by Jon Auerbach
My mind had shifted into grief mode, a familiar setting, to process this new reality and I had already moved past denial and anger to bargaining.
“What if I just played it safe?” I asked myself. “I won’t go milling about in dark alleys late at night,” I declared. “You can’t get stabbed with a mystical knife if you don’t hang around in an area where the knife wielders are likely to be.” It was just another version of being street smart.
My mind continued warring with itself the rest of the day, one side never gaining enough will to either command my hand to click over to the Quest Board or delete the bookmark forever.
When the texts from Stacy and Lisa began pouring in about our dinner, I broke the stalemate and rushed out the door to meet them.
This was what I needed. A night of distraction. Even if I couldn’t tell them what was going on, just being with other people was enough for the moment, despite them probably ignoring me for most of the evening.
“JJ, have you lost weight? You look great!” cooed Lisa.
I hated that nickname. It’s not like my last name was long or unusual. It’s Jacobs, how much more nondescript could you get?
And yes, I had lost weight, thank you very much, all in the last 20 hours. I wish I never had met Steve.
“Oh, maybe just a little. Trying to eat smaller portions, you know.” I said sheepishly.
“Well whatever you’re doing, keep it up! Anyway, Stace, you should have seen the look on Brad’s face when he saw this month’s credit card bill, I swear…”
I tuned out Lisa’s latest wedding planning squabbling while moving the spoonful of orzo around on my plate. It had only been four months since their engagement, but it felt like that movie The Five-Year Engagement, what with the number of dress fittings, celebration drinks, celebration brunches, and other assorted celebrations that Lisa had concocted. For some reason, news of these outings always managed to trickle my way at the last minute, but I learned long ago that as the member of the trio with the least social capital, I should just be thankful that they were still even friends with me.
“JJ, what do you think of my new haircut? I’m trying something out for the wedding.”
I looked at Lisa’s hair, which looked indistinguishable from its normal look, but I knew better than to say that, so I studied her perfectly coiffed do for a few more seconds before answering.
“It looks cute!” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
“No!” Lisa pushed away the rice balls she was eating in disgust. “I told the hairdresser I wanted to look hot, not cute! UGGH! I have half a mind to storm down to that salon right now and demand a refund. I swear, if they’re going to charge $650 for a cut, they damn well better…”
I ignored Lisa as she launched into a cavalcade of explicit and violent things she was going to do to her hairdresser, who, based on my three-word review, had done terrible, life-shattering damage to both Lisa’s hair and psyche. I sighed.
These were my friends. Not just my friends. My two best friends. My two only friends. Shoot me please. I only had myself to blame. Most people would jettison a bunch of self-centered vapid friends at the first opportunity. But not me. You know how sometimes the first people you meet freshman year of college end up being the ones that stick around the rest of your life? Yeah, well, I had the unfortunate privilege of running into these two during my first 20 minutes in Ann Arbor. They had ambushed me by my dorm room as I was fumbling with all of my luggage.
“Hi! I’m Stacy and this is Lisa.”
I had looked them over warily. They looked like they belonged to the popular set: hair and makeup perfect even though they had just spent hours unpacking, just in case someone important or cute walked by. I meanwhile looked like I had just woken up after a nine-hour bus ride.
“Hi, I’m Jen. Jen Jacobs.”
“Nice to meet you, JJ,” Lisa said. “Can I call you JJ? You look like a JJ.”
“Umm, sure, I guess. My mom used to call me J-”
“Perfect, then it’s settled. JJ, you’re coming with us. We spotted some cute boys hanging out in the lounge upstairs”
I relished these girls at first. Really. I had no one else in my life then except an aunt I hadn’t seen since I was a kid and some neighbors who made sure I wasn’t getting into any trouble those last few months before I left for college.
And they were nice to me. At least at first. They let me borrow their clothes, taught me about boys, and tried to be the older sisters I didn’t have. I perversely felt a sense of superiority whenever the three of us were strolling through campus.
But over time, the compliments turned backhanded, the slights started mounting, and my standing in the group began to decline. But I held on, as much as I could. What other choice did I have? There was no one else.
I felt a buzz in my pants pocket.
I pulled out my phone and nearly dropped it on the floor. The Quest Board had somehow opened on my phone and was displaying blinding, blinking pink text.
“Time for a new Quest?” it said.
I put my phone back in my pocket, my hand trembling. What was happening? It was like the Board knew what I had learned and was determined to wrap its tentacles around me and not let go.
My mind wandered back to the internal battle I had been putting off earlier. It was a bad habit I had accidentally picked up during a meditation class in college; instead of focusing on my breathing, I inevitably created an intense visualization about something that was giving me anxiety and this time it was no different.
It was single-combat: the old, normal me versus and the new, magic me.
The normal me was dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and I held a wooden staff and shield for some reason. The magic me was dressed as a valkyrie, with a shining metal helm and an axe at my side.
It was not the bloodbath I was expecting. Normal Jen wielded the staff with discipline and efficiency. Valkyrie Jen was the opposite: erratic and emotional. She swung her axe with too much force time and again, allowing Normal Jen to step to the side. This went on for several rounds, until a wicked grin appeared on Valkyrie Jen’s face, and she suddenly lurched forward and struck the ground in front of Normal Jen with the axe.
