Metamorphosis Online Complete Series Boxed Set; A Gamelit Fantasy RGP Novel: You Need A Bigger Sword, The New Queen Rises, Reign With Axe & Shield

by Natalie Grey

  “It didn’t occur to me until just now.” Sam sounded faintly prickly. “And I’ll handle it. I’m more familiar with the code.” He stood up and left before Chris could retaliate.

  Jay grabbed his papers off the desk and rushed out behind Sam. “Sam, wait.”

  “Not now, Jay.” Sam looked weary. Whatever brief flirtation he’d had with being a commanding leader, it was gone now.

  “Yes, now,” Jay hissed back.

  Sam swung to face him. He wasn’t a tall man, but with his hands in his pockets and the assessing look in his eyes, it was easy to forget that Jay was looking down at him. “All right, help me understand. Why do you care so much? You’ve been fighting us on this from Day One. You want her to keep this ranking. You don’t want her in a guild. I don’t even think you want her to have a sponsorship. Why?”

  Jay stood frozen for a long moment. This was dangerous. He had to tell the truth, just maybe not all of it.

  Definitely not all of it.

  “You don’t know what this world means to me,” he said finally. “You don’t really play.” When Sam raised his eyebrows, Jay hastened to explain. “You’re not a jerk about it, you just have people in your life who care who you are, okay? A lot of us don’t. We don’t have anyone who respects us the second we walk out of these offices.”

  Sam blinked at him.

  “Whenever anyone logs into Metamorphosis,” Jay said, “the only things that matter are their skills, and who they are as a person. It gives everyone a fresh start, and a chance to be judged for the things people should be judged for. Gracie…” He caught himself. “Callista. You have to see her to understand, I think. When someone needs her help, she doesn’t think twice about giving it. She loves the world, and she’s building something; a guild of her own.”

  “Okay, so—”

  “No, hear me out,” Jay pleaded. “So Harry was a dick; I get that. He probably did write this quest to screw the Ds, honestly. But the reason Callista got the ranking was that she did do something. She walked into an unknown amount of danger to save a bunch of pixels, Sam. The kobolds hadn’t ever done anything for her, and you know how overwhelming the game is at first. It feels real, and the danger feels real, but she did it. Anyone could have, but they just sold the jewel for money. I watched the Hill Warden tell a bunch of players that fragment of lore and none of them did anything with it.”

  Sam rubbed at his forehead and sighed. “That may be, but—”

  “I helped build this world so people could get what they deserved!” Jay’s voice was rising. “To just change the rules so she doesn’t get the boost anymore? It goes against all of it.”

  Sam gave him a long look. “Okay,” he said finally. Jay sagged with relief, but Sam held up a finger. “For now,” he said. “I will present all three options to Dan and Dhruv.”

  “Four,” Jay said numbly. “Leaving it be. That’s the fourth option.”

  Sam held back a sigh. “Right. Four options. They choose. After all, this world was their idea, right?”

  “Right.” Jay accepted the reprieve.

  “Go home, Jay.” Sam put his hand on Jay’s shoulder. Right now, he was every inch the father of a stubborn toddler. “I spend too much time trying to convince my three-year-old to go to sleep, to have to have the same argument with a guy pushing thirty. You’ll get paid. Just go home and get some rest.”

  Jay managed a laugh. “Yeah, yeah. And you won’t—”

  “No, I won’t re-roll the character while you’re gone, and yes, I will manage Chris, and yes, you will buy me a nice bottle of something for Christmas this year.”

  “Roger that,” Jay said. His heart was pounding as he headed home.

  He didn’t mean to fall asleep when he got home, but after a shower and another hastily-devoured meal of fast food, he was almost tired enough to go to sleep right on the kitchen table.

  He barely made it to the bed before he passed out.

  He woke blearily a full sixteen hours later and pushed himself up to look around the room. He was ravenous, but he actually felt human for the first time in almost a week. He checked his phone out of habit, felt the familiar, dull disappointment that he could drop off the face of the Earth for sixteen hours and apparently not have anyone care, and called for delivery as he wandered into the main room.

