Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Stahhp it, momma! I’ll be a good boy!” I hollered down the corridor. “Rin! She’s beating me up!”

  That was apparently what did it for her, because Suri’s scowl cracked. For only the second time since I’d met her, she busted up laughing. So did I, until she friendly-punched me in the arm and drove one of the nails in deeper. I yowled again.

  “Hector, are you...? Oh.” Rin drew close enough to us to see what was going on. “Umm. Did you guys know you’re bleeding?”

  For some reason, that only made Suri laugh harder.

  “Okay, seriously now,” I said, once I’d recovered my normal speaking voice. “There was a door down where the slime axed that guy. We should go check that out.”

  “I wonder what he was doing down here?” Rin joined us, and offered us herbal potions. “Here: I can’t use these. Mercurions have to use Silicone Gel and mana for healing and stuff...”

  They were only Mint Potions, the weakest kind of healing tincture, but 10 HP a pop was better than nothing.

  Five minutes later, we limped down the corridor and surveyed what remained. We were able to pick up the dead man’s loot - Iron Scraps, 2x Moss Potions, 1x Iron Dagger blade, Lockpicks, Locksmith’s Tools (Shoddy), 35 silver Rubles and a gold ring with the face of a cat - which Suri took from my hand without asking. She held it up to look at it more closely by torchlight, and grunted.

  “Syndicate member,” she said, handing it back. “That’s a membership band. Interesting.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, searching around for anything we might have missed.

  “Long story,” she replied. “But this man was a member of the Nightstalkers. Their boss calls himself the King of Cats, so he’s probably Meewfolk. They run most of the low-end organized crime in this city.”

  Rin hung back, chewing nervously on one of her bangs.

  “There’s two locks on this door,” Suri said. “One mechanical, one magical.”

  “You any good with locks, Rin?” I turned to her.

  She nodded, and silently came up to take the lockpicks from me. She got to work, and after barely ten seconds, the mechanism in the door clunked.

  “This is definitely one of Kanzo’s locks,” she said grimly. “Give me the necklace with the key.”

  She held a hand back. I passed it over, and she inserted it into the mage-lock. There was a second clunk, and the door swung open. An odd smell filtered out: clean, earthy, and electric. The smell of mana.

  “Don’t think this leads outside,” Suri said. “You first, Rin.”

  “You’re resistant to Stranging, aren’t you?” I asked Suri aside.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m Fireblooded. Are you?”

  “Dragon Knight, sort of. I’ve got some heavy-duty mutations. You could dip me in mana and I’d live.”

  “See, you say that now, but one day some... I dunno, a fuckin’ mountain lion or something’s gonna body-slam you into a river of mana and you’ll...” Suri trailed off as Rin opened the door. “Wow. What the fuck?”

  Chapter 18

  I felt like we’d entered some android’s nightmare. Or wet dream – I actually wasn’t sure.

  The nude husks of six unanimated Mercurions hung from the ceiling suspended on body hooks. A couple of them were covered in sheets, like spoopy ghosts. The others were just buck-ass naked, and very not-alive. Their eyes were nothing but empty sockets. Their mouths were slack, hanging open to show toothless gums. None of them had hair, or any kind of detailing beyond their basic features. They were sexless and indeterminate, but finely sculpted.

  Further in the laboratory were big hourglass-shaped distillers, and tanks of liquid mana that glowed with pulsating light. They were empty. There was a workbench with a partially finished, mounted skull made of metal, and a surgery table, currently empty. Mercurion body parts were everywhere. Some of them were obviously being worked on. Some of them had obviously been cut off the bodies of other Mercurions and were being used as models.

  “No... No!” Rin ran to the desk, frantically searching through the scattered papers on top of it. “No, Kanzo! No!”

  “Eww. I feel like we just walked in on someone’s porn collection.” I took a step forward. “What the hell is this?”

  Suri found a switch on the wall. Magelights came to life when she toggled it, illuminating the suite of rooms. The light should have made it better, but only served to make the scene more macabre. There were an awful lot of smaller body parts pinned to felt boards that we hadn’t been able to see in the dark.

  “This is...” Suri dropped her voice to barely a whisper. “This explains a lot.”

