J. F. Danskin
The Call of the Coven
Shadow Kingdoms Book 2
First published by Inkpot Books 2021
Copyright © 2021 by J. F. Danskin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
J. F. Danskin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
First edition
Cover art by MiblArt
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Contents
Chapter 1: No Reply
Chapter 2: A Way In
Chapter 3: Testing the Concept
Chapter 4: Back at the Coven
Chapter 5: Josa and van Turk
Chapter 6: The Streets
Chapter 7: The House of the Mercenaries
Chapter 8: The Gangplank
Chapter 9: The Hummingbird Inn
Chapter 10: The Hurricane
Chapter 11: Further Information
Chapter 12: To Sea
Chapter 13: Rats
Chapter 14: Pursuit
Chapter 15: Missile Attacks
Chapter 16: To Sefindarg City
Chapter 17: Port of Nimroth
Chapter 18: The Back Streets
Chapter 19: Captives
Chapter 20: In the Cell
Chapter 21: Threatened
Chapter 22: The Lock
Chapter 23: Out of Town
Chapter 24: On the Road
Chapter 25: Viperstar
Chapter 26: Mountain Pass
Chapter 27: The Mercenaries
Chapter 28: The Lake
Chapter 29: The Farm
Chapter 30: Interlude
Chapter 31: Slavers
Chapter 32: Lizard Warriors
Chapter 33: The Bridge and the Road
Chapter 34: The Village
Chapter 35: By Morning
Chapter 36: The Wagons
Chapter 37: A Reckless Charge
Chapter 38: The Elemental Hand Guild
Chapter 39: Katresburg
Chapter 40: Connor’s House
Chapter 41: The Tower
Chapter 42: Silver
Chapter 43: To the Coven
Chapter 44: Threat to the City
Chapter 45: Amelia Prexis
Chapter 46: Repairs and Revenge
Chapter 47: The Knights
Chapter 48: The Enemy and the Wall
Chapter 49: Reunited
Chapter 50: Ready
About the Author
Chapter 1: No Reply
It’s raining, and the sky is dark despite the early hour, the clouds thick enough to block out the last of the early evening light. October is often this way here.
I am with two of my classmates, sitting in a café in the city – a rare social occasion for us. Andros and Kashif are both computer science students on my course. The former is a young Greek man, brilliant but extremely quiet, while the latter is funny and eccentric, but not great at fitting in with social norms.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call the pair of them friends exactly, but we do occasionally do group projects together on our college course. You could say that we are united by a shared disdain for our classmates.
We have been saying for weeks that we should head into the city, though none of us ever seem to prioritize it. This makes me chuckle a little. As a group we lack leadership – and as a result, get nothing done. It’s the same with our projects, which often turn into three projects going in different directions. Some tasks are not cut out for group-work, in our defense.
It couldn’t be further from the way things are with my group of companions inside the Shadow Kingdoms game. I mean, granted – the game isn’t real. It’s an immersive VRMMO game set in a fantasy world, complete with magic, combat and mysterious creatures. But the strange thing is how differently I behave there. I have the same brain, intelligence and personality that I do in real life – the software can’t change any of that. Yet with a morning star in my hand and a group of sinister knights pursuing me, I make decisions, form plans, work as one with my companions. You could even say that I show some leadership skills.
Or perhaps I am just kidding myself. I haven’t been in the game for the past two months.
My companions in the game – it pains me to think about what they might be facing now in the rising chaos and brutality of Shadow Kingdoms. Those I felt closest to are Lugg, the compliant and brave half-orc, and Garner, a loyal and skilled ranger. Garner is protective of his mother, Maleki – a witch, whose coven on the Isles of Dubasa briefly became a home base for our group during the time that I found myself stuck in the game, unable to log off. And together with coven member Coruff and a lizard shaman called P’oytox we led one of the Knights of Dawn deep in to the Badlands in the Islands of Dubasa. There, we worked together to slay him – a strike back against the knights’ campaign to murder magic users.
But four of the Knights still live, and so my friends are under threat. And I can’t access the game world to help them.
* * *
Perhaps because I still obsess over what happened to me before the game shut down, conversation over coffee turns to the design of immersive games. After a bit of prompting, I give my two friends a synopsis of what happened when I was stuck inside Shadow Kingdoms. Andros stares at his phone during most of the tale, but Kashif is more curious. “Did they ever explain what happened?” Kashif asks. “How you got stuck or what happened to the timeline to cause it to jump forward?”
“To an extent. But for some reason, their explanation didn’t satisfy me.”
“How come?”