  He knew what people would advise him to do at this point: go out into the sunshine, do some errands, and be a productive member of society. Sam, especially, would tell him to do literally anything except log into Metamorphosis Online.

  He logged in.

  By now, the VR set felt familiar on his body, as if he should be wearing it and it had just been missing for a while. He was relaxing and smiling to himself when the ding sounded for an incoming message. He gave a laugh of surprise.

  “Fancy seeing you here at this hour.”

  “I might say the same,” Gracie said. “I thought you worked during the days.”

  Of course, Jay realized. He usually played late at night, so she would assume that. “Day off,” he said, skirting the issue. “Really needed to take a break after this big project.”

  “Ah.” Was it his imagination, or did she sound a little bit sad?

  “What do you do?” Jay asked, genuinely curious.

  “I’d, uh… I’d rather not talk about it.” Her voice, still echoey with the Aosi filters, nonetheless sounded very small.

  With a jolt, Jay remembered his big speech to Sam and felt like an incredible jerk. “Hey, you want to see the sunrise from that temple? You know, the place where shit went sideways? I hung out there a bit ago, and it’s fucking gorgeous. We really—” He coughed to hide his misstep. “They really built this place to be an experience.”

  There was a pause. “Sure,” Gracie said cautiously. “Meet you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  They arrived at the base of the hill at the same time, and their characters began to climb with the untiring gait only a fake character could maintain. The view around him seemed so realistic that Jay had to remind himself his legs weren’t really going to get tired as the path sloped up.

  Gracie seemed lost in thought. She didn’t stop to pick up any of the ores that appeared along the side of the trail, and she didn’t really speak. The 9 was still over her head, and Jay decided not to comment on it. She hadn’t seemed very keen on it the last time they’d played.

  In the temple, now cleared of ghosts and strange stitched-together monsters, they made their way between toppled columns and saplings that had pushed themselves through the cracks in the floor. The temple wasn’t restored, but the game seemed to be suggesting that, at long last, it was a place where there might be life of some sort.

  “You think this place is supposed to be from before that big war?” Gracie asked finally. She had stopped to brush her fingers through the leaves of a sapling, and she crouched to look at a column. “Before they scattered the races?” She looked at Jay.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Jay said honestly. He looked around. “Yeah, that’s probably what it is.”

  “I like it,” Gracie said. “This whole world waiting to be discovered. I wonder how much is hiding around here? Stuff like that kobold tomb.” She stood up. “Did the other races keep the peace between the kobolds and the fae? I bet we won’t know. It’s just one of those things that got lost when the races were scattered. Historians would spend generations trying to get everything back, and they still wouldn’t know all of it.”

  Jay watched her, smiling slightly. Sometimes he got so caught up in what the game was in terms of friendship and camaraderie that he entirely forgot what an achievement it was in the sheer scope of the art and the story.

  Gracie walked to the edge of the cliff, eyes focused on the horizon as the sun began to dip. She looked cautiously down the slope. “Do you get totally wrecked if you fall off a cliff here?”

  “Yep,” Jay said. It wasn’t speculation. There had been a contest in the office after the open beta to see who co
uld make the most impressive splat.

  After that, management had decided to make the splatter graphics a bit less realistic.

  Gracie nodded. Her arms were crossed over her chest as she looked out at the horizon, and eventually, she said, “I deal blackjack. That’s what I do.” She looked at him. “You asked,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, I—”

  “I was embarrassed about it,” she explained. She’d gone back to studying the horizon. “I went to college and majored in math, and then I did nothing with it.”

  “Bet you know a hell of a lot more about blackjack odds than most people,” Jay pointed out.

  There was a pause before she smiled; it was strange getting used to the emotes in the game. “That’s true. But it’s like this game, I think—people think they’re playing the game, and I think some are, but the people who run it are playing a totally different game. The sponsorships, the guilds…” She sighed. “I keep having to turn down invitations, by the way.”

