by Sam Ferguson
[QUEST ADDED: A RING FOR FREYA]
Brian didn’t make it his active quest, but he definitely wasn’t going to put it off for long. Leaving the shop, he rushed to the Anorit library. Inside he found Mike, Augustin, and Rhonda all waiting for him.
“We were just about to come looking for you,” Mike said. “We could see the book icon turned green, but it seemed to take you a lot longer than it should have.”
“Ah... sorry. There was a troll in the cave where the book was. I barely escaped.”
“Nice work!” Mike said. “I should have gone then—I have a couple of new spells I haven’t tried out yet. One has a randomized impact aspect but is supposed to drain life. It might have countered the troll’s healing ability.”
“It’s all right. I got a nice bonus though, Barry tried to attack me again. He ended up falling over the cliff’s edge.”
Mike laughed loudly while Rhonda and Augustin each contributed a softer chuckle.
“I’m sorry I missed that!” Mike said after a bit.
“Guys, I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but I have a beetle sample calling my name,” Rhonda said. Can we hurry and finish this quest?”
“And I have a warrior guild quest I want to finish tonight before I go to bed,” Augustin said.
“Sure, one thing though,” Brian said. “I have a couple ingredients you might find useful for alchemical uses,” Brian told Rhonda. He dropped the manticore heart and wolf fangs on the ground.
Rhonda picked them up. “Thanks! I know just what to do with these.”
“We’ve already turned in our two books,” Augustin said.
“And I turned in the cookbook we took from the orcs,” Mike added.
Brian nodded, knowing they were all waiting on him. He went up to the scholar, who was sitting behind the desk busily muttering about some sort of spell book.
“We have the missing books,” Brian announced.
The scholar looked up and pushed a pair of thick spectacles higher onto the bridge of his nose. Each of the four books appeared on the desk in front of him.
“Deidra Dii’s Famous Satyr Recipes,” he said as he checked it from the list. “Artermis Klunker’s Clanking Clonkers,” he said as he opened a second book and inspected the interior. “Good, good.” He checked it off the list. “Brimball’s List of Unexplored Caves.” The scholar flipped it over in his hands, then stacked the first three books, muttering to himself as he crossed the third off the list. He then picked up the fourth book. “My, my, my, this book is stained with blood.”
“It came that way,” Brian put in. “On account of the troll eating the man who borrowed it and all.”
The scholar shook his head. “No, no, this won’t do. This won’t do at all.” He opened the book and found some blood spatter on the interior pages, but nothing that distorted the words. “It’s still in usable condition, but the order will not pay full price for damaged books. The reward for this book will be reduced to two hundred and fifty gold.”
“That’s not fair,” Brian protested. “It was like that when I found it.”
“No, no!” the scholar stood up and wagged a finger as he looked at Brian over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles. “The unfairness is the damage to the book. Now the knowledge is damaged. The collection the book fits into will not be pristine. That is the true injustice here. A book has been destroyed!”
“I mean... the guy who borrowed it was eaten,” Brian said.
“Both of our books had dead people holding them,” Rhonda said.
“And the cookbook borrower was imprisoned by orcs,” Mike added.
“But sure, let’s mourn the bloodstained book...” Brian shook his head.
[QUEST COMPLETED: OVERDUE BOOKS]
[+406 GP]
[+1,000 XP]
[You are now level 5]
[Fezhik reputation +10]
[Order of Anorit reputation +50]
[Greencap reputation +10]
“Nice, just hit level five,” Brian said.
Mike laughed. “I’m level eight now.”
“Me too,” said Augustin.
“I’m level nine,” Rhonda said.
Everyone turned to face her.
“I thought you said this was your first time playing?” Mike said.
“It is, but I’ve been making a lot of potions with the ingredients I pick up. I’ve also spent time talking to folks around town and in the shops. My alchemy and persuasion skills have gone up quite a lot. I’ve also been able to complete several alchemist guild quests.”
Dang. New girl has brains, beauty, AND is kicking my butt in VR.
“Well,” Mike said. “Now that we’ve split the gold for completing this quest, we should see how close we are to buying ourselves a house so we can have our own custom save point and hire mercs and stuff.”
“I have four hundred and sixteen gold,” Augustin said.
“I have five hundred and three pieces,” Brian said.
“Well, thanks to my looting last night and today’s... um... extracurricular activities at the Featherstone residence, plus the reward from this quest, I have twelve hundred on the nose.”
Rhonda folded her arms. “How much did you say the house was going to cost again?”
“Five thousand,” Mike replied. “We’re at a little over twenty-one hundred so far. What do you have?”
Rhonda smiled. “Four thousand, five hundred and thirty-three.”
Silence hit the room like a thunderclap. Mike and Brian shared a glance, and then finally Mike worked up the nerve to ask.
“How did you come up with that so fast?”
Rhonda’s smile widened. “I told you, I’ve been making a lot of potions. I didn’t see the need to keep all of them, so I sold almost everything I created. But first I spent time talking with the vendors until they were in a cooperative frame of mind. I got pretty good prices.” She paused and then added, “Sometimes it’s smart to study the plants and bugs.”
