More Than a Game

by Andrey Vasilyev

  “Three to the left! One leech!”

  “Tanks!”

  “One down!”

  “Two down!”

  “Heal the tanks!” the mage yelled to the cleric. The mage was apparently in charge of the group. “Take out the leech!”

  A bonfire, the remains of the fireball, blazed in the center of the graveyard. There were quite a few skeletons writhing in its flames—at least a dozen. It looked like they’d done a great job awakening the local undead.

  On the other side, farther away from my wall, the tanks were finishing off the leech, the last of the three skeletons. It didn’t appear to be putting up much of a fight, just grinding its teeth and rolling its burning red eyes as if to complain about its difficult bony life and say, “There was no life in life, and there will be no life after life!”

  “Hey, guys!” I yelled, remembering that the local undead fauna would respawn in five or seven minutes and figuring that I should use that time to get out of the graveyard. “Don’t shoot—friendly!”

  I moved along the wall with my hands in the air.

  “Who are you?” the mage asked in surprise. His name, or so said the label above his head, was Grigor.

  “I’m the golden fish, and I’m here to give you three wishes!” I couldn’t resist. “A player, who else? I was walking along the plain and got held up. My plan was to sneak through here quietly, but then you came along and started throwing fireballs at everything.”

  “You wouldn’t have snuck through,” the archer jumped in. “They’d have shredded you. You didn’t know this was a cursed graveyard? As soon as night falls, the dead lords come out of their graves and wander around under the moon. They even say that one day, the graveyard will be visited by the Master of the Dead, himself, and that he’ll start building his empire from this spot.”

  There was backstory everywhere you turned. And it would have been interesting to clap eyes on the Master of the Dead—probably an interesting guy to look at.

  “Well, I was going to go around the edge,” I said with a wave of my hand.

  “They still would’ve eaten you alive,” the mage answered.

  “So can I go?”

  “Of course. What, you think we’re going to stop you?” the mage asked in surprise. “We’re fair players, not PKers. And what would we even get from you? What could you have collected on the plain? The Sword of a Thousand Truths?”

  The group laughed heartily.

  “Obviously. Well, yeah…gopher skins…that’s about it. Little by little,” I confirmed.

  “Okay, you’d better get out of here. The respawn is five minutes, so they’ll be crawling back out soon,” the mage added with some seriousness. “All right, men, let’s form a triangle—they’ll be coming from the center, I swear.”

  I quickly ran to the other side of the graveyard and got to the exit. The group had already forgotten about me. The tanks had made a triangle in the center, the hunter was moving along the right flank, and the mage patrolled the left. Only the cleric stood off where I first saw him, and I ended up right next to him. They got to work.

  “Hey, be careful. There’s a named monster around here,” the cleric quickly said without taking his eyes off the center of the graveyard.

  “Yeah, I already got him,” I responded. “But still, thanks for the warning.”

  “No worries. Here we go!”

  I looked back toward the graveyard to see that the ground around the central graves had opened up, and skeletons were crawling out.

  It’s all the same, I thought. First in the lowlands, now here…all the same.

  “Watch the edge!” the mage barked.

  I didn’t care to watch anymore and started walking home through the dark and already not so scary forest. While I was exhausted, I didn’t really care if the local goblin horde heard me.

  My map showed that the road I had already traipsed along several times that day was about a kilometer and a half straight ahead. So, I plowed ahead without bothering to look where I was going; I just pulled out my map every few minutes. I had almost reached the road and could just about see it when:

  “M-m-m, food coming! Hey, goblins, dinner come! Many food!”

  At that moment, I understood how Gandalf the Gray felt when he saw the balrog and said, “There it is. And I’m so tired!”

  I took 20 damage. And 20 more. Branches crashed. This time it sounded like there were about twenty of the goblins rather than the five I dealt with during the day.

