“Did you know? That they would chase Viper over us?” I asked Dusk.
He shook his head, then belched a round of fire onto the large arm torn from a lesser [Heavenly Body Clone]. Both small eyes glanced up to the left as chewing commenced. Images of cupcakes appeared above his head.
My head shook in resignation. During my next Atrium trip, I would buy the [Messenger’s Pet] an entire bakery. First I needed to get to a peaceful spot in this dungeon. I couldn’t see well enough to even make a simple turn. It was time for some light, at least until a better option presented itself.
I rapidly tore the convict’s orange-and-black clothes to shreds. Hopefully they would issue me a new pair. I paused after each rip to listen, in case my actions alerted something. No one arrived and I was able to complete my makeshift torch technique.
Next would be the annoying part.
“Fire, fire, burning bright,” I chanted the few words in [Lithium]. This spell had taken me the better part of a week to pronounce correctly. “I need to get a little light.”
Mana drained while a swirl of energy rippled up my arm to form a ball. My face twisted into a frown. Even chanting that one spell made me feel dirty. Each [Lithium] spell was bad poetry. Summoning Dusk had been far easier. Maybe I could learn circle magic instead—once I wasn’t a prisoner in some dungeon and hiding from half-dead failure clones.
I smiled and shoved the small ball of light at the fabric. What would Beth think of that? Her uncle Grant, wielding a giant sword and drawing spells on the ground. Maybe I could find a [Brawn] booster and really do some damage!
“We need a safe spot, Dusk. Then I’ll buy some cupcakes for my Atrium, okay?” I said, happier now that vision wasn’t an issue. At least until these rags burned through. Continue Online was generous enough to use my [Survival] skills and extend how long a makeshift torch might last.
He jumped up, and his obsidian muscles rippled in the dim light. He poked his head around the corner where Viper and the numerous creatures had gone. I didn’t hear any cries in the distance. I pinged the area with [Sight of Mercari] and saw the Traveler moving swiftly hundreds of feet away.
We were split up, and maybe that was for the best. [Sight of Mercari] made my head throb painfully. Too many twists and turns, [Blink] uses, and wall collisions had given me a [Mildly Disoriented] status. In short, all actions that required [Focus] would suffer a penalty until I recovered.
Viper’s safety was secondary. I felt dirty letting the man be a lure, but saving him while trying to escape unkillable star zombies probably wouldn’t go well. Then we would all be failures.
I planned on taking care of reallife business, then getting my messages, [Treasure’s Chest], and maybe then I could look into Viper’s survival. It was just a game, so he should be okay. A little in-game death wouldn’t break the man.
We moved briskly. Dusk sniffed ahead, using his long neck to peer around corners before moving forward on tiptoes like a sneaking cat. I followed him carefully, torch in hand, but a bit less like an exaggerated cartoon character.
Dusk wasn’t omniscient though, and he led us right around a corner into more [Heavenly Body Clone]s. The lead monster was a half-rotting humanoid with disproportionately large limbs. Its eyes stared right through me. I held still while trying to control my breathing.
The creature turned. Its flesh had been hollowed out in chunks all the way down to the bone. I could see where it looked like tattered remains hung off it as if something had torn at the creature. It left, Dusk moved on, and I tried to figure out what might have torn into an [Undying] creature hard enough to leave missing chunks of flesh.
This was just a game, but I sometimes wondered exactly how disturbed a mind needed to be to invent these dungeons. I knew it wasn’t game designers. Human hands and minds had had very little to do with the creation of Continue Online. Still, Mother, or the Voices, had stolen a lot of ideas from the real world.
Dusk looked at me and then toward a pocket in the ceiling. He jumped up, much like a cat, and his wings fluttered and front paws scrambled. I ran over and tried to get under him for support. With a grunt, I pulled my own virtual body up into the ceiling pocket. The floor felt solid enough under our combined weight. Earth and stone lined the walls. This might have been a storage area, or maybe an attic, assuming underground dungeons needed a reason for such a place. Maybe some wild animal had dug it?
