by Erik Rounds
Tasha shook her head. “I don’t have anything like that. I don’t feel like any kind of legendary figure, though. I’m just a girl who likes playing games.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. We did meet in the Temple of the Player, so it isn’t that outlandish a possibility,” Ari said, “I see you’ve already met my daughter. Don’t be offended; she’s shy around new people.”
Tasha crossed her arms. “But not too shy to steal from them? Your daughter took something that belongs to me.”
He brought out his daughter from behind him. “Oh no, not again. What did you take from her?”
The small girl showed Tasha’s phone to Ari.
“I’ve told you before, only use your Steal ability on monsters, not on people. Other people don’t like it when you take their things. Now return the magical glowing rectangle to our new friend and say you’re sorry.”
The girl protested, pointing at the pile of digestive fluids on the ground, “But… I thought… she was a m-monster.”
“Hmm. You probably shouldn’t say that about someone. Most people will think it’s rude. Anyway, give the nice lady back her rectangle.”
She outstretched her arm, handing the phone to Tasha. She looked at the ground, her face an unreadable mask.
Tasha took the phone from her, and the girl’s hand went back to her side. “It’s okay, no harm done. How about we team up and find a way out?”
Ari shook his head. “We can’t leave yet. We need to search the temple for something. Don’t worry, though, we’ll help you find a way out first.”
The girl was completely covered by her cloak. Tasha was only able to see her face.
“Hey, no hard feelings about the phone, okay? What’s your name?”
A look of abject terror appeared on the girl’s face. She opened her mouth, and Tasha thought she was going to say something, but no words came out. After several attempts, she said “P… p…”
She pulled out a notebook and scribbled something on it with a pencil, handing to Tasha. It read, “My name is Pan. Sorry about before.”
“Pan?” Tasha said.
The girl smiled and nodded, sighing in relief.
Tasha said, “You don’t talk much, do you?” Pan just shook her head while looking at the floor.
“Listen,” said Ari, “did you eat yet? Why don’t you join us for lunch? At least I think it’s lunchtime. The menu clocks don’t seem to be working like they should be, which is concerning.”
Tasha’s mind filled with thoughts of food, and happy thoughts flooded her. “Yeah, I could eat.”
Ari tapped at an unseen surface in the air in front of him, and a pizza in a nondescript brown cardboard box materialized in his outstretched hands.
“Where did you get that?” asked Tasha.
“This pizza? It’s a fairly common monster drop if you know where to hunt. I hope you like pineapples and ham on your pizza. Pan gets anxiety when pizzas don’t have pineapples on them.” Ari looked apologetic.
Tasha didn’t actually like Hawaiian pizza but had the good sense not to say so. She took a seat and grabbed a slice. “So… Mr. Aralogos. What brings the two of you to this temple?”
“Just call me Ari. The two of us have been searching for something, and our search led us here. We weren’t expecting a temple to appear all around us.”
“What are you looking for, exactly?”
Pan hesitated before answering. “A cure.”
“A cure for what?”
Pan just remained silent. Maybe she meant a cure for her condition. It seemed like she was more than just shy. She might be autistic, but Tasha couldn’t say for sure.
She decided not to pry any further, and their conversation quickly turned to other topics. Tasha’s health and mana had been gradually recovering as she ate. By the time the pizza was done, her health had been fully refilled and she felt refreshed.
“Ari, can you tell me about magic? That cleaning spell you cast on me before, can anyone do that? I’ve been focused on increasing my number of hearts, but I was wondering if I should think about increasing my mana supply instead.”
“Sure,” Ari said. “Anyone can cast spells, but caster types deal higher amounts of damage and can use more complicated techniques. Spells consume mana containers that slowly refill over time outside of combat, so the number of mana containers that you have decides the number of spells that you’ll be able to cast in a single battle. It is possible to cast multiple spells with the same container, depending on the spell.”
“So how would I cast spells?”
“You’ll need to write them yourself, or transcribe them from a spell book. I found this simple fireball spell book here in the library.” He pulled out a scroll and held it out to her. “Take it. Pan already knows the spell ,and I have no need of it.”
She thought about the tabletop and video games where spellbooks vanished once they were read by the caster. “Will the book disappear if I copy the spell?”
He handed the book to Tasha. “Disappear? Of course not. It’s just a book with some script on it. Go into your menu, click on magic, then ‘create new.’ That’ll bring you to a spell designer. Just copy the script exactly as it is written.”
Tasha opened the menu and tapped through it, bringing up the spell designer. A floating QWERTY keyboard appeared in the air in front of her. She took a good long look at the spellbook, flipping through the pages.
The first page described the fireball spell and where it should be used as well as the potential dangers of misuse. The spell itself began on the second page. She read the first entry and recognized what it was immediately.
“I know what this is. I mean the language and syntax is different from what I’m used to, but it’s definitely source code. There’s a class definition, event handlers, conditional statements…”
She kept turning pages. “This seems to be a list of commands to manifest a projectile and an event handler to compress the air at the end point, transmute the gathered air into hydrogen, and ignite it, creating an explosion.
