Shepherd's Wolf

by M. Andrew Reid

  Haymaker grinned, “Then let’s cut to the chase. What do you want me to do?”

  Bishop sighed, “As the population in Verdia grows - what is it like eighty million now? As the population grows people keep pushing out here to the Southeast Shore. When we founded the Haven, we picked the furthest possible spot from Verdia City that wasn’t inhabited by big and nasty creatures or some crazy Agilus tribe. There was absolutely nothing out here besides this port in Bluegrass that supported some NPC farmers. But now instead of being in the wilderness we are on the frontier. This is bad, because with the frontier comes bandits and general lawlessness. We have a limited defense right now...”

  “But you need someone who knows how to fight,” Haymaker finished.

  “Exactly. I am too busy with the Haven’s daily affairs to tend to the defenses. Bandit attacks are becoming more frequent and more annoying. When I raised the matter at a members’ meeting, it was unanimous that we needed someone to help us look after ourselves. Your position would be the Shield of the Haven, and you would serve under me - the Light of the Haven.”

  Haymaker grinned, “You picked some good titles.”

  “It’s part of the fun. Three-fourths of Verdia is puffing up and strutting around, right?” Bishop chuckled. “We decided that we needed a Brutalli. We don’t have any Brutalli Haven members. We also decided that we wanted an Explorer. Conquerors tend to be self-centered, arrogant jerks who don’t cooperate.”

  “True.”

  “We also decided that the candidate would have to be at least Level Ten.”

  Players in Verdia achieved higher “levels” based on the experience they had gained throughout their life in Verdia. Level indicated a player’s proficiency at his or her job. A warrior who killed monsters would level up faster than a warrior who only battled the weeds in his garden. Players also received experience from simply spending time in Verdia.

  Bishop continued, “You’re a Level Twelve which makes you more than qualified. I started asking around and your name kept popping up. Folks said that you were starting to get burned out with fighting all the time and were looking for something new. They also said you had served a stint in Kogan’s Heroes.”

  Haymaker shrugged modestly, “For a month.”

  Kogan was a legend in Verdia. A huge Brutalli Paladin with a flowing white mane, he was the epitome of knight-in-shining-armor. He had been a beta-tester, was the de-facto leader of the Explorers - ruling from a gleaming castle in Ra’ah - and weighed in at a solid Level Thirty-One. Most players in Verdia were lucky to break Level Ten after a year of heavy playing, and each level was exponentially harder to achieve.

  Kogan likened himself to a holy warrior, and even headed a movement to set up a chapel in Ra’ah and Verdia City. He tried to emulate medieval warrior monks, and as such would only fight with blunt weapons. His knights, Kogan’s Heroes, acted as the keepers of the peace and general do-gooders in Verdia, picking up some slack left by the neutral NPC guards in the major cities.

  Becoming a member of Kogan’s Heroes meant becoming a minor celebrity; everyone knew who they were. Kogan was the type of man that was either admired or loathed.

  “Only a month or not, if Kogan accepted you that means your heart is in the right place- which is most important to me.”

  The waiter came by and set down the steak and the steaming cup of tea. He smiled at his two patrons, “There you go sirs.”

  Bishop chuckled when he saw the enormous steak, “Another great thing about this place; no heart disease. Would you mind telling me more about yourself?”

  “Of course not.” Haymaker thought for a moment, “I’m an accountant. I spend all day at work swimming in numbers and I come home to - well what I come home to isn’t much. I guess I come here to relax and forget about my rotten life.” He gave a sad laugh.

  Bishop’s eyes filled with compassion, “I notice a lot of that in Verdia. Maybe this job will give you something that will rub off in the real world.”

  “That would be nice,” Haymaker replied. “I boxed in high school in the flyweight divisions. I fought when I was in the service, too. That’s where I get my nickname.”

  “It’s a good one,” Bishop said. “I guess that’s what the gauntlets are for. I’ve heard that you don’t carry weapons. I can see why you don’t need them. Now, eat your steak before it gets cold.”

