The Renegades

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “Well in that case we should begin with the culinary trade. Although, biota don’t eat solid food and I doubt some juice will make you feel full. Pircs need their meat.”

  “Vegetarians,” sighed Chip. “All right. Let’s go and study. We’ll see what there’s to eat later.”

  “Nah. Vegans eat vegetables. We biota are vegetables ourselves. All we do is drink. By the way, it might even be possible that we drink blood too. And why not? It’s a liquid. A vampiric potato, what do you think?”

  “In Djibouti I saw an old movie about killer tomatoes,” shrugged Chip. “You won’t scare me with some moldy Idaho.”

  “If you ask me, since the invention of cinema, humanity has exhausted all the ways of scaring itself. Killer elevators, snowmen, condoms…They’ve done it all.”

  “A condom is a killer by function and designation,” Chip proclaimed pedantically, sniffing the air, “of your future offspring and half the pleasure you get from the act. But hold, you vampiric tuber! I smell the smell of meat. Follow me!” And grabbing me by the hand, the furball rushed decisively into an alley from which the aroma he had sensed was emanating. It wasn’t even finding cooked meat among the biota that surprised me, so much as that its smell was…unpleasant…revolting even. And I’m normally a big fan of barbecue, steaks and other meat dishes.

  The mysterious smell was emanating from a small courtyard. A culinary instructor named Artichoke was puttering over an improvised grill. An NPC biota with bright yellow petals for hair was helping him. Her name fit her well—Mimosa.

  “And how does one eat this?” Artichoke was frowning, smelling the barbecue with evident revulsion. “And, more importantly, how am I supposed to assess its taste if I can’t eat?”

  Chip froze without releasing my hand and suddenly exclaimed:

  “What are you doing, you child of glucose?! Who taught you to cook like that, hellion?! Why you’ll turn it all into ashes in a second! Step aside, greenhorn and let me work my magic!”

  Saying this, he moved the vegetable chef unceremoniously from the grill and began to yank off the skewers, instructing in the meantime: “You can’t just up and throw the meat on the fire. What’s wrong with you? No, we need embers first…And who cuts meat into pieces like this? You could as well simply stick the entire cow onto the skewer, you weirdo.” My companion looked around seriously and began to issue orders: “All right. Give me a sharp knife. The maestro is in the kitchen! What do you have for seasoning?”

  The chef initially opened his mouth in outrage but then quickly realized that this furry ruffian could solve half her problems—if anything, in terms of tasting—so he turned around and began to relay Chip’s demands to the assistants.

  A copper pot of impressive size appeared from somewhere with a lid, as well as plates, platters, spoons, smaller pots and the work got underway. Half an hour later, the courtyard looked like a kitchen under the open sky at some historical reenactment festival: Stew bubbled in pots, meat sputtered on pans, fat sizzled dripping into the coals, small biota hands worked the dough, sliced toppings for pies, and above it all the pirc’s deep bass resounded, teaching my cousins the secrets of ‘food-magic.’ Mmm…yeah. It looked like my friend hadn’t wasted his time during all the vacations he’d taken. Not every autocook had as many recipes in its memory banks as Chip did in his head.

  “Is there anything you don’t know how to do?” I asked just in case, taking a plate of pies from Mimosa’s hands. She had already dropped several platters and tipped several pots, so I tried to keep a close eye on her.

  “Lots of stuff,” Chip replied without looking up from his work. “For example, how to build. Or how to dance. The academy had a dance hall and a teacher, and one could study in one’s spare time, but I preferred hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship and paid extra for them as well as for language classes.”

  “Oh! I did hand-to-hand combat too,” I bragged, keeping one eye on Mimosa. The girl looked so discomposed that everything was falling out of her hands.

  “And, how’d it go?” the furball inquired. “Did you become the bully of your block?”

