To Sir, with Love: An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World Book 1)

by Blodwedd Mallory

  Acknowledgments

  The writing process to develop a book, while it might be solitary, is certainly not the work of one person. These days the sources of information are manifold, so I owe a debt of gratitude not just to the teams at Funcom who imagined such a fantastic game world for The Secret World, but to the many players who felt as inspired by it as I do, who compiled endless details and analysis of the locations, missions, and NPC characters and their motivations in books, blogs, databases, and more. That gave me the notion I could fictionalize the mission To Sir, with Love into a story that someone who doesn’t play The Secret World or Secret World Legends just might want to read.

  On a more personal note, I want to thank those who gave feedback on the drafts and ideas for the story: Kelly Dewsnup, Sutton Morgan (the original Gypcie!), Natalee Thompson, Regina Napolitano, and Lisa Gift. Your encouragement and help kept me going! Thank you, Trista Emmer, for your excellent editing and editorial assistance. Your skill (and fabulously reasonable prices) kept me in the business of writing this book.

  To Kai Engel, your lovely atmospheric music has been the soundtrack for many Secret World projects for me now. Maybe we’ll all get lucky, and Johnny Depp will pick you to compose the theme for his new TV series set in the Secret World.

  Finally, to my husband, Mark Reviea, who doesn’t like fiction: Thanks for enduring the writing spurts and periodic random questions about the details of a particular scene. For a guy who claims not to like fiction, you sure have some good ideas about telling a story. I love you whole, big bunches.

  To Sir, with Love

  An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World

  Blodwedd “Wedd” Mallory

  Editor: Trista Emmer

  Cover: Mark “HolloPoint” Innes

  Published October 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Amber McKee

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of author and Funcom.

  This novel is a fictionalized version of an in-game mission available in both The Secret World and Secret World Legends. It is a labor of love from a fan of both games.

  The Secret World (TM) and Secret World Legends(TM) are registered trademarks of Funcom Oslo AS. This book is a work of fiction and not an official Secret World product, nor approved by or associated with Funcom. Any game characters, NPC dialogue, locations, or other intellectual property (IP) referenced are the products of Funcom. The author claims no ownership and uses the IP under licensed agreement with Funcom. Any other names, characters, places, and plots are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  A preview of the next Unofficial Legend of the Secret World: London Underground

  “It's all shut down, Kaidan-cho, everything, from the park to Orochi Tower...”

  The voice was urgent, young, and feminine, with an English accent. I opened my eyes to find myself laying on the floor of what appeared to be a subway station, artificial light flickering, the cold tiles pressed against my cheek.

  In front of me, I could see three people arguing, two women and a man, standing in front of a gray metallic gate blocking the entrance to the platform areas beyond.

  My heart beat loudly and my eyes blurred as I tried to focus. I could see a dirty hand stretched out in front of my body—I was laying on my left side on my shoulder—but it didn’t look like my hand. Above it was the sleeve of a white leather jacket with blue leather trim cut to look like a flame. That confused me further. I didn’t have a jacket like that.

  “SDF quarantine. Good news for Tokyo, bad news for us.” The other woman spoke, her voice softer, although still young and feminine.

  I pressed up on one elbow. The floor in front of me was littered in the grime and trash typical to subways, but there was something new. A strange shiny black substance covered it, spreading out in thin offshoots like the roots of a tree. In places, the substance was pooled into thicker pods and had started to climb up the nearby wall.

  “I thought the Dragon thrived on Chaos?” The man spoke now.

  The second woman retorted, dryly, “Someone once told me the Illuminati had all the answers.”

  Dragon? Illuminati? My head spun as I continued to try to focus my eyes, my breathing shallow. My body had a dull ache as if I’d been knocked down. My left hip was sore. This was a strange dream and very vivid. I couldn’t ever remember being aware of pain in a dream before.

  My heart thumped loudly. What was I feeling? Was I afraid or merely curious? The detail in this dream was terrific. I could smell the mechanical, oily tang of the subway trains and the faint institutional funk familiar to places that people traversed in large numbers. My eyes blurred again. I shook my head and focused on the three speakers in front of me.

  A young platinum-haired woman dressed in a ribbed, white V-neck sweater, jeans, sturdy boots, and a puffy red winter vest stood nearest on my right. She was wearing an off-white knit cap, a tuque, which pressed her short shag cut hair down over her face, covering her left eye. There was a well-used shotgun on her back, held in place with a thin leather strap, which wrapped around the vest.

  “They're saying a bomb. It's never just a bomb.”

  The other woman with the softer voice, who was standing nearest the gate, responded. “Something worse. Something that brought the Filth with it.” She looked vaguely Asian and was wearing headphones, a rust-colored cropped off-the-shoulder T-shirt, and low-slung yoga pants, with a katana-case strapped to her hip. Ornate dragon tattoos embroidered her shoulders, and her black hair was gathered back into a ponytail.

