by Isaac Stone
WOLF MOUNTAIN: A litRPG Novel
Adventure Online Book 1
By Isaac Stone and Timothy Mayer
Copyright 2017 by Isaac Stone
1
I ended up on Wolf Mountain because of a cheating husband. His wife sent me there.
I was a happy fool answering phones and watching my life enter a routine that drove me closer to madness every day. Had I not answered the call, I would not know Chamita the wolf girl, the treasure hunters, nor would I have fled into the forest with bootleggers in pursuit.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I told the lady on the other end of the line, “I’m not allowed to go into personal matters. If you need to, I can transfer you to a department that will better help you….”
“You fucking moron!” the voice screamed at me over the other end of the line. “My husband is with a nineteen year old dominatrix right now! He’s spent all our money on her! He plans to leave me! Do you have any idea what I’m facing? Goddammit, I need that money from the mutual fund so I can leave this place! Now start the transfer before I really get mad!” My coworkers in the other booths could hear her scream over my headset. They looked over their cubicle rims.
“I wish I could help you,” I tried to tell her.
Then it hit me I forget to tell her that everything we said was being recorded. Oops.
“I need to inform you, Mrs. Scott,” I began, “that everything we are saying is subject to recording and may be used for….”
“Listen you little twink,” she screamed again, “start the transfer now or I am coming down there personally to cut off your miniature cock!”
That did it.
I proceeded to tell her, in graphic detail, what I thought about her, the ritzy area listed as her residence, her lawyer husband (also listed in the profile), and everyone about her social class. I told her what she could do with her big house and the pool boy she was probably doing every other week. I advised her on what escort service might be able to use her talents before she turned fifty. Then I took a deep breath.
When I finished catching my breath, I realized there was no one on the line. She’d broken the connection at the start of my tirade. I looked up to see my call supervisor standing next to my cubicle with a lady from the human resources department.
“You don’t need to fire me,” I told them.
“Yes we do,” the supervisor said. “It looks bad if you quit.”
Thus ended my two-week job with Mutual Unlimited, a large financial company outside Philadelphia.
This was the fifth job I’d held since graduation. The charming college up in the mountains where I received my bachelor’s had done little to help me. They handed me the paper and that was about it. I had the diploma framed in the cheap apartment I rented. Four years for a degree in archeology and a ton of debt in student loans. No way to get out of those, Uncle Sam would follow your ass overseas to collect the cash. The banks didn’t care about how I planned to pay when I started school. The government guaranteed the payment.
I’d worked out in the field for a cultural resource company, but the money was lousy and the benefits nonexistent. Most of my coworkers had degrees in my field; some had advanced ones. The work didn’t seem so glamorous when you were digging through frozen mud at five below. We were supposed to dig for any cultural artifacts in advance of the construction workers. In truth, we were rushed to finish because the construction company was on a timetable. I’d even had union guys drive by and yell at me. Obviously they didn't want to hear about it if we ever did find anything.
I made my way home in my Ford beater. I still owed a ton of money on it too. The car almost went off the curb the week before. I was forced to get the brake checks. Another 500 dollars went into the repair job from the man who sold it to me. He claimed he knew nothing about the lousy brakes, but these things happened.
I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a chubby twenty-five year old man who was in a spiral downward with no career opportunities. It hadn’t seemed that way when my dad took me to visit the college before I left high school. The place was impressive and I met some neat professors who were well known in the world of Near Eastern Archeology.
Although I should have listened to the professor who said, “Don’t marry another archeologist, you’ll starve to death.”
I wasn’t starving right now and maybe a cut in my food budget would be an improvement. Rent wasn’t due for another three months as I had enough sense to pay it in advance. With my uncertain employment, I had to cover every base I could think about these days.
There was always The Game House. It was one of your friendly local gaming stores where I hung-out in the evenings. The place was large; it took up several bays of the defunct strip mall where it was located. The owner was a guy my age named Lane who provided free tables for the gamers and a whole bank of electronic games for the other crowd. I’d grown up playing Hammerstrike with tabletop miniatures with my brothers. The place was a second home to me. At any given time, you could see young and old guys playing card games, tabletop adventures or even the old-fashioned board games.
I decided to stop there before I went back to my place. It was only three in the afternoon and I really needed to call my parents. They’d left the area and moved to Florida after the kids left the house. I couldn’t blame them, the old house was over a hundred years old and needed work my dad couldn’t do any longer. I was the only one from my family still in the Philadelphia area.
I parked the car in a slot close to the storefront. At this time of the day, there weren’t too many gamers in the store, so parking was easy. There were only two other places left in that strip mall. On one end was a childcare center of some kind with a chain link fence across the front. On the other side was an auto parts place that never seemed to be open.
