Gamers

by Cambry Varner

  Evaluate (Int)2

  Magic (Int)2

  Knowledge (Int)2

  Perception (Wis)2

  Ani Friend (Wis)2

  Healing (Wis)2

  Survival (Wis)2

  Intimidate (C/S)5

  Entertain (Cha)5

  Charm (Cha)5

  Deceit (Cha)5

  Abilities: Sneak Attack Bonus, Two-Weapon Fighting, Roguish Talent +3 to Locate Traps

  Darcy looked over her sheet and nodded, apparently impressed. Sally couldn’t help feeling a small measure of pleasure from the silent praise. It had only taken her moments to figure out how the scores worked to create the characters she wanted. If she had known she was going to become her character for real, however, then she would have made other changes such as putting the extra 18 into Constitution for more HP rather than into Cha.

  It took a little longer for Mina to finish copying her character information, and when she handed it over to Darcy, she got the opposite reaction. Darcy stared at the parchment, then looked at Mina, and then looked back the parchment again. “What the hell is this?”

  “What’s wrong?” Mina said, taken aback. “I copied it exactly.”

  “How?” Darcy said, lifting her eyes from Mina’s stats to the Barbarian woman. “How the hell did you get a measly sixteen in Strength? Are these…” Darcy’s eyes narrowed dangerously, “are these default stats?”

  Mina’s face remained blank. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Did you click the ‘roll’ icon to get your stats?” Darcy said, hotly. “Or did you just click okay through character creation?”

  Sally rose to her feet and peered over Darcy’s shoulder at Mina’s stats and grimaced. She may be a novice at this game, but even she could see that these stats were subpar compared to hers.

  Race: Human

  Level 1 Barbarian

  HP: 11 (14)

  Armor Class: 15

  Str: 16

  Dex: 15

  Con: 14

  Int: 12

  Wis: 10

  Cha: 8

  Swim (Str)3

  Climb (D/S)3

  Acrobat (Dex)1

  Sneak (Dex)1

  Legerdemain (D)1

  Evaluate (Int)0

  Magic (Int)0

  Knowledge (Int)0

  Perception(Wis)1

  Ani Friend (Wis)1

  Healing (Wis)1

  Survival (Wis)3

  Intimidate (C/S)5

  Entertain (Cha)-1

  Charm (Cha)-1

  Deceit (Cha)-1

  Abilities: Rage, Wrestler

  “I was in a hurry,” Mina said, throwing up her large hands in a sign of defeat. “I told you I had a chem test to study for.”

  “Default stats are gimped!” Darcy’s voice rose with emotion. “You got stuck with basic crap scores when you could have gotten much better stats by rolling! Everyone knows that!”

  Sally laid a hand on Darcy’s shoulder to calm her before she went into a tirade. “There’s nothing we can do about it now. Can we still finish this dungeon?”

  “Yeah, we can,” Darcy said, slowly deflating, letting the anger go. “With me here, the group dynamic is rounded out.” She tucked the sheets into her bag and collected the torch from the sconce where they had put it before she passed out the sheets. “Alright, there are two more rooms ahead. Sally, you go first. Mina will go…wait, Mina, where is your weapon?”

  “Over there,” the barbarian woman pointed at a great ax lying on the floor yards away. It had double-sided crescent blades, with the handle looking like a roughly sanded tree branch. “I threw it at the rats.”

  “Why would you throw your only weapon!?” Darcy demanded scandalized.

  “It was the only thing I had in my hands,” Mina said pointedly.

  “Don’t throw your ax!” Clearly, Darcy could barely keep herself from screaming. Feeling sorry for Mina, Sally was glad to see her sister draw a deep breath and let it out slowly until she was able to control her voice. “Alright, Sally needs to go first to look for traps, Mina will go behind her, and I’ll take up the rear.”

  “Waitaminute,” the tall barbarian woman who was now shouldering her great ax. “Why can’t I go last?”

  Sally recognized the twitch that suddenly appeared beneath Darcy’s eye. It was a twitch that occurred when she was about to go into a fury. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, you remembered it.

  “Because we’ll need you to go in before Sally to fight the walking skeletons in the next room,” Darcy explained in a stiff tone that begged for a drink or a cigarette.

