“Oh, I see,” I said. “I’m, um, just traveling, trying to find my own way in the world. You would not know the place I came from—it is very distant.”
“I have knowledge of all the known zones in this land,” Faun said. “Surely, I know of the place you come from. Tell me, is it the Zone of Wind . . . or perhaps the Zone of Sand? Your garb looks to be well suited for the desert wastes.
The Zone of Sand? I thought. The Zone of Wind? The names of these places seemed a little uninspired, like something straight out of a sixth-grade fantasy story, but my positive experience with the game so far had already overshadowed any half-assed naming conventions I was going to confront.
“Uh, no,” I said. “I am from a zone called Earth.”
“Earth . . . like the ground? Do you mean to say that you hail from the Zone of Stone, then?”
Oh my god, really? I held my hands up and dismissed the notion. “No, no. It is just called Earth. I am sure you have never been there. Only a select few people can even make the journey. But tell me more about you, Faun. What is this place called?”
“We are in the Evermeadows of the Zone of Leaves, known as Tel’Maryn, ‘The Land of Countless Green,’ by those of us that live here.” She spread both arms and waved them through the open air, gesturing at everything around us. “I am a servant of the Temple of Leaves that is in the heart of the forest over yonder.” She indicated the expanse of trees on the horizon.
Tel’Maryn. That was better, at least. It still sounded like some generic fantasy bullshit, but it was inarguably a step up from “the Zone of Leaves.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. “It is a pleasure to meet you. What do you do at this Temple of Leaves, then? What even is the Temple of Leaves?”
“My . . .” she breathed. “How little you know of this land.” I could not tell by her face if she wanted to laugh or was simply beside herself with bewilderment. “I am a ranger there. I scout the forests and plains all through this land, communing with the wildlife and citizens alike. I report to the Temple of Leaves with any news worth noting—the health of the settlements and forests, any sign of danger both foreign and domestic, and other things of that nature. The Temple of Leaves is the central hub of Tel-Maryn. All of the zones operate this way with their respective temples. Surely, you have a place such as this in the Zone of Earth where you come from, yes?”
I nodded my head, saying, “Yeah, sort of. We just don’t call it that exactly. What all goes on at these temples?”
“It is where a zone’s ruler or rulers reside. Most of a zone’s military might is focused there since it is each land’s center of power. Students of magic flock to the temples to study their craft, since it is a convenient place to compare their findings. That is not to say this is what all magic users do, of course, only those that are more . . . academically focused. Your naturalist magicians, such as channelers, shamans, and druids, prefer to keep to themselves, away from populated places, tending to their studies alone. It is all a matter of what one’s calling compels them to do.”
“That’s very interesting.”
“Yes, I feel the same way.”
I could tell she was still speaking with a little reservation, as if she did not fully trust me yet, which was understandable of a normal human being who randomly encountered a stranger alone in a place like this. Her hints of hesitation and slight unease confused me in this setting though. If she was a game developer here to guide me through my testing, there was no reason for her to regard me with this kind of suspicion. If she was a friendly NPC, this sort of unwillingness to accept me at face value would only get in the way of the story that the game was trying to tell, needlessly hampering my progress. It was a puzzle for sure.
“May I see that blade of yours?” she asked.
“This?” I moved my hand to the hilt of my scimitar, and she nodded.
I drew the blade from its sheath and held it to her, my hands supporting each end. It gleamed in the morning sun. There were some scribbles on its side near where the handle ended, which stopped only a few inches up the flattened side of the blade from there. It looked to be some kind of unfinished writing, but I had no idea what it was supposed to say, probably some fantasy text that I would not have been able to decipher had it been completed anyway.
She looked my weapon over, leaning close to me to get a better view. Her breasts continued to taunt me, hanging like juicy fruits only a few inches from my fingers. Her hair smelled like a campfire with the faint hint of her own unique scent added into the mix. I suddenly forgot all about the fish.
Her head turned back up to me as she remained stooped over the blade, her eyes hinting at wonder. I could see her breath condensing on the polished leather covering my torso. My own breath streamed down and blew single strands of her hair like a gentle breeze.
“Your sword appears to be magical. What does it do?”
“Oh, uh.” I choked up, trying to maintain my focus on her face. “I don’t know. I just found it.”
She glanced back at it for a moment and said, “Interesting. Do you have magical powers as well?”
“I don’t know.”
She seemed more puzzled than before but also more comfortable with me than she had been.
“I know a few spells,” she said, grinning. “I can detect the presence of magic, though I cannot tell you its source or what any magic can specifically do. Would you allow me to use my magic on your hands and your blade?”
As far as I was concerned, I was already under her spell, but I was willing to let her use her magic on whatever part of my body she desired. I smiled and said, “Go ahead.”
She placed her delicate fingers on the blade and began to chant something under her breath. I could not hear her very well, but I doubted she was speaking English anyway. Soon, her palms began to glow a bright neon green, and I could feel the blade vibrating slightly in my hands. It tickled. A low hum followed the sensation, and the pace and volume of her chanting both increased in parallel with the tingling sensation emanating from my sword.