I remembered the strip mall years ago, as a kid, when I moved here with my parents from Illinois. Where the game store was situated, there used to be a video rental place. This was back before all those vanished. I laughed a bit as I remembered the time I asked my dad what videos were kept in the back room with the squeaking doors. He never did answer.
The whole area had changed a lot in the last ten years. I moved back after college before my parents left for Florida. There wasn’t much else to do and I’d found my first archeology job in the area, so it seemed the sensible thing to stay. At the time, there were still plenty of people I knew from school around town. Now, most of them had moved away.
As I walked up to the glass door, covered by a poster, it flew open. I stopped as a girl of eighteen bounded out with a set of rabbit ears on a beret. They flopped in the wind. She was cute, no more than a hundred pounds, but I hadn’t seen her around before. I turned as she ran to a car in the lot and I noticed a foxtail attached to the belt of her tight jeans.
“Did I just see an anime character leave the store?” I asked Lane. He was behind the counter making change to an older man who held some cards he needed for a game.
“That was Rachel,” he told me as he shut the cash register drawer. Lane, who had black hair and dark eyes, didn’t think too highly of modern ways to handle the money. He put in a credit card reader the previous year with great reluctance. “She’s been coming in a lot this past week. How’s the job?”
“It ended today,” I told him. He noted my downcast look.
“What happened, Vince?” he asked me. “I thought you liked that job.”
“One pissed off caller too many,” I told him. “I had a lady call in and wanted to drain the fund because her husband was with a younger woman. She wouldn’
t shut up, so I told her what to do. In graphic detail.”
He shook his head. “Guess you’ll need another job. Any prospects?”
“None. I’ll get the resume updated tomorrow. God knows I need the money because the student loans have to be paid at the end of the month.”
“You can always go back to school,” he told me. “You’ve talked about that.” Lane turned as the mailman came in and dropped off some packages.
“I looked into it. All it will do is increase my debt and there’s no guarantee I’ll have any job when I get out again. Hell, when I worked for that dig company, I had people with master’s degrees working right next to me who made the same money.”
“It’s not supposed to be the easiest way to earn a living,” Lane responded. “I never could understand why you didn’t follow your brothers and go into computers.” He went over the mail and began to go through the packages.
“I hated the idea of staring at a screen all day,” I explained to him. “It was my idea of hell. I don’t have the determined mind they inherited from dad. I’m more like my mother.” Mom was an artist and taught at some community college before dad retired and took her south. I grew up in a house filled with her paintings and ceramics.
I walked through the store and came to the new games section. Lane had them divided up by company and interest. My favorite company was Sandstone Gems, a small place out of Modesto, California that had their own system. I liked it and took to the entire series of books they published to help you run the games. Most of their games were retro based: space operas, knights, and cowboys. They were all based off a roll of one or more D10 dice. I even owned several sets of 28mm figurines that I’d painted on my own.
But there was nothing there to interest me. No matter, I needed to watch every cent until I landed another job. I had some money saved up, but not enough to last more than a few months. After that, I’d have to phone my parents and beg for more cash. My dad would loan it to me and humiliate me to the point where I hated myself. He wasn’t too keen on my career choice and never missed a chance to ask me if I’d found the Diablo Giant’s battle-ax. For some reason he thought that was funny.
There were six tables in the room where I stood. They were about the same size and could accommodated at least six games on each one. Right now, there were two gamers with post-apocalypse battlefields set-up on the table. They had their hand-painted miniatures deployed around the demolished buildings and Styrofoam terrain. Both guys wore a fez with the logo of a local game club. These were the dedicated players who lived at the game store. I don’t think either of them was married, although they were in their thirties.
One guy, the taller of the two, dropped a handful of dice and looked at the results. They didn’t need to consult the codex at their level. The other man shook his head as his opponent moved his army into position and began to roll again.
“I think you just lost your hell tank,” he said to the other man.
I stayed around for an hour, talking with some of the gamers I knew and watched the play. It was still light due to the time of day, but I didn’t want to go home. Home was the little apartment where I would stare at the walls until I had the courage to call my parents and admit failure again. I wasn’t in bad company, according to the job reports, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I still had to pay bills and do something about my lousy social life. I hadn’t been out on a date in months. Most of the girls I knew in school moved on after graduation. No one wanted to spend time with a guy who couldn’t pay his own bills, much less help them with theirs. Even my friends who opted for medical school and professional routes were locked into programs where they only emerged every few months to breathe.
There were very few women at the game store and most came with boyfriends. Over in the electronic side of the store, it was worse. On any given Friday night, you could see a guy in a console fighting the enemies of the universe with a control stick. Meanwhile his girlfriend sat next to him and played with her smart phone. Given the level of social skills most of the male denizens possessed, it didn’t surprise me eligible women avoided the place.
