The Great MacGuffin: A LitRPG Adventure (Beta Tester Book 1)

by Rachel Ford

  “Uh, sure.” Again, he was silent.

  “You’re googling it, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, what’s a MacGuffin.”

  “‘An event, device or object that serves to forward the plot despite lacking intrinsic importance of its own.’”

  “You’re reading that, aren’t you?”

  “‘Common examples,’” Richard continued, “‘include the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend, or secret papers, a stolen briefcase, etc., in spy fiction. The MacGuffin serves no role beyond motivating the characters, and spurring either (or both) the heroes and villains to action.’”

  Richard trailed off, mumbling to himself, and Jack rolled his eyes. He was clearly reading through a passage somewhere – maybe Wikipedia, or some movie trope website. Now and then, he heard him mumble the name Alfred Hitchcock in reference to popularizing the term.

  Then, though, he scoffed. “Dude. The dagger is not a MacGuffin.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “No way. The dagger isn’t irrelevant. No dagger, no Iaxiabor.”

  “Bollocks. The dagger could be swapped out for anything: a vase, an urn, a scarf. It wouldn’t change the story one iota.”

  Richard laughed derisively. “Umm…yeah it would. Duh. Imagine calling something ‘The Scarf of Doom.’ That would just be sad.

  “Anyway, the dagger does play a role. It’s what holds Iaxiabor’s soul.”

  “Am I actually going to get to fight Iaxiabor? Or am I going to spend the whole game trying to keep the dagger safe from his minions?”

  Richard paused for a full ten seconds. “You know I can’t tell you that. I could lose my job if I did.”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, until I know differently, I’m going to keep calling it a MacGuffin.”

  “It’s not a gosh darned MacGuffin.”

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “It’s a great, big MacGuffin.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “The MacGuffiny-MacGuffin to ever MacGuffin. The Great MacGuffin.”

  “You’re nuts, dude.”

  Jack laughed. The truth was, he was feeling alright. He had a cup of coffee and half a plate of pancakes in him, and he was ready and rearing to go. “Hey, no offense, Richard, but I should get on with this. The sooner I finish, the sooner I can go home.”

  “Oh, right.” He saluted. “Okay, Richard out.”

  Migli’s hand returned to his side. “Shall we proceed, Sir Knight?”

  “Sure, Migli. Let’s move out.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  They scoured the beach for a good fifteen minutes. Once or twice, Migli pointed out points of interest. “Look at all that fallen lumber. That’d make a good campfire,” or, “Look yonder, sir knight. That’d be good fishing, I’d stake my beard.”

  They ran into a lone Susmala, which Jack took down with fire. It took longer than he remembered. But the day was bright and sunny, so he could work in relative safety. To his disappointment, the fire spell did not pre-cook the boar meat. Still, he added a slab of raw pork to his belongings.

  After a space, they reached a river inlet. Migli turned to him. “Check this out, Sir Jack. I’ll warrant more than a few boats have come inland via this route. We should follow it, to see if any yet remain.”

  “I don’t know, Migli. I doubt this is a frequent tourist stop. Let’s keep following the shore for a bit.”

  The dwarf stood in place, still talking. “I’ve heard tell of a pirate, who was supposed to bury his treasure on this island.”

  “That’s great. But treasure’s no use to us without a boat. Anyway, I don’t have time for a treasure hunt. I need to get home.”

  “They say he followed the river inward, until he reached a cave that looked like a skull.”

  Jack glanced downriver. All he saw was thick vegetation and heavy mosquitos. The shore, by contrast, looked breezy and sunny and inviting. “Let’s go this way,” he decided, marching down the sandy beach. “We can always swing back if we need to.”

  Migli followed him, and they traveled for a while in silence, save for the breeze and the crash of surf. Then the dwarf fell to singing about true love.

  Hair like sunshine and gold

  Pure beauty to behold

  A heart so true

  A heart for only you

  Jack snorted. “So who would that be? The waitress in Dragon Run? Or the captain’s daughter on the Lady Luck? Or perhaps your true love, Elise?”

