In a flash of motion, Commander Queenshand was next to Jeeves. I felt like the [Awareness Heightening] skill kicked in only to help me watch these events in slow motion. Commander Queenshand’s clenched fist came up, orange transparent gears spinning into existence.
She jabbed on with one hand, and [Mechanoid] body parts flew off in chunks. Commander Queenshand moved with a boxer’s instep and gave my friend an uppercut. I watched the former Hal Pal AI shatter. Its health bar dropped and as dying cries came from the butler and nanny voices.
Party member [Mechanoid] Jeeves: deceased
“Ahhhhh!” Treasure screamed. Her body was still falling. One of the woman’s arms lifted as the other pressed buttons on her wrist device. Dusk was similarly hissing in outrage, his tiny body leapt into the air.
Old habits die hard. I frantically tried to imagine [Blink]ing next to them. [Morrigu’s Gift] should have been in my hand. The large two-handed sword of William Carver and my [Barricade] skill could easily deflect the attack. Failure resulted on all three counts.
I had none of those items. Instead, I reached out with one hand and stumbled forward. Treasure’s wrist shot lights at the Commander. I saw the aura of orange flicker, pieces shattered away, but this enemy leader was exceedingly strong. Treasure had never been a fighter either, it wasn’t in her [Core].
It was in mine. I got ahold of myself and switched to a large cannon blaster. One shot would drain all my energy. Treasure’s face was wide with anger. In the time it took me to transform my weapon loadout, Commander Queenshand had already punched through Treasure’s head. The [Mechanoid] popped like a pinata, wisps of smoke drifted off of the female human’s orange lined fist.
Party member [Mechanoid] Treasure: deceased
I fired anyway. I didn’t know what else to do. The blonde’s head whipped in my direction. Her shoulder lifted and arm curled. Orange holograms once again flared to life in the form of a round shield.
She glared at me. Dusk landed on her back. The woman spun around and popped a blade out of its sheath and jammed it into the [Messenger’s Pet] in one smooth motion. He bit, spit, and clawed with all four arms. The Commander’s shields of orange were shattering further. Her health remained untouched. She twisted the blade while I tried to fire off one more large blast from the cannon.
Companion [Messenger’s Pet] Dusk: deceased
It wasn’t enough to save Dusk. He shattered in a spark of light and energy. I hadn’t saved anyone. I lost myself for a moment. In less than thirty seconds the woman had decimated all those who stood by me. It was my worst fear realized. All the deep-seated worry that had plagued me for days came to pass. Those I cared for were gone once more.
Commander Queenshand tried to fire up the holograms around her legs, the ones that allowed such insane bursts of speed. An image of gears came in but faded rapidly. For a moment, the woman stared at her legs then shrugged. She stomped toward me.
Those around me always seemed to pay a price for my inability. First Xin, I should have made her skip the train. My sister, putting up with the repeated suicide attempts. Beth, learning all about my issues was another mistake.
This woman was responsible for all the latest failures. Lightning crashed above, lighting up the localized destruction for me to see. My eyes zipped to each fallen body in turn. It felt like the ARC synchronization skipped, imagery froze, my head tried to push it all away for only a moment.
Then rage solidified. This time, when Xin was taken away, I had a reason. A focus and it hadn’t just been the possibility of her. It was Jeeves, Dusk, and Treasure. All of them gone because of her, a woman willing to stab someone in the back to achieve her goals.
“You took away my wife!” I shouted as lightning crackled above. The cannon shifted to my heavy Gatling gun. Another round of energy drained away as bolts slammed into her orange shield.
Numerous pieces chipped off, but it still held strong. Her armor finally showed signs of damage from Dusk’s vicious clawing. Portions around her belly and shoulder were adorned with long streaks going through to skin.
“Weak!” Her hand curled in front and a giant orange shield popped up. The second set of blasts from my Gatling gun vanished into it, shattering additional holographic gears.
“You took away my friends!” I yelled. The giant gun was tossed to one side. It transformed into miniature Dusks and they ran toward her.
