by Charles Dean
“I insist. I must thank them. They have done us a service when there was nothing to gain, so this is the least I can do.”
“Please, master, please stand up,” a man said, and several others began moving toward him.
“Yes, please stand up. We’re not worthy of this kindness.” One woman actually tugged at his body armor as she tried to pull him to his feet. “Please, don’t be so kind and bow. We couldn’t even stop them, and we don’t deserve this.”
Lee heeded their pleas after a moment, pushing himself to his feet and looking at his successful manipulation. So, this is the effect that honey has over vinegar. Lee’s face might have been as calm as ice, conveying only solemnity as he looked at them, but he was bouncing around on the inside. If he was going to be peer pressured by this mob and forced by a meddling god to make a religion and grow it, he definitely wasn’t going to let it be a violent and vengeful one. There had been enough sadistic, violent religions on his own homeworld, so he didn’t need to propagate any of them here. It was a small victory, but he was thrilled to know that he could exert even a tiny bit of influence on the world by helping shape the religious morality.
He actually wished that there was a baby around for him to kiss, like politicians were known for, but of course there wasn’t. Instead, he did the second-best thing: he went to the side of an older lady and tried to comfort her. He put a hand on her back as he talked to the others, trying to drive home his point and prevent as many people as he could in this world from falling down the wrathful path of his old world’s religions.
“I cannot do much for you all. Your trials of faith and perseverance will be many, and others will constantly test and anger you, insult and harm you, drive you to the wall and try to take from you. I don’t ask that you not defend yourself, but I ask that you not seek out an eye for an eye. Remember that tomorrow’s trials will be much like today: you will suffer during the evening, and light will come again during the morning, but the reward will still not be felt. Know that those who follow my words here, those who endure no matter what the trial, will be gifted above all others in the next world—the world where I will have authority, where I will have power. In that world, I will grant you all the end to your tribulations and do everything in my power to see you live more comfortably than all those who scorned you and turned their back to me. It’s easy to be strong in faith when you are still enjoying its blessings, but it is much more difficult, and thus much more rewarding, to have faith even as you are cursed. Do these things, persevere, and I shall reward your efforts.”
Due to your continued practice at lying and deceiving others, your Charisma has grown by 3. Current Charisma: 8
Six of your personal followers have become zealots. Your Personal Faith has increased by 18. As Zealots, their religious related abilities and skills will grow at twice the normal rate, and they will be able to specialize into previously locked religious classes such as Priest. You will also receive a 50 Charisma bonus toward quests or conversations with these followers, and they will also receive a 10 Charisma bonus when talking to those of the same religion. However, due to their religious zealotry, they will suffer a 35% likability penalty with all those of other faiths.
Current Personal Faith Total: 39
Well, that’s handy, Lee thought as he looked over the benefits that his zealots gave him. And then, after skimming past the part about skills and abilities, he saw the 50 bonus Charisma he received when dealing with his zealots, and his lecherous brain kicked into overdrive for a moment. No, stop that! He shut the line of thought down right away. He had been away from alone time with a computer or a proper girlfriend for too long recently due to his travels in this land, so he had to calm his brain down right away. He forced himself to consider the other less-pervy benefits of being a beloved holy man.
The best part of all of this was that he had gotten 18 more Personal Faith as a result of their increased devotion. Considering only around forty people had been there to begin with, and of those he had only managed to get fifteen to convert, this was a big deal. He had actually more than doubled the amount of Personal Faith they had in him with just one speech.
That’s it. As soon as I get back to the real world, I’m picking up every religious text I can and watching every video on famous prophets. I will not take the skills of my ancestors and teachers for granted, he told himself, fortifying a plan for his next visit home.
“Now that’s how the pious should behave,” Lee heard David grumble from the side as everyone else just quietly stared at Lee. “All this murder and kidnapping stuff ain’t gonna convert anyone.”
He didn’t make out anything past a ‘hmmm’ from Ling and the others, but he could see there was a very serious look on Miller’s face.
“Justice doesn’t count as vengeance, does it? It ain’t eye for an eye if you’re just cleaning up scum, is it?” Miller asked with great earnestness on his face.
This was an improvement for Lee because he was used to seeing the blowhard justice warrior, who ironically probably did more evil in terms of mass murder and carnage in the last two days than most every apathetic nobody in his hometown would do in their whole life, actually listen to him. He was expecting Miller to just overwrite everything he said.
“Of course it doesn’t. Burning bad guys and running the wicked ones through with your spear is what it means to be a Paladin, so of course it isn’t!” Miller exclaimed before Lee could respond, nodded to himself again and let out another drunken shout.
Yep, that’s exactly what I expected him to do . . . but at least he listened to me for a moment in the first place. Lee shook his head.
“So, if they’ve gone down to the town, doesn’t that mean they know we freed them, and there will be people coming?” David broke the moment, reminding Lee why he wanted the group to stay in the first place.
“Yeah, it does. And these people . . .” Lee looked over the group. “They aren’t fighters. We need to make it to town and reclaim that advantage quickly. We need to find the barkeep.”
“If you say so, boss,” David said.
“Mhmm. I’m with you, no matter where we’re going,” Ling announced.
