by Rachel Aaron
SilentBlayde winced as she finished, and Tina realized belatedly that she was yelling, which made her feel awful. SB didn’t deserve her temper. Her guilt intensified when he turned away, wrapping his arms around his waist in a sign she recognized as maximum SilentBlayde upset.
“I’m sorry, ’Blayde,” she said, running her hand through Roxxy’s copper dreadlocks. “I’m just stressed. It’s been an awful night. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
She paused, waiting for him to reply. When he didn’t, Tina winced. She was trying to think of what else she could say when the elf collapsed right in front of her.
“SB!”
Tina lunged to catch him but stumbled instead when a horrible pain stabbed into her chest. The agony quickly spiraled outward, spreading down her torso and into her limbs until her whole body felt as if it were being crushed. As she gasped for air, her first panicked thought was that she was having a heart attack. It had to be something in the real world, because this pain was way worse than anything the game allowed for. But when she forced her violently shaking hands up to cover her ears in an attempt to trigger the emergency logout command, something new slammed inside her.
It felt like hitting a wall at full speed. Her head went WHAM, then SPIN, then WHAM again as the world turned to blurry Jell-O. She could dimly hear the other players screaming as their hazy figures dropped like cut puppets. A second later, Tina went down too, pitching onto her face next to the inert form of SilentBlayde.
The blackout couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. Tina almost wished it had been longer, though, because the moment she regained consciousness, all of her senses started trying to kill her. Her eyes were burning and blinded, and her body just felt wrong. It was too gigantic, too heavy. The sound of her own blood pumping was like hammer strikes in her ears, and her mouth was full of the gritty, acidic dust of the Deadlands.
It was overwhelming. Tina had never realized just how much FFO’s engine muted her in-game senses until they’d all kicked into overdrive. Even when she managed to roll over onto her back, the sullen gray light of the Deadlands scorched her eyes like she was staring straight into the sun. She threw an arm over her face to block it as she waited for the pain to fade, but that just let her focus on the roaring in her ears and the heaviness of her armor as it crushed her limbs. No matter what she did, the torment just kept going, rolling on and on without any hint of why it was happening or when it would stop. Then just when Tina was sure she was going to crack under the pressure, the hand she’d dug into the dirt beside her bumped something blessedly familiar.
Multiple small glass vials were strapped into loops on her belt. It was her potion holster, the place she kept her healing items for quick access while she was tanking. They were all still there now, and Tina grabbed one automatically, yanking a pan-elixir from the first slot. She knew it was stupid. Whatever was happening, it was obvious that the Sensorium Engine—the kinesthetic feedback system that allowed FFO to mimic physical sensation in virtual reality—was catastrophically broken. Hell, it was probably cooking everyone’s brains right now. A healing potion, even the most amazing cure-all in the game, was just a digital item. It couldn’t actually help her, but Tina didn’t care. She was willing to try anything to make the hurting stop, so she grabbed the potion and popped the cork, relying on years of habit to bring the vial to her mouth and dump it down her throat.
When she promptly choked on it.
Rather than simply vanishing as usual, the rainbow liquid of the pan-elixir splashed wetly against her tongue. Equally astounding was how good it tasted—like the freshest, sweetest strawberry smoothie that had ever been. It took a few coughs, but once she got it flowing down the right pipe, the magical ambrosia washed away her pain and confusion, replacing them with glowing warmth as Tina’s broken senses slammed back into place.
Strength surged through her limbs, causing the coffin-like weight of her armor to vanish. Light and free, Tina shot to her feet with such vigor that she missed her new center of gravity and nearly fell over again. Swaying from side to side, she wondered what the hell the Human Analogue Translation System was doing. Operating Roxxy had always felt a bit like walking on poles, but at least the game had more or less matched Tina’s real five-foot-tall body to that of the hulking stonekin. Now, though, she felt as if she was something else entirely.
Flailing for support, Tina grabbed one of the road’s crumbling stone signposts. Grabbed and missed, because her arms were now three times longer than she was used to. Off guard and off balance, Tina lurched forward to wrap the entire post in a bear hug. She was leaning on the stone to steady herself when the post cracked in half under her tremendous weight, sending her right back toward the ground.
