Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  She nodded.

  “So what I’ve been trying to do so far is power up my team of rebels and get a lot of allies, and then we’ll take the Collective down like that.”

  “Then who will rule?” she asked. “The city needs a ruler. There was an emperor in here before. He lived in the spire back when it was wood and stone. The Father took him down with magic, they say. I couldn’t figure out exactly what happened there. He and his followers explained to everyone that the Blight was the result of Titania being gone for so long, since she is the goddess of rebirth and life, so I get their logic. They gained a buttload of followers, and here they are.”

  “A whole buttload?”

  She nodded sagely. “Some sources say two buttloads.”

  We laughed quietly at our stupid joke, the alcohol fully clouding our brains.

  “You think these guys are shady, though?” she asked, her voice still too loud to be considered a whisper.

  “Yeah … why?”

  She tapped her nose and tripped up to the bar, leaned over and spoke to a few of the odder-looking men for a while. I kept watch, wondering what she could possibly be doing. And staring at the way she bent forward and rose and fell on the balls of her feet.

  I flicked my eyes upwards and accidentally landed locked on the gaze of a young man across the bar, who was staring straight at me. He held my gaze for several seconds before he flicked it over to Xanthe, who took no notice. Something about the guy was giving me the creeps.

  As Xanthe turned and strode back towards me, I was about to inspect him when he turned and disappeared through the crowd. It was kind of annoying that inspection took three or four seconds of full concentration, I realised. Now I had no idea who the guy had been.

  “You OK?” Xanthe was asking. I snapped my gaze over to her as she sat down and it was as if the full sound and colour of the room faded back in.

  “Hmm? What were you talking to them about?”

  “Oh, the map,” she said, as if it was obvious. I didn’t think it was.

  “The map,” I repeated quietly.

  “You’ve gone a bit weird,” she said. “Is it the alcohol? You wanna screw the food and go to bed?”

  The concern in her eyes was touching, actually. We had only known each other for maybe three hours. Getting drunk with someone really was the best way to fast-track a friendship.

  I hadn’t been drunk in a really long time, though, so the old me came out. “You’re asking me to go to bed?” I asked, and felt my mouth twist into a grin. She rolled her eyes but there was no venom in it, only habit. “You’re not saying no…”

  “It seems a touch vulgar to fuck a handsome stranger a few hours after you slit your boss’s throat, don’t you think?” she asked, stretching her arms above her and then rolling her neck. “It’s incredible being in here. It makes me notice just how much my neck and back used to hurt back in the real world, now that I can’t feel it at all. You know?”

  She turned to me with her shaped eyebrows raised expectantly, but my grin hadn’t faltered. “You think I’m handsome?”

  This time her eyeroll seemed more dismissive than it had before. She wandered back to the table, and I followed her, past a crowd of people. “You still didn’t say no,” I reminded her. She didn’t respond, and though the atmosphere between us was light, I couldn’t help but still feel uncomfortable about the memory of that man who had burned his gaze into the side of Xanthe’s face. He had also been involved in a conversation with Varkas. Who was he? Did it matter?

  “You know, I’m glad it was you who stepped up to help me before,” she said, her voice raised over the general hubbub around us. The landlady placed our game pies in front of us and we thanked her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, you seem like a nice person,” she said, and bit off a chunk of steaming meat from her fork. “God, I’m so hungry.”

  A nice person. That was nice. A bit tepid, but I’d take it. “I am a nice person,” I said. “Handsome, too.” When she looked up I was waggling my eyebrows, and she spluttered out a laugh and shook her head.

  “Shame you’re kind of a dork.”

  “I’m a dork?” I challenged, and she nodded. “I’m a dork? You spent eight months inside a video game collecting information about their cultures and factions and lore. That’s full geekery. Did you make a fan wiki about it?”

  She blushed.

  “You did!” I cried. “Whether or not this place is officially a different universe … you still dedicated your life for a while to a game. That’s dorky.”