Augustin started chuckling in the background.
“Let’s go get our house!” Mike said enthusiastically.
7
Horse Thieves and Traitors
The group followed Mike to a large lot on the western side of the city, two blocks south of the main castle. The house itself wasn’t much to look at—a single story building fairly similar to most of the houses in Fezhik with a whitewashed shiplap exterior and thatched roof. One of the front windows was boarded up, but the other was intact, with diagonal iron work running along the outside of the frosted glass.
“Here it is,” Mike said. “It may not look like much now, but we’ll be able to upgrade it several times so that it’s a proper manor house. It will allow us to hire mercenaries and recruit NPCs to our house as well. It should also create a steady flow of income for us at higher levels, like fifty gold per hour or something like that, to use for outfitting the group.”
“Sounds good,” Augustin said.
“It will also give us our own unique save point, so we can better plan our quests.”
“I like it,” Brian said. “It’s plain, but I can see the potential.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had already seen similar devices in previous Terramyr Online games.
“All right, everyone give me your gold. I’ll make the purchase and list each of us as founding members of the house. That way, each of us will get higher rewards as we upgrade the house.”
“You aren’t going to steal the gold and run away?” Augustin joked.
“I thought about it, but honestly the house will make us all a lot more money in the long run,” Mike said casually.
Brian and the others tossed coin bags to Mike. He then went and interfaced with the for-sale sign. After a minute or two, Augustin asked, “What’s taking so long? Did they raise the price?”
“No, I’m just making sure I list all of our character names so it recognizes the founding members. Also, I’m trying to select a cool house flag and name.”
“So, explain
this to me,” Rhonda put her hands on her hips while everyone waited for Mike. “Owning a house gives us a unique save point and a way to take a cut of the profits any future house member makes from a quest?”
“Yeah, among other things.” Brian nodded. He loved the geeky, number crunching aspects of games like this, but also the opportunity to employ real strategy against other players. “The ultimate goal of a game like this, once rolled out commercially, would be to establish a house of sufficient size and means to attract the strongest players—along with a range of NPCs—to eventually rise to leadership of a faction.
“So for us, we would hope to eventually gain enough wealth and reputation that one of us becomes governor of the Greencaps, or perhaps that, as a group of four founding members, we supplant him for some kind of four-person triumvirate,” Rhonda nodded, understanding the Roman political reference. “After that, we would want to lead our faction to dominion of the entire continent, either by alliance or conquest of the rival factions. The final goal would be to take the Crystal of Power and subjugate the natural races and the essence of Terramyr itself. At least until another group is able to wrest control away from us. Then we try to find a way to take it back, which might be easy, or might have us clawing back up from the bottom of the dog pile again, depending on how badly we get taken down. We should give it a try when the game is available for real.” He was already making plans for how they would be able to smoke any competition with the kind of preview they were getting of this world.
Finally, the “for sale” sign disappeared from the front of the house. A flash of golden light washed over the building and lot. A two-foot stone fence topped with wrought iron bars extending another two feet enveloped the lot. A wrought iron gate with a snarling dragon head perched along the top rail closed the property in. The boarded window was replaced with a fully new window matching the other one, and the chains were removed from the front door.
[ACQUIRED KEY TO HOUSE BOB]
“House Bob?” Augustin asked.
“I thought you said you were going to make a cool house name?” Rhonda chimed in.
Brian snickered. “Couldn’t think of anything clever?”
“What?!” Mike stammered. “No, I made a cool name. I wrote in “House Lokton.” You know, like one of the book series had. I don’t know what happened.”
“What happened is we paid five thousand gold, most of it my gold, and you got us a really dorky house,” Rhonda said.
Mike puffed air into his mic.
Score one for Rhonda. Brian tried to rescue his friend. “Maybe it just glitched out or something. Check the menu for the house. Brian opened his user interface and found a new section for “House Bob” and opened it up. Right there in the founding members section it listed the following order; Bob, Demetrius, Kolvurin, and Sylendra. “I think I know what happened,” Brian said. “Looks like it just gave the house the name of the first member, and since Bob comes first alphabetically for our character names... it took it.”
“Ugh.” Mike groaned. “Hi, I am Kolvurin, mighty founder of House Bob and Terror of the Known Realms.”
Augustin laughed. “Actually, for all the NPCs, Bob might be a terrifying name. I mean, it is the most different name if you think about it. Everyone else has these fantastical names, and then there is Bob. It might strike fear into their hearts.”
Rhonda and Mike laughed.
“Well, either way, we’re all part of House Bob now,” Rhonda said. “We’ll just have to make the most of it. Let’s go inside.”
“Ladies first,” Augustin said.
“Such a gentleman,” Mike said.
“Not always,” Rhonda commented. “He also says ‘ladies first’ when we come to a scary cave or find a pocket of monsters.”