“So… magic is basically computer programming, and mages are all programming nerds. That makes so much sense.”
“I don’t know what a computer is,” Ari said, “but yes. All magic spells are scripted programs. The script is just half of the process, though. Once you are ready to invoke a spell, you need to gather the mana within your body to feed to the spell.”
“How do I do that?”
“It will automatically happen when try casting the spell, though there are techniques you can use to purify your mana, amplifying its effects. For now, just focus on casting the spell.”
Tasha spent the next half hour transcribing the code from the spellbook to the menu screen while Ari went through the rest of the books. It was unfortunate, but there didn’t appear to be any way to transfer spell scripts other than copying them by hand.
“Now this is interesting. When I added the part that creates the projectile, a red marker appeared, indicating mana cost offset. Same thing for the end-point explosion. The script that describes how to cast it has a negative cost.”
“That’s so you can see how much spells cost,” Ari said. “You can offset the mana cost by adding elaborate and complicated methods of invoking the spell. So if you see a mage dancing a jig while chanting, he might be trying to cast an expensive spell without needing to consume too much mana.
“I’ve never met a gunblade user, but I think you can change the invoke script to allow the spell to cast when you pull the trigger.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Tasha as she tapped away at the invisible keyboard. “The code completion feature is showing me a list of API commands. If I just change this slightly… and done.”
She tapped on “Save,” and the fireball spell was added to her list of available spells. “Let’s try this out.”
Raising the gun, Tasha flicked the switch to spellcasting mode, brought it to eye level, and pointed it at the back wall.
“No wait!�
�� yelled Ari, but it was already too late. When Tasha pulled the trigger, energy rushed through her entire body, starting from her feet and shooting into her abdomen, her chest, and into her head. It wasn’t painful, more like a tingling sensation that ran through her body.
Red light filled her sword ,culminating into a fireball that emerged from the end and crashed into the wall. Tasha was knocked backward against the opposite wall by the recoil. Fortunately the fireball explosion didn’t hit any of the books.
“Sweet!” she exclaimed in triumph. There were burn marks on the wall. Pan was watching happily with a big smile on her face.
Ari facepalmed. “Tasha, are you insane? We are in an enclosed space surrounded by books that are made out of extremely flammable paper.”
She lowered the gunblade. “Oh, right. My bad. I’ll be more careful with that from now on. So… are there any other spellbooks in the library?”
“No, that was the only spellbook. There are some other books you might be interested in, though.”
Tasha began to peruse the library’s selection. It wasn’t a large library by any means, but there were several dozen books that caught Tasha’s attention. One was titled A Brief History of Questgivria. She leafed through A Treatise on the GP Based Economy, A Bozo’s Guide to Effective Inventory Management, as well as Gods, Eidolons, and Aire: Who They Are And How Not To Piss Them Off.
One book that caught her attention was titled Complete Magic-System API, which would surely come in handy when designing spells. Ultimately she took all of the books and added them to her inventory for later perusal. Each book took up a single slot in her inventory—presumably because they were each unique titles and therefore didn’t stack. She had two hundred slots, so she was fine for the time being.
As she was removing everything from the room that wasn’t nailed down and adding them to her inventory, she asked Ari, “So do you know anything about the couch potato class?”
“Just a little,” he said. “It’s a difficult class to be. Most people go for the more straightforward fighter and caster classes.”
Tasha frowned. “So you’re saying it’s a crappy class?”
“Not at all. Most classes unlock new abilities automatically by leveling up. The couch potato class is different. With couch potato, the only way to unlock new abilities is by reading books, watching plays, or listening to music or stories. Each book offers a different ability, and there’s no way to know what ability you’ll get until you actually read the book. The same book might teach a different ability to different people with the couch potato class.
“Once you actually learn a new ability, it only remains unlocked until you replace it with a different ability from another book. The abilities unlocked in this way are at level 0. If you can raise them to level 1 before switching abilities, it remains unlocked permanently.”
Tasha smiled. “So I can get any ability from any class just by reading books, playing games, or watching movies?”
“Movies?” Ari said, looking at her strangely. “I have no idea what that is, but yes. You can unlock any ability from any class. The catch is that you wouldn’t know which book to read to gain that ability. You might spend a lifetime just trying to find the right book to give you the skill you’re looking for. With other classes, you know ahead of time which abilities you’ll get at which level. Also, the abilities are still level locked. So if you receive a level 10 pickpocket ability that belongs to the thief class, you wouldn’t be able to use it until you reach level 10 in couch potato.”
“It still sounds like I’ll be able to get more abilities as a couch potato.”
“That’s true, though you need to put much more effort into finding and mastering those abilities.”
“Is there anything else I should know about the class?” she asked.
“The class-based stat bonuses are more complicated. A fighter class might offer bonuses to strength, and a mage class might offer bonuses to intelligence, but the couch potato class is trickier. As a couch potato, you’ll receive a bonus to every stat after reading a book. That bonus decreases over time.”
“So, the stat bonus is only really useful for a few hours after I read a book or watch a movie?”
