“I thought there weren’t any classes?”
“Yes and no. There’re play styles that are like classes, but they’re called Paths, and titles kind of do the same thing. Oh! Have you got a copy of the handbook yet?”
“The what book?” Books hadn’t been printed for a decade now. Digital systems had transcribed nearly every piece of paper. I put up both hands in confusion and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh. My. God. Really, Uncle Grant?”
“Yeah. Totally.” I managed to get every ounce of playful confusion available into my voice.
“So no! Hold on!” Beth, true to her insanely impulsive nature, had already run off from the table and went to get something out of her room.
“Get back here!” Liz yelled at her daughter.
Beth was too lost in her current mission to bother responding. I heard violent shuffling from the rooms below as my niece searched for something. One eyebrow raised in Liz’s direction. She sighed.
“So when is she getting the boot?” I asked.
“After college I’m charging rent! Don’t think Grandpa will take you in either!” Liz was clanking down silverware and scowling. Finally, she huffed and went back to get more food from the kitchen.
“Doesn’t Dad play games too?” I asked.
“God. I can’t escape you geeks.”
“So it goes.”
Beth came screaming back into the room as if she was being chased.
“Here, take this! But don’t let anyone know you have a copy unless you trust them.”
Here I had thought about the end of a paper-and-ink era and my own niece shoved a pile of colored papers into my hands.
“Aww, you trust me. I’m touched,” I said.
“Is that the book for your game?” my sister asked. There was half a frown on her lips and a flash of annoyance in her eyes.
“Yep. All sorts of useful tips and information. Suggestions, general build ideas, a rough world map of what’s been explored. Tons of stuff about the game to study in your spare time,” her daughter responded.
“Seriously? You’re giving your uncle something illegal?” Liz sounded confused and almost outraged.
“It’s only illegal in some countries. America hasn’t banned it. Go us!”
A casual flip through showed a lot of random tidbits of information. Skills of all sorts were outlined, along with tips about navigating the world. Quest ideas and conversational keywords were printed out next to an entire section on dungeon handling. Oh look, tips on party compositions.
“This is actually kind of useful.” Though Carver’s maps in his house were probably way more detailed than anything user-made. Especially something handed around like a bootleg from the seventies.
“It’s the other world’s Bible.”
“I thought this game was meant to be extremely realistic though. Doesn’t all this—what does this say, dungeon crystals?—isn’t that unrealistic?” There was an entire set of information on how reaching the final level and boss had rewards.
“It is a game. The realism is how you interact with it, the way the world changes as players do things. Look up the interface bonuses, or the last guild wars event.”
“Mh?”
“Good Lord. I’m going to kick you out if you keep blabbing about that game,” Liz said. She was busy assaulting her steak and potatoes with ever-increasing force.
“You should play too, Mom!” Beth shouted.
“No thanks, I have enough realism living in reality,” her mother responded.
“Say that after you do a backflip off a wall and high-kick a man in the face. Bet you’ve never done that.” My niece moved her hands with back and forth action punches.
Liz actually laughed. “Got close. Kicked Edward in the balls, you remember that sleaze?”
Beth wrinkled her nose. “I have no idea what you saw in him.”
“Well you know, it wasn’t about his personality. It was about what he had between his…”
I suddenly embedded every ounce of my attention into ruffling pages and reading more information. Oh look, certain key NPCs could be resurrected but only under specific circumstances. Wide-scale battles with the blessing of certain Voices would help them resurrect as well, or win arena tournaments. How neat was that? Some NPCs that seemed impossible to kill were tied to legendary quest lines that were still mostly theorized.
Politics changed the landscape as players built up towns, invested gold, or completed group events. The guild wars event my niece talked about had completely removed one kingdom from the map and established two towns at the base of a mountain range. According to the aftermath notes, the mountains in question were higher level. I cut in between my family’s commentary of their latest boy troubles with a very important question.
“There aren’t levels, are there?”
“For players? Not really. It’s a matter of skills coming together and those building up your stats. That’s in the book. Then those skills combine to a theoretical evaluation of what you can do, called Paths.”
“This guy’s note says he’s a Rank one, Tank Path?”
“Basic meat shield. There’re branches into the other classic titles and roles, Paladin, Knight, Sentinel. They’re all about what you’d expect. Damage dealers and craftsman have their own rankings.”
Beth was going back for a second helping while chattering away. My sister was busy mouthing words to her food while shaking her head.
“That’s neat.”
“My best is Rank Fifteen, All-Star, of the Caster Path.” Beth excitedly said around a mouthful of food. Table manners had never been a big thing to Liz, and clearly her daughter had inherited the same mentality.
“And that is…?”
“Balanced mage I completed a few awesome quests, soloed a boss or two, and got the All-Star title. I like the flashy effects. Whoosh! Fireball!” She pantomimed using both hands to cast something away from her.
“Aren’t you the pro.”
“Uh huh!” My niece flashed a smile and bobbed her head.