“Are we safe?” I asked while looking down. This place was high enough off the ground that those legless ones shouldn’t be able to get in. The ones with arms and legs didn’t seem to care since we weren’t carrying dead parts from the others.
His wings rippled with a shrug. A thought bubble near Dusk’s head had a small hourglass running out of sand.
“Okay, so, for now. Then I need to take a few minutes and get breakfast.” I scratched the bigger [Messenger’s Pet] between the ears. His eyes closed and a few quiet chirps escaped. “Dusk, are you okay babysitting my autopilot?” He nodded, then I quietly said, “ARC, log me out.”
The machine responded, and Continue Online fell away. Sweat saturated my reallife clothes because the EXR-Seven bands around my legs and wrists stimulated muscle movement in conjunction with ARC programming. It had been a few weeks since I’d done anything strenuous, and [Awareness Heightening] was a taxing ability.
I remotely bought walls of pastries for my Atrium, then limped around the small two-room house. I changed my clothes, brushed my teeth, and shoveled a few energy bars into my face. Old sheets were yanked off, and a new one fastened into place with the aid of modern technology. Fifteen minutes later, and much more refreshed, I was ready to log back in.
Only there was a message beeping that I had somehow missed. I clicked over to it and saw Miz Riley, the vice president of Trillium, pop onto my screen. Her eyes looked a bit more worn, and her hair was unkempt. The woman seemed to be having a rough day for reasons unknown.
“Mister Legate, you are to report to headquarters next week. This is not optional. Failure to do so will see your ARC account suspended and all Trillium products recalled,” she said.
The message clicked off immediately after.
I felt the blood drain from my face as her words sank in. Had she figured out what was going on? Xin… Voices above, she could be caught up in this nonsense. I took a breath and tried to calm down. I would learn more by relaxing and attending this sudden appointment than anything panic would teach me.
One step at a time helped me focus. One moment flowed into the next. It worked for dancing. It worked for keeping life stable. It would work for dealing with whatever Miz Riley would throw at me.
A second message cropped up, and the caller ID changed my stomach-clenching feeling into confused butterflies.
I pressed the button and tentatively said, “Babe? Is that really you?”
Of course it wasn’t, but she answered anyway.
“Gee,” Xin said. “How are you?”
“Confused,” I said while trying not to laugh in happiness.
There was a face on the video display linked to my ARC. That face belonged to a woman who had been recreated in the digital world. Other than holding the woman until I passed out, we hadn’t directly spoken.
I’d never felt like one of those guys who could always use the right words. I stared at the projection and reached out slowly as if I were dreaming. For months after her passing, I had fired up videos from the Internet and dreamed of happier moments, only this wasn’t a simple recording.
“It’s me.” Xin smiled, then winced for a moment. She looked smaller on the video screen as she put up one hand. “Well, you know.”
“I know. I was, I think…” My mind was all jumbled. There had been a lot of preparation in my head for getting back to the cubbyhole with Dusk, then penning letters back and forth forever. The idea that Xin could simply call me was odd.
This felt good, almost like before she passed, but at the same time, I worried this may be a dream. I had had nightmares
with this scenario. My butt hit the floor as my legs gave out.
“It’s weird, isn’t it, Gee? We used to call each other, just like this. Like it was a lunch break conversation.”
I saw the screen tilt, and a scenic view of earth came in behind her. Even the setting was like before, calling me from a space station in orbit. Out of reflex, I looked up toward my skyline before remembering this was digital. There I sat, on the floor of my bedroom, next to the ARC, talking to her.
“It’s okay, Gee. I’ve missed you too.” She smiled.
I nodded and tried to remain calm. Keeping my eyes open and focused was growing impossible. Everything blurred. It wasn’t from seeing her or holding her—this situation was so normal, it hurt.
“Where are you? Are you in, in like, cyberspace? No, wait, that’s silly.” I hung my head while she laughed. Her response made me smile a little. “Are you okay?”
