“So nice,” I say as I spread out.
She moves next to me and lays her head in the nook of my shoulder. “You know, you’re not too bad looking when you clean up.”
“You don’t like my long hair?”
“I do, and it’ll be back when we go to Unigaea in the morning. Well, I should say I like it when it is clean, like when we were in Stater.” She yawns. “That feels like ages ago. It was nice, though.”
“So, um, we’re cuddling then?”
If I put more points in MIND, will I somehow gain the ability to speak to the opposite sex without sounding like an idiot?
“Yes, we are.” To confirm Sam just wants a warm body, she turns away from me and presses her lower half into my side. Her robe filters away and the blanket rolls up to cover her up.
“Everything is automatic here,” I say, just to say something.
Sam yawns. “Night, Oric.”
“Night, Sam.”
Chapter Nine: Tea-scapades
I wake before Sam, expecting a morning sun and a crimson sky; instead, I get a starry galaxy that looks identical to the way it looked last night. To check that it’s morning, I bring up my dashboard and see that, thankfully, the dashboard is the same user interface that it is in Unigaea.
The digital sundial says morning, and the digital sundial doesn’t lie.
I move away from Sam, slide out of bed, and walk to one of the windows. I can see another part of her ship if I move all the way to the left, but I’m not able to make out much more than that.
The notion to explore strikes me, so I move to the front of her room, expecting a rectangular door to form in the wall.
It doesn’t.
I think about trying “open sesame,” but this thought triggers a memory of a Chinese restaurant near 18th street in Chicago that had a sesame chicken special every Wednesday. Grew up on that shit.
I take a seat on Sam’s couch, my bare feet against her southwestern print rug. I recall her saying she was from Santa Fe, or was it Albuquerque? Never been, but that’s not saying much as I have only been out of Chicago a few times. Why leave Chi-town? I had everything I need.
“Quiet, brain.” I whisper to myself.
I would teleport back to Unigaea if I knew how. Raising my finger, I expect a log point to materialize. I’m sadly mistaken, though, and it doesn’t.
To pass the time, I pull up a map of Unigaea and take a long, hard look at the choke point between the Eastern and Western Splits.
That’s where the battle will happen, and to get around it, we’ll need to keep west, to the foothills of the Western Splits, mainly because of Lothar’s size.
“So a two-day ride,” I whisper as I use my fingers to place markers on the map. The battle will likely have started by the time we arrive. The Obelisk seemed geared up and ready to go.
“Sam,” I say after I’ve played with the markers a bit longer, figuring out the fastest route. “You ready to wake up?”
She stirs and turns to her other side.
“Ramjet, can you make the place smell like coffee? Better yet, can you make us some coffee?” I ask aloud. Figuring my request will fall on deaf ears, I’m taken by surprise when a panel opens up, folds out, and forms a flat tabletop. An espresso machine pixilates on the tabletop, and a shot begins pouring into a tiny cup.
“Well, shit. Ramjet, turn up the lights.”
The room swells with brightness and Sam flops to the other side, her eyes narrowing at me. It is still strange to see her in her other avatar with her long brown hair. Her facial features are set differently as well, but they at least mirror her Unigaean avatar.
“I made coffee, or Ramjet did. Someone did, but at least it was my idea.”
Sam sits up, the blanket pulled up to her chest. I walk the little cup over to her and she takes it.
“I like these little cups.”
“It’s called a demitasse,” she says. “I was once a barista, when I was eighteen, before I joined the Proxima Pilot Program. Surprised I even landed that position.” Sam finishes the espresso. “But enough chit chat, let’s get back to Lothar and Wolf.”
I take one more look around at her sleek room. “I’d love to come back here.”
“We will definitely come back here, after all this is over.”
“Wolf too?”
Sam laughs. “I’ll think about it.”
(^_^)
Our avatars take shape before Lothar and Wolf.
