by Brian Simons
Coral looked around the dimly lit cavern. There were no eggs in the flickering torchlight.
“I have carried this egg,” Embra said, “for ages. I refuse to raise a hatchling in a world unsafe for our kind. He no doubt wanted to bind my youngling as his own follower. Of all the despicable thoughts, a dragon bonded to a human.” Embra snorted one last pillar of flame and turned her nose toward the rough ceiling. She had told her tale.
After a long silence, Coral said, “You don’t seem eager to break out of here.”
“Where would I go?” Embra asked. “What ancients would be left? The leviathan, the quetzl. They’ve all been torn to bits by greedy lice by now.”
“Hiber is still alive,” Coral said, “the manticore up on the mountain.”
“Oh, yes.” Embra laughed. “Hiber. The captain never truly goes down with the ship, does he?”
Still no quest. Coral wondered how far she’d have to go toward freeing Embra to trigger one, or if she had already missed her opportunity.
“I’m here to free Grum,” Coral said. “I could try to free you too, if you promise not to eat me.”
“I made that mistake once,” Embra said. “Never again. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s not to eat lice. I know where they’ve been and it disgusts me. Still, I would like to fly again, if my wings remember how. I would even stoop so low as to provide you transport in exchange for a little help.”
Coral supposed that was better than nothing.
“Where do I start?” Coral asked.
“There’s a fault in that wall, the one between the windows,” Embra said.
Blat took this as his cue. He Headbutted the wall, but nothing happened.
Coral stared ahead, unable to see any sign of weakness in the stone. She’d have to trust in Embra’s truesight. She took her bow and readied a Hot Shot, releasing a molten arrow that slammed into the wall, then fell to the floor and cooled.
“Believe it or not,” Embra said, “I already tried fire. I need you to unlock me. I can handle the rest.” She shook a front paw, which had a long, thick chain around it secured by a large lock. Coral realized each of Embra’s four paws had the same heavy bindings keeping her on a short leash. There wasn’t enough slack to lift her feet more than a few inches from the ground.
“And you’ve been kept like this for how long?” Coral asked.
“Get to work,” Embra said.
Coral lifted one of the locks. It was a block of chiseled diamond with a long rectangular hole in the center, the same material as the chain links that wound around Embra’s paws. She took a hook shot arrow from her quiver and slid the barbed tip into the lock, holding the wooden shaft like a pencil. She spent a few minutes feeling around for any mechanism she could manipulate before the game told her not to bother.
>> This activity requires lockpicks. You have 0 lockpicks.
“There’s magic at work, obviously,” Embra said. “But there is a key. Find it.”
“In the castle?” Coral asked. She should melt the bars off the window, grab Grum, and leave. Rescuing an imprisoned ogre might make a heartwarming video, but being captured by a legion of Havenstock’s guards would not.
“Well it’s not here in this cell,” Embra said.
Leaving Embra behind would destroy any shot Daniel and Sybil had at conscripting Hiber in the fight to save Travail. Plus, saving her might make a really awesome video if she could pull it off. Coral switched on her recorder again. In fact, she might as well just leave it on, rather than risk letting even a single good moment evade capture. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Grum took Coral’s hand and led her across the cavern, toward a set of metal bars like the ones that sealed the cell’s window. A metal lock kept the grate closed tight, not that it stood in Coral’s way. “Good luck!” he said.
I’ll need it, she thought, passing through the bars and helping Blat squeeze through behind her.
The hallway ahead was empty. Coral’s footfalls echoed in the silence, a tiny sound filling a large space. She crept slowly, afraid that a guard would come rushing toward her. No one came.
“Can you fit in my bag?” Coral asked. If Coral had to make a run for it, she didn’t want to leave Blat behind. The low level goblin would make an easy kill for the castle guards. He seemed skeptical, but when Coral bent down he climbed into her bag and kept his head poking out.
Ahead was a stairwell behind a stone archway. Coral pressed her back against the stone wall next to the door frame and wished she had a Sneak skill, or better yet, a cloak like the invisible elf Enforcers that wandered the Ogrelands. She took a deep breath and stepped into the stairwell.
With care, she was able to keep her feet from falling flat on the stone and giving away her presence. The stairs wound upward to another series of hallways, this one lined with doors. She tried each of the doors, but the result was always the same. Her hand swept through the space the metal door handles occupied. The level above that was exactly the same.
If the key to Embra’s diamond shackles were behind those doors, Coral wouldn’t find it. She had to hope it was elsewhere. She went back to the stairwell to climb another level. A few steps up, she saw a large crowd of players yelling. She darted back down the steps. Had they seen me?, she wondered. Her heart beat against her chest. She drew an arrow and readied her bow.
“You will go no further,” a man yelled.
Uh-oh, Coral thought.
30
“We’re looting the castle and you can’t stop us,” someone else yelled. A chorus of cheers and hollering rose up.
“You will not steal!” the first man said. “You’ll only die trying.”
Coral sighed, relieved that the yelling wasn’t directed at her. She climbed a few steps to listen in.
“We’re dying anyway,” the second man said. “Arbyten stole from us, and we’re here to take it back!”
