Openings

by Thomas Davidsmeier

  “What...”

  “Out of Character violation. Dari ignored multiple warnings apparently. I’ve been briefed to take his place. My name is Jorn.”

  Still perplexed and rubbing his head with his free hand, Leo laid back down into place inside the pump housing. Reaching up, he started to work on a particular gear that looked excessively worn.

  Encouraging him on, the new dwarf said, “Keep at it, Machinist Leo. You might soon be replacing Noin as the Chief Machinist on the League Council at this rate.”

  Leo thought, but did not say, “That’s the plan, new guy.”

  Instead, the rogue replied, “Well, it’s a shame that there’s an opening.”

  Chapter 12

  Uncertain but hopeful, Nathaniel gazed down the road, past the village, and to the fen beyond. “What exactly is our plan going to be in there? Arrows from a distance, you and Scout close, then fight hand-to-hand while I pick off any I can without plunking you two?”

  Still considering the possibilities, Chris shaved a few curls off the stick he was whittling before he answered. “I guess I don’t really know what it is going to be like in there. I’ve never been in a fen that I know of. Isn’t it just a swampy sort of place? How much is our mobility going to be limited?”

  “The day before you saved me from that skeleton, I was only a toddler. I’ve never been to a fen. Maybe somebody in the village has been and could tell us about it? Maybe even make a map...”

  Nodding absentmindedly and knitting his brows in consternation, Chris kept whittling on his stick as they walked. They got closer to the village, and Chris kept pulling his knife along the stick to shave off little bits here and there. Nathaniel could not help himself.

  “Are you carving that stick into slightly straighter, slightly smaller stick?”

  Chris looked at his squire in exasperation. “No, I’m trying to make an arrow shaft. I’m hoping to pick up the Fletcher skill or whatever it might be called.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to let somebody who already has the skill make your arrows for you?”

  “But, then I would have to rely on them to make my arrows for me. If I can make my own, I won’t have to count on anybody else.”

  Suppressed incredulity flickered across Nathaniel’s face as his right eyebrow rose slowly. Unable to find the right words, he just nodded to his leader. Thankfully, they had arrived at the village, and Nathaniel did not have to figure out how to tell his leader that he thought he was crazy. Was a paladin going to learn farming and blacksmithing, too?

  Actually, it was probably a really good thing Chris was knocking on the apothecary’s door so Nathaniel did not asked that question out loud. He could just image Chris carrying a hunk of iron and a hammer around everywhere and pounding on it incessantly. Nathaniel fought back a laugh as he imagined their party waiting to ambush someone while Chris was pounding out a horse shoe. Imaginary Chris was asking, “Where are they? I can’t believe they’re not here yet.”

  When the apothecary opened the rickety door, real Chris blurted, "How many healing potions do you have for sale now after working on them last night?"

  With a flat, expressionless face and a deadpan voice, Marcus replied, "Depends how much gold you have."

  It was a strange response, but Chris guessed business was slow for Marcus without the road through the fen. "I’ve got plenty I should think, unless you've got dozens of potions done. I didn't think you could make them that fast..."

  Marcus’s eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second before he relaxed and shrugged his shoulders. "I have managed to finish four healing potions. Unfortunately, I was quite weary and eventually had to stop. Their potency is variable. Somewhere between six and twelve health per potion most likely. There are the occasional duds unfortunately. I believe I’ve mentioned the inadequacy of my equipment. But, four should be plenty for a first level paladin, I should think."

  Chris laughed. "I've been getting assaulted by random undead sent from a frienemy. I'm Level 3 now. But, your potions still seem quite useful to me. How much for all four?"

  Marcus's eyes widened for a moment at this statement from Chris. Sir Christopher assumed it was because he was buying all four of the healing potions.

  "Twenty-five gold. Twenty for the potions and five for the lamp oil and inconvenience."

