Seeing as the former denizens of this place were awakened, it seems likely that the Drowned Burrow would be a good place to find an awakening stone. Go there, and you might actually find a way to fix this issue.
Objective: Search the Drowned Burrow for an awakening stone.
Bonus Objective: Cleanse the stone of its corruption.
Reward: 54,000 experience
Accept? Y/N
Okay, so the wisp was annoying, but it had a point. Rather than make blind stabs into the jungle and savanna surrounding Ishildar, just hoping to stumble upon one of the corrupted stones, she now had the opportunity to investigate a known source.
Accepting the quest, she chewed her lip and glanced at her group members. “My obnoxious companion here just gave me a quest to find the source of the attack. Anyone here a tracker? We can probably follow their trail back.”
“Uh.” Jeremy appeared to be trying hard not to laugh. “I know you mentioned having neglected some character basics, but I doubt you even need Tracking in this case.”
Devon followed the line of his finger as he pointed toward the edge of camp where a flattened strip of grass as wide as a highway shot off across the savanna.
She sighed. “Okay, never mind that tracker comment. You guys in?”
“Yeah, but I gotta log for a few. Catch some Zs,” Torald said.
The others nodded. Devon glanced at her real-world clock. It was getting late, and she’d been totally ignoring her messenger app. Maybe it would be good to acknowledge the outside world and get some sleep before heading into a dungeon.
“Yeah, you’re right. Tomorrow?” she asked.
The others nodded. As Devon sat down and got ready to log out, she realized that she hadn’t even thought twice about inviting players on the quest. A month ago, unless she’d been grouped with her guildmates, she would have left the party within a few seconds of looting.
Weird.
Chapter Nineteen
THE HEATER IN Devon’s apartment made the worst racket. Installed sometime in the previous century, a rattling fan blew across heating coils that seemed to collect every dust particle in the vicinity for the purposes of burning it alive. Basically, through December and January, her apartment sounded like a factory floor and smelled an awful lot like singed hair.
Sometimes, she went as far as to browse for a new rental, but then she started to think about how she’d have to find someone to help her move her couch and bed. Tamara had suggested that the guys from her mountain bike shop would help and take payment in beers, but Devon was frankly horrified at the idea of letting them see how blank the walls were and how bad her heater smelled.
Of course, there were probably movers who would do it, but a little voice in her skull worried that they’d go home talking about the woman who had so few friends she had to hire people to move two pieces of furniture.
Anyway, the price tag on a nicer place made her wince. She could afford it now, no problem. But sometimes, it felt like she’d never stop being the sixteen-year-old girl scraping together food money after her mom booted her through the door. Better to keep tucking her earnings into savings—or to be more accurate, into her checking account which wasn’t the smartest financial planning but didn’t require her to worry about interest rates and dividends. Given what had been going on with E-Squared lately, and the real threat of Owen’s father running a massive smear campaign against the company, she might be back to scraping together work soon anyway.
She piled the throw blanket she’d been covering herself with while playing on the far couch cushion, and swung her feet down to land in a pair of fuzzy slippers. Shuffling to the kitchen area, she yawned and squinted at the crack where the blind didn’t quite cover the window. It was full dark, eight at night, but the Christmas lights that some festive neighbor had strung along the railing of the balcony terrace flashed merrily in the night.
Who did that? Why decorate the shared balcony of a shabby old apartment building?
With a deep breath, she planted her feet and confronted the contents of her kitchen cabinets. Despite her efforts to hide it in the very back corner, the massive jar of dried black beans seemed to laugh at her. It turned out, cooking beans wasn’t like cooking pasta, a skill she’d finally raised to what would be two or three points in the game. You couldn’t just boil water, throw in a handful of beans, and wait ten minutes. After nearly breaking a tooth, she’d actually looked up the process.
Sort through them one by one to make sure the harvesting and sorting machinery hadn’t snuck in a few pebbles? Soak the damn things overnight, draining at random times? Then cook the damn things, seasoning to taste? What did that mean? Seasoning to taste? Was she supposed to have a particular taste, like, her own personal flair? Some exotic spice blend she’d hand-tuned to satisfy her unique palate…?
Yeah…no.
Of course, since she’d been ordering her groceries through a delivery service, she hadn’t had a good concept of exactly how big a five-pound container of beans was. Pretty big when you “cooked” just a handful.
She grabbed a bag of tortilla chips and a tub of raisins, then retrieved some salsa and a beer from the fridge. But as she approached the table with her meal, she glanced again at the beer.
Tamara used to do this thing where she reduced her carbohydrate intake for a few weeks at a time because she said it helped her build muscle and lose fat. The lower the amount of dead weight she had to move from the bottom of the trail to the top, the faster she could do it, apparently. Devon had an average build, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to adjust her muscle to fat ratio for better health, especially since her job was sedentary, to put it mildly.
Unfortunately, upon quizzing Tamara for details on what constituted the dreaded simple carbs, the other woman’s long description had pretty much described “the contents of Devon’s cabinets.” Turned out, most things that Tamara ate during her health kicks needed to be cooked.
Total non-starter for Devon.
