early twenty-first century prime time animation.
"You assholes," Torian shouted at his guildies. “Aren’t you going to do anything?"
Gregor looked around as though he was expecting someone else to take the heat. Then when he realized they were all looking to him he sighed and stepped forward to hit the still sputtering Torian with an apologetic shrug.
“Sorry man,” he said. “You’re the one who told us not to attack guards where other guards could see us.”
Torian’s eyes narrowed and Gregor seemed to realize, too late, that he might’ve given something away. The way the goblin captain’s eyes narrowed said Gregor had definitely given something away. Then Torian’s eyes went wide and he bellowed in pain as one of the goblin guards slammed a sword into his thigh.
“I told you not to attack him!” the officer barked, though there was something to his tone that said they also weren’t supposed to attack him where anyone could see, same rules of engagement as Horizon Dawn apparently used, and Torian was going to be in deep shit if they managed to cart him off somewhere that lacked witnesses.
“Sorry. I sneezed,” the goblin said.
The officer glared. “I didn’t hear a sneeze.”
The goblin let out a couple of half-assed coughs as he twisted the blade this way and that causing Torian to bellow in pain all over again. He glared at the few remaining Horizon Dawn people, and it was clear that all reason and control had left him.
"You assholes fight off higher level goblins like this in the raid dungeon all the time!" Torian shouted, spittle flying from his mouth as the goblins started dragging him away to what I imagined was going to be an unpleasant fate. The mention of killing goblins in the raid dungeon didn’t seem to endear him to his tiny captives who suddenly got a bit more rough as they dragged him away.
The one who still had a sword embedded in Torian’s thigh was riding him like a bucking bronco and using that sword to maintain his position, laughing gleefully every time Torian cried out in pain.
“That’s rough,” Kris said, and this time she didn’t bother saying it in party chat. A few other non-Horizon Dawn players around us nodded in agreement. Hell, some of the Horizon Dawn people also nodded in a rare moment of solidarity.
“They’re like stabby little pointy-eared murder machines,” Keia said.
“I don’t want to be on their bad side,” I agreed.
Torian’s eyes locked on me and Keia and Kris, and there was a moment of clarity through the pain.
"Don't let them use any of the crafting stuff in this town. This is our town!"
"Um, how do we do that?" Gregor shouted at Torian, seeming genuinely confused as the forge looked like it was open to all and, I suspected, without that Writ of Nobility there was no way they could prevent someone from accessing the thing.
"Form a human chain around the thing and don't let them touch it! I don't care how you do it, just get it done!"
I sighed and rolled my eyes. I’d really been hoping I could get in some quality time at the forge. My mind was awash with all the wonderful things I could do with a combination of weapons and Spellcrafting supplies. Sure I’d have to start small, but still. There were possibilities opening up in my mind now that I had access to the forge and I’d done a little research about how they worked, and Torian had just slammed the door on those possibilities.
The Horizon Dawn people left behind, the ones who’d been so ineffective in saving their guildmaster, formed a circle around the forge. I sighed. Though I had to admit it probably wasn't an ideal location for my plans to begin with.
The forge was in the middle of town, after all. There were people all around us who’d see what I was doing and maybe ask questions or get ideas. The whole point of having a secret ability that no one else knew about that gave me an unfair advantage was lost the moment I let anyone else know about said secret ability.
It wouldn't do for me to start advertising Spellcrafting, though I wasn’t even sure about the rules for this branch of crafting. I’d been able to destroy weapons to discover their spell infusions and infuse gems away from a Spellcrafting table, but there had to be a reason for those Spellcrafting tables to exist.
The problem was there wasn’t anything out there about Spellcrafting on the web because it was either super rare or anyone who had discovered it was keeping their mouths shut, so I was grasping in the dark and figuring out the rules as I went along. I didn’t want to figure out those rules in public where someone might see what I was doing and decide they were going to try and figure it out for themselves.
I also didn’t stand a chance of fighting off all the assholes who’d formed up around the forge. So I satisfied myself with flipping Gregor and Kravos the bird. I figured getting their guild leader dragged off to be tortured by the goblin guards was good enough for one day, and I didn't want to press my luck. Even if there were more guards around the place fingering their swords and looking like they were waiting for someone in Horizon Dawn to give them an excuse.
