Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  Maybe these monsters truly were drawn from our collective unconscious like my dad said. There was a horrifying déjà vu to the Queen’s emancipation. Some nightmare horror embodying the fear of birth and motherhood: it should have been alien but it wasn’t.

  Dropping onto the bed of skulls and remains, her weight splintered bones underfoot as she hissed in challenge to the Tarrasquito. Despite all its wounds and loss of hp, the Tarrasquito had no fear or quit in it.

  Now that I was back in what I can laughably call my right mind and paying attention, I realized how stupid I had been to follow my golden goose down into the depths without bothering to wonder if this was a one-way trip. Still, this final battle was something to behold.

  The smart money was on Mommy Dearest. She would finish off the Tarrasquito and then come for me. I knew it was time to run back to the surface, but like an idiot I stayed. Letting the Tarrasquito die at the hands of this unnatural thing just sat wrong with me after he had done me so much good.

  It wasn’t all silly sentimentality. I coveted whatever goodies this local boss dropped. The colony had been left undisturbed by any players for a very long time. This mini-dungeon was ripe. The loot from clearing this out would be tremendous. It was worth the risk of dying.

  If I had a healing spell to my name, I would have slapped some cures on the Tarrasquito. At anything close to full strength, the Tarrasquito would win. Without healing it was hard to see what else to do to help. I could just attack the Queen myself, but I didn’t think my damage output was going to shift things quickly enough. The Queen clambered down her bed of bones. Despite the uneven footing she managed to get a charge rolling and threw herself onto the Tarrasquito just after her last--I refuse to call it a child--died.

  Her slight staggers as she got moving across the pile of bones gave me an idea.

  I started the breathing, chanting and hand gestures for the spell I wanted. It took me three tries to ignore the battle and my own fatigue well enough to cast it, but I did. My command word, “Vach!” sounded out. Words, even magical ones, sounded out of place as two beasts struggled for dominance.

  Dark oil began to seep from minute cracks in the ground under the battling monsters. Quickly, a square about ten feet across was covered with a natural, oily grease thick enough to make it difficult to stand. Only one of the two monsters actually was trying to stand. Orwell wrote, “Four legs good, two legs better.” If you are in a life and death struggle on a patch of grease, “Six legs best,” is the governing credo.

  The Queen Mother stutter-stepped. The six-legged Tarrasquito was as stable as a boulder. It snapped at her leg. Dodging, she lost her balance and fell. With that, she lost her reach and leverage. Even so, it looked to me like she would still pull out a win. Her claws found gaps and breaks her children had made in the Tarrasquito’s carapace at the cost of their lives.

  It was time to give the Tarrasquito some more advantages. I triggered the Burning Hands spell in my ring and lit the monsters up. They were so tangled together that there was no way to avoid the Tarrasquito, but I didn’t have to. The unstoppable bastard was immune to fire damage. From the screams that the Queen Mother gave off, I could tell she didn’t share the immunity. Then the grease caught fire and her hp plummeted.

  Truly they were a pair of Kilkenny cats fighting and fit, scratching and bit. Their hp shaved down and looked ready to bottom out at almost the same moment. Almost, meaning that only one would win. For sentimental reasons I wanted it to be the Tarrasquito. The fire burned and so did the Queen. With a final shriek of outrage, she fell.

  The Tarrasquito took one final bite from her now charred and dead carcass. Ignoring the flames, it turned. Its speed was slowed due to the grease, but with the same implacable pace it now came for me.

  Some part of me had hoped it would ignore me and head back to the surface and tend its plant. That it could know that my spells were only meant for the queen. But like all of us, it had its aggro list and lived by it.

  Chanting and breathing, electricity arced down my arms and I laid hands on the nearly dead monster just as it cleared the flames.

  “Thanks,” I told it as it died. All I could give it was a final victory against a foe and a clean death. My actions weren’t gratitude as normally imagined, but hadn’t our primitive forefathers given words of thanks as they killed their prey? We had technology that made us the next best things to gods and here I was basically living the same lifestyle as my caveman ancestors. I had to laugh, which turned into a choke as the smoke from the grease fire caught in my throat.

  Eventually I got a hold of myself as I was now alone in the silence of the empty colony. It was time to finish this up and get out of here.

  First, I looted the last few prairie dogs. Then I turned to the Tarrasquito and skinned and harvested it. Having done so before, I knew what a difficult job it would be, but this time my skills were higher and I knew my way around the thing. I managed to get an additional portion of meat. The skin was no better than before, but I got a new twelve percent added to my Skinning skill once I was done.

  Saving the best, or at least unknown, for last is my way. You may be the sort of person who would rather see immediately what the dungeon boss dropped. If so, I have no kick. Go lure your own living juggernaut and destroy an unnatural perversion at the heart of its colony of spawned minions, and you can loot in whatever order floats your boat.

  Dissecting the queen’s corpse revealed that it was pretty useless. It had a few glands that I had to remove from nauseating areas. The system identified them as useful alchemy ingredients. So, I gained some skill bumps and moderate donations to the Gathering Quest. Other than that, the queen was a bust. Since she was the end-boss of this little slice of hell, I knew that somewhere in here there had to be a much bigger drop. All that was left in the cavern was her giant roe sac and the pile of bones it was lying upon. Joy.