  “If Sally is going first anyway, why don’t I give her my great ax, and she can go in fighting?” Mina asked, ignorant of the warning that Darcy’s twitch brought.

  Seeing Darcy’s face go several shades of scarlet, Sally quickly spoke up, “Darcy, you’re a mentor, remember? I don’t know this stuff myself, so this is no different than answering questions in a forum.”

  Darcy nodded and visibly made the effort to calm down. “Alright, listen close. Sally is a Rogue and has less health points than you at only nine points. If she goes in alone, after one or two swings, she’s dead. Your health is higher than hers, so you can take more damage before going down. And you deal more damage with your greatax.”

  “And no,” she said just as Mina opened her mouth to speak. “Sally can’t use your great ax because she’s a Rogue. Rogues can only use simple weapons like rapiers, but Barbarians can use martial weapons like great axes. I need to go last so I can watch your back and heal you. And before you point out that I’m wearing armor, yes, my armor does protect me from taking damage, but my mace can’t do as much damage as your ax. With that said, are there any more questions?”

  Mina raised her hand with an expectant look.

  Darcy drew a small breath, held it, and let it out slowly. “Yes?”

  “Can’t you top me off on health points? I only have eleven now, and if I have to fight off monsters, I rather do it with full health.”

  “If you had fewer health points, I would, but I think you can take a hit or two before I have to heal you.”

  “Couldn’t you give me a potion instead?” Mina asked, voice up an octave, obviously stricken at the thought of getting hit “once or twice.”

  Narrowing her eyes, Darcy said, “I’m not giving you a potion to heal three measly hit points. You’re just going to have to trust me to keep you standing. Now, if there isn’t anything else up somebody’s ass, then let’s go.”

  Minutes later, Sally led the line, holding a torch to light the way for the humans. Mina followed almost close enough to violate her personal space, with Darcy marching at the rear. As much as Sally hated going first, she could understand Darcy’s reasoning, as she was the only one with low-light vision and could see farther than the circle of light from the torch. A door loomed ahead, and without needing Darcy to remind her, Sally checked for traps.

  With her relatively high Wisdom and Intelligence scores, along with two points she’d assigned to the skill during her character creation, Sally had a +5 bonus to the Perception roll for finding traps. When Darcy was convincing her to give Shadow’s Deep a chance, she had explained the game’s mechanics of dice rolls. The higher the number, the more the chance of success at whatever you were attempting to do. The imaginary dice roll was typically that of a twenty-sided dice, but there could be variations depending on magic items, spells and other contexts. The adjusted roll was compared to the difficulty of the challenge. Finding a trap in a tutorial dungeon was probably a challenge rated around 10. So a twenty-sided dice roll with a +6 bonus should yield a high enough number to be successful eighty percent of the time. All the same, it wasn’t obvious what she should be searching for, when she had never used the skill before finding the string of the scythe trap. Sally looked for inconspicuous strings, hidden panels, tiny slits in the floor and ceiling, and found none. Then she tried the door. It was heavy and wooden with a large brass knob that was s
o rusted it barely reflected the torch’s light.

  “It’s locked,” she commented.

  “Then pick it,” Darcy barked from behind Mina.

  “With that? My fingers?”

  “With your thieves’ tools.”

  Before Sally could utter, what thieves’ tools? she knew where they were on her person. Just as Clerics got paper and ink pens, Rogues received a set of tools to pick locks. Sewn inside a hidden pocket on the inside of her leather jerkin was where the thieves’ tools were kept. The pocket was small and narrow to keep the tools from slipping out, but they came freely when she plucked at them. They were thin, needle lockpicks of metal, a small mirror on a tooth-brush-like handle, tiny pair of scissors, and pliers. Tucking the lockpicks between her teeth, she slipped the other tools back into the hidden pocket and went to work. Without ever having done this before, she prodded at the tumblers and received a satisfying click of a released lock.

  “Okay, I got it,” she said, putting the lockpicks away.

  “Alright, stand aside. Mina’s going in next.”

  “I am?” Mina yelped in terror.

  “Yes, you are,” Darcy said severely. “We are not going through this again. If anything goes wrong, just Rage.”

  Sally sighed when she saw Mina’s confused expression. “What do you mean Rage? Get mad?”

