Owl and the Electric Samurai

by Kristi Charish

  For a hairsbreadth of a second, I could have sworn he was going to double down. Then he sighed, and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Alix,” he said after a moment and opened his eyes. The anger was gone, if not the dark mood that had settled on him as of late. “I’m letting my temper get to me and cloud my own judgment.” He nodded at the screen. “Forget what I said. Contact the elf if you think that’s the best route.”

  Funny thing; if Rynn was the empathic one, why couldn’t I shake the feeling that I was the one left gauging the emotions?

  Rynn ran his hand through his hair. “I need to get some fresh air and clear my head. And it won’t hurt to check in with security again and see if they’ve got a fix on the mercenaries.”

  “Whoa, what?”

  He made a tsking noise, chiding himself. “I’m sorry, I was preoccupied and didn’t mention it. A few of the mercenaries have been spotted in Las Vegas. Apparently the IAA has decided to ignore Lady Siyu’s decree.”

  He didn’t sound surprised. Considering the current climate, neither was I. “How many?”

  “At the moment? Just the ones stupid enough to use commercial flights and their own passports. The Zebras I’m still tracking, but they’ll have someone here if the others have surfaced. I’m not too worried about them—yet. They’ll wait and see what happens, let the other outfits do their dirty work.”

  I wasn’t so concerned about them getting in. I was more worried about what happened when we tried to leave.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” Rynn said. “I need to clear my head.” He reached over and gave me a quick kiss on the forehead, but still, there was that preoccupation and distance.

  There was something else though that was bothering him. God knows how I figured that out, but I was sure of it. I reached out and grabbed his arm. For once, I seemed to have surprised him. A lot of firsts . . .

  “It doesn’t just have to do with the IAA and the elves, does it?”

  “It’s everything. The elves, the possibility of a change in power.” He shook his head and gave me a weary look. “The powerful in these games never run any risks, but the nymphs and radish demons downstairs?” He narrowed his eyes. “Working in a casino for a dragon is a far cry from what any of them dreamed of doing with their lives, but it’s a sight better than being hunted down by humans. And they would be the first. The elves, dragons, the real monsters? It’s like your human struggles. The poor man always ends up paying for the rich man’s war,” he said.

  As hard as I might, I couldn’t offer up any disagreement, which is why I didn’t stop Rynn again as he left. Sometimes, apparently even incubi need to be left to settle their own emotions.

  Me? I had an elf to deal with. I refilled my coffee and settled my strategy before maneuvering around Captain and back to the desk where my laptop was open. Let’s hope I could get Carpe to talk.

  Captain hopped back into my lap as I settled in. “Let’s see if we can’t deal with the asshole elf, shall we?”

  He turned his big green eyes on me and let out a long, drawn-out mew.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “I’ll try not to let it degrade into insults, okay?”

  Captain huffed.

  “Fine. I’ll keep it civil for the first ten minutes.”

  That seemed to appease him, and he finally settled in. Apparently, Captain had a thing for setting realistic expectations. Who knew? If only negotiating with Carpe were as easy.

  I set my fingers to the keyboard. First rule of negotiations: if you can, pick the location. I’ve got a job for us, Carpe, I wrote in the message window.

  What you thinking, Byzantine? scrawled below my own message a few moments later.

  I didn’t bother answering through my mic. Like I said, I was trying to keep things civil. No raiding low-level goblin hordes this time, promise. I got a noncommittal huff over my headset.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said to myself and shot Carpe off the map I’d settled on. One I’d wanted to explore but wouldn’t put any cards on the table.

  “A Norse treasure trove?” Carpe said over the headset after a brief moment.

  That’s what the map says. A wise player once said to never trust what’s on a map—right before something ate him, I imagined.

  “Hardly seems worth it to share. You could handle this on your own.”

  Second rule of engagement? Never open with what you want to bargain for, but also don’t waste your time.

  “Consider it a peace offering. I’m bored. Then we split the treasure fifty-fifty.” I waited to the count of two before adding, “Of course, if you have better things to do . . .” Or need more time to plan how to double-­cross me . . .

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  And that was the crux of the problem. No one ever warned the person they were about to double-cross.

  Holding the warm mug of coffee in my hand, I ported Byzantine into Dead Orc Soup. Let’s see if I couldn’t pump Carpe with some carefully worded questions on the evil elves trying to screw me over . . .

  And figure out just whose side Carpe was on.

  10

  WORLD QUEST

  11:00 a.m. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, World Quest

  “I don’t know. Looks awfully good to be true, Byzantine,” Carpe said over my headset. It was in reference to the town we’d reached, a small, picturesque walled city set in a fjord, modeled after the fortified Viking cities that used to dot the coast. From what I gathered from the buildings and NPCs, it was supposed to represent the early to mid-medieval ages. It was the right city; my in-game map said as much. All we had to do was find the treasure.

  I took a sip of my coffee. An Americano this time. I’d finally managed to summon up the energy to run the espresso machine . . . and suffer through Captain’s pleas for food every time I’d set foot in the kitchen. Currently he’d settled for batting the food toy around. I was impressed. It had been out in the apartment for almost twenty-four hours and it wasn’t in pieces. Yet. “Those who never take chances never find resurrection scrolls,” I told him.

