Gamers - Amazon

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  They checked around the bazaar hoping to see a tavern sign. When they didn't see one, Unthar picked up the nearest villager, an old fellow with wispy white hair and milky clouded eyes.

  After he set the wrinkled old man down, he led them from the bazaar through narrow side streets until they stopped beneath a sign reading Smoke and Barrel.

  Their entrance brought stares from the hardscrabble patrons of the smoky bar, including a one-eyed man in the corner that leered at them long after they sat down. After they huddled around a table, a buxom waitress with all her teeth attended them.

  "What do you desire?" she asked in a husky voice.

  Stephan put his hand under her skirt, pulling her against his side. "I think I'm beginning to like this Mr. Johnson."

  "I'm hungry, and we don't have any money," said Avony.

  Mouse surprised everyone by throwing a small bag of coins on the table. "Dinner and drinks, please."

  When the waitress left, Mouse shrugged and said, "Found it in the bazaar."

  Moments later, the waitress returned with five plates of steaming turkey legs, tubers, and a mug of water.

  Avony tentatively took a bite and closed her eyes, savoring the flavor. "Real food. Mmmm...," said Avony. "I don't even care how it got here."

  "The waitress is a robot, I could tell under her skirt," said Stephan. "Chairs and table are real, too."

  After dinner they sat around staring at each other.

  "Now what?" Gabby asked.

  "I'm not sure what's next," said Avony. "But the smoke in this town is totally debuffing me."

  "If we figure out what's next then we can get out of here," said Gabby. The one-eyed man in the corner was still staring at her. Or maybe he was checking out Avony. Either way, he made her feel creepy.

  "Any brilliant suggestions?" Gabby didn't reply to Stephan's comment. "The smoke is giving me a headache. Think we can get some rooms so I can lay down for a bit?"

  Mouse shook her coin bag and left to find the innkeeper. She came back soon after and threw a handful of keys on the table.

  "We really don't have time for lying around," said Avony.

  Stephan held his hands to his temples. "You'd understand if you felt the hammers inside my head right now."

  Unthar grabbed his key and left the tavern. His leaving brought their conversation to a standstill until Stephan finally grabbed his key and marched away from the table.

  "I'm going to get some rest," said Stephan before he left.

  "Fine," said Avony. "I'm going to ask around town. I think the air outside is better than in this tavern."

  "Guys," said Gabby. "I don't think we should be splitting up this early in the raid."

  Avony and Stephan ignored her and went their separate ways. Mouse shrugged and started spinning a coin on the table.

  Frustrated, Gabby left to find a place to practice with her swords. She needed to clear her head. A secluded courtyard in back of the Smoke and Barrel proved to be the best spot.

  The Blades class was built upon the neural shaping skill set. Neural shaping was the art of creating games that encouraged the player to follow certain behavioral patterns.

  The teachers explained it was necessary as a competitive advantage to create a well functioning system, but to Gabby, it smacked of mind control. Even if it helped them win the war versus the Southlands, she didn't like learning it.

  Gabby loved the challenges of LifeGame but sometimes chaffed against the rigid hierarchy of the system. It was why she enjoyed hacking, besides the desire not to lose Zaela to a low rank.

  Neural shaping required understanding of the mechanics of brain operation. Each time she performed a move, a problem was presented on her eye-screens. The faster and more accurate the answer, the more power the move had.

  Gabby always found herself questioning the motives behind each problem and so delayed her answers enough to make it her worst class.

  She preferred the Warrior-Maiden class because it was built upon advanced game theory. In straight competition, each player had the same chance of winning.

  Gabby lurched through the moves: Cat and Cut, Two Moon Sweep, Angry Cloud, Flying Fish, and Bladestorm. When she attempted the last maneuver, Bladestorm, she tripped over her feet and came crashing down on her butt.

  She rubbed her leg where she'd landed. The hair on the back of her neck bristled. Gabby spun about to find Avony leaning against the entrance gate.

