by Rachel Ford
Finders, Keepers quest update
Objective failed: keep the Blasey family ring
Objective failed: return the Blasey family ring
Objective added: give the cursed child the Blasey family ring
Objective complete: give the cursed child the Blasey family ring
Finders, Keepers quest complete
You have lost goodwill among the people of Kaldstein.
You are disliked by the people of Kaldstein.
He was about to grumble about making enemies on behalf of a cursed kid who tried to kill him. But Jordan let loose an exclamation of joy, and turned to him with an expression so full of radiant joy that he found himself forgetting what he’d meant to say. She wrapped him in a fierce hug. “That was brilliant, Jack. Nicely done.”
He wasn’t sure if he actually flushed, but he felt like he’d flushed. He shrugged in as casual a manner as he could effect, though, as she slipped her arms off him. “Just a lucky guess.”
Jordan was grinning happily. “Brilliant guess. Come on, Jack. Let’s get this kid back to his mom. And then let’s get the heather out of here.”
Chapter Seventeen
It wasn’t quite that easy, of course. They had to carry the boy all the way back to the first floor, and the prison cells. And on seeing the cells, he began to scream and cry for his mother. Nor would he be consoled by either Jack or Jordan’s assurances that they didn’t mean to imprison him, but were only trying to reunite him with his mother. He yelled at the top of his lungs, and beat Jack’s shoulder with his fists. Now that he’d returned to his human form, those little fists did only a point or two of damage at a strike.
Still, Jack couldn’t wait to be rid of the youngster. But it wasn’t until they reached the cell, and he saw his mother, that he finally stopped screaming at them – and started screaming at his mother instead. She screamed too, and they each raised such a ruckus that Jack’s head throbbed.
Jordan squeezed in between the sobbing child and the bars to free the sobbing mother. Then, they sobbed together for a bit, while an alert told Jack,
The Boy Who Cried Wolf quest update
Objective complete: reunite mother and child
The Boy Who Cried Wolf quest complete
You have gained goodwill with the poor and downtrodden.
You are well-liked by the poor and downtrodden. Seek out beggars and outcasts in your travels. They will provide you with what information and succor they can.
Jordan spent a few minutes trying to make the mother understand the importance of the ring, but all she achieved was redirecting the woman’s sobs her way – and then, to his horror, Jack’s. She wrapped her arms around him and cried on his shoulder. “You’ve saved my boy,” she said over and over.
The first dozen or so times he ran through every possible version of you’re welcome he could think of. It wasn’t a big deal, it was his pleasure, he’d do it anytime, and so on. Finally, when he started repeating himself, he turned plaintive eyes Jordan’s way.
She laughed, and then said, “We should get out of here.”
“Yes,” the woman said, scooping her son up. “Lead the way.”
Jack was only too glad to do so. He headed out and turned toward the earthen stairs. To his dismay, though, he saw that the woman went for the rope bridge instead. Jordan just shrugged when he looked her way.
After a very precarious trip over every swinging bridge and rickety wooden ladder in the facility – or so it seemed to Jack – they reached the bottom floor. They didn’t run into any enemies, since they’d already cleared the place. The NPC woman forged ahead, so Jack let her take lead. She clearly had been programmed to know the way out.
The NPC led them back to that final chamber, and then straight toward the far end, behind the altar. Here, she paused, staring at a blank wall.
Jack raised an eyebrow, suddenly doubting the wisdom of following her. “Uh…I think we found another bug, Jordan.”
She, though, shook her head. “There’s got to be a secret passage around here. I guess we were supposed to have already found it.”
“Oh.” He stared at the earthen wall, and could see nothing to differentiate any one portion of it from another. “Where?”
“I don’t know.” Jordan put her palms on the wall, and started pressing sections of it.
Nothing happened. Jack watched for a minute, and then did the same thing on his side of the NPC.
