“C’mon, we can get away in the woods.” Naomi grabbed Sally’s arm and pulled her along towards the field.
“Wait, there are others…” With the girl’s help, maybe she could help Darcy and Mina after all.
“It’s too late. The Cut Throats already got ’em, but I know where they’re going.” The girl pulled her arm insistently. “I’ll help you get them back, but right now we gotta book it.”
Book it? Stunned, Sally let Naomi pull her away from the tavern, and they both took off across the clearing. There were shouts behind them which spur them to run faster. Naomi sped ahead, her legs churning into a blur, and she ran with an unnatural speed that left Sally behind.
“Wait!” Sally hissed.
“Hurry!”
“Slow down!”
Too late. Naomi zipped between two trees, nearly rebounding off them like a pinball between bumpers. Sally scooted between the boles and ducked low, taking full advantage of her sneaking skill and low-light sight. Behind her, she could hear men shouting and boots thumping on the grass.
Without thought or hesitation, she began scaling a tree. Her hands and feet finding handholds and steps with ease. She laid flat along a branch, looking down at the heads of men breaking through the foliage. Holding her breath, she watched and waited as the men slashed the bushes to scare her out of hiding.
“There were two of them. I saw two of them!” said a man with a head so bald it gleamed in the darkness.
“There’s nothing for it. They pulled a runner. At least we have the two in the stables so the Boss should be happy.”
“He won’t be if they don’t have it.”
“Well, that’ll be their problem, won’t it?”
The men drifted through the trees and out of sight. When Sally couldn’t hear their footfalls any more, she released the breath she had been holding and sagged on the branch. Her heart was still pounding hard in her chest, and she could hear the blood rushing through her ears.
“Hey, they’re gone,” someone whispered right next to her ear.
Sally nearly fell but caught herself by locking her legs around the branch and hugging it with both arms. Looking up, she saw Naomi hanging upside down from a higher branch with her legs folded over the limb like a gymnast.
Sally managed to get herself into a sitting position on the branch. Once balanced, she was able to focus on the most important thing on her mind. “Tell me. Are you from the—the real world?”
“The place with McDonald’s, Twitter, iPads, and Google? Yeah,” Naomi said, still hanging upside down.
The relief of finally meeting another person from the real world made Sally almost light headed. “Do you know why we’re trapped in the game?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Naomi said. “I was logging onto Shadow’s Deep, and then I was in the tavern.”
“You started in the tavern?” Sally asked.
“It’s where I logged off yesterday. I did a pretty tough quest, so I went to the inn to heal my character,” Naomi righted herself on the tree branch and had a thoughtful look on her face. “I think I came to this world sleeping because I woke up in bed as if I had been sleeping all night.”
“We started at the Lair of Tears.” It made sense that players would start where their characters were when they last logged off within the game. Darcy would have logged off with her Cleric at the Lair of Tears where new players like Sally and Mina began. Since Naomi was having her character rest in the inn to restore health, then she appeared sleeping in bed.
Naomi lowered herself onto the same branch as Sally with a dancer’s grace, barely making the tree limbs waver under her weight. Squatting on the branch, balanced on the balls of her feet like a small stone gargoyle, she regarded Sally with light blue eyes. “You’re level one?”
“Believe it or not, this is actually my first time playing,” Sally sighed. Logging into the game may have been hours since, but now it seemed like many days ago.
“Really? Are the others level one too?”
“Mina is, but Darcy is level three. What level are you?”
“Five.”
Sally’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “If you’re so high level, then why couldn’t you save my sister and Mina?”
Naomi chortled. “Level five isn’t high level, and the Cut Throats bandits are levels six and up and there were a lot of “em. I could have taken one or two by myself, but the rest would have turned me into hamburger meat. You must be a new player if you don’t know who they are.”
“Cut Throats?” Sally was again experiencing that overwhelming feeling that she was way out of her depth.
“They’re the main bad guys in this area,” Naomi said. She laid a finger across her chin in thought. “The weird thing is that they have never came into the village before. You only saw them in quests or random encounters in the forest.”
Sally knew how that went with RPG villages, which were usually safe zones. The villagers would gripe about monsters, bandits, or a dragon causing problems, but you never actually see the danger come to the village unless it was scripted by the game.
“You said you knew where they were taking my friends.”
“Yeah, to their hideout in the forest.” Naomi hitched a thumb over her shoulder in the direction the men had departed.
“Let’s go rouse the villagers and…”
Naomi shook her head. “Sorry, that’s not how the game works.”
“What do you mean? The villagers can help us.”
Naomi snorted. “It was the innkeeper that sold you out to the Cut Throats. I heard him talking with the Cut Throat outside my room. And the villagers won’t help outsiders who hang out with an elf, even a half-elf.”
Sally’s lips tighten in a near grimace as she didn’t need that bit of hurt brought back. Swallowing it back, she said, “Then what do we do?”
“We go save them,” Naomi said almost bouncing on the branch in a jovial mood,
“You already said that you can’t handle them alone.”
“We can together.”
Sally opened her mouth to unleash a hundred reasons why that was a terrible and suicidal idea, but the only words that came out were, “We can’t.”