Lothar sits on his meditations box, skimming through an old scroll, and as soon as he sees us, he looks up at us over the lenses of his glasses. Wolf barks like mad, and I hardly have time to realize I’m back in my giant slayer armor before the Tagvornin beast hops into my arms and takes me down, covering my face with licks.
“Easy, boy!” I scratch him behind the ears, and once I get both hands around his head, I start moving his head back and forth, playing with him. He play-bites at me, and soon, we’re rolling around, Wolf barking and snapping at me as we play in the snow.
Once I’m through horsing around with Wolf – odd to put it like that, but that’s indeed what we are doing – I glance over to see Lothar’s curly red hair lightly accented by snowflakes.
The inquisitive giant has already begun grilling Sam about our trip, asking her all sorts of questions about the ship, what we did there, what it is like in her room, and what if the OMIB really does resemble a starry night.
“It does,” she says in answer to his last question, “and I do wish you could go there. You’d enjoy the view.”
“I get a pretty good view from up here,” he jokes. “Anyone want a pastry? I had some for breakfast, fed Wolf too.”
“What I really want is some jerky.” I open the list to find I am completely out. I thought I had a little left, but that’s what I get for thinking.
“We should have gotten some before we left. No worries. I have some.” Sam tosses a sliver of jerky over to me.
Wolf tracks the jerky all the way from my hand to my mouth. He barks, licks his lips, barks again, his big blue-green eyes locked on my hand.
“You already ate. You fed him well, right?”
“Plenty well,” Lothar says.
“You’ll be fine,” I tell Wolf as I finish the jerky. “Okay. So we have two days’ ride to get to where I think will be the best point to try to take out Broken.” I smirk. “My god, the guy’s name is worse than Czech Meyout.”
“Who?” Lothar asks.
“Never mind. Let’s see what we’re working with here.”
Mandrake Flower (6)
Sunset Root (1)
Jatla Root (1)
Wizardous (1)
Karuna Seaweed (5)
Yellow Bonnet (4)
Cinnamon Flower (3)
Aramis Weed (1)
Burn Bush (1)
I make a mental note to get more pinecones.
“You have that look on your face,” Sam says.
“What look?”
“The look of a madman.”
“I’m thinking about making pinecone IEDs.”
“My point exactly.”
I equip the burlap sack of Jatla Root and the Cinnamon Flowers. Dropping to the ground, I lay my cutting board out and start chopping the root. I don’t have much water on me, but the snow will work, so once I have the root and the flowers chopped, I go to the nearest lump of snow I can find and shovel it into a pot.
“That fire still warm?” I ask, even though I can still see some of the embers burning.
“Should be,” Lothar says as he watches me curiously. “You are making some type of tea, yes?”
“That’s right.”
I get the snow boiling and tell Sam to bring me a little more. She does so, and once the pot is nearly full of boiling water, I add the Jatla root and the cinnamon flowers. “This Jatla root is something a merchant gave me on my way to Tin Ingot, after you died,” I tell Sam.
“How could I forget my own death?”
Lothar snorts at
this. “Your retorts are golden, Sam!”
I look down at Wolf and I swear he rolls his eyes at me. Good, just so we’re on the same page, I think as I stir the chopped root and the cinnamon flower petals together.
“So this root greatly boosts stamina, but it gives one a killer hangover, and too much of it is a very, very bad thing.”
“So why are you making a tea out of it?” Sam asks, her hands now on her hips. It’s still odd seeing her as an aged Hourglass Mage, especially after just seeing her in her true form, well, true enough form.
“That’s what the cinnamon flower is for, to counteract the bad effects of the root.”
“And you think it will work? Why don’t we use my magic?”
“Pfft! This will definitely do something. Trust me, Sam, herbalism is my medium.”
She laughs. “Your medium? You an artist now?”
“Maybe.” I add what’s left of my yellow bonnet to the boiling mixture. This last part came to me just now, so I’m going with it. The bonnet has healing properties, which may help to counteract the spacey feeling caused by the Jatla root.
