Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  “What are you talking about? Her boss?” I asked, turning to look properly at the young woman for the first time.

  She had cropped blonde hair and sharp, beautiful features. Her body was perfectly curvy in a way that even made sackcloth look good. “It’s you,” I said, and then winced at how throaty my voice had suddenly become.

  “It’s me,” she snapped back, and folded her arms across her chest, jutting her chin towards the two men. “Neither of you are in the Collective. No Collective member would assault another outside the Hall of Silence without fearing the Father and his spectre.”

  “The fuck is she talking about?” one of them whispered, looking around with some nervousness. They weren’t from the Collective? I was lost.

  “Who are you two, then?” I asked, stepping forward again, my hand going to hover by my dagger. One of the men noticed this and snorted out a laugh.

  “You white knighting?” he asked. “Just because she has tits doesn’t mean you need to jump in front of her.”

  “Look,” I said, “we can’t kill each other, but we can be killed. She told us that.” I nodded to the woman. “And I’ve seen the Glitch with my own eyes. It’s real.”

  “We know,” one of them spat. “Our friend died, and came back as a … a thing instead of respawning properly. And she knows how it happened. She probably knew from the start this would happen. Didn’t you? Bet you could have fixed it, but the money was too good. Am I right?”

  “I didn’t know anything,” she said bitterly. “I was telling the truth. I didn’t know what Hendrix was planning then and I don’t know how to fix bugs in a game I’m inside. I don’t think it’s possible. Unless you’re Bryson. He is the only one inside who can access the code.”

  I looked up, interested. “Bryson Mayer might be able to fix the Glitch?”

  She shrugged. “He tried and he failed, but he only tried a couple of things. Then he hopped into the game. I think we’d be better off focusing not on fixing the problem … but on avenging the fallen.” Her eyes darkened suddenly, and I raised my eyebrows at the anger that radiated from her.

  “Piss off,” I said to the other men, who looked like they were about to yell something, but I held up my hand to cut them off. “For your own good. If anyone finds out you’re not really part of the Collective, you’ll be executed and there’ll be nothing you can do about it. Their levels are so high we’re not even able to see what they are.” The woman nodded in agreement with me. “Seriously. Good luck and whatever, but you have to leave the city. Now.”

  They looked at each other with barely contained irritation. “Incendia is going to have a fucking cow,” one of them muttered. “Good luck being in the dud team,” he added over his shoulder as they snickered and strode back towards the city gates.

  “The dud team?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “We are assigned to different factions. People get very attached and loyal about things. I’m not a psychologist.” She sounded annoyed, and I didn’t know what I had done wrong.

  There was a silence, during which I looked over at her, and she looked me up and down with an expression I couldn’t figure out. As far as I could tell, she was appraising me with irritation.

  “So, uh, you’re the girl from that transmission.”

  She chewed on her lip and her gaze trailed across the ground nearby. “That’s me,” she said. “You’re a player, then, definitely?”

  “Definitely,” I said, uncertain about that fact suddenly for the first time in my life.

  “Then explain to me how you got a spectre? That’s not a feature we planned to open up to players.”

  “You work for Mayer’s company?” I asked her, eyebrows raising with interest.

  “No, not technically. My employer was … let’s just say a very powerful man. He was a sort of … consultant, and he got things done that nobody wanted to do themselves. It’s a sad indication of the state of the Earth that his job was so very in demand by politicians around the world.”

  “Right,” I half-interrupted. “But you know how the game works? I need to know everything.”

  She lightly rolled her eyes. “You’re some kind of hacker,” she said. “I’m not giving you anything else.”

  She turned to walk away, and I quickly joined her and matched her pace. “I’m not a hacker,” I said. “Carl the programmer told me to answer a personality question about Firefly and then when I got here I got a spectre. It wasn’t my intention.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, but now she sounded unsure and she was looking at me sideways with her brows knitted together. “Carl? I don’t know a Carl.”

  I shrugged.

  “But I didn’t know all of the programmers. Tell me, have you seen a man named Hendrix around here by any chance?”

  “No,” I said apologetically. “He’s the one who killed us all?”

  “Yes,” she said simply, still walking in no easily determinable direction. I took a second to inspect her, which made her shiver slightly but she didn’t protest it.

  Xanthe Mistwalker

  Level 1 Human

  Dawnspire Acolyte

  “Acolyte,” I said. “You and I must have similar personalities, then.”

  When she turned around, her face fell at my stupid grin. “What?”

  “Well, we took the personality quiz and got sent to the same place.”

  She turned back and let out a breath. “Sure. Listen. I’m an immortal still, since my body hasn’t been killed.” She faced me, her lips still twisted in a thoughtful pout. “But I need to power level. You’re not exactly crazy strong, or anything, but you’ve made it to Level 5 without dying so that means you’re either lucky, careful or capable. I’d be an asset since I don’t mind dying as much as you. Will you help me out? Just for a day, or two.”

  Being around her now, when I had so recently been watching her face holographically made her feel to me a little like a celebrity. She had the looks of one, that was for sure.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Party up for the rest of the day and grab some easy quests, or go find some easy targets to kill. Just do some grinding.”