The earth sundered, a crack forming under Normal Jen’s feet. As the ground split apart, Normal Jen tried to jump to one side, but slipped and fell, her fingers digging into the dirt atop the deepening chasm. Valkyrie Jen walked over to the edge, surveyed her opponent for a few seconds, and then, without warning, sliced the girl’s hands clean off, sending Normal Jen tumbling into the depths.
Back at the table, a small smile began to form on my lips. This was the last time I was going to sit with these two and feel sorry for myself, I thought. I was destined for greater things than being the third wheel to two vapid women.
I took my phone out of my pocket again and looked down. My hand trembled, the burst of confidence expended. The blinking message was still there and I quickly tapped it with one finger, bringing up a single Quest.
“Please bring five three-quarters eaten portions of food to 1690 Bleeker St. in the next 20 minutes. But it can’t be your food. Tricky, I know. Also, a stolen lipstick. Reward: 2 iron tokens.”
I stared at the Quest, which seemed to have been written by the guy sitting at the booth behind me. If I hadn’t just been put through the ringer by Steve and his stupid scar, I would have been totally weirded out and refused to take it. But what would have bothered me yesterday morning wouldn’t even register today in my new reality.
Now that I knew at least some of the truth about the Quests, the requested items didn’t seem like they were destined for some intricate magical concoction. No, if I had to guess, the Requester was hungry and had some spare tokens lying around. Iron being fairly worthless, it was like getting food and lipstick for free. So of course I accepted the Quest without giving it another thought.
“Ugh, this sucks!” I said, still staring at my phone.
“What happen
ed?” asked Lisa.
“My boss just emailed me. Some new investors are coming in tomorrow and he needs some more hand holding on the new code we just finished up. I gotta run, I’m sorry, girls!” I pushed my plate away and began inching out of the booth.
“Oh that stinks, JJ! Let’s have them wrap up some stuff for you to go. I’m done eating anyway, don’t want to add any more inches to my figure since I already had my last fitting. Excuse me?” Lisa snapped her fingers at a passing waitress as I exited the booth, knocking over Stacy’s purse “accidentally” in the process, the contents spewing all over the floor.
“Shoot, my bad Stace! Let me clean that up for you.” I got down on my knees and began scooping up the fallen items, pocketing a neon red shade of lipstick for myself.
I grabbed the food from the waitress and raced out of the restaurant. Ten minutes later, the items were safely deposited on the stoop of a seemingly abandoned townhouse and I was enjoying a leisurely evening stroll back to my apartment.
My mind wandered back to the aftermath of the battle. Valkyrie Jen stood alone at the edge of the chasm, before walking a few paces to pick up the wooden shield that Normal Jen had been holding. She stared at the depictions on the front, and I observed them too.
There was me, staring at a computer screen, my eyes bloodshot; me, waiting for Duncan to FaceTime from Hong Kong; me, trying to pay attention at dinner tonight. Valkyrie Jen shook her head and let out a loud guffaw. Then, with a flourish, she tossed the shield into the air, grabbed her axe from her side with the other hand, and, with a perfectly timed swing, obliterated the shield as it began falling to the ground.
Despite the earlier violence that I had witnessed, this display of wanton destruction raised a little seed of doubt within me. Had I made the right choice? As if sensing the growing moral quandary, the pieces of the shield on the ground began shaking as if they were trying to put themselves back together.
Valkyrie Jen however was having none of it. She snapped her fingers and a column of flame erupted around the broken shield. The flames vanished and when the smoke dissipated, all that was left was a pile of ash. Satisfied with her destruction, Valkyrie Jen then turned her gaze skyward, as if she could see me, as if I was a goddess watching her creation from above. The proud warrior grinned at the sky, clapped the dust off her hands, and walked away.
The scene dissolved into a hazy mist and when I reoriented to my surroundings, I found myself in front of my apartment. A grin had formed on my face, the same grin worn by the valkyrie.
In the end, I didn’t need the battle to convince me which path was the right one. Why? Because for all my fear and doubt, it was really a simple choice between the drudgery and loneliness of my prior life and the chance to be part of something fantastical and extraordinary.
What other choice did I have?
10
Farhampton
“As far as husbands went, and I’ve had too many to count, Henry was one of the better ones.”
The pie crust turned a golden brown as I watched anxiously through the oven window. I waited a few more minutes and then, mitts in hand, I removed the pie and set on the windowsill in the kitchen, the cool autumn air drafting in through a crack.
Quest complete. Well, almost. Just needed to drop this baby off under a bench in town and the tokens would be mine.
No, really.
It was early Saturday afternoon and the house was quiet. Duncan was upstairs sleeping, having landed early this morning from Hong Kong and needing to get rested for his boss’s party tonight. We had rented a small house for the weekend in Northampton, a very old East End hamlet with a very new name. Evidently an enterprising real estate agent had started advertising his listings as being located in the then non-existent town of Northampton to foreign buyers looking to stash their cash in the U.S. and suddenly, prices began skyrocketing, trendy shops began filling the downtown strip, and the town council was considering multiple petitions to change the town’s name.
