by Hugo Huesca
“Those are torpedoes!” Rylena exclaimed.
“I know!”
“Deploy flares!”
“Right! Which button?” I yelled back, glancing in panic at the controls.
“Oh, s—” I heard her say as the transporter filled the entire screen. We were flying at full speed against it.
I opened fire at the very last second and metal exploded all around us. A brutal collision almost sent me flying against the screen, and I held on to the flight stick for dear life. The shields dropped to fifty percent.
And we had crossed the transporter! Behind us, the explosion was still ongoing and the torpedoes dots had disappeared.
Behind me, the Posse of Iron fighters didn’t have a legendary ship with tank-like shields, so they simply avoided the transporter. One of them flew up and the other to the side.
“Point guns overhead!” I exclaimed.
The fighter flying upwards was a bit too fast in its chase, his wingman wasn’t covering him yet. I slammed the brakes on the Apollo and pushed the flight stick all the way back, fighting with the throttle all the while to maintain control. The ship’s nose shot up while conserving its front momentum, almost like a motorcycle doing a wheelie. Momentum rapidly went down before the fighter could react. I released the brakes and pushed forward again, and the ship’s nose went back to normal, just as the enemy ship passed over the Apollo Wing. A gatling-laser barrage instantly sprung towards it at close range. For half a second, the fighters shield blared in blue hexagonal patterns, and then they burnt out. The remaining half second was enough for the fighter to explode.
“Got him!” Rylena said, from the back.
“I saw!” I was smiling ear to ear. A pearl of sweat came down my forehead, I swatted it before it went into my eye.
The other fighter’s pilot wasn’t willing to risk his ship against a cruiser with the Apollo’s stats, so it disengaged one second before we came out of the debris field.
Instantly, an announcement went “ping” and a familiar screen appeared in front of me.
Congratulations! You completed the Quest “Hunting the Hunters”! You have made new enemies! You’re now a silver-ranked Pilot. Your skills have gone up: Piloting (2nd level)
“Only second level?” I complained. I was sure I’ve made a better job than just second level. “It says I’m a pilot now, that’s my class?”
“That’s your profession, inside a ship. I’m a gold-ranked gunner, doesn’t mean that’s my class. You’ll have to select your class after you get enough skill points to promote out of ‘rookie.’”
Rylena sat back next to me and shooed me away from the controls. “This is how you do a Warp jump,” she explained, her hands flying on the control panel, “pay attention. You input the coordinates here, choose the quadrant, wait for a flight solution… Alright, hold on.”
She buckled herself in and I did the same. That would’ve been useful a while ago.
The Apollo bent space and time all around us and the stars became white lines flying at impossible speed. I could feel my digital intestines getting to know my spine. Even the skin of my face drew back, like a cartoon… This was entirely an effect of the Warp Engine and not at all related to acceleration. But, of course, I wasn’t meditating on the nature of physics in Rune. I was thinking something more akin to, “Blarrrrghhhhhh.”
There was a flash of white light and then the stars went back to normal. This time, there was no Earth behind us, no space station in the distance, no debris field covering our tracks.
“That’s a warp jump,” Rylena said. “Like riding a roller coaster, right? They are used for short interstellar travel, star-to-star. We are somewhere in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri. For sector to sector travel we use hyperspace. I’ll teach you the basics after I’m sure no murderous bounty hunters are following our tail.”
“Good call,” I said, relaxing on my pilot seat. It smelled and felt like real leather. “Shall we go to Prima, now?”
“Not yet,” she said, “Kipp said we were headed for a death-world, right? We need to make some preparations first. I have an NPC contact in a mining factory near here, shouldn’t take long.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, “I have to eat some dinner now.” I could hear Mom calling me, her voice not farther than ten meters away from my ears, and yet it was as if we were stars away.
“Hurry up,” Rylena said. “You don’t need to log-out completely, just select ‘away’ on your Options screen. You’ll just stand here, like a complete idiot. At my mercy.”