She caught herself at the last second, narrowly avoiding another face full of dust. In her rush to stay upright, though, Tina accidentally took the top half of the broken post with her. The huge chunk of stone had to weigh a hundred pounds or more, but it felt like nothing in her arms. Surprised, Tina gave the stone a squeeze, grinning when the gray rock crumbled beneath her colossal strength.
It was incredible. All the previous sensory trauma was gone, forgotten in the power-drunk euphoria of the pan-elixir. As she steadied herself at last, Tina could feel the astounding strength of Roxxy’s body, her body, running through every muscle. She could smell the earth on her stone skin and taste the cool smoothness of her white marble teeth. The stonekin’s senses had completely overwhelmed Tina to the point where she couldn’t even feel her real body lying in bed at home anymore. She was still marveling at the way her stone hands moved like actual flesh inside her armored gloves when a loud, persistent, and terrifying noise finally beat its way through her magical high.
Tina looked up with a start. Someone was screaming. Lots of someones. Shaking her head to clear the last of the pan-elixir’s effects, Tina turned to see the rest of her raid thrashing on the road like an entire school of fish out of water. From the way their hands were covering their faces, she knew that they were going through the same sensory hell she’d just escaped. She still didn’t know what had caused the disaster—if it was a bug or some horrible new hack—but the pan-elixir had worked on her, so she grabbed another off her belt and dropped down beside the spasming SilentBlayde.
He cried out when she touched him, screaming in pain as her huge hand crushed his shoulder. Tina let go with a curse and eased up on her strength until she was cradling him like an egg. Next, she pinched the small potion bottle delicately between her giant stone fingers and popped the cork. When it was ready, she pulled down SB’s special-edition Fukumen Festival 2060 ninja mask and gently pried his clenched jaw apart just enough to shove the pan-elixir into his mouth.
After a few sloppy chugs, the elf’s hands flew up to cup the potion bottle. SilentBlayde finished the rest of the elixir in one gulp, then his bright-blue eyes snapped open as he slipped out of her grasp. He moved so fast, Tina didn’t even see him stand before he was on his feet in front of her, hands raised high over his head.
“Woooooo!” he cried, doing a perfect double back-flip. “That was amazing!”
“SB!” she snapped as he did a cartwheel. “Get a grip!”
Her voice—huge and deep now to match her body but still female—boomed across the dusty plain, and the frolicking elf covered his long ears in pain.
“Sorry,” she said at a much more reasonable volume. “But we’ve got problems.”
She pointed at the convulsing players, and the Assassin’s blond eyebrows shot up.
“Whoa,” he said, pulling his ninja mask back over his nose. “What’s going on, Roxxy? I felt like I was dying, but now I feel amazing. Never better in my life.” He reached up to touch his delicately pointed ears in wonder. “What’d you do?”
“Gave you a pan-elixir,” Tina replied, pulling off her backpack. “No idea what’s going on, but it worked for me, so I tried it on you. We need to get everyone else up or at least not in seizures. Got any pans on you?
”
“Two on my holster plus a full stack of twenty in my bags,” SB said proudly.
Tina whistled. “Damn, dude, you’ve been working hard.” Pan-elixirs were stupidly expensive to make. “I’ve got the main tank’s allotment in my pack, which is another twenty. Go get started administering yours, and the guild will pay you back. Get the healers first so we don’t all get slaughtered by some random monster.”
SilentBlayde saluted then popped the first of two elixirs off his belt holster as he moved toward the closest healer, a white-robed, fish-faced ichthyian Cleric who was curled up in a ball. Meanwhile, Tina turned her attention to her backpack. Between her and SB, they should have enough potions to get everyone up, but when she flipped her bag open and made the hand gesture to bring up her inventory, nothing happened.
“What the hell?”
