Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  Nick sighed and nodded. “I hadn’t realised you were just an Acolyte. Yes, it’s true. If their goddess deems you impure, you’ll be killed.”

  I chewed on my lower lip. “How do we know if we’re impure?” I asked.

  “They give you all a candle and you must walk in a circle around the Hall of Silence holding it, and if it goes out…” He grimly drew his finger across his throat.

  “Jeez,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “That seems … arbitrary.”

  Nick nodded. “Do you see? Why the rebellion has started up?”

  “I guess?” There were rebels against every powerful faction in history and in fiction. Of course I could see why there was a rebellion. But the Collective did seem to me to be a little crazy. Why had Charon and the quiz determined that I should be a member? It was bizarre to me. I bet that Luke was something awesomely cool. I couldn’t wait to hear all about his adventures.

  “Good. Well, thank you for your warning. I will leave the city right now. People will start to gossip otherwise, and I do not want to draw any more attention to myself or the rebellion.” He nodded to himself. “Will you do me a favour and deliver the sword?” he asked. “Then it’ll take people just a little longer to realise I’m gone.”

  New Quest!

  Special Delivery

  Nicholas Graystone is skipping town and needs his final job to be completed so people won’t come looking for him quite so quickly. It’s likely that you will receive a reward from Brother Caspian for your bravery if you tell him the truth, too.

  Reward: Unknown Item(s)

  70 EXP

  Accept/Deny

  I quickly accepted the quest, and the sword along with it, noting with some interest that he had the same family name as the pretty lady I had just helped in the garden. It didn’t seem to have any relevance. They may have just been distantly related, connected by house and blood alone. But it meant that he was probably nobility, behind his worn clothes and calloused hands.

  I nodded at Nick, and walked past him and out the door. “Good luck,” I told him, turning back.

  “Be on your guard,” he warned me right back. “If I were you, I’d consider skipping town too. Before you have the misfortune of a tiny gust of wind in the wrong direction.” He drew his finger across his throat one more time.

  “Yeah, man, I got it. Death.” I didn’t want to die, sure, but it wasn’t going to be the end of the world if I did. “Don’t worry. I’m not super interested in becoming one of them. I just kind of … fell into this position.”

  “I get it, I do, I nearly joined myself, to get money for my family,” he said. “But then I found out about the Initiation slaughter, and I ran from Dawnspire with a couple of hired mercenaries. I joined up with Rufus in Onorton and I haven’t looked back. You should consider it, if you value life.”

  “Totally,” I said. I hadn’t decided what I actually wanted to do yet. The high-ranking Collective members were crazy strong; the strongest people by far that I had encountered yet. But if membership came at too high a price, I’d probably pass on it.

  With that done with, I exited the house and made my way with the sheathed sword shoved through the rope holding up my sackcloth. I looked like some kind of badass scarecrow and I didn’t care who knew it.

  I got up to the Hall of Silence’s entrance and then realised that if I went inside, I might trigger the main quest, since I had technically helped the woman with her plants. So I turned around and went to see Ronan instead really quick, to collect my loot and grab that level before I progressed. If I had heard correctly, there might be a fight coming at Initiation. Either with the rebels, or with the Collective themselves.

  He looked up with an expectant smile when I entered. I didn’t want to sell Nick out so quickly, but I was a sucky liar, so I just gestured to the sword at my hip and looked grim.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking uncertain.

  “It was kinda complicated,” I tried to explain. “He wasn’t who he said he was, but he turned out to have pretty good motives. He’s leaving town and he’s not coming back.”

  Ronan nodded for a little while. “I have to ask. Did you kill him?”

  “No!” I said. “We talked a little and he told me he was here to save some people from some impending doom.” I shrugged as if it was no big deal. I didn’t know if Ronan was in any way affiliated with the Collective. I didn’t think he was, but I didn’t want to risk seeming like I was a traitor in any way. Those guys didn’t look forgiving.

  “Anyway, I’m going to go and deliver the sword myself. Nick is long gone,” I lied. “He, uh, was going to curse the sword before he handed it to the Collective, and I stopped him.”

  “Well,” Ronan said, shaking his head. “I knew it. I should trust my instincts. Thank you, I suppose. And thank you for delivering the sword for me. I think that if you were lying, you would probably have taken off with it instead.”

  “Exactly,” I said. I may have done it, if I had a high enough Strength, but I didn’t. So I’d just pretend I was a good person.

  “A deal’s a deal, then.”

  Quest Completed!

  A Traitorous Assistant?

  You have received 20 gold

  You have gained 90 EXP!

  He handed the money over to me. I now had 40 gold in my pocket and it was already starting to pull down my stupid cheap trousers. I needed a coin purse and pack.

  Then suddenly a tingling started at the base of my spine and rolled up, and suddenly I felt great. Pumped.

  Congratulations!

  You are now Level 2.

  You have gained 1 Attribute Point.

  You have gained 1 Skill Point.

  A skill point and an attribute point? Not too bad! I pulled the other gold from my pocket and showed Ronan, and he nodded.

  “The best weapon this buys,” I said. It may have been wise to save a little more money, but I was getting impatient.