  Migli ignored him and rambled on about a love burning brighter than embers in a dragon’s hearth. Jack focused on their direction. The island’s vegetation seemed to be getting sparser. The sandy shore expanded, stretching further and further inland.

  They kept going for a good, long ways. The sun beat down blazingly hot against them. By now, there wasn’t a shred of vegetation anywhere, except as a distant green haze against the horizon behind them.

  Jack felt his ire rising. “What a wild goose chase you’ve led me on, Migli,” he fumed. “I don’t even know why I listened to you in the first place. Of course there’s not just random boats lying around on an island in the middle of nowhere.

  “What kind of idiocy is that, anyway?”

  He was still berating the dwarf when his foot plunged through a seemingly innocuous patch of sand and sunk deep into a hollow below.

  “Be on the lookout,” Migli said at the same moment, “these shores are crawling with malscorpioni.”

  Jack might have asked what in the hell macaroni beasts were, had not a set of pincers seized his leg at that precise moment. A quick pull yanked him down into a freefall. He tumbled into the dark, landing heavily on a dry, crispy surface. It snapped and crackled under his feet. He lost a handful of hit points with the fall, but his main concern was finding the owner of those pincers. He suspected they’d do a lot more damage than a little fall.

  He glanced upward, toward the opening above him – the trap into which he’d tumbled. Migli was peering down, a little black block against the bright sun overhead. “Look out, sir knight,” he called. “You’ve fallen into a nest.”

  Nest wasn’t the word Jack wanted to hear. He didn’t follow the etymology. How would a macaroon beast nest? It didn’t make sense. But somehow, he felt instinctively that whatever this saccharine nightmare might prove to be, its nest was exactly the wrong place to be.

  As if to support the theory, he heard clacking behind him. He spun around. Other than a little patch of sunlight shining down from above, illuminating old, sundried seaweed and brown, dead grass, he could see nothing.

  Jack conjured up a fireball and held it at the ready. The reddish glow emanating from it cast a little bit of light in the surrounding area.

  And he screamed. He was staring into five sets of dull, dark eyes. And every single one of them was on the same body, dotted along the front of some kind of cephalothorax.

  Jack didn’t stand and fight. He wasn’t going to die with his boots on, or go out in a blaze of glory. On the contrary, he turned tail and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. Indeed, he ran so fast, the wind put out his fireball.

  He didn’t care. He just kept running. The clacking of some kind of wretched legs behind him urged him onward, faster and faster. Once or twice, he smashed into walls. Somehow, he always managed to pick himself up, though, and keep going.

  The commotion attracted more of the things. He didn’t know if these were the macaroni monsters, or if they were something else. He didn’t really care. No macaroon or macaroni monster, or whatever Migli had said, could be worse than the arachnid nightmares behind him. He’d only caught glimpses here and there, but they were more than enough. The monsters had pincers, a hard, shell-like body, and a long, segmented tail. Every once in a while, the one nearest him would lash out with a stinger. He’d duck and dodge, and so far had managed to avoid being impaled. But he’d gathered that even their tails carried something unpleasant.

  Jack found himself plunging into
dark tunnels, running this way and that wildly, with no sense of direction at all. For a while, he could hear the dwarf shouting banalities and well-wishes. Then his voice disappeared, just like the light.

  He ran on. He could hear a rush like thunder in the distance. He feared what new terror this might be.

  Then again, the terror behind him, the swarm of hideous arachnids at his heels, was about as bad as he could imagine. Whatever waited, it had to be better than this.

  So he ran. The hot, stale air of the tunnels started to get cooler. Then, he realized there was moisture in the air. His lungs felt a little less parched. He started to perspire.

  He kept running. The thunder got louder until it was almost deafening. Water. It’s water, he realized. Running water.

  The sound of the arachnids chasing him fell away. He didn’t know if they’d actually turned back, or if he just couldn’t hear them over the underground river. He half turned to check, and very nearly ended up impaled on a massive stinger.

  They were definitely still there. He ran a little harder.