  If you manage to kill one of these unnatural maternal horrors, you can skip searching through its giant roe sac and ovipositor. I looked and it turns out they contain nothing of value. You are welcome. Of course, you are apt to have a functioning Luck stat. My lack of Luck stat has made combat, casting and so many other aspects of the Game a pain in the ass. But the lack of auto-loot is far and away the primary thing I will never forgive Maya for subjecting me to.

  I was left with the giant pile of bones. Nothing for it but to start in on rifling through it. I donated those bones that were intact enough to be craftable items. The rest I threw to the side to be reclaimed by the Game. The ability to donate made the work go more quickly than I had feared. The pile shrank and my quest bar grew.

  Finally, the pile was scattered or absorbed by the quest until the prize that lay under the countless victims of the Queen at the heart of this colony was revealed. At the center of the pile, I found a stone. Looking at it with mundane eyes rather than via a Game prompt showed me nothing remarkable. It was an oblong block of red sandstone. It looked like someone had worked it slightly long ago, but to what purpose I couldn’t figure out. I touched it and let the game tell me what it was.

  ??one of ????e

  The floating tag blurred for a moment.

  ?ac??’? P???ow

  The letters swam and blurred again.

  βαίτυλος

  Great, the letters were all revealed but the language wasn’t English.

  Lia Fáil, ὀμφαλός, S???? ?f ??s??n?, Fürstenstein, Mora stenar, knežji kamen… over and over the tag blurred and changed, showing obscure titles in different languages or different English titles with too many letters replaced to decipher.

  I was either too low-level, too unskilled, or lacked the stats necessary to know just what the reward was at the end of this little adventure.

  I toggled my Eyes of the Hunter. For one brief moment, the description block under the title wasn’t empty:

  Apud Monasterium de Scone positus est lapis pergrandis in ecclesia Dei, juxta magnum altare, concavus quidem ad modum rotundae cathedr
ae confectus, in quo futuri reges loco quasi coronationis ponebantur ex more.

  That would have surely helped if I spoke Latin. The description came and went too fast for me to memorize or write it down, which also assumed that I had pen and paper. Turning my Eyes of the Hunter on and off over and over never brought this or any other description back.

  The easiest and simplest thing to do with this mystery was to just donate the thing. It was obviously valuable and, if I was too low-level to identify it, I was likely too low-level to be able to use it. The little voice that had been urging me on demanded that I stop fiddling about, donate the thing and go kill and gather more.

  My hand hovered over the donate button. This one item could be worth more than all that I had just donated. Which just underscored the thing that was staying my hand. The Game made you pay a penalty for donating unidentified items. The more valuable this stone was, the bigger a loss I’d incur by donating it unidentified.

  But it wasn’t like I could take the thing into town and pay a local expert to reveal its mysteries for me. I knew that this thing was extremely valuable. This mini-dungeon had likely been left to its own devices since the Game began. Like fine wines and certain books, age only improves dungeon mobs and loot.

  I cursed Maya and the Party. Other players could have access to civilization. But if I walked into a town, her lackeys would kill and strip this from me. I’d be damned if she could steal it from me and fuck her if I would have to donate it unidentified and at a loss. I’d experiment and tinker with the thing until it revealed its secrets.

  Mucking about with mysterious items of unknown power and ability was asking for trouble. But the little voice which had been urging me just to donate the thing changed its tune. I almost thought I heard a little whisper now urging me to keep the thing. None of the rest of my brain bothered to object. Fine, all my inner angels and devils were in agreement. I took the thing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was morning when I finally exited the colony from a sandy tunnel. The open sky made my eyes blink and tear for a bit. I had been looting corpses the entire night.

  The surface of the colony felt eerily empty. No more sentries. The Prairie Dogs had cleared all their area of anything other than themselves and nothing had moved in to replace them yet. Soon enough, other mobs and resources would fill their area in but for right now the wind whistled across a huge cleared and abandoned area.

  My Gathering Quest completion bar was at 87%. I was so close I could taste it. Even without any slick maneuvers like I’d just pulled off, I’d have this thing wrapped up in a few weeks. A month tops. With a spring in my step I started back on the hunt. I trotted away from the colony and back into the wilderness.

  It was too bad I wouldn’t be able to see Maya’s and Jude’s faces when they got the announcement I had knocked out another Beginner’s Quest. It was probably better that I would have to imagine it. Jude and his damned poker face wouldn’t change anyway.

  Scrabbling along the valley floor, I came across a black tailed deer. It looked odd. Its ribs were showing and it looked like it might have a diseased status effect. Whatever was wrong with it made it an easy grab for the quest. It didn’t notice me until I was in good position for a heart strike. My sword entered right between those picked out ribs. It was in such bad shape, it never got the chance to attack or flee. I wasn’t going to eat the thing so who cared? It generated a much smaller amount of points for the quest though.

  A Bisnaga cactus I passed was in fruit. My herbalism skill and dex were high enough to allow me to grab it without taking damage. Its spines and needles were even slower in trying to stab me than usual.