  “No. I realized that if someone wanted it, they could drop me with one blow and so I switched to running,” I confessed. “But I still go to training every once in a while. Just to stretch and hang out with my friends. Besides, nothing brings you back to reality like a blow you fail to block. Really makes you want to live…”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Chip nodded. “And after that to get back to your feet and let your opponent have it. No, but what is this disaster!” He yelled at the clumsy Mimosa who had yet again dropped a knife. “All right, lady, you really need a smoke break…or just a break. No objections!”

  Instead of objecting, Mimosa broke down in tears and ran out of the courtyard.

  “I guess she doesn’t smoke,” I remarked.

  “Or she’s made of tobacco,” Chip proposed a reasonable alternative. “All right, my vegetable muse, go console her. Tell her that I don’t smoke either.”

  “What am I, the local therapist? Go figure out what’s wrong with her yourself. These kinds of situations aren’t my forte. My typical response in these cases is, ‘It’s your own fault, dummy.’ Never seems to go over well.”

  “I’m busy with this work, that’s one. You’re a fellow biota, that’s two. And finally, which one of us has the consolation quest?” Chip summoned his best counterarguments.

  “Fine,” I had to admit, looking ruefully in the direction where the biota had fled.

  The quest had to be completed one way or another. In the end of things, how bad could it be? Had she broken a nail? Had her petals faded since the day she’d emerged from her bulb? Had her boyfriend forgotten about their pet hamster’s fifth birthday?

  I almost guessed right. My trembling little Mimosa, it turned out, was the odd one out among her cohort of married friends. The NPC’s imitator mind—designed to simulate a human one—instantly generalized the situation: ‘No one loves me and no one wants to kiss me.’ I sincerely tried to recall something uplifting and hopeful, a song about an epic love awaiting each lover in her due time, but for whatever reason, my head was spinning with other stuff.

  “In the Twilight Dream I beheld the world beyond the Arras,” I began tangentially in a fairy-tale tone. “And I heard a song of a human minstrel. It’s a song of brides, love and fortune.”

  Mimosa sobbed and stared at me with her enormous, tearful eyes, as I in my turn drew the first harmonious chord from my lute. I don’t know what spurred the author to write the song, but it had become my personal go-to on the topic of family life.

  Little Adele came running to the glade

  To tell the daisies of her sorrow…

  I sang about how the young shepherd girl was torn because she had to choose among three handsome young men. Mimosa listened and sniffled, secretly envying the heroine’s fortune. The song skipped ahead ten years. The narrator returned to the older shepherdess, wishing to find out what choice she had made and how her life had turned out. Unfortunately, Mimosa’s curiosity would have to go unsatisfied—it was no longer possible to identify one of the handsome paramours in the bloated, red face of Adele’s husband.

  Three different paths

  Will give you in the end

  Just a red face and a belly…

  The young biota hiccupped and looked up at me.

  “Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up,” I shared my bit of popular wisdom. “There’s nothing for you to be upset about. Live and be happy and in several years your married friends will envy you.”

  “Really?” Mimosa smiled meekly.

  “You bet!” I nodded confidently, secretly rejoicing that in several game years I wouldn’t be around to find out. Who knows how this story would really turn out?

  Attention! New bardic ability unlocked: ‘Song of Consolation.’ Dispel one or more negative status effects from the party. You may learn individual songs from songbooks or
by composing your own.

  Ah! It worked! In other words, consolation for us means the dispelling of debuffs. I wonder what ‘awaking love’ will unlock?

  Stepping out on the street, I immediately stumbled onto the pirc’s mocking look.

  “And where were you when I got married?” he sighed with exaggeration. “I would have dodged so many problems…Try and stay nearby, will you? What if I get married again and get my head knocked off a second time?”

  “Hah! In that case, you should memorize these verses!” I snorted happily and took ahold of my lute again. My mood was excellent and only a human would understand this poem about lost love I had rattling around my head.

  All in green went my love riding

  on a great horse of gold

  into the silver dawn.