“Sure, I’ll do that,” I said, standing up from the pilot’s seat.
“Cole? Good piloting back there. You are not as useless as I thought.”
“Damn right I’m not.”
CHAPTER TEN
Toxic Adventure
I was back twenty minutes later, with a full belly. My avatar was just where I left it, standing on the back of the cabin. Rylena wasn’t anywhere to be seen and the screen was down.
Just before I could get worried, the door opened and she came in. “Great, you’re back.”
She was carrying a backpack made of metal threads. She tossed it to me. It was surprisingly light. “I got you some things for the trip. They’re not a gift, you’re paying me back.”
“Thanks.” Inside the backpack, I found a stiff looking spacesuit, like a less bulky version of the ones the real astronauts used while on Mars. “What’s this?”
“It’s a spacesuit. You use it on planets where the atmosphere is poisonous, stuff like that. More advanced versions, like the one I’m wearing, can double as armor and withstand conventional weapons. Yours… well, don’t get it near anything sharp.”
“Shouldn’t have bothered.” Besides the spacesuit, I got out a medkit, an advanced version of my own communicator, and an honest-to-god machete.
“Don’t store it all in your inventory or you’ll just run out of space. This stuff is cheap, that’s why you carry it in a backpack.”
“No weapons?”
“Look, I can see your stats,” she said, “I think it’s better if you don’t get near any gun for the time being.”
“I’m sure it isn’t that bad.”
She sighed. “No, I’m not joking, man, there’s seriously something wrong with your hand-eye coordination…”
“Maybe I just need to train my skills a bit more,” I said, crossing my arms and frowning.
“You don’t understand —Fine, look at this,” she produced a hologram with a list of names inside. Next to them, percentages in descending order. “This is part of what I do as a Battlemind. Math. I study variables, make predictions, analyze information.”
“Doesn’t sound very fun,” I admitted. Math had never been my strong suit in school.
“It is if you are not a caveman,” Rylena replied and made a small, derisive gesture. “Grandmaster Battleminds direct the course of wars. They’re the in-game equivalent of Generals. I work on a smaller scale, but I’m damn good at my job, and I can tell you, you have an accuracy problem. Here you are, at the bottom of the list.”
My name appeared beneath one “Honeybeetle Alpha” and on top of “Toxic Curmudgeon”. The percentage next to my name was 8.7%
“Well, I’m not on the bottom of the list,” I said, pointing a finger at Mr. Toxic Curmudgeon. At the very least, I had my dignity.
“That’s a bot,” she said. “A middle-of-the-rankings Alliance tried to get some fake players controlled by Scripts to bolster their ranks. The bots sucked and were banned the same day they logged in. ‘Toxic Curmudgeon’ is a randomly generated username. So is ‘Honeybeetle Alpha.’”
I glanced at the rest of the names in that list. Yeah, some of them looked like they came straight from a random-name generator.
“Fine,” I grumbled, “point taken. Pointing a gun in real —in simulated life— is not the same as using a mouse and keyboard. Got it. I still need to defend myself if we are attacked on Prima. What I’m supposed to do?”
Rylena pointed at the metallic backpack. “Run very fast at them and hack at them with your machete.”
“Is that… is that a viable combat tactic in this game?” I asked her.
“No.”
The Prima Star appeared over the Apollo screen’s as I programmed another warp jump. It was an old star with a pale blue flame. According to the screen, it was smaller than the Sun.
I’d seen pictures of a dwarf star over the Internet. I’d never been so close to one (just like everyone else). It had an eerie quality to it, like a St. Elmo’s fire as you cross a swamp at night. Or hearing steps on the creaky stairs of the empty mansion you are sleeping in. The Prima star looked majestic in its funerary pyre, powerful, and very sad.
So, that’s why blue is the color of melancholy.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Rylena whispered like people do when standing in front of a work of art. “This Star and others like it have started so many fights these two years.”
