Couch Potato Chaos- Gamebound

by Erik Rounds

  Time remaining: 42 minutes

  Hands trembling, she took the weapon and turned back to the man. Did they expect her to kill him?

  “It’s easy,” said the queen’s man. “That weapon will make you strong. Just push it into the elf’s chest.”

  She looked at the shining green weapon and then back up at the elf. His defiance from before was gone, and his eyes shone with fear and hate.

  Panella looked at the crowd. A chant had started again. “Kill the elf! Kill the elf! Kill the elf!”

  She didn’t want to kill anyone, but all those people wanted her to. If she did what they said, she would make them happy. She remembered the boy who had stabbed the woman with the pointed ears. After he did it, the woman stopped moving. The people in the crowd were happy about it and loved him. Would they love her too? An adult was telling her to put the knife into the elf’s body. Wasn’t she supposed to do what adults told her?

  She looked at the dark elf who returned her gaze with hate filled eyes but remained silent.

  His scan information appeared. The elf was a level 36 healer named Naclorien.

  She looked back to the crowd. Everyone was cheering her on. Well, not everyone. She found her father in the crowd. Why wasn’t her father cheering her on? She wasn’t the best at reading people’s emotions, but she could tell that he wasn’t happy with her. He said something to her, but she couldn’t hear what it was from so far away.

  She touched the edge of the blade with her finger. It cut straight through her skin without any resistance at all. A small trickle of blood poured out of the cut. She could feel power radiating from the knife. It would be easy. Just one push of the blade into his chest would be enough.

  The queen’s man knelt down next to her. “You have to kill him. It’s easier than you think. All of those people out there want you to do it. Don’t you want them to love you?”

  She looked at her dad who mouthed the word “No.” Panella dropped the knife to the ground. Its blade sank into the wood-paneled floor up to its hilt. The cheers of the crowd turned into boos and angry sounds.

  “Pick it up,” said the guard. “If you don’t kill him, someone else will. Remember that he’s just an elf. He isn’t like us. He doesn’t feel pain the same way we do. His kind are lesser. It is the prerogative of the weak to be dominated by the strong. That’s just how the world was designed.”

  Pan didn’t understand, but knew she didn’t want to be here. She wanted to go home. She started toward the stairs, but the man grabbed her arm, stopping her from leaving.

  “You can’t go until you do what I’ve told you. The people out there came to see blood. If it isn’t his, it’ll have to be yours. If these people think you’re an elf lover, you’ll never make any friends. The other kids are doing it, and soon they’ll be stronger. You don’t want to be left behind, do you?”

  She shook her head. Why was she so weak? She didn’t know what to do. She collapsed to the ground in a fetal position with her hands over her head. Her entire body was shaking.

  One of the queen’s men stood her up and another punched her in the stomach three times, and then twice in the face. The strikes were painful but not especially strong. After their assault, she still had three and a quarter heart containers. The blows were meant to hurt, not to kill. The man holding her threw her into the assembled crowd, who moved aside as she tumbled to the ground.

  She tried to get up, but adults were kicking her and pushing her back to the ground. One of them was her neighbor’s father. Why was he hitting her? She coughed up blood. It hurt. It hurt so much. She tried to laugh it off, but that just made the adults angrier for some reason.

  She should have done what the man said. Why did she have to be so weak?

  By the time Ari pushed his way to Panella, she was down to half a heart container. Ari stood between her and the mob. Most of them backed away, their courage having evaporated. The situation had empowered the mob to attack a low-level unarmed girl, but not one of them wanted to risk fighting a grown man to get to her.

  Ari picked up the girl and put a health potion to her mouth. One of the queen’s men approached him. “You’re this girl’s father?”

  “Yes, I am,” Ari said.

  “She disappointed us today, but that’s all right. Our benevolent queen is generous with her gifts. If your daughter can find her courage before we leave, we’ll still honor the queen’s promise to bring her to level 5. I suggest you speak with her before returning. It will take over a month to drain the elves of their levels, so be sure to return before then.”

  As Panella swallowed the red liquid from the health potion, mist poured over her body, fixing the damaged areas, and her cuts and bruises disappeared.

  The crowd had already forgotten about her as they cheered the next child, who had taken her place on the platform. A girl even younger than her held the shining green dagger in the air in victory. Someone unbound the limp figure from the post and threw him into the cart atop a pile of elven bodies. It was the dark-elven man that she’d spared. His lifeless, unseeing red eyes stared in her direction.

  “Let’s go home,” Ari said as he placed her on the ground and led her away from the mob.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be. You did the right thing. There is no honor in killing an unarmed and bound opponent. It might take us a few more years, and you’ll have to train harder, but we’ll get you there, and unlike those who took the queen’s gift, you will have earned it.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  From that point on, Pan began to take a more active role in combat against mist monsters, despite her young age. Ari purchased a lightweight crossbow for her to use.

  At first, she had terrible aim, but she trained every day, and bit by bit, her aim improved. Her hands were always trembling, but when she held her breath and focused, she could steady them, even if only for a few critical seconds. She wanted to put points into precision to be a better shot, but Ari insisted that she focus on strength and agility to compensate for her physical deficiencies.

