by Sam Ferguson
He hunted down the health potion, gathered it up, and then looted the other two fallen NPCs. He gained two sets of common clothes and five gold between them. The guy who had been taste-testing didn’t even have a dagger.
Brian almost felt bad for killing the taster. Almost.
He then went to the hut, which was no longer burning but had a blackened roof, and peeked inside. There was a small wooden chest next to one of the three skinny beds. He went in and tried to open it, but it was locked.
Brian selected his lockpick set and went to work. He could feel the tools vibrate in his hands whenever he tried to open the lock, telling him he hadn’t found the right angle. He tried a few times, attempting to pull back anytime the tools quivered too much, but on the fourth try he snapped his pick.
Dang.
Without another set he wouldn’t be able to open it. Just on the off chance it would work, he slashed down with his sword, but the chest didn’t even move. It just made a heavy thunk as the blade connected with it.
“Some other time then,” Brian told the chest. He realized then that the swordsman should have had the key if it was his chest. The key hadn’t been on the NPC, so maybe it was somewhere in the hut. Brian searched the bed, then looked under it. He searched the other two beds, and then the table; he searched the single potted plant, which looked to be a sadly under-watered tomato plant maybe? Then he went to the fireplace and checked along the mantle. He lifted an hourglass and found a single, dull gray key.
Smiling, he turned back for the chest. He used the key to open the lock and happily removed the four hundred gold pieces inside, though he was slightly disappointed to not find anything else.
He closed the chest and then moved to the crate of wine bottles. Perhaps he could gather those and sell them. He examined the crate and frowned. All of them were coming up as “spoiled wine” as he examined each bottle. None of them had any value.
He did, however, find a single gold coin at the bottom of the crate as a result of removing all the bottles. He picked it up and then started the long trek back to Fezhik. After about a mile of not seeing even a deer, he decided to use the fast travel function instead of walking. He opened up his map and selected the Morr’Tai lair.
Though the marker was indicated on his map, it appeared as a dull gray and wouldn’t activate, despite attempting it many times. Tentatively, he moved his attention to the marker at House Bob. It lit up as soon as he hovered over it. He activated the fast travel option, and a moment later materialized outside of the house.
Huh, a glitch maybe? Brian wondered to himself. He opened his map and looked at the fast-point markers for Fezhik and the Drunk Imp. They both lit up as he hovered over them in turn. He hovered over the Morr-Tai lair again, wondering if the start point affected whether it would register as active. It stayed gray and would not respond to an attempt to activate it. He selected the marker for the Drunk Imp instead, figuring that would drop him off marginally closer to the lair than the city gate would. A moment later he found himself standing in the street outside the pub. He opened the DM function.
[Meredith, it looks like the fast travel function is having trouble. Can successfully travel to three other points, but the Morr’Tai lair in Fezhik isn’t working]
He found the first two guards in their usual place, but the skeleton guard on the lower level was now gone. The Krattii guard was now partnered with an elf assassin.
“Where’s the skeleton?” Brian asked.
The Krattii looked at him with a confused expression. Her scaly lip curled upward, and she glanced to her new companion. “It is disorderly to have the dead walking among the living. The other one has been... dismissed.”
Brian’s eyes widened and he glanced from one guard to the other. That’s a bit grim, even for the Morr’Tai. Would they really kill one of their own just because he was a skeleton? Then again, Barry had been sent after him for an unknown reason. Perhaps there was an inner turmoil in the Morr’Tai ranks. After all, there was the political intrigue quest. Perhaps part of that was subterfuge from within.
Brian walked down the long corridor to the main chamber and found the familiar elf quest-giver sitting at the same table. Apporaching him, he initiated conversation to report completion of his quest.
[QUEST COMPLETED: MISGUIDED BLADE]
“Excellent,” the elf said with a grim smile. “The murderer should be happily reunited with the spirits of his friends now in Hammenfein.”
Brian smirked. Hammenfein was where the damned souls went—Terramyr’s version of Hell ruled jointly by Hatmul and Khefir, two brothers and the sons of Khullan, a cursed fallen god chained to five pillars of the abyss.
[+1,000 XP]
Oooo. That’s a nice bump.
[+200 GP]
“Try not to spend it all on...” the elf sneered and shook his head. “Oh never mind.”
Brian turned and walked toward the job board, stopping at the save point along the way to update his file. Brian paused mid-step, confused and wondering whether his eyes were playing tricks on him. The pedestal was broken. A strange crack ran through it. It didn’t look like an artistic detail from within the game, but as if the actual object was split in half due to some sort of glitch. The inside of the pillar wasn’t filled in, and at the right angles Brian could see out from the inside of the broken halves as if they were only visible from one side.
The dragon statue atop the pedestal was all wrong too, disjointed with some of the limbs attached upside-down. Brian tried to interface with it, but nothing happened.
“You’re back,” a familiar, eerie voice stated dryly.
Brian turned around and saw the high elf that had creeped him out the last time he had gone to the job board.
Brian sidestepped the strange NPC and went to the job board. He started to examine the postings there, but the NPC followed him.
“I sent the one known as Xylxxian after you,” the NPC said.
