by Prax Venter
He roughly grabbed the sturdy Farmer’s shoulder and pressed his gloved hand over her mouth when she spun violently to see who dared interrupt her righteous furry.
She stopped struggling after her big brown eyes almost popped out of her round face, and Jack pulled away. As a group, the four of them moved back from the door.
“We are all in mortal danger,” he whispered. “Velintanna, the Orchid Oracle, is a half-Corrupted woman who’s originally from Alt’s dimension and holds major influence in Ivyset Crag. No questions now. We are all going for the Docks. Ryea, can you climb a rope?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before he took out the spear he’d used before, shifted it to his left hand, then summoned a coil from his inventory.
“You try and stop me,” she whispered, making a fist to show her determination. She’d been on the skittish side before, but this gentle Farmer would now use her bare teeth to shred those who threatened her family and home if she had to.
Haylee held him with her gray eyes and although she remained silent, her gaze made it clear that he would be answering her questions on the way.
“The Supreme Mayor is supposedly comin’…” Jip said, and Jack wondered if this former citizen was going to be a problem. “Ryea, dumpling, play along, understand?”
The young farmhand then angled his voice toward the ceiling and spoke loudly. “Now now, sugar lump! We need to wait quietly for the Supreme Mayor!”
“Oh, yes!” Ryea called out eventually. “I’ll probably just take a nap instead of all this hollering!”
Jack shook his head at their obviously bad acting, but it was a good idea to explain why the angry woman had gone abruptly quiet, and if there were Guards outside in a Town that encouraged NPC-level problem solving, there was a good chance this would work on them.
Ryea took too long but her hands and legs were strong, and she made it down eventually. Haylee and the Blackmoor Townsfolk were probably brought here specifically because there was nothing much between the inner wall around the top of the crag. Beyond that were more rice fields all the way to the sea. The rain started and everyone equipped their cloaks as Jack hurried the group through a small access door in the fancy quartz wall.
They now had a straight line to the sea.
“You have to tell me what’s happening,” Haylee shouted over the driving fat rain as they hopped down through the rice patties, and Jack willed open his permanent private notepad filled with data on the subject.
By the time the group had reached the muddy shore, Jack had recounted Velintanna’s attack and tried to explain her true nature as another visitor to Subroutine Sana. Jip and Ryea weren’t as far along as Haylee was regarding the purpose of their virtual world but both Townsfolk were way past questioning anything he said.
Haylee told him the other Gardener who’d originally come to Blackmoor and stayed to watch the recapture of Pinefall had approached to them in the middle of their tour and escorted them to the room. Fenok was his name. They’d only been locked up a short while, and Haylee had only fired two Light Rays into the clouds before Jack found them.
That news gave him hope they’d be able to reach the Docks ahead of anyone knowing they were gone.
“Ancient half-demon advisors walking among us?” Ryea wheezed as she kept up their frantic pace along the edge of empty farmland. “Regular demons ain’t enough for you, King Jack?”
“I believe it!” Jip said, sprinting by his Farmer’s flank. “I’ve heard the stories of her line. Always spawning girls that look similar, always taking a place at the Mayor’s ear. But there is no denying her gift with plants and growing things. My sister has a portrait of the Orchid Oracle in her shop, she does.”
“So, people have actually seen this 200,000-year-old woman as a child?” Jack asked, keeping his eye on the coastline.
“Oh Sure, I grew up with her. Well, not with her, but at the same time. The one we have now appeared when I was pluckin’ my first carrots. Sometimes an Orchid Oracle vanishes for years, but a young daughter of her line always finds her way back to the Crag. Been a tradition as long as there’s been ivy growin’. It’s said she has a secret sanctum where each Oracle goes to die, or be spawned, and maybe to teach the next in her line about the ways of petals and roots. It’s been whispered she takes many lucky lovers there to seduce and become her... well…”
“Well, what?” Ryea said, her fatigue forgotten as she glared at him through the pouring rain.