  I noticed she said “filth” like it had a capital “F.” I looked again at the black substance covering the floor. Was this some biological outbreak? Where was I? The first woman had said something about “Kaidan-cho.” Was that in Japan?

  “So we fight,” the first woman spoke again. “That’s what us Templars do.”

  Templars! Understanding flooded me. Now this dream made more sense. I was fantasizing about my future with the Templars. But, the dream was so real, so vivid. It was unnerving.

  “I enjoy a good fight. It's just that these bloody trousers are velvet,” said the man, who stood off to the right, gesturing at his pants. He was wearing a long, dark-brown duster and had short, spiked brown hair. He appeared to be in his mid-30s, while the two women seemed younger, early-20s-ish. Were they supposed to be agents of some sort?

  The Asian woman looked over at me as I struggled to my feet. “Sarah! Thank Gaia! Are you okay? How are you feeling?”

  I staggered as I stood up and swallowed hard as my stomach lurched with the movement. Who was Sarah?

  I looked down at my body but didn’t recognize my clothes, or truth be told, the warm brown color of the skin of my hands. I held up my arm to see the blue-flame details that ran down both sleeves of the white leather jacket I was wearing. I could see I had on a pair of gray jeans and old high-tops. I reached up to touch the wide cloth headband on my head. Maybe it was a scarf. My hair felt different, smoother, finer, and shorter. I turned slightly and could see the black ends of it touching my shoulders. That wasn’t right. I had long, auburn hair that I typically wore in a bun.

  This was some dream. I’d never been someone else in a dream before, but I was too fascinated to let the strangeness bother me. I didn’t know what was going on here, but there was only one way to find out. I nodded my head at the second woman to let her know I was okay.

  She nodded back, then turned to the first. “If Zuberi was here, he'd tell us this is the worst time to argue.”

  “Well, he's not. He's down there somewhere,” the blond responded, gesturing through the locked gate. “Sarah, get your gun.”

  I jerked with a start. She meant me. I spied a shotgun on the floor near my feet with an anxious t
hrill in my stomach. I’d never used a shotgun before. How hard could it be? I picked it up, holding it gingerly with both hands, muzzle pointed toward the floor in what I hoped was proper safety etiquette. I prayed silently that there were shells in it because I sure didn’t know how to load them.

  I looked around the room and spotted the subway exit behind us, a back-lit sign identifying it on the threshold above, gleaming in the dimly lit room. A small, deserted news kiosk sat along the wall to the right of the stairs, with newspapers and magazines lining its display shelves. I could see more tendrils of the stuff—the Filth?—reaching across the floors like blood vessels in a circulatory system amid the trash and old newspapers. A brightly lit vending machine offering candy and cigarettes for purchase stood at the right of the kiosk, providing a strange contrast of normality to the otherwise grim scene.

  A large thump echoed from the stairwell beyond the gate in front of me, and I turned back quickly at the sound of footsteps running toward us. From the stairs emerged a frightened woman. Spying us, she grabbed the gate and began shaking it frantically. “Let me out!”

  “Open the gate!” the blond woman in our group yelled. The Asian woman crouched down and struggled with the latch at the bottom, trying to pry it up.

  “I'm trying, Rose! It's inside the electrics somehow, the Filth...”

  “Let me out!” The woman trapped behind the gate screamed more urgently now, the gate ringing as she shook it.

  A man sprinted up from the stairs behind her. My mind boggled for a moment as I took him in. He was wearing a buttoned-down white shirt and gray trousers like a businessman, but his face and head were covered in a black, shiny tar, with two tentacles waving wildly from it. Was he infected with something? Was he contaminated with this Filth they kept talking about?

  Before I could contemplate it any further, he jumped on the woman behind the gate and knocked her down, tearing at her face and arms with his teeth. She shrieked pitifully as she attempted to push him away.

  “No!” the Asian woman cried out as she stepped away from the latch, covering her eyes, as the monster ripped the trapped woman apart in front of us.

  “Fuck me!” the guy in our group yelled.

  “Oh. My. God!” Rose echoed.

  My eyes were wide and I shook at the sight. “We have to help her!”

  I aimed the shotgun at the gate and attempted to fire, but nothing happened. Looking down I realized the safety was still on. I flipped it off and raised the gun to try again, but I was too late. The woman had stopped struggling. The infected man jumped off his victim and ran off the landing down the stairs to the left beyond my line of sight.

  Acid poured into my stomach as horror flooded me. This might have only been a dream, but seeing the woman torn to pieces in front of me was very real and upsetting. Her body lay on the landing beyond the locked gate, blood pouring from a wound on her throat, her sightless eyes clouded in death.

