Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  “You ready for the next step?”

  New Quest!

  The Initiation

  The goddess Titania has witnessed your actions today and is ready to bestow her judgment upon you. Will you pass, or will you fail?

  Reward: Unknown Item(s)

  200 EXP

  Accept/Deny

  I greedily accepted. 200 EXP had leapt me up a whole level, and the item rewards would probably be awesome.

  “Before the last Acolyte returns,” I said tentatively to Brother Nickel, one eye on his freaking pet snake, “do you guys have a training room or anything?”

  “A training room?” he repeated, and I felt stupid.

  “I want to learn how to fight,” I said. “Anyone here know how to teach?”

  He let out an incredulous splutter. “You don’t look like the type who can’t fight,” he said, and though it didn’t sound like he meant it as one, I took the compliment.

  “I just got my first weapon,” I said with a little hesitation. I had seen the other Acolytes but I hadn’t noticed any weapons. Nickel furrowed his brow a little but he didn’t scold me.

  “I know that Brother Dareth used to be something of a swordsman before he dedicated his life to the Lady.” He peered at me. “Where is your sword?”

  I lifted up my shirt to show the holstered dagger.

  “May I?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything, but the large man plucked the weapon from my sheath with a practiced wrist flick and turned it to lay flat across his palms. He swished it through the air once and it made a satisfying ‘zing’, and then he handed it back to me.

  “Sufficient,” he said. “Ronan or Hrzog?”

  I didn’t reply, wondering if something had gotten stuck in his throat just then.

  “Boy? Which smith?”

  “Ronan,” I said. “Who is Herz...og?”

  “Hrzog,” he corrected, and I repeated it quietly. “He’s probably the best swordmaker in Dawnspire, which makes him one of the best swordmakers in the Veldt. Ronan does a very nice dagger, though.” He smiled, and I made sure to return it, eager to build relations with such a powerful dude. You never knew when that kind of thing would come in handy.

  “Thanks,” I said, not sure what for exactly. “I’ll go find Dareth—”

  “Brother Dareth, Acolyte.”

  “Sorry. And see if he wants to teach me how to use a dagger.”

  “That’s wise. If you are chosen by the Ivy Lady, you might have to make use of the thing. The Father has been sending Initiates out of the city gates to, erm, assist the farmers recently. Wolves are everywhere.”

  “Yes, I met one,” I said grimly, and flashed the bloodied bandage around my ankle. I realised it didn’t hurt at all any more, and I could probably dispose of the dirty rag since I was healed up.

  “Next time make sure it doesn’t lay a fang on you,” Nickel advised, and walked away. I watched him go for a moment and then went through the double doors he had just entered through, assuming that they were what led to the members’ quarters and perhaps the kitchens, too. I had to find Caspian, Dareth, and something to fill my stomach, as soon as I could, preferably.

  While I walked along the hallway — which once out of the creepy-ass Hall of Silence was suddenly made of warm woods and decorated with tapestries and shelving; much more like a nice homey place — I pulled out my new pendant and inspected it.

  Pendant of the Ivy Lady

  Good Quality

  Defense: +2

  Req: Dawnspire Acolyte

  Great, not too bad. I replaced my current, useless, pendant with the one I’d just received. It still outed me as a member of the Collective, but at least it had some use to it.

  I paused before I got to the bedrooms and took another look at my skills to see if I could spend any of my points. A lot of my current skills relied on Intelligence and Charisma, because I had just been bluffing my way through the game to get some gear, but now that I had some I figured some combat would be in my future. I didn’t want to feel more pain than I had to, so I would focus on being sturdy and strong for now.

  I put one AP (Attribute Point) into Strength and one into Fortitude, and felt that familiar dizzying tingle flow through me. I decided I was still going to save my SP (Skill Points) for when I had some skills to do with combat, too.