That got Brian’s attention. He turned and prepared himself to unsheathe his longsword for a fight. “You sent him to kill me?”
The NPC nodded calmly. “The Morr’Tai is not... orderly. There is chaos in this group. I must rectify that.”
Brian examined the NPC carefully. He didn’t have a weapon in his hand, in fact, his hands were clasped in front of his waist, giving him a strange, reverent appearance. His face neither smiled nor scowled, but there was a definite danger in the words, Brian could feel it. Brian caught onto the word “order” and narrowed his eyes at the NPC. “Wait, was it you that sent the skeleton guard away?” Brian asked.
The NPC cracked a smile. Not the conniving grin one would expect from a sly assassin bent on taking over the order, but a peaceful, pleasant smile like that of someone truly pleased with what they’d done and proud to discuss it.
“It was not orderly for such a creature to wander about,” the NPC said.
“But it was a Morr’Tai guard,” Brian replied. “Surely you knew it was on our side.”
“Side?” The NPC’s smile disappeared, and it arched a single brow. “Yes, let’s speak of sides, shall we? I am in need of a champion, an arm to impose my will. I had thought Xyxxlian to be strong enough for the task, but it appears that you were stronger than him.”
“I won the fight, if that’s what you mean,” Brian said, inexplicably not wanting to stretch the truth of the events too far.
“These other Morr’Tai do not have the... vision to grasp higher concepts. They are limited in scope, and thus they make poor champions, but you... you could be a good champion for me.”
Brian smiled. Now he understood the creepiness. It was all part of a takeover from within. A narcissistic maniac wanted to overthrow the Morr’Tai and claim leadership for himself. He’d seen it plenty of times before. Likely this particular NPC would either die in the final struggle and pass the proverbial baton to him, or they would become enemies in the final battle and Brian would have to take the leadership position by force and then rebuild the order
from the ground up.
“And what do I get in return?” Brian asked.
“That remains to be seen,” the NPC said. “I will soon have need of you. Return later and I will give you your first task. Complete it, and I will give you... more prestigious assignments. Who knows, you may soon find yourself not only my champion, but perhaps even at the head of the Morr’Tai.” The NPC smiled wickedly and turned to walk away.
Nice. Brian was far more excited about the Morr’Tai now. He had played as a Morr’Tai assassin before, but never had he had the chance to become the leader. Most of the previous games had ended with some high-level political target and then would taper off with never-ending, less important targets for money until the player got tired of playing through the quests.
Brian looked back to the save point and grunted. Definitely another glitch for Meredith.
[Hi, Meredith. Found another bug. The save point in the Morr’Tai lair in Fezhik seems to have broken apart and loaded wrong. I can’t interface with it either.]
He needed to get some sleep before tomorrow’s work. Leaving the Morr’Tai lair, he then fast traveled to House Bob. Once inside, he updated his file and logged out for the night. He was so excited for the Morr’Tai quests that he completely forgot about the ring for Freya.
“Soon I’ll be the head assassin, Barry, and then you’ll have to acknowledge your loss.” The thought of getting one over on Barry, and then forcing him to recognize it, was almost too alluring to allow his mind to settle down for sleep. After a few minutes he turned his mind to the dig site. After all, Meredith might think they were all here working for her, but in reality he was here for Professor Rojas, and the volcanoes were not going to allow for a return trip next year if they kept fuming like they had been recently. And if any of the earthquakes managed to cause a large-scale eruption... Brian shifted and turned his thoughts to something else. No need to think of lava flows and ash clouds when trying to relax.
8
Machi and Little Man
QPLLN-DIG-OSITE-2042
Use this ^^ loading code to meet me in a testing program in twenty minutes. Easier to show than tell—Meredith
Brian had just walked in from the worksite where he had been sorting through some of the bagged finds that had been sitting from earlier in the year. Before the evacuations, the team of volunteers from the nearby settlements had bagged dozens of pounds of finds, most unsorted and unwashed, all needing proper analysis and cataloguing. Everything from pottery sherds, to fragments of animal bone, to bits of charcoal that may or may not have been properly sampled from a feature. Volunteers could be enthusiastic, but sometimes created extra work on the lab side. He hadn’t really expected to see an answer from Meredith and had only glanced at the display as a force of habit built over years of primarily communicating with his team members through the old chat system.
Holy crap, when did she send that? he wondered with a jolt. He checked the time stamp. Twenty-five minutes ago. Dang it! He slapped his forehead and then instantly regretted the melodramatic gesture. Half-dried mud was now plastered across his brow. He rushed to wipe his hands and face off with a damp towel. When he had asked her for updates on any insight her computer program had generated from the carvings found in the simple stone sarcophagus he had unearthed last year, he had assumed she would ignore the message and expect him to ask once or twice more during a nightly meeting before brushing him off with a half answer. He hadn’t imagined she would get back to him within a couple of hours and be willing to do a virtual meet.
He hurried to his gaming spot, a pile of pillows and blankets on top of his bedroll, and put on the headset. He typed in the code Meredith had sent him and made a light ticking sound with his tongue at the top of his mouth, willing the system to load more quickly.
