“Plus, I’m sorry.”
“Shut up.” She had out a tablet with the RPG logo on the back, with several of those glowing racing stripes zigging and zagging around it. “I’ll run a diagnostic. It’ll run scans for a few minutes and make sure all the routines, subroutines and–”
“Sub-subroutines?”
“Action packets and code clusters. Like I said, shut up.”
He ducked his head and sighed.
“Sorry… I’m just, I thought this would be going differently, okay? I didn’t expect to have to do actual work while I was here. I was hoping for a nice, relaxing… ugh.”
“Dogfight in space?”
She sighed. “I guess that was a stupid expectation, huh?”
“Well you better get ready,” he said, and gestured out toward the rapidly approaching. “We’re gonna crash pretty much any second.”
Kayle swore at the situation, then gasped. Another red circle flashed into Derek’s HUD, and at the bottom of his screen blinked the words Engine Failure.
Chapter 7 - Planetside, Honey-Loving Natives
“God! How many times are things going to be Risky or Desperate in this game?” Derek asked, holding hard onto a handle built into the wall. Meredith grunted, straining to keep the stick level as gauges and screens booped and beeped at them, showing red on some, and a dark orange on others. An emergency klaxon gave a half-screech but died shortly after, Meredith’s quick and impatient fingers finding the off switch faster than a complete loop of its programmed repetitions.
Spling– some bolt or screw popped out of its place with force and zinged about the room. He dodged desperately, Fortitude popping up into his HUD and two dice rolling to his defense. A 7 and a 9, not bad. He matrixed backward and the thing zinged by, bouncing once more and then lodging into the lovely shoulder of Kayle Jai.
“Ahhhhhhh!” Meredith screamed. “That hurts so goddamn much. This AR feedback is way over regulation. Jeez– ah, okay, it’s settling down. I felt like I’d been shot!”
Every time you make a skill check in a Desperate situation, you gain 1 XP! He punched the notification away, only to have another one pop to life right in front of his field of vision. The blatting of horns and confetti shot into view, with the message Congratulations! You have earned enough XP to level up! Would you like to do so now? But he’d already swiped it away before registering what it meant.
Whoops.
“Hey, Mare?”
“No. Not now.”
“Uhh… what can I do? How can I help?”
“Just sit over there and look pretty,” she snapped.
Derek couldn’t help it, an animalistic growl came out of him. It was a wieekoo response from the game, and he immediately regretted it. Kered was coming to the fore more often, and it wasn’t exactly welcome.
“Fine, see what you can do to keep us from imploding or exploding or both.”
A new pie circle popped into his AR, causing him to grit his teeth in annoyance. However, this one was green, and read Safe landing, a wonderful alternative to the reddish Engine Failure. Both had six wedges, though the red one had a wedge filled in already. He reached back into the cockpit, which was full of levers, dials, switches and readouts, and began doing his thing.
The game automatically rolled his Engineering for him, resulting in a 2.
Damn! Not now, dice gods don’t fail me now!
Would you like to spend a Plot Point to reroll Y/N?
He slammed his hand on Y without thinking twice. The new roll was a 6, which was apparently enough. Between him and Kayle, the green circle had gone half full, while the exploding engine pie shot up three wedges.
“Complete success baby!” she shouted. “Get your ass in gear!”
He spotted a panel and opened it, only to find a confusing mess of toggles and wires. “Toolbox, there’s got to be a toolbox!”
The AR flashed before him. Are you attempting to be Resourceful? Your score is 1.
“Fine, yes!”
“Check in the compartment next to the door,” Kayle suggested, then let go with a string of curses that made him cringe. As soon as she did, he had two dice instead of one. Your teammate is assisting you! They rolled a 10 and a 2, thank god, and a second later, a toolbox had slid out of the wall.
Every time you make a skill check in a Desperate situation, you gain 1 XP!
“That is so annoying!” he shouted. “Please tell me you can turn that off.”
“Not the time!” Kayle responded frantically.
