by Max Jager
Brooke quickly let go of its tail and tried to jump backwards to evade, but the creature was too fast. The sword grazed her stomach, it was just a shallow cut that didn't hit anything vital. She let out a scream of pain and she hit the ground clutching her stomach, and curled up in a fetal position.
"Brooke!" Elliott shouted out.
"I'm okay. I'm okay. It just hurts. It really hurts." Brooke gasped out.
The lizardman looked around, Elliott was starting to get back up and Snipes was still trying to use the bow, while Sophia was still trying to take it from him. It started to move towards Snipes again but Elliott immediately grabbed its arm and tried to yank the creature to the ground. The lizardman immediately swung its tail at Elliott to stop him, but Elliott quickly evaded the tail, but he didn't let go of its arm.
The lizard turned to attack Elliott, then suddenly someone fell out of the sky and landed on the creature. The lizardman screeched in pain and was knocked to the ground with its arm bent at an awkward angle. With the brief glimpse Elliott caught of the person, he identified them as Carley. Carley ungracefully hit the ground with the lizard, and due to the momentum Carley had from their jump they were sent skidding across the dirt.
Carley let out a groan of pain when they finally came skidding to a stop, and quickly started stumbling back to their feet.
"Where did you come from?!" Elliott questioned, cautiously keeping his distance from the lizard, but remaining ready to strike it if it made any sudden movements.
"I jumped down from the tree." Carley answered "Just dislocated my arm, I'm fine."
"Why would you do that? You hurt yourself." Elliott questioned, he tensed as the lizardman stood up again and watched it as it looked back and forth between himself and Carley. It wasn't moving one of its arms anymore and by the way it limped it was safe to say both its arm and possibly a few ribs were broken.
"You needed help. It doesn't matter if I got hurt, I'm not important, the important thing is that I crippled the lizard. I honestly expected to get hurt worse than this. I'll keep its attention on me, find a way to chase the thing off." Without waiting for an answer Carley moved in on the lizardman. This was extremely dangerous, the lizardman had a sword and Carley had no weapons and not only that but Carley was physically frail, they wouldn't be able to do anything to fight back against the lizard.
Carley was agile though, the lizardman was enraged at this point and was wildly swinging and lashing out at Carley with its sword and tail. But Carley was avoiding every attack, often by a very narrow margin.
Elliott was trying to figure out a way to scare off the lizardman, but he didn't know what to do. He tried moving in to attack it with another branch, but the beast was watching him now and took a swing at him when he got too close. Then Carley immediately moved between them to keep the beast's focus off Elliott.
He had to do something, Carley couldn't keep dodging like this forever. He was going through every possible option he could think of, trying to find some way, any way to scare off the creature. Then all of a sudden the lizardman let out a shriek of pain. Elliott looked at the lizard to see that it had an arrow sticking out of its back. He looked back over at Snipes and Sophie to see that Brooke was now over there. Brooke had grabbed Snipes and was restraining the boy, and Sophie now had the bow and arrows.
The lizardman spun around to look at Sophie, and as soon as it saw her with the bow it sprinted after her. It still moved incredibly fast, but was now slowed down by its wounds. Before it could reach her she fired another arrow into its chest. The lizardman screeched out in pain and almost fell over. It stopped running. It saw Carley and Elliott moving in, it saw Sophie preparing another arrow, and it spotted more humans coming out of the trees to join the fight.
The lizardman hissed and took a few steps back, then suddenly ran into the water and swam deep down into the lake, disappearing from view.
Elliott heard the others coming and glanced back to see who it was. He spotted George and Fate running over to them.
"What is going on? I heard screaming." George asked as he ran past Elliott and knelt down beside Jake to figure out what happened.
"Get the wounded over to the edge of the water." Carley grabbed an arrow from Sophie's quiver and rushed to the lake.
"The kid was a dumbass and pissed off that lizard creature." Elliott answered, as he ran over to help Brooke walk. George and Fate carried Jake to Carley.
Sophie and Brooke were yelling at Snipes the entire short walk to the water. "Snipes, everyone got hurt because of you! What the hell were you thinking!" Sophie yelled at him.
"It's not MY fault the bow and arrows are broken, I would have handled it just fine by myself if they weren't broken and had just worked when I used them." Snipes argued.
"They are not broken, you just can't use them correctly! You should've just let me do it from the start!" Sophie had had enough and just ignored Snipe's remark about how she must have cheated to make them work. She wouldn't give him the bow and arrows back, so Snipes stormed off to return to the camp.
"This is in no way sanitary, but we need to clean the wounds and this is the only water we have nearby. Use the lake to clean the wounds, I'll make bandages before they lose too much blood." Carley took off their own hoodie, and immediately began using the arrowhead to cut the hoodie apart. Under the hoodie Carley had been wearing a simple violet shirt.