When the VR scene unfolded to him, he was a little disoriented to find himself in a setting that looked more like a skeleton rendering of a world. Green and blue laser lines indicated the outline of the ground, trees, and the basic outline of the main features of his worksite. Looking down at his hands, he was startled to see that his own body was a simple polygonal mesh. He surveyed his limbs and experimented with his ability to move about. The actions were smooth and responded in real time, he just couldn’t sense anything around him. It was like playing a first-generation VR game where everything was purely visual but with cutting edge mechanics.
“Nice of you to join me,” Meredith’s game avatar, fully rendered, sauntered across his field of view. He jolted, startled by the sudden sound of her voice. She smirked, but kept walking, moving over the laser net image that appeared to be the outline of his front yard stretching away from his dwelling toward the village dig site. “Not that I’m pressed for time working to input data from seven fussy archaeologists while simultaneously chasing down a cascade of glitches in the multimillion-dollar gaming software I’ve been tasked with white-glove debugging. You can show up late any time it suits you,” her tone was ironic, but oh so unpleasant.
Unsure of how to respond, and choosing to swallow the first words that came to his mind, Brian followed her silently, jogging slightly to keep up. As they moved, he noticed that some areas had already been painted in using images from his drone videos, with mesh items placed occasionally here and there. He assumed these incomplete items were suggestions based on some of the artifacts he had written up or reports of some of the finds that had been bagged, cleaned, and catalogued from previous years. He was impressed with how authentic the suggested items looked to what he had described in his research.
Meredith stopped in front of a mesh frame ruka, a traditional Mapuche building usually constructed of timber and thatching, much like the one he was currently living in. Through the laser-grid walls he could see a figure seated with its back to him. Meredith entered the ruka and gestured for him to follow her inside. He internally laughed at himself for stooping through the doorway. It wasn’t solid, and probably wouldn’t have kept him from moving if he had just walked through.
Coming around the front side of the seated figure, he caught his breath in surprise. He could tell from the clothes and the items displayed in the woman’s hands and on the ground in front of her that this was La Dama.
La Dama Auracania is what the local press had dubbed her, but Brian only thought of her as Machi, the shamaness. Remarkable to find in a moist, temperate environment, the remains had been preserved in a lava rock sarcophagus sealed with what looked like volcanic glass. She had been interred along with a number of carved items with previously unknown pictographs and symbols on them.
The digitally rendered woman had no mummified appearance to her though. She had a life-like, flesh-and-blood face and limbs, with long dark hair.
“The computer analyzed the skull and was able to create a face. The DNA samples you uploaded gave us skin tone, hair, and eye color. The only items that can’t be predicted with complete reliability were nose and earlobe length. But I’m sure you’re primarily interested in the results of what the computer decoded from these,” Meredith bent down and picked up one of the palm-sized stone carvings lying on the ground at Machi’s feet.
“I’ve got to say, I totally underestimated how this would hit me,” Brian said breathlessly, “I mean, yeah, I’d love to hear about the carvings, but just look at her!” He knelt down in front of the digital woman and looked at her from every angle. “It’s like meeting a ghost, but even better!” He stood enthusiastically to face Meredith. “You’ve done amazing work!”
Meredith casually spread her hands out to the side, palms up. “What can I say, I’m a fountain of knowledge.” Her tone was dry, but Brian thought he detected a note of true satisfaction hidden under the casual demeanor. “For example, by cross referencing the carvings found with your lady friend here, some of the samples from the funeral caches at the Silva caves, and finally—this was key mind you—the glyphs the professor found in the oracle’s sanctuary, the computer was able to predict a grammar structure at least.
&nbs
p; “It won’t be able to put words or sounds to the symbols without a frame of reference, but here is an example from a longer section.” She gestured to the back of the ruka where the curved lines denoting the end of the structure morphed into a tall, straight surface on which several lines of text popped up. The lines were mostly lists of the various parts of speech listed under the corresponding symbol from the stonework.
Emphatic particle—pronoun—verb + marker—preposition- [possible article] + noun…
this continued as lines continued to populate on the wall.
“You can see that it has determined that what we have is a syllabary at least, though likely not a true alphabet. The language appears to be agglutinative. The computer has been able to recognize verb stems with various endings applied as possible tense and person markers… hold on, how are you with languages? Am I speaking over your head, going too fast?”
In truth, she was going too fast, much too fast. Brian had picked up a fair amount of the local indigenous language from learning in real-life how to tell what others were saying to him and how to respond more or less correctly, but languages were not his thing. He had barely scraped by in his undergrad Latin classes, and had nothing but PTSD-esque memories of the one semester he had passed Attic Greek… the semester the dean himself had decided to teach the 101 class to prove to the other professors that it was possible to reduce the attrition rate. True, most everyone had signed up for the 102 class, but by Brian’s reckoning the majority had only done so out of fear of displeasing the Caesar himself, not out of a love for or confidence in ancient Greek.
“Meredith, your time is super valuable. Augustin is the one you’ll want to show this to. He will be able to break this down in a matter of minutes, I’m sure. That man knows like four languages,” Brian was desperately trying to think of the least painful way to extricate himself from the conversation.