  Darcy’s face hardened, but she didn’t fly into a diatribe. “We’ll talk about it later. Sally, your rapier won’t do much damage against skeletons, so hang back and give Mina support if she needs it. Use the torch like a club if you need to.”

  Mina stared at the door with quivering trepidation before she swung it open. At looked as though she was about to plunge in, however, at the last second she backpedalled and slammed backward into Darcy, who shrieked in fury and shoved Mina forward. This looked like it took Darcy some effort, what with the Barbarian being noticeably larger than she was, but anger and exasperation must have put some strength behind her shove. Sally watched as Mina stumbled through the doorway and Darcy plowed in behind her.

  Following with the torch held high, Sally could see forms surging towards them from the darkness. Five skeletons wearing rotting rags charged at them with swords raised. They were like something out of a film, except they weren’t CGI animation or claymation. Sally could smell the rot wafting off them and hear the chilling rattle of bones moving without flesh or tissue to cushion the joints. They converged on Mina, who began swinging her great ax in wild arcs, each one accompanied by a panicked shriek.

  The greataxe caught one of the skeletons across the ribcage, taking off the arm carrying the sword. Darcy moved in and swung her mace at the head of another, completely shattering the skull in one blow. The bones fell in a pile at their feet in scattered shards. Sally stayed close behind Mina and Darcy, making sure the skeletons didn’t try to come around behind them. Wailing, Mina kept swinging while Darcy cursed and smashed skulls left and right.

  A skeleton finally noticed Sally and saw her as a potential target. Its eyeless sockets bored into her, nearly freezing her heart. She stabbed with the rapier, but the blade threaded harmlessly through the ribs of the undead. The metal rattled against the bones with a mad percussion that sent chills down her spine. Damn, her rapier only did piercing damage, and from how Darcy’s mace was making short work of them, these creatures were susceptible to bludgeoning damage. The tip of the skeleton’s sword barely missed her nose as it retaliated. Yelping, she dashed it across the temple with the torch, nearly scorching Mina’s back.

  “Hey!” Mina yelled, which turned into a shriek when a skeleton took advantage of her distraction and sliced her arm. “I need a heal spell!”

  “Keep fighting!” Darcy groused, blocking an attack with her shield. “We almost got them!”

  Sally thwacked the skeleton again across its ivory brow and ducked the return stroke. She had never moved so fast in her life; her reflexes were as quick as lightning. Whenever the sword came towards her, she moved out of its way. Sometimes the enemy sword was close enough that the blade stirred the air which she had occupied only a second ago.

  Hit and dodge. Hit and dodge. Over and over, until its skull began to crack. The torch was hurting the skeleton, but the damage she was causing was low, probably due to her low strength or the improvised weapon. Eventually, the skeleton collapsed when its skull finally caved in. Looking around for the next opponent, Sally saw the room was empty save for the three of them. Darcy was breathing hard but looked nonetheless for wear. It was Mina who was looking at her bleeding arm in sheer misery. Blood was dripping off her fingers and dotting the ground.

  Kicking away the remains of a skull, Darcy stepped over to Mina and laid a hand on her shoulder to cast a spell. Again, Sally watched with intrigue as the healing glow left Darcy’s fingers and ebbed into Mina’s wounded flesh. The flesh mended itself like some grotesque war video in reverse. Sighing in relief as the pain eased, Mina gingerly moved her arm and smiled when there was no pain.

  “Sally, are you alright? I saw one go after you.” Darcy said, checking Sally over.

  “I’m fine,” Sally held up both hands to show off her unharmed condition. “It couldn’t land a hit on me.”

  “Okay. Mina, how are you on health?”

  Mina checked. “I’m only two down from full.”

  “Good. We’re doing great for a party of three.” Darcy wiped the sweat off her brow and then adjusted her hood. “Just one more room, and we’re at the end of the dungeon.”

  “Are all dungeons as straightforward as this?” Sally asked. “We’ve been going in one straight line.”

  “This is just a tutorial dungeon, remember? Most dungeons are mazes with traps, secret rooms, dead ends, and plenty of monsters. Some dungeons are so big they can take weeks to finish,” Darcy replied as she checked her backpack. “We’re going to take a break while we suss out what our next move is. The next room is going to have kobolds, and they have a leader that thinks he’s Billy Badass because he can shoot magic missiles.”