  Haymaker set to work on his steak. He had it finished in under five minutes. When the waiter came around for the bill, Bishop refused to let Haymaker pay. After the two had left the restaurant, they headed down to the port.

  Bishop made a weekly trip to town for supplies, and knew it would be a good opportunity to meet Haymaker. His horse-drawn wagon waited on a pier next to a sleek sailing ship. Stewards were carrying boxes from the ship’s hold and packing them onto the wagon. Bishop smiled warmly when a young woman hopped down from the mainmast and tossed her long dark hair. She carried the prerequisite curving cutlass and swagger of a ship’s captain. She ignored the gangplank and leapt over the railing. With a big grin on her face, she stepped up to the two men.

  “Haymaker,” Bishop said, “I would like you to meet Gale, Captain of the Alexa. Gale, this is my new friend Haymaker.”

  Gale gave a quick salute. She spoke with an Irish lilt, “So he’s the boy you’re conning into being your bodyguard?”

  Bishop turned up his palms in resignation, “I couldn’t get you to leave your silly boat, so I had to find the next best thing.”

  Gale laughed, “I’m going to get you to sail with me one day, old man.”

  “Not likely. I’m not too keen on finding out if getting seasick in Verdia means getting seasick in the real world,” Bishop replied.

  “Looks like you’re all set, Bishop.” Gale checked off the Haven’s list of items in the ship’s manifest, “I guess one of your scientists talked someone into letting them get a new microscope. I had the crew set it off to the side here.”

  She handed a box marked “fragile” to Haymaker, “Be careful with it. You know how they are about this stuff in Verdia City.”

  Omni was loathe to allow real-world items into Verdia, but would do so under special circumstances, usually under a “one time only” agreement. This meant if the item was lost or stolen, it would not be replaced. If an attempt to sell such an item occurred, Omni knew instantly and would put a stop to any transaction. But, if someone wanted to steal it and keep it, Omni looked the other way. Omni’s permission of this process was one of his strange quirks that everyone took in stride.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem, I don’t plan on walking back home.”

  “The Haven finally got a teleport Gate?” Gale asked. “It’s about time you geezers got a Gate so you don’t have to drive your wagons real slow in the wrong lane with your blinkers on.”

  Haymaker chuckled, but Bishop’s face turned sour, “I’d suggest you leave unless you want a “back in my day” speech.”

  Gale quickly spun around and jumped back aboard her ship. She turned and waved before disappearing below deck.

  Bishop grinned, “She’s a good girl; the first to sail around the whole continent. She did it about six months ago in a ship half the size of the Alexa. Now, she runs supplies down to us from the Inner Sea. She’s raising money to circumnavigate the planet.”

  Haymaker shook his head in wonder, “Even after a year I’m still amazed by how much there is to do in Verdia.”

  “Anything you can imagine, and quite a few things you can’t.”

  “Maybe you should advertise for Verdia,” Haymaker quipped.

  “I don’t think I represent the target demographic,” Bishop replied. “Let’s go; up on the wagon.”

  Haymaker climbed up beside Bishop, who pulled his Character Manager from a fold in his robe. Bishop punched in his coordinates for the Haven, and turned to Haymaker, “We only have a recall gate.”

  This meant that the teleport gate at the Haven could only return players back to the Haven, if they wanted to lea
ve the Haven they had to do it by some other means.

  “It’s fine. I’ll set my CM to recall back to Verdia City,” Haymaker answered; briefly raising his Character Manager before allowing it to vanish.

  “Good, otherwise it’s a long walk home,” Bishop finished preparing the trip - known as a jump or a move - and the two men, along with the horse and wagon, vanished in a blue mist.

  …

  They reappeared among the swirling vapors of a teleport gate. Unfazed by the journey, the horse paced forward; the wagon rolled off the white pads. Haymaker surveyed his new surroundings. The Haven nestled into the mouth of a narrow gorge in the Southeastern Mountains, a gorge that broadened into a wide green valley and extended almost to the horizon. Sharp peaks made entrance to the Haven Valley impossible other than through the gorge.