“That’s right. It gets worse, though. The bonus can go negative, and when it does, you lose stat points, and the number of heart containers drops by half. Don’t get me wrong, the couch potato class is a powerful class. In fact, it is common among crafters and merchants. It is, however, one of the hardest classes to master.”
“Thanks, Ari. How do you know so much about this?”
He shrugged. “I do a lot of reading.”
Having taken everything of value from the room that wasn’t nailed to the floor, they made their way back to the room that Pan had found her in. The same room that used to hold carnivorous slinkers. Denver was curled up on the floor, taking a catnap. He looked up and got to his feet as he saw his mistress approaching.
Before Tasha had a chance to introduce him to the two newcomers, Pan had already gone up to Denver and started petting him, and he licked her face in return. It turned out that the girl liked dinosaurs.
They continued exploring the temple. Pan and Ari had already cleared out most of the lower level. Finally the party reached a large room that appeared to be the entrance. There was a large doorway with stained-glass windows shining multicolored light into the room. On the floor against two opposing walls were four pressure plates.
Ari looked the room over. “I believe that if we stand on all four pressure plates at the same time, that the door will open. That’s how these sorts of puzzles usually work.”
Pan and Ari each stood on two of the plates on one side. Unfortunately, Pan wasn’t quite heavy enough to weigh it down, so she removed some of the heavier items from her inventory to increase her weight. It seemed that when items were stored in a person’s inventory, they ceased to exist until they were removed. Tasha would have to inquire about that in the future since the disappearance of objects appeared to violate the law of conservation of mass.
Getting Denver to stand on the pressure plate and not move wasn’t easy. Eventually she coaxed him to lie down on the plate by luring him there with a slice of pizza. Fortunately he stayed there for long enough for Tasha to reach her own pressure plate. As she stepped on the plate, the room started to rumble, and a hole opened up in the center of the room. High tempo orchestral music began to play in her head. She recognized the style of music as a video game boss battle theme. Rising to fill the hole was a circular platform containing an enormous iron glove that ascended into the room.
Words appeared in the air above it in a fancy script:
The Master Glove – Dungeon Boss
In her HUD, scan data appeared for the temple’s boss monster:
The Master Glove (Level 6)
Boss monster who guards the Temple of the Player. The Master Glove is a floating disembodied white glove… of DOOM!
ATK 7
Mag ATK not applicable
DEF not applicable
Mag DEF not applicable
Thirty small hearts appeared in the air above the towering figure.
Tasha staggered backward. The monsters she’d fought against so far had been small and manageable. This floating glove, on the other hand, was nearly as large as her living room.
Pan brought out her crossbow, aimed it at the floating iron glove, and pulled the trigger. The bolt left the crossbow, hitting the glove but deflecting off its iron surface, dealing no damage.
Ari turned to Pan. “Don’t waste your ammo. Don’t forget that this is a dungeon boss. You’ll only be able to hurt its special weak point. Just watch its attack patterns for any openings.”
The fist formed into a palm and swept across the room, pummeling Tasha’s body and slamming her into the wall, knocking her breath out. The battle had just started, and she was already down to three hearts.
The palm slammed into the ground in three different places across the combat a
rena. It drew back into the air and pointed, thumb up and index finger pointed toward Tasha. Light coalesced at the edge of its finger. Tasha dodged out of the way as a bolt of lightning stormed toward where she had been only moments before. A small crater appeared in the wall.
In the palm of the hand, an eyeball opened. Tasha’s video-game-fu told her that this must be its weak spot. Traditionally, eyeballs and glowing squares indicated points on a boss where they could take damage. She aimed her gunblade at the eyeball and shot a fireball. The shot was off and hit the palm to the side of its eye, doing no damage and consuming half of her mana in the process. She wouldn’t be able to cast that spell again during this battle.
After that, the giant metal glove repeated the same set pattern. First it would sweep across the room, then slap the same three places in the ground that now had impact marks, did a projectile attack at one of the party members, and then opened up, revealing an eyeball. The entire cycle took less than half a minute. The second time it appeared, she missed as well. Tasha clearly needed to boost her precision stat.
“Pan, I need you shoot the eyeball when it appears.”
The girl nodded and quickly reloaded her crossbow while Ari and Tasha dodged the monster’s attacks. Denver had wisely run off somewhere.
When the eyeball was finally revealed a third time, Pan fired a bolt right into the hand’s eye. Tasha cringed sympathetically despite herself. The hand collapsed to the ground, eye pointed upward. Tasha ran to the hand and stabbed it over and over. Ari’s fist appeared to turn to stone as he pounded against the eyeball over and over again. Once they had dealt ten hearts of damage, it closed its eye and began the cycle all over again.
This time it added another attack to the cycle. After the projectile attack, it spun its index finger around in a circle, blasting the ground open as the end point of its beam hit the floor. Tasha took a hit from its finger bullet, and that brought her down to two hearts. Pan missed her opportunity to fire since she had to dodge its circle attack. Finally Pan did manage to hit it the next time around. Ari and Tasha beat the crap out of the collapsed glove, bringing it down to ten heart containers.