  Chip listened to the poem quietly and, contrary to my expectations, grew more and more somber as I sang. Once I’d finished he sighed:

  “Ah…yes. And the Loveboat flounders against the bluffs of life…” He turned to the bustle behind him and began to bellow with exaggerated rancor: “What are you dumping all that salt into the ground beef for? You woeful leek, you vacuous onion!” And the pirc hurried to the site of the disaster as I read another system notification:

  Attention! New bardic skill unlocked: ‘Song of Woe.’ Song of Woe causes negative status effects in your listeners. You may learn individual songs from songbooks or by composing your own.

  Mmm. An odd outcome. It looks like I had accidentally rankled a sore wound in my furry friend. I don’t remember anything about woe in Coleus’ quest either. On the other hand, the option of dishing out debuffs could come in handy. Though it seems I’d managed to debuff Chip without any particular spells for the purpose.

  I opened my quest journal and reread the description: Demonstrate that your performance can awaken courage and love, grant warmth and succor, instil joy and light sorrow. No mention of anything negative. A strange quest. But tomorrow is a new day and I can finish my class quest then. For now, it’s time to cook.

  It was clear enough that Chip—and I by extension—had received a new, rare quest that led to a chain of further quests associated with the preparations for the Festival. Formally speaking we had to prepare dishes for our guests from the Lair, but the pirc and I knew whom the hospitable biota were really planning on feeding. Guests from beyond the Arras. And seeing as I was nauseated by all the dishes I loved so much out in meatspace, this quest was undoable for a biota. How can you prepare a dish that revolts you? I suppose the quest had been planned for visiting pircs, but our biota friends had a role in it too: Drinks had to be prepared both for our guests and for other biota. Soon enough I learned what the difference was: Whereas visitors to the Tree were accustomed to drinking punches, juices and lemonades, biota beverages were a bit more elaborate. Would you care for a cocktail of spring water, mixed with copper dust and garnished with a pinch of earth from some special hill? Sounds awful, to put it mildly—and yet it tasted…Well, I don’t even know what to compare it to. I suppose some kind of energy drink with a citrus taste. This drink was called ‘Copper Water’ and it granted +1 to Strength and Agility.

  This is all to say that we wasted more time on the culinary chain than we expected, but in exchange leveled up our culinary stats a pretty bit, as well as our reputations. We also got a chance to buy a sheaf of various recipes, including several rare ones.

  “So what’s up? Where are we off to next? To the blacksmith? The alchemist? The jeweler?” Chip asked, scratching his belly contentedly. His mood had clearly improved and the number of buffs he’d received from eating exceeded a dozen.

  “First let’s go find the sigils that we’re missing.”

  “Makes sense,” Chip said happily. “We’ll finish the map while we’re at it. Let me see what you have so far…”

  We copied each other’s updates and decided who would focus on what sector. It was looking like we would complete our project by the end of today or tomorrow.

  It was fun to look for sigils, but it was dull to draft a detailed map. Who needs all this topographical data, gradients, watercourses and other details? The map had to be drawn with multiple levels, keeping the various branches and their distances in mind. But Chip was unshakable and I had to go along with him. We’d started this together, so I had to work honestly. At least given the detail of the drafting, it wasn’t hard to find the Tenth’s sigils. At first glance, they were chaotically distributed, yet it seemed to me that as soon as we marked them all on the map, the pattern would jump out at me. We had only one more left to find…

  “…there’s a blank over there in the southwest sector,” a conversation between some passersby drew my attention. “There’s an interesting place there but the mobs are strong and those damn thorns…”

  “You think it’s worth looking around there?”

  “Without a doubt. I’ll need to level up my camouflage a bit more but then I’ll go check it out.”

  A group of incredibly high-level players walked past me, all of them Level 20–30. One of them noticed the map in my hands and stopped, curious:

  “Hey kid, where’d you get that map? What’s on it?”

  The word ‘kid’ almost made me lose my temper but the custom of teaching etiquette to passing players is a long-lost art.