She made the gesture again with the same result. Her backpack was no longer a void of floating icons representing her stuff. It was just an ordinary cloth rucksack filled with squashed bread. Grabbing the strap, Tina turned her bag upside down and shook it. Twenty loaves of bread, some gold coins, and three large iron bars fell out. She was staring in horror at the sad pile when she realized it wasn’t just her inventory that was broken. The entire interface was gone. Her health bar, defense points, ability icons, mini-map, chat log, raid list—everything she normally kept up was missing. Her vision was perfectly clear of all information overlays, including the level icons and player names for the raid in front of her.
Bag forgotten, Tina shot to her feet, swiping her hands through the menu gesture as she went. Just like with her backpack, though, nothing happened. She made the gesture to bring up the system menu next, but all she saw were her own giant steel-gauntleted arms waving in front of her.
She stopped, stone body shaking. As alarming as this situation had been so far, Tina had never questioned that it was caused by something explainable—a bug, a hack, a horrible malfunction—something that made sense. Now, every instinct she had was screeching at her that this was different. This wasn’t just an interface screwup. Something fundamental in the game had changed, something bad. She was struggling to make a list of everything that was broken when a wind blew down from the Dead Mountain’s battlements, carrying the faint sound of hundreds of screams.
Her head shot up, then she took a step back. Maybe she was just seeing things differently without the interface, but the Dead Mountain fortress looked… bigger. Much bigger, like an actual mountain. With the wind blowing down it, she could hear screams coming from the upper levels, but she didn’t see the undead patrols on the battlements anymore. She also didn’t see the purple swirl of the instance portal. The giant gate was now just empty, standing wide-open to reveal the huge, dark hall of the dungeon’s first wing and the things moving in the dark inside it.
“SB?” Tina called, voice trembling. “I think we need to get out of here. How’s that healer coming?”
When the Assassin didn’t answer, Tina turned to see he was still wrestling with the Cleric. Trapped in sensory overload, the blue-scaled ichthyian thrashed at every touch, wrenching his mouth away whenever SilentBlayde tried to cram the pan-elixir between his fish lips. Tina was about to go help hold him down when a harsh metallic screech pierced the air.
She whirled back around with a curse. Every Dead Mountain raider knew that noise. It was the sound the skeleton patrols made when they detected a player. Wincing at the bad timing, Tina drew her sword and started searching the gray landscape for the enemy, but all she saw was the empty road.
Confused, Tina squinted down the gray road toward the mountain. As she’d noted before, the swirling purple vortex that used to mark the start of the dungeon was gone. Without it blocking her view, she could see undead moving inside the Dead Mountain’s grand entrance hall, but they were hundreds of feet away, much too far to have been triggered by the raid.
No one must have told them that, though. No sooner had her eyes adjusted to the dark than Tina spotted a pair of enormous armored skeletons as they ignited their flaming swords and rushed forward, bones rattling as they charged through the hall and out the mountain’s gate.
Straight toward her.
Scrambling, Tina bent down to grab her massive tower shield off the ground where she’d dropped it. By the time she’d gotten it back onto her right arm, the first skeleton was on top of her. It was even bigger up close, ten rattling feet of dusty bone, tarnished armor, and blue-white ghostfire filling her vision as it raised its flaming sword with both hands to chop at her head.
For an eternal second, mortal terror froze Tina in place. Then years of habit kicked in, and her body moved on its own, snapping her shield up just in time to catch the burning blade before it could land in her scalp. The impact sent Tina’s feet sliding backward down the dusty road, but she managed to stop the monster’s rush. She shoved the skeletal knight back next, swinging her own oversized sword to smack its blade off her shield with a ringing clang.
The parry was pure instinct. The undeads’ chopping attacks had always been repetitive and predictable, and Tina had spent so many years battling skeletons, bandits, dragons, and so forth that the motions of FFO’s active combat system had long since become second nature. But while all of those battles had felt as real as the game could make them, they were nothing like this. With the gritty wind blowing in her face and her muscles aching from deflecting the skeleton’s attack, Tina had never felt more heart-poundingly “here.” The rattle of animated bones, the cobblestones sliding under her metal boots, the so-cold-it-burned heat of the ghostfire rising from the monster’s blade—it all felt real, and the fear that brought was real as well, slowing down her practiced motions as the skeleton threw its sword up to hammer into her shield again.