Electricity sparked in Naomi’s eyes, and for the first time, the girl knelt perfectly still on the branch. Then in a steely tone, she said, “Yes, we can. Can’t is not in my vocabulary. You can stay in this tree if you want. I won’t be here telling you you can’t, because I’ll be saving your friends. You can come with me if you want.”
With that said, Naomi dropped from the branch. Sally watched in open mouth astonishment. Not because the girl was spiraling to her death, but how gracefully she fell. No, it wasn’t exactly falling. It was gliding downward as if she had an invisible parachute slowing her descent. She landed on her bare feet with less effort than a dismounting gymnast.
It wasn’t as graceful, but Sally climbed down the tree with smooth expert movements until she was on the ground with Naomi. “Wait, I’m coming too.”
***
The night air was cold against her face as Sally trekked along behind Naomi, who moved at a brisk walk. She was actually jogging, but she kept stopping to let Sally catch up to her. Every once in a while, Naomi would suddenly perform a cartwheel or flip over an obstacle like a large stone or log. One time her heel nearly caught Sally on the chin when she somersaulted.
Exhausted from trying to catch up to Naomi, Sally motioned her to stop and the girl did so reluctantly, shifting from one foot to the other as if she had to pee. Being still at last, Sally got a chance to get a good look at the girl, who couldn’t have been any older than fifteen or sixteen. Her hair was very pale blonde, almost as white as her clothing which looked like durable linen pajamas and it hung off her slight frame in wrinkles.
“What’s your class? I don’t recognize it.”
“I’m a Monk.”
Sally blinked in utter confusion. “Like Shaolin or Kung Fu monks? I thought this was a west
ern medieval world. Why would they include an eastern base class?”
Naomi shrugged. “Dunno. My brother and I love martial arts films, so I chose Monk as my class.”
“Alright,” Sally was eager to learn what she could from Naomi, “so you woke up in the tavern and then what happened?”
“I was freaked out, but I was hungry too, so I ordered something to eat. Then I overheard the innkeeper complaining about a Cleric getting mad at him for not letting her half-elf friend sleep in one of the rooms.” A smile spread across Naomi’s round face. “I thought you guys might be players too, but I wanted to be sure before I said anything. I was gonna follow you around tomorrow to see if you acted like players.”
“That’s similar to our plan,” Sally said. It was painful to remember that Darcy and Mina helped came up with that same idea and it made her realize how deeply she missed and worried for them.
Naomi continued recapping her story. Unable to sleep, she had climbed through the window and onto the roof to stargaze and look over at the barn where Sally slept. The sounds of footsteps inside her room had caught her attention. Taking great care not to be seen, Naomi peeked over the eaves and through the window to see the innkeeper and a man dressed like a Cut Throat rummaging through the room and her backpack.
“What were they looking for?” Sally asked. “Money?”
Naomi shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were mad that I wasn’t in the room so I think they were after me too.”
“Do you think they know we’re…players?”
Naomi considered this a moment. “No, I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think they know this a game. They all act like normal people.”
That, to Sally, was one of the ways that this world was horrifying. In a typical game, NPCs acted according to a script that wouldn’t change too much, whatever the players’ actions. In this version, it seemed that the NPCs actions were based upon their own nature or motivations, which was proving to be very lethal with bandits coming into villages and taverns, which were usually safe zones in RPGs, and racist innkeepers betraying their own patrons. These were symptoms of a game gone wrong.
If the Cut Throats weren’t after them for being players, then why come after them at all? A sudden thought prompted Sally to ask, “Naomi, did you play the game yesterday?”
“Yeah, I play almost every day,” Naomi nodded hard enough to make her pigtails bob.
“Did you do anything in the game yesterday? Anything significant?”
Naomi rubbed the back of her head. “I dunno. I did some quests. Why?”
“Because my stepsister Darcy created her Cleric yesterday and did quests to level up,” Sally explained, almost in an urgent manner. Maybe if they understood what the Cut Throats were after, then it would perhaps give them a clue on how to get Darcy and Mina back. “All the villagers that gave her quests remember her. They’ve been calling her by her character’s in-game name, Sister Korra. What did you do yesterday?”
Naomi shifted from foot to foot as she thought. “Nothing really. I just did some grinding. I killed some wild boars, bears, and wolves…”
“Be glad there are no park rangers out here,” Sally muttered.
“I also killed a few Cut Throats,” Naomi raised her shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe they want revenge or…oh, shoot. I think I know what they want.”
Sally restrained herself from seizing Naomi by the shoulders as if to shake the information out of her. “What?”
“It was a random drop. I swear, I didn’t take it on purpose, but it was loot!” Naomi opened the front of her gi, showing off a white undershirt and drew out a leather packet sealed with a circle of red wax. Upon closer inspection, the wax had a seal of a hawk with spread wings grasping a struggling serpent in its talons.
Sally broke the seal and opened the bundle. Inside were several folded pieces of paper which she opened and tried to read. The handwriting was tiny and the words were squeezed together as if whoever wrote it wanted to write a novel on a single page. She was able to make out a word here and there, but none of it came together to mean anything. They were written in elegant calligraphy, but it was so curly and full of flourishes that it was impossible to decipher.