It’s just a game, he reminded himself, and selected whatever tools he happened upon first. Just like the cockpit buttons, the tools mattered less than his dice rolls.
The game traced tiny glowing lines around the tools, beside which was written Fine Quality Tools. This time his Engineering roll gained Increased Effect, judging by the flashing notification that appeared when he’d grabbed the tools.
“Engineering time,” he breathed, and it came out as a low, intense wieekoo growl instead. He shoved the tools into the open panel and just kind of moved his hands around ineffectually. His dice rolled 6 and 4, but somehow his Partial Success was upgraded to a Complete Success. A huge sigh of relief later, the green circle for Safe Landing filled in completely, with two wedges remaining in Engine Failure. A glance at the viewscreen showed the planet’s surface rapidly rushing up to meet them.
“Hang onto your butt,” she hissed, and then he was up in the air. He rebounded off the top of the seat, which hurt, and fell on his head, which also hurt.
You’ve sustained a Level 2 Harm. Would you like to resist and step it down to Level 1? Y/N
He groaned out an affirmative, whereby the game then rolled Fortitude for him. A roll of 8 later, he didn’t feel too bad, just bruised. Conveniently enough, Bruised ribs settled into a flashing box in front of his eyes, at the lowest of three Harm levels. Next to it read Decreased Effect, which caused him to groan again. It too disappeared.
The ship (what remained of it anyhow) skidded to a stop.
Kered remained curled on the floor (slanted as it was, jamming him against the still-open toolbox) for entirely too long, just trying to breathe. It was a game, he told himself over and again. It was a game and if he turned off the AR overlay he’d just be in a huge space filled with white blocks magnetically bunched together or however they did it. The game couldn’t kill him.
“Hey, uh… Kayle?
Every time you make a skill check in a Desperate situation, you gain 1 XP!
He couldn’t help it, and swore loud and long. The XP drifted up into the box next to The Terror Within and became another cheerful checkmark. Taunting him.
“Tell me how to turn it off,” he groaned. “I can’t watch all the stupid die rolls and XP gains. It’s–” Killing me, he was about to say. “–distracting. Mere?”
“Untwist those panties, and hang on a second,” she said. A couple of clicks later, she slumped out of the captain’s chair and crept back toward him. “You okay?”
“Bruised ribs,” he said.
“I promise not to punch you until you’ve healed that up.” She paused. “Now, if you swipe in from the left, you’ll see a little gear. That’s your AR settings.”
He did so, and winced. He was currently at full haptic pain response. He dialed that back to moderate, then checked on the notification settings, and scaled those back. Definitely no more Desperate XP notifications. He erased the dice all together, and opted instead for readouts of the score outcomes, along with the outstanding clocks. Those must’ve been the pies with the wedges.
Oh yeah, he’d leveled up!
He swiped through menu items until he landed on the little red number in one of the tabs. Okay, level up, great. He tapped it, and suddenly the blare of trumpets and party noise makers and confetti returned, making him wince. Congratulations, you’ve leveled up! He tapped on it.
A list of his rewards spilled down before him, with entirely too many exclamation points:
● Your ability points have be
en refilled!
● You’ve been completely healed!
● Your position has been moved from Desperate to Controlled!
● You have been gifted 1 Plot Point!
● Your armor has been restored!
● Your account has been given 2 Credits!
● You have gained 1 Skill Point! Tap to choose and allocate.
“One! One measly skill point?,” Derek moaned. “Seriously?”
“One at a time, killer. Don’t knock the Plot Points and Credits though.”
He swallowed his disappointment and tapped it. If only he’d tapped it while they were in the ship, it might not have exploded. “Is there any strategy to allocating skill points? Should I go to rank 3 in something or just fill in a first dot or what?”
“You get bonuses if you have both skills ranked up in a genre,” she said.
He went to tap the second dot of Engineering, then reconsidered. Most likely his days of trying to fix their ship were over. They no longer had a ship, for the time being. So, no on Spacecraft. They were probably in a situation where they’d need some Survival. His was zero, and rolling two dice only to keep the lower was for chumps. He selected Survival 1, and then confirmed with a Y.