They tried for a good two or three minutes with no luck. Jordan gave up first, but only because Jack stuck it out doggedly so as to not come across as a quitter. He’d already spent the entire descent complaining. He didn’t want to further aggravate her.
“Not here,” she said.
“Nope.”
“There’s got to be some kind of switch or something, somewhere. We just need to find it.”
He nodded. “Unless this is another bug.”
“Can’t be. Where else are we supposed to go?”
That was a good point. They’d explored every inch of the place, as far as he could tell. “Alright. Well, I guess we should get started.”
Jordan employed a methodical approach, starting at the NPC, and working her way along the wall in what would eventually be a full circle back to the woman and child. Jack’s approach was a little more scattered. He started looking at the wall, and quickly lost interest. He wandered over to the pillars, and examined two or three before deciding they probably weren’t it either. He moved on to the brazier, and for a minute got distracted by the soothing heat. But he didn’t see any buttons near it, so he wandered off. He checked a few rocks, and a makeshift bench halfway across the room. Then he wandered back to the NPC. “Hey,” he said, “I don’t suppose you know where we’re supposed to go?”
“Lead the way,” the woman said.
“Great. Super helpful. Thanks.”
The wolf boy said, “I want to go home, mommy.”
“Shh, shh, my darling. We’ll be home soon.”
Jack rolled his eyes and wandered off toward one of the pillars he hadn’t checked yet. Then, he frowned. He was pretty sure this was one he hadn’t checked. Isn’t it? He couldn’t remember exactly. But either way, he found no levers or buttons or pull chains, no pressure plates or concealed keyholes.
He wandered around, checking in now and then with Jordan. She’d made her way along about half the wall, but hadn’t found anything yet.
He sighed, and pulled himself up onto the altar, planting his backside on the top of it like it was some kind of bench. He figured he’d earned a break.
All of a sudden, he felt the stone shift underneath him, and he dropped a good six inches. A chunk of rock smashed his tailbone, and he was vaguely aware of being glad that this was a videogame and not real life. Mostly, though, he stared in stupefaction. Somehow, a gaping maw appeared in the wall in front of the NPC.
The woman ran through the aperture with her son, and Jordan called, “Woah, how’d you do that?”
Jack jumped off the altar, and turned to inspect it. The central portion had dropped half a foot. “Uh, I think this was the button, or pressure plate or whatever.” It didn’t make sense to him to put a button on a sacrificial altar where you’d put bodies. But, this was a videogame. It didn’t have to make sense.
Jordan came running over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good job. Come on, we need to follow that woman, and make sure she’s okay.”
Jack glanced back at the brazier, and remembered his witch’s brewing station. But she’d already ran off. So he sighed to himself, regretting ever having got involved in the rescue business at all, and followed.
They needn’t have worried, though. There were no more bad guys beyond the door: just a seemingly eternal staircase, leading up, up, up. Finally, it reached a wooden trap door.
The NPC’s spilled out into a dusky evening, Jack and Jordan on their heels. “Sugar,” he said. “The day’s gone.”
“Yeah. My shift’s almost done, actually,” she
said.
The NPC woman, meanwhile, turned to them, “Brave adventurers, we are forever in your debt.”
He brushed this aside with a wave of his hand. Unless there was gold involved, he didn’t want to hear it. And considering she was one of the game’s poor and downtrodden, he figured there was approximately zero chance of that.
“It’s almost night,” she said. “May we impose a little longer on you, and sleep at your fireside tonight?”
“Of course,” Jordan volunteered, ignoring his frown. “It’s dangerous to travel in the dark.”
The game told Jack,
You have gained goodwill with the poor and downtrodden.
And the NPC repeated, “We are forever in your debt.”
Jack rolled his eyes. The boy said, “I want to go home, mommy.”
“Shh, shh, my darling. We will, soon.”
“I’m hungry, mommy.”
“I’m sorry, my love. I don’t have any food.”
“We should give them something to eat,” Jordan decided.