"I don't think we’re going to get anywhere here," I said.
"I don't think so either," Keia said with a sigh as she looked longingly at a blacksmith working the forge who I assumed was the guy she needed to turn in her quest to. Unfortunately he was behind the Horizon human wall that’d just formed. "I suppose we should just move on."
"That's right," Gregor said. "You assholes get a move on. If you know what's good for you, you won’t come back here either. You’d be better off if you left town for good.”
"We'd be happy to show you the way," Kravos said, holding a hand out and allowing a flame to dance above his fingers.
I rolled my eyes. It took every ounce of my self-control not to pull out one of my gems, infuse it with the wrong kind of spell, and toss it on the forge to see how many more Horizon people I could kill.
The only thing that stopped me was we were in the middle of a crowded area where the same problem applied as when I thought about using the forge and trying out my Spellcrafting abilities in front of everyone.
Back at that mine I’d had no one behind me to see me surreptitiously infusing a gem with the wrong spell. Here I was dealing with a crowd, and there was always a chance a player would see what I was doing and ask questions I didn't want to answer.
Not to mention Torian had been right on the money about risking an AoE attack in a crowded spot. I didn’t want to hit non-Horizon players, or risk lowering my reputation with the goblins by accidentally taking one of them out.
So I turned and walked away from the confrontation Gregor and Kravos were clearly hoping for. Yesterday I might’ve let myself get goaded into that fight, but I wasn’t playing that game today, tomorrow, or ever again.
44
The Magic District
"That went well," Keia said.
She was staring at the still receding form of Torian, alternately screaming abuse and in pain as he was dragged away, with a predatory gleam in her eyes that reminded me it would be a terrible idea to ever get on her bad side.
"Tell me about it," I said, glancing to the forge down the street and the Horizon Dawn wall still around it even though we’d skedaddled. "I guess we need to find a different forge."
"I think that's the only forge in this town," Keia said.
"That can't possibly be the only forge in town," I said. “This place is way too big for that.”
“Is it?” Kris asked. “I think you got spoiled by the Elder Scrolls games where there are always redundant crafting locations.”
Keia and I both turned to stare at her with a touch of surprise. She shrugged.
“Hang around this guy long enough and you pick up a few things,” she said.
“There has to be more than one,” I said. “Is there a way to pull up a city map or something and…"
I cut off. Because of course the moment I started thinking about pulling up a city map the game obl
iged me by pulling up a map with key locations marked. With glowing runes rather than in English, which wasn’t helpful at all. I stared at the thing and thought about getting a translation, but instead text along the bottom was highlighted.
A key.
“Seriously?” I growled.
“What’s up?” Keia asked.
I gestured to the city map. She came around beside me, moving in close which helped relieve some of my frustration.
“The map is labeled in some weird runes. I have to look at the key at the bottom like this is some theme park or something,” I growled.
“Oh yeah, that’s totally in goblin,” she said. “The little guys can speak English, at least the ones in Nilbog, but the devs made some weird artistic choice on maps and other stuff and wrote in whatever their language is.”
I muttered as I scanned the key down at the bottom.
“Find anything?” Kris asked.
“There are a couple of crafting hubs, but they’re all in semi-public areas,” I said.
“That’s not ideal,” Keia said.
“Why not? If there’s another forge let’s go there and get to it,” Kris said.
I double checked to make sure we were in party chat. The last thing I wanted was for loose lips to sink this ship before it even got a chance to set sail, but Keia beat me to it.
“We want to keep this whole Spellcrafting thing on the down low,” she said. “Using a new ability no one in the game knows about in a public area isn’t the best way to keep things nice and inconspicuous. Especially if we’re using a crafting table that everyone previously thought was a bit of set dressing and not something genuinely useful.”
“Spellcrafting?” Kris asked. “What the hell is that?”
Again I double checked that we were in party chat, and breathed a sigh of relief. Even knowing the name might be enough for some enterprising asshole to figure out a way to unlock the skill for themselves.
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