  Her face a blank mask, Avony slipped away, leaving Gabby alone again.

  "We are so going to be a TPK," Gabby mumbled.

  She wondered if she would be able to escape to the mountains and find the Frags, should they lose. She doubted it with Mr. Johnson waiting for her, but she'd give it her best shot. They'd probably take her away as soon as she lost and pick through her system to find what they wanted to know about the Frags.

  It was so stupid that her team was scattered around town. They could get picked off one by one, split up as they were. They needed to figure out where to go next and wandering around looking wasn't going to find it.

  They probably just had to talk to an old man in a tavern somewhere, the oldest fantasy trope in the book. Then it hit her, the one-eyed man in the corner had been staring at them. They all seriously needed an intelligence buff. The answer had been staring at them, literally, though with one eye.

  Gabby leapt to her feet, only to find her way blocked by a gang of filthy villagers with clubs and knives. The woman with no teeth she'd bumped into at the bazaar led the group. She had a wicked curved knife and the way she tossed it from hand to hand indicated she had some skill with it.

  There were at least twenty villagers. Not going to be an easy task, even if most of them were minions. The odds certainly weren't in her favor.

  Adrenaline surged through Gabby, as she slipped into a fighting stance and waved them on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After a lifetime of competitions and game theory, Gabby was expecting the mob to spread out and surround her. It's what she would have done if she'd been leading them.

  Instead, led by the screaming woman with the knife, they charged her with their weapons waving overhead. It was a tactic, she supposed, that nearly worked, as Gabby was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

  The toothless woman was the first to reach her and Gabby neatly sidestepped and brought the blade across her chest with a Cat and Cut. The woman crumpled to the ground a few steps later.

  Then Gabby switched to Two Moon Sweep and Angry Cloud as the villagers swarmed in waves of two and three. A few fell to her blades.

  After withstanding the initial onslaught, she found herself surrounded, the tactic she would have used, though now they had a few less villagers. Gabby felt lucky she was only being attacked by dim witted computer constructs.

  Her arm throbbed. One of the villagers had cut her. As she examined it, another lunged in and she dispatched him quickly with Cat and Cut.

  Gabby wondered if the others were being attacked, as well. The villagers occasionally surged near her when she turned her back to them, but then she spun around again and they backed up. She was getting dizzy from the constant spinning.

  Desperate to get her back to a wall, Gabby used Flying Fish to force one side to back up. Once they realized where she was trying to get to, they bunched up on that side to stop her.

  Frustrated, Gabby thought about using Bladestorm. It was the perfect attack for a group, but she'd completely failed practicing it earlier. The maneuver required solving a series of problems, combined with fancy footwork and she was already dizzy.

  But if she didn't do something soon to break the stalemate, they might get a lucky strike in. Another lunging wave from the villagers brought another cut, this time on her thigh, right below the chain links. Her muscle cramped up around it, causing her to move more slowly.

  Gabby had just about convinced herself to try Bladestorm when she noticed a few villagers disappearing at the back of the group. Going on a hunch, Gabby threw h
erself at the villagers, trying to distract them from what was happening in back.

  By the time they noticed Mouse, she'd culled about a fourth of the group. When they turned to her, Gabby launched into a series of Two Moon Sweeps and the villagers broke, the remaining escaping out the gate.

  "Thanks," Gabby said.

  Mouse just smiled behind her hair and slipped her daggers back into her sleeves. Then her eyes grew wide and she hurried to Gabby's side. Mouse ripped the shirt of a dead villager, tearing it into strips and began treating Gabby's injuries. Gabby had been hit more times than she'd realized.

  "Were you attacked, too?" Gabby asked.

  Mouse nodded.

  "We need to find the others."

  Once Gabby's injuries had been treated, they left the courtyard to find the others. The streets were empty, except for the ever present black dung smoke.

  They didn't have to look long, as Unthar found them, grim-faced and bloody, though none of the blood was his. He looked strangely pleased by the carnage.