Coral crept to the top of the stairs. She peered out of the stairwell and had a direct line of sight to the throne. Regent Harold sat there, impassive. Before him stood a full complement of castle guards and Plato, the regent’s yellow-robed magician. The mage’s face was round and smooth, showing no emotion as he held a hand full of crackling energy over his head. It was a show of force against an angry throng of players, hundreds strong, that had stormed the castle. Arbyten had swindled them out of money, and they were here in an attempt to reclaim some of it.
Coral had seen players protesting at Arbyten’s headquarters. It only made sense they would protest in the game too. She stepped further to get a view of the man championing the company’s control over the castle’s coffers. What did he care whether these lowbies raided the regent’s riches?
That man was Yardley, AKA FighterFluid. Daniel’s nemesis, and now her own as well. He was a heartless player who bought his way to the top by spending real world money on high level gear. Even now, with the economy in shambles, his golden armor and Cloudborn cape would sell for enough to feed Coral for a year. She stared at him, her blood beginning to boil.
Oh, she thought. When did that happen? It was Sir FighterFluid now.
“If you neckbeards were smarter or more skilled at anything the real world prizes,” FighterFluid said, “you’d have a real job like me. I don’t even play full time, but look at me. I control the castle guards! This may not be a PvP zone, but I can still have you killed and let the guards loot your corpses just for fun, so know your place and call off this charade.”
“If it’s loot you’re after,” the regent called out to the crowd, “pay the elves a visit. They’re hiding a creature made of pure gold.” Then, turning to his head knight, he said in a voice loud enough for the angry players to hear, “I wouldn’t mind if you killed them all anyway. Look at this, elves and ogres and drow rallying alongside humans. It’s disgusting. How did they make it as far as the castle? You’re slipping, Sir FighterFluid.”
Yardley glared at a guard stationed behind the angry throng of players.
He nodded. The guard cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Charge!”
The players were facing forward and must have assumed it was one of their own urging them into action. Dozens of players lunged forward and clashed with the guards standing before the regent.
It was despicable that players like Yardley used the game like this, turning real world money into virtual power they’d only use to torture less fortunate players. Coral had video now of Yardley using the guards to manipulate the crowd. She had video of horrific transformations, of broken resources, of lag, and of players begging for fairness from a game that had stolen their money and left them with a crashed economy.
She had to choose Hector. She had to send him the footage and help him oust Domin if there were any hope of reclaiming Travail and setting everything right. She just had to do it without putting her parents in harm’s way.
The ball of energy Plato held in his palm sizzled and hissed until bolts of lightning fell from above. Too many of the players were trapped in the spell’s area of effect with nowhere to run. A handful died on impact and dozens more were grievously injured.
As the guards rushed forward with swords and spears, more players fell. Others still pushed through the fray and ran past the throne. Several feet behind the seated regent was a wooden door leading to the mess hall. Coral couldn’t touch the door’s metal handle herself, but she could make an escape now that other players had thrown the door open.
The guards were strong, but they were outnumbered by the players. She just might make it through.
Coral sprinted toward the open door, ticking off stamina points as she ran. She had 220 of them. That gave her just over three and a half minutes of sprinting before she tired out.
“Not so fast!” a guard yelled, thrusting a spear at her sidelong. The metal spearhead passed through her ribs like a ghost, but the wooden pole made impact and sent a sharp pain up and down her torso.
>> You’ve been hit! 58 Damage.
The damage was nothing compared to what the metal tip would have done. She kept running, ignoring the pain. The guard declined to follow her, focused instead on stemming the tide of onrushing players.
“A bounty on all of your heads!” FighterFluid yelled. Down to 185 stamina. She left him behind and kept running, through the mess hall lined with wooden tables and stone columns that supported the floors above. She ran toward the door on the opposite end. Above that door, still sealed in a glass case, was the Soulkeeper Axe. She shuddered. After all the time she spent running from it, it was odd to run not just toward it, but under it as it hung like an executioner’s blade.
Other players had opened the next door. Coral ran through it while more players followed behind. Guards charged after them. The corridor ahead split into hallways, which split off toward other hallways. Each intersection was a decision. The crowd of players she ran alongside started splitting up, getting smaller and smaller as they chose different directions to run in. Coral ran for a full minute before she hit a dead end, alone.
The sound of swords and crackling of spells told her the guards had caught up with some of the players. She doubled back at a full sprint and chose a new route with only 90 stamina points left.
Five players were fighting off two guards in the next corridor she looked down. She wouldn’t get through that way. The next corridor had an injured guard slumped against a wall. He tried to slash at her with his sword as she jumped over him, but he couldn’t connect.
Down the next corridor she found a few players running and she followed them. She was disappointed they weren’t opening the doors as they ran past. She’d have to tag along until they did.
Then a crack of lightning whizzed past her ear and struck the iron platemail of a player in front of her. Coral looked back. She hadn’t counted on Plato giving chase, and he was the last member of the regent’s court she wanted taking aim at her. She had seen firsthand how powerful his spells were. Even with the added Spirit from her ravager’s rags, she may not survive.