  “Right, but when it was all said and done, you were willing to spend ten years inside a game, and I was going to stay in the real world with all the real stuff,” she teased.

  “Nah, actually, I was just a tourist. I was planning on leaving after a week.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly looking a little guilty. “Sorry. I didn’t know. The … news … must have especially sucked for you, then.”

  “I’m honestly not that bothered that I can’t go back. I might have tried to if I didn’t learn that I was dead, but only because my only real friend is back in the real world. He’s here, actually, but I don’t know where.”

  “So you would have left to go be in the arms of your male … friend?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that I’d go anywhere near his arms, but I would have preferred to be in the same plane of existence as he was, if I had a choice.” The meat was delicious: juicy and salty.

  “And this friend is platonic?”

  I looked up at her searching eyes. “Are you asking me if I’m gay?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I’m straight.”

  “You’re talking about your friend like he’s your sweetheart back home, is all.”

  “Luke is amazing. You’d fall in love with him if you met him.”

  “Like you have?” There was laughter under the surface of her words that I wasn’t enjoying.

  “I’m not in love with him,” I said.

  “Methinks the lady doth pr—”

  “I’m not in love with him,” I said again. The twinkle in her eye made me snort with laughter, though. “He’s done a lot for me. That’s all.”

  “Like what?” Xanthe looked away and made a jerking off motion very subtly with her hand. I swatted at her wrist and looked around, and she giggled.

  “Stop that, we’re in a religious order, you can’t do that shit in public. No, not that. Other stuff.”

  “What, like—”

  “His family took me in when my mum kicked me out, when we were teenagers.”

  She fell silent, realising that I was suddenly serious. “Oh. Why’d she do that?”

  I shrugged, but I did know the answer. She stayed silent, looking up at me with something far closer to concern than pity, which I appreciated. “She got pregnant. I did badly in school, and in life. Her boyfriend told her I’d be a bad influence to their daughter when she arrived. She just couldn’t say no to him. That’s it.” I shrugged again. “Luke’s family took me in. He’s been a good friend to me since I was ten years old. Defended me against people at school. Whatever. It’s hard to count all the ways how.”

  “Alright, sorry for all the jokes,” she said. “I want to find my brother as well. I don’t know what his username will be, but he looks a bit like me, just smaller. If you find him, tell him I’m here in the city, would you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. This food isn’t half bad, is it?”

  “It’s quite good.”

  She smiled up at me, mid-chew. “I’ll pay you back when I have money.”

  “Sure, don’t worry about it, though.” I smoothed my hand across the splintered wooden table and felt something in the atmosphere between us shift when her gaze didn’t move from me after a full five or six seconds. I looked up and caught her eyes in mine and she smiled again.

  “Let’s get a room here,” she said after a moment.

  “But we have a room i
n the spire,” I said.

  “We share it with a dozen other people.”

  I stared at her for a moment. She tucked a few blonde strands behind her ear, and bit her lip.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, right.” I stood up so fast that the chair toppled backwards and smacked a passing guy in the legs. I raised my hand in apology and he looked as though he was going to have something to say about it, until he saw Moro swishing her tail from side to side at my heel. Then he just turned back around to his conversation.

  I chatted to the landlady for a little while — Varkas wasn’t there but I really barely noticed that — and settled up and booked a room for the night. All in all that night I had spent 27 gold coins. I had 88 left. 82, actually, since Xanthe suggested we sneak another round of ale back up to the room and I had entirely forgotten the word ‘no’. Not that I would have refused even if I had thought to.

  We whisked our tankards up the rickety stairs and she unlocked our door with a firm hand and gestured inside the musty little room with a smile. “It’s a single bed,” she said with a laugh as I stepped inside. “This was all they had left?”