  Avony appeared not long after, still pristinely white. She gave Gabby the once over, smirking at her wounds.

  "Oh, Mario!" Gabby exclaimed. "Stephan went to take a nap. They could kill him in his sleep!"

  The team ran to the Smoke and Barrel, bursting through the door and taking the stairs three at a time. The hallway was littered with frozen corpses.

  Stephan was lounging on a plush bed looking pleased with himself.

  "I'm a light sleeper," he said.

  Avony tossed her hair in dramatic fashion. "I guess it was just Gabby that couldn't handle her attackers. She looks like shredded wheat." Avony laughed a high sweet cackle. "You are aware the Blades are not a tank class, right?"

  The rest of the team watched her carefully, expecting a response.

  "I know what we need to do next," she said, deflecting their expectations.

  "Get on with it," said Avony.

  "This is a fantasy game, right?" Gabby said. "Fantasy stories always have a quest and sometimes that quest is given from an old guy in a tavern."

  "And?" said Stephan.

  "The one-eyed guy that was undressing Avony with his eyes. Well, eye," she paused. "He fits the bill."

  "Him?" Avony shivered. "I thought I was going to need a shower."

  "Well, what are we waiting for," said Stephan.

  They marched downstairs and found the one-eye man and crowded around his table.

  "We've come for our quest," said Gabby, sliding into the seat opposite.

  "Whoa," said the old man, a bit of beer foam stuck on his whiskers. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. These things take time. Trust and all that."

  "Look. We don't have time," said Gabby. "The other teams have a massive head start. Give us the quest, or we'll have to kill you."

  The old man laughed as the rest of her team gave her questioning looks.

  "What would I have to fear from the likes of you? I'm just a sub-routine designed to dispense quests," he grinned. "If you kill me, then you lose your quest."

  "But that would be metagaming. If you're truly a sub-routine for the game, you should respect our threats as a dirty old man would fear for his life in this situation," she explained.

  "Well, if I were metagaming, it was only because you started it." The old man took a long swig out of his mug, letting beer trickle out the side of his lips and onto his stained shirt. He slammed the mug down when it was empty, cackling at her.

  Avony walked away from the table with her hand to her forehead. The rest of the group hid their disgust just as well.

  "So there was no metagaming involved when we were attacked, conveniently when we were split up?" Gabby countered.

  The one-eyed man cleared his throat. "That was just story, the game maker has to keep you honest."

  "But this is a competition," she said.

  "And you got extra LPs for your efforts," he said.

  Gabby smiled. "So that attack was for our benefit alone."

  The old man opened his mouth as if to retort her statement and then closed it.

  "So give us the quest, old man," Gabby said.

  He sighed and wiped the beer foam from his face. "I guess they didn't roll me a high enough intelligence score."

  When the team stared at him expectantly, he straightened up in his chair, preparing to give a canned speech.

  "Cut to the details," said Avony. "We don't need the fluff."

  "Fine," he said. "You kids take the fun out of games anymore. So serious."

  These games had never been about fun, Gabby thought.

  "There's a dragon and you kill it. End of story. Good bye."

  The old man wiped his hands together and made shooing motions.

  "Details. There has to be more to it than that," said Stephan.

  "You didn't want the flavor text," the old man said. "Reconsidering my original speech?"

  Gabby checked with the others. They each nodded in turn.

  "Fine. Speech away," she said.

  The team, who'd been scattered around the corner of the room, moved close, taking the seats around the old man's table. They waited as he watched them, like a raven with one good eye, black like a pebble, head tilting, this way and that.

  When his mouth opened like a cancerous cavern, and before they could move away, black smoke erupted in tendrils. They moved like whips, capturing them, wrapping them up in cocoons of inky mist.

  Gabby realized she had made a mistake, taunting the old man, the quest giver. Or maybe it hadn't mattered at all.

  A curious thing happened then, something she didn't expect was possible with LifeGame.

  She grew dizzy and lightheaded. The room wavered in abstract, turning fuzzy and a drone erupted in her head like a million geese flying over.