  Assuming that Marcus just was not a morning person, Chris ignored yet another gruff response from the apothecary. Smiling, Chris reached in his inventory pouch and counted out twenty seven gold. With no other shops in the area, he wondered why he had been given two hundred gold to start with. What else was he going to spend it on besides goodwill? "Here, and the extra is a thank you for the quick work."

  Marcus nodded in acknowledgement as much as gratitude. He sniffed as he turned back into his hut to put the coins away, "Thank you, though there isn't much for me to spend it on while the road through the fen is closed."

  Nathaniel volunteered from behind Chris, "Don't worry! We'll take care of that!"

  "I am sure you will," sighed Marcus. "Goblins shouldn't be too much trouble. Just roll right in there and wipe them out, I suppose."

  "Actually," said Nathaniel, happy to be involved in the conversation, "We're going to scout things out a little first. Goblins can get classes and levels like people, or they can form troops if they're on an organized side. A big troop might be a bit of a problem. Ten or twenty organized attackers? Yipes! But, smaller ones we think we can handle."

  Chris looked back at Nathaniel grimly. "Why don't we wait until we've handled some of them before we start making bold pronouncements and assessing our chances of overall success. Right, squire?"

  Surprised and a little hurt by Chris’s reaction. Nathaniel beat a hasty retreat from the conversation. "Right-o, boss."

  Nathaniel made the zip-my-lips sign and threw away the key to boot. Sticking with the sign language, he tried to mimed pulling out a map and tracing a route on it. Chris just shook his head at him, not understanding the act. His frustration at his squire’s overconfidence made it hard for him to do anything but dismiss Nathaniel’s antics at the moment.

  Interrupting the strange show, Marcus asked, “If you’re going into the fen, could you be on the lookout for mallow plants? Their roots are part of healing potions. After that marathon session last night, I’m running quite low. Plus, they make a great addition to stew. They grow a bit off the cart path, a few yards from the edge usually.”

  Nathaniel peered carefully at the plant in question. It was a white, carrot-shaped root with a tall, feathery stalk of leaves shooting out the top. The squire smiled at the apothecary, nodded, and gave a solid thumbs up sign.

  “Well then,” smiled Marcus at the two adventurers, “Make sure to collect plenty of mallow and not too many goblins arrowheads!”

  The paladin and his squire stowed their potions and started off down the road. Scout chased around them until Nathaniel finally started playing fetch with him again. The fen looked like it was a bit more than a mile down the road now that they were on the other side of the village.

  “Do you think they’ve got any horses around here? I mean, I didn’t ride back home, but I’ve already got the skill here.” Chris was getting tired of taking long walks in his metal armor. After his painful first day in the worldgame, he was not about to start taking it off to travel. Who knew when a mess of undead would pour out of a portal from nowhere?

  Nathaniel pitched the stick for Scout again. “I haven’t seen any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist in the Divided Lands. They’re just not in this little neck of the woods.”

  “Hmm... I smell a trade route opportunity. Find some neighboring kingdom and trade for some horses. Bet it would increase our farmers efficiency and overall production. It could get us started boosting the population, filling in all this empty land with civilization.” Chris waved around at the rolling grasslands that surrounded Fenton and seemed to stretch to the horizon on the other side of the river.

  Laughing, Na
thaniel quipped, “Spoken like a true megalomaniacal leader in the making!"

  The river meandered along between deep banks north of the ford at the village. Streams had joined it from those open grasslands to the east and west. Each side had a pebbly strand at the bottom of five-foot-tall, gullied banks. Nathaniel tossed the stick out into the slow water near the side of the river. Scout bounded down one of the gullies and splashed out to the stick to retrieve it.

  The shape of the brook’s channel got Chris thinking. “Has it ever rained while you’ve been in the Divided Lands?”

  “No, not that I remember. Well, I guess I've seen it raining in that weird way on just one field every once in awhile. But, only for like ten minutes or so.”

  “Well, why is this brook’s channel so big? Does it ever flood? Where does its water come from? Are there seasons here? What's the weather like?”