  He hovered a finger over his display of daggers, ranging from small to hefty, and rough to incredibly ornate. He stopped one a thin but functional one, about eight inches long and tapered at the end, with a leather grip. Nothing fancy, but it would open up a world of possibilities for me.

  “I’ll take it,” I said before he got the chance to speak.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forty gold.”

  I looked at my money, and blew out my cheeks. “Thirty-five?” I offered. Five gold seemed like it might do to get me some food later; I didn’t really know how much a hot meal cost around here.

  “Deal,” he said, quickly. So quickly that I knew I could have gone lower. Bastard. I smiled and took my prize and handed over the gold, pocketing the rest.

  You have discovered a hidden skill!

  Bartering: Because merchants don’t deserve to make a living wage, right, champ?

  Related Attribute: CHA

  I rolled my eyes at the text that had appeared, and Ronan raised his eyebrows. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Thanks a lot for your help. I’m sure I’ll see you again.” He showed me briefly, a little impatiently, how to secure the sheath to my trousers and demonstrated drawing it quickly and sheathing it quickly, and I thanked him and left for the Hall of Silence.

  The image of Nick drawing his finger grimly across his throat danced through my mind, but I ignored it. Death meant very little in a game, right? Sure, this place felt more real than life back home … but I would respawn.

  I was pretty sure I would respawn.

  5

  London, England: the Exodus

  Anderson paced as his assistant checked the vitals of a dozen people in storage and made notes on her paper. Bryson Mayer sat chewing gum on a nearby piece of expensive equipment that Anderson couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  “Alright, everyone seems to be fine,” the pretty assistant said with a small nod, and made some more notes.

  Anderson looked around him. The g
enerator and two backup generators were in the room, and so were all of the people who had voluntarily walked into the game Bryson had invented, to be locked away for up to ten years.

  Thanks for your sacrifices, he thought with a manic laugh bubbling up in the back of his throat.

  “What have we hit?” he asked. “How many people are in here?”

  “We’ve hit double the number of initial players I was expecting,” Bryson said, checking his tablet. “But remember, Mr. Hendrix, that we still estimate at least half of these people to leave before their trial week is over. That was true originally, though, too, so we still may have double the participants in the end.”

  People who had given their life savings to play a video game for ten years? It was preposterous, and Anderson would never have imagined it being the case, but it was, and he wasn’t going to let an extraordinary chance like this pass him by.

  “Almost two hundred million people are in this basement,” his assistant said, her quiet voice echoing slightly. The people were stacked in containers that looked an awful lot like the capsules bodies go in at the morgue, and were set to be hooked up to all of these ugly-looking machines for the next ten years of their lives. “They’ll all have to relearn how to walk when they get back. It’ll be such a shock to their systems I imagine therapy would be a necessity.”

  “And you guys will have to pay for it,” Bryson said, indicating to Anderson himself, who bristled.

  They were right. If these people came back after a decade of not moving, his people would be responsible for their reintegration into society. These lazy gamers would be seen as brave heroes for giving up a decade of their lives for the good of humanity and the X3 Project.

  If his resolve hadn’t been set before — and it had — it was certainly set now.

  “Let’s go,” he said, checking the time on his expensive wristwatch and waving the other two away.

  “What’s the rush?” Bryson asked, causing Anderson’s cheeks to flame.

  “What are you implying?” he spat suddenly, and Bryson just laughed.

  “I mean, aren’t you enjoying hanging out with essentially the biggest horde of zombies on planet Earth?” he asked, and Anderson let out a breath when he realised the man was only teasing.

  He led the way quickly out of the room, their shoes making the only noise in a room filled with one hundred million living human beings. The thought made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and he couldn’t wait a second longer to shut the door behind them, with a shiver.

  People would thank him, if they ever found out what he did. It hadn’t happened yet, but it was in motion. It couldn’t be stopped.

  They were six flights up in the elevator when they were violently jostled and the journey stopped. An enormous explosion rang out and nearly deafened all three occupants of the elevator. It stopped, the emergency light flashing, and Anderson wiped sweat from his face and blinked hard.

  “Too early,” he muttered. “Why now? Idiots. Fool. We could have been…”

  “What’s happened, Mr. Hendrix?” Bryson asked, his voice rising as he got to his feet. He tapped on several buttons to no avail and the assistant panicked, slapped at the walls, and hummed to herself to try to calm down. “What’s happened?”

  “I … how should I know?” he demanded. Every alarm in the Mayer building was screeching at top volume and it was painful on the ears.

  They were meant to wait until he had left the building.

  Someone was getting fired over this oversight.

  “The people,” Bryson said, clutching at his face. “All the people. Do you think they’re alright?”

  The assistant turned, sickly pale. “You said they were safe!” she cried.

  “They were safe barring a totally freak accident that destroyed their physical bodies,” Bryson yelled right back. “I’m not a fucking superhero; I can protect against likely issues with technology so the chances of failure are below a thousandth of a percentage but I can’t completely eradicate all possibility of human error or complete fucking chance!”