  There’s probably some unwritten rule that says I should have turned to fight them. You can’t let some hungry little goblins get the better of you. But I didn’t care about unwritten rules. It’s all well and good to be proud and brave, but it’s better to live and fight another day. I sprinted, first to the road and then along it. The goblins ran after me for a few minutes, shooting arrows and screaming at me all the way, “Food run away! Stop food! We eat meat, bury bones! Hard year, dig up, chew bones!”

  But then they stopped pursuing me. Maybe they couldn’t keep up the pace with their short, bowed legs, or maybe they weren’t allowed to go outside their location. Who knows?

  To be honest, I was running on fumes. And it was only when I had completely run out of breath and felt like a horse run ragged that, thank God, I saw the familiar palisade wall. I dug deep to cover the remaining ground, tumbled into Tocbridge, sat down by the fence, and logged out of the game.

  You know, I’ve reported on Sensation, I’ve judged a dozen wet t-shirt contests, and I’ve participated in Beaujolais Day (and that last one is crazy!), but I have never—I repeat, never—been so physically and emotionally exhausted.

  I felt scraped and dried three times over. And I was incredibly hungry… Only I had no desire to cook.

  I crawled out of the capsule, laid down on the couch, and said, “I’ll relax for a few minutes, then grab something to eat and start writing my article.” I mentally patted myself on the head for my gung-ho attitude and perseverance. And with that thought in my head, I fell sound asleep.

  My phone woke me up. Mammoth, I thought with a sinking feeling in my stomach and looked at my phone. It wasn’t him. Instead, it was Elvira, my latest flame, who I was supposed to take to some event that day or the day before—I couldn’t remember. Maybe an exhibit, or maybe the theater—I couldn’t remember that either. Judging by the fact that it was dark outside, and she was calling, probably the day before. I looked at the time on the display, which told me it was 4 a.m. and tapped the button to answer the call.

  “You bastard! You scum! You animal!” She got right into it without so much as a “Hello” or “How are you?”

  “Um,” I grunted sleepily into the phone.

  “You jerk. Look at that; he’s sleeping! And here I am waiting. Nervous, trying to call everyone!” I wondered who she might have been calling since we didn’t have any mutual friends. “Nobody knows what’s going on, and he won’t pick up the phone. Because he’s sleeping!”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “I hate you! I…hate…you!” She added some kind of Tatar curse and hung up.

  “Okay,” I said. “Time to think about some breakfast.”

  I turned off my cellphone and landline before going back to sleep, as I still had another two hours. The doorbell rang, interrupted only by the kicks slamming against the door. Elvira wasn’t mincing words.

  “And here comes breakfast,” I said, this time completely awake. I wrapped a blanket around myself and went to open the door. It flew open, and I ducked immediately, which was the only reason I didn’t get a purse to the face. I’d seen that trick from her before.

  “You animal!” my morning guest hissed, stretching out her fingers in what looked like an attempt to decorate them with my eyeballs.

  “An animal,” I nodded.

  “I hate you!”

  “You’re repeating yourself.”

  “How could you do this to me?”

  “Not on purpose!”

  “What
wasn’t on purpose?”

  “Nothing was. I’m sorry!” There was one thing I did know. Arguing with a woman was like going to the dentist; it’s either painful or expensive.

  Elvira spluttered and popped like an egg in a skillet for another ten minutes until she mistook my haggard expression for pangs of conscience. Somewhere in the middle, I’d mentioned that I hadn’t eaten in a day, and her feminine instinct—feed first, yell later—kicked in. She cooked something for me, we had a romp in the sack (and on a full stomach…phew boy), and finally ended up kissing tenderly. I agreed to do the same for her that night, and she left for work.

  “Quite the morning,” I observed while smoking on the balcony and watching my little Genghis Khan drive off in her Matiz[8]. “It’s enough to kill someone.”

  Dryads, goddesses, skeletons, Elvira… Too much. Soon, I was going to get a twitchy eye like that one saber-toothed cat. Or an aneurysm. Petrova from the office was lucky; her column had her used to constant craziness, what with her being a cowgirl one day and a nun the next. I, on the other hand, had suffered through nothing more than the cigars, mojitos, various pop stars, starlets, mutant artists, and unrecognized geniuses of the quiet, restrained, and predictable public. And here I was breathing in the heady air of a week’s worth of excitement.