  “I guess so,” I said, taking another drink before I set my tankard down and looked at the back of her neck as she surveyed our place for the night. I was pretty sure I had not imagined the looks she’d thrown me, and the meaning behind asking for a room separate from our peers. I knew I was an alright-looking guy, but every time I had gone out in the past the women had all been far more interested in Luke than me, so my confidence was way into the gutter, relative to how it perhaps should have been. As for life in the real world — well, I kept my head down and said and did nothing. My muscles had wasted away and it was hard for me to keep up the illusion of confidence with women when I had to crane my neck to look up at them from my chair.

  Here, though, I realised that I was on a pretty good playing field. Compared to the other men in that bar, I was appealing. It would take some getting used to.

  I took a chance, thinking about what Luke might do in this situation. Xanthe was kind of infuriating at times, already, but she had to be one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen — not to mention that she was intelligent, self-assured and occasionally pretty fun to be around.

  I rested my hand on her left hip, swept away her hair, and kissed her neck. She didn’t run away. In fact, she leaned into it and made a soft noise of happiness. I chose not to speak, or do anything that might break whatever spell we were under — probably alcohol — and I gently turned her to me, cupped her face, and slipped my tongue between her soft lips. She responded instantly, melting into me as if she belonged there, her hand running across my back.

  She pulled back for a moment and looked into my eyes. “Definitely not gay?” she asked, choosing entirely the wrong time for an attempt at humour, but it made me smile. She was offbeat in a way that I was already growing to like.

  “Try me,” I suggested, and she laughed and fell sideways onto the bed, crawled back to the head, and lay on her back. I climbed onto the bed too, and covered her with my body, and she wasted no time wrapping her legs around my waist. This was not her first rodeo. And I guessed that she had gotten over, somewhat, her rule of not sleeping with strangers right after she had murdered a colleague. Which was more than fine with me.

  Our clothes came off piece by piece and I was momentarily concerned that the game would have decided against programming in certain aspects of pleasure — or even certain acts at all — but they had very much kept everything in.

  We confirmed that once. And then again.

  Her skin, hot, sweaty and completely and totally real, pressed against mine as we caught our breath. I held her tight until I felt her breathing change and she fell asleep. I kissed her below the ear and fell asleep too. The deepest sleep I had had in a long, long time.

  When I woke up, light streamed in through the ratty, pointless curtain and I shielded my eyes from the rays until they adjusted. I sat up to see that I was completely alone. All my stuff was still there, but all of hers was gone, including her shoes.

  I went downstairs once I was dressed to grab some bread and cheese or something to stem the dull ache in my brain, and she wasn’t there either.

  When I’d paid and counted my remaining gold — 77 — I wandered back to the spire, confused by this point, and saw no sign of her anywhere.

  She was gone. She had left. Hadn’t even said goodbye.

  … fuck.

  13

  Falchion

  Name: Matthew Blake — Level: 5 — Progression: 77%

  Race: Human — Specialization: None

  Faction: Dawnspire Collective — Rank: Initiate

  STR: 14

  DEX: 12 (+3)

  INT: 8

  WIS: 5

  FORT: 10

  CHA: 9 (+4)

  Atk: 7 (+8) — Def: 5 (+15)

  Alliances:

  Dawnspire Collective — Very Friendly

  Top Skills:

  Snickersnee (Level 4 — 20%)

  Speech (Level 4 — 70%)

  Dodge (Level 2 — 80%)

  Stealth (Level 2 — 15%)

  Deception (Level 2 — 25%)

  Where would Xanthe have gone as such a weak character? Level 2, with almost zero gear. It made no sense. Unless her actual goal in the game was sex with me, she had so much more to try to achieve, and the best way to do it quickly was to party up with people a little stronger than her — which was exactly what she had been doing.

  Unless maybe she felt that sleeping with me was going to complicate things between us, which was probably true to a certain extent, but it wasn’t like I was planning on proposing to her. I was happy just to have us mutually benefit from future arrangements. Fuck. It was seriously hard to think of her without thinking about that stuff now.