  “No, but they also don’t get eaten by dragons and fried by fireballs.”

  “Gird your elf balls and stop whining, Carpe. It’s barely a Level eighteen dungeon, and as far as the map says there’s only one major monster guarding the treasure.”

  “And every map in World Quest should be trusted implicitly?”

  “No, but what kind of treasure hunters are we if we don’t give it a chance and hear it out first? I don’t think I want to live in a World Quest where a treasure map has to cough up proof of its good intentions before a couple dungeon crawlers like us will take it out on the town.”

  I could hear the sigh along our comm channel. “There is something seriously wrong with you. What level is the monster?”

  “Thirteen.”

  Carpe swore. Level thirteen meant it’d be packing some serious firepower, and we’d have to do some reconnaissance to figure out what kind of Level thirteen monster it was.

  “Giant or a Medusa,” Carpe said.

  “A Medusa this far north? More likely an ice troll, or a baby wyvern.” I’d been reading up on Nordic monsters. Most, like the sea monsters and dragons, were in the low twenties, meaning a team of three or more, but the under-fifteens were still more populous than one might ­imagine.

  Carpe went silent.

  “Look, are you in or not?” I asked, wondering for a minute whether Carpe would play along.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m in. Just changing up my inventory. Here, hold these in your magic thief bag, will you?” A set of scrolls and three knives appeared in my inventory, which I transferred into my bag of holding. How did the thieves of World Quest end up the RPG game’s equivalent of a packhorse?

  “To be honest, I kind of expected you to throw me something besides a treasure map,” Carpe said.


  “Hunh,” I said, as I began to scope out the area for any magic wards we might want to avoid. “As I’m not a mind reader, what were you expecting exactly?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Byzantine. You’re the one who uses World Quest to plan out your personal treasure hunts. How about you tell me what it is you’re looking for?”

  “Wow, personal insults and dragging up my past transgressions. You really must be off your game today, Carpe. You ever think I’m not all about the treasure hunts? Maybe I just want to spend a couple hours playing a video game with my friend, the elf—who occasionally stabs me in the back.” No magic anywhere. Not on the gates, not set in a trap to catch thieves past the threshold; I ran into one of those once. They aren’t pretty.

  “What is it I heard someone say to you once? Something about a guy in a whorehouse visiting his sister . . . ?”

  “First, that’s a low blow to the working whores of the world.”

  “I suppose your boyfriend would know.”

  “Wow. Carpe. Wow. Jealousy and misogyny. Diving through the Looking Glass real fucking darkly today, aren’t we?”

  “Just like to make sure I’ve lowered myself to my teammate’s level. Wouldn’t want to give anyone an inferiority complex. Now just where the hell does the map want us to go?”

  “Town square.”

  I set my avatar on a course for the center of town, a wooden structure set in a courtyard of rough-hewn wood surrounded by hay and sawdust. I did another check for magic, traps, anything as we approached. To be honest, I’d been expecting at least a magic trap . . . maybe a party of NPC protectors of the faith.

  Everyone was just going about their business. Like a normal village.

  “Is it me, or are the townsfolk a little, well, normal?” Carpe said into my headset.

  I won’t lie, it was surreal. And a little uncomfortable. Aping real life a little too much as far as oblivious townsfolk. “Map says we’re supposed to stand in the center,” I said.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. It’ll either tell us what we need to do next, or teleport in a monster. Or a combination of the two.”

  The two of us headed for the center. As soon as we reached it, a circle flared into existence, denoting in-game magic. “A teleport point,” I said to Carpe. Not uncommon in World Quest. It made the treasure hunts more interesting; you couldn’t completely map out the area. Took a home game advantage away—you can’t dominate an area if you don’t know where the final map point is.

  Still no sign from the crowds milling around that anything was amiss . . . or even that we were there.

  “Okay, don’t tell me you aren’t creeped out now,” Carpe said.

  “Just look at the map and see what it wants us to do next,” I said as I kept my avatar on a very high lookout. Carpe was right. This was way too easy for World Quest.

  Carpe’s avatar huddled on the ground beside mine in the center of the magic circle, a signal that he was preoccupied with a spell. “The map’s showing me a teleport spell, a specific one. Shall we?” Carpe asked.

  I gave the NPCs around us one last good look. Still nothing, as if the blaring pentagram in the center of their square wasn’t there. I shook my head. World Quest NPCs weren’t exactly known for riveting conversation, but this was a little meta, even for them. “Just get the teleport spell working, and get a couple defensive spells ready. I’m betting the monster is waiting on the other side.”

  “Roger Wilco, Byzantine. And I’m holding you responsible if we end up in a bottomless pit of death.”

  I watched and waited. The screen air around Carpe lit up as he activated the spell contained on the map, and I braced myself for the worst as the screen flashed opaque white and our avatars began to reappear in a matching teleport circle in another region of the game—a field, set amongst arid low hills and mountains that reminded me vaguely of the Mediterranean.

  I circled my avatar, waiting for an attack.

  It didn’t come.

  “Where the hell are we?” Carpe asked. “And when?”

