by Deck Davis
Tripped grinned. “It’d be nicer to be watching out for redheads, but I need to find where the sleels go to have their lullabies. Any ideas?”
Jon sucked in his cheeks. “I’m a spirit archer,” he said. “Most of my skills center on shooting arrows at stuff. But when we first started out, we were leveling up by killing wild boars. Our sneaking skill was awful and we kept losing them. Then I noticed their footprints, and when we followed them, I learned the tracking skill.”
“Right!” said Warren.
“What are you thinking?” said Tripp.
For the first time since Tripp had met him, Jon looked excited. He hadn’t missed noticing that of the three, he seemed the least enamored by the game. His eyes were alive now.
“If your theory is right,” he said, “then the sleels prowl the plains at night. When daylight starts to break, they’ll go back to their nests.”
Tripp started to feel a rush of excitement. “And when they do, we just need to track their breadcrumbs home.”
Warren slapped Jon on the back, and then Tripp. “I think we just made plans for tonight. Cool, huh? Think of all the loot we’ll get.”
Lizzy finished dealing with the trader and turned around. “What’s got you guys so excited?”
“You’ll see,” said Warren. Then he looked at Tripp. “Meet us outside the gates when it gets dark. I’ll send you a friend request so we can always find each other.”
Friend request received:
Warren – Cleric - Level 6.
Tripp hit ‘accept’, and then checked his map and saw that Warren’s player marker was on it.
He and Bee spent the rest of the day in the plains south of Goddenstone, where he hunted down frorargs. He took his new knowledge about the sleel nests and he applied it to frorargs, knowing now that they didn’t just spawn randomly or appear out of thin air.
Instead of wasting time hoping to find them randomly, he prowled the plains and looked for their tracks, which were claw imprints in the dirt. After 30 minutes of this, he gained his third skill.
Skill Gained: Tracking
Level: Nickel 1
The ability to see signs of animal life in the terrain and use this to hunt them down.
Bonus: Animal tracks will now appear more prominently in your vision.
Need: To track a specific species of an animal, you must have already encountered one of that species
Restrictions: As a level 1, you are limited to tracking animals who move across the ground.
Related skillsets: Hunter, archer, tamer.
Like the skill description said, when he walked over the plains he saw that parts of the grass glowed yellow, and he knew that following these would lead him to the nearby frorargs.
Despite gaining his new skill, he was still going to need Jon’s help tonight since he was only a level one tracker, and couldn’t pick up on the signs left behind by flying creatures.
He used his new skill to catch frorargs unaware. This, coupled with drinking the potion of Quickstrike, meant he could carve through the fat-bellied frogs much easier. There was no need to use Bee to herd them toward him, no need to resort to catching them and throwing them in water.
While he hunted for the critters, he told Bee to keep making arcs in the surrounding area, uncovering more of the map and also identifying herbs on the plains.
As the sun began to set he was tired and hungry, but he was stronger.
You have leveled up to level 5!
You have leveled up to level 6!
- HP Increased
-Manus Increased
Please choose a stat to add [2] attribute points to:
Power [2]
Mind [1]
Technique [3]
He’d already decided that he was going to put as many points into his technique attributes as possible, since that – as well as actually using his skills – would govern how great a crafter he became.
There was an argument for spreading his points equally and become a better-balanced character, but he’d done that before in games. All it really resulted in was a character who wasn’t particularly good at anything but didn’t suck, either.
He didn’t want mediocrity. He wanted mastery.
With that in mind, he spent his stat points before Bee had a chance to try to change his mind.
Technique increased to [5]!
- Manus 25% more effective
- Crafting skills improve 5% quicker
His crafting improvement speed had only increased by 5% this time, but he guessed that was the law of diminishing returns. The better you got at something, the slower your future progress became.
It was kinda like having a morning coffee. The first time you try coffee, it blasts tiredness out of your head. After a month of coffee-drinking, you need to heap more and more into your cup until soon you’re drinking enough coffee to kill a horse.
There was no new skill this time; he hadn’t earned a new skill through spending stat points since he’d gotten underlay, but it didn’t matter. He’d improved his technique, and that’d translate to his crafting skills. Now, he just wanted a chance to start using them.
“Get the tentacle, and become Konrad’s apprentice,” he said. “First things first.”
After killing frorargs, leveling up, and looting the creature’s corpses all day, he was a little harder to kill thanks to his increase in hitpoints, and he was a little richer after finding 67 gold coins. Not a bad day at all.
He whiled away the fading daylight hours by setting up a campfire and setting the cooking pot he’d bought above it.
It was a beautiful night, with a calm wind that stroked the grass left and right, and the chirping of nighttime insects that reminded Tripp of his bedroom at Uncle James’s house, when he’d open the windows and hear the grasshoppers. It didn’t feel like the kind of night that threatened death by sleel.
He took some frorargs corpses, chopped them up, and then boiled them. Out of the four corpses he used, only 1 yielded something edible, with the rest burning beyond recognition. This gave him yet another new skill; cooking. It was his first in-game skill that he was actually pretty good at in real life.
