Forsaken

by Cebelius

  She looked at him steadily as she added, "But you are my love now. And you will remain so, as long as you do not forsake me."

  Abram nodded, then shook his head and said, "Yeah, sorry Angie. You're right. I should be reasonable about this."

  When he looked back at her she was smiling warmly, and bent at the hip, pulling the cowl of his robe back to kiss him as she said, "Angie? I like that. As far as pet names go, I think it suits me."

  He returned her smile, knowing better than to tell her that he pretty much always shortened the names of anyone he met to two syllables or less at some point or another. Angrboda was just too much of a mouthful.

  It did suit her, and he smiled until she asked, "Is your own name truly Abram?"

  "Why ask?"

  His eyes narrowed as he looked at her, wondering if ulterior motives were finally coming into play. She shrugged and said, "Abram seems like a bastardization of another name, that's all."

  Abram chuckled and shook his head as he said, "It's the other way around. Abraham, right?"

  He looked at her and waited for her nod before he said, "Abram was the man's original name. When he was ninety-nine years old God renamed him Abraham."

  He laughed self-deprecatingly as he said, "Most inappropriate name in history. In my case anyway."

  "Why? What does it mean?" Angie asked.

  Thinking about his name made Abram scowl. This is a goddamn game, not therapy. Less heart-to-heart, more face melting please.

  Rather than answer, he just shook his head and looked up into the impenetrable dark as he asked, "How are we going to get back up there?"

  "I will climb. It is only about fifteen body lengths. I have done it many times, though not recently. Remember, in times past the bergsrå of Svartheim and I were good friends."

  "Bergsroe?" Abram asked, doing his best to follow her pronunciation. "What's that?"

  Angie glanced up, thinking a moment before she shrugged and said, "Mountain troll? Do you know what a troll is? I am related to their kind, though only distantly."

  Abram's face twisted with distaste. "Ah, yeah. I do. I didn't see any trolls when I was there though."

  Angie shrugged and said, "Well, perhaps we shall see what became of them when we get there. Are you ready?"

  "As long as I can close my eyes," he said, and whipped a hand out to brace himself against one wall as the ground shuddered.

  She smiled wryly at him as she said, "Sorry, just getting up. Yes, you should be able to close your eyes. I will let you know when we arrive, and set us both inside the tunnel."

  "Sounds great."

  His nerves must have shown through in his tone because she chuckled as she stepped to him and wrapped her arms around him. All the while the ground shivered and he could hear the sounds of something vast moving out beyond the range of his dark sight.

  The place where he'd spent most of the last several hours was best described as a small grotto that looked out on the vast underwater lake into which he'd have fallen — and either died on impact with or drowned in — had Angrboda not been taking a bath at the time.

  Since she essentially had him wrapped up, he tilted his head toward the water as he said, "How deep is it?"

  "Toward the far end it is deeper than I can swim and hold my breath."

  "As a proxy?"

  She shook her head. "As me. This truly is a prison for me, young Abram. If I could hold my breath long enough, and the pressure did not crush me, I could probably gain access to the Everdark from here. Troglodytes will occasionally come to speak with me, so I know access to their domain may also be had from the waters. With my capabilities I can sustain myself, keep myself clean, but no more."

  "I guess there are a lot of fish, if even someone like you can get enough to eat," Abram said as he saw one of her bare feet come into view around the edge of the grotto entrance. Her big toe came up to his waist. Her ankle was above head height.

  "Holy fuck you're big," he muttered. "Are all Jotun as large as you?"

  "Some," she said, looking out at herself speculatively. "And some of us have the magic to change our size. I had that in fact, but it was taken from me when I was placed here."

  "Who put you here, Odin?" he asked.

  She scowled, then shook her head. "No. One of the Powers. That is a story for another time."

  A hand swept into the grotto and caught them both up. Angie curled herself around him and he found himself wishing she weren't wearing a cuirass. It would have made things much more comfortable, and a bit more kinky.

  He closed his eyes, but instead of climbing with him in her cupped hand, she put him, along with her own proxy, in a belt pouch that smelled strongly of fish.

  He wrinkled his nose, and she chuckled at him as she said, "Well, what did you expect? I have to make all my own clothing and equipment for my proper body. Beggars can't be choosers."

  "I suppose not."

  Inwardly, Abram made a note that if he ever got the chance, he would have something made for her proper body. Clothing, perhaps even just a blanket. It would probably be well-received.

  If I'm trying to form and keep a harem, best remember the gift-giving schtick. All the dating sims rely on a mechanic like that.

  Their ascent was marked by jostling, followed by stillness. He could tell that Angie's primary focus was in her main body, and held himself still. The last thing he wanted to do was distract her while she was climbing. She'd probably be fine if she fell, but he doubted the same could be said for him.

  Instead, as she climbed, he wondered at the verisimilitude in the game. As far as he knew, there wasn't anything even close to this realistic on the market. He rather suspected that Angrboda was being played in real time, just like he was. That was the only way he could think of to make this experience plausible.

  But how could they possibly make money off a game that requires a cast to actually PLAY the NPCs? Maybe I'm in some sort of beta test, and my play-through will be used to feature content that won't really be there in the main release ...