  Good question. I took stock of the area and the structures that were now starting to fill in on my own game map. I recognized that we were on the outskirts of a late Roman town—the amphitheater was still a prominent structure—but eyeballing it I’d guess that the newer structures had been built over an older Greek city. I spotted the lake down the hillside. Wait a minute . . .

  I turned my avatar around and checked the hillside to be sure. “We’re in Macedonia. Lychnidos—or Ohrid, to be exact. Home of Alexander the Great. As to the when . . . ah, after the Greeks, but still in the later Roman period, I think.”

  Hunh. Supposedly a burial mask made of gold for Alexander the Great went missing in this town, right around this period or a little before. No one had been able to find it, not with the medieval town that had been built over the original structures . . . might be worth taking a look around. Just because I was here to probe Carpe didn’t mean I wasn’t above a little reconnaissance while I was at it. Yes, I had sworn off using World Quest for my treasure hunts, but come on, there had to be points for good behavior.

  It also distracted me from the nagging thought in the back of my mind that kept insisting this was way easier than a World Quest treasure hunt had any right being. I did another check on the screen map, casting my Detect Magic spell for good measure.

  Still nothing. The in-game time was early morning, and as far as I could see the only things moving around were vaguely Roman NPCs, going about their daily business.

  Weird. I realized Carpe had said something. “What?”

  “I said, I figured you’d have me crawling around some ruin in Tibet for sure, not a generic treasure map.”

  I ignored the probe. Carpe had thrown a few vague ones at me over the past hour. I wasn’t biting. Instead, I was keeping him off balance with a quest that had absolutely nothing to do with either of my real-world problems. “It’s not a generic treasure hunt . . . it’s crossed into the realm of metageneric. And maybe you don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do.”

  “Brothers visiting their sister in the whorehouse. And why the hell aren’t you trying to get me to spill on the elves?”

  “Because I’m maturing and working on developing a deep respect and understanding for all things supernatural. Starting with you. Now how about we start with a conversation on why you really had me risk my life for that spell book?” I searched the game screen. There really was nothing here—or nothing that raised any alarms or posed an immediate threat.

  “Touché. And the town is up the hill.”

  Round one to Owl. The lack of any monsters or guards trying to protect the treasure might be unnerving, but far be it from me to turn my nose up at easy treasure. I set my avatar headed toward the old gated city on the hillside above us on autopilot, then pulled up the notes I’d been making on Jebe and my list of most likely burial sites—the ones I’d been compiling while playing with Carpe.

  Despite our differences over the past few months, there were two things I knew without a doubt about Carpe. One, he took World Quest seriously. Determined, focused seriously. Two, he wanted to know what I was up to and liked to spy on me digitally.

  Oh no, wait. There was a third thing I knew. He couldn’t do both at once.

  I’d had my search window open on and off for the past hour and not a peep from Carpe on my recent history.

  To be sure, all my notes were handwritten. I courted disaster, but I didn’t jump in bed with it.

  I went over my list as our avatars approached the town. There were six or so sites that looked promising as final resting sites for Jebe. The problem was that regardless of which one I went with, it boiled down to two bad choices.

  Tibet or Nepal.

  Mercenaries or the Chinese. At the moment, neither of those were particularly appealing options. The mercen
aries were obvious, but the Chinese? Let’s just say we’d had a disagreement about a handful of terra-cotta warriors last month, which Rynn didn’t know about. Oh the joys of breaking that one to him. . . .

  I turned my attention back on the screen as our avatars reached the city gates.

  “You weren’t wrong, Byz. The World Quest version of ancient Lychnidos has a Roman feel to it.”

  Good thing the dates were never exact—and neither were the people. Otherwise they probably would have reacted a hell of a lot more aggressively to our dress and appearance as we approached. Hazards of an RPG: people tended to err on the side of obscenely flamboyant when dressing their avatars, so the NPC—non-player characters—that inhabited the game had to interact as if everyone thought pink Hello Kitty armor was perfectly normal. Otherwise, every time a player tried to sell their goods or start a quest, there’d be chaos.

  As it was, the Roman NPCs offered us about as much of a look as we entered the gates as they would give any other travelers or traders.

  The city guards only nodded at our weapons as we strode in. Early in the history of World Quest, players had been forced to hand over their pointy bits, but that got tedious. Easier to make all the towns noncombat zones. Not the entire town, mind you: cellars, dungeons, and ruined tunnels were still try-to-kill-you fair game, but you couldn’t attack other players when they were, say, pulling out their coin purse to pay someone. The game designers were above taking cheap shots . . . unless it was me, in which case cheap shots were fair game.

  Now that we were in Lychnidos, the map had changed once again to show a dotted line leading to a dwelling of some sort—or that’s what the map made it look like. I checked the area on the screen. Though the layout was familiar, the buildings didn’t quite match.

  “I think the map and town are supposed to be separated by a couple hundred years,” Carpe offered.

  Fantastic. “Just keep your eyes on the line and make sure we don’t stray too far off it.” Carpe’s in-game sorcerer had access to more of those kinds of spells than my thief did. Counterintuitive if you thought too long about it . . .