“Great, done! What’s next? Where are we?”
“Welcome to Lagrenia, planet of the Crand, home of the Stellar Necropolis. Which I can proudly say is less than a day’s journey from where we landed,” Meredith said.
Derek got up, feeling a whole lot better than he had.
Why would anyone want to feel all of that pain?
He shook his head and looked out the viewscreen. It had a crack running down its corner, but it still glimmered with high resolution light. The present view was that of the top of a forested plateau swathed in thick fog and torrential rain. The creaking of the hull signalled tremendous wind torque and unimaginable atmospheric pressure.
“What is going on out there?” Derek asked. That was one hell of a storm.
Meredith got up out of her chair and stretched. “What is going on is that we just had a really bad series of rolls in what should have been a gimme introduction mission and now we’re trapped on our target planet in the middle of a 1 in 100 chance megastorm without anything fun to do. That is what is going on. But, luckily, such situations are programmed to hasten themselves through so as to get us players to the meat of the action. I would guess that something crazy is going to happen in five to ten minutes. So get those buns ready for some running and jumping because I’m going to guess the local flora is not happy to see us.”
Derek stretched as well, and then he began pacing back and forth. Clank clunk clank clunk his boats sounded. The air felt stuffy and wet, tension thrummed through his body, and his brain tickled with the hint of a headache. Come on come on! Action do your thing!
He turned. “You think there’s a first aid kit or–”
“Wahahoohoohoohoohee!” the onboard computer squealed. Meredith shrieked and Derek came running over.
“What the hell is this?” Derek asked, his wieekoo avatar shrieking and whining. A fanged mouth had appeared in the middle of the electronic keypad.
Meredith shuddered. “This is what happens right before a technician loses his job. That’s what this is. It’s a glitch, Derek. A horrible and awful glitch that probably is a string of code meant for the horror genre.” She took out her Prestige Gaming command pad and hacked into the system to remove the offending line of code. The mouth disappeared, but the console took on a vague triangular shape, causing Meredith to curse and type harder. Finally the console gave up resisting and went back to being normal.
“So you fixed it?” Derek asked. Meredith rolled her eyes.
“Looks like a native glitch– something that happens more than I’d like to admit in these crossover worlds. But that’s probably the only one–”
Clank, clung, cling! The sound of multiple somethings striking their craft came from the outside. Looking at the viewscreen Derek saw that the rain and wind had died, true to Meredith’s prediction. However strange spears waved through the fog and all of their points sparkled an electric light green. One and then another flashed out to strike the craft. And after the third strike the vehicle shuddered and its lights went dark.
“Warning– EMP detected. Vehicle shutdown in process. Please eliminate the source of the EMP before resuming,” the onboard computer remarked. And then the screen faded and everything was darkness.
“Great. Yeah, okay. So I guess I just drop the scrap in the back and we go out and fight the natives, yeah? How many spears did you count up there Meredith?”
“Maybe twenty?” she responded thoughtfully. “We might be able to take them, you know. We are superheroes, after all.”
She got up from her chair and strolled over to where the makeshift door hung squished into the hull from Derek’s telekinetic burst. Meredith kicked the heel of her right boot into the ground and blades sprung out from both the boot tips as well as the backs of her hands.
“Drop it, Kered!”
Clung! The back dropped, hitting the ground and spinning away.
“Ka-reeeeeeee!” the natives screamed. Now that he could see them Derek realized that they looked like fat little Winnie the Pooh bears, with tails like Tigger, and teeth like Pennywise. He shuddered and wondered how it would feel when they started to eat him alive.
“Just a game, just a game, just a game,” Derek chanted to himself.
“Hi-yaaa!” Kayle Jai yelled, stabbing a very exuberant Crandish in the face with a leggy straight. I made no sound as it toppled over backwards into the arms of its companions. Another two followed attacking her from her flanks. Kayle ducked under the flashing spear point of one, then grabbed the shaft of the other. Twirling it in her hands she deflected a thrown spear, then stabbed the one on her right in its cute and fluffy stomach. That Crandish threw up blood and curled in on itself.