  “What?” Jay felt a spike of worry.

  “I keep getting invitations,” Gracie said. She shrugged, and her shoulders stayed hunched. “People who think my ranking means something. It’s a glitch. I need to submit a ticket about it.”

  Jay wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. Of course. They’d spent the past three days scrambling to figure out how she was going to take them to the cleaners, and instead, she was trying to do the right thing.

  Why hadn’t anyone ever expected that situation?

  “Honestly,” Gracie said, “all of them make my teeth ache, anyway. Like, they seem super smarmy, and you get the sense that they’d be totally insane when it came to how often you had to log on, you know? It’s just annoying.”

  Jay swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. I get that.”

  “Anyway, I like our group.” She smiled again. Her shoulders had relaxed. “We need a few more to try to run a month-end dungeon or whatever, right?”

  “Yeah. The proper dungeons are all ten-man. Most guilds have more than that, though.” Jay sighed. “Then it’s a whole thing about who gets picked to try for the month-first. You know, to see which guild can get through the run before anyone else? The top guilds load in pretty much immediately, and they’re just trying any combination they can to figure out the puzzle before other people do.”

  Gracie shook her head. “Eh, I don’t want to be going crazy in my off-time. I just…you know, I think we’d have a good time going through, right?”

  “Yeah. We definitely would.”

  “And there’s so much more to the game. I still have to explore it all. On the other hand…” She sounded wistful now. “$500 isn’t chump change, you know?”

  “I know.” Jay watched as she had her character clamber onto the slope of a column. She sat down and patted the space next to her.

  “Good view from up here.”

  He went to join her, and they sat contemplatively as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars wheeled above them.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” Gracie said. “You were right; this place is amazing.”

  “It is,” Jay agreed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sounds of sniffles came from the bar as Gracie watched, half-hiding behind a column.

  The woman who came to her table had just had a fight with her boyfriend. Gracie had seen it all unfold. Seen the security personnel swing smoothly into action, suited and outwardly deferential but with looks in their eyes that said what the patron started, they would finish—and probably not in a way the patron wanted.

  So the boyfriend had left, and the woman, after brushing off the security guards, had looked around, seen Gracie as one of the only other women nearby, and come to sit at her table.

  She was still crying when she arrived, which didn’t faze Gracie. You saw a lot of people in Vegas on a false high, and you saw a lot of others who were realizing just how false the high was. It wasn’t that she didn’t see happy people; she did. The unhappy ones just stuck out more.

  “Take your mind off things?” Gracie asked, nodding to the table.

  The woman hiccupped and caught her breath, and then her face crumpled again. “He has all my cards and chips. I didn’t have any pockets in this dress, so he has my stuff. Oh, God.” She hid her face in one hand, her voice rising to a squeak as she tried to hold off the sob.

  What happened next, Gracie would find herself defending to a long succession of suited individuals. The casino was dead, no cards were dealt, and there were no chips on the table. She gestured to clear her hands for the cameras, then came around the side of the table.

  “Hey. Hey, it’s not so bad, okay? Let’s get you some water at the bar, and then we’ll call your hotel and get you into another room for tonight. Get you a new key, okay?”

  The woman looked gratefully at Gracie. She didn’t seem able to say anything, just gulped and stared in mute appeal.

  “Come on,” Gracie said. She looked around to see if she could catch Matt’s eye, but she didn’t see him, so she helped the hiccupping woman over to the bar. Lara was there, a former cocktail waitress who’d lobbied for some hours behind the bar. She saw the woman’s tearstained face and gave Gracie a wide-eyed look. “She needs a glass of water,” Gracie said, “and to use the phone.” She pointed to where the phone behind the desk was. To the patron, she added, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I—yeah.” The woman gave a hiccupping nod and pulled Gracie into an impulsive hug. “Thanks. It was all so overwhelming for a moment.”