“Can we burn them?” Miller asked
Lee knew exactly what Miller was going to ask even before he had gotten the words out. “NO!” he shouted, shutting down the idea as quickly as possible. “We are not burning down Satterfield.”
“Can we burn down the tavern at least?”
Lee just gasped at him, dumbfounded by the oaf’s need to torch as many persons and their property as possible. “You know, if we burn a building that’s connected to other buildings, they’ll all burn down in a chain reaction. Right?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, let’s drag the enemies outside and then burn them all alive out in the open,” Miller said, smiling. “We must appease Augustus and . . . you. You do still like burning stuff, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” Lee answered as he thought about what Miller had said. That won’t work in a town skirmish, but he’s not wrong. That idea could come in handy later. It’s entirely possible that we could drag people out and start burning them alive.
Just when Lee had thought everything was wrapped up, that he’d be descending the mountain back down toward Satterfield, someone pulled on the back of his leather armor.
“You can’t leave us,” an older woman pleaded.
Lee looked at her, confused. “I’m not. We’re going back to town now.”
“No, I mean you can’t leave us out of the fight. If our Herald is fighting, then we must fight too.”
“But what if you get hurt?” Lee blinked, not sure what help she could be, and suddenly noticed the entire group’s attire. He hadn’t thought much of it since he had been around David, Ling and Miller, but the whole group held pickaxes or other weapons, and they were all wearing a few pieces of armor too. Did they already plan for battle? “You all aren’t fighters, and we’re about to go into a conflict that will most likely result
in even my death again.” Lee felt odd having to tack on that final word.
“We can’t abandon you, though,” one responded. “If you die, what will become of us then?”
“Right!” Another cheered on this sentiment, hoisting a pickaxe over her shoulder at the same time. “If you perish, they’ll just take us back, right?”
“I don’t care what happens to me there: I just want to take one of those bastards with me,” an older man, his beard holding all the hair the top of his head used to, chimed in.
“That’s right. Don’t stop us from joining you,” the motley crew of scrawny slave’s youngest-looking man added.
“But . . . death. Very real, very serious death will probably await you if you follow,” Lee warned. At the moment, he had managed to climb up to level nine thanks to the mass murder of the soldiers earlier with the fire and the killing of the Krobken, but that didn’t mean that this rabble was good for a fight. For all he knew, they were level one to ten individuals who had never killed anything in their life. They had never absorbed pieces of anyone’s dead soul like what the statue mentioned about how EXP really worked. That meant that, while he could probably handle a few soldiers on his own in the upcoming fight, especially if they were the same level as the ones he had been fighting before, there was really no way to say how well they would fair.
“That doesn’t matter. If we die, we’ll just be waiting for you to show us the promised land in the afterlife,” the girl said.
“Right, don’t worry about it. Let’s just go kill some evil bastards and stop them before they take any more of our town for their twisted purposes!” the first one to speak added.
“AND BURN THEM ALL!!”” the pyromaniac Paladin, Miller, tacked on with an unsettling zeal.
This whole “of Fire” title for my deity screen is entirely your doing. Why don’t you take it? Lee grimaced as he thought back on the smell of roasting human flesh for a moment before getting back to the matter at hand. “Alright, let’s . . .” He looked around at his brave followers, each of them having gone quiet as they waited for him to say something inspirational, but he just wasn’t sure of what to add. There wasn’t anything more to say than, “Well, let’s go kill some bad guys and a barkeep and take all of his booze as recompense!”
While the group shouted out a chorus of, yeahs, yays, and just weird noises as they all gave their approval, Lee made his way to the other side of them and started his march back toward the town. “Let’s also find a bed,” he mumbled to himself along the way.
“Mhmm. All killing and no sleep . . . not a good combination. Might end up killing the wrong person,” Miller agreed.
Let’s not forget all the walking too, Lee thought but didn’t say out loud. He wasn’t sure how any player in a game could really take to all the walking they had done. He absolutely hated travel in most of his MMOs back home, and it turned out that walking in person was no different. Sure, it was a necessity that was put in order to make the world feel ‘more realistic,’ but at the same time, that was also why unrealistic, flying, fart-powered, comically-proportioned mounts were invented. The more realistic a travel system, the more boring the game.
——-
When they got to the town, they were ignited with a sense of enthusiasm that one shouldn’t have after barely getting any sleep and then marching for seven miles.
After their talk, Lee had been torn on what course to take after they arrived back in town. The other group had essentially caused them to give up what little advantage they might have had from the element of surprise by traversing down the mountain and into town early. As such, Lee actually had a choice to make: either let everyone rest and eat before marching into town or just go straight in. He almost told the group to set up a perimeter around the town so that they could try and catch anyone who left, thinking it might be the best way to catch the courier while letting most of them take a respite, but the problem was that he might be able to leave town in other ways as well. And, despite the fact that the town wasn't very large, he definitely didn’t have the manpower to completely surround the entire town.