“This is extremely graphic!” Derek called out. He scrolled his HUD and chose a laser blaster, feeling a holster appear at his side. Two equipment slots disappeared from his available inventory.
Pow! One Crandish dropped. Pow! There fell another. Then a glowing green point accelerated toward him. What the hell? Is that thing charging me? He stumbled back in confusion, and took the point of the spear hard in his shoulder.
You’ve sustained a Level 2 Harm. Would you like to resist and step it down to Level 1? Y/N
He selected yes, rolling a six. Impaled he read. Damn!
His vision went dizzy and almost drunken, but his pistol blasted another Crandish pooh bear monster alien. He slumped to one knee. Meredith screamed, a distant echo in his ear. He saw a pile of those Crandish around her, but so many more beyond her and then she took a spear to the throat and dropped. Was she dead?
“Kayle?” he croaked, firing wildly at anything that moved.
Then came a tremendous bang from outside. Thunder? Was the system bringing back the storm? The Crandish stopped and milled about in frightened confusion.
Crack! The sharp sound of something hitting the ground at high velocity piped in from outside. The force of the impact blew away the fog in all directions, clearing the battlefield for its later participant. Bronze skin, long black hair, emerald eyes and the tight body of an acrobat covered in a skimpy, curve-hugging chainmail bikini stood beaming like some sort of medieval tribal goddess. In both of her hands were clutched curved shortswords, shiny, sharp, and covered in a bluish magical aura.
“Ya!” the woman yelled, her face filled with anger and bloodlust. She sprinted forward, slashing back and forth, left and right between them. Chop, stab, slash, bash. Her elbows, her heels, her blades– all were one in the murder frenzy she presented them. And, when all the Crandish were left a meaty slurry on the ground, she sat, panting.
“You all have something to eat? And some booze? I think I deserve a break.”
Chapter 8 - She Has An Amazing . . . Smile
Kered the wieekoo was clearly smitten immediately.
That kind of thing was inevitable when you put a mid-20’s hormone-filled hetero caveman in the same room with a half-naked tanned sex object that moonlighted as a whirling dervish of devastation with the short sword. Gods, Meredith wasn’t even inclined toward the lesbian, but there was no denying the sheer animal magnetism of this woman.
She felt cheated. And trespassed upon.
“Who the hell are you?” Meredith demanded, rising into a sitting position to treat her wounds. Using her Medicine skill would take her out of critical and maybe give her some legs to stand on.
The new woman was a surprise. Meredith had expected to find only Non-Player Characters out here (NPCs, like in the Gear kiosk) but here was another paying customer. Her avatar Kayle Jai was in no fit state to take her on, either. Die rolls resolved in her HUD and her Medicine roll only cleared her from a Level 3 down to a Level 2 Harm, which was still serious business. She was going to be at minus one die on all rolls until she could step it down again.
“Listen, thanks for your help but staying quiet is just making things strange. Who are you and why the hell are you dressed like that?” Meredith asked.
This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Meredith was very close to just calling the whole thing off and either stalking away to leave him to his own devices, or pinning him to the floor and demanding consent out of him.
“I’m Sigourney. Sigourney . . . Steele,” the woman replied, looking about as if she were lost. “My ship exploded and I escaped?” she asked confusedly, brushing back some errant hair.
Meredith drew a deep breath, moved over to tend to Derek, and tried to regain some measure of cool. So what if the hot Amazon was a good foot taller than Meredith. Kayle Jai was every nerd’s wet dream. This vixen hadn’t piloted them to safety, Meredith had. This real-life pinup wasn’t applying bandages and using a Medicine skill of 2 to see to Kered’s stupidity-induced wounds. No, that was her too. She’d burned all her plot points to get him back toward healthy, and was considering simply hacking the game and resetting them to healthy.
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