  The entrance to the gorge, less than one hundred yards across, was protected by a twelve-foot high sandy-red stone wall. Clustered buildings that made up the Haven rested behind this wall. A visitor peaking over the red stones would see a broad plain stretching out to the limits of view, with a rocky sea shore several miles to the southeast.

  Three faces joined to create the wall. One face looked almost directly northeast, while the other two slanted back into the mountainsides. Any attacker would be climbing a gently sloping hill for the last thousand feet. This made the location a very defensible one.

  Haymaker and Bishop climbed the wall, which was wide enough for several to walk abreast. Haymaker stopped to take in the view, “This is a beautiful spot. It shouldn’t be too hard to defend. What exactly is it that the bandits want?”

  Bishop pointed behind them, to the valley, “There’s a decent sized gold mine back there, as well as some other ores. We also make some pretty powerful potions and elixirs and whatnot and they must think we’re dumb enough to keep a huge stockpile here. The bandits we’re getting now are mainly entrepreneurs who want a good base of operations when people start moving here in large numbers. It has been getting steadily worse over the last month.”

  Haymaker stopped at a large contraption- topped with an enormous curved bow- fixed to the outer lip of the wall, “What’s this?”

  “That,” Bishop replied with a proud grin, “is a design of my own. I call it the auto-bow. You turn the crank there to draw it and the hopper above keeps feeding arrows in. We can get about three hundred arrows a minute if somebody strong enough is at the crank. We have four of them mounted on the wall. Without them, we would have been overrun a long time ago. We just don’t have enough fighters.”

  “This is amazing.” Haymaker swung the huge bow around in its mount and easily turned the crank several times. He was rewarded with a rapid THUNK-thunk-THUNK-thunk as the bowstring drew tight and released. “It’s very smooth. You could sell this design for a few million in Verdia City.”

  Bishop gave a dismissive wave, “I don’t need money. And I prefer this advantage over everyone else.”

  “So you’ve got two here in the center and another two in the side walls?”

  “Yep.”

  “These make my job a lot easier. Do you have the ranges marked?”

  “Do we what?”

  Haymaker pointed out over the wall, “You should put out some small markers at the maximum range of your defenses, and maybe another set closer in at the “sweet spot” where your gunners are most accurate. Makes it a lot easier to know when to start shooting.”

  “That’s a thought. We just throw these things up here as soon as we can get them made. They’ve worked pretty well so far.”

  “You’re making more?” Haymaker asked.

  Bishop nodded and slapped the large rectangular hopper that sat on top of the bow, “It takes a while. The gears and parts are very expensive. There’s only one blacksmith in Verdia skilled enough to make them, and he doesn’t come cheap or easy.”

  Haymaker raised an eyebrow, “The Shepherd?”

  “I guessed that you would have heard of him.”

  The Brutalli raised his arms and turned his palms out. A small shepherd’s staff glowed faintly on each gauntlet.

  “Ah,” Bishop stroked his beard, “Another satisfied customer, I see.”

  “You bet. I used my pay from Kogan’s Heroes, plus a lot of other booty I had collected. They will never dent or break, and he put fire protection on them. I could reach into a volcano and I wouldn’t feel it.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve actually met him?”

  Haymaker shook his head, “Nobody has except the guy who deals for him. Even Kogan couldn’t get a meeting with him.”

  “It’s a shame, I would like to thank him personally for the work he’s done. I can’t believe that someone can make the gears for these auto-bows with ancient metalworking techniques.”

  “I think that Omni is the Shepherd.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Haymaker turned to face into the compound, staring down through the gorge to the expansive green valley below. “Why did you put all of your buildings so close to the wall? Why didn’t you build in the valley? It would be a prettier setting than these cliffs, and if someone broke through here at the gorge it would give you more time to defend.”

  “It would seem logical,” Bishop replied, “except that somebody lived in the valley before us. He doesn’t take kindly to new construction.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A dragon. A rainbow dragon. A big one.”

  “Oh.” Haymaker shook his head. “Yeah I can see why you’d want to build back here.”

  “He doesn’t mind us farming the fields or fishing on the lake, but anything we tried to build past the lower mouth of the gorge got torched.”