But one easy alteration to her diet had jumped out from their conversation. Apparently, beer was particularly bad when it came to the whole body-composition thing. As a Mormon, Tamara didn’t drink it anyway, but she said that her bike shop friends complained incessantly about going dry for a few weeks during intense training.
With a sigh, Devon plopped the chips, raisins, and salsa on the table, reunited the beer with its friends in the fridge, and fetched a glass of water. There was always dwarven grog if she felt compelled to unwind a bit.
Her meal ready, Devon pulled up her messenger app. She groaned to see a new contact request. Judging by her tagline about preparing to take the next step in immersive gaming, Devon guessed it was the girl from the noodle shop. She was tempted to delete the request, but that would be an asshole move since it had been her choice to give the girl her information in the first place.
She clicked ‘accept,’ and then immediately set herself to ‘away’ in hopes the girl—handle: WizKitten…ugh—wouldn’t try to strike up a conversation. Maybe Devon could put that off until the next time she was grinding up her Manual Labor skill or something.
Unfortunately, WizKitten didn’t seem to notice things like the ‘away’ status.
Oh hey! *squee* Did you game today? How was it? I can’t wait!!?
Devon cringed and pinched the bridge of her nose. She poured out her water and grabbed the beer again.
“Pretty good. Big battle with a weird overgrown beaver. I’m exhausted so heading to bed now. Talk to you later!”
Hahahahahahahahaha! OMG I’m like how fast can they do this surgery, you know??
The girl then waited for at least two seconds before sending another message.
Okay chat later! I hope hope hope I spawn near you in game. *hugssssss*
Devon stared at the message almost in disbelief. What on earth had motivated her to give out her fricking contact? It would be cruel to unfriend the girl, but she couldn’t imagine having
daily conversations like that. Maybe she could forge a new identity or something. Move to a private island while she was at it.
Of course, that wouldn’t stop the girl from finding her in game. At this point, it seemed like at least half the player population knew about Stonehaven. She couldn’t exactly change her in-game identity without totally abandoning everything she’d built.
Maybe the settlement defenses could have some kind of cannons that “accidentally” misfired whenever an approaching player *squeed*.
Or maybe the demonic plane would be a nice place to hang out for a while.
After dismissing the girl’s messages, she responded to Tamara’s note about the sponsorship stuff, explaining that she was going to try approaching the CEO after she accomplished her current in-game task. Hopefully Tamara wouldn’t need more details, because Devon didn’t really want to get into the stuff with Zaa. She’d never explained to Tamara about how Ezraxis had taken over her subconscious mind. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t quite sure why that was. Maybe she hadn’t wanted her friend to look down on her gaming career. In the mainstream—mostly led by people like Owen’s father—there was still a big current of opinion that felt games were an evil to society. The anti-tech movement claimed that people should try to make the most of their real lives rather than fleeing to virtual reality. Tamara had never indicated she felt that way, but knowing that others did sometimes made Devon feel like she should be embarrassed of her passion.
It was ridiculous, but she’d never done a good job controlling those kinds of insecurities.
She hovered her awareness over the message, wondering if she could make it sound less vague without getting into details, but eventually shook her head and sent it.
Emerson had sent, uncharacteristically, a very terse note.
I need you ready to go after Owen the day after tomorrow. Please. And I’m sorry it’s so sudden.
Holy…Devon fumbled the raisin she was lifting toward her mouth. Tomorrow? She’d expected to ease into the whole demon thing slowly, testing out the abilities that became available as her Shadowed stat moved toward 100%. Not to mention she’d imagined the gradual transition would help her handle the emotional side of things while giving her the chance to train her mind to resist the demonic impulses.
She looked at the tub of raisins and felt a little sick at the thought of eating anything else. Abandoning her meal, she shuffled to the couch. Time to log in and find something to target with her doublet’s Night’s Breath ability. Just reaching 100% Shadowed by tomorrow evening would be challenging, not to mention figuring out how to cope with the transition.
Great.
Chapter Twenty
EMERSON WASN’T RESPONDING to messages. Had his contact information gotten corrupt? Had his relationship with his company gone sour again, causing him to “go dark” as he put it? The last time he’d run into problems with E-Squared, he’d fled to a hotel in Saskatchewan where he’d worked in secret on Owen’s problem…
Given what he’d told her about the resolution with the other programmer, she didn’t think that was the case. So why wasn’t he answering?
Cynthia racked her brain for new ideas. She just had the two contacts for him, an archaic email-type reference where she’d communicated under the guise of a scam-hawking Nigerian prince, and his regular messenger handle. She’d already scoured E-Squared’s website for alternate addresses, but there was just a central funnel for contact inquiries, no doubt filtered by an army of algorithms and staff before it reached anyone important. And without giving away information about why she was trying to get in touch with Emerson or the CEO—information she didn’t think ought to be given to low-level employees—she had little to no chance of passing the filters.