  I shook my head hard as if to rid it of all thoughts, and figured I’d make my way back to the inn to ask if the landlords had seen any sign of her that morning. If she had just taken off, that was fine. Kind of. I just wanted to know if I should have been looking for her or not. Her Initiation, after all, would have been soon and she was going to miss it if she didn’t reappear at some point.

  There was no way, surely, she would miss that kind of free EXP.

  So what the hell had happened after I fell asleep?

  I cut through an alley on the way to the inn — by this point I was pretty sure that I had some idea of how the layout of the city worked … this small section of it, anyway. I came out on the other side and spotted Varkas and a couple of other men wandering with purpose through the alley right by the inn, so I jogged into the shadows and called out, “Hey!”

  Varkas turned on his heel and spotted me, then his face split into a fierce grin and he pointed and snapped something low to his comrades, who also turned and smiled at me. One of them stormed up to me, and then jerked his head aggressively into my face as if to freak me out. It worked. I took a couple of steps back, even though he hadn’t touched me, and he stepped behind me so that I was surrounded by a triangle of men in the alley.

  “Have you … seen the girl I was with last night?” I asked, suddenly feeling really unsure. What was going on? The other guy in the alley I recognised — he had definitely been the one giving me the stink eye from the other end of the bar most of the night.

  Varkas and the dude exchanged a look of filthy glee and then turned back to me.

  “Your girl was hot as hell, what was she doing with you?” the younger guy asked.

  “That’s a bit uncalled for, isn’t it?”

  “Now that we’re stuck here forever, we gotta get serious,” the guy behind me yelled over. I glanced over my shoulder to take him in. He was tall with a scar over his eyebrow — which he must have opted to keep, he could have been rid of it if he wanted to — and a black buzzcut. The guy in front of me was a bit softer around the edges, but had the carefully shaved hairline of a serial killer.

  “Serious?” I asked, looking at the three of them
, their feet apart and hands nearing their weapons, and sensing that I was in some very real danger. But I was disorientated and hung over, and yet feeling more like myself after last night than I had in such a long time. “What’s so good about being serious? Serious is overrated, like Frasier or deep fried chocolate bars.”

  “Hey man, fuck yourself,” serial killer demanded. “Talking about deep fried chocolate. Shut up — we gotta do this. You might as well stay quiet. You’re outnumbered, even with the wolf.”

  Fuck. They were really going to try to kill me? My palms were sweating. Why the hell had the designers implemented a palm sweating mechanic? Serial killer nodded at Varkas, who stomped up to me.

  I prayed to the gods of the Speech skill.

  “Wait,” I said, holding up my hands. “Listen. If you’re after me because of the whole spectre thing, you have to know that it doesn’t mean I’m super loyal.” The words were slipping out of me at the speed of light but it wasn’t quick enough for how fast he was advancing on me, so I tripped backwards a few steps. I felt an arm loop around me and, panicking, I blurred my wrist so that my dagger stuck into buzzcut’s arm…

  ...or it should have.

  The point of the dagger slid away as though a barrier was around his skin — the same way it had when I had aimed that killing blow at Ryken’s back. What the hell? Come to think of it, he should have been hurting me at that moment, but I couldn’t feel him digging into my ribs to any meaningful degree.

  I managed to struggle my dagger back into its sheath just as Varkas reached me, aiming a punch right to my face. I half expected the blow to slide against my skin just as my dagger had, but his fist connected with a sickeningly hollow crack to my jaw, and I spun around in my journey to the floor. I landed headfirst on the stone, managing to slap the ground with my forearm on impact to minimise the damage to my face just a little, almost feeling the bone in my arm give way instead.

  Dazed, I rolled onto my back and blinked the stars out of my eyes just in time to see that he had unsheathed his own blade — and it was considerably larger than my own dagger. It was just a shortsword, but it was still sharp, glinting and pointed.