  Rin was shaking. She shuddered her way to the desk and dropped onto the stool, put her face on her arms, and wept.

  “I get that this is creepy, but I don’t think I get the implications.” I looked around, not entirely comprehending the gravity of what I was seeing. “What was he doing? Experimenting on his own kind?”

  “How much do you know about Mercurions?”

  “Nada.”

  Suri rolled her shoulders, grimacing. “Mercurions have some real strict social rules. Firstly, marriage. Marriage is real important. They usually marry in threes, and the trio gets hitched in this big ceremony. Two partners from one clan, one partner from another. Part of the ceremony is that the dominant clan gives the three newlyweds the instructions on how to craft the next generation of Mercurions. They get special blueprints for their honeymoon, basically, so that they can have kids.”

  “Right.” I wandered over to look at one of the hanging bodies, alert to the fact that this was an RPG, and thus a good chance they were Zombie Sexbots who’d come to life and attack us.

  “Animating someone and giving them life is... hard.” Suri kept her voice low, glancing at Rin as she cried herself out. “Real hard. And dangerous. Doing it alone, without some tried-and-tested blueprints, is usually a recipe for disaster. Mercurions shun anyone who tries to create a child without guidelines, especially if that person is doing it by themselves out of wedlock. Double the outrage if that person is desecrating the dead to learn how to create a child. What we’re seeing here is...”

  “Juch’ik’haxi!” Rin slammed her fist down onto the desk and pushed up to her feet. “This is... I can’t believe you, Kanzo!”

  Rin kicked the stool over, and I ran to her before she flipped the desk. “Wait! Don’t destroy the evidence!”

  The junior Artificer turned on me, eyes wide and furious and distraught. I had a brief impulse to hug her, which I brushed aside. She wasn’t a kid, though I had to remind myself sometimes.

  After several seconds, Rin backed up, swallowed, and picked up the stool.

  “I’ll start over there,” Suri said, pointing to the tanks. “Try not to wreck anything. Look for stuff we can take to the Volod. No offense, kid, but the more evidence we find to paint this guy as a psycho and an aberration, the less likely Andrik is to shut down the Tanners’ District.”

  “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” Rin began to sort through the papers on the desk with trembling hands. Her jaw was clenched so tight I could hear her teeth creaking, and she was fumbling with small, spasmodic ticcing motions. “He was supposed to follow the rules!”

  I ducked my head to catch her eye and get her to look at me. “What rules? The Mercurion laws?”

  Rin rubbed her hands, shaking her head. “No. I mean… yes, those too. When I-I came here, I’d just lost my dad to HEX. I was scared to be alone, so th-they gave me a craftmaster who could… who I would feel safe with. I didn’t have anyone else but Dad. I still lived at home with him and went to work every day at Ryuko…”

  At mention of Ryuko, Suri looked up from across the room and frowned.

  “Hey.” I dared to catch Rin by the wrist, and she looked up at me sharply. “It’s gonna be alright.”

  “I’m sorry. I sound like a child.” Rin shook her head, but didn’t pull away from me. “I wasn’t… I just…”

  “You’ll be okay.
” I dropped my voice, gently releasing her wrist. “You’re on the spectrum, right?”

  For a moment, I saw something in her face that I hadn’t expected to see: shame. She nodded, cheeks burning blue.

  “It’s okay.” I nodded back. “I had a friend offline who was Aspie as hell. That man was more my brother than my brother was. I’ll watch out for you.”

  Mercurions didn’t cry tears or get red-rimmed eyes, but Rin’s expression said it all. Before I could stop her, she grabbed around my waist and pulled me into a hug. She buried her face against my chest and shook.

  “She alright?” Suri asked over P.M. “Looks like she’s short-circuiting.”

  “Sort of. She’s autistic, I think, and kind of fragile,” I replied. “Don’t worry, the reactors will be back online shortly.”

  Suri raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and continued pillaging her side of the lab.

  “Hey, I have to go look for evidence, okay?” I patted Rin on the shoulder in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “You just take a seat and work it off.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay. I just… too fast.” She shook her head. “This is all happening too fast. I don’t want to think about HEX or Dad or fight or see… I don’t do blood and guts. I never wanted this kind of quest. I just wanted to make stuff with my friend.”