“Because you’re weak! A coward!” she shouted. Her hand glowed orange and she bashed one of the metal Dusks hard.
My hand reached down in an attempt to activate [Material Conversion]. The microwave noise dinged, but my energy kept going up. Mass stayed constant. There might not be enough material in here for me to absorb, or this wasn’t metal at all. Obsidian should have been comprised of iron and other elements.
I couldn’t see a way through but kept trying. Four more Dusks went out. My body turned into a tiny creature compared to the looming Commander Queenshand. I felt like a child standing against a demon. David versus Goliath. An ant against her boot.
The world around us was falling apart. Energy above kept zipping through purple mist in waves. Thunder rolled and overpowered us. This was hell, this was the underworld, and I was fighting a losing battle.
My head hurt. The world around me felt disturbingly alien. A nightmare landscape where every passing second drove home painful imagery. I would go down swinging, Voices, game creators, and my own past be damned. Cowardice would never be an option again.
Two of the [Mechanical Minion]s tore into her shield. It had finally shattered, but her fist dealt excessive damage. She destroyed one, and another attacked. I could see her health bar dipping.
I had spent too much mass on the army of Dusks. My wrist lifted up, fingers tipped down, and weak blasts went off. One by one the [Mechanical Minion]s bit at her armor. They each got a few good bites in before being punched into a million pieces.
I tried to activate the fourth ability, [Camouflage Program]. My body shimmered briefly with green. This skill wasn’t useful in a blackened landscape like this one. The laser blasts kept going off. By the time Commander Queenshand got close enough to swing she was at half health.
It wasn’t enough.
I panicked and tried to use [Blink] once more. The ability of my prior game world would have saved me. [Morrigu’s Gift] and [Morrigu’s Echo] would have easily displaced that shield. Here, though, in this world, I had been doomed from the start.
Then the universe tilted like someone changed the channel. There was no other way to phrase it. Lightning above still flickered. Obsidian still existed around me, but it felt like the science fiction scenery sloughed off. This floating piece of earth became an island, and all around a storm raged.
Once more I tried [Blink], only this time the ability worked. My body snapped into being right behind Commander Queenshand. I swung around, feeling a level of grace and ability that had been missing since my banishment from Continue Online. The weapon in my grip lashed out automatically. Similar to how I had done thousands of times before. Everything tilted back. It had only been a few seconds before science fiction and space odysseys ruled again.
My body, shorter by far, sat perched on the woman’s back. Two streams of light came over of the metal hilt in my hand. Both eyes shook as I followed the lasers down and saw where they drove through her. The weapon had pierced her from shoulder to stomach.
[Mechanoid] body parts lay all around. Eggman and MrJohnson were in pieces. Commander Queenshand grasped at the twin lasers sticking out of her chest. Orange holograms fragmented as the woman tried to grip the beams of solid energy. She attempted to take in a lungful of air.
Her head turned just enough for me to see one outraged eye. I stared as the light of consciousness drifted away and she lost focus. The health bar shattered and a message popped up telling me I had killed a key NPC. My fingers lost their hold as we fell forward.
Elizabeth Legate: Uncle Grant? What just happened?
My belly shook
. Bile crept upwards. That hadn’t been a player who might resurrect. She didn’t feel the same as a monster or dungeon creature. The creed I tried to follow of letting humanoid NPCs live their lives in peace had been violated. I had killed in rage.
Jeeves was dead. Treasure had followed rapidly. Dusk had been killed in this game. Xin’s chance at resurrection vanished. Every crushing failure piled together resulted in one irrefutable fact. I was capable of murder when pushed this far. Virtual or not, Commander Queenshand had been alive.
Xin had faith that I wasn’t a killer, and this just violated it. I knelt on the ground and tried to hold myself together. No sound existed beyond the lightning crackling overhead. Frozen rain formed an endless cloud up above. Pieces of my companions littered the area.
My head jerked upwards quickly. We were in a digital world. This was all virtual and generated by artificial intelligences. We were inside the ARC, but that didn’t matter. This mess needed to be fixed. Successive failures on so many counts could be undone, maybe. I had to hope.