Focused on the enemy with the blade over her head, Tina didn’t even notice the second skeleton rushing past her until it was several feet down the road. Confused and frantic, she considered letting it go until she realized it wasn’t trying to flank her. As the tank—the player in the party who taunted monsters into attacking them instead of going for smaller, squishier prey—Tina was used to being the only target, but the second skeleton hadn’t even glanced in her direction. It was going for the downed raid behind her, its sword already lifted to strike the helpless body of a human player lying on the ground.
By the time Tina realized what was about to happen, it was too late. She watched in horror as the skeleton’s blue-white flaming sword swept down, slicing the incapacitated player’s head off in a single strike. The head bounced away like a rotten melon while the neck stump pumped blood onto the gray rocks of the road.
As she watched the viscous red liquid soak into the dust, Tina forgot that there was a skeleton over her head as well. She forgot about the fight, forgot about the raid. All she could see was that red liquid pouring from the stump of what had once been a person.
There was no dismemberment in Forever Fantasy Online. Getting hit with a sword caused a stagger animation and lost hit points. There wasn’t even blood. Certainly nothing like this. This wasn’t just a new graphic. She could see the bright white vertebrae sticking out of the dead player’s neck. See the blood dripping down the sundered flesh to the ground where it sank like an oil spill into the gray dust of the—
The skeleton in front of her brought its blade down on her shield with enough force to make her stagger. The deafening crash of cursed metal on sunsteel snapped her out of her shock. Blinking frantically, Tina tore her eyes away from the corpse and shoved her shield at the skeleton attacking her to buy some room. While it was recovering, she looked frantically over her shoulder to get an eye on the skeleton behind her, which was already moving toward the next unconscious player.
Tina moved on instinct, slamming her foot down to activate her wide area taunt. The only way to prevent another disaster was to get the runaway skeleton focused on her, so she stomped as hard as she could, yelling for good measure. With no ability interface, she had no way of knowing i
f the ability would work, but the moment her boot landed, a brilliant shockwave pulsed out from her foot, running up the skeletons’ legs and through their bodies until the blue-white ghostfire in their eye sockets flashed red.
That was exactly what was supposed to happen. But before Tina could feel relieved about activating the right taunt by gesture alone, everything else went wrong.
Normally, the environment in FFO wasn’t collapsible. That must have changed too, though, because unlike every other time she’d used her taunt on this exact stretch of road, her stomp now sent a spiderweb of cracks through the ancient cobblestones. The ground fell apart a second later, toppling Tina and both skeletons over as the road collapsed into a wide crater of loose dust and rolling stones.
To Tina’s dismay, the skeletons were the first to make it up. They rolled back to their feet in unison, chopping at her with their swords while she was still scrambling to get her legs under her. She lurched backward just in time to avoid getting filleted, throwing out her arms for balance, which was a nearly fatal mistake. The moment her shield was out of the way, the first skeleton’s blue-white flaming sword shot through the gap in her defenses.
Tina gasped in terror as seven feet of flaming steel crashed into the heavy armor that guarded her neck. As expected of top-level raid gear, the runed metal deflected the blade with barely a scratch, but the ghostfire that coated the skeleton’s weapon flashed an angry white. As the light pulsed, Tina felt burning cold bite through her armor, down her neck, and into her collarbone on her right side. It wasn’t a dangerous hit, but the burn still hurt a hell of a lot more than the game should have allowed, and the unexpected pain destroyed what was left of Tina’s stability.
She went down with a pained yelp, smacking her head on a rock as she landed, which was how Tina learned that the “don’t show helmet” setting she used so she wouldn’t have to play the game while staring through a realistic-style visor now meant “you have no helmet.” The only things that saved her from an instant KO were the weird metal-but-not-metal copper dreadlocks of her hair, which softened the blow. Still, all Tina could do for the next several heartbeats was lie dazed on her back with her sword arm flung out and her shield over her chest as she stared up at the flat gray clouds of the Deadlands. Then the sky vanished as the two skeletons appeared above her.