  “Ummm... And, this line of questioning is going to help us chase off a tribe of goblins how?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand this worldgame we’re in. Is the terrain changeable or static? Like in Civ, you get advanced enough, and you can change things from one type to another sort of terrain.” Chris kicked a pebble out of the path and wondered if he had really changed anything. Was he going to be able to change things with what he was doing in the Divided Lands? His mind was pulled inexorably back to the cafeteria, his classmates, and his sister. The last mental picture he had taken in the cafeteria exploded in front of his mind’s eye. It was like he was there again. Closing his eyes and biting his tongue, Chris fought off the memory and pulled himself back into the present. How could think about this right now possibly help? Sure, he had wanted to use the memory as motivation, but even now, it was still overwhelming him.

  A puzzled look spread over Nathaniel's face. The younger boy wanted to ask the older if he was all right. The look on Chris’s face had been one of fleeting agony. Yet, after the correction in front of the apothecary, Nathaniel did not want to speak out of turn again. Instead, he commented on what Chris had last said before he had fallen silent. “These would have been good questions for Brother Aleksandr.”

  After a pause, Nathaniel ventured a further suggestion, “For example, what if we dammed the river? Do you think we could drain the whole fen?”

  Thankfully, the oddball suggestion caught Chris by surprise and yanked him out of his inner turmoil. He turned to look at his squire and smiled. “Who’s the megalomaniacal one now? You want to change the whole ecosystem there to drive out the goblins?”

  Embarrassed but happy to see Sir Christopher smiling again, Nathaniel replied, “I was just asking really. I don’t know if it would help or not. You’re right. It’s silly. Maybe goblins don't like the damp and would like it better drained. Did the book say anything about their habitats or anything?”

  “Well,” Chris began as he fell into regurgitate-the-facts mode from school. “It said that goblins are the smallest and weakest humanoids in the Game. They end up on the worst land usually. Stoney ground, swamps, deserts, sewers in cities, and wastelands in general. I don't think they necessarily like those places, it’s just that bigger and badder things don’t let them have any of the nicer land. So, why don't we try traditional methods first? We’ll be the bigger and badder things that push them out. Then, if that fails, we can work on your Tennessee Valley Authority projects.”

  Nathaniel looked at the paladin in confusion.

  Chris tried to explain. “Tennessee Valley was when the government made an organization... Never mind. A history thing on Earth.”

  Chris paused awkwardly and thought a little while he whittled a few curls of wood off his ‘arrow shaft.’ “Boy, that fen sure looks awfully big. I hope we just have to drive them away from the road or something. I’ve never been in a fen, but I bet it would take days and days to make the whole place a goblin-free zone.”

  ***

  The fen turned out to be a place of tall, reedy plants, things that looked to the paladin and squire like grasses, shallow open water, and a lot of low, treeless land. The ground had sloped down to the edge of the immense sea of the grassy plants. Far to their left, the west, they saw the blue haze of a very distant forest. To their right across the now wide and slow river, the ground rose and the fen turned quickly into the grassland that continued to the horizon.

  “I’m just going to take the front; you stay close so my aura can catch you in its area of effect. If they try to ambush us, they might go for you first, so be hyper-vigilant.” Chris was obviously nervous. He did not like the idea of following the road down between the tall, concealing plants that lined its sides.

  “We should have tried to have Marcus draw a map for us,” suggested Nathaniel, making sure not to let it sound like an I-told-you-so. Though in truth, it was only an I-mimed-you-so.

  Despite Nathaniel’s carefully selected tone, Chris snapped back. “That’s actually a great idea, especially if you’d had it about thirty minutes ago in the village when we were at his hut.”

  Nathaniel wanted to tell Chris that he had suggested it even before they got to Marcus’s house, let alone the failed miming. Still, Nathaniel reminded himself that they were in a pretty stressful situation. Maybe Chris was not used to being in charge? Nathaniel had never really had the chance to be in charge of much on Earth, so he decided to cut his Fearless Leader some slack. Still, he did not like someone growling at him in anger. So, Nathaniel whispered, “Maybe we should be quiet and sneaky for a little while.”