  The sleeping quarters were sparse and minimalistic, which actually wasn’t a surprise. There were eight beds in this particular room, and one man was sleeping on it. I inspected him, but he was a Brother I wasn’t looking for. There were several chests at the foots of the beds, and I considered peeking into a couple, but I thought it would be far smarter if I didn’t attempt to steal from these powerful people.

  “Acolyte.” I heard a cool, unpleasant-sounding voice hiss from behind me, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. When I turned around I was greeted by the sight of a member of the Collective that I had never seen before. He had large, wide lips and a messy mop of blond curls. “You seem to be carrying something that does not belong to you.”

  It took me a second before I reached down to clutch the sword at my hip. I lifted it up and gave an awkward smile as I checked out who he was.

  Brother Caspian

  Level 22 Human

  Dawnspire Enforcer

  Friendly

  “Yes,” I said. “This is for you. I’m delivering it as a favour to Ronan, the blacksmith.” I thrust it forward and he took it and turned it over in his hand, then unsheathed it and frowned at the shining blade.

  He looked back up at me with distrust. “Did it see anybody else’s hands but yours?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Congratulations! Deception has reached Level 1!

  The sudden text nearly made me jump, but I managed to hide that from him.

  “I will be checking it for curses,” he told me solemnly. “I expect you will take the sole responsibility if I find anything.”

  My brow twitched at his words. “That hardly seems fair,” I pointed out, “I didn’t make the thing, after all; just delivered it to you.”

  Caspian’s wide lips thinned and he looked me up and down with distaste before his expression softened a little. “Thank you for bringing this to me,” he said finally, and fished in his pocket for a couple of coins to toss to me. “Now shouldn’t you be getting ready for your initiation?”

  Quest Completed!

  Special Delivery

  You have received 6 gold

  You have gained 70 EXP!

  Miserly bastard, I thought as I counted the gold coins in my hand. Nobody nearby was mobilising in any way, so I figured I still had time to find the other guy with blade experience. I should have asked Caspian, maybe, if he knew where his Brother was, but was kind of glad to be rid of the guy.

  I left the sleeping quarters and carried on through the hallway in the direction opposite the hall, and soon came to a dining area with roughly a dozen members of the Collective. There was a woman strumming some kind of stringed instrument and wordlessly singing, and men and woman dressed in the now-familiar Collective garb were talking and laughing and eating. This seemed a little more promising.

  I inspected everyone methodically from left to right and found no one with a name even resembling the one I had been told to look out for — although I had almost totally forgotten it already. I was pretty sure I would recognise it if I saw it.

  I found a man in the corner surrounded by food on different display blocks and I managed to haggle my way into buying a half a loaf of bread, some meat and some cheese for five gold. I had no idea if that was good or not, but honestly from the twinkle in the guy’s eye I was going to guess I’d been ripped off.

  Maybe levelling up my Bartering ability wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “Hey, another Acolyte,” I heard some people saying to my right. It was then that I felt the slight tingle that showed me I was being inspected by one or more people, and realised that it was likely I wouldn’t even notic
e the feeling if I wasn’t expecting it.

  “Dude, come sit here,” another voice called out, one that I had never heard before, and I craned my neck to look in his direction. There was a table of five people ranging from about eighteen to thirty, with one guy clearly in his early fifties and only one thirty-ish-year-old woman. The guy who was calling me over was about nineteen, and scrawny with freckles.

  I wandered over, quickly casting my eye over him as I did.

  Samson Hevi-Mettle

  Level 2 Human

  Dawnspire Acolyte

  That was strange — why didn’t this guy have any kind of relationship with me? I settled into a chair opposite him, and next to the woman, and glanced over to inspect her too, wondering why the feature was acting up.

  Atraea Nekomancer

  Level 2 Human

  Dawnspire Acolyte

  Yeah, she didn’t have one either. What was up?

  Then something dawned on me, and I cleared my throat lightly and leaned in. “Are you guys … from Earth?” I ventured to ask. Samson grinned widely and nodded, gesturing at the woman.