The information in here was intense. More page flipping ensued. It looked as though people had donated walls of notes and hand written scribbles. This wasn’t anything like a printed document or online guide. It felt practically grade school.
“Why do the ranks go up instead of down?”
“Then people would fight for number one, not that they don’t.”
“Boys.” I feigned all the female exhaustion available to me. My sister had uttered that very tone more than once over the years.
“Nah, the highest Warrior Path is actually a girl, I think. She was a few months ago anyway. I met her during Rosemarie’s Siege. That woman held back a dragon that was so big—”
“Really?” Old Man Carver was a [Dragon Slayer], so part of me was professionally interested. A woman playing a tank-type character and holding one back was very neat sounding.
“Yeah. We got the spell-caster controlling the dragon while she held it back.”
“All this shop talk is boring me.” Liz got up with a clank of dishes and went to their newfangled dish washer. It was similar to the tried and true ones from twenty years ago, but it sorted dishes on its own, rinsed those pesky dirty ones twice, soaked some items and all around did wonders on crusty cheese. Mother still complained about cleaning.
“Anyway, Continue is meant to be more about living a life of adventure and doing things you can’t do here, not about being the best. There’re too many people in the world to bother for number one. Most people use the rankings to help with group quests,” Beth said.
“I’ve seen quests.”
“I’d hope so. Just about anything can be construed as a quest. You’d be a terrible gamer if you hadn’t gotten at least one.”
“Oh, the one I’ve got is a doozy.” My head shook slowly as my current mission details came to mind.
“Can I hear?”
“Nope.” How would anyone sane explain the quest I’d been given? Pose as an NPC,
guide new players, figure out a mystery connection to a random woman, and do one last adventure. Explain that convoluted situation to my niece? Negative! “But maybe you can help me. This quest has a few side goals.”
“Oh, totally worth doing. Unless it’s a trick one,” she said.
“Trick one?” I dug through the notes for anything on quest tips. There was a little in there about what skills were useful in certain situations. Social skills and NPC interactions mattered as much as the combat skills did. More than one piece of advice said to work on both sides of the coin. Players who spent all their time in the woods training were often terrible at finding out secret routes through quests. Or so the notes said.
“Yeah. Some quests, I guess, have optional side routes, but there’s, like, layers or secret resolutions. You ever read a book about this stuff?”
“No,” I said.
“Okay, so some players have read a lot about virtual reality games. Like, generations ago, there were tons of theories on how they’d pan out. Good fiction stuff, right?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. In these stories, the protagonist would get a difficult task and make progress only to find out the possible repercussions, and try to do something like…” She faded out completely with a blank look on her face.
“Earth to Beth.” I waved a hand in front of her face.
Beth looked lost in thought.
“Okay.” The call of Earth finally grabbed my niece’s attention. “Here’s a real example from the Altheme Provinces.”
Hey, that was vaguely near Old Man Carver’s current location.
“A few years ago in-game, someone was trying to kill a princess. Only she’s in another castle, and the one the players were protecting was a body double.”
“Sounds like a bad movie plot.”
“Most quests are, but high school wasn’t much better.”
“You still passed with good grades!” Liz yelled.
“Yes, Mom!” Beth shouted back.
“Anyway, they protected the double because hey, quest says so. Someone points out she’s not really the princess, yet killers keep coming. Turns out she’s really a half-sister, which is why she can be a body double. Players discovered this—wham, bam, kingdom gets flipped upside-down.”
“Still a bad movie plot.” I sighed and tried to scan over more notes. There were some things in here about skills and how they linked together. Apparently any weapon skill merged with a body-building skill qualified the player as a Rank one Warrior Path.
“It gets worse, and this really happened to one of my friends!” She slammed her hands on the table in excitement.
“The trials and tribulations we must suffer.”
“In the end, it turned out that the first princess was trying to kill the second princess to remove any possible conflict when the king passed. She fails, territory splits into two, total civil war.”
“Okay.” The last of my potatoes were finally gone. “It’s still a bad movie.”
“Anyway, about eight months later in-game, and after a ton of quests, the first princess is killed in a big war. For real dead, corpse validated.”
“Ouch.”
Liz was extra annoyed by our conversation now and snatched my empty plate away from the table.
“Yep. Super ouch. All of this was decided by mostly players too. Their quests and actions impacted everything for hundreds of miles.” Beth eyed her mom and hastily shoveled down a few more bites.
“That is kind of neat.”
“Yep! And had the players doing this quest failed to protect the second princess—the one who was a body double at first—this kingdom would have stayed fine.” Her words were half a mumble around the latest batch of food.
“Really?” I said.
“Yep. The first princess was actually trying to abolish the kingdom’s slavery. My guild officers think the kingdom would have been better off had those first players failed.”
“The hidden trick to this one?” My eyebrow went back up in question.
“Players could have probably reconciled the two groups into one kingdom and made things idealistic and heavenly. Angels would descend and shed rainbows all over those involved! For glory and fame!” She dropped her silverware and waved her hands around.