According to Boxe, practicing cooking would increase his chances of producing edible things, and eventually would boost the benefits he got from his efforts. Not to mention, the taste-realism in Soulboxe was amazing.
Now, the one portion of frorargs he’d managed to cook would boost 25 of his hitpoints. It wasn’t great, but it was something, and it was another step toward becoming self-sufficient.
He ate the cooked frorarg to replenish the HP he’d lost fighting. Then, with darkness setting upon the plains and with his hunger sated, he packed up his campfire.
It was time to go sleel hunting.
As he headed back toward the Goddenstone gates, he saw Warren, Jon, and Lizzy waiting for him. Lizzy had changed her outfit and was wearing a leather breastplate that looked like it’d take a blow or two, and steel boots that made Tripp’s look like he’d found them on a scrapheap. Jon’s quiver was full of arrows, and Warren had a necklace around his neck that Tripp hadn’t noticed before.
Bee flew over to him, returning from her circular jaunts in the plains to fill-in some of Tripp’s map. “Wow, you’re level six now. You’ve been busy.”
“I hope you have, too.”
“Are you calling me lazy?”
“Would I say a thing like that to my only friend in Soulboxe?”
“Yeah, you would,” said Bee. “Here. Pickings are slim on the plains, but I added some herb location to your map.”
He checked his map and saw that 3 types of herbs grew in Godden’s Reach.
Pearl Orchids
Properties: Healing
Nightshade
Properties: Poison
Blue Dill Mace
Properties: Manus restoration
“Good work, Bee. We’ll gather some soon. Maybe tomorrow, if tonight doesn’t go to plan.”
“Flower p
icking? Lucky us.”
“Level six?” said Warren, when he noticed Tripp approached them.
Tripp checked their levels. “Looks like you guys leveled up, too.”
“Jon wanted to boost his tracking, so we grinded a little. Did you know there are gators down south? Follow the stream long enough, and you’ll see some ugly S.O.Bs.”
Jon was standing with his arms crossed and his bow slung over his shoulder. “We ready?” he said.
Tripp had detected a coldness from Jon, but he guessed the guy wasn’t all bad from the way he’d smiled – and then tried to hide it – at his brother and sister before now. Besides, he liked that Jon was practical and that he was already set to go.
There was just one thing that was bothering Tripp.
“Listen,” he said, scratching his head. “Don’t think that I’m not happy to have you guys helping me, but they say three’s a crowd. Or four, in this case. I know you guys are playing Soulboxe so you can meet up and stuff, and I don’t want you to think you have to help me.”
“Are you kidding?” said Warren. “All four of us sneaking up on the sleels…if we nail one of them, the treasure will be insane. A loot pinata. ”
Lizzy watched her brothers, her elephant trunk lazily twirling in front of her face. “The boy has loot on his brain. Probably has posters of scantily clad loot chests on his bedroom walls.”
Warren nodded. “We couldn’t afford to play for too long, so if we’re going to find something valuable, then we better do it fast. It just so happens that Tripp here came up with a great idea.”
“We better get started,” said Tripp. “Let’s run through this again; we find a sleel out there on the plains, and then glue ourselves to it. Stay out of distance so we don’t trigger its attack response, but keep it in sight.”
Jon nodded. “The problem is, it’s so dark that we’ll bump into its ass before we know it’s there.”
“Perks of being an orc; night vision. I’ll see them from a decent distance.”
“Then let’s get going.”
They set out across the plains, Jon walking in front in a half-crouch, though his efforts at stealth were made useless by Lizzy’s. As a grey tusk, her feet pounded on the ground.
They might as well been waling over the plains while beating drums. Any attempt of stealth was further ruined by Warren, who kept humming the theme tune from Crosshammer – Chicago PD.
I always hated that show, Tripp thought.
He guessed it didn’t matter that they weren’t being too quiet; they weren’t creeping up on the sleels tonight. He just needed to see one in the distance, and then they’d track it until daylight. The only danger would come if they got too close to the sleel and triggered its attack response.
“It’s amazing out here,” said Lizzy. “I know all the freaky stuff comes out at night, but damn, did they paint a beautiful night sky. You never see this kind of thing in the city.”
Tripp saw what she meant; the dark of the night sky was broken by the twinkling of millions of stars, some white, others flashing red and yellow. It reminded him of camping trips with his dad and brother, and how as soon as they left the city and they pitched their tents and the sky got dark, a sense of calm would come upon him.
Man, he missed those days. No responsibilities, no worries, just childhood freedom. Bow and arrows, barbeques, campfires.
Well, he guessed he was getting all that here, wasn’t he? Soulboxe really was a vacation.
Eventually, they had walked for so long that Warren had given up humming, and instead, he walked next to his sister and they chatted about how different their childhoods were. Tripp enjoyed listening to them, but he was aware that Jon walked a little apart from the pair.
Something’s bothering him, he thought.
Tripp walked alongside him. “Ever been hunting for real?” he asked.
“I bought a pellet gun from a kid at school once,” said Jon. “I shot a magpie in my garden. Never thought I’d actually hit it. The gun was so lightweight you could barely feel it when you pulled the trigger, but I heard the bird squawk like hell, and then it fell off the tree. We couldn’t find its body though; god knows what happened to it. That’s the nearest I’ve come. Nearest I’d ever get, outside of the game. It isn’t for me.”