“Why? Blue means they are old, right?”
“Usually. A blue star has mostly exhausted its hydrogen supply. But, Prima used to be a red dwarf. In the real Universe, red dwarfs burn their hydrogen very slowly and the existence of their blue stage is just speculation. The universe isn’t old enough to have blue dwarfs, yet, here’s one.”
“So, the developers added a couple million years to the age of Rune’s own universe,” I said, trying to imagine a group of lab-coated people fist-fighting over a videogame.
“The astronomers disagree if this blue dwarf is an adequate representation of predicted, real, blue dwarfs. For all we know, Rune is based on current theories of astrophysics and even quantum mechanics. Mostly. It includes things that make no sense, too, and some others that are only beginning to make sense now, two years later.”
“Sounds like creepypasta to me,” I said, thinking of the badly-written horror stories that were all the rage of the Internet year in and year out.
“Who knows. Tell me, Cole, have you ever seen a black dwarf? It’s the next stage in Prima life cycle, the one after it becomes white. Normally, a star would live for a quadrillion years before becoming one.”
“No. What does one look like?”
“Like staring a dead god in the eye, and wondering if it will blink.”
A shiver ran down my spine. The rest of the trip towards Prima Planet we made in silence.
“You want a landing zone that’s clear, but not any clear landing zone,” Rylena explained, as I ran the scanners over and over again as we circled the area where we thought the Temple was located. “Otherwise we’ll get eaten by the subterranean giant worms. Look for a hard rock surface, perhaps over a mountain.”
We were on an island in the middle of an ocean of acid, whose fumes rose hundreds of meters towards the atmosphere. The upper atmosphere layer was corrosive and the Apollo’s shields had gone down twenty percent just crossing it.
I’d read about death-planets in my investigation of Rune. They were a kind of end-game content. You’d find the best quests in a death-planet, the rarest minerals, and most unique loot, hidden in forgotten research facilities and Precursor monuments. Only half of the expeditions to a death-planets were successful, most of them ended in a total party wipe.
This planet, codenamed “Sludge,” was of little interest to most top-ranked explorers. It had no secret facilities, no rare minerals, and no legendary weapons hidden in secret quests. It only had an ocean of acid and carnivorous plants all over its apocalyptic surface.
And the giant worms, of course.
“Any other predators we need to worry about?” I asked. I found a nice expanse near the top of an elevated hill, only a couple miles away from the center of the island. “Because you gave me a machete, Rylena.”
“Useful against plants,” she said, “don’t worry about the animal life, most of it lives under the ocean.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that? The acid is strong enough to destroy any spaceship, you said so yourself.”
“People have recorded it with strong enough radar systems. Lots of writhing masses at the ocean’s depths.”
“Oh.” The ocean bubbled away in its yellowish, curded milk-like surface. I decided I’d never get near it, game or not.
The Apollo Wing landed without a hitch, but I still left its shields raised as we descended into Sludge’s surface. From the hill, I could see the mustard sea extending all into the horizon. It had no waves and no current, except for its constant state of ebullition. I could see huge bubbles rise and pop over the distance, pustules on the skin of a leper titan.
In front of us, a ragged jungle descended into the heart of the island, about a hundred miles of algae-green splattered with burnt, rocky hills. A mountain range split the expanse in two. And the blue star gave the sky a ghost-like appearance, as if the entire world stood eternally in a twilight limbo. My suit’s readings told me the air outside was freezing cold.
Sludge was a tomb.
“We are headed for the mountains,” Rylena pointed. “The temple is at their feet.”
The temple, she had told me earlier, had already been explored many times, as the Prima system was one of the first Death Planets found since Rune’s release. Still, there must be something the other players missed since Kipp had been sure to send us here.
“Let’s go, we don’t want to be around when night falls.”