I give it a final stir and look to my companions. “Okay, who wants to try it first? Lothar? Wolf?”
Only Wolf comes forward.
(^_^)
“This stuff is crazy!” Lothar the scholarly giant trots along at a good clip. He moves at twice his normal pace, his meditations box rolling on the ground behind him.
“You got him high,” Sam calls over her shoulder. “Wolf too!”
We both are on Wolf’s back, the big Tagvornin canine hopped up on Jatla root as well.
He’s moving faster than he’s ever moved, and even though Lothar’s stride length is longer, Wolf does a pretty damn good job of keeping up with the giant.
The crimson sky above is as foreboding as ever, and the light-heartedness of my group is at odds with the all-out war to come, but that’s two days from now, or at our current pace …
I pull up my map and the blinking icon indicating my position scoots forward. If we stay somewhere in or near the Western Splits tonight, we should be able to reach the back of the Stater encampment tomorrow night.
The corners of my vision pane are a little scratchy, likely due to the Jatla root tea I taste-tested, but I’m definitely not experiencing the same feeling I felt when I traveled from Drachma to Tael with a wolf’s dead body in a cart.
Fuck that trip.
This gets me thinking about higher consciousness and what’s at work behind the scenes of our psyches. I don’t recall putting one and one together and assuming Sam could heal Wolf, yet somehow, without vocalizing it either physically or mentally, I naturally came to this conclusion.
It was probably the Obelisk.
I recall her flaming form and wince. The pyro afflicted give me the creeps, and to think that that’s the form she’s taken for now adds a whole new depth to the battle to come.
In a way, we, or better, the Obelisk, will look like a bad guy. I imagine the battle from the perspective of a southern soldier. They ride north, only to be met by an army of the flaming dead and Metican warriors on horseback. Yikes.
Maybe it is purposeful, I think as we reach a fork in the road. Maybe the Obelisk wants to look like a bad guy, like an evil group of burning zombies, for the intimidation factor, but also to make the next asshole RPC who rides north with an army think twice about his decision.
“Reborn Player Character,” I whisper. I’ve already signed up to be one; pretty much anyone born in the 2050s and onward is signed up to be an RPC. It is a way to live eternally and an RPC isn’t stuck to any one world. They can OMIB-port, as Sam called it, and they can live a number of lives in a number of very different Proxima worlds.
An RPC can also permanently commit to death. This was one thing the Proxima Company put into place when they first created RPCs. While it is a simple toggle to turn final death on, it does require a meeting with a Proxima RPC death representative, who goes over what it means to finally die, and the importance of a will for whatever digital estate the person has built.
Funny to think that I live in a world in which you can’t die.
And I don’t mean Unigaea, I mean the real world. If a person signs up to be an RPC, as soon as they die, all of their experiences and thoughts – recorded on the life chips installed in our heads in the real world – are uploaded to the RPC.
An RPC is an NPC, to be sure, but their D-NAS is built by the real person’s memories and life experiences, so they are just about as adequate of a representative of the living person as we’ll ever be able to muster, which allows for them to interact with loved ones forever.
There have been countless stories used as advertising for the RPC program by the Proxima company that show family members reconnecting with loved ones, be they soldiers who have died, or death caused by sudden accident, cancer or heart disease, old age.
The list goes on.
Humanity has become immortal by way of video games.
(^_^)
“I need to eat something,” Lothar says a few hours later, his cheeks red.
“We can stop and see if any animals, um, run up to us.”
“No,” Lothar says, slightly out of breath. “There’s a roadside diner ahead. I’m craving less gamey food.”
“Where?” I look to the distance, which is mostly covered with trees. While our current terrain is relatively flat, the foliage blocks us from seeing what’s ahead. That is, unless one of us is a giant who can see over many of the trees.
“Not much further. We’ll stop there. This region usually has restaurants friendly to giants due to its proximity to Tael.”