  Then he felt the floor disappear beneath his feet. He fell, and fell, and fell, until he landed with a heavy splash in a great, icy body of water. All around him, arachnid bodies fell too. Splash. Plop. Splash, like stones dropping into a lake.

  Jack went down first, and then he went forward. The water moved with an incredible current, sweeping him away. A faint, bluish light lit the riverbank. He could see arachnid bodies struggling in the current, just as he was.

  He fought with his limbs, trying to reach the surface. His lungs felt like they were going to burst. He made it, finally.

  The arachnids were less successful. The smallest of the two dozen or so stopped struggling first. Jack was aware of a boost to his experience points. The others soon followed, and his points climbed.

  He was gasping for breath, and fighting to keep his head above water, when a thought entered his mind.

  You’ve gained a character level.

  He whistled. At least, he tried to whistle. It came out more like a breathy sputtering. Still, he was impressed. That made him a level fifty-six player. Not too shabby for a noob.

  His self-satisfaction necessarily had to take a backseat to self-preservation, though. The current was tossing him this way and that, battering him against rocks. Now and then, it would drag him under again, and he’d have to fight his way to the surface.

  He tried to get near a bank. He figured he needed to catch hold of something, so he could pull himself out of the water.

  That, though, proved easier said than done. Every time he got close to a bank, the water would drag him in a different direction, or batter him mercilessly against some clump of rock. His lungs were half full of water, and though it didn’t hurt the way it might in real life, it wasn’t comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

  Then, just as suddenly as he’d plunged into the water, he found himself free falling again, right over the edge of a waterfall. He landed with a heavy splash – one that took his health meter down to a third.

  But the flow was gentle here. The raging torrent of the underground river gave way to a soft, easy pace. And, more importantly, it spilled out of the dark into a lush, green country.

  Jack waited until he made it outside. Then, he managed to drag himself onto the bank. He lay there for several long minutes, wheezing and breathing in grassy smells.

  He didn’t hear anyone come up behind him, so his surprise was that much more palpable when Migli’s voice sounded, “Excellent work, Sir Knight. You vanquished those malscorpioni like a hero of old.”

  Jack rolled over and squinted up into the sun. “No thanks to you, Migli. As usual. You would have left me to be killed by the macaroni demons.”

  “I’ve scouted ahead,” the dwarf said. “There’s a pirate camp a league upriver. By a strange looking cave, shaped like a skull.”

  He frowned. “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the cave you were telling me about? The one with treasure or whatever?”

  “That’s the rumor, aye: that there’s a great trove of treasure buried in Skull Cave.”

  “You mean the river carried me all the way back to the bleeping beginning?”

  “Come, sir knight. We should move out, if we mean to take the pirate ship before they leave.”

  Despite the danger ahead of them, Migli took to singing. He went back and forth between songs about actual gold, and a maid whose hair shone like gold. They found a well-worn trail a ways down river, following the river bank. It was easier than picking their way over wet stones and up steep banks, so they transitioned to it.

  Migli kept on singing for a good two and a half miles. Then he fell quiet.

  “You see anyone?” Jack whispered.

  “Not yet. But this is pirate country. We should avoid the road.”

  He nodded, and the pair of them headed back off the trail. They walked easily enough for a space, until they spotted a lookout ahead of them. Then, they dropped to a crawl.

  “You take care of him,” Migli whispered. “I’ll watch our flank.”

  Jack rolled his eyes, but he didn’t argue. The dwarf was about as stealthy as a bull in a china shop, so heading off on his own would probably keep them both out of trouble.

  He crept forward, covering each yard slowly and painstakingly. Little by little, the distance disappeared until he was thirty feet away. He was close enough to hear the lookout humming to himself. He was singing about gold too – this time, golden doubloons.

  Jack shook his head. Dwarves and pirates.

  He got closer. He was twenty feet away now. He could smell a strong stench of rum wafting along the gentle afternoon breeze.

  He crept closer yet, until he was ten feet away. He could smell rank body odor – days and days of sweat, and bad breath, and general lack of hygiene.