  His thoughts ground to a halt as he considered just what Angrboda had done with him. Unless they'd hired a porn starlet with better acting skills than he'd ever seen, it seemed unlikely they'd have a real person at the controls. Maybe multiple actors for one character?

  That line of reasoning led him back to the prologue, and he just couldn't picture who they'd market to. The beginning of this game was beyond brutal. What if a kid got hold of it? Hell even without the prologue ... there had to be a way to age check, but he hadn't gone through anything like that.

  "We're here. Hold still."

  Angie wrapped her proxy body around his again, and he was scooped out along with her and deposited just beyond the archway of the opening for the vast pit he'd fallen into yesterday.

  "Give me a moment, so that I can climb back down," she said as she settled him on his feet and straightened. "I could just drop into the water, but I'd rather not."

  "Sure, take your time. I'm in no rush."

  And that's actually true, he mused to himself as he thought about it. He couldn't remember any projects he had that needed doing. He made a mental note to check his calendar next time he left the game. He could afford to take a break if he wanted ... as a matter of fact, given his psychological limitations, his budgetary requirements were almost zero. As long as he checked in with his employers and was on call during Black Friday, there was nothing he really needed to worry about.

  Angie was blank-faced, her concentration clearly elsewhere, when Abram heard something behind him.

  He turned and saw a goblin just as the little creature shrieked and turned to run.

  Abram lifted his hand, dropped his middle two fingers, and sent pencil thin arcs of purple lightning through the dark. They caressed the goblin, who arched as he screamed with every ounce of power in his lungs, then collapsed to twitch errantly across the stone.

  One second, Abram thought, glancing up at his mana bar. There were current/full measures n
ext to each, and his mana bar currently read '89/90(100).'

  His spell did twelve hit points a second, so the goblin had less than that, which made sense. Goblins were pretty much fodder.

  He checked his map, and verified something he'd been curious about. The area cleared to his vision was exactly one hundred twenty feet according to the legend, giving him pretty amazing range. He wondered how far the goblins could see. The one he'd killed had only been about ... sixty feet away when it had shrieked.

  "Well, your spell certainly is effective, and ... unique," Angie said as she stepped up next to him. "Typical mages opt for heavier bolts."

  "It does the job. How far can you see?" he asked.

  "My true body's only sight limitations underground are hard barriers, water, or light, which all obstruct whatever might lay beyond. For my proxy, the goblin you just killed is at the very edge of my range."

  "So around sixty feet."

  "If you say so. How far can you see?"

  "About twice that far."

  "That will be useful. I do not know of many creatures that can see farther in true darkness than I can."

  Abram nodded, filing the information away. It was a crucial advantage.

  The goblin's scream did not appear to have drawn any additional attention, which didn't surprise him given the bodies that littered the corridor beyond it. The adventurers that had come this way not long before had really wrecked up the place.

  Moving to the goblin's corpse, he bent, checked for a pulse which he did not find, and searched it. Nothing useful.

  "Doesn't anyone in this fucking g- ... dungeon keep any coinage on them?" he asked. "I searched several bodies on the way out too, and no one was carrying any money."

  He glanced back at her, but Angie simply shrugged. "I don't concern myself with the economy of goblins or their kin. Disgusting creatures."

  "Can't argue with that," he said, straightening. As he started to advance, she asked, "Why would you want money anyway? Where would you spend it?"

  "Telling me there aren't civilizations in Sub-Cel?"

  "Well, yes, but you might find it difficult to trade anywhere. Templates are ... sought after. My previous love died at the hands of the dwarves after ... well, let us say they passed him around and leave it at that."

  "Is everyone on this planet some sort of evil psychotic nutjob or what?" he asked, glancing back.

  "Civilizations vary everywhere, Abram, but you will find that even most ordinarily good people change when confronted with the prospect of congress with a template. If you want to survive, you will have to be very careful who you trust."

  "Well at this point, if I see it I'm going to kill it unless I have a damn good reason not to," Abram said wryly. "Not sure I can be much more careful than that."

  "Ah, well in that case if you see a troll, spare it. One such may help us if handled properly."

  Abram blinked at that, then shrugged and nodded. The two had come to a four-way junction, and he paused there as he looked left and right. The trail of bodies went on ahead, but he'd come from that way. These other two passages were ones he hadn't been down. Following an old gamer trope that usually panned out, he turned left.

  "Why go this way?" Angie asked.

  "I want to get a full map of this place," Abram replied. "I also don't want to leave anything alive behind us. We'll explore the floor in left turns until I've got the full scope of the place, then go to the next floor. Rinse, lather, repeat. Quiet from now on. No sense in giving ourselves away."

  The next half hour was a study in high-stress, no-payoff exploration. Every single corridor they explored had precisely the same dimensions, and the same layout. Four dormitories containing beds and empty armor stands, two on the right side of the hallway, and two on the left. At the end, a room with a series of seats in a heavy stone platform that could be identified by smell. They passed the stairway Abram had descended and continued to the end of the corridor. There they found a rather expansive room with four long, bench-lined tables. The place had a neat, orderly feel to it, and two archways on the far side of the room led to a kitchen that had obviously been abandoned in the middle of meal preparation, given the smells of burnt meat and the slight pall of smoke that still hung in the air. Stews were boiled down to crusty goop at the bottoms of cauldrons and the fires were down to the barest coals.