  “We’re players,” he whispered excitedly. “So is Gellert there,” he said, nodding to the older guy at the other end of the table. “So you’ve figured out how to spot others, too?”

  I was going to say ‘literally just this second’, but instead I proudly nodded.

  “We haven’t been saying anything to the non-players,” the kid continued in his whisper.

  “Me neither,” I agreed. It was best if we didn’t step on any toes, especially if we were only here for a week. That was an interesting conversation starter, anyway.

  “Either of you leaving after your week is up?” I asked.

  Atraea took a sip of water and shook her head. Her shoulder-length brown curls bounced and she looked steadily at me. “I don’t have anything to go back for,” she said quietly.

  Samson shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. In real life I was super unpopular. Here I’m … super unpopular too, but maybe I’ll get a spectre.” His eyes widened. “Doesn’t it sound like we’re going to? The whole ‘no one has gained a spectre in thirty years … Titani— um, the Ivy Lady hasn’t blessed anyone for a long time’ spiel. It’s exactly what you’d hear in a cutscene before it reveals you’re the chosen one. Right?”

  He had a point, but I didn’t think that S&S was that kind of a game, to be honest. I leaned back and then opened my mouth again, asking a small question that had been on my mind. “What’s the difference between saying the Ivy Lady and saying Titania, by the—”

  “My heartbeat; my soul,” the few members of the order nearby murmured before going back to their food.

  “Oh,” I said. The freckled kid nodded grimly.

  “Atraea and I figure they came up with the nickname ‘the Ivy Lady’ just so they could not say that whole thing,” he joked. I smiled along with them as they laughed together. It was nice that they’d clearly found each other’s friendship in a really intimidating game.

  “So, uh, you guys completed your quests pretty fast then, huh?” I asked, trying to make conversation as I tore off bits of bread and meat and tried to fashion my purchases into a sandwich I could fit in my mouth.

  Oh shit, wait, I had a dagger. I pulled it out of its sheath with a pretty satisfying noise and sliced what I thought was a hunk of ham that I’d just bought. It went through cleanly, and I raised my eyebrows, impressed.

  “Yeah, we worked together. Things are a little quicker like that. We noticed you’re on level 3, though. You did a couple of quests?”

  I nodded and took a bite, realising as the flavours combined and hit my tongue just how starving I had been. The taste was unbelievable. The game was transmitting the flavours right to my brain with remarkable accuracy, and though it was nowhere near the best food I had ever eaten, just the fact that I was eating food like this inside a video game was mind-blowing.

  “You get any good loot?” Samson asked excitedly.

  “Just the dagger,” I spat, and wiped my lip with the back of my hand. “And this ring.” I flashed it and they ‘ooh’ed, making me feel like a woman casually announcing her engagement to her workmates.

  “It … increases Charisma,” Atraea noted proudly, and nodded. “You’ve got to be careful, too much Charisma is bad for your character; I read it somewhere.”

  “You did?” I furrowed my brow. Samson completely ignored her, weirdly, and continued to chat with me, excitedly.

  “You get any weird or interesting skills?”

  “Improvised Combat?” I suggested, taking another bite. “Everything else was pretty standard so far; I’ve got to try some more interesting things.”

  “The quest I took had me steal from someone’s house so I got a whole load of things like Burglary, Stealth, Appraisal,” Samson said. “Atraea had to go wrestle a couple of escaped horses back to their stables and she got … what was it?”

  “Beastmaster,” Atraea said, eyelids flaring. I nodded; that sounded awesome. “I heard there are infinite skills,” Atraea said, clearly more confident speaking now that she had sized me and my loot up. “The game will keep adding more for every action people do that can be improved on.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it’s possible to have infinite improvable skills,” I said. “Definitely will be a high number, though, I can see that.”

  “No, I heard it was infinite. It’s something to do with the RNGs and the … server.”