The Game House was the modern equivalent of a smoker club or pool hall. Guys had a place to congregate and hang out with others that shared their interests. Someday Lane would get a liquor license and then he’d put a bar into the place. I could only speculate how alcohol would affect the gamers. The arguments over dice rolls would intensify.
I looked down at my shoes. Polished and black, as my former job required. At least I didn’t have to wear a suit and tie. The phone center job I had before it required us to look sharp, as you might have to do a live video chat. That call center went bust and I never did find out why. It was attached to an insurance company, so I doubted the work was transferred overseas.
It was a few more minutes until I reached the apartment. I checked the mail and pulled out a few flyers and bills. The bills I pocketed and the flyers went into the trash. Why does every apartment hall have the same smell? They all have a scent of disinfectant. I’ve only lived in a few, but it seems to be a common characteristic. I suppose the cheaper ones smell even worse.
By the time I’d unlocked the door and tossed my mail on the cinder block and boards that I called a desk, I was ready to grab the remaining beer in the refrigerator. It had been a long day and I needed a break. It was a good thing there wasn’t anything stronger in the apartment because I would be wasted in an hour. I needed to focus, get my own computer on and figure out the money situation.
I sat down in what passed for a chair around my kitchen table. I scored it a few months ago from a restaurant down the street, which tossed it out the back door. Ditto for the table from a bar that closed down last month. Sometimes you need to be resourceful.
I’d turned off my smart phone when I left my former place of employment. The last thing I needed to do was call someone while driving through freeway traffic. By now, Lane would have told the regulars at his store what happened. My gamer friends would try to get in touch with me. I didn’t want to explain 10 times over what happened. I popped the cap on the cold beer and let the smooth, bitter flavor pour down my throat. A few minutes later I felt the alcohol kick in and my blood pressure reduced to the point where I could make rational decisions.
It hit me the computer was plugged in and on the other side of the table. All I had to do was boot it up and I could began the process of applying to other companies. Christ, I hated this part. The endless explanations over why I needed a job (because I like to eat!), whom I worked for in the past, and whom I wanted to work for in the future. The personality tests where the worst, but there were still ways you could beat them if you knew which test they used. I hated those things. One night after a grueling day of job hunting I had a dream where a man had me tied into a chair and forced me to take a personality test. When I wouldn’t respond, he would slap me in the face and yell, “Answer me!”
The first thing I needed to check was email. I was certain the “Ta-da” letter would be there from my former employer, but I needed to see if anyone had responded to the resumes I’d sent out months ago. The first thing I did was check the email as it was the most pressing part of the day.
I almost spit my beer out when I saw the email from Sandstone Gems. Was this some kind of promotion? If it were, why would they title it “Game Tester Opportunities”? I clicked on the email with shaking hands and waited for it to open.
“Dear Mr. Richards,” it read, “we have been informed by a mutual friend you are free and in need of temporary work. As we have an entirely new game system in development, we thought you might like to spend a few weeks testing it for us. Of course, we will compensate you for the time you spend. Please click the link on the bottom of this letter if you are interested.”
I almost broke the mouse when I hit the link.
2
For as long as I can remember, people talked about Virtual Reality (VR) game systems. There were places you could go to slip on sm
all computer screens over your eyes and transport yourself into a simulated game. I’d tried one at a mall myself, but wasn’t impressed with it. Yes, you would find yourself in an art gallery, but the effect was gone once you walked through a table or your hand vanished into a painting. All the systems could do was fool your eyes. Your other senses weren’t affected, so I doubted they would ever be of any use.
As I looked at the Sandstone Gems website, I was fascinated by their level of development. Sandstone proposed a new system where the gamer was transported into the game. This was no Skinner box; this was complete immersion. The company had hit on a system where a gamer would find themselves in the game and could not tell the difference from reality.
Another image, which appeared on the screen, showed a man sitting in a chair with a band over his head. The information on the screen told the reader how a monumental breakthrough in information transmission to the brain would send a person into whatever reality they wanted. The use of this technology was restricted at the present, but had all kinds of potential. I noted the company was coy about the nature of this new technology. Even my access to the explanation was limited. There were many areas on the website where I had no access.
Another screen showed a player inside a game where he or she could assume the role of any character they wanted. This prospectus told the reader how the entire system was in the test phase, but the company had many ideas on how to use it. Another screen showed a very realistic landscape. The company claimed the player would experience it inside the VR system.
I was floored.
This would change every mode of entertainment in existence. It wasn’t even comparable to other online games, which replaced the crude role players’ ones many years ago. This was a level of sophistication people dreamed about. No matter how lousy your current life, you could become anyone you wanted in any setting the company could devise. Forget video and computer games, once this system was introduced, it would replace everything else.