  It was here that Abram finally found something useful. A knife, razor-sharp, that replaced the rusty piece of crap he'd pulled from the goblin he'd killed getting out of here.

  Angie watched him take it, and commented, "That will be little good against an armored opponent. It is too thin."

  "If I'm facing an armored opponent with only a knife left, I'm fucked anyway," he said with a wry smile.

  "Why take it then?"

  He shrugged. "Knives are always good for something. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it."

  She blinked, then smiled. "Sensible."

  And because I'd rather die than get caught by these things again.

  The rest of the first floor turned out to be completely deserted. The only other things of interest Abram found were statues. There weren't many, but they were obviously once flesh and blood given their postures and the fact that they wore clothing and armor that couldn't have gotten there without being put on or stitched into place.

  That creature that freed me really WAS an actual gorgon. Wearing a mask. That's why I couldn't see her face. That's why I didn't turn to stone.

  Abram shuddered. Angie didn't know anything about gorgons, as it turned out, so he simply let the matter rest other than to warn her not to look if she saw a winged, snake-haired girl with brazen claws reaching for her mask.

  "How am I supposed to fight a creature I can't look at?" Angie asked.

  "If a gorgon wants to kill you, it's pretty much game over," he replied wryly. "You'll be fine. Won't your mind just go back to your body?"

  "Yes, but dying while invested in a proxy is very painful, and tends to either stun or completely knock me out for a time. I would be vulnerable."

  "And I would be dead. Let's just hope we don't run into her or if we do, she's not in a killing mood."

  The second floor was much the same as the first. In fact, it was exactly the same.

  Just as the first, it was abandoned. There were more stone statues in the side corridors, and more bodies in the main hallway.

  Abram learned a bit about the adventurers he was tailing as he examined the corpses.

  He had already established that one was a gorgon. At least two others were clearly wielding edged weapons of some kind; they had an archer, and someone in the group relied on claws. Almost every corpse they passed had its throat ripped out, and some of them had clearly already been dead when it happened.

  Double-tapping. These people know what they're doing.

  On the one hand, the fact that the game was so detailed left Abram with moments where he felt like puking at the gore and viscera scattered around the hallway, but on the other, the very fact there was so much detail allowed him to pick up info he'd never get in any normal game. The bodies didn't vanish, and there was clearly some sort of ecology at play here. The dungeon wasn't just a bunch of random rooms connected by hallways. Instead, Svartheim was quite obviously a military facility.

  As they walked back toward the stairs that would lead them up to the third level, Abram asked, "Was Svartheim always like this?"

  "No. Svartheim obeys the whims of the bergsrå. Given the current layout, they have been subjugated."

  Aaaand there's the quest hook. Better than a floaty golden question mark, I must admit.

  It wasn't until they were halfway through their exploration of the third floor that things got interesting again.

  7

  I'm Not Locked In Here With You

  The third floor proved slightly different than the first two. Instead of a straight hallway with branching corridors leading to dormitories, this floor seemed to be taken up by
various work centers, and not all of them were abandoned.

  As Abram moved down the corridor with Angie just behind him, a dull orange glow showed beyond a distant archway. As they got closer, both of them heard a bellows working.

  He looked up at Angie and mouthed, 'Are you ready?'

  She already had her short-handled ax and shield in hand, and clicked them together as she nodded once.

  Abram edged up to the archway and waited there, giving his eyes time to adjust to real light. He hadn't seen any in ... well, this was the first time he'd experienced it in-game. As he waited, he heard metal clink, and then the sharp, repetitive spang of a hammer striking hot metal.

  Once his eyes stopped aching, he peeked around the corner.

  A single hobgoblin worked the forge. Unfortunately, as soon as Abram saw him, he saw Abram.

  The creature was a bit taller than he was, and much broader across the shoulders. His body was heavy with muscle, and he wore an apron stained and singed from long hours at the forge, though his upper body was otherwise bare.

  Before Abram could decide what to do, the hulking beast lifted the hammer and threw it with uncanny accuracy. Abram ducked back around the corner and the hammer flew out into the corridor and struck stone chips from the wall before clattering heavily away.

  A moment later, a klaxon began to sound.

  "Ah shit," Abram muttered as he rounded the corner, one hand raised.

  The hobgoblin was hauling hard on a rope mounted to a ring on the far wall. When Abram's purple lightning reached him, he arched and sagged, both hands wrapped tight around the rope, and the warning bell wanged a discordant note. The hobgoblin jolted again before his hands slackened and he sagged down the wall.

  Two seconds for that one, Abram noted, checking his mana to make sure. Somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hit points. Fairly standard so far.

  "They're coming. I can hear them."

  "Step away from the arch," Abram said as he turned and splayed a hand toward the wall on the far side of the hallway as he said, "Tentacular rune."