  “Yeah, I bet.” I gently prised her off me, and helped her to the stool. Rin took a seat, rocking back and forth as she began stimming by drumming her fingers, becoming quickly absorbed by the pattering of her hands in her lap.

  Once she was situated, I I turned my eagle eyes to the desk and shelves that stood near it, and picked out any odd-looking feature I could spot. My gaze snagged on a shiny copper container that looked kind of like a vacuum-sealed bread box with a hatch on it, complete with a small, spoked wheel to unlock and reseal it.

  Curious, I drifted over and twisted it open, then flinched back as warm red light spilled out through the crack. It beat against the skin of my fingertips like sunlight, but the feeling didn’t intensify or get uncomfortably hot. There was no alert from my HUD, either. I opened the hatch again, wider, and hmm’d when I saw what lay inside.

  It was a collection of rubies. Some of them were as big as a golf ball, but most of them were smaller than a dime. They were all rough-cut and unpolished. Each stone had a glowing heart the color of blood: a deep crimson light that pulsed when I pinched a stone between thumb and forefinger and lifted it up.

  Quest Updated: The Slayer of Taltos

  After breaking into the secret laboratory of Kanzo, the Slayer of Taltos, you have discovered a mysterious, magically active crystal. Volod Andrik needs to see this.

  Reward: 50 EXP, Mysterious Crystal [Quest Item].

  “Hey Hector, what did you just find?” Suri looked over sharply. “I got a quest update.”

  I held the crystal up for her to see. “This thing. Hey, Rin: do you know what kind of crystal this is?”

  Rin looked up, still mute and obviously distressed, but when she saw what I was holding, her eyes widened. She held out her hands, and when I gave her the stone, she held it up to the light.

  “I can’t identify it,” she whispered. “My Analyze ability doesn’t work on it.”

  “Some kind of mana crystal?” I was thinking back on what very little knowledge I had of magic. “There’s bluecrystal and greencrystal… could there be redcrystal?”

  Suri shook her head as she joined us. “Never heard of redcrystal mana.”

  “This doesn’t look like normal mana crystal. Too heavy.” Rin passed it from hand to hand. “I don’t know what it is. No wiki entry. It’s definitely magical.”

  “Our quest says we should bag it, tag it, and take it to the Volod.” Suri motioned to the notes on the desk. “Read anything interesting?”

  I looked down. “If you need someone to read anything, I’m not your guy.”

  “You can’t read?” Rin asked.

  “Technically, yes.” I held up a finger. “Functionally... we’d be down here for hours. I’m pretty dumb.”

  “Apparently, or you’d know that can fold the notes into your Inventory and get the menu to read them to you,” Suri replied. “Just hand them back to us so we can each rip a copy.”

  “Right. I keep forgetting that we’re virtual reality plague ghosts.” I gathered up the notes, and didn’t even have to stuff them in a pocket: my HUD flashed an alert as soon as I’d collected all the papers into a pile. Another 50 EXP, and a New Quest Item: [Kanzo’s Notes]. There was also another Quest Update, which told me that we’d now collected enough evidence to present it to the Volod.

  Suri’s nose wrinkled. “Plague ghosts?”

  “Well, yeah. Me and Rin both died of the HEX virus in our, uh, ‘previous lives’.” I motioned to her with my head. “Hence, plague ghosts.”

  Rin nodded.

  Suri tilted her head. “What’s HEX?”

  “How can you not know what HEX is?” Rin blurted.

  I discreetly elbowed her in the shoulder.

  Suri shrugged. “Whatever. Anyway, I want to get back to Andrik with these documents – they’re all the evidence we need. Hurry up and read.”

  Rin nodded. After a second or two, her eyes began to rapidly scan back and forth, reading text on a display I couldn’t see. Same with Suri. I stood there and let my HUD spoon-feed the information straight into my brain. Then I had it read me the entries. Most of them were developmental notes, written in a mixture of Common and Mercurion scripts. I couldn't decipher the Mercurion scripts, but the HUD narrator read me the others inside the privacy of my head. It even did it in Kanzo's voice.