"Do we really need to do all this? It is just a game after all, right?" Brooke asked, but did as she was told and began trying to clean the wound. The water was strangely warm, being in the middle of a snowy forest it was unexpected, but at the same time the warm water was a nice change from the freezing snow. She didn't bother asking why the water in the lake was warm, it didn't matter.
"Uh." Carley paused. "I don't know, I forgot it was a game for a minute. Um, we probably should still do this, just in case." Once Brooke and Jake cleaned out their wounds Carley quickly bandaged them up with scraps from the hoodie. "We will use snow as ice to keep it cold and numb until it heals a little more. It is the best thing we have."
"What about your arm?" Elliott questioned.
"Not important." Carley brushed it off "How is the camp? Almost set up? And did we get any firewood?"
"Camp is as good as it's going to get." George answered.
"And we got firewood, we just dropped it when Snipes ran off like an idiot. We can go pick it back up." Elliott answered. "But seriously, if your arm is dislocated we really need to reset it before you cause it more damage, I know how." He reached out, but as soon as he touched Carley's arm Carley jumped and quickly pulled away, looking back at Elliott as if Elliott had just attacked them. The look in Carley's eyes was like a scared, cornered animal.
"I'm trying to help." Elliott insisted.
Carley grabbed their own arm and with a wince of pain pulled their own arm completely out of joint, moved the joint back into position, and pushed it back in. The look on Carley's face clearly conveyed how painful it was. "There, fixed."
"Don't do that kid!" Elliott didn't understand what was wrong with Carley, it was like they had no sense of self preservation. "Never use force, you could break your arm that way."
"I don't care. And I'm not a kid, I'm twenty, I'm just short." Carley stood up "Let's get back to camp before that thing comes back."
George nodded and stood up. "I agree, Elliott can you assist Brooke in getting back? I can carry Jake back, Carley, Fate, and Sophia can go pick up the firewood."
"Yeah, I can do that." Elliott replied.
It wasn't long before they all got back to camp. Using the firewood and Matthew's lighter they started a couple campfires for everyone to wait near. Snipes was off to the side by himself, there was tension between him and most of the group now. Hours passed and the devs never came to contact them. Before they knew it, night had fallen and everyone was trying to find a comfortable place to sleep near the campfires. Everyone except Carley, Carley was nowhere to be found.
Next Chapter: Th
e Beta Tests
Chapter 2: The Beta Tests
- Chapter 2: The Beta Tests -
Brooke woke up relatively early in the morning to see Elliott sitting beside her. He had a flat stone in his hand and was eating something off the stone. "You got food without me?" She questioned. She looked around the camp and almost everyone was still asleep, however Carley and Olivia were both missing.
Elliott shook his head. "Carley made food for everyone. It's just an egg, so it isn't much. But it's something."
"Oh, where did she go?" Brooke asked. "And where did Olivia go?"
Elliott shrugged. "I think Carley made their own camp somewhere else, she doesn't seem to be very social. I noticed that Carley left the camp last night and never returned until this morning. And even that return was brief, dropped off the food and immediately left, not staying any longer than needed. I do not know where Olivia went."
"She is a strange one. But at least she seems helpful and friendly." Brooke commented. She cringed in pain as she sat up. The wound on her stomach still hurt a lot. "And the devs didn't come to get us out, it's been over a day now."
"Yeah, I had a feeling they weren't coming." Elliott replied. "How are you feeling? There isn't enough food for everyone, so grab your egg before everyone else wakes up. There's fourteen of us and only eleven eggs to go around."
"There's fifteen of us." Brooke spoke up as she cautiously reached over to the fire and grabbed one of the flat stones that were beside it. On the stone was a cooked egg.
"Well, I didn't count Carley, since she has her own camp and probably has her own food." Elliott replied.
He heard someone jump down from a nearby tree and glanced over to see Carley cautiously approaching them. "No, I don't have my own camp. I just slept up in a tree, and I brought all the food I made here. Anyways, I just checked on Jake and he's doing okay. Still in pain but he's okay. Brooke, right? How are you doing?"
"I'm okay, it's not a bad injury it just really stings." Brooke answered. "I just woke up, so we will have to see how I'm feeling a little later." When she heard that Carley hadn't taken food for them self she handed the food she had picked up to Carley.
Carley shook their head "Food is for you guys, I'm not hungry. I'll eat at the next meal we have." Carley then reached into their back pocket and pulled out a very small travel-sized hair brush and handed it to Brooke.
Brooke gave Carley an odd look. "You carry a hairbrush on you? Thanks though." She put the stone with her food down and quickly ran the brush through her hair.
"I've spent my fair share of time sleeping outside, and my hair's almost as long as yours so I know how easily it gets tangled, and gets random crap stuck in it when sleeping outdoors." Carley gestured to their own long, hip-length hair.