We travel a bit further up the road, and stop once the smell of cooking meat wafts over to me. It isn’t long before we see a fairly decent sized lodge nestled into the forest. There’s outside seating for giants and a mahoosive canvas covering, likely for giants to rest under, as the room inside the lodge isn’t adequate for the big people of Tael.
“Beer?” I ask Sam as we approach the outside seating area.
“Sounds like a plan.”
At the human-sized table, a few weary merchants sit with empty pints in front of them. They’ve already seen that both Sam and I are Player Killers, and while they aren’t quite gawking at us, they do take turns looking each of us over and whispering to one another.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to kill you,” I tell the merchants.
Sam rolls her eyes. “You sure know how to make an entrance, don’t you?”
“Actually, any of you fellas have some healing potions for sale?” I ask. “Pinecones, too. I need some pinecones.”
Lothar plops down onto the giant picnic table, crosses his arms onto the table, and lays his head onto them. Wolf rests with his head on his two front paws, looking up at Lothar for food that the giant doesn’t yet have.
“Don’t mind him,” I tell the skeptical merchants, “and don’t mind my wolf either. He won’t bite, unless I ask him to.”
One of the merchants, an older man with braided hair, clears his throat. “I have healing potions, pinecones too.”
“Then we’re in business. Sam,” I call over my shoulder, “I need some money.”
Sam approaches, the ends of her robe dancing above the ground. “How much do you need?” she asks, slightly irritated but not irritated enough to slug me.
“That depends on what our good merchant friend here says. So, ten pinecones, and six healing potions. How’s that?”
“One thousand lira,” he says firmly.
“Fuck me, man, I know what a healing potion costs! You guys act like Player Killers are unaware of normal market prices. I could get a couple cases for that amount. I could also check these woods out for pinecones and find a few myself.”
“Then buy your fucking cases and get your ass to the woods, Player Killer,” he says defiantly.
I lift my hand to the hilt of my Splintered Sword just as Sam clears her throat. “We will take it all for a t
housand then.”
“Damn, you really just got ripped off,” I tell after she’s collected the goods and we’ve turned away. Sam hands me most of the potions and the pinecones, a devious smile on her face.
“What?” I ask after we’ve returned to our table.
“Counterfeit lira,” Sam whispers.
“Where the hell did you get that?”
“It was on my person when I spawned with my new avatar.”
“How do you know it’s counterfeit?”
“It’s listed as such in my inventory list, but if you look at it, it looks just like normal lira.” She produces a thousand lira note, which features one of the gods of the Rune Lands. My back to the merchants, I look the bill over, keen to find any discrepancies. None found, I hand the money back to her.
“Keep it,” she says.
“Thanks?”
Sam pinches my cheek. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
The lodge turns out to have pretty decent food. Lothar gets the giant platter, which could have a better name yet which totally makes sense after I see just how big the plate is and what it contains: meat, boiled potatoes, extra-large carrots and a hearty soup made of goat milk, turnips, and salt and pepper.
Sam and I have meat and beer, some off-world stuff called Horse Piss, which is better than it sounds. Wolf especially appreciates the collection of bones and discarded organs the waitress brings to him.
Everything is fine and dandy until it comes time to pay, and Sam yet again pulls out her fake money.
Leave it to goddamn Lothar to blow our cover.
“Is that the counterfeit lira you told me about?” he asks loud enough for the fucking waitress to hear him.
“What!?” Sam asks, completely taken off guard. “What are you talking about?”
The waitress, a muscular beauty with a ponytail that stretches well past the small of her back, looks suspiciously from Sam to me.
“Don’t look at me,” I tell her, “the giant is high.”
“High?”
“Do you mean the Jatla root?” Lothar asks. “I believe I am coming down from that.”
The merchants got whiff of our dilemma at the mention of the word “counterfeit.” I don’t know what they’re planning, but three of them have gathered around the one who Sam paid earlier, all now examining the bills she gave him.
The Red Plague: A LitRPG Trilogy (The Last Warrior of Unigaea Book 3) Page 8