  The smell of smoke and burning meat seeped through the gaps in the elevator doors and made Anderson’s eyes water. “Are we getting out of here or what?” he muttered, pounding at the door. “That stench is disgusting. It’ll be bad for our health to breathe it in.”

  “This can’t be happening. It has to be something else.” Bryson pulled a tablet from the thin bag at his side and tapped on it, remotely checking on the generators. “They’re all … fuck. They’re all blown. Overloaded. They’re offline. How?”

  The assistant grabbed her hair and screamed furiously. “Joe! No. It can’t be. All those people. We … we could be arrested for genocide.” She sank down against the shiny wall of the elevator. “We could actually have committed a genocide.”

  Anderson swallowed, wondering if sharing his vision for a future on Planet X3 would cheer his companions up, but sort of doubting it was really the time for that, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “It must have been an overload of some sort,” Bryson was mumbling, peeling off the control panel and tapping in a sequence of buttons and then leaning in to listen to the crackling of the speaker. “Overload or subterfuge. But who would want so many people dead? No one. No one.”

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” Anderson’s assistant was gasping now, trying and failing to get a full deep breath. “Joe.”

  “Can you hear me? We’re alive, but the elevator is stuck.”

  A cool female voice came through the speaker. “One moment, Mr. Mayer,” she said, and Anderson wondered if it was robotic or just a superbly well-trained woman. “Help is on the way.”

  “They’re all dead,” Bryson croaked. “Aren’t they? Tell me.”

  There was a long pause. “No life detected on the lowest floor of the Mayer building,” she finally confirmed.

  “No!” the assistant screamed, clearly having found her breath. Her hair was a mess beneath her fingers and her eyes were wide and flicking left and right.

  “Shit,” Bryson hissed and kicked the side of the elevator.

  “Stop that!”

  “What? That’s it. We’re getting life in jail,” he spat. “Fuck everything. Fuck you both. Fuck the world. I’d rather die.” The elevator roared back to life, and then the doors opened. A gaggle of security guards helped the three of them out, and Bryson immediately tapped something on his tablet and made his way to another elevator at the other end of the large reception area.

  “Where are you going?” the assistant cried weakly, looking like she wanted to go with him instead of standing near Anderson, who couldn’t control the look of neutrality on his face. He couldn’t twist it into grief or confusion without feeling cartoonish.

  Without turning back, Bryson answered firmly.

  “What is there left for us out here? I’m going into the game.”

  6

  The Initiation

  I was possibly walking straight to my first death, but I was too curious to ignore a completed quest. 200 EXP was quite a lot, actually, and glancing at my progression told me I was a quarter of the way to my next level anyway.

  I planned to use my dagger at the first chance I got, unlock the skill, and immediately put my point into it to make up for any lost time.

  Name: Matthew Blake — Level: 2 — Progression: 28%

  Race: Human — Specialization: None

  Faction: Dawnspire Collective — Rank: Acolyte

  STR: 12

  DEX: 10

  INT: 8

  WIS: 5

  FORT: 9

  CHA: 9 (+4)

  Atk: 6 (+4) — Def: 5 (+0)

  Alliances:

  Dawnspire Collective — Friendly

  Skills:

  Speech (Level 1 — 25%)

  Stealth (Level 1 — 25%)

  Improvised Combat (Level 0 — 65%)

  First Aid (Level 0 — 40%)

  Deception (Level 0 — 90%)

  Bartering (Level 0 — 65%)

/>   I noted the (+4) to Attack, which meant that my dagger was considered ‘equipped’ by the game. I was getting close to becoming an actual viable player for my level. Maybe.

  Luke was probably already out conquering neighbouring settlements with an army of thousands of men, and I was celebrating minor progression. Not too bad for the first four or five hours, I supposed, but I would need to up my speed since later level-ups would be trickier.

  I got inside the Hall of Silence, after a quick glance around that showed no sign of Luke, and made my way through the main room filled with quiet members of the Collective, and luckily I ran into Brother Nickel as he was coming through the back door.

  Sort of unluckily, too, since I literally ran into him, and the ghost snake slithering alongside him lurched forward and snapped its jaws as a warning about three inches from my nose.

  “Acolyte,” Nickel snapped, “watch it.”

  I stood there, stunned, realising just how close I had come to soiling my sackcloth. “I, um, I’m sorry,” I said. “I completed some quests, so I’m back here.”

  “Good,” Nickel said, pressing a drawstring bag into my hand with a nod. “Well done for doing your part for Dawnspire. Hang tight and wait for the other Acolytes to return. It won’t be long, just one more to come.”

  Quest Completed!

  My Heartbeat, My Soul!

  You have received Pendant of the Ivy Lady

  You have received 40 gold

  You have gained 200 EXP!

  What I really needed was not jewelry, honestly, but real gear. Armour. I pulled the chain out of the bag and saw that really it was just a slightly prettier version of the one I was already wearing.

  Then I felt that wonderful spine tingle again and I shuddered.

  Congratulations!

  You are now Level 3.

  You have gained 1 Attribute Point.

  You have gained 1 Skill Point.

  That was more like it! Faster growth felt way better. Now I had two unspent Attribute and Skill points, and I wasn’t really sure what to use them on.