Of course, contacting E-Squared was only one piece of the massive task she had just two more days to accomplish. Other than the possibility that E-Squared could provide expensive lawyers—which would be nice, of course, but Cynthia wasn’t without resources—the main reason she needed to get in contact with Emerson was to warn him about the governor’s new timeline. At the very least, the warning would give E-Squared more leeway to come up with a response. She doubted any sort of PR message would help Owen’s cause, but at this point, anything was better than letting the plan go ahead. The moment the family moved him out of the hospital and into what was probably a wireless-free zone at their family estate, he’d be forcibly cut off from the demonic AI’s servers. According to Emerson, that was far more dangerous than leaving Owen in his current state.
Cynthia took a deep breath and a large swallow of her triple espresso. At ten at night, the coffee house was almost deserted, most patrons having moved from caffeine to alcohol. But she couldn’t afford the luxury of sleep until the Thursday deadline, and hanging out in public places was better than prowling her apartment with the temptation of her bed within a few paces.
She sighed.
The truth was, sometimes Owen’s situation made her so enraged that she could imagine being drawn in by movements like the governor’s. The gaming company and its hardware partner had stolen Owen’s life, and if things went the way Emerson and his senior management hoped, no one would ever know. Sometimes she was tempted to go public with the story.
But she had to think about what Owen would want. More than that, she had to think about Owen’s safety. Right now, the best chance he had for a full recovery was with the company. They were trying to fix the problem, and if they were simultaneously trying to protect their business, she could grant them that. Until she had a chance to talk to Owen about what he wanted, anyway. Would he be angry about what had happened once he woke? If so, she’d support him in any way he desired. She’d tell her story to the media, even if it made her a target of Internet hate among gamers.
If he instead wanted to forgive the company and continue on, she’d do her best there too.
But until they reached that point, where he woke and smiled at her and wrapped his arms around her, her only focus needed to be helping E-Squared rescue him.
Which meant somehow stopping the family from moving him home in two days.
Emerson was unreachable, but Cynthia wasn’t helpless. She’d been to a couple lawyers’ offices already looking for help in a power of attorney case but had made the mistake of mentioning that the governor was involved. Not a great plan. They’d come up with plenty of other justifications for their refusals, but Cynthia knew the score. No one wanted to cross the Calhouns.
So far, she’d been trying to squeeze her efforts into her lunch break and the brief window after the administrative offices where she worked had shut down, but other select offices remained open. With two days left, that was no longer an option. Her currently accrued PTO had been exhausted in the early days after Owen’s collapse. For the first week, she’d sat by his bedside, assuming that he could wake up at any minute. Only her depleted time off had forced her away.
For the next two days, she’d try to call in sick. HR would push back, claiming that the executive staff would make an exception to the remote work policy if she logged in via the secure VPN and made herself available for video conferencing. As if someone with the flu would want to appear on camera. She’d have to counter with the embarrassing explanation that it was an intestinal bug—everyone pulled the same trick. Of course, make that excuse too many times, and some sleaze from the research recruitment group would drop by her office with a leaflet on the company’s latest trial for an irritable bowel syndrome remedy. A total conflict of interest, of course, but the corporate structure had been designed to skirt the legal edge. Barely.
Anyway, taking a sick day outside of regular PTO hours would come directly from her paycheck. As she’d just been telling herself regarding the lawyers, she wasn’t without resources. But cutting her own pay to take the time to find a lawyer wasn’t going to help that situation.
She checked her messages again. Nothing from Emerson. Hovering a finger over his contact, sh
e inhaled then clicked. It couldn’t hurt to send another ping. The worst he could do was ignore her, and that was already happening.
Hey, she typed on her tablet screen, did you get my other message? Need to figure this out ASAP. Thursday is too soon.
That finished, she went back to the spreadsheet where she was tracking law offices and assigning a desirability rating to prioritize tomorrow’s search.
And in the back of her mind, she started working on contingencies. No matter what happened with the governor’s bid to assume custody, she wouldn’t let the man execute his plan to use Owen for his selfish purposes.
Desperate times, desperate measures and all that.
Chapter Twenty-One
CHEN WATCHED MEI sleep. Tucked beneath the down comforter that kept out Minnesota’s winter chill—even with the solar working all day and the pellet burners incinerating compacted paper waste all night, darkness and wind brought cold pressing through the well-insulated walls and triple-pane glass of their small home. He shivered despite the blanket he’d dragged from his own bed when he couldn’t sleep and had padded down the hall to set up camp in Mei’s room.
She’d been worse lately. Not suicidal as far as the family knew, but what Chen had read about her major depressive disorder made him wonder if any of them could know before it was too late.
Just fourteen. Why did her disease have to strike so young? Most girls her age were giggling about boys and trying out different fashion statements. At least, that’s what he saw at the social gatherings for homeschoolers.
Sometimes their parents tried to make the best of it by rationalizing that the depressed years under their roof gave more time to correct the cause of her imbalance. After she turned eighteen, they wouldn’t be able to force her to try any more therapies. Sure, they’d pay for whatever options might give hope, but Mei might refuse to keep trying. From what Chen understood, that was a particular danger with depression—the effort required to heal could seem so overwhelming, especially when many other attempts had failed.
Citadel of Smoke: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 4) Page 16