Naomi was squinting at a second note and shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t know what it means.”
“I don’t know either. If they’re after these letters, then we can make a deal with the Cut Throats and get Mina and Darcy back.”
“We can’t do that! It’s a quest item!” Naomi snatched the packet and the pages from Sally’s hands so fast that her hands were a blur and held them to her chest as if they were her baby instead of pieces of paper. “We can’t let the bad guys get these.”
“Why not? We can’t even read them!” Sally cried with her hands curled if she might try to take them back.
“They must be really important if they’re willing to kidnap people to get them back so that’s all the more reason why they shouldn’t get them!” Naomi shoved the packet back into her gi and tied it with the finality of chaining a gate. “I don’t think the Cut Throats are going to keep their end of any deal we make with them anyway. We’re better off fighting them.”
“How?” Sally cried utter bewilderment. “All I have is two kitchen knives.”
“That’s why we’re out here!” Naomi held out her arms to indicate the forest around them. “We need to find their scouts, kill them, and take their weapons as loot. You’ll have a decent weapon, and we can find out where the hideout is.”
Sally’s jaw dropped. She tried to speak, but her tongue failed her. After closing her mouth, she swallowed and then swallowed again. Slowly, with all the will she possessed, she asked, “You don’t know where their hideout is?”
“Nope,” Naomi said, digging a finger in her ear so nonchalantly, one would think she was attending a boring lesson. “I hadn’t gotten far enough in the Cut Throats questline to get to the hideout.”
“But you said you knew where they were taking Mina and Darcy.” It was all she could do to keep from throttling the girl.
“Yeah,” Naomi inspected the tip of her finger and flicked off whatever nastiness she found in her ear. “Because where else would they take them?”
“So why are we out here if you don’t know where the hideout is?”
“Because this is where I encountered Cut Throats in the game yesterday,” the girl said, finally getting exasperated from the line of questioning. Though, not as much as Sally is for having to ask them. “We just have to keep walking, and they’ll jump out and attack us eventually.”
“Oh my God!” Sally yelled, finally losing her composure. “We’ve been out here for hours, and I’m tired, scared as hell, and my sister is being held captive by people calling themselves the Cut Throats for Christ’s sake! You’ve wasted time looking for crooks that probably not even out here!”
“Oh, but we are, Miss Elf.”
Sally whipped around. Three men were standing behind her. All of them wearing the same red bandanas across their mouths and noses and in their hands were daggers and swords which glinted maliciously in the moonlight.
Chapter 5
Cut Throats
Darcy’s favorite part of the day was the hour before waking. All bad things were forgotten, and the world was a comfortable blanket wrapped around her.
“Darcy…Darcy!” A voice penetrated the blissful languor.
Darcy rolled onto her side, curling up in her bedroll, and tried to ignore the persistent voice. “Make it go away, Gina.”
“No, it’s ‘M’-ina,” the voice said, sounding out the “m” sound. “Get up. There are men outside.”
Darcy unwillingly left the land of sleep behind and found herself eye to eye with an Amazonian bronze giantess. A cry stuck in her throat as the events of the past day crashed down on her. Clearing her throat, she listened. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Trust me; they’re there. I woke up, and I heard someone walking around outside.”
“It mi
ght be one of the stable boys checking on the horses.”
“There aren’t any horses in here!” Mina hissed, her eyes wide with fear. “And Sally’s gone.”
Darcy looked down at the empty bedroll beside her which was void of a half-elf Rogue. “Where the hell did she go?”
“I don’t know!” Mina cried in a near panic. “She was already gone when I woke up!”
“We have to find her!” Darcy said, rising to her feet.
“We got to hide!” Mina protested, remaining crouched in the stall. “They’re out there!”
Before Darcy could retort, she heard the large stable doors creak open. She ducked down and thought herself foolish for giving into Mina’s paranoia. It was probably Sally coming back. Yet, something told her that it wasn’t Sally. A stone settled in her stomach as her feelings of dread gave weight to Mina’s fears.
“Mina, get your ax,” Darcy hissed reaching for her armor.
Once she touched the chest plate, she withdrew her hand. No, it was too heavy to put on without making too much noise and that would take too long. Going without the chest armour would lower her Armor Class from 17 to 12, but there was no help for it.
“Mina, you’re gonna have to take the lead. As soon as they get close, take their heads off with your ax, and we’ll run out the back. I’ll stay close behind and heal you if you need it.”
She noticed that Mina wasn’t holding her ax. She was hugging her knees, shaking, with brown eyes as large as silver dollars. “Darcy…”
“Mina, get your ax…”
“I can’t…”
“It’s right there!”
“I can’t move. God, I’m so scared. I can’t move.”
Darcy fought with the diatribe that threatened to explode from her. A twitch started in her right eye, but she managed to keep herself under control. Not because she was considerate of Mina’s mental state or feelings, but because blowing up right now would give away their position. It was both trying and antagonizing to keep calm when all she wanted to do was throttle the wretch.
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