  Then the world spun on its axis and the light grew dim. She was blacking out, slowly. She could hear the old man laughing.

  She shouldn't be blacking out, she thought. The sense-webs couldn't control her consciousness. Only give the appearance of reality. Or was this part so skillfully woven that it appeared that she was blacking out. Her body was a moss-ridden stone.

  Had it been a trap all along? The albino Coder had placed him there, expecting her to metagame. All was not as it seemed, he'd warned her, and she'd lead them right to him.

  Have I lost the game?

  Chapter Sixteen

  The sand castle had thick glazed windows that reflected like bright stones. Or were they bright stones that reflected like windows?

  Still, they were there: stone or glass.

  The walls were adorned with an assortment of spires and towers like spears errantly thrown across the grounds. Each one more different than the last.

  A flock of gulls flew over the tallest tower. No, wait, is that right? Or were they tiny bugs that appeared to be gulls?

  Then the view rotated and Gabby tried to close her eyes, to ward off the vertigo, but the vision persisted.

  Huge hands found a nearby sand quarry and dug into the depths, pulling up black tarry sands in thick globs.

  Gabby wanted to disengage from the vision and wake up, but she didn't know how. The cool grit of the sand felt soothing across her calloused hands.

  She wondered if it was some kind of immersive. But the realistic ones like she was experiencing were banned in the GSA.

  If she concentrated, she could sense her heartbeat buried within the overwhelming sensations of reality she was feeling.

  The huge hands brought the black sandy mixture up to the mouth, and she felt herself exhale. A hoary frost filtered out over the sand. The breath made her hands tingle as if she'd dipped them in mint.

  The hands worked the sand, twisting and forming it. After a dozen tugs and pulls, when the sand became hard to work, a fresh breath would make the mixture malleable again.

  When the spire was finished, Gabby admired her handiwork, a twisted tower like an elongated conch shell made out of obsidian. Though she'd only been along for the ride, she felt
she could remember how to make the structure if she had the tools.

  The sand giant, which Gabby assumed she somehow inhabited, wondering if it was somehow the same one they'd battled with at the beginning of the raid, lumbered back to the castle and fastened the spire to an empty wall.

  Judging by the size of the sand dunes beneath her feet and the gulls that had flown by earlier, the castle had to be a hundred feet tall. The giant admired the castle, emanating a low hum, like a cat's purr.

  The giant returned to the quarry and sunk both hands into the inky depths, pulling out wet viscous sand, making a sucking noise as the hands freed themselves.

  A black mist floated out of the hole and formed before the sand giant.

  The giant, startled, let a glob of his building material slide from his hands to fall back into the quarry.

  Baleful eyes, like a million rotten galaxies, stared out from the mist. The form of an arm, wrapped in black gauze, pointed back toward the sand castle. Thin threads like death's tattered cloak weaved toward the castle.

  The tendrils dipped into cracks in the sand castle. One wrapped around an older spire that had faded white with the sun and it crumbled back into sand.

  Gabby felt her shoulders hunch and face droop. The giant was sad. The black mist wasn't threatening destruction of the castle, but highlighting its inevitable downfall.

  The wraith wrapped itself around the giant, cold whispers seeping into its sadness. A shiver ran down her spine, or the giant's, she wasn't sure anymore.

  Though the words had no meaning, there were no words, Gabby could hear the promise of permanence in the wraith's whispers. Gabby tried to will the giant to fight the black mist and keep it away from its castle, but she was only a bystander to the action.

  The wraith floated to the sand castle and filtered itself through the spire they had just fastened. The sand squeezed together like ice forming until it became whole.

  The giant let the remainder of the tarry sands slip off his hands to fall back into the quarry and snapped the spire away. He swished it around, testing the strength of the tower. Jabbing it into the castle walls, he punctured a hole the size of a delivery truck. The spiral tower became a sword and like a child finished with his creation, the giant battered the castle into a pile of sand.