  “I guess it would be out of character for you to kill him.”

  Bishop nodded, “You can’t kill a creature like that. It’s so beautiful. I don’t think that we could kill it anyway; it’s enormous - sounds like a crashing helicopter when it buzzes the valley. He’s never attacked us personally, and we sure don’t have to worry about him sneaking up on us.”

  The rainbow dragon was the largest dragon in Verdia. Full grown, a rainbow dragon’s wingspan could reach one hundred feet. It was so named due to the iridescent scales that covered its body, and due to the fact that Limerick - who had discovered many of Verdia’s creatures - had a no-frills naming process. At least the name was descriptive; the dragon’s scales caught light and refracted it in a brilliant and blinding array of color.

  A ridge of spikes on the dragon’s head, the trailing edges of its wings, and its tail rippled with bright white feathers. Like all dragons in Verdia, the rainbow dragon was related to the four-winged birds that inhabited the world.

  Rainbow dragons had two large wings that extended in flight, flapping occasionally, as well as a smaller pair of “boosters” below and behind the main wings that fluttered at amazing speed, providing thrust. Larger dragons thumped like helicopters as they soared, and a full grown rainbow dragon developed a tremendous roar.

  Most dragons in Verdia were feathered, some more than others. Not all of them could fly, and not all of them could breathe fire. The line between dragon and bird was blurry. Despite the feathers, which were so bright that they lacked a real-world comparison, the rainbow dragon was definitely a dragon: big, scary, and fire-breathing.

  “Your very own rainbow dragon,” Haymaker said wistfully. “You should feel fortunate; as far as I know there are only about ten on the whole planet.”

  “Hopefully we can protect him when this area starts getting more populated. Most people will see him as a way to get rich fast.”

  “A rainbow dragon would be worth a lot,” Haymaker speculated.

  “I’m sure you’ll meet the dragon eventually, though I haven’t seen him in a few days. Let me show you your office.”

  “I’ve got the job?”

  “You had it about thirty minutes ago. Now, let’s finish up so I can log off and take a walk. If I don’t do two miles a day my
joints get achy.”

  The Explorer City- Ra’ah

  “I’d suggest hiring a guard, Laura.”

  Zephyr fluttered nervously around his latest ward, a slim blonde girl with chestnut brown eyes. The little red bird came to rest on her shoulder, “That camera you have is worth a lot. I can think of a lot of people who will try to take it once I’m gone.”

  Laura Bailey rolled her eyes and reached up to stroke her protector’s fuzzy head, “You worry too much, Zephyr. I’ll be fine. Nothing bad has happened yet.”

  She walked down a long flight of stairs leading to the street. Ra’ah nestled into several hillsides, with a wide paved main street running through a valley between the hills. Smooth buildings blended into the hills, painted soft pastel colors and designed with rounded edges. Everything had an organic feel, excepting a white castle on the east side and a cathedral’s spires that poked the sky to the west. Verdia City was barely visible from the tallest point in Ra’ah, a large building that faced the sunset. Laura and Zephyr were now descending from this building, which was the Dalton Support headquarters for Ra’ah.

  “That’s because I’ve been with you. Nobody will mess with you when you’ve got me on your shoulder. But as soon as I leave...”

  “Nobody’s going to do anything to me. I’m not a threat to anyone; I don’t even have a weapon! Why would anyone want to hurt me?”

  Zephyr stared blankly at his master, “You aren’t serious are you? That camera you have is worth millions of Verdii if it’s stolen. You haven’t exactly been secretive about carrying it.”

  Laura toyed with the digital camera hanging from her neck. She had received permission to use it in Verdia because it was a crucial part of her thesis; she was comparing current evolutionary theory to the development of life in Verdia.

  Her review board at UCLA had been surprisingly open to the proposal. Administrators at Dalton had thought it a wonderful idea and good press for the game. They had given Laura the camera under strict conditions that it would not be replaced under any circumstances. Omni had apparently set rigid guidelines for this type of thing. If successful, Laura would become the first “e-biologist.” She was not going to waste time looking for a bodyguard.