Elizabeth Legate: Grant?
This last message came from my slightly older twin sister. She was worried, but my mind was elsewhere. I rapidly paced through twists and turns of my recent experiences, evaluated the choices made since coming to Advance Online. Each moment was turned over and compared. Five minutes, ten, maybe more time passed as I sat there at the heart of a dead world.
Events came together to form a large picture. The players I had encountered. The [Mistborn]. Eggman and his Continue Online counterpart, KeylessLock. Delivering a message to the ogre version of Auntie Backstab. The army following Shazam. My own autopilot among them. Dusk. Jeeves. Starting on the [Wayfarer Seven].
There were too many puzzle pieces for a human hand. Multiple occurrences pointed to more than simple coincidence. A final fact slid into position. All of this started with letters from my [Messenger’s Tube]. There was only one set of beings in existence that might be able to manipulate so many variables to reach this point.
Among all my self-reflection revelations was one more emotion. Anger. I was so god damned angry with the Voices. To them, my struggles were a test, a challenge like William Carver and Requiem Mass had been.
“Activate NPC Conspiracy, username, Hermes.” The words slipped out, and around me, everything changed.
Session Sixty Five – The Plea of Orpheus
The world inside my ARC had changed. Rocky cliffs and purple lightning clouds up above had faded. A ruined landscape made of my companions’ and enemy’s bodies vanished. The gray space of [Mechanoid] afterlife sat there waiting.
“Awaiting input,” the ARC said in its calm feminine tone.
I didn’t know how to proceed. There wasn’t a box to start screaming at. My [Mechanoid] body had faded only to be replaced by the virtual Grant avatar. It felt slightly slimmer and full of more energy than the version of me before Continue Online.
“The Voices!” I shouted up at my ARC. My body literally lay inside an ARC bed, my mind within the ARC machine, but for some reason, the presence always seemed to exist above me.
“Please provide further detail for your request.”
“I want to speak to all the Voices!” Picking a specific Voice didn’t matter. They were all in on this together. There was no way that one of them would sneak around and start a plot without the others being involved.
The room abruptly tore in two, as if paper were being ripped endlessly. My body spun as if an old fashion dryer were trying to wring me out. Hands went out to each side in an effort to find stability. Though the horizon flipped end over end wildly my feet stayed firm.
My eyes drifted to one side of the room. Once again I sat oddly between virtual realities. Decorating each side was a backdrop adorned with an old heraldic shield.
The clear blackened space of Continue Online’s world was given a man’s outline, in his hands, a giant sword pointed down into the ground. The [Mechanoid] gray afterlife sat on the left. Its symbol was a large metal man pointing a Gatling gun toward foes unseen.
These two pictures on either side of the room resembled my characters between the two games. My feet sat pinned in both worlds. Straddling the same border I stood in was an ARC. It felt still, almost like the body inside were dead. I half expected roses to be littered against the bedside in tribute.
A being appeared in the blackness of Continue Online’s half. First the Cheshire’s grin, then a motley pattern of clothes. Last was the hat, split into ends with bells hanging off. My least favorite Voice had answered the call first.
“What’s here? The portrait of a blinking idiot!” the Voice clacked at me. Its words sounded neither male or female, but rather like a doll being wound up. No teeth or eyes lay beneath the mask, only a grin, and deep sunken eyes.
“Where are the others?”
“A blinking idiot who can’t even use his gifts correctly. Do you not remember the words, dear Hermes? Is yon vessel the real world?” the Jester asked. One slender hand pointed toward the ARC sitting ten feet away.
“Isn’t it?” I snapped at the Jester. For once the creature’s mocking presence didn’t upset me. Irritation and fresh anger overrode all prudence.
“Do you think me a fool? I am not a monkey here merely to answer your tantrum demands,” the Voice said.
“It’s about time I got answers.”
Both the creature’s hands went up. Jingles accompanied the movement. The Jester’s face turned and an elongated nose stuck out comically. It said, “Then look to the East.”