  “I’m making a map of the tree. Learning cartography.”

  “Oh…” the player drawled, disappointed and losing all interest in me, ran to catch up with his party. “Such a newb thing. Wasting time on maps.”

  And like a mirage, the party of elites vanished around a corner.

  “What a constructive and civil exchange…” I muttered perplexed and returned to the task at hand.

  Chapter Ten

  By the time I caught up on my sleep and re-entered the game, the pirc had managed to locate all the other sigils and was currently bouncing in front of me like a furry ball. A very large furry ball with long sharp claws and a loud toothy mouth.

  “Do you even sleep?” I asked, yawning from inertia.

  “We’ll have time to sleep after Neo-Communism triumphs over Late Capitalism! Let’s go, commissar, I’ve stumbled on Kolchak’s stash of tsarist gold.”

  We ran past the sigils he’d found in just over an hour, but our final discovery didn’t shed any further light on the puzzle.

  Quest updated: The Mysterious Sigil (36 of 36 sigils located).

  Achievement unlocked: ‘She may be a big girl, but she still believes in fairy tales…’

  Achievement reward: +1 Attractiveness with NPC children.

  And that’s it. No fanfare, no congratulations or rewards—unless you count this super-useful Achievement.

  “Looks like I’m a little bird,” I replied to Chip’s unasked question.

  “What?” he asked, stumped.

  “The naïve little bird, ever heard of her? She nests in the eaves and makes friends with cormorants.”

  “Aww what the hell,” the pirc said annoyed when I showed him the Achievement I’d unlocked. “In other words we just scoured the entire tree like a pair of lunatics strictly for the glee of the developers? There has to be some kind of system, some riddle…”

  “There doesn’t have to be anything,” I grunted in reply, also irritated. “Do you have any idea how many empty social quests over nothing they have here?”

  I opened my mouth to go on but immediately shut it. The quest! There had been no notification that I’d completed the ‘Mysterious Sigil’ quest. And this meant that there was more to do.

  “Let’s look for patterns,” Chip went on after I’d shared my realization with him. “What do we have?”

  “A bunch of dots on the map,” I grunted, unfurling my parchment. “No detectable system. They’re distributed wherever, without any regard for the branches.”

  “Let’s see…” Chip settled down beside me, unfurled a clean parchment and glancing over at mine began to sketch a strange figure. As I understood it, he was drawing lines b
etween the points we’d found. Completing his work, he placed both scrolls beside each other and began to slide his fingers over their surfaces.

  “Bunch of convoluted, Fustian nonsense…” he muttered and began to sketch a second shape. He repeated this process several times, with the only difference being that on his third pass, the pirc made no comment at all.

  “Ah get outta here!” He slapped my knee, exasperated, once he’d completed his check. Was he really tracing this flower because he had nothing better to do?

  Checking the map one more time, the pirc gave up and waved his paw:

  “That’s it. Abort. Return to base immediately. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  “It’s already morning,” I reminded him.

  “Don’t be pedantic. We’ll have to sleep on this.”

  “All right, we can crack our heads on it again later. Pretty soon we’ll hit Level 10 and we still haven’t dabbled in jewelcrafting.”

  “I have this one idea…” Chip said in a conspiratorial tone and waved me to follow him.

  On the way to the master jeweler, Chip suddenly stopped, frowned as if he’d bitten into a lemon and blurted out:

  “Hold up. There’s a…this thing…I lost track of time. I need to pop out to reality for a half hour. Will you wait?”

  “Not even a question. I’ll check out the various ways of growing my character in the meantime.”

  Chip exited to meatspace. I sat down in the shade of a large flower and decided to spend my time with purpose: crawl around the fora and consider the build for my character.

  So, what did I have? I could merge my build with one of the standard classes or create something new and unique by mixing various traits and abilities. This means that I’d have to familiarize myself with the diversity of the various class skills and roles in general terms and then delve further into the promising directions.