“. . .cannan huchaka nah . . . verim boli est . . .” There was definitely no English verbiage peppering her words. “. . . kalim mergartu ren . . .”
At one instant the entire blade glowed that green color and then everything faded all at once. Faun straightened her back and returned my gaze, nodding her head in satisfaction.
“Your blade certainly has magical properties. Perhaps we can find out what exactly it does at a later time. Now, let me better see your hands.”
Without waiting for me, she took the sword and placed it back in its sheath for me, her arm brushing against my outer thigh as she went. I drew my hands back several inches simply out of instinct, but she reached for them and pulled them closer to her waist.
“Hold them out here,” she ordered.
Her hands were over mine as they had been hovering over my sword moments ago. She went through the same chanting routine, and the tingling was more intense this time since her spell was being cast directly on my upturned palms now. They started to sweat, and the tickling almost became unbearable at a certain point. It was all I could do to prevent myself from interrupting the spell to scratch, but I managed to hold firm until she had finished. Again, she looked at me with that satisfied expression.
“There is something magical about you, too, Si1ence.” Faun paused for a moment and asked, “Will you accompany me to the Temple of Leaves? I am returning there now after my most recent survey of the land.”
Hell yeah, I’ll come with you! “Sure, I guess I could do that.”
“Wonderful!” she said, clapping her hands together in an excited childish fashion I would not have expected of her. “I will finish cooking my food and then we can be on our way. Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, I just did—have you had the fish here?”
Her meal consisted of a handful of tiny balls that looked like little potatoes. She stuck each one on the end of her knife and patiently roasted them, crouching down nea
r the blaze all the while. Her legs called to me from down there, but I did my best to focus on other things. Since I hadn’t been doing tournament play in the past few years, I hadn’t really gotten out much and, when confronted with women like her, I found myself behaving like a prisoner just released from a decade-long stint. Her allure was almost too tempting to resist. Almost. But I was able to hold out, even as her effeminate campfire scent wafted my way in the breeze.
I watched her eat, both of us remaining silent, exchanging pleasant smiles now and again when our eyes met, and then we were on our way. She led me alongside the road. Not on it, but alongside it just at the edge where the grass met the dirt. I asked her why she did this, and she explained that it was more pleasing to her feet to feel the ground give a little under her weight. It was then that I noticed she was walking barefoot. My eyes had not traveled that far down yet. The only thing adorning her body below the knees was a dark brown anklet of wooden beads fastened above her right foot.
She had a point about the ground. It wasn’t just the grass bending to our footfalls, but the soil as well. It was as if it were swelling with little cushions of air that our steps released upon contact. My uncle Jim lived on several acres out in the country during the last four or five years of his life. It had been given to his late wife by her dad when he died. After she passed from pancreatic cancer, it was his alone. They had not done anything with it up to that point except for pay the exorbitant taxes, but after she died, he decided to move out there and live the rest of his days closer to nature. The ground there felt a lot like this, and I remembered it was always fun to run on, kind of like walking on a trampoline without the bouncing. Each step I took now with Faun brought me that much closer to my uncle.
We’d been walking for what must have been hours. The sun was well past midday, but I was unsure of what that meant exactly. For all I knew, the days in this game world were only six hours long. Few games had full 24-hour days. Most players did not have that kind of patience. If there was something happening at night in the game, they did not want to have to wait all day for it to turn to night. Without a way to keep track of time, I could only guess at how much time had passed. All I knew was that the forest did not appear to be getting any closer.
My mind began to wander, as it tended to do during long stretches of silence or monotonous activity like walking in a straight line for hours on end. I thought about how, since I was in a game world, there must be some sort of quest system or storyline. There is no game without an objective. That would just be boring. That being the case, no objective had presented itself to me.
Perhaps discovering Faun and following her was a part of my quest, but it had simply not been spelled out to me in plain terms. Most games had some kind of log that players could refer to if they forgot what their current tasks were. A lot of games allowed players to work multiple questions simultaneously, so there had to be a way of organizing and keeping track of all of them. If I was to rack up something like 20 objectives in this world, I expected there to be a place I could go to see my missions all written out.
But maybe that was up to me here. Maybe, in an effort to convey as much a sense of realism as possible, the game left it up to me to keep track of my goals. Maybe I simply had to write them all down myself. I could kind of understand that, but it seemed like a major oversight to not include a pen and notepad in my rucksack at the outset.
“We will camp here,” Faun abruptly announced, stopping and turning to face me.
I had been entranced by the motion of her hips for the past—I don’t know—the past eternity. I only snapped out of it at her sudden proclamation. The sky was a brilliant gradient of red, pink, and orange. I was already about to experience my second night in this world. At the thought, I could only hope that my vitals were somehow accounted for as my comatose body lay in my bedroom back home.
The forest still seemed forever away.