  When she was seven, her vocabulary had improved to the point where she could speak in short sentences, though her enunciation and body language didn’t always match her words. It was much easier for her to write what she wanted to say rather than try to communicate verbally. She would often become frustrated by her inability to speak like everyone else, and her severe physical disabilities were a constant source of stress. Autistic meltdowns were routine, but she learned that she could reduce their frequency and intensity by spending time in cold, quiet, dark places, such as Mad Marina’s broom closet. Silent meditation helped her avoid sensory overload to a small degree.

  One day in her eighth year, she wanted to learn more about her class. So while Ari was speaking with Pan and Marina, she asked him about it. She knew how to summon Ari and understood that she would be able to summon other figments at higher levels, but other than that, she really didn’t know much.

  Ari explained that summoners invoked beings known as figments who shared a portion of the summoner’s mind. Pan already knew that, but then he explained that when the summoner grew to sixteen years of age, the summoner would lose the ability to summon, and the class would be lost. Upon hearing this, she grew visibly panicked. She scribbled something on her notebook and handed it to him.

  The question was: “What will happen to you when I turn sixteen?”

  “I’ll disappear forever,” he said. “I’m a figment, just a projection of your mind. Without your imagination to bring me to life, I won’t exist.”

  “Wh-why?” she asked. “Why d-d-d…” Tears formed in her eyes, and she wiped them away.

  Marina frowned. “You didn’t tell her before now?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because you were too young to understand,” said Ari. “Because there’s nothing I can do to change it. Maybe because it was too hard to say. You don’t need to worry about me, Pan. I’m not afraid or anything. Figments are transie
nt beings who normally only exist for minutes at a time. I’ve lived longer than any imaginary person has a right to.”

  For a long time she didn’t say anything, but finally she scribbled a response into her notebook and handed it to him. “I don’t want you to disappear. There has to be a way for you to remain.”

  Ari handed the notebook back. “I’ll admit that I’ve become attached to the idea of living, but there’s nothing to be done. I’ve read quite a lot on the topic, and if there is a way to keep me alive, nobody has found it.”

  She wrote her response. “If no mortal has found a way, then we need to ask a god.”

  “You’re being silly. Even if we knew where an eidolon was, most of them take the forms of animals, weather patterns, satellites, or abstract concepts. Only a small handful of eidolons deign to speak with mortals.”

  “What about Libra?” asked Marina. “He might be able to help.”

  Pan looked at the ancient woman. “M-Marina… who is L-Libra?”

  Marina looked at her. “Call me Mad Marina. I feel like I’ve earned that moniker, and I won’t have people not showing me due respect by leaving it off. Either that, or call me Gran.”

  “Was that a triple negative?” Ari muttered at the old woman’s antics.

  “G-Gr-Gran,” Pan offered.

  Ari decided to push the issue. “Why do you insist on calling yourself mad? Your wacky antics aside, you happen to be one of the clearest thinkers I know.”

  “The majority of any society must be sane by definition,” Marina said. “Frankly, I want nothing to do with those self-interested bastards. Now then, Libra is the eidolon of prophecy. He’s always moving from place to place, disappearing here and appearing there. Nobody knows where he’ll be at any given time, but if you can find him, just offer him a coin, and he’ll tell you something… interesting. Whether he tells you how to save Ari is anyone’s guess.”

  “Okay,” said Ari. “So how do we find this Libra?”

  “I just told you that nobody knows where he’ll be at any given time. Weren’t you listening? I’ve always suspected that there was some pattern to his movement and the timing of his appearances. So throughout the years I’ve been keeping detailed logs of where and when he’s been sighted.”

  Ari frowned. “Really? You just happen to have this critical piece of information. Why? Why have you been doing this? What is Libra to you?”

  “Why, he asks,” Marina said. “Why? It’s because I’m mad, obviously! Haven’t you been paying attention all these years? “

  “You want to ask Libra a question of your own, don’t you?” asked Ari.

  Marina turned away. “Maybe I did. I doubt I’ll have the chance now.”

  “What is your question, Mad Marina?”

  “It really doesn’t matter now. Panella’s question is much more important.”

  “Pan. Don’t l-like P-Panella,” said Pan.

  “You shouldn’t be so particular about your name, young lady,” Marina said. “Just look at me. I don’t care what people call me, do I?”

  “No… No, Mad M-Marina.”

  “So, anyway, I’ll show you my notes, and maybe we can work out some pattern to its movements, assuming a pattern actually exists.”

  “What does this eidolon look like?” Ari said. “If we’re going to be looking for him, it might help to know what he looks like.”

  Marina went to a bookshelf and took down an old tome. She opened it to a page somewhere in the two hundreds and showed a drawing of the eidolon to Ari and Pan.

  “Libra doesn’t look human,” she said. “He is a puppet inside an unmoving glass and wooden box. There is a coin slot in the front. Querents are expected to put a 1 GP coin inside the slot while asking the puppet a question. After it does a funny song and dance, it spits out a piece of paper with some interesting piece of information relevant to the querent.”