  I swallowed hard and turned my gaze away. With my left hand, I pumped a shell into the chamber. Next time, I thought with anger as I bit back tears, I would be prepared to fire.

  A low knocking sound came from my left. What was that? My heart rate jumped again, and my eyes widened. I turned quickly but kept the muzzle of the shotgun low.

  To the right of the kiosk and vending machine, the wall of the subway station had three large vents midway up to provide air circulation underground. They were large enough for a human to stand in. My adrenalin spiked as I realized the covers on two of them had been torn off, revealing the blackness beyond the reach of the artificial light of the area in which we were standing. The others also turned and faced the noise, dropping back into postures to prepare to fight.

  “Watch out!” the short-haired man called out as a Filth-infected creature appeared in the rightmost ventilation tunnel. It jumped down and threw itself at us.

  The Asian woman drew her katana and brandished it at the creature, but I was ready this time, and, holding the shotgun up to my cheek, I fired past my companions at the infected man. The blast caught him in the stomach, and he fell back against the wall, dead or incapacitated. My shoulder stung from the recoil of the shotgun, but I felt a deep satisfaction in having hit and downed my target.

  Fuck you, Filth.

  “Nice shooting!” The blond woman, Rose, yelled at me from over her shoulder.

  She was interrupted by a raw hissing scream that echoed from deep within the tunnels, assuring us that more infected specimens were on their way.

  “How many have they got in there?” the short-haired man asked.

  “It's gone viral so fast... If this gets out into Tokyo...” Rose responded.

  “It doesn't. We stop it here. Whatever it takes.” The Asian woman glared at us as she swiped down with the katana to make her point.

  “Shouldn't we consult the Council of Venice first?”

  “Shut up, Alex,” Rose responded sharply. “Mei is right.”

  The short-haired guy, Alex, had said that in such a dry, sarcastic voice that I knew this was an old argument between them. I also knew what the Council of Venice was. I had worked with them firsthand at the Innsmouth Academy on Solomon Island when they arrived last fall to assist with the familiars that were over-running us. Why did Alex make consulting the Council of Venice sound like a bad thing?

  Before I could finish my thought, six more infected breached the vents and jumped down to attack us. Rose raised her shotgun and took the opening shot, blasting away from the left side. The Asian woman, Mei, swept her blade before her on the right, holding them at bay, while Alex threw fireballs from a little further back. I positioned myself sufficiently that I wouldn’t shoot any of my group, pumped the shotgun again, and aimed at the infected with both barrels as they swarmed towards us.

  Rose gave them the full salvo, her shotgun making a pop, pop, pop sound as she laid waste to the infected lunching toward her with fast, repeated blasts. Mei decapitated the filth man nearest her, her blade moving like a tsunami, barely visible with the speed of her strikes. Alex continued to bombard the infected with fireballs, his arms flowing forward as the flaming energy erupted from his palms. I did what I could, one shot at a time, trying to hit my targets with the new weapon.

  Because this was a dream, I didn’t have my chaos or blood foci. I was effectively as dangerous as a newborn, my earlier lucky shot notwithstanding. Thank goodness my companions were capable fighters.

  Before long, the infected were all dead and laid on the floor in front of us. I took in a shuddering breath. There were more on the way and who knew how many would breach the ventilation tunnels this time. We had to get the gate open and move deeper into the subway. Here, we were mostly sitting ducks.

  Mei crouched down again in front of the gate’s locking mechanism, fiddling with the latch. I heard a click as it gave and she raised the gate up, jumping to push it up into its casing. The opening yawned like the entrance to a netherworld. Alex must have felt the same, as he quipped, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

  “Thanks for the encouragement, Alex,” Rose said with a scowl.

  Mei cut her off with a gesture. “Let's do this. Take it like all the other occult disasters, right?”

  “We really have to stop meeting like this,” Alex quipped again.

  We started down the stairs to the next landing. I turned away as we moved past the torn-up victim of the first infected man. Shame and sorrow burned in my chest at her death. The Filth had to be stopped, and I was ready to fight it.

  Below I could see another gate between us and the actual train platform. I couldn’t read the signs posted on the walls, which probably described where the trains traveled, because they were all in Japanese kana. But it didn’t matter. The infection was right here, covering the floors, the walls…everything.

  As we moved out onto the landing to the next set of stairs, the wall to our left began to bulge, as more of the infected ran up the stairs toward us. With a squeal and a crash, the tiles lining the wall
split open, and a cloud of black filth exploded outward. A piece of flying shrapnel from the wall hit me in the chest, and I was knocked back, the air leaving my lungs in a whoosh. I hit my head hard against something behind me, and the scene faded to black.

  London Underground is slated to be available on Amazon in early 2019. Visit http://www.blodweddmallory.com to subscribe to the LotSW mailing list and get the latest news about this and other upcoming unofficial Legends of the Secret World!