“All right,” I mumbled, feeling as if I had to relearn how to speak as her spell dissipated, leaving me in a daze. “How long until we reach the Temple of Leaves?”
“About three days’ time.”
She got to her knees and set to work digging in the ground with her trowel. Instead of asking what she was doing, I thought to just wait and see. After a couple minutes of this, she dug up four more of those little potatoes.
“Tubers.” She grinned, handing half of them to me. “They grow all over the plains. You can often see their vines popping out of the ground.”
“Oh, nice,” I said, accepting her offer. “Do you have any tinder?” I felt foolish having burned all of mine. Now that I knew fire behaved a little differently in this world, I would use it more sparingly.
She rummaged through the satchel at her belt, pulled out a clump of fuel, and dropped it at my feet. I stooped down and pulled out my flint and steel, intent on making myself useful. Pride washed over me and displayed itself in my face as I ignited the fire on my first attempt. Within a minute, I had a good blaze burning, and Faun had found a total of eight tubers to cook. I took half and followed her lead from earlier, roasting them one by one on the tip of my knife.
“I am curious to know what magic you wield, Si1ence,” she said with a mouth full of potatoes. She took one of the jars from her waist and offered it to me to sip. It was one of the ones I had assumed to be empty earlier, but it was actually full of water. Sensible.
I took a sip and said, “Me, too. This is all news to me, really.”
“What a special feeling that must be—to have magical abilities which you are unaware of. I have heard of channelers and enchanters who have had to go through long journeys of discovering their hidden abilities. I wonder if your case is much the same as theirs.”
“That would be pretty wild,” I said. “We’ll find out soon enough.” I handed the bottle back to her.
“Indeed, I am sure that we will.” Her full lips kissed the edge of the jar and she gulped down some herself. “I will tell you this: it is fortunate for my people that you have come along, as you appear to be a warrior, and we can use all the help we can find.”
“Yeah, I’m a decent warrior, I would say. What kind of help do you need?” A quest, perhaps?
She looked over her should to the forest and let out a sigh. “There are a group of slavers and wealthy corrupted men that roam this land. I wish I could tell you that Tel’Maryn is a place of peace, but I cannot truthfully make such a claim. There was a time when this place knew nothing of strife, but over the years, these dark forces have slowly been building.”
Definitely a quest!
“This group—they call themselves the Gray Favor—have taken control of parts of Tel’Maryn. They hug close to many of its boundaries, preventing people from coming and going, separating us from the rest of the world. At its head, this clan is controlled by a sect of defrocked priests, evil magicians, and power-hungry warlords. Their numbers grow with each passing day.” I was startled to hear the sudden metallic pop that had accompanied the appearance of the neon blue interface following my fight with the Mangler creature. Faun didn’t even seem to notice the glowing blue window that was now hovering at my side. It read:
Quest Started: Paving The Way
Objectives: [] Slay Conn Felvid
Below the objective was the portrait of a snarling, middle-aged bald man. He looked to be sneering at me with a twisted smile reminiscent of the ghoul I had beheaded the previous day. This portrait was the only part of the interface that was not colored in that overwhelming blue. I was thankful for this because it would likely have been much harder to identify the man otherwise. A simple golden hooped earring gleamed at me from his left ear. His head was turned in such a way that I was unable to see if the jewelry had a sibling hanging from the other side.
There was a description of the man under the picture telling me that he was a former member of some royal court in the Zone of Leaves who in recent years had turned to a life of crime, no better than a common thief.
I
chuckled upon reading that. I was a thief after all, but RPG’s often made excuses for their players’ backstories. This guy was a thief and needed to die. I was a thief and needed to kill this man like the good hero I was. It didn’t always make sense.
The bio went on to describe how Baron Felvid used his capital and position of influence to quickly gain the respect and climb the ranks of the Gray Favor. He was now one of its prominent members, a head that needed to be chopped off if the enemy was to be defeated. This was all that the interface revealed to me, and it disappeared as soon as I finished reading. It was good to finally have some real direction.
“So, Si1ence,” Faun said, picking up where she left off minutes ago, as if no time had passed between now and her last sentence, “will you help my people and I vanquish our enemy?”
What kind of guy was I to say no to those breasts?
4
Faun had this thing she did. I thought it was kind of cute. I had noticed it the previous two nights and also when I woke up the following days. Always before the sun either disappeared below the horizon or just as it was peering over at us from the hills, my companion would turn to it, get down on both of her knees, and say a little prayer. None of the time I caught her doing it could I hear what she was saying, but I was sure that she was speaking in another language, like when she had worked her magic on my hands. I hadn’t yet asked her what this was about, assuming it was probably a quirk of her class, which seemed to make her a ranger with magical tendencies, likely druidic in nature.
Neither of us talked much as we traveled the next day and a half alongside the road, feeling the slight give of the aerated virtual soil beneath our feet. In our short time together, my guide had already taught me so much about these prairies—the Evermeadows, as she called it.
Circuit World Page 4
