by Rachel Ford
Andrew started to cry, and the ranger sighed. “For the love of the gods, stop sniveling, boy, and tell us what happened.”
It took a little more tact and compassion on Jack’s and Ceinwen’s parts to get the boy to resume the story. But in a minute, he did. William and the demons, he said, stripped Mayor Ashford and the dead of their valuables. “Everything – every coin, every ring, everything that could be sold.
“And William took it all. He called it ‘his payment.’
“But one of the demons – he tried holding out on him, I guess. He slipped the mayor’s ring on. He and William, they fought. William knifed him, and the demon – he went down.
“But William couldn’t get the ring off. He even tried cutting his hand off, but nothing worked. And the other demons, they were mad as hornets on account of the killing. So William took his treasure and went on his way.
“And the demons, they went on their way too – them, and the mayor, all trussed up like a ham for a feast day.”
Andrew had stayed there all night, and all the next day too. He’d managed to get the arrow out of his arm and stop his bleeding. “But I didn’t dare go back the way I came – for that was the way William went. And I figured…well, I figured someone would be out this way sooner rather than later to look for the mayor.
“Only…only no one came. Until you showed up.”
Jack nodded. “I think I know where your mayor is, Andrew. I’m not sure it will be much of a consolation. But they didn’t take him to torture him. They took him to a fortress, far from here. A terrible demon named Kalbidor – he is collecting a thousand heroes together. I think your mayor is one of them.”
Andrew blinked. “Why?”
“Well…to kill them.” Andrew shivered. “He needs their souls to unleash an even worse demon.”
“Poor Mayor Ashford.”
“Poor world,” Arath said. “The mayor’s one of the lucky ones: he’s already going to be dead when Iaxiabor returns.”
“If Iaxiabor returns,” Karag corrected.
“I do have one question,” Ceinwen said.
“What?” the boy asked.
“Did you – did you stab a fox earlier?”
Andrew stared at her in frank surprise. “Yes. I – well, I was going to eat it. But it got away. How did you…how did you know?”
“It’s a long story. But – that fox, it led us to you.”
Chapter Nine
Jack used a healing potion on the kid, which restored his arm to working order. His companions furnished the boy with food and water. Then they all set out for Fox’s Crossing together.
Jack’s new objectives were to report Mayor Ashford’s fate to Marsha Wellington, and to tell her the truth about William the Wanderer. He also noticed that he had an objective about bringing the foxes back to town.
Andrew talked as they walked. Not now and then, or in spurts. He just talked. And talked. And talked.
Jack tried to be patient. He tried to remind himself that this kid had spent a month on his own, injured, starving and fearing death at the hands of demons or cutthroats. But by the second hour, he was ready to offer himself up to the demons for sacrifice, if only it brought an end to the talking.
The worst part was that the conversation was utterly meaningless. At first, Jack had assumed it had something to do with their quest. He figured Andrew would drop some hint about the demons, or maybe their surroundings, or…something.
But he didn’t. He went on about his family, and how much he missed his parents, and the last meal he’d eaten back in Fox’s Crossing, and a hundred other mundane topics that Jack tried to ignore.
And the more the kid talked, the more Jack wondered what the hell the developers had been thinking. Had they really paid a voice actor to record all of this meaningless minutia about a random NPC’s exceedingly boring day-to-day? Worse, had someone first spent their time scripting this rubbish? And, for the love of God: why?
Was this some kind of inside joke? A test of the player’s patience? Or had one of the team run out of real work, and decided to pursue this nonsense?
He was pondering this perplexing puzzle so intently that he missed the first notes of ominous music floating over the horizon. It wasn’t until Ceinwen touched the hilt of her blade and asked, “What’s that?” that he heard it: soft and low and promising trouble.
“Oh sugar.” He threw a glance around the open plains. He could see nothing and no one. But that music signaled only one thing: there were bad guys nearby. A fight was going to go down.
Jack was still trying to puzzle out where the bad guys were when a stab of pain shot through his back.
Real pain. The kind of thing that wasn’t supposed to happen in a videogame – not even a virtual reality one.
And this was a lot of pain. He could feel blood trickling down his back, and the great, deep gash from which it flowed. “Duck,” he said, which only rhymed with what he meant.
Ceinwen, though, nodded. “They’re coming from above. Stay low. Keep your eyes on the sky.”
Jack had no idea what she was talking about, but he glanced upward. “Suds and biscuits.” Huge, fierce birds circled overhead. He could see the silhouette of their talons and beaks, and great, terrible wingspans.
The music went on pounding away, low and threatening. The birds started to squawk and shriek.
“Raptors,” Arath said. “They probably spotted the dwarf. There’s bad blood there between raptors and dwarves.”
Jack nodded vaguely. He remembered dialogue options earlier in the game that mentioned dwarves enslaving raptors, though that had been in reference to a different, larger species.
But he wasn’t thinking about Migli’s ancestral guilt. He was thinking of something far more recent – of his own run-in with a sea raptor in the southern isles. A run-in that, in combination with a little bit of bad judgement and hubris, had led to the accidental death of a few young sea raptors. Accidents happen, and all of that.