Jip sent her a warm smile. “To become her Farmhand.”
“More likely to be her fertilizer,” Jack said, his mind recoiling from the love he saw between Jip and Ryea. “The Corruption Oracle is pure evil. Haylee, you need to warn everyone. Figure out how to take her down.”
“If she has an odd mind like you, Jack, why didn’t the countless generations exposed to her odd ways start questioning things?”
Jack shrugged at her as they moved passed the first real structure on the coast.
“I think she is intentionally encouraging the opposite. I’m beginning to think it’s just the idea of challenging norms, Haylee, not some magic field around me. And she’s had way more time than I have to understand the unique ways of this virtual world.”
“What is your plan to rescue Lex?”
“I wish I had an answer for you. If you can think of something I didn’t, do let me know.”
The group grew quiet as they hunched along the shoreline and were beaten lower still by the heavy, roiling rain. Any Guards or Gardeners Jack noticed never faced the sea, and the downpour did the rest to obscure them. It took far longer than Jack could handle to finally make it to the Docks. Everything that wasn’t thirty yards in front of them became lost in darkness and storm, yet some hearty Townsfolk workers still went about their business up and down the many piers.
“The only way to The Embrace is through deeper waters,” Jack whispered to his party. “We go under the piers.”
A hooded Haylee followed his order with a sharp nod, and Jack’s eyes moved to her custom silk bookbag. Any arcade flyers left and all her adventuring journals had no doubt been ruined by water damage. With a silent curse, he’d wished he’d shot Haylee with his mining laser sooner. It was the final step needed to get her access to his already invaluable notepad.
That was if Alt wasn’t gone forever.
He waded forward past his waist thinking that if he also lost Lex, he would never be able to so much as glance at the blue “Our World” letters over-
“Jack,” Ryea whispered as she grabbed his arm from behind her wild brown eyes locked on his. “I can’t swim.”
Some bulwark in his mind holding back the eternal panic and dread buckled as he looked at her freckled face and the desire to just Teleport away from this group of deadweights made Jack question whether he deserved be a King.
“I say we see if we can find four wee tiny boats,” Jip said, actually looking around for one under the wharf currently hiding them.
Once more, Jack bent his broken mind toward not freaking out and felt another leg of his virtual stability come unhinged. There was now no doubt that the AI called ARV Alternis was an important part of what he was now. What made him whole. The looming thought of never knowing what happened to Lex…
“Logs,” said the Dark Prism by his side. “Boats float- Boats are made of wood. Jack, I know you have some palm logs from Doveport. Hand some out and let us grip them like personal boats to keep us afloat while we keep moving.”
Jack turned on his keen-eyed royal advisor and knew what had to be done.
“Uh, yes,” he said, his horrible shaking hidden by the darkness.
As he mindlessly accessed his nearly infinite inventory, Jack took encouragement from the fact he stood at the maw of the abyss of utter madness and was able to step back before falling endlessly.
“More like pulled back,” he said out loud, handing Haylee one of the four-foot palmwood logs he just happened to have tucked away in a psychically accessible database.
“No,” he said, waving for her to take the lead. “Let’s sail our tiny boats.”
Blackmoor Cove’s Farmer paddled forward on her log as the four of them moved in a line out into the deeper waters and deceptively intense waves.
Several Heroes and Gardeners stood near land at the start of the pier and none of them saw the group climb up. All of Subroutine Sana’s cookie-cutter, seaside Docks were equipped with a rope ladder wrapped tight around their entire left support, and from there, it was just a hop across the gangplank into his magnificent Royal schooner.
“She’s all yours, little one,” Jack said as he mentally willed the legendary construct into a Trade Interface the moment they boarded.
When the panel appeared, his side held a small painted icon of The Embrace. With a weak smile to the smartest Dark Prism he knew, Jack selected the emerald button labeled ‘Accept’.
“What-?”
“No time, Haylee.”