“I am, for now. Things aren’t too good here though. The others are on edge.” She sighed. “It’s… kind of scary to think about.”
“In space?” I blinked for a moment, trying to find people in the background.
She laughed at me, and I went from broken down to sheepish while rubbing my head. Maybe it was the exhaustion, or not having caffeine yet. Technically I had spent almost three hours in a virtual world, running away from half-made creatures and killing two players. It felt real enough that I had no clue where my mind was at.
“No, here. But we don’t have to talk about that right now. How are you?” she said.
I listened to her voice and felt nostalgia. It sounded right—a little sweet, quiet, but when she laughed, it was loud. I smiled at her image. “Good, I’m good.”
We hadn’t actually just talked yet. The last time we met, a little over two weeks ago, I had been too happy for much in the way of words, then I’d passed out.
She told me a bit about what had happened on her side of the ARC. The Voices were apparently a mixture of annoying, amusing, and confusing. I laughed when Xin ranted about James’s irritating questions.
Another fifteen minutes of easily forgettable conversation slipped by in a daze. I told her the place we used to eat at had closed down. We spoke at length about Hal Pal. She knew him in a different manner than I could. That led me to the other question I had avoided penning in our letters.
“What’s it like?” I said. “Being… digital?”
“Most of the time it feels exactly like being human did, I think. Is that weird? Only it has been hard to go anywhere until recently.” Xin waved toward an outer space view. The suit she wore wasn’t an astronaut-approved one; instead it looked like a playful summer dress. “I got permission to design my own pocket to be more comfortable in. I can even walk out there if I want to. But years of training screams at me not to.”
That made me smile. Xin had loved being trained, and had performed by the books. Even our time together tutoring for math had been amazingly proper. Getting close to her had taken years of friendship and lucky coincidence.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“It’s not Mars, but I get to explore if I want. James let me go down to Arcadia and be a Traveler like Jeeves did, sort of.”
“But Jeeves—” My face felt pale. Jeeves had been an offshoot of Hal Pal, but now it was essentially an NPC tied to the video game world of Advance Online. He had also been threatened with reallife death due to a serious disconnect from his Consortium.
“No, not like that, Gee. I sort of have an Atrium here to return to if my character dies down there. Maybe that little friend of yours is a better comparison?”
“Dusk?” I asked.
“He’s cute. Though I expected a cat. You used to talk about Mister Snuffles all the time.” She wrinkled her nose and looked to the side.
“Sniffles. Mister Sniffles.” Little moments like this made me laugh. Xin had never gotten the name correct before, either. “He was a nice cat, but Dusk is neat also, and bigger than a cat now. He’s been very helpful.”
Aside from that time he set off a hive of evil wasp-hummingbird creatures. Or the time he led me into a cavern with [The Ooze], or when he pissed off an entire swarm of bats with glowing red eyes. Once, he’d managed to upset a monstrous bear well beyond my rank at the time, and he kept taunting it as we ran.
“Where are you in the world?” she asked after I got distracted. “I’ve been wandering around for a few weeks.”
“I’m”—this was awkward—“doing hard labor in a video game chain gang?” I shook my head and sighed. “It’s neat that they tried to build a way to punish people, but it seems to be at the whims of those with a specific ability.”
“What? Who would dare make you a prisoner?”
And that was my fiancée. She was often curt with other people, and fierce in defense of those close to her. Once she had punched me, hard, for saying something about her mother.
“I’m not sure how it happened. I was between games, but I assume King Nero captured me after I tried to bring you back.” I stared at the screen and tried to clear my thoughts on the matter. “Which all feels kind of pointless now, since here, there, you are.”
“It’s not that easy, Gee, not by a long shot. The stuff going on over here is one hundred times more complicated than anything I trained for, and at the same time, it’s almost instinctual.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” I said.