  Over the next three years, the three of them tried different predictive models to calculate Libra’s historical appearances. Pan began learning some advanced mathematics and needed to allocate some stat points into intelligence, despite her father’s insistence that she focus on strength and agility.

  At first there seemed to be no pattern to where Libra would appear. Sometimes he would appear in the middle of a field with nothing for hundreds of miles, and other times he would appear in someone’s bedroom with no warning. Once, a merchant ship had found the eidolon floating on the surface of the ocean. They were assuming that most of the time, his positions were not recorded, and they were working with limited data. If they had more information, working out a pattern would be easier.

  Pan created a list of its locations given what they knew about the latitude and longitude of its appearances. She used pieces of yarn to connect its appearances in chronological order on the interior of a large glass globe, hoping some visual pattern would become evident. In the end, it just looked like a glass globe with bits of string connecting dots.

  Marina suggested that they try to connect the points in a different order than chronological. In at least some of the records, the nature of the question had been included. She tried to connect the different points geographically on the globe by matching similar themes together. Oddly, there did seem to be a pattern—no similarly themed question was asked in the same geographical area.

  In fact, the distance between similarly themed questions seemed to be the same. Similarly themed questions were always asked exactly 333 miles away from one another. Lines between those questions always formed equilateral triangles.

  They started looking for a question that would be similar in theme to “How would you allow a figment to exist without a summoner?” There were only two questions that were even close in theme to that one. One question asked whether a person could continue to exist in Etheria in some manner after physical death. The other question was about how to imbue golems with sentience. Both questions had to do with the nature of life and how to give it to something that had none. Most questions were less of an existential nature and more of a get-rich-quick nature.

  Pan connected the points on the globe with uniquely colored pieces of yarn. She drew two circles on the outside, representing a 333-mile radius around each point, showing the possible locations of Libra’s next appearance. That was assuming, of course, that Libra kept to the positional pattern and hadn’t already appeared at one of those locations sometime in the past.

  The circles intersected at two points. One of them was in the middle of Ultros Bay, right in the middle of the water. The other was in Zhakara, not even thirty miles from the village of Wilmarth, where the three of them lived. That seemed too great of a coincidence to be mere happenstance. Now they knew where Libra would appear; what they didn’t know was when he would make his appearance. He could appear at that spot tomorrow or in a thousand years for all they knew.

  For a while, they were unable to solve this. Pan wanted to go there immediately and wait for it to appear, but both Ari and Marina couldn’t agree to that plan. Without a city’s monster-repelling field, there was nothing to stop mobs from attacking every few hours. Setting up shop there without enough GP to build a portable monster-repellent field was foolhardy at best.

  It was Pan who finally solved the conundrum. She suggested looking for patterns on a four-dimensional hyper-sphere rather than a simple three-dimensional sphere. The difficulty with this was that they couldn’t model it using a globe and pieces of yarn. Four-dimensional space wasn’t something easily comprehensible by humans. One of the more cerebral races might be able to help them, but in Zhakara anyone who wasn’t human was a slave and had long since had their independence and free-thinking natures beaten out of them.

  They ended up saving up some of their GP and “renting” one of Lord Hempledon’s arachnid slaves. An elf might have been able to work out the calculations, and the owlfolk were the wisest, but the spider women were the most advanced at higher mathematics.

  The spider woman’s name was Spindra. The upper part
of her body was vaguely elven in appearance with pointy ears angled backward. Her lower half was that of a spider. She wore a tattered white shirt and a slave color that shone with a dim light.

  Ari extended his hand to shake hers. The spider woman took it hesitantly. Her eyes darted to the charts and numbers as well as the large globe in the middle of Mad Marina’s study.

  “Hello, Spindra,” he said. “My name is Aralogos. This is my daughter, Pan, and this lady is Mad Marina. We were hoping you could help us solve a puzzle.”

  Spindra took her hand back and shot a look at her handler, who stood in the entrance. He was never out of sight. The other slaves might have been broken, but her mind was still as sharp as it was when she was captured many years ago. “Aralogos. Pan. Mad Marina. Spindra greets you and thanks you for letting her leave her cage, even if only for a moment.”

  “They keep you in a cage?” Mad Marina asked.

  The spider woman nodded her head. “When they don’t use Spindra to do their pointless budget calculations, they keep her in a cage and show her off as a prize.”

  Her eyes shot back to her human handler nervously. She moved closer to Mad Marina and spoke in a low voice. “Spindra knows what you want from her. Those charts. Those dates and numbers you have written down on the chalkboard. That globe. You are trying to predict an event that will occur thirty miles from here, and you want Spindra to look for patterns from a higher dimensional perspective.”

  “You were able to figure all that out just by looking at our notes?” Ari said.

  “Spindra already knows the answer,” she said. “There’s nothing in four dimensions, but in six, the answer is obvious. Spindra knows exactly when this event will occur.”

  “When?” asked Pan. “P-please help.”

  Spindra glanced again at her human handler nervously. She then leaned over to Marina, “Spindra will tell you, but first you must free her and kill that guard. Can you remove Spindra’s collar? It stops her from weaving spells.”

  “I want to help,” Ari said, “but if we let you go, they’ll kill us. We can’t fight every guard between here and the city gates.”