The consequences of that particular accident, though, hadn’t been pretty. At the time, the game had told him he was reviled by creatures of the air. And though he’d done a little penance in the intervening playtime, he was still disliked by the creatures of the air – a broad category that encompassed everything from dragons to birds. Presumably, including this species of raptor that was trying to shred him.
“Wicked creatures,” Migli said. “Once we used them as messengers, and their larger cousins for transport. Now they are grown wild and brutish.”
“Which is dwarf for ‘they won their freedom in battle,’” Arath said with a wild laugh. “But human for ‘tastes good roasted over an open fire.’” He raised a blade toward the heavens, and called, “Come on then, you vermin. Come at me. I could use a hot meal.”
The raptors obliged, screaming down to divebomb him and the entire party.
Karag, against whom the birds looked not much bigger than ravens next to a man, swatted them away mercilessly. Jack’s experience points climbed with each kill.
The rest of the group fared less well. Ceinwen managed to avoid damage and kill a few. But they were as large as a medium-sized dog, with great wingspans and vicious talons. She had to work hard to avoid their attacks.
Andrew screamed and ran more than he fought. Not as much as Migli ran, though – or, for that matter, Arath. For all the other man’s words, when the raptors came for him, he bolted. The birds chased the trio around the open plains, squawking in frustration as they evaded capture.
Er’c followed the examples of his peers who stood and fought and drew his sword. He took a few hits and some serious damage until he reevaluated his strategy. Trading the blade for fireballs, the young mage quickly reversed his losing streak. The raptors erupted in balls of flame, falling out of the sky as their feathers sizzled away.
Shimmerfax and Frosty, meanwhile, stayed mostly out of the thick of things. After one of them wound up impaled on the battlecorn’s horn, the raptors avoided the former. And no one t
ried to attack the little dragon, perhaps out of some affinity between winged creatures. Jack didn’t know, but he was glad at least that he didn’t have to worry about his pet’s health.
Because he had plenty to worry about where his own was concerned. The raptors fell on him with a vengeance – literally, he guessed, as well as figuratively. They tore away at his flesh and whittled his hit points down. But the strikes did more than cause him in-game damage.
They hurt like hell. Jack felt like pieces of his flesh had actually been torn off by those wicked beaks. He could have sworn talons had actually sunk into his back. He felt pain, and fear, and disorientation.
He started to feel dizzy. The world got hazy. He swung his blade haphazardly, trying to ward away any- and everything. Still, the attacks kept coming, and getting through. A kind of fog settled on Jack’s brain – a fog of fear and confusion.
“Take a healing potion,” Ceinwen called.
Jack didn’t, though. He had raptors swarming him. He couldn’t let his guard down. He didn’t dare take his eyes from them. He kept swinging his blade; and he kept taking damage. His hit points were low now, in the mid-twenties. His vision clouded. He could barely see, and he seemed to be shaking from head to toe in some kind of cold sweat.
Am I in shock? Am I going to die?
He heard Ceinwen’s voice, seeming very far away. “Er’c, use a healing spell. He’s not going to make it.”
Were they talking about him? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t feel his arms anymore. He didn’t know if he was still swinging his sword. He didn’t know if he even still had the blade. He had the vague sense that he was dying.
And not just in the videogame.
It scared him. It terrified him. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t fight it.
And then a wave of soft light enveloped him, and his hit points started to climb. The throb of agony in his wounds lessened. His skin knit itself back together.
And the pain receded, a little at a time until it was all gone.
Jack’s vision cleared. He was on the ground, he saw now, weaponless and covered in blood. But his injuries had healed. Er’c and Ceinwen watched him with concern while Karag batted away the last few raptors who still circled overhead.
He was about to ask what had just happened when his companions froze in place, hovering over him. Migli appeared suddenly at his side – pulled from wherever he’d run to. “Yo, Jack, what’s going on?”
He groaned. “Richard?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Me? What are you doing, bro?”
Jack had no idea what the other man was talking about, and he told him so. “I didn’t call you. What are you doing here?”
“Call me? You didn’t need to. Your stats – they’re all over the place. Your heartrate started spiking. Gosh darn it, man. I thought you were about to have a heart attack.”
Richard didn’t swear much, so the absurdity of his filtered cussing notwithstanding, the word choice surprised Jack. “Wait, what?”
“Everything was buzzing, all the alarms and everything. I thought – well, I thought you were dying.”
This required a bit more explanation, and with a little coaxing, he got it. Richard explained that Jack’s vitals monitors had plunged into critical statuses – all of them. “I paged Dr. Roberts and got right into the game.”
Jack cringed. “Roberts? Oh no.”
Migli – Richard – shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, dude. But…yeah, that’s not something I can ignore. If you die, I’ll lose my internship.”
It seemed to Jack that there was more at stake than someone’s internship. But he didn’t have long to debate the matter, because Dr. Roberts came on the line shortly thereafter, his voice gruff and heavy with sleep.
“Owens? You still alive?”
“As far as I can tell…”
This was followed by some mumbling from Roberts, and a harried explanation on Richard’s part.
“Off the charts? What are you talking about? Everything looks normal to me.”