He frowned at her. “Jordan, it’s bad enough I didn’t get to make potions back there. But I don’t want to waste my food too.”
“Come on,” she urged. “We can start a fire here, and you can make your potions. Anyway, we got food down there. We should share.”
Grumbling to himself, Jack fished out a dry end of bread and handed it to the woman with a brusque, “Here.”
“Oh, thank you, kind adventurer,” she said. And the game alerted him,
You have gained goodwill with the poor and downtrodden.
Jordan smiled triumphantly. “See? It’s good to be good.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. In a game full of heavy-handed moral judgments, anyway.”
“You’d really let a mother and kid starve in real life?”
“Of course not. But these ones aren’t real.”
Jordan had already moved on, though. She set to work collecting firewood. Jack sat and watched for a bit, and then, feeling guilty for his laziness, pitched in.
They found Shimmerfax a ways from their makeshift camp. Jordan glanced back at the mother and child, who were little more than shadows on the horizon now. “Wow. We covered a lot of ground.”
“Yeah. Not that this worthless horse lifted a hoof to help us.”
“Battlecorn. And what do you expect him to do? Climb a ladder?”
“Of course not. But he’s supposed to be some kind of hero, isn’t he? So far, he’s about as useful as Migli.”
She laughed, and set out in the direction of the battlecorn. “Come on. He’s going to wait for us there until we get closer.”
Jack nodded. He’d already figured out that the game’s proximity sensors were a little quirky. “What a loss.”
The glittering unicorn seemed to be standing by a great boulder, grazing lazily. It seemed a cruel irony to Jack that he’d lose all the useful companions, and be stuck with yet another worthless character – after spending the whole game so far with the useless dwarf.
Indeed, he was thinking exactly that when he got close enough to realize that the boulder had a face, and hands and feet.
He drew up suddenly. “What the heather’s that?”
Jordan squinted into the now near darkness, and then laughed. “It’s an ogre. It must be what threw us down into the pit.”
He frowned. “Can’t be: it’s dead.”
She turned a toothy grin his way. “Shimmerfax killed him.”
His frown deepened. “No way.”
“He’s a battlecorn, Jack. I told you. They’re warriors.”
Jordan rezed the dead ogre, and it and Shimmerfax followed them back to camp. They got a blazing fire going, and then she showed Jack how to use his witch’s station to brew up some potions. The interface was simple enough. He just needed a fire. Then he could set the station over it, and dump ingredients into the cauldron. Depending on what ingredients he dropped into the pot, he could produce anything from consumables like soup or energy boosting teas to poisons.
He spent a good, long time creeping Jordan out by mixing gross things together: human flesh and goblin eyes and so on. He came up with more potions than he could carry, and she refused to help him out. “Nope. I am definitely not taking your goblin eye serums.”
“It’s not a serum, it’s a poison. Because goblins are evil, so it has evil properties.”
She shook her head. “Nope. Not happening.”
In the end, he gave his lowest level potions and poisons to the NPC woman. He didn’t give her anything worth much, or particularly effective. But she thanked him each time, as if potions to add a plus one stealth boost, or a poison that would deduct a single health point, would do anyone any good. And each gift boosted his favorability with the poor and downtrodden. By time he worked through all of his ingredients, and disposed of the resultant potions, he was revered by the poor. The game told him:
Beggars and outcasts will go out of their way to assist you in your travels. They can provide valuable information, and will open their homes to you.
Jordan shook her head at his enthusiastic reception of this news. But then she broke news of her own. “Sorry, Jack: I’m out of time. I have to head out, or Avery’s going to get on my case for going over my hours.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jack set his alarm and settled in to sleep after she left. But not until the NPC mother and child bummed more food off him, and settled in on the opposite side of the fire.
His last memory was the kid, whose name he never did learn, whining about going home. Then he woke up sometime later, to a pitch back sky overhead, and the low snores of a battlecorn and the two NPC’s, and the much louder rumble of the sleeping ogre.