  I finished my cigarette, and with it, my self-pitying musings before heading online to gather more information. About gods and heroes.

  The sun was high in the village, the roosters were long done crowing, and the village people had already drawn their water. Children’s voices laughed in the square, while in the background, the blacksmith’s hammer clanged away. And I was sitting up against the palisade wall right where I had collapsed the day before. In front of me, were two old ladies, and it appeared that I was the topic of their conversation, “They all come through here drinking just like our old fools!” one said.

  “That’s what I’m saying. He’s sitting there with his eyes all bugged out like that, and he couldn’t care less,” agreed the second.

  I stood up, prompting the old ladies to scurry off to the side in consternation.

  “Watch it!” said one cautiously. “I’ll tell my son, and he’ll show you!” She waved a wrinkled fist in the air.

  “Yes, I know, ma’am. He’ll show me, and we’re all alcoholics, and it’s our fault the Soviet Union collapsed—damn democrats.”

  The women couldn’t quite believe their ears—they understood the first part of what I said, but the second… I needed to strike while the iron was hot.

  “How about telling me if the shepherd is in the village. Or did he take the cattle out to pasture?”

  “The shepherd? Willie? I think he’s at the smithy. Trying to get an apprenticeship there.” She waved in that direction.

  “What do you care?” the second asked, her inner interrogator kicking in.

  “I’m looking for a squire,” I said. “Off I go. See you later, my dears!”

  Naturally, the shepherd was at the smithy, so I told him where the cow was and received in return some experience, a little gold, and a big thank you. But what I appreciated most was that I leveled-up. The blacksmith was surprised and complimented me by fixing my equipment for free. I thanked the good fellow and set off to find the old man, turning over in my head what I’d read online.

  There wasn’t much to find about the gods. In the official version that came with the Fayroll theology, I read something about how there were entities called demiurges who created the world. They created it, and that was it. They created a planet with seas, continents, forests, and valleys. Oh, and its population: dwarves, elves, humans, goblins, and all the rest. But after they created it, they left—no governing, no interfering. But then later, the demiurges added some additional material. They apparently decided that someone needed to be in charge since without a guiding hand, the whole thing would be a mess of thieves stealing from or killing each other. So they created a handful of gods. But then things went downhill. The gods they made were foul, and, instead of creating a worldwide peace that led to a new golden age, most of them began to divvy up spheres of influence, call themselves Fathers of the People, and turn on each other. That went from bad to worse, until finally, world war broke out that made killing the order of the day…

  Demiurges put up with that for a time before having enough and telling the gods to go get lost in a parallel universe.

  The latter put up a fight, but didn’t have the stomach for it, were soundly routed by the demiurges, nearly lost their divine power, and hid in the sunset. They left behind a few confessions, some stray priests, a knightly order, a number of items, and, as it turned out, hidden quests. There might have been something else, but the general public was not aware of it.

  But about the quest the dryad gave me, I couldn’t find anything anywhere. It looked like no one had yet come across it in the entire history of the game, though there were some people claiming the developers told them about quests having to do with the gods who had left. They said whoever got them would earn mountains of gold or become an enormous force in the game. One of the quests was said to give players the magic power lost by the gods. The rest, of course, were nothing to sneeze at. Although some people said there were quests that led to upheaval, disaster, and genocide.

  I was certainly aware of what they could get you, seeing as how the very first, paltry little quest got me a fantastic sword. I may not have been able to use it thanks to the level requirement, but I could imagine what lay ahead. Still, I needed to think hard about whether to keep going. Especially, since I had no idea what lay ahead.

  On that note, I checked my map and noticed that there weren’t any quest markers. I zoomed out. Still nothing. I zoomed out still further, and there it was.

  Dryad Number 2 lived 150,000 miles away from where I was, somewhere in the east. And I had no idea what level the locations there were, seeing as how I’d never been there. The map only showed their names. In short, my dryad was off stuck somewhere in her tall tower…

  That was a quest I’d have to come back to. And, incidentally, I had a sneaky little idea.