  “Oh, that’s what I’ve been doing,” I told her. “There are some jackalopes in a farm nearby and some rats in the sewers.”

  “Rats in the sewers,” she repeated. “Let’s go. Lead the way.”

  “Wait,” I said, dropping behind her quick gait even though she was supposedly following me. “Xanthe. Is that your real name?”

  She snorted. “No, it’s not my real name. Is your real name Matthew Blake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor example,” she said. “Just call me Xanthe. Or whatever. I don’t care. I just want to get to Level 3 before I go to bed. It’s Initiation for me in the morning and I want to be ready.”

  I remembered the shitstorm that had been my initiation and wondered if Nick or whoever else were going to crash the party again.

  “You need to do a quest for someone,” I said. She nodded. “Have you got one yet?”

  “No, I’ve been walking around trying to start conversations with NPCs, and then I got yelled at.” She gestured with a frown to the wolf. “You know, from what I studied about the Titania cult that cropped up in Bryson’s game — sorry, uh, here — the prophecy said that when the one chosen by Titania is selected … the one chosen by No One will also be selected. Did you know that? You may have just doomed all the people in Ilyria by triggering a world event of this magnitude with your … hacking.” She shook her head hard.

  “I really didn’t hack,” I said. “I just answered a personality question the way Carl told me to. It didn’t seem like a hack to me. Maybe a little boost. You think that’s why I got the wolf?”

  “It’s just that I don’t see how he could have programmed something like that in,” Xanthe said, tapping on her lower lip as I led her around to try to find an entrance to the sewers. I had to try hard to keep my eyes off of her. “It’s not r
eally possible to programme much of anything in now that everything is already in motion. The next spectre was something that was supposed to happen around this time, according to prophecy, but … we’re invaders to this place. Titania doesn’t know who you are, so why would she have chosen you over anyone else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She seemed irritated by my complete lack of knowledge on the subject, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help with that — I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

  “Listen, if we party up, can I share quests with you?” I asked suddenly, pausing near the market district. Although Excision was hidden in my bag, I didn’t feel like risking anything if I didn’t have to, by wandering past Hrzog with his stolen property.

  “Uh, yeah, but I wanted to grind,” she said, pausing with me. “I need to gain a level.”

  “I have … two quests I need to get done, and one has a pretty big EXP payout. Which you would receive equally, right?”

  Xanthe nodded. “Right.”

  “After that, if you level up a little, maybe we can go for some dungeoning tomorrow,” I suggested, trying not to make it sound too much like I was asking her out on a date. An adventuring date. A deadly, gory, dark and dingy date. “I have this map and I wanted to see where it leads.” I pulled it out and, beaming with pride at having something so cool to present to her — like an exotic bird fanning out his feathers — I opened and tapped it with my forefinger, waiting for her to be impressed.

  She kept her eyes on mine for a second longer than she should have, and then sighed and leaned over to look. There was a long enough silence that my arms started to get tired of holding the paper up high.

  “This is actually…” she began, and then paused again to lean even closer. “Hmm. Where did you get this? It should be a high-level quest item.”

  “I—”

  “Stole it,” she finished for me, but she didn’t seem judgmental. “Right. This is probably worth … a lot.”

  “You want to go?”

  “No,” she said, surprising me, and then looked up with a smirk. “We should think about selling it to the right person, though. The enemies will be too hard for us, I imagine, and the loot will be intense. A higher level treasure-hound will snap this up in a heartbeat.”

  Sell it to the right person, huh? I had somebody in mind, but Ryken would need to be on board.

  “Ready to party up?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Give me a second to remember how to do this.” She stared at me blankly for a couple of seconds, and I shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot.

  You have been invited to party up by Xanthe Mistwalker.

  Accept/Deny

  I flicked ‘Accept’. Then I navigated to my quests and shared both ‘Freehill’ and the farmers’ rent quest with her, and she smoothed her hand across thin air to accept. I got a good look at how dumb it looked to stand and interact with your personal interface that no one else could see.

  Now that we were partied up I had her HP and stamina bars underneath mine, both full. “Well, we could go and look into talking to the Father about the farmland rent,” I said. “Do you think he’ll take kindly to it, though?”

  “Doesn’t really matter,” Xanthe said. I assumed she was reading through the information because her eyes were rapidly scanning left to right in the air in front of her. “Quest information just says to ask. We still technically succeed even if he threatens us and asks us to leave.”

  “You think … he might try to kill us?” Me, I was really asking. She still had her body, after all. Her consciousness could pop in and out and she would respawn just fine.

  What would my real body look like right now? I didn’t know exactly how I had died. She had said something about overloaded life support systems. I had to wonder, then, whether it actually had been her boss who had achieved that, or if it had been the intensity of the game itself, added to the fact that many millions of people were locked in at once. But she seemed so sure that it had been this man’s doing. I had no reason to doubt her.

  “I don’t think so. He worships a goddess who seems to have chosen you as her favourite, after all. Right?”