  He moved through the leaves of a low shrub. He was about five feet away, now. He got to a crouching position and started to reach for the blade tucked into his belt.

  Then, he stepped on a branch. He heard the snap of the wood before he even knew what he’d done. He froze.

  The lookout didn’t. The lookout spun around. “Oi, ye landlubber, who be ye?”

  Three options popped up in Jack’s mind.

  I’m Death, come to claim you.

  I’m…uh…Jack. Remember me?

  And

  I’m the new guy.

  Jack thought quickly. His hand was inches away from his blade. The lookout already had his drawn. He decided to go with the third option and announce himself as the new guy. If nothing else, maybe the confusion would give him a chance to draw his knife.

  The lookout blinked. “New guy? I thought you was shorter than that.”

  Three more options presented themselves.

  Just kidding. I’m Death, and I’m here to collect.

  You saying I’m short, landlubber?

  And

  Aye, that’d be the rum doing yer thinking for ye.

  Again, he went with the last option, and the pirate laughed out loud at the mention of rum. “Aye, now that be true enough, I shouldn’t wonder. Alright, New Guy, what be yer name again?”

  “Jack.”

  “Right. Alright, New Guy Jack, what in Beelzebub’s name be ye doin’ crawling around down there?”

  He had four options now.

  Getting ready to end your miserable life, pirate scum.

  Tying my shoe.

  How about you mind your own business?

  And

  Looking for doubloons…?

  He went with the bit about doubloons, and the watchman nodded briskly. “As good a reason as any, I reckon. Well, then, carry on, Jack.”

  Jack studied the ground for a moment, sifting dirt around with his fingers. Then he glanced up. “You know, I almost forgot. The captain needed me to go see him.”

  The lookout shivered. “Argh, ye better not keep him waiting, then. You know what they did to the last one who d
id that?” He shook his head. “Keelhauling. It ain’t a pretty thing, and that’s a fact, it is.”

  Jack demurred that no, he didn’t imagine keelhauling would be pretty, and then he thanked the other man for his time and moved on. He didn’t know how Migli would get past the sentry. He figured that would be the dwarf’s problem to sort out.

  He decided to march into camp, cool and confident, like he belonged there. If pretending he had business there had worked with the lookout, maybe it would work with everyone else.

  It did, for the first little while, anyway. He strode into a makeshift encampment. It had a few ramshackle shanties, a big, central cooking fire, and a moored sailboat by the river. All around, rough men lazed in the shade, drinking and arguing and playing at games that involved dice and cards. Someone was cutting a big chunk of meat off one of the monkeys on a spit over the fire. Someone else was trouncing a fellow pirate while onlookers cheered. To judge by the shouting, the loser of the fight was suspected of being a card shark.

  But none of them batted an eyelash at Jack. Apparently, having got the okay from the sentry, he was free to go about as he pleased. Or maybe they were too liquored up to notice; even with a steady breeze, the stench of rum was heavy in the air here.

  He couldn’t really tell, and it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that he strolled in among the pirates, and no one even glanced his way. He paused to get his bearings. He’d seen the fire and the ship already, and the hutment. What he hadn’t seen yet was the cave itself, and that was because it had been almost directly behind a patch of trees.

  Now, though, as he stood in the center of camp, he saw it. In fact, he stared at it. A great, gaping mouth seemed to open in the gray cliff-face. Two little niches set in the stone several feet above looked like two great, empty eye sockets. It didn’t help that the pirates had lit campfires in each of the sockets.

  It seemed to stare at him like something possessed, some manner of demon or malevolent spirit. Jack gulped and contemplated his next move. He could use pirate treasure. That was for sure. He’d be able to by all the spells he wanted then, and new weapons too.

  Then again, the ship was what he really needed. As drunk and indolent as these pirates were, he could probably meander across the yard and slip into the river. It’d be a matter of keeping out of sight long enough to cut the mooring ropes – and then the current would carry him away, free and fast. He’d be safe before the pirates even knew what happened.