“Go down the rocky path, oh Chosen Hero,” the old man said. “Halfway down you will enter Hawkspoint, a small outpost of the Empire in this land of rock and snow.”
His expression changed, and the old sage just stood there, mindlessly staring in front of him. Then he muttered something inaudible and walked towards the altar, where he kneeled again. Zack shrugged, turned around, and squeezed between two misty cliffs slashing through the sky in the way no real rock or even mineral of crystal form ever could.
“Just so you know, you failed the Turing test,” Zack told the sage as he departed.
The rocky path wound down the slope like a grey snake, or sometimes rolled like a stream, splitting, then coming back together, often hugging rocks at dangerous angles. Zack felt an onset of vertigo again, but now it felt damped down pleasantly, just enough to gently tickle his imagination and fear of heights. As he started his way down, small rocks and gravel rolled from under his feet and trickled down the path. In the distance, a wolf howled, and another one answered unpleasantly close.
“Combat,” Zack muttered, his glove shapeshifting again, his hand instantly filled with the Copper Dagger. It was the most basic weapon, Zack realized, and yet it felt deadly and sharp. He was pretty sure no puny wolf would be a match for him.
The path was empty, however. Still, now he moved forward carefully, trying not to disturb the little rocks and gravel underfoot. Huge pines overgrown with moss crisscrossed along the way, so he had to climb over one fallen trunk, then crouch and squeeze underneath another.
Skill Improved: Sneak +1
Achievement Unlocked: Advