The Alchemist of Aetheria: A LitRPG Adventure

by Jared Mandani

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: The Alchemist

  Chapter 2: The Sage

  Chapter 3: Player versus Player

  Chapter 4: Backstab

  Chapter 5: The Boss

  Chapter 6: Permadeath

  Chapter 7: Of Humans, Orks, and Elves

  Chapter 8: Differences of POV

  Chapter 9: The Heist

  Chapter 10: Area of Effect

  Chapter 11: The Chosen One

  Chapter 12: The Mob

  Chapter 13: The Altar

  Chapter 14: Awake

  The Alchemist of Aetheria

  -Book 01-

  A LitRPG Adventure

  By Jared Mandani

  The Alchemist of Aetheria is © 2018 by Jared Mandani

  This book is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, institutions, or places living, dead, or otherwise still shambling is entirely coincidental.

  Thanks for purchasing this book. Happy reading!

  Chapter 1: The Alchemist

  “Hey, Zack! What’s up? How was your exam?” Nicky and Scooter caught up with him in the dusty hallway, beside the school lockers, and questioned him in turns. “How was the test? What’s your score? Was it hard? Was it the last one? What was it?”

  Zack took a big breath. “Chemistry,” he replied. He had just cleaned out his locker and carried a duffel bag that was just heavy enough to make him want to wiggle out of this conversation. The duffel was packed tight with his school equipment, especially chemical glassware and hardware. Every teacher in the school seemed to agree, speaking of the great game of life, on what Zack’s next quest would be.

  “So you’re what, going to be a chemist?” Nicky asked.

  “Make explosives or something!” Scooter’s jaw dropped, his freckled face glowing feverishly.

  This joke was terribly old. Everyone in this school was secretly sure Zack worked on making poison or explosives. This was what his peers saw as the real, substantial science.

  “Yes, I’m going to be a chemist. Guys, I really have to go.”

  He tried to rap-salute them goodbye, then squeeze past, but Nicky stepped up and blocked his way. He was a big guy, one of the basketball team.

  “Look,” Nicky said. “Me and Scoot here, we are going on a camping trip. Like, by the lake. In the woods or something. Around a bonfire. His folks are into this stuff, you know? Camping stuff, professionally, like for real. And they own this forest plot, so are you going or…?”

  “Who, me?” Zack took a step back, hefting the duffel bag in his hand. “You know, Nick. This was my last exam. I’m pretty tired. And I have two quests to finish today before I’m allowed to take a rest.”

  “Quests, you mean videogames and stuff?” Scooter asked, his glowing face also crowding the escape route.

  “And stuff. Exactly,” Zack said, and he rolled his eyes.

  Scooter was the kind of kid everyone considered a nerd just because of his looks. Zack never bought into this game. It was clear Scoot lacked any intelligence, which prevented him from seeing how stupid he looked trying to actually appear smart.

  Yet, Zack didn’t attack them and didn’t complain. He merely fixed the straps of his schoolbag and switched the hand he held the duffel in. “Actually, guys, you won’t believe it, but my mom promised to buy me this next generation VR rig, the one that comes with this next-gen Aetheria MMORPG basic license key. It’s all a bunch of gamer stuff you don’t care about but I do. It might be waiting for me at home. And I intend to spend this summer solely in testing and exploring it. You know the level of how real and cool it plays? It’s almost like you can feel everything in there!”

  “Aetheria?” Nicky asked. “A fantasy game or something?”

  “The most advanced virtual reality MMO ever,” Zack said. “Dude, are you living under a rock?”

  This game was big, even three years back, being a very ambitious project on Kickstarter that even required a new wave of hardware to run it, no less. A new generation of gaming experience, entirely. Just uberkewl, trust me dude. Even people who didn’t play games knew what this was about. Everyone was talking about Aetheria. Its world was supposed to become the first mass virtual resort; a true alternative universe you may experience, as close to Your Actual Virtual Life as it gets. Yet again, a few skeptics were overrun by crazed crowds of hyped-up enthusiasts thrusting their money in front of the developers, from every sphere of society, speaking of how revolutionary this new VR technology would be. Everyone wanted this game. They even asked Elon Musk on Twitter to work on it instead of space rockets. No one wanted Mars anymore. Everyone wanted Aetheria.

  “So what do you mean?” Scooter raised his eyebrows. “You mean you’re, like, going to spend the summer in some virtual reality Matrix thing or something? Come on, man. Summer?”

  “Not Matrix,” Zack said. “Just the world governed by my own boundless imagination. You wouldn’t understand. May I go now?”

  “Look, man.” Nicky spread his hands and took a step back. “You do realize you’ll never pick up a girl this way?”

  “You won’t pick up a girl sitting by a campfire in some trailer park in the middle of nowhere, swatting mosquitoes, either,” Zack said. “See you online.”

  Zack had been on a camping trip once, not with these two school specimens but with his mother and her lady friends. The experience had been extremely unpleasant to say the least. It hadn’t just been mosquitoes; it had been hot, and humid, and cobwebby, and he had been bitten by a wasp in the end. And his backpack had been so heavy. Since then, Zack had known all too well what wild nature was like; and a chlorine-smelling trailer or a dusty cabin made it hardly more interesting and desirable.

  “Whatever, man.” Scooter also moved out of the way, and the pair of his school buddies departed, muttering amongst themselves.

  Zack could have taken a bus to get home, but he decided to walk all the way instead, to save his cash. He shared a two-bedroom project apartment with his mother, a striving painter. He had to go to college this fall. Money was tight.

  He crossed the sunlit underdeveloped street his public school was on. It was all crumbling houses of red and white bricks, their windows dim and dusty. Then, through an overpass suspended above a wide noisy highway. Then, through a park lush with greenery and discarded ice cream wrappers; then down a damp and cold alley towards their project building, under the endless trail of cooling fans dripping condensate; and then down the hall towards the elevator.

  All the way, Zack oscillated between different feelings about the future. First, he imagined logging into Aetheria, straight off, without finishing the main quests for the day. A sudden bout of nostalgia struck him afterwards. For a moment, Zack couldn’t help but think how he was taking this particular route for the last time. It felt both sad and good to leave high school behind. He thought he would miss his astronomy and chemistry lessons but, with the entire continent of Aetheria waiting for him, it was hard to miss them too much and too soon. And so he oscillated between these two feelings all the way up on the elevator.

  Zack’s mom was so excited to see him she opened the front door before he even rung, just as he exited the elevator’s graffiti-infested interior. His mom wore a paint-stained apron and held a long brush in her teeth, its end dripping red paint on the linoleum floor.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll clean this up later,” she said. “Come with me. Come on, hurry up.”

  She led him deep into the dark narrow hallway, giggling all the way towards his room. Then she threw its door open.

  “Tadaaa!” Zack’s mom sai
d.

  She had kept her promise. The rig was here, and it looked amazing. It made his workplace, which was more of a gamer’s nook, look like a fighter jet cabin or some spaceship control room. The VR headset, built to resemble something out of Robocop, rested right next to his Alien-themed custom gaming keyboard. The helmet’s neon lining slowly pulsated, its colors cycling through blue, purple, cyan, and white. The massive built-in headphones bulged and the wireless gloves made of inflatable silicon and charcoal titanium alloy rested next to the helmet, two robot gauntlets crisscrossed by a side.

  “OMG,” Zack said. He was astounded despite the lack of actual surprise – he had visualized this day a million times already. He kissed her and added, “Thank you, mom! You’re the best.”

  He hugged her carefully then, shying from the wet multicolored paint smeared all over her cotton apron.

  “Want to try this thing now?” His mom asked. “Or shall we celebrate by having dinner first? Pizza maybe.”

  Zack frowned. “It’s tempting,” he said. “But first I must deal with the remaining quests. I want my summer to, you know, officially begin after I’m done. Where is my quest journal by the way?”

  “I moved it here!” His mother pointed with her brush at a piece of A4 paper stapled to his dart board. The list on it read:

  QUEST LOG

  Take Final Exam in Algebra (12 XP earned)

  Take Final Exam in Astronomy (12 XP earned)

  Take Final Exam in Chemistry

  Research Colleges

  Apply to Colleges

  Clean Room

  24 XP Total

  Next Level: 50 XP

  Zack stepped up to the board, pulled out the dart, and pressed the paper against a wall. With the other hand, he pulled a pen from his breast pocket, crossed out the chemistry exam, and wrote (12 XP earned) next to it.

  “Twelve!” His mom hugged him back. “An A+!”

  “How else?” Zack replied. “Twenty two out of twenty two correct. I have to finish off the remaining two quests before I can play. I think I will start right now, you know; the faster I’m through with them, the better.”

  “And what happens on the next level? Pizza?”

  “No, mom. College,” Zack said. “College finally happens.”

  His mother nodded without saying anything.

  After a moment, she told him, “Okay, I’ll be in the kitchen then. Want some spaghetti? I’ll make a festive dinner for my little sorcerer.”

  “Alchemist,” Zack said. “I told you a million times. It makes a huge difference. It’s two completely different classes, a Sorcerer is someone who, you know, launches fireballs at his enemies, or summons lightning, or…. Or summons a cloud of poison. And an Alchemist is a creator of items. It’s a crafting-based class, a… a specialist in substances and ingredients.”

  “Okay,” his mother said again, and she left for the kitchen.

  The evening birds of early city summer, mostly swallows and sparrows, were chirping loudly behind the window. It was thrown open, propped with a magazine stuck into the gap, and still the air in the room was hot and humid and hardly moving at all.

  Zack landed into his adjustable titan-infused gaming chair and switched the computer on – he was required to switch it off every damn time because his mother had a problem with nerves after his dad left. Zack’s secret impression was his mom was just being paranoid over electricity and gas and water, maybe because of the bills. She had returned home thrice at a time as she left to check if she had left anything electric unplugged. He didn’t unplug his station but switched it off when he left, just to please her, and still she kept pestering him telling how this thing is on because it keeps glowing and blinking its lights, despite the entire hardware resting peacefully in the Sleep mode.

  The brand-new VR rig beckoned him. Zack already had the client installed, for months now; in fact, ever since the moment she had promised to buy this brand new rig for him as his big graduation present. It must have cost her.

  Zack ignored the urge to click the AetheriaVR icon immediately. He opened the browser and googled “college chemistry education prices” instead.

  In another tab, he opened the trust fund account his dad had left him with.

  Their small kitchen was back past the cluttered dark hallway. Zack smelled fried eggs as he navigated between boxes and ski equipment, still unpacked since they had moved in, half a year ago.

  His mother was cooking spaghetti and painting at the same time as he entered their small cramped kitchen. He made his way to the table and sat down, elbows on the tabletop, his head propped against his palms. Zack rubbed his eyes.

  “Mom,” he said. “Did you spend my college money on the VR rig?”

  His mother merely flicked her hand at him, not stopping to paint with the other. Her painting was a flower composition, again. Zack was skeptical about those. He was sure if she was to draw something cool, like a monster, or a robot, a painting like that would be much easier to sell.

  “Who says it absolutely had to be college money?” She asked. “It was just some money I was told to spend on you. Besides, I made you a promise. I mean it was six months ago. I thought I’d sell at least four pictures by now, besides, you never told me how much the cursed thing cost, and I would look stupid if I would say no to this handsome sales person whom I told everything about my promise. Right? How could I say ‘no’ after what I said? Not after I told him it was a graduation present for my little sorcerer son!”