  "Mart 2, 1655: Failure, again."

  "Temmuz 7, 1655: Failure. Body perfect, but did not wake. I'm going to have to scrap her and start over."

  "Junia 8, 1656: This body is not at all like the last one. Wise humans say that the definition of insanity is doing something wrong over and over again... well, this time, I'm sure she will be right, even if her form is unorthodox. I will take her to the Seid fount in Mount Racosul and raise her on my Wakening Day. I hope she wakes... I PRAY she wakes."

  "Junia 8, 1656: I did it! Sweet merciful ancestors, you have given me a child! All these years of scraping together and spending everything I could on mana. I bathed her in the vault at the heart of the volcano and she woke! She cannot breathe well yet but that does not matter. She lives! The cognition system with the linked crystals in suspension is so much more efficient than the orthodox pressurized seid methods. Already, she is unusually intelligent and quick-witted. Even better, she treats the memories in the Ruby Mana like her own memories! This old artist will finally have the proper vessel... someone who can pass along my work in its proper form and continue to instruct Rin. I can hardly believed my child is alive. I already have a name for her, but I dare not write it down."

  "Well, shit." After a minute or so, Suri clicked her tongue and crossed her arms, leaning against the edge of the desk with a faraway expression on her face. "He did it."

  Rin's expression crumpled as she read the same notes.

  "Wait: there's more." I skipped ahead, to where the writing became more erratic, and got the HUD to start narrating where I saw a lot of exclamation marks and caps. The entry read: "Julius 23, 1657: THEY TOOK HER! THOSE BASTARDS TOOK HER FROM ME! Phaedra, ancestors, what do I do now!?? I have to find her. At least she didn’t have the memory stone in place already - my worst nightmare."

  "Wow," I said. "Check out Julius 23rd. It's 1657, isn't it?"

  Rin ground the heels of her palms against her eyes. "Yes."

  I clicked my tongue. “Looks like you were dead on the money. Someone is blackmailing him. They kidnapped his daughter.”

  "Did you know he had a juchi down here?" Suri asked.

  Still covering her eyes, Rin shook her head.

  "Not for an entire year?"

  The Mercurion girl looked up sharply. "No! I didn't know, okay? I didn’t know he owned this lab. I wasn’t even here in 165
5."

  “Hey, guys - cool it down a bit. We’ve got our evidence now. Let’s take these and the gem to the Volod,” I said. “Rin, do you want to come with?”

  “I-I can’t.” The girl hung her head. “If Andrik meets me, do you really think he’ll let me go?”

  I winced. “Prooobably not.”

  She looked up at me pleadingly. “Please, just let me stay. I want to do my quest, and it wants me to investigate this place more deeply. Why don’t you come back to the shop tomorrow? I know you broke in here with good intentions, but… I just… I need some time alone. Here – let me send you a Friend Request. You can find me or message me whenever you need to. I’m a Mod – I mean, I should be a Mod – so I can’t block anyone.”

  A second later, my HUD chirped. I swiped the interface in.

  [Player Rin Lu has send you a Friend Request. Do you accept?]

  I accepted the request. Suri shot me a dark look, and I didn’t need to be a genius to know why. In pretty much every murder-mystery I’d ever played in a game, the murderer was the least-likely person in the room. In nearly all circumstances, that person would be Rin: adorable, vulnerable, smart but loyal to her surrogate dad despite him being some kind of freaky mad scientist. I glanced around the room. We knew it was actually Kanzo who was murdering people, but we didn’t know if he had help or not. And if he did...

  Suri seemed to be reading my mind. She crossed her arms. “Rin, you should be advised that I’ve taken snapshots of everything in here. This lab is a key crime scene, and if you disturb it any further, you will incriminate yourself.”

  Rin cringed away from her. “I won’t do anything, I swear. I don’t even want them to know that I know it’s here. They’ll arrest me.”

  I nodded. “Be careful.”

  Suri and I left her in there, carefully shuffling through other papers on Kanzo’s desk. We headed back through the cellars to the workshop in companionable silence.

  “Weird question,” I said. “Do you have any past-life memories of being a cop?”

  “You’ve got a real hard-on for this past life stuff, don’t you?”