“What about Warren?”
“He was in the scouts. In fact, he was in every club you could ever think of. Archery, chess, track, soccer. He only came home to shovel dinner into his mouth or to sleep. Then he was attacked on the way home from school one night.”
“What happened?”
“He probably wouldn’t want me to say.”
Tripp nodded. “Fair enough. I was attacked, you know. It’s why I’m here.”
“Oh?”
“Saw a couple of guys trying to mug a woman. I stupidly went over, and the bastards threw acid in my face.”
Jon gasped. Tripp saw the color pale from his already-white cheeks. “Acid? You see that kind of thing on the news, but…”
“Hard to take in, right?” said Tripp.
“I don’t know how you can be so cool about it. I’d be losing my mind.”
“I kinda have lost my mind in a way,” said Tripp. “I’m in a regrowth pod right now, and they’re trying to get some of my sight back. Soulboxe is supposed to be a place to escape while they do that. The doc mentioned they’d be filling me full of some chemical or other, too, something to keep me calm.”
“They can do great things with medicine these days. I hope they fix you,” said Jon.
“Thanks.”
Warren joined in step with them now. “It was three guys and two dogs,” he said. “The attack Jon tried to whisper to you about.”
Tripp waited for him to speak. He’d always been told that he was a good listener, and part of that was keeping his mouth shut and just letting people take their time with what they wanted to say. Too many people only listened long enough until it was time for their own chance to speak.
“I was walking home from high-jump practice and I cut through St. John’s park.”
Jon shook his head. “How many times did I tell you to stay away from that place when it’s dark?”
Warren shrugged. “You know me. Anyway, it was dusk. Only one of the park lamps was working, because people kept throwing stones at the rest and smashing them.”
“They deal drugs there,” said Jon.
“I used to cut through the park all the time. Took me a minute or two,” said Warren. “I never had any problems. Only, that night I saw an older guy walking his dog through the park. It was pitch black in one of the most dangerous parks in the city, and there’s a guy walking his labradoodle puppy.”
“They should close that place,” said Jon. “Or start fucking patrolling it, at least.”
“What happened?” asked Tripp.
“There were a group of guys with bull terrier dogs hanging by the only working lamppost. The labradoodle guy cut an arc away from them to walk past, and then two of the guys kneeled down, unclipped their bull terriers from their leads, then let them loose. It took about a second before one of them brought the labradoodle pup down, and then they were both going at it, biting chunks out of it like it was a rabbit. The older guy was helpless. Frozen. Honestly, Tripp. I can still hear the pup yelping.”
Tripp thought about Tidus and what he’d do if that ever happened to his friend. A lot of people wouldn’t have understood. They’d have said Tidus was just an animal. But Tripp knew deep down he’d give his life to save Tidus if something like that happened to him.
“I ran over and kicked one of the terriers in the balls and made it back-off, but then the other one clomped its jaws on my ankle. I’ve never felt pain like it. Then a police car showed up outside the park. I think its sirens and lights must have scared the guys off, because soon me, the older man, and his pup were alone.”
“Did the pup live?” said Tripp.
“Talk about priorities!”
“Sorry, let me re-phrase
that. Did the pup live?”
Warren grinned. “It pulled through. The guy had to crowdfund to pay for an operation, but it survived.”
“What about you?”
“Yeah, I survived.”
Tripp couldn’t help laughing. Warren had that way about him, Tripp had noticed from their brief time together. He had a way of lightening any mood. “Any lasting damage?”
“The terrier tore my tendons like they were tissue. I had health insurance through my job, but it didn’t cover everything. I can barely walk at anything faster than a brisk pace these days.”
“I’m starting to think it isn’t worth trying to help people. Maybe every man should look after themselves. I got blinded, you got your ankle screwed up. It would have been easier for both of us to walk away.”
“I get Christmas cards from the old guy every year,” said Warren. “They always have a goofy picture of him and the pup, and he always filled the inside part of the card telling me what they’ve been doing over the last year. His wife died, you see, and his daughter bought him the pup because he needed company. If you ask me, helping people is worth it. We have to look out for each other.”
They walked on in silence then, until Warren fell back into talking to Lizzy. Jon moved a little closer to Tripp. “He says he doesn’t mind what happened to his ankle, but he does. If you offered him a magic pill so he could sprint again, he’d take it. If you ask me, that’s why he chose the cleric class. He can dish out free health care in Soulboxe.”
Tripp was glad he’d met them now. He felt a bond forming with Warren. They both knew what it was like suffering life-changing injuries when they’d tried to help someone.
But while Tripp regretted helping, Warren seemed happy with his choice. Tripp wondered what it’d take to get to that state of mind, and he doubted he ever would. If someone could offer Tripp the magic pill that Jon mentioned, he’d refuse it and ask for a time machine instead.
Soon, he saw something in the distance. It was a dark shape slinking over the plains, floating two feet above the ground and looking sinister as hell. It was so far away that even his night vision didn’t let him see it in detail, but there was no mistaking what it was.