  Zack sighed, feeling dizzy. He looked outside the window, at the endless cascade of rooftops and satellite dishes as far as one could see. Then he looked back at her.

  “Mom,” Zack said. “Please tell me. You’re not off your meds, are you?”

  He instantly went red because of saying it, but his mother didn’t look offended.

  “I already moved to half-dose,” she just said. “I feel okay in fact, in case you’re wondering, thank you.”

  “I’m sorry, mom,” Zack said. “It was cruel.”

  This is why my dad left you. What kind of mother does that, anyway? he thought.

  “Look,” mom said. “This handsome guy, I mean the sales person who sold me this, well he said you can actually earn money with this game. It has like cyber sports or something.”

  “This is all free-to-play buzzwords and scam,” Zack said, turning away from her to stare at the old creaky ceiling fan-lamp, around which a lonely moth danced, an early guest of summer. The moth’s shadow trickled between the swirling blades, and he watched this dance, with no idea what to say.

  Zack’s mother put down her brush.

  “No, let me explain, this sales person guy, he told me…” She touched Zack’s hand to call for his attention. “He said, this is like, a new technology. It takes time to get used to. They have to draw people in, so they pay them real money. How many coins you collect in this game, he said, is how much money you can sell back to them. Just press a button in the game, punch your card in, and there’s a transaction within two hours. I mean you are a great gamer; you have all the skills, so you could make money with this! Enough for college and more! You’ve got the entire summer to practice it, and I’m sure you will this way or another spend this summer vampire style, hiding from daylight behind your computer, so I must have decided why the hell not, it beats a boring summer job, doesn’t it? And you love doing it, which is the only thing that’s really important to me, my son doing something he loves to do.”

  “I love chemistry,” Zack said, rubbing his eyes with his palms again. “Education is important. I want to be rich like dad. No offense, mom, but come on. Our happiness in life depends on money. You cannot deny that. And living like we are, here, in this hellhole…”

  His mother turned her painting around to show it to him. It wasn’t all that bad a painting, if too much red and depressing for his taste.

  “Here’s my art no one buys,” his mom said. “But I’m not doing it for money, and I
never did. I’m doing it for pleasure and art’s sake! And some of my creations are still in the gallery. Someone might buy something, who knows! We live for happiness, not money and not even education, if this education makes you as unhappy as your public school did. Your dad was never happy despite all his career and education, no matter if he was able to accept it. I saw you during today’s ceremony, and you looked happy when it was over, not before.”

  “You saw me? You weren’t even there.”

  “So what? Quite a few parents in the group streamed it. I saw you from every angle!” His mom put a plate of steaming spaghetti in front of them, with some scrambled eggs on top, sprinkled with oregano.

  “It’s not school. It’s the kids,” Zack said. “They invade my personal space. I don’t need anyone. I don’t care about making friends. What is the purpose of friendship if everyone separates and forgets each other in the end? I don’t care about anyone at school. And they just won’t get it, Scoot and Nick. They laugh at me for taking games so seriously. They treat me like a nerd. And I love the imaginary world for one reason: it’s perfect. And this world, it’s simply not up to my standards. And no one gets me because of me being different. I’ve got no peers who would understand me. I thought…”

  He thought how much difference could college make for him, where everyone would be at least a chemist, and possibly also a gamer. Thinking about all these lone years at high school was a lot of stress.

  “Thanks, mom,” Zack said after barely touching his spaghetti. “I think I’m not that hungry.”

  Aetheria was already installed, and gaming was the best way to take off the stress, and RPG gaming was the best oblivion medicine Zack had ever known.

  “I think my college quest is failed then,” he said.

  “It isn’t failed,” his mom replied. “It just requires you to eat some carbonara, then go play this game until I sell something or you win your money back. Oh, by the way, I threw out the box. They don’t accept these gadgets back without their original packaging, so don’t even think about trying to return it. Go play and have fun. Enough education for now. It’s summer.”