I pause, finishing the last of my coffee. “I emailed the developers of Shadow Kingdoms after I got out of hospital. They gave me a written apology and a free lifetime membership to compensate me for my distress.” A quick glance around the café, which is emptying as closing time approaches. “I decided not to push it any further, given that I think it was my fault.”
“What?” Kashif leans in, his face intent, and Andros’s eyes also flicker upwards to scrutinize me.
I sigh. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into it, but… I’ve opened the box now. “I did a small bit of editing to the code on my Kjatari implant,” I explain. “Just enough to mean that the game would keep running if I logged off. I figured I could advance a bit more quickly. You know, just like afk farming in other games. I leveled up my character while I was doing things in the real world. Twenty four seven.”
“Whew.” Kashif opens his mouth wide and looks at Andros, who is now sitting forward, frowning intently, having slipped his phone back into his pocket. “So, you got yourself stuck there?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. Because it was working fine at first. Something happened when the other players got kicked. They said to the press that it was the action of a rival company hacking their IP. I’m not sure if that’s the entire story, though. I think someone was trying to do something inside the game world, and they needed players out. My hack meant that I somehow prevented them from achieving their goa
ls.”
“Go on,” says Kashif.
“Things were happening, and they began before I got there. Someone was wiping out monitors – the mods in the game. They were being slaughtered, one by one. I assume they were all NPCs, though – the human mods had been kicked.”
“So,” says Andros, “assuming that they hadn’t allowed for your hack, it’s possible that you messed up their plans somehow?”
“Perhaps. The game had advanced almost 30 years. Somehow it had been freewheeling, and when I regained awareness, a whole series of plots had been playing out. I think the NPCs just continued with what they had been doing. And everything was in bad shape as a result.”
Kashif nods. “But you do think that the devs were trying something? Something they wanted to keep secret?”
I nod.
“So, what is it?”
I give this some thought. Exactly what were they trying to do? I knew my friends and I had got in their way, but what was the goal now? Would they continue their campaign of killing magic users – and would anybody try to stop them? What would it lead to – and who was behind it?
“I mean, it might not be the whole company,” I say. “But somebody in PreacherKorp knows what is going on. I would say that they are trying to reshape things inside the game in some way. They are trying to achieve something, and they don’t care who they hurt in order to get it.” I pause, looking from one of them to the other. “But exactly what that is, I don’t know.”
This is true. But I intend to find out. And so I’ve been contacting everyone that I can think of who could help. The original coders and developers of the game world. Experts in VRMMOs. Tech gurus and futurists. Even if I only hear back from 5% of them, I may get some vital clues.
And that could save my friends.
* * *
I check my messages on my way home, but there’s nothing important. It looks like I’ll have to pursue other avenues to find out more about how to get back in.
That’s right. I may have had a traumatic experience inside the game, but I still feel loyalty to my friends in there. They never seemed like computer generated NPCs – they were real, at least to me. They had goals, wishes… and I think they had feelings. And I am sure that they are all in danger from the Knights of Dawn.
I push open the door to our home, a two-storey house in a small town that is twenty minutes by train from the city. The younger children are staying with our grandparents for a few days (rather them than me, I have to say) but my Uncle Roy is in, and he puts his book down and gets up when I walk in. “How was shopping?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he goes through to the kitchen. I follow.
“Did you get what you needed?” he prompts as I sit down at the table, glancing at me and perhaps noticing the lack of bags. I shrug and ponder over how best to answer him. “Close enough,” I say at last. “I made some decisions – so I’m halfway there.”
He chuckles as he takes a plate out of the microwave, and hands it to me. It is some kind of vegetable stew. “Browsing, then. And your friends?”
“Did they buy actual objects, you mean?”
He laughs again. “No, Lucy. How are they?”
I scratch my head and then pick up a fork and stab it into a carrot. “Much as normal, I would say.”
“Mmm. Sometimes people are hard to read. Don’t forget to ask them how they are feeling once in a while.” He pours himself a tumbler of red wine and sits down opposite me as I eat.
“Hard to know what’s going on in someone’s head, you mean?” I ask.
“Some would say so, yes.”
“How do you mean?”
He takes a swig from his wine. “How do we really know that the behavior we see from others reflects their thoughts and beliefs?”
“True enough.”
He doesn’t realize how close he is to my own thoughts about the Shadow Kingdom game, and in particular the human-like actions of the NPCs. Or perhaps he does – my uncle can be very perceptive.
It’s nice of him to make the effort to talk to me, anyhow. I know he’s worried, and so I chat for a few minutes before heading to my room. When there, I check for messages again. Nothing.
Images of Shadow Kingdoms fill my mind as I fall asleep. But rather than the semi-immersive game overlay that I used to experience, it is just a vivid daydream that quickly gives way to slumber.