The struck player fell to the floor and Coral leapt past him, pushing beyond the other players and hoping Plato was too distracted with them to pursue her.
Cries of anguish receded as Coral ran headlong down a corridor leading to a stairwell. She had 25 seconds of sprinting left when a bright bolt sizzled behind her. She Combat Rolled forward, narrowly avoiding the magic spell. Plato had disposed of the last batch of players handily, and was now on her trail.
She could take the stairs up, and keep searching, perhaps in vain, for a diamond key that would set Embra free. Or she could head back down, into terrain she had already mapped out in her mind, run through the metal bars to safety, and scoop up Grum. That was the quest she came here for after all.
But then what? Daniel and Sybil couldn’t fight Sivona alone, especially not with the Aracqueen at her side. She turned and ran up, taking two steps at a time and darting into the corridor beyond.
She ran through the maze of hallways on this floor, passing wooden doors as she had seen throughout the castle. One door stood out. It led to a room that must be exactly above the mess hall. The double doors were made of a thick, dark metal. In her peripheral vision, a yellow blur rounded the corner. So he had followed her up. She didn’t look back again. She ran toward the door with her last few points of stamina, slowing to a walk when that ran out. She made it to the metal doors and then strode through them, into a long room filled with exquisite treasures housed in glass boxes.
She panicked for a second, worried that Blat didn’t make it through the barrier, but with him perched in her inventory bag she was able to Shiftwalk with him in tow.
The air was still, like a living soul hadn’t passed through this room in ages. A series of glass cases lined the edges of the room, and another ran down the middle, leading to another set of metal doors on the opposite end. Plush red carpet lined the walkway around the displays.
Golden crowns sat on purple pillows. A long silver scepter topped with an orb of twisting metal rested on a delicate cloth. Vintage swords sat idle in museum-quality cases. It was a treasure trove of high level gear. Coral wondered what types of quests would land one of these items in a player’s hands. Protecting the castle? Proving oneself as a top-notch thief?
A banging on the metal doors reminded Coral that time was limited. Plato would find a way in soon. She needed to find that key fast, but she walked at a snail’s pace without the stamina to hurry herself along.
She scanned the glass cases for anything remotely resembling a key while Blat began to drool. His eyes fixed on one shiny object after the next. He hopped out of Coral’s bag and pressed his face against each glass case in turn, smudging them all as he went.
In the middle of the room, between a sapphire-lined chalice and a pair of bracers with various precious stones attached, sat a small, clear pick. It looked more like an awl than a key, tapering to a fine point with no teeth. The smooth cuts on its handle refracted a prism of light just like a fine diamond.
Coral glanced at the other cases. None had anything remotely similar. She tried to lift the glass from its base, but it wouldn’t budge. She raised her hand high overhead and slammed her fist on the surface of the glass, but it didn’t break. Her hand throbbed from the impact.
“Blat?” she called. The goblin had disappeared amidst the glass cases. “Blat!” He didn’t respond, and she couldn’t exactly go chasing after him.
She readied a Hot Shot and lowered the arrow to the glass, its white-hot metal failing to weaken the glass at all. This case was more than a display. It was a very high quality barrier meant to keep greedy fingers like hers out.
The door had stopped banging. Something jingled on the other side. Plato must have found someone with keys.
“Blat, you have to come back!” she yelled. “You can’t stay here, they’ll kill you.” She craned her neck to catch sight of the goblin. He had parked himself in front of a small case with three large rings on an ivory pillow. He was too far. She’d have
to lure him toward her.
She reached into her inventory bag and pinched her Ring of Force by its jewel, the only part of the item she didn’t Shiftwalk through. She raised the ring into the air. “Oh, Blat?”
He glanced at her, then did a double take. Now she had his attention. The goblin crept closer until Coral could scoop him up and plop him into her bag. He perched there, frustration dawning on his face as she tucked the ring away again and continued to rummage in her bag.
Blat huffed but he didn’t dive further into the bag. Coral searched for anything that would help her nab this key and run through the second set of metal doors before Plato zapped her dead. She couldn’t touch her sewing kit or her tackle box. Hook shot arrows wouldn’t cut it. And there was death’s veil.
Of course, she thought. Glass and stone. She wasn’t sure she could afford to keep feeding her ravager’s rags, but it was that or run away empty handed.
She wrapped a piece of the ethereal fabric around her arm, starting just below the elbow and working her way down toward her hand, winding it between her fingers and then around her thumb. She pressed the death’s veil seams with her thumb and watched them melt into one continuous sheet of fabric. She started on her other hand and nearly finished when the metal doors swung open and Plato burst in with two guards behind him.
Coral pressed the seams together on her second glove as Plato readied a spell.
>> Death’s Evening Gloves (+) (blighted). What did you expect, mourning gloves? Constitution -5, Spirit +25. Durability: 35/35. Part of the Ravager’s Rags (+). Set bonus Shiftwalking: 1 piece (metal and bone), 2 pieces (glass and stone), 3 pieces (magic and fey), 4 pieces (night and day), 5 pieces (another dimension), 6 pieces (death’s ascension).