Based on the stories the former captives told, there were several ways the enemy had snuck their victims out of Satterfield and up the mountain. That’s why, when the decision finally came, he chose to just march right in and go straight for the most suspicious bar: Copper Lane. Since they reasoned it had to be a man, and two of the three men worked at Copper Lane, it was the natural destination to check first. The building stood separate from the ones on either side of it, and it was clear where its theme came from the moment Lee saw it. Even though it was a wooden building, it was surrounded on all sides by copper tubes as if it were straight out of a steampunk convention. It even had several large, seemingly-pointless gears built into the wall that didn't seem to be connected to anything else.
Do these people even have mechanical technology that would even use gears like that? Lee questioned as he studied them.
David interrupted Lee’s thoughts before his own gears could spin any further trying to make sense of the purely-decorative machinery.
“So, umm, boss . . .” David began, interrupting Lee’s thoughts as the funny-looking band of partially-armed and partially-armored slaves surrounded the entrance to the building. “Not to harp on any one point, but how do we figure out which barkeep is the guilty one?”
“I still can’t believe it might be one of them,” one of the former slaves chimed in. “They . . . It just wouldn’t make sense. I don’t want to believe it.”
“Well . . .” Lee raised a hand to silence the group and prepared himself. He had been thinking about this issue for a while, and he had an idea for how to address it. “We’re going to have to be really rude, sadly. I suggest that a few of us hold down the suspects while the rest of you search the place for any clue you can find. If we can get something tangible . . . well, that will make our job easy. If they’re panicked about us finding something, or they think we actually did find something, they’ll also be more likely to confess. So, even if you guys don’t find anything, come up after and pretend like you did. If they still don’t crack, then . . .”
“Then we can just kill them to be safe,” Miller offered when Lee trailed off.
“No!” Lee said emphatically, shaking his head. “No, that’s not okay. We only kill the guilty party after we get a map.”
“Fine,” Miller said, actually pouting as he reached for one of the copper cogs and opened the door.
Inside, the entire room was lavishly furnished with copper barstools, copper tables shaped like gears, and there was a long wooden bar decorated with copper tubes that had froth coming out their ends. Copper Lane definitely lived up to its name on the inside as well as it did on the out. There was a man working at the bar who was eating eggs and chatting with three patrons who seemed to be dining on what looked like a salad chock full of nuts and leaves.
Holy crap, this guy is totally a steampunk-styled hipster, Lee thought as he approached the barkeep. He even had a long, twirly mustache and the oddly-over-groomed beard that were the defining attributes of hipsters back in his hometown. If it wasn’t for the fact that his style paired so well with that of the bar, he would have stood out like a sore thumb—or at least appeared as out of place as this bar was in the middle of Satterfield.
As soon as Lee and the crew walked in, the composed and sophisticated-looking barkeep dropped his spoon and started crying.
It wasn’t an ‘I just ate something incredibly spicy’ cry or a ‘Holy crap that hurts, but I have to be a man and tough it out’ cry. It was a full-on bawling with tears and snot running out of his eyes and nose, and he climbed over the five-foot-tall bar and started running straight toward Lee.
“See? Guilty and about to beg for his life,” Miller said in a low voice to Lee as soon as the man started toward them.
Lee thought he was going to collide with him, that he was going to be tackled by the unarmed, snot-covered, crying barkeep until he noticed
his trajectory wasn’t a beeline. He was running right past him. Lee was just about to shout for someone to stop the man, and Miller had already readied his spear to gorge him, when he stopped without a word having to be spoken right in front of the girl who had assured everyone of his innocence moments ago. He dropped to his knees and hugged her, crying into her shirt, while she patted his head.
“I’m so . . . I’m so happy you're back! I heard some of the others came in last night, but no one saw you. No one said anything about where you were either,” he choked out between sobs. “I thought I had lost you for good.”
She started crying too, but it wasn’t nearly as badly as the man. “It’s okay, dear. I’m here for you.”
Miller had concluded the same thing as Lee—that this man couldn’t be the spy—and he said in as low a voice as possible, “Well, then that leaves only one suspect left.”
“Wh-where is Dad, honey?” the girl asked. “Doesn’t he still usually cover the morning shift?”
“He hasn’t been able to sleep well since you’ve been gone, so he couldn’t do the morning round anymore. He just drank himself to bed an hour ago. He’ll be so happy when he wakes,” the man answered, standing back up and adjusting himself.
What?! You are lovers with this man, your dad owns the place, and you didn’t think to mention that when we were talking about suspects earlier? Lee resisted the urge to start screaming and pull out his hair. There was nothing stopping him except for the fact that he just couldn’t bring himself to ruin their moment.
“Well, that only really leaves one suspect,” Lee said as he looked to Miller.
“No, no that can’t be!” Ling protested. “I’ve known Ramon my entire life. He couldn’t . . . He couldn’t do that to us!”
“She bit her tongue as we came here to investigate her lover and father, but those reactions weren’t fake,” Lee concluded with certainty. Nobody could act that well. There was a difference between crocodile tears and breaking down like that, and he couldn't possibly imagine a father who would willingly give up his own daughter he loved so much that he was drinking himself into a stupor after. None of it made sense, so he just dismissed the man outright. Yet, Ling and Miller both looked equally depressed at his conclusion. “They aren’t suspects.”