Chapter 2: A Way In
When I wake, I half expect to be back in the game. But no – here I still am. In many ways, I feel just as stuck here as I did when I was in Shadow Kingdoms with no way of logging off. At least there I had something I was working towards – to reach the shadow crafter rank, meaning that I would have achieved a top account worldwide – a ticket to a lucrative sale, and thereafter to pursuing my coding career in New York City.
Of course, an account is worth next to nothing, now. Like many people, I’ve been waiting anxiously for the game to restart for weeks – but have been waiting in vain. However, I know for a fact that the game was still running even when it was officially offline. And so I am convinced that events will have moved on, even when I’m not there – and perhaps nobody else is, either.
In any case, my aims have changed – I am not even sure I would sell my account if I got the chance. Increasing my stats and rank in the game rapidly became a means to an end, with the real goal being survival – both for me, and for my in-game friends, especially Lugg and Garner. It might not be the real world, but you develop some genuine trust when you have to rely on another person for your life. I have found it hard to move on, I know – but why should I?
Of course, I have another problem. After I ended up in a coma and unable to exit the game, my family were terrified. And now it’s going to take some persuading for them to let me go back in, even when and if the game does come back online. They don’t even want me playing other immersive games at this stage.
Which only leaves one real option: find a way to do it they won’t know about.
* * *
I have a bagel for breakfast, and then sit down and open my laptop, I bring up my messages once more with no real expectation, only to see – amongst the spam – a message with the sender listed as ‘Connor Champion’. It’s a name that I know without having to think about it even for a moment – he’s only one of the founders of PreacherKorp, and the developers behind the entire Shadow Kingdoms game world!
My heart thumps faster as I click on the message and read:
Hi Lucy,
Thanks for your email. And I guess I should also say – thank you for playing Shadow Kingdoms! Not that the game has anything much to do with me now, but as you obviously know, I did invent the game world. Some months ago I left PreacherKorp to start up my own company – Viperstar Games. But Shadow Kingdoms still has a special place in my heart.
I was interested to read about your case, and even more interested to hear from you. It’s hard to say why you got ‘stuck’ inside the game, but I think you are right – the pre-written plots have gone awry. I don’t yet know whether that is by accident or, to an extent, by design, in the sense of someone wanting things to go off track. Both are possible.
One thing I am sure of – the timeline got bugged at just the moment when all the players were briefly booted. I believe that the “intermission” is connected to certain people at PreacherKorp wanting to modify some storylines, and needing to kick the real– human – characters in order to achieve a partial reset. Why? I can only speculate. But something stopped them from doing so – it looks like your presence may have had something to do with it, leading to multiple failed resets and a glitch in the timeline.
And whatever caused you to be stuck in the game, it messed with the intentions they had, I am sure of it. That is going to cause them all kinds of problems, and probably explains the long delay before the game is relaunched. Which I believe it will be.
The thing I should explain is that SK was set up in such a way that devs can’t just alter stories and characters.
I must admit, I am partly responsible for that feature! It seemed too risky, too easy to abuse in a way that would ultimately put people off the game and make it feel less realistic. We based the world itself on blockchain technology, and it can’t just be re-written – the owners can’t just kill characters off, award themselves money and the like. They have to achieve things in game.
Now, it seems, PreacherKorp has been left with a chaotic world that has run on 20+ years from where it was planned, with no way of setting it back. All the storylines have taken on a life of their own. The IP is too valuable to abandon it, so my guess is that they are doing their best to manually get their house back in order.
On that note, you are wrong about one thing – there are still players in the game right now. I’m sure of it – I can still access it myself.
Best,
Connor Champion
I read the email over, dwelling on that last line. ‘I can still access it myself’.
But how?
The corporation has announced that the game is suspended for additional security measures to be put into place to avoid any future corporate espionage.
So if what Mr Champion says is true, then he must be using another way in. And while all of my companions from Shadow Kingdoms are still under threat, I need to find my own way in.
And then I can help them at last. I just need to hope I get there before it’s too late.
* * *
I spend the rest of the day eating snacks and finding out all that I can about Connor Champion. I knew he was one of the founding devs, but there seems to be even more. It seems he wasn’t lying when he described himself as the originator of the game world, if not the technical side – he’s no coder.
I was wrong to think that he was a founder of PreacherKorp, too. In the early years, he worked together with a guy called Jaden Lucho, and Lucho then founded PreacherKorp and hired Champion to work with him. After that, the company grew extraordinarily quickly.
The Call of the Coven: A LitRPG novel (Shadow Kingdoms Book 2) Page 1