“Yes sir. Now. But it wasn’t before.”
“You’re telling me Owens here died and what? Came back to life?”
“No sir. I don’t know what happened. Just, all the sensors started blaring.”
Roberts harrumphed, like he didn’t believe it, and said that he was going to go through the sensor logs. This last bit came out more like a threat than anything else – as if he was saying, “And you’d better hope they bear out your story.” He didn’t say it directly, but there was something in the tone that made the implication clear.
Even through the avatar, Jack could tell Richard was sweating bullets. The dwarf had already blinked about fifty times in the last minute. Now, he glanced over his shoulder, and scratched the back of his head, and shuffled in place. He assumed this was a reflection of Richard nervously glancing around his office and shifting in his seat. The VR headset would detect the upper body movement and translate it to a fuller body motion.
But then Robert’s said, “Huh,” and, “Hmm,” and even, “What the devil?” Which told Jack that Richard was in the clear – but he might not be.
“Uh, Doc? What’s going on here?”
Roberts didn’t answer. Not right away. He said nothing at all for a good two minutes, except for the odd grunt. When he did finally speak, his tone sounded smarmy and forced. “Well, Jack, looks like Richard did the right thing in calling me. Nothing to worry about – just a sensor glitch by the look of it.”
“Sensor glitch my buns,” he said, and cringed as it came out. But the undefinable creepiness of the substitution was the least of his problems. So he went on. “We both know it was no glitch. What in tarnation’s going on here, Roberts?”
“Now, Mr. Owens, there’s no need to raise your voice. As I said, I’m sure it’s just a sensor glitch.”
“And if it isn’t?”
The other man sighed, a long, exasperated sigh. “Well, I really don’t think hysteria is going to make any difference. At least, not a positive one. Do you?”
Jack scowled. As before, Roberts’s line into the game was distinct. It didn’t pass through any filters, nor did it commandeer the Migli avatar. So he had no focal point to direct his anger at. He just scowled.
“As I was saying…I’m going to need to come back to the facility. So, you can just hang tight – and try not to panic. If there is anything here, and I’m confident there isn’t, panicking will only heighten your risk of a relapse.”
“Well, I guess that doesn’t matter,” Jack snapped, “since there’s nothing to it, right?”
Roberts hesitated for a moment, and then sighed. “Well, Mr. Owens, if you feel a bout of panic is what you need, have at it. We’ve all got our coping mechanisms, I guess. Just – get it out of your system before I get there.
“And Richard?”
The boy’s voice came back on the line, trembling a little even through the dwarf’s filter. “Yes sir?”
“Page me immediately if there’s the slightest variation on any of Jack’s readings. Do you understand me?”
Chapter Ten
Jack spent nearly half an hour assuring himself that he was not about to suffer imminent death, and then reminding himself of the urgency in Roberts’s voice when he issued his last command.
And Richard? Page me immediately if there’s the slightest variation on any of Jack’s readings.
Richard stayed on the line but offered very little in the way of solace. He seemed too preoccupied with his own situation. “I didn’t really have a choice,” he told Jack at one point. “I had to call him. That’s protocol.”
He figured the young man was running through the justifications he felt he might need to present to the doctor, or maybe even Avery Callaghan himself: no sir, I wasn’t panicking. I just followed protocol.
Richard confirmed this suspicion a minute later when he said, “I mean, I know he hates getting paged at night. I wouldn’t have
done it if I had a choice. But – well, I don’t have the medical training to make those kinds of evaluations, do I?”
Jack assured him that he’d done the right thing, adding, “I mean, my life is on the line here. So from a purely selfish perspective, I’d prefer overcautiousness anyway.”
Richard nodded, his avatar’s lips set in a grimace that was half obscured under his bushy mustache. “Yeah, but he won’t want to hear that.”
As the minutes ticked slowly past, Jack found himself in the unwelcome role of comforter to his companion – offering reassurances that the young man had only done what he’d been told to do, and promising that he had detected no sign of animosity in Roberts’s tone. “He was definitely happy you did it,” he said. Another time, he reminded him, “He told you to do it again, remember? So he knows you made the right call.”
Richard had nodded, and the dwarf’s beard had bobbed with the motion. “That’s a good point, Jack. He wouldn’t have told me to page him – not while he’s driving – if I got it wrong.”
This tided him over for another three or four minutes. Then Migli started chewing his nails. Jack watched in a state of curious mortification. On the one hand, well, it was a disgusting habit. And on the other, he couldn’t help but be impressed that the game could mimic even such obscure player actions to such a degree, and with such realism.
Eventually, though, a good thirty minutes after he’d got off the line, Roberts did show up. Jack was probably happier to hear from the other man than he’d ever been; and to judge by Richard’s voice, the intern was more unhappy than he’d ever been. “I’ve been watching the whole time, Doctor Roberts. Not a flicker of anything.”
Roberts didn’t bother to acknowledge the statement. Instead, his voice piped through to Jack, clear and unfiltered as before. “Owens? You still with me?”
Jack didn’t want to read too much into that language – because there was at least one interpretation that rather chilled him to the core. “What’s going on, Doc? What caused this ‘glitch’?”