  Slime and sap leaked over my hand. The fruit had looked alright from above but underneath it was bruised and rotten. Wiping the sticky juice and pulp off my hand, I found that the Gathering Quest didn’t want to accept the thing. I cut the bruised and ruined part off. The Gathering Quest took the remainder after that, but the points were a pittance of what they should have been.

  A disturbing trend grew more and more apparent. I had collected the flowers off a deer-vetch vine dozens of times these past weeks. They weren’t the most common herb in the valley, but I had found them often enough to remember what they looked like and how many points they were worth without using the system to tell me. They were a decent seedling-level herb. The flowers should be a pale lavender shading off to red. These looked kind of grey. I plucked them just like I had all those other times before, but I wasn’t able to donate it. It just crumbled into dust. Same thing happened when I tried to harvest some chichiquelite.

  Something was off about the plants and animals around here. I made my way back through areas I had already been in. They had the same problems too. Whatever was happening seemed like it was happening everywhere. Was this some sort of local event? A drought or disease?

  My foot fell through the cover of a hive of some sort of giant insects. Instead of being stung and ravaged, all that happened was that my boot crunched through their desiccated corpses. I identified them:

  Vicious Sand Wasps

  Bembix Steniolia

  The remains of one of the most vicious flying insect monsters of the desert.

  The system wouldn’t accept the husks either. The land was clearly dying of something.

  I started searching and exploring faster and faster. With all the mobs and herbs dead or dying, I didn’t fear running into anything that would kill me. I started hoping I’d run into some pitiless creature bent on feasting on my brains or liver. It would at least be a sign of life and vitality. But everywhere I looked the land was withering.

  My gut really dropped when I tried to mine a small vein of ant hill garnets. The tiny red stones were dull and lifeless. The system wouldn’t accept them. Whatever was going on was impacting even the geology of the area. All the resources were drying up.

  I was able to cover ground at a speed that I couldn’t possibly have managed before. I ran up and down each side of the valley. Everywhere was barren. People often think of deserts as desolate and empty, but I had come to know the area. It had been alive and complex with subtle and harsh beauty. Now it was dead.

  Panting, I made it to the edge of the valley blocked by the barrier that ringed the Crib. Beyond were the wilds that you couldn’t enter till you finished your Beginner’s Quests.

  The barrier ran almost straight across from one side of the valley to the other. The barrier’s slight angle meant that one slope of the valley extended an additional hundred feet beyond the other.

  The borderline separating the Beginner’s Area from what lay beyond wasn’t static. It wasn’t a wall. It was more like a curtain or maybe a membrane that shifted and undulated from some wind only it could feel. It was alive somehow. It pulsed and shifted across maybe a dozen yards.

  It reminded me of the way waves in the ocean will cover and then reveal a band of sand. The valley was lapped and washed by the barrier. There was some sort of pattern as the movement would build to a crescendo, swallowing as much of the valley as it could, and then ebb.

  The land that was washed over by the barrier wasn’t suffering from whatever was killing the land in the Crib. Plants, herbs and small level zero creatures looked like they were thriving. Something about the barrier or what lay beyond protected this band of life from whatever was killing everything in the valley. The farther from the barrier they were, the more they faded and grayed out until the land became blighted like the rest of my valley.

  As I stood there studying the barrier and the blight and trying to figure out what this all meant, a giant chuckwalla waddled across from the other side. Luckily, I was far enough from it that I didn’t trip its aggro. I needed information much more than Gathering points or exp. I needed to study it, not kill it.

  I shifted farther away and watched. The white and black banded lizard tasted the air with its tongue and then made its way along the valley floor.

  As it neared the side of the valley further from the barrier,
its scales started to dull. The previously crisp white and black rings lost contrast and it started moving more slowly. I tracked it as it made its way through the valley. Eventually, it sort of wobbled and then collapsed. It lay on its side, panting for air. After not too much longer, it just despawned into the remains that are left after you loot a corpse. Seconds after that, all that was left was dust.

  Looking back up the valley I had just explored, I saw that the valley was no longer dying. It was dead. Dust, bones and petrifying remnants of plants were all that remained.

  A haze of dust made from all that had lived blew through the valley and soon all that remained was dead rock and a few petrified trees.

  WTF?! Just when I was about to coast to victory, my little slice of heaven dries up. I had mastered this valley. The chances of there being anything more difficult than the prairie dog colony or the Tarrasquito was low. Even if there was some unbeatable big bad lurking, there had been enough things I could gather that I could have stuck to some basic grinding and finished the quest up. It was like someone was out to ruin me.

  Oh. Of course.

  I started looking through my system messages from when I was distracted down in the prairie dog colony. Eventually I found it.

  Player Boone!

  “The land and the King are one.” - Merlin

  “One what?” - T. Pratchett

  The area surrounding Quartzite and the Mines of Madness! is owned and controlled by WotC, a subsidiary of GSG, Inc. Professor Brady has exercised his option to Fallow part of his land to increase the rate of nano density in other parts of his land. The standard 100 to 1 penalties have been applied. We are sorry if this has inconvenienced your gameplay.