“Bet that would have taken some skills.”
“Probably, like a Rank twenty on a negotiator path or some other people skill. Probably could blackmail them too.” Beth waved dismissively. She clearly did not follow any sort of negotiator path. My niece seemed far more inclined to fight things.
“Wait, are there actually angels in this game?”
Liz brought over another round of food for her daughter and scraped it onto the teenager’s plate.
“Probably?” Beth said. She looked away for a moment, then shrugged.
“How does anyone figure this stuff out?” That was, like, five layers of silly double-crossing that anyone would get lost in.
“Most secret resolutions require an approach way outside the box. If it was something the NPCs’ skills could handle, then there’s no point.” Beth downed half her glass of water and kept right on eating her third helping.
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah. You think outside the box. What skill does the NPC have, what do you have? Apply pressure!” She ground a thumb into the table with entirely too much glee on her face. “Sometimes you find really cool stuff.”
“That’s—” I set down the stack of papers she’d shoved at me. “Actually really good advice.”
“Better stop there, she’ll get a big head. Then I’ll never hear the end of it.” Liz had been listening, even if she professed dislike of the topic.
“Next stop, Queen of the World!” Beth pretended to give a mad cackle at Liz, then slurped down the last of her food before rushing off. “Oh, Uncle Grant!” Beth popped back in and was hanging off the door frame. “My guild’s planning a war in about a month of real time. Find me by then, okay?”
“Okay!” Too late. My niece was already gone, leaving behind a whirlwind of thoughts in my brain.
Liz and I made idle chit chat for another thirty minutes, but my brain wasn’t really in it. Opening the guidebook would be tactless though. My sister deserved a more invested conversation. Eventually, we both realized it was going nowhere, and I felt okay again. My brief bout of “what if” induced melancholy had faded during our game-infused conversation. For now. Eventually it always came back. This last year had been easier than the one before it. Which was easier than the year before that. Sometimes I lost track of the moment and forgot that she’d passed away nearly three years ago.
“Mh.” Lost in thought, I started the farewell procession.
“What’s up?”
“I’ll need to buy flowers.” The thought made me shut my eyes for a moment longer than normal.
Liz smiled, then shook her head sadly.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah. This game is a good distraction.” A year in reality, four years in game. Time and distance would help heal all wounds, or so my therapist said. My expression must not have been reassuring enough for Liz.
“The game looks nice, but don’t forget us here in reality, eh, baby brother?”
“By like two minutes,” I grumbled.
“And I’ll never let you forget it.” She gave me the same smile I’d been subjected to for decades. The grin was pure mischief, but the eyes held a tint of worry at the edges.
“Thanks, Liz.”
“Anytime, Grant. Be safe.” She tried not to look worried. Only Liz and those in my meetings knew how bad I’d really been. We hugged briefly, and her hands stayed on my shoulders for a moment. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m okay, Liz.” I gave a tired smile, the only one that was really available to me when I thought about the past, and waved good night.
The porch light stayed on until I got into the van and set the Auto NAV for home.
Family, for me, was the last safety
net of a rock-bottom life. They were everything. If Liz or Beth ever needed me, I’d do anything to repay their kindness. A college fund and ARC for Beth was just the start. Liz was harder to pay back. She’d always been the strong one.
But not me.
I distracted myself on the ride home by reading through the guidebook Beth had given me. Continue NPCs were real, but the world itself had some strange settings. Dungeons were one of them. Did [Haven Valley] have any? Would making it to a boss constitute a great adventure? I had no other good leads. Then there was the whole question of Mister Carver’s skills.
Fine. I had to stop taking this game so seriously and maybe be entertained by trying unexpected things. After all, my life was infinitely less depressing if I only looked forward. WWCD? The real Carver, not the [Guide] Carver. He would be proactive! He would chase a lead until the adventure was over. Then chase everything that resembled a female. I planned to skip that latter part. Even after all these years, the idea of being with another woman felt wrong.
Session Twelve — Questions, Mister Legate?
William Carver had completed a day without me and was asleep again. According to the monitoring method players could use before logging in, he had made it back to the tiny shack. Logging in shoved my character into the darkness of the Ultimate Edition trial room. Hopefully I could reach one of the Voices here—James or Maud preferably.
“Hello?”
There was a pause.
“Grant Legate. You’ve returned. How was your time away?”
James—good. Starting with him would be best.
“Enlightening.” I thought. “I have some questions if our deal is still in effect.” Asking “is our bargain still on?” would have been a question.
“Of course, Grant Legate.”
Soon I would shed the Voices’ annoying usage of my first and last name.
“Is William Carver related to Mylia?” I said. There was no use hiding the biggest question on my list.
“No. Why would you suspect that?” James responded.
“William seemed to get around a lot.”
“A man after my own heart. But there were protections in place for that sort of thing, at least during his day.” That was the Temptress—red-skinned, scantily clad, more a lingering promise than anything else. I could feel her eyelashes flutter.
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