Mike and Brian both laughed at that.
“I don’t want to presume you’re helpless just because you’re a woman,” Augustin joked.
“Reminds me of Gimli when Legolas goes into the underground passage but Gimli is afraid to go,” Mike commented.
“Except I have better hair than Legolas,” Rhonda said.
“I dunno,” Mike protested. “I mean, your hair is great, but Legolas is... well... Legolas.”
Rhonda opened the door and went inside. Brian let Augustin and Mike go in next, then he brought up the rear. House Bob was a lot nicer on the inside than he had guessed it would be. Nice dark wood floors. A save point pedestal near the front door. The foyer stretched thirty feet back and was about twenty feet wide. Two doors were in the north wall and two more in the south, bedrooms most likely. Three open arches allowed passage from the foyer to a long dining hall.
In the middle of the foyer was a tall column made of marble. The stone was polished to a high sheen but didn’t have any designs on it.
“That’s our trophy totem,” Mike explained. “Once we start to rack up achievements, it will look cooler.”
“Oh look, our tapestries are hanging,” Rhonda said.
Brian looked up toward the ceiling and saw the four tapestries hanging large and proud for all to see. He moved to the save point and updated his file. His player ribbon then hung from the save point. The others did the same.
“Before we split up, I think we should take the excess gold and hire a steward. He will keep NPCs from breaking in.”
“Is that a frequent occurrence?” Augustin asked.
“Sometimes, plus it works against other players. I mean, I know this isn’t a full online version, but—“
“We could keep Barry out,” Rhonda said. There was something in her tone that was a tad more forceful than just a playful delineation of preferred teammates.
Whatever it was, she didn’t elaborate, and no one had the courage to ask.
“Yep, it will keep other players out even from the same campaign party,” Mike affirmed, moving the group beyond the awkward silence. “Everyone in favor of the idea?”
Three voices approved the motion in unison. Mike interfaced with the house menu once more, and about thirty seconds later House Bob had a well-groomed, rather tough-looking steward. The NPC’s name was Hektarin Longshield, a much better fantasy name than Bob, but there was no changing the house name now. Besides, Brian kind of liked it. Who else would name their character, or their house, Bob? No one. It was unique, in spite of its otherwise commonality.
Taking a closer look, the steward not only provided access to some low-level healing functions, he was a level-nine warrior. Companion NPCs usually matched the level of the highest-ranked player character; it was nice to have one that could perform dual functions. He would be a decent deterrent to most intruders, Barry included.
“I had enough to upgrade the door and window locks too,” Mike said. “Once one of us hits level ten, we should start seeing NPC recruits asking to join the house. Any recruit we admit will also defend the house if attacked or broken into. Unless we send the recruit away on assignment of course. Level ten is also when we can see our job board, which usually springs up along the back wall before the dining room. Should help us gain a solid advantage for quests and such.”
“Sounds good,” Brian said. “I feel satisfied with my work here tonight. I’m probably going to call it quits and put in a little work on my thesis before I turn in for the night.”
“I’m going to run down a few warrior quests before I log off,” Augustin said. “Want to make sure they’re all glitch-free so I can report something to Meredith tomorrow.”
“I still have that beetle to examine, but I suppose I could complete one more alchemy guild quest,” Rhonda said.
“Excellent, and I have a burglary job to finish for the thieves guild,” Mike said. As each of his friends headed for the door, Brian interfaced with the save point and logged off.
It had been nearly two days since Brian had logged on. Though he had fully intended on completing all of his active quests the previous day, he had been swept up in the excitement of discovering a stash of food items along the base of a partially excavate
d foundation that he had been working on for some time. Initially, he had found two jars filled with maize. While working yesterday, he had come across the remains of a pair of guinea pigs.
Since the date of the village he was uncovering was from the time of the last eruption of Quetrupillan, about 1,400 years ago, guinea pigs in this area, about the time the animals were first known to have been shipped outside of Peru, would have significant meaning for contact with people to the north. Not to mention a completely different set of implications if these animals proved to be of the Columbian line of guinea pig from the same time period. While most people probably didn’t need to ever think about mitochondrial DNA of guinea pigs to give their work meaning, this sort of thing was very exciting for Brian.
It required time and care to properly dig out the rest of the food storage area. He couldn’t simply snatch the items out of the ground that interested him the most. The context of the find was just as important as the find itself. By the time he had torn himself away from his work, it had been long past the scheduled time for the nightly meeting, and he had been too exhausted to worry much about it.
Using the old chat system the next morning, Brian had sent a written update to the professor and asked him to convey his apologies to Meredith as well, promising to make up his game time soon. When it had come right down to it though, the same thing had nearly happened again.
Brian knew it would be hard to explain to most people, but he had been the type to completely lose himself with single-minded focus on a task once he started something ever since he had been young. He figured that was why he had done so well in college and graduate school, even with the distance components of so many of his classes. He was good at focusing. Maybe a little too good, especially when the task allowed him to use his mind and his body and a little music was playing in the background.