Her perpetually calm demeanor shattered as she confirmed the trade and then Jack grabbed her shoulders.
“You can’t use the Dockmaster, so you’ll need to sail somewhere else in range. I trust you more than anyone to keep things moving. After I figure out Lex, I can think of several ways to meet you back in Blackmoor. But do not come back here without hundreds of Heroes, Haylee.”
He held her terrified eyes with his for a moment longer and then turned back toward the top of the Crag. System-spawned torches dotted certain parts of the inner wall that would burn no matter what, and Jack squinted through the rain to target one as far north as he could.
“See you soon,” he said over his shoulder as he knelt. The moment his knee hit the smooth deck of his ex-royal ship, Jack triggered his shift and zipped through a considerable amount of space.
The virtual world snapped forward to meet him, and he tried to remain motionless already holding a low profile. Movement to his right pulled his eye and Jack discovered a guard wearing a hooded cloak walking along the wall with his focus turned out toward the Town below.
With only moments before someone raising the alarm, Jack felt terror and adrenaline saturate his body as he tumbled forward into the shadowed bushes below.
The rain seemed to stand still as he fell until he broke through the lush green leaves and struck the gnarled roots below.
Jack -65 | HP 807/872
Ignoring the pain was easy as a bearded man peered over the edge, his searching eyes illuminated by his almost useless hand-held torch. The lookout hadn’t started shouting yet and the way he panned his flame around were the actions of someone searching, not finding.
About thirty seconds passed with him still just standing there, scanning the area, and Jack blinked away some of the rainwater dripping through the leaves that concealed him. He had to get away from here and back to his wife, and yet he dared not move with someone so close and actively searching.
Jack knew the only real answer at this point was to get back into the ancient Gardener’s closet where Lex stood alone in the darkness. When Haylee solved Ryea’s inability to swim, Jack could only stand in the ocean frozen by despair. It was debatable whether he was just feeling bad for himself or he was truly unfit to be making any decisions, but what finally struck him was the fact that Velintanna had been existing within Subroutine Sana for countless generations.
No matter what Jack did to try and force a public confrontation, what would stop her from simply killing everyone in the room? She could spend generations hunting down any survivors and in another 200, 300, 1000, virtual years, no one would even remember the Irrelevant Hero or his strange Kingdom in the stormy cove.
No, his only real choice at this point was to get back to Lex before Velintanna even knew he’d been popping around this nauseatingly rich city. Maybe if he allowed himself to stay close to her, he could keep her engaged- keep her talking...
“Did you see her?” said a new voice from above and Jack refocused on the top of the quartz brick wall.
“I don’t know what I saw,” the first man said. “Probably just a shadow.”
“What are we dealing with here, Horte? I hear strange royalty from foreign lands murder’n Mayors. The Oracle up and going missing along with them foreigners just as the Corrupted wetlands send us a westerly banger? It ain’t right, and I got this tingling fear up my spine- to be full honest.”
“I don’t know,” the bearded man named Horte repeated softly before scanning the rain-drenched area once more. Then, both continued their patrol along the top of the inner wall.
What remained of Jack’s sanity crawled into the corner of his mind as his taut muscles launched from the bushes and sprinted him along the maze-like hedgerows without stopping until he was at the dark stairwell leading under the Crag. He’d grown sure-footed for many reasons, and with blind madness directing his steps, Jack made it down into the waterways without breaking his neck.
A constant swirl of ‘not getting there fast enough’ and ‘running into the other Player’ wore at the thin cord keeping Jack tethered to himself yet the only real choice was to embrace the fear that drove him forward.
Between alternating sprints and checking corners, Jack eventually returned to the dead-end hallway where he’d left his wife. And what he saw there snapped that tenuous cord instantly.
The massive bricks were toppled, the door was open, and only the clacking silence of the aboveground watermill echoed in the ancient hallway.
Jack scrabbled forward, kicking shards of broken pottery with his boots. The old planters were whole before, and the evidence of a struggle inspired his imagination as he came to a stop in front of the empty jail cell.