James, a heavyset black man who served as my personal Voice, faded in near the ARC. He stared down at the figure inside and smiled in my direction. There was a twitch of one cheek that hinted at amusement.
“Two realities, both alike in dignity, in your fair ARC where we lay our scene,” James said with a hand up in the air. He held back a chuckle that threatened to make his belly quake. “From petty desire break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
I blinked a few times trying to understand what James was saying. This made no sense, and it wasn’t how my usage of this ability was meant to go. It sounded like they were both quoting plays at me like Jeeves had just moments before being punched clean through.
Dammit. Jeeves had died for me because I couldn’t move fast enough in a giant metal body. Commander Queenshand could have easily killed me instead with that kind of power, but she chose to pick off all the weaker party members.
“James!” I shouted at him and tried to move. Neither foot responded, instead I felt frozen, stuck with a leg standing in the gray and the black. “What’s going on!?”
“All the world’s a game, and the humans merely players; they log on in, and they log on out, and one man in his time plays many characters,” James spoke and waved his arms around in emphasis.
“Why do all this?!” my yell echoed across the landscape. It felt like there were two, maybe three of me shouting. The ARC’s feedback made my head spin. Their acting and words were throwing me off.
“Witless fool. Did you think you were the only actor upon this stage?” The Jester clacked with laughter. Its form wandered through the dark half.
“Oh, happy dagger!” The Temptress suddenly appeared. Reddened curves teased from the Continue Online side. She was close, breathing hotly upon my neck. Her quick and playful growl sent shivers down my spine. “I’ve got thy sheath.”
My head shook rapidly and her voice pouted. There was a hint of an [Instant Gratification] quest box popping up that faded promptly. I could see a slightly flirtatious smile as the naked woman disappeared. The Jester cackled a fresh round of amusement at us, visibly it was gone, but the Voices always watched from inside the darkness.
“Your companion’s enjoyment of Hamlet has us inspired, Hermes,” James stated as he approached. “Mezo had originally asked for an entirely different play, but we reminded her that last time she was turned down.”
“I don’t think this is what Shakespeare intended
,” I said. Mezo’s idea probably wasn’t what Shakespeare intended either.
“It seemed fitting enough to me. Cross Star’d lovers,” James said a cherubic smile across his lips. “For did you not cross stars for love?”
That one phrase reminded me why I was so angry. This song and dance the Voices had assaulted me with proved a distraction from the original issue. Jeeves, Treasure, Dusk, their passing. The [Mistborn] falling into other people’s hands. All of it aggravated me.
“And failed, because you set me up from the start.” I wanted to point a finger at James, but my body moved slowly.
The black man shook his head and asked, “Why would we do such a thing?”
There were a lot of facts that came to mind. I was given a title [Messenger of the Voices] in Continue Online. They offered this [NPC Conspiracy] ability. Not just the real world variant I had used, but one that gave me abilities in Continue Online. Being overly invested in me playing and performing all these tests made no sense when I tried to reconcile it all in my head. Or rather, it made sense when I thought about it from a certain angle, but that idea felt so dangerous to consider that I couldn’t even think about it.
Anger clouded my judgment when it came time to act. Mezo, the Temptress, had clouded my senses and took time to shake off. I inhaled deeply, then again twice more. Relaxation techniques helped me back away from making further choices when overloaded by emotions. One question at a time, forward toward the destination, eventually I would run out of time on the [NPC Conspiracy] ability or get my desire of saving Jeeves and the others.
“That’s exactly what I want to know!” I shouted. “And this play, it’s Romeo and Juliet, right?” The Temptress, Mezo, had given me a rather firm reminder with the happy dagger line. That was the sentence Juliet used before stabbing herself. “Romeo and Juliette died at the end, are you hinting at something?”
I started to go down the very line of reasoning that had me worried. William Carver. Xin Yu, both were examples of deceased people within the game world. I had no desire to go run off a cliff just to join her on this side of reality.
Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) Page 44