  I turned slowly back to Samson and he silently returned my look. Maybe it would be best to not totally believe everything Atraea said. That was the feeling I was getting. It was disappointing, because now I wasn’t sure if Beastmaster was a real skill, and I would have loved to gain it. Other than that, she seemed pretty nice, and I liked Samson so far. I felt a kind of kinship with them both for being from Earth and for randomly starting off in this Collective situation.

  “Any idea what your specialisation will be?” Samson chirruped, fidgeting with his hands under the table. I wondered what kind of a kid he had been in real life. We hadn’t been able to alter our existing VR avatars on coming into the game, so all players would just have looked like themselves, with a few tweaks — moving a body too different to your own was often too difficult to get used to quickly in hyperrealistic VR so it was fairly common to just scan your actual physique — but the healthiest versions of themselves, hence my working legs. So in real life Sam would have been scrawny and freckled, but maybe with bad teeth, or acne, or other irritating defects. As it was, he just looked like a healthy normal person.

  Atraea was a little thick around the middle, and had a large amount of frizzy hair, but other than those defining characteristics and her wide brown eyes she again looked pretty ordinary.

  Back before the accident I had been really into physical activity, so my VR form happily let me play with my previous broad, healthy frame, even though I recently had lost the ability to walk.

  “Sorry, my specialisation?” I had forgotten that he had engaged me, too busy looking around at everyone at the table. The older man was happily chatting with the non-players (which, even though NPC stands for Non-Player Character, weirdly seemed like a much nicer way to refer to them than NPCs). “Like, my class?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess you didn’t read many beta tester reports? Oh man, I got obsessive about it!” He continued to fidget with his own hands as he spoke. “I read so many. Yeah, one tester got really into mining silver ore, so pretty soon his character sheet read that he was a Silver Miner. Another dude got his Charisma score to the highest he could do in a short time, then went from village to village and convinced the workers to rise up against the leaders. He got the title of Insurrector. Which is the coolest fucking thing ever.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So we read ‘Acolyte’. But that’s our rank?”

  “You can choose between a few things for your actual title — ‘Human X’ — but most people choose their specialisation. It’s kinda like a class because it can lead
to some cool things, but it’s not so locked in. You can be a Fisherman for two years then go out and become, like, an Ogreslayer.” His eyes were wide and his hands animated while he spoke. I smiled, kind of secretly jealous that I hadn’t spent time researching the game like he had. I knew I’d be at a disadvantage.

  Saying that, though, I was a level ahead of these two already, just by blind luck.

  “Oh hey,” I said, suddenly remembering I didn’t have loads of time. “Have either of you guys seen a guy called … fuck …” I rubbed my forehead. “Dethal? Darthel? Dareth! Brother Dareth.”

  Samson shook his head no. “You got another quest? That’s sick.”

  “I saw him,” Atraea said coolly, swigging at her water with a grimace like it was mead, which it was not.

  “Did you?” I confirmed. “Where?”

  She looked a little caught out, and I turned away again, realising that engaging with her might be a waste of time a bit more often than not.

  “There,” Samson said suddenly, pointing at the far end of the food hall. He had been systematically inspecting for me and I nodded at him.

  “Thanks, man. I’ll see you around, yeah?” I stood, then sat and lowered my voice again. “Be careful at the Initiation. I know we, uh, can’t die but … just keep an eye out and don’t let your candle blow out. I bet death here isn’t fun.” I was annoyed that I couldn’t help any more than that. But if I had let them curse that sword it would have ended up with my death, probably at the hands, er, talons of a powerful griffin.

  They looked blankly at each other and I stood and walked away, towards where Sam had pointed.

  At a table of Brothers and Sisters, I paused at the foot of their table and put my hands on my hips. “Hey guys,” I said uncertainly. “Is Dareth around?” I squinted at them each in turn. There was a Santhia, Greous and Turk…

  “Acolyte,” Santhia snapped. I turned to look at her. “Are you referring to Brother Dareth?”

  I paused. “Yes?” I had thought that was pretty obvious.