Lex was gone.
Jack brought a hand to his chest as some phantom pain sprouted from… what? Was his heart not beating? Did it matter? He ignored it and dumbly looked back into the room, searching the small space with the ridiculous hope that she’d not been erased forever.
Not even a body to bury.
Jack stumbled back to the far wall and slid down to the dusty ground. Shards of ancient pottery littered the corridor and he received a jolt to his shutdown procedures when he sat on a particularly sharp chunk.
Jack -6 | HP 801/872
The thought of never hearing her sing her healing song again soaked through his mind and the crumpling King of Blackmoor slumped sideways along the wall. The shards were scattered everywhere, and his numb mind focused on the fresh new patterns their struggle caused. He followed them down the hall with his eyes…
And Jack’s despair was struck by the lightning bolt of realization.
The rebooting Irrelevant Hero crawled along the wreckage on his hands and knees as he took 12 more points of damage, and finally jumped to his feet when he noticed another scraped line along the wall near the intersection.
Jack started laughing as tears poured unhindered from his eyes while he followed the marks his Battle Queen had left for him.
Drawing on walls with broken pottery was one of the first real things he’d taught her.
- 7 -
The glittering, giddy joy at realizing that Lex could still be alive faded when Jack realized she was being dragged off by an ancient, unknowable madwoman. The fact that Velintanna didn’t kill a struggling Lex meant she wanted to keep her alive, which, while good, could mean certain life-long torments worse than death.
The path of pottery scrapes led Jack deep into the carved waterways and he could tell that no Townsfolk or Hero had been this way in a long time. Eventually, Jack saw one single piece of broken pottery on the ground and picked it up as he passed. There were no pots in this abandoned tunnel and assumed her writing implement had been discovered.
True enough, the intentional lines pointing the way stopped after that point, but now that he was paying extremely close attention, his cave-trained eye picked up the telltale scuffs of a trail. The crumbling stone bricks faded next, yet he continued to ign
ore the unstable dirt ceiling as he followed the traces of his wife’s passage.
His sense of direction was better than most, but he knew for certain that they headed east when his torchlight illuminated the slurping mass of purple tendrils. He was now out of Ivyset Crag all together.
Jack grit his teeth and pushed forward into the Corruption, the twist in his gut ignored as he fell under the familiar first-level debuff.
Weak Corruption Drain -
Lose 1 HP/60 seconds | Active while touching Corruption
~ It will consume you
If she’d been dragged deep into this tainted land, that long life of torment he imagined wasn’t a valid concern anymore. She had only hours to live.
“I’ll consume you,” he snarled back as he threw himself into the narrow, crumbling place that would be avoided at all costs if Lex weren’t deeper inside. The tunnel narrowed down to four feet at times and appeared dug out by a large burrowing animal as it twisted around denser pockets of stone on its path of least resistance.
His boots slipped in the slime, but the otherworldly infestation served as a distributed mesh for holding back the crushing weight above. 24 Hit Points later, and what had to be a half mile of cave, Jack finally came to something new.
The distant sound of Lex screaming.
Whatever twitching pile of insanity Jack had become now wholly fixated on that one sound and moved through the pus-laden passage as an animal himself- even getting on all fours when it helped him tear up the dark tube of infested soil.
He dismissed the ever-burning system torch back to his Inventory when he saw the flashing impossible colors of spell effects flicker ahead, and after a sharp bend, he came to a straightaway ending in a gruesome scene that would have broken him if he hadn’t been broken and rebuilt so many times today.
It was her lair, and Velintanna pulled his wife by the wrist while Lex’s other arm was chained to the wall. Near Lex was a single Mother of Demons’ eye on a pulsing orange stalk and it looked as if it were infesting one of Thymus’s Hero Scanners embedded into the wall. The terrible black and red orb held impossibly still as it beamed nightmarish rings of energy into Lex’s golden eyes.