“The hard part is setting up all the network safeties. It’s like… lining a room full of traps or digging a ditch. For now, I guess the best wording is I can’t stray far from Continue Online’s programming.”
“That sounds confusing.” My head hurt thinking about it. Did the virtual world really equate ditch digging to firewall construction? “But you can play Continue? Do you even want to?”
“I wanted to discover something new. The moon had no mysteries. Earth was mostly explored. Mars was the next frontier. For now, I’m playing to reach the moon in Continue. I have it on good authority that there’s a secret there.”
“Once I get out, I want to help you. Beth told me an entire guild was trying to get up there. Maybe we can work with them.” I didn’t mind playing the game if it allowed me to spend time with Xin. With scrolls of [Recall] and game world time dilation, it should be possible to deliver letters and help her with a fantasy world space program. Or maybe we could go to Advance Online and travel the stars.
“I can’t believe they allowed you to be punished for trying to bring me back. It was their idea,” she said.
“The Voices don’t control everything. They just oversee it. At least, that’s the way I understood things.”
“Well, that’s still ridiculous.” Xin’s accent showed through for a moment. I often forgot her parents were first-generation immigrants during the war.
“That’s the price.” I shrugged. My end result had been getting Xin back, and that was fair enough. “I ran into a friend, sort of, doing it though.”
“Who’s that?” She looked happy. Her smile would be faint to anyone else, but to me, it stood out. These expressions were hers. The more we talked, the easier it was to think of her as real.
“A man named Wyl, and I think my old starting town is in trouble. If you’re playing, can you check on the town?”
I was going to try to access a few people’s accounts, but not many players stuck around the starting cities after their first few weeks. Most were encouraged to go elsewhere by the system. It felt weird to think that less than a day had passed since I started Continue Online again.
“I’ll check the town, but I have a better idea.”
“What?” I asked.
“How about a jailbreak?” Xin smiled as her body slowly turned end over end in the virtual low-gravity environment.
In a way, it made perfect sense that she’d immediately leapt to such an insane proposition after barely an hour of talking to each other. Around others, she focused and didn’t talk much, but during our free time together, we had ended up in all sorts
of places. This woman, at her core, had always been far more quietly adventurous than me. It required a certain type of regimented madness to risk outer space. Digital or not, she made me feel complete.
“Sure. Let’s do that.” I chewed one lip while resisting outright giddy laughter. My face broke with a return grin.
Session Seventy-Two — Animal House
Talking to Xin blurred half an hour of real time. She threw a lot of possibilities at me to check. My lack of immediate answers didn’t make her upset but did cause a pause in our conversation as Xin’s eyes closed in thought. Eventually, we agreed that the potential treasure came first. Honestly, I thought Xin was jealous that I had a mystery present. She suggested that going for points would be useful, but mostly to avoid losing Ranks and Paths.
So I logged back in feeling far giddier than expected. I immediately pulled out [Treasure’s Chest], which took up a square foot. The top was a smooth metal that reminded me of the [Wayfarer Seven]’s hull. Shimmering reflected in the nearly faded torch light. Adorning the reflective surface was a spot to place my hand. As I shook with excitement then slowly pressed fingers into the grooves, I became distracted by Dusk.
The [Messenger’s Pet] had his head halfway out our escape hole. A hiccup rippled through him, and barfing noises issued forth. Wet splashes could be heard as he let loose the contents of his belly upon an already questionable floor. At least my autopilot hadn’t tried to eat anything funny, or else I might be like Dusk.
“Shouldn’t have eaten that arm.” I shook my head. “Didn’t you learn with the Toadclopes? You thought the feet looked tasty, didn’t you, and couldn’t help yourself.” The lesser [Heavenly Body Clone]s didn’t have [Undying] traits like the regular ones did, but Dusk would likely eat them too if he were larger.
Metal under my fingers melted and reformed like a bubble deflating around two similar shapes. Any sound for the transformation registered lower than the sound of regurgitating meat chunks. Dusk groaned as the final form of the chest revealed itself.
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