  I looked at the happily trotting wolf and then back at Xanthe, and shrugged. “If you think we can do it without me losing my life, then I’ll do it,” I said. What she had said made sense, and I could do with all the experience I could get, now that death meant, well … death.

  It really changed the tone of the game, and the way I wanted to play it. In The Afterlife I had charged around in thick armour with a broadsword, happy to take just as much damage as I dealt, but here … obviously, that was different. I would be wise to pursue a sneakier approach, with some attention paid to my Fortitude in case of emergencies.

  “Let’s do it,” she said, clapping her hands to wake me out of my thoughts. I realised that we were right outside the doors to the spire again, and out of instinct more than anything I gave a cursory glance around me for a familiar face. But he still wasn’t here. While I was scanning, I realised that the woman was doing the same. Looking for the person she had sent that message to, no doubt. With no luck.

  I followed her inside and Nickel and Dareth looked up and nodded as we passed. I gave them a polite wave, and tried to summon up all the Charisma I had.

  “We’re looking for the Father,” I said. They both gave us the same quizzical look on their very different-looking faces, and then exchanged a look between them.

  “Why?” Dareth finally asked, looking back at us.

  “There’s a message we need to pass on,” I said. “It’s for Xanthe’s initiation task.” It was a half-lie; not one that seemed to matter enough to increase my Deception.

  Nickel stood and Silas reared up on the bench, flicking his tongue through the air in my direction. His eyes were so glassy and empty when I compared them with Moro’s brilliant amber gaze. The snake really kind of weirded me out, to be honest. I had never been the biggest fan of snakes in the real world.

  “He’s through here, he will have just finished his meal.” Nickel’s eyebrow twitched. “Are you sure you want to do this? What’s the message? No — that’s none of my business. I can only advise that you reconsider.”

  I gave a pleasant smile. “We thought that maybe he would be willing to lend me an ear, because of the spectre thing.” I pointed at Moro, who looked up at me in return. “You know, how Titania—”

  “My heartbeat; my soul!” the two Brothers barked, making me jump. I had forgotten about that.

  “Yes, sorry. How she chose me. You know?”

  “Go ahead,” Nickel said. “We aren’t going to stop you. I just don’t know how he will react.”

  As we walked behind the velvet curtain that obscured the other half of the Hall, Xanthe leaned in to my ear a little. “I’m thinking, too, that our Father might know where Hendrix is.”

  “Where do you think he is?” I whispered back.

  “Hendrix has been here for two days and, although he made me do all the research, he has a fairly intimate knowledge of the geography of Ilyria — including where the safest parts of the map are. He will probably have gravitated somewhere that wasn’t dangerous, but apart from that, I have no idea where he might be. If he’s made ripples, though, the Father will probably have heard the name.”

  Behind the curtain and to the right, hidden from plain sight, was a door. It was slightly ajar, and I felt a little nervous going to knock on it. This mortality thing was really messing with my head in a way it just hadn’t back in reality.

  “He has ears everywhere,” Xanthe was continuing. I held up a finger, as politely as I could, to quiet her before I knocked on the door. It creaked open but we didn’t dare cross the threshold.

  “Yes?” a tight voice came from inside.

  We stepped through the door and into a hallway, with another open door immediately to our right. The room he sat in seemed to me like a fairly modern study, with a sturdy mahogany desk and a far
wall made entirely up of bookshelves, stocked to the gills with dusty tomes.

  At the desk, reading a scroll and tapping on his lower lip, was the Father. His face was obscured just like the Faceless man in the White Suns guild — I wondered, if I figured out how to do that to myself, would I? It might help me out if people stopped recognising me as the golden boy of the Collective — but for that I would have to cloak the wolf as well. Actually … doing that might offer me considerable protection in certain circumstances.

  The Father looked up at us. Or I thought he probably was — it was impossible to see exactly where his eyes were looking from deep inside the shadow of his cloak.

  “Initiate,” he said. “Acolyte.”

  Well, we weren’t being murdered yet. That was pretty encouraging. I cleared my throat before Xanthe could speak, figuring that it was a certainty that my Charisma and Speech were higher than hers.

  “Father,” I said, starting as confidently as I could, “we are here to deliver a message from some of the farmers outside the city gates.” I made the last minute decision to say ‘some farmers’ instead of naming names, because it occurred to me that he may still be angry, even if not directly at me.

  “Hmm?” he said, intertwining his fingers on his cloaked lap. A movement to my left surprised me, and I noticed Rae for the first time, curled up on the rug behind the door we’d entered through. Her large, shining eyes were regarding me unblinkingly.

  “Uh. They believe that they are being charged too much to be able to farm in these unblighted lands,” I continued, far less confident-sounding to myself now that I was aware of the eyes of a spectral griffin trained intensely on the side of my face.

  “They will have to leave here, if the rates aren’t lowered,” Xanthe added helpfully, and I resisted the urge to shush her. I had no idea what her Charisma score was. “They’ll die.”

  I glanced at her and then back at the Father. There was a very, very long silence. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up. “We promised them,” I said, desperate to fill the silence with anything. “Just that we would bring it up with you.”