  A cloud of frustration passing over his face, Chris agreed, “Fine.”

  The paladin had been restless and uneasy all morning long. Again, his mind was being plagued by thoughts of his sister and others that he knew at the school. He was fighting for them, to save them. But at the moment, he was facing what seemed like an impossible task that he had thought would be simple. First quests are always supposed to be relatively easy, right? What was with a thirty square mile swamp that had to be cleared of goblins? This wasn’t like a video game where terrain types just changed how fast things moved on the screen. Was he really going to have to slog through he-knew-not-what to hunt goblins all over this vast wetland? At least there were not any sewers dumping into the fen. Of course, there could be one he just did not know about. Why could it not have just been a protect-the-caravan quest? Those were so much simpler.

  His stormy mood broke about twenty minutes later when he got a notification from the Game. They had been darting between shady patches of reeds along the edge of the road pretending to be ninjas like all little boys who have ever heard of ninjas do. Chris looked at the notification and found out that he had learned a skill called Stealth.

  Standing on a narrow, rutted cart path in a strange fen in a strange world, Christopher McKnight was overjoyed. Something had actually gone right. The skill was just Novice level, but he had not had it before. With this little reward, Chris’s attitude changed immensely. The thoughts about the stakes he was battling Jeremy for in the Game did not leave. But, Chris remembered that he was playing a game, and he was good at games.

  Encouraged by the skill growth, the boys kept moving like imaginary ninjas along the winding cart path with Scout bounding around them. The path connected the numerous islands of slightly higher ground and crossed the watery gaps on piled up earthen causeways or simple, short post-and-beam bridges. Because it doubled back and forth to try to use as much solid ground as possible, the path was much longer than the four mile width of the whole fen.

  Chris and Nathaniel played ninja most of another hour despite Scout totally giving away their positions by running up to play with them constantly. It was approaching noon, and so they started discussing lunch. Brother Aleksandr had supplied them with plenty of apples, crusty travel bread, and a couple wheels of some kind of hard cheese. These had all gone into their inventories for safe keeping.

  Their Staminas were down a couple points each from the walking and sneaking, which seemed to be the Game's way of showing hunge
r and tiredness. Again, Chris wondered how running out of Stamina in the middle of a battle worked. He reminded himself to look it up when he got the chance, hopefully at lunch.

  “Do we just sit down in the middle of the path and eat?” asked Nathaniel.

  “Don’t know why not. There aren’t going to be any carts coming by to run us over, right?” Chris seemed nonplussed by the idea of eating in the middle of a what was essentially a road.

  “The path makes another turn up there, and that should cast some shade onto it, we should stop up there. Boy, I’m glad there’s only one path. I’d be totally lost with all the twists and turns on this thing.”

  “Yeah, I bet nobody could have drawn a map of it anyway. Looking for a shady spot sounds like a good plan to me.”

  They started to walk toward the next bend in the path. Nathaniel asked, “Do you think we should start shouting ‘Here gobby gobby gobby!’ after lunch?”

  Thinking for a moment, Chris shook his head. “If you were grown up and had a class, I’d say yes. But, I really don’t want to get ambushed while you have just 8 Health to work with. I mean the damage quoted in the Bestiary is 1-6, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be able to help a lot more when I’ve got a class. We can totally wait till tomorrow for that tactic. I guess we’re admitting this is going to take a couple days? This place is so huge, I wonder how long it is going to take to root all the goblins out...”

  "Do we really have to get them all?”asked Chris. “Or, do we just have to make the road safe? I wish this game had a quest log or some sort of interface or something..."

  Nathaniel shrugged his shoulders, "Isn't making the road safe and getting rid of all the goblins that the same thing?"

  When they turned the corner in the path, they got a surprise. The path continued straight for a hundred yards across a long island, but at the far end there was an equally long bridge. It looked like there were small humanoids out on the bridge moving about.