Brooke laughed a little and nodded "Yeah, thanks. You really should eat though." She said as she handed the brush back and picked her food back up to resume eating.
"I'm alright, I don't need any food right now. Not hungry." Carley brushed it off. "Just need to find the courage to offer the brush to that Fate lady now."
Brooke gave Carley a questioning look. "Why do you need courage for that? She seems friendly enough. Heck she seems friendlier than I am and you talked to me no problem."
Carley shook their head. "I can tell you're friendly. That and you're almost the same size as me, you're only a tad taller. It makes you a little less scary than everyone else. Most of them tower over me."
"That's the fun of being short." Brooke laughed.
"You really think I'm scary?" Elliott interrupted. "You weren't afraid to face the lizardman head-on, but I'm scary?"
Carley nodded "Extremely. The lizard thing had very clear intentions, it just wanted to kill me and I'm not afraid of death. Your intentions are unclear, you could have better intentions or you could have worse intentions. I can't tell." Carley said in a forced cold tone.
Elliott nodded. "You make a lot more sense now. You know, you're not much different from us, we too have seen what people are really capable of. I used to think the same way, we both did. But we found some good people we can trust and now the world isn't such a scary place anymore." He replied. "Have you found anyone to trust? If not I do hope that you can eventually trust us."
Carley hesitated, thinking about whether or not to answer, but then nodded. "My girlfriend is out there somewhere. She entered the game with me but apparently was dropped somewhere else in the world. I just need to find her."
"What's her name? We'll keep an eye out for her too." Brooke replied.
"Jess. 5' 4", just a couple inches taller than me. Black hoodie, yellow blouse, I think she had black leggings when we entered the world. Blue eyes and brown hair that goes to her mid-back." Carley replied. "I am a bit worried about her. She doesn't have the right mindset to survive combat, but I'm sure she will find a group to be safe with."
"So you also think people can really die in this world?" Brooke asked.
Carley nodded "Well, look at the facts. We can't logout, we can feel pain, and we entered this world with the exact items we were carrying. The items have such a level of detail that I have to believe that these are the real items we had, like our actual physical belongings were brought into the game with us. There's no way these could be copies. Which brings up the question, are these our real bodies? It looks like they are, I checked my body and it was copied exactly as it was in the real world, even things the game should have had no way of knowing about. That would explain all of the weird non-game features we are finding that logically shouldn't exist in a game, like us feeling pain, or the cold. And if these are our real bodies-"
George approached the group "Then we really don't want to die." He interrupted.
As soon as he approached Carley shrunk back and gained a little distance from the group. "Yeah. It's all speculation, but we probably don't want to test it and find out. Anyways, I should go."
"Alright, remember you can come to us if you need anything." Elliott replied as he watched Carley quickly leave and disappear into the trees again.
"Any reason she's afraid of me?" George asked. "Did I do something wrong?"
Brooke shook her head "No, seems like she's afraid of everyone. Didn't give a reason, but I can only assume something happened in the past. We used to be the same way, she'll be fine once she learns she can trust everyone. Just give it time."
George nodded. He spotted that Fate was now awake and gestured for her to come over. Once Fate joined them and grabbed some food she sat down on a nearby stone and waited to find out what he had to say.
"Alright, now this is just my opinion but the four of us seem to be the most competent people here. You two can fight and you have survival skills, I can fight, and Fate seems to be the brains here. So we need to figure out what the next step should be. They clearly aint coming to get us out of this game, we are going to need water and more food, and preferably to find somewhere to camp where we are not lying in snow." George started.
"Sophie seems to be a pretty good shot with the bow." Brooke pointed out.
George nodded "I agree, but her decision making skills were subpar, based on what everyone said happened in that fight. She knew she needed the bow to help you guys immediately, which shows good problem solving, but where she failed was waiting so long to get it. If I remember the stories correctly, you had to go get it for her Brooke. Right?"
Brooke nodded "Yes, but that wasn't her fault. Snipes wasn't letting her have it."
George shook his head "I agree, it is Snipes's fault. But she should have just smacked the kid and taken the bow. If she had done that you and maybe even Jake would not be injured right now. It was you, Brooke, who had the intelligence to know that Snipes needed to be taken out of the picture to win the fight. She failed to realize that, and because she dropped the ball you got hurt."
"That's a really harsh way of looking at it man." Elliott shook his head. "She did her best, and did very well. We wouldn't have won without her."
G
eorge nodded "I am not arguing what she did, or her skill with the bow. She is a very good shot and was our ace to win the fight. But she fell short on her ability to make the hard choices, something the four of us can do very well. And don't get me wrong, that isn't a bad thing on her part, you honestly need to be just a little bit of a sociopath to make these difficult decisions on the spot like that. So to say that she can't says that she's a very pure and kind hearted person. But when it comes to making decisions, our best chance of survival is letting the four of us make the decisions, because we CAN make those hard choices."