  Mina timidly raised her head, an action which looked so out of place on the broad face of the powerfully built woman that Sally had to resist smiling. “What are kobolds?”

  “Little lizard people with bad attitudes who have managed to slam two brain cells together to figure out how to swing sticks,” Darcy said, settled her backpack on her shoulder.

  Again, Mina raised her hand. “What are magic missiles?”

  “You don’t have to raise your hand,” Darcy snapped, getting exasperated again. “We’re not in a classroom.”

  “Sorry, a habit from college,” Mina said sheepishly, her broad cheekbones turning pink. “But what are magic missiles?”

  “Magic Missile is a low-level spell that shoots magical darts. They don’t do much damage, but they never miss the target. They can whittle away your health if you aren’t careful.” Darcy explained launching into a lecture that Sally recognized from her years as a Game Master teaching new players the rules. “Mina, you’ll go in first and draw the magic missiles your way.”

  Mina looked as if Darcy declared they were going to chop her foot off. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously,” Darcy said sternly. “I’ll be there to heal you if you need it. If it gets dicey, you can Rage.”

  “You mentioned that earlier,” Mina said. “What is that?”

  “It’s a special ability for Barbarians. It temporarily increases their Strength and Constitution by four.”

  “So getting angry will make me stronger and healthier?” Mina sounded very doubtful.

  “Yeah, you know, you get pissed off, and you want to beat the shit out of someone,” Darcy said. “You never felt that way before?”

  “I’ve been angry, but I never wanted to hurt anyone because of it,” Mina said, cringing at the thought.

  “Really? I think there’s an issue with my blood sugar if I don’t feel like that at least once or twice a day.” Darcy shrugged and continued, “Sally, you’ll hang back until the fig
hting starts. Then creep in and take out Billy Badass while we distract him. You should kill him in one hit.”

  Sally’s brows rose. “You want me to do that by myself?”

  “Yes, being a Rogue, you can deal extra damage with surprise attacks and Sneak is a Dexterity and Intelligence skill. With your nineteen Dex, it should be very high for a beginner.”

  Sally summoned her character screen and looked at the list of skills. Sure enough, among her skills, Sneak had the highest bonus. “Yeah, I’ve plus seven.”

  “See? You got this,” Darcy said with an affirmative nod. “The challenge rating is likely to be ten. Alright, are we ready?”

  Mina said, “No.”

  Sally shrugged, “I guess so.”

  Pretending that she had a more eager team, Darcy pointed at the door with her club and spoke with enthusiasm, “Let’s go.”

  ***

  I can’t do this.

  It was amazing how often she could think these words in the handful of minutes it took for them to get to the next room and for Darcy to propel Mina through it. There was a frightened scream quickly followed by hisses and snarls and the whoosh of a great ax being swung and Darcy cursing as she bashed heads with her mace.

  Sally was tempted, oh so tempted, just to stand back and wait for the fighting to finish and deal with Darcy’s outrage afterward. Yet, hearing Mina’s cry of pain moved her to action. Bending low, she walked through the door in a crouch she could never have sustained for long in her old body. As it was with finding the trap and Legerdemain, the knowledge of moving without sound and staying in the shadows came to her instinctively.

  Short lizard people wearing ragged clothes surrounded Mina and Darcy and jabbed at them with long spears. On the far side of the room was a lone lizard, a kobold, prancing about waving its claws as if it was doing a cheer for his team. With each wave and hiss, a glowing blue arrow shot from its claws. The first arrow penetrated Mina’s shoulder, and then a second barely missed Darcy’s right eye but left behind a thin red line along her cheekbone. Both of them were suffering from dozens of gashes and bleeding tears in their clothing.

  Sally pushed back her fears and dashed along the wall, well out of sight of the attacking kobolds, not even Mina or Darcy took notice of her, although they were probably wondering where she was and when she would act. Her rapier made not one sound as she drew it from the sheath. Once she flanked him, with no hesitation or second thought, Sally streaked forward and shoved the blade hard between the ribs of the spellcaster. The tip emerged from the chest in a fountain of dark blood.