That sent a shiver up his back. The ogre was a massive thing, a good twelve feet tall and seemingly made entirely of stone. Still, he reminded himself, it was on their side. Jordan’s reanimation staff defaulted fallen and newly resurrected foes to their side.
He glanced at his clock, and saw he’d only rested for an hour. So he closed his eyes, and went back to sleep. He repeated the process a dozen times or so, his periods of sleep getting briefer and briefer.
The NPC’s woke up. The woman professed her undying gratitude again, bummed yet another bit of food off him, and set off into a dimly lit morning. Her kid trailed behind her, still moaning about his home.
The battlecorn got up too, and set to grazing. The ogre rose last, looking about as happy and rested as Jack felt: not very.
He picked through his inventory, looking for something appetizing. He didn’t feel much like eating, but he knew he needed to. So at last he settled for a roast, which tasted like cardboard. It had, he realized with dismay, been one of his early creations, before he’d realized the in-game importance of salt. Still, he choked down what he could, and offered the leftovers to the ogre.
The ogre wolfed it down with a gluttonous haste that turned Jack’s stomach a little. But it did put the creature in a better mood. At least, he assumed the newly lighter tone to the guttural moaning signified an improved mood.
Jack tried to make conversation. The battlecorn just stared at him, and he felt a little silly for trying. “You’re a horse. Of course you don’t talk.”
The ogre grunted a few monosyllabic responses, in a language that seemed made up. Which set Jack’s mind thinking about etymology and language, and permanence and meaning. “I guess, really, it’s all made up, isn’t it? It’s not like language exists on its own. We make it up to communicate with each other. But no people, no language.”
But after a half hour of pondering the intrinsic value of ogreish grunts he didn’t understand versus human words he did, Jack worried that maybe the game and his long confinement was getting to him. “Am I going nuts?” he asked his two companions, which seemed a lot closer to confirmation than he liked. After all, who else but a crazy person would try to converse with a sparkling unicorn or a rock monster?
So he got up and paced by the fire.
Then, he called, “Speak to supervisor.”
A moment later, a disembodied voice bellowed into the stillness. “Yo, Jack, how’s it going?”
No mistaking who that is. “Hey Richard. Alright.”
“Well what can I do for you, my man?”
Jack frowned at the burst of exuberance, and for a moment reconsidered his plan. But, then, he still had hours left before Jordan got in. He didn’t want to spend them alone, or worse, trying to strike up a conversation with horses, like some kind of whacky Lemuel Gulliver trying to converse with the Houyhnhnms. “Hey, so I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”
“Sure.” Then, Richard added, “I mean, probably. Whatcha got in mind?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to quest with me?”
A loud, emphatic snort filled his ears. “You mean, roll my backside into one of those machines? Not on your life, amigo.”
Jack frowned. “No, I don’t mean that, Richard. I mean use your VR headset.”
Richard started to hem and haw, and wonder what Avery would think.
Jack shrugged now. “Fine. I just figured you might like to play a videogame. But suit yourself. If you’d rather sit there twiddling your thumbs…”
“Come on, man,” the intern interjected, “I didn’t say that.”
“Well, it’s not a trick question. You’re stuck at your desk, doing nothing, right?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say nothing…”
“So either you sit there doing nothing, or you play the game.”
Richard considered for a long moment. “We’re not really supposed to do that. This is your beta test. But, on the other hand, I mean, you do need companions to get through this part of the quest, right?”
“Exactly.”
“So, in a way, I almost have to, if the test’s going to be successful.”
Jack agreed. He didn’t particularly care what rationalization Richard used to get over his reluctance, as long as he got there in the end.
“And my character build is pretty crazy.”
“Great. Can’t wait to see it,” he lied.
“Alright. Give me five minutes, man. I got to figure out how to export my character into someone else’s world. But I’ll be right there.”