  Gracie smiled and extricated herself. She was halfway back to her table when she saw Matt—and his boss, Vince. She felt her stomach drop, but steeled herself and nodded toward the bar. “I was getting that patron sorted out.”

  “You aren’t supposed to leave your table,” Matt said somewhat despairingly. At Vince’s cleared throat, he said, “Let patrons handle themselves, Gracie. We’ve had this discussion before. Call Security if you can’t get them to leave.”

  “She didn’t need Security,” Gracie said. Her pulse sped up. “She just needed to get to the bar. No one’s in tonight, and there are dozens of other tables—”

  “You don’t leave your table,” Vince said.

  “There were no cards dealt, there were no chips, and I cleared—”

  “You don’t leave your table.”

  “What harm did it do?” Gracie demanded.

  “You don’t worry about that.” Vince leaned toward her. “You don’t make judgment calls. You follow the rules.” He punctuated the last sentence with gestures for each word. “Are we clear?”

  Matt apparently recognized Gracie’s expression, because he stepped in between them with a practiced smile. “Perfectly clear, Mr. Wallace. Gracie, come with me.”

  Gracie managed to bite her tongue until they were in the back corridor, but she couldn’t manage a single moment longer than that. “Oh, come on, Matt. You know it was the right decision.”

  “Gracie—”

  “What’s better for literally every patron on the floor? To watch a sobbing woman get hauled out by Security, or to step away for thirty seconds to give her a good client experience and—”

  “Gracie—”

  “Dammit, Matt!” Gracie swung around to face him. “Haven’t you ever just had a bad day and needed someone to be nice to you?”

  “Yes,” Matt said emphatically. “And if you’d give me a moment, I’d tell you that. But Gracie, this isn’t about ‘needing someone to be nice to you’ or ‘the best client experience.’ We’ve been through this before. Tons of times.” His eyes were serious. “You know Vince is a hardass about the rules. That’s just how things are. You don’t make judgment calls. Even if I keep sticking my neck out for you, I may not have the power to help you keep your job.”

  I don’t even want the fucking job, Gracie thought resentfully. She’d dodged two more entreaties to become a cocktail waitress, and Vince was beginning to hint that she might get reassigned whether or not she wanted to be.


  Between that and this, she was busting her ass to keep a job she had never really wanted. She was scrabbling just to…what?

  She sighed and looked away, her jaw tight.

  “Take a bit,” Matt suggested. When she looked up warily, he said, “Not like, take some shifts off. I mean, just take a few minutes right now. I’ll tell Vince I put you on backroom duty. Take a break, read something. You don’t have to clock out.”

  Gracie swallowed. “Thanks, man.” He really was doing all he could for her; she knew that.

  “Yeah.” Matt nodded. “But, Gracie…” He looked at her and waited for her to say the words.

  All of Gracie’s resentment came back in a rush, but she forced herself through the statement. “I don’t make judgment calls,” she enunciated precisely.

  Matt nodded silently—he knew better than to push his luck—and disappeared down the hall, and Gracie headed back to the break room, silently fuming. She hated this. Before, her job had just been something she had to do to make it. She’d been happy enough to have her own place on her own terms that she had mostly been amused by the various annoyances of patrons and management.

  Somewhere over the past few months, that had shifted. It had shifted a lot.

  In her locker, she rummaged in her bag and pulled out her phone. Her eyebrows shot up when she saw the screen, and to her annoyance, she felt another surge of something that felt like claustrophobia.

  Kyle wanted another date.

  She stared at the message as she slumped into a chair, then typed back a short message. His had been assumptive bordering on rude—that he’d pick her up for their date on a certain day. She wasn’t working then, but he hadn’t known that.

  She put the phone down without answering. In the mood she was in, she’d tell him to shove his head up his ass, and there would be her first chance at a date in months, down the tubes.

  “Come on, Gracie,” she muttered to herself. “You have to be able to do better than this.”

  But what was “this?” A successful guy, handsome, who made her laugh. And it wasn’t like this was a movie plot where it was Kyle against the plucky, poor-but-lovable underdog.