  On a separate note, I decided I wasn’t going to say anything to my clan. There was more than just the game at stake; I had my articles to write. And if I were to tell them, they’d go plowing through the rest of the dryads while keeping me locked up in between. Screw them…

  And I needed to get that head to the old man. Long story short, he saw me, beamed, and said, “What do you know! The old beast didn’t kill you after all. You’re lucky!”

  “Lucky, shmuky. Here’s the head!”

  “There it is,” he said, happily looking it over. “The very one!”

  You finished a quest: Kill the Swamp Beast.

  Reward:

  250 gold

  1000 experience

  “Oh, and let’s do the paperwork to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up,” he went on. “Write here that you received 300 gold.”

  “Here you go. Tricky old guy!”

  “Just making ends meet…”

  I walked away, checked in again with the halfling trader, lazily haggled a little, and sent him all the junk I’d accumulated the day before. All I kept was Burrig’s mandibles; they were unusual, and who knew when they’d come in handy?

  That was about everything I needed to do there. Sure, I still had the left foreleg quest, but I really couldn’t care less. I pulled it up, found the “Cancel” button, and clicked it. Maybe that was cutting corners, but it was boring, and I was tired of life in the countryside. The city was calling my name. Civilization, a knightly order, and the class ability instructor. I opened my map, got my bearings, and started walking toward Fladridge.

  Chapter Eleven

  Between Before and After

  I’m not a big walker. I mean, come on, why couldn’t they make it like the good, old games I played when I was young and happy? Everything was so simple and easy. No matter where you were, there was always some griffon-rider o
r slovenly groom watching over a herd of horses you could borrow. Sometimes, there was just a bearded mage leaning on his staff next to a stationary portal that he kept open for you. You just jumped in and whizzed your way to wherever you wanted to go, for a reasonable fee, of course. Simple, fast, easy.

  Not here. There was a downside to the whole immersion experience. Sure, later on, you could find ways to shorten distances by, for instance, buying a horse. But that meant slogging all the way to Level 70, paying a postilion good money to train you, and finally shelling out for a horse that cost something like a Daewoo Matiz.

  Somewhere way down the line, you could even buy your own personal mountain eagle. They cost as much as a plane, but as a status symbol alone, they were worth it. I’m not sure if anyone ever bought one, as I never came across any eagles, though the possibility was still there.

  Aerial mages had it the best since they could learn the Portal spell at Level 80. That made them the only class in the game that could teleport on their own. Even they had their limitations, however. They could only move around areas they’d already explored in the game, the spell itself cost a mountain of mana, and it took days to recharge.

  A more widely available way to move around were the single-use portal scrolls. At first glance, their 1,500-gold price tag didn’t seem unreasonable; you read them, picked a destination, and found yourself there. The problem for beginning players was that 1,500 gold was an unheard-of sum. You could find a group going in the same direction and have everyone chip in, but that was much easier said than done. Plus, portal scrolls only took you places you’d already been.

  So, there I was three hours into my walk down the yellow brick road. Happily, the developers did their best to throw in quests here and there that broke up the monotony.

  My first encounter came about 7 kilometers from the village with an obviously insane girl in a red beret. She was waving her arms and wailing. “Walk me home, brave warrior. I’m afraid of the dark forest!”

  Just to be polite, I asked where her home was. As it turned out, she lived with her mom in a hut somewhere in the Very Dark Forest, which was about an hour’s walk from where we were standing. Not exactly on the way. One hour there, another back, and besides, I’d heard of girls in red hats. You’re taking them home, a wolf shows up, and you have to kill it. Then a couple hunters take its place, and you have to deal with them, too. Oh, and who knew what her mom was like? She could come thundering out of the house with a cleaver in each hand, and you’d have to finish her off just like the rest. All of that, and I’d get maybe 300-500 experience and fifty gold. Screw that. I’d just saved a little green monster, and I was still trying to dig my way through all that got me.