We walked towards the mountains, diving deep into the vegetation of the island. Sometimes it was sparse, sometimes it was so dense that I had to make a path using my machete. Some roots resisted my hacks, and when I finally managed to cleave through, they vomited purple plant-blood all over my spacesuit.
“Don’t take the suit off when we return to the ship,” Rylena told me the first time I got sprayed. “That stuff is toxic.”
“Figures.”
I began to wonder how long was the trip going to take. It was midnight in the real world, and the mindjack’s Window showed both night and silence. Tiredness started to seep through my real body into my avatar’s. I wanted to go to sleep, even if Sludge was in the middle of its eerie day. My machete’s swings got heavier and clumsier. What would happen in-game if I fell asleep in the real world? Would I keep playing here, my body asleep but my conscience awake?
Rune was like a lucid dream, it wouldn’t be far off. Even now, the game’s dreamlike aura played with my senses. Strange, faint, bird-like screams came to us every few minutes. Roots retreated from my path, hid on the edge of my vision, then froze when I turned to them. Yellow acid mist surrounded us as Rylena and I walked deeper into the island. It came from geysers spitting the custard over the distance. The acid was hot and it reacted with the cold surface by becoming a curtain of mist that circled around the island, prey to the winds, as if dancing.
As the ground was covered slowly with roots and dead vegetation, the tree-like plant stalks became fatter and fatter. I could feel the roots dancing under my boots as they tried to scurry away from my view.
Wait a second.
That wasn’t an illusion. The plants could move.
“Uh, Rylena?” I muttered over the suit’s comms while looking at my feet and trying not to panic. It was like being ankle-deep into a nest of dark-green snakes. Wriggling, festering, slimy…
“Yeah, I noticed,” came the stiff answer. “Whatever you do, don’t make any sudden moves.”
I turned back and saw Rylena’s suit was covered up to her waist in the snake-roots. Her visor was down, so I couldn’t see her expression, but her hand was slowly materializing a rifle.
“I think the machete awoke them,” she whispered, over the comms. “Giving their size, I believe they are strong enough to suffocate us if they become violent.”
“Is engulfing us their way of saying ‘hello?’ because they already look violent to me.” I was now knee-high in the roots. I could feel them clenching my legs, pressuring them slowly, but with more and more strength every time.
“If we startle them they w
ill tear us apart,” Rylena said, “so don’t move a muscle.”
“They are about to break my legs,” I whimpered. I could feel the muscles around my knees swell with pressure. But the knees would be the first to break. I forgot all about Rune’s reduced pain receptors. I had broken bones before in real life, and my brain was hovering on the edge of panic at the thought.
Maybe I could hack them all in one strike. I slowly raised the machete over my head, blinking furiously to shake the sweat pearls that streaked down my forehead and into my eyes.
“Just hang on!” Rylena was trying to point her laser rifle, but the roots around her had begun to push her under their weight, to drag her. “The stalks are… their brains…”
I wasn’t listening to her, though, I only paid attention to the way the suit around my legs crumbled. In a second, I’d be squeezed like a sausage… Then I lost it. I got the machete down with all my strength, screaming incoherently. The blade bounced over the roots, left a thin purple gash and nothing else. I tried to hack again, but suddenly the roots roared to life. One as thick as an anaconda enveloped my arm and pushed it aside, my feet left the ground and I had to fight to breath under the weight of a dozen roots weighing down my rib-cage, smothering me, trying to pull me apart. I screamed and tried to fight them, but it was like punching a wall. One of them was at my neck and the suit’s sensors went mad with alarms. I didn’t know what would kill me first, the atmosphere when my suit breached, or the plants tearing me apart.
A controlled chain of lasers shot beneath me, missed the roots completely and smashed against one of the fat stalks over the distance. The stalk exploded in flames and it shrieked like a crazed bird. The roots shook me around like a ragdoll, maddened. The one around my neck relaxed, as did the other. I fell to the ground with a thud and my vision tinted red.