Fortunately, the new eight-figure homes that had popped up hadn’t yet fully pushed out the quaint cottages that dotted the town’s winding roads, it had only made their owners jack up the weekend rental price. But Duncan didn’t flinch at the cost, his most recent bonus plentiful enough to absorb the hit.
Speaking of, the man had still not made his way downstairs. Which gave me time to make another pie. I cut up the apples I had picked earlier into slices, poured the sugary filling into the crust, and laid the top over the whole thing. I slid it into of the oven and pulled up the details of the Quest:
“One apple pie, made with Mutsu apples picked from the 17th row of trees at Running Brook Orchard. Reward: Seven iron.”
I wasn’t planning on Questing this weekend, as I needed a break from, well, everything. The last four months has been an unrelenting grind. If not for the mandatory three-day wait between Quests, I would have tried to do one every single day. Even with the gaps, I still managed to rake in 40 wood and 16 iron for a grand total of 72 experience, leaving me just a hair over level three. The day I reached that milestone should have been a happy one, but Duncan had been away and I hadn’t felt like drinking by myself (again). So I splurged on a spa day and tried to forget that to get to level four, at my current rate, would take at least eight months. If the Council, whoever they were, wanted some new blood, this incessant grinding was not the way to go about it.
And I hadn’t had any luck tracking down the mystery library books either. Several visits to branches in all five boroughs had yielded nothing, hours of online searching had been fruitless, and if I set foot in another used bookstore, I was going to shoot myself.
So it was a nice surprise when I woke up to an email from Duncan the other day that not only would he be coming home a few days early, we were going away for the weekend to boot. A whole weekend with Duncan was a rare occurrence and I wanted to be present, rather than thinking about alchemy, prima materia, and the scar.
Unfortunately, my curiosity and boredom got the best of me after five minutes, as I really had nothing else to do when I got to the house yesterday evening. I had innocently pulled up the Quest Board to see if there was anyone out here who had taken the red pill. Turned out that the East End was not a Questing hotbed, with only a smattering of rinky-dink fetch Quests offering a few iron at most. I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than six iron, so seven iron was right on the line, but the opportunity to take in the fresh fall air at a scenic farm was enough of an incentive for me, so I accepted.
The orchard was practically empty when I arrived and I paid the ridiculous $40 for the right to fill a bag with more apples than I would be able to eat in a month and set off for the designated row. The few orchard employees out among the trees eyed me suspiciously. I suspected that they were used to seeing happy couples arm-in-arm, or parents swinging their kids in the air as they meandered about. The pathetic sight of a girl picking apples by herself at 8:45 in the morning couldn’t be countered by an argument that the apples tasted better or there was something satisfying about foraging for your own food.
But I didn’t need to justify my presence; I just needed to find the frakking trees so I could go make my pies.
Yes, pies, plural. If this wasn’t yet another errand for someone, then there was something different about these apples and I was damn sure going to figure out what that was. Which was easy enough. I would just make a second pie, take a bite, and see what happened.
I walked down the path that ran through the center of the rows of trees, until I reached a very threatening piece of yellow tape that was strung across the gap at the 17th row. I looked around to see if anyone was nearby and seeing no one I stepped leisurely over the tape and into the forbidden section.
I knew something was wrong immediately when my right foot sunk into the soil down to my ankle as soon as it hit the ground. My left foot remained planted on the other side, and I stood there, stradling the tape, trying to reclaim my foot and my freedom. But the soil had turned rock ha
rd, almost as if it was cement. I struggled without success for a minute or two, all the while looking back to see if anyone had noticed my predicament. Luckily I remained undetected, but unluckily for my favorite hiking boots, I quickly determined that the only way to wrest myself free was to leave my right boot trapped in the dirt.
I gave the trapped boot a good pull just in case the dirt had decided to play nice, but it wouldn’t budge and I reluctantly parted ways with it and walked away from the yellow tape.
The ground was slightly damp from recent rains and my right sock soon was covered in dirt. I contemplated wrapping the empty apple bag around my foot and trudging back to the front of the orchard, but the sight of stray apples littering the ground gave me an idea.
I backtracked one row and took a hard left away from the center path. The trees in the 17th row abutted their siblings in the 16th row, the only difference being there was no yellow tape separating the two. Apples littered the ground at the base of the trees. I stopped at a random spot and pushed my way in as far as I could manage. The corresponding tree in the 17th row was still a bit out of reach, but luckily, its fallen apples weren’t. Careful not to step too close to the weird soil, I began collecting the Mutsu until I had a decently full bag and then retreated to safety.
I looked down at my spoils. The apples were green like regular green apples. I put the bag down and removed one of the apples. It weighed what you would expect an apple to weigh, no magic golden apples here. I brought it up to my mouth, held it there for a few seconds, and then took a small bite.
Nothing happened.
I swallowed and took another bite, swirling the apple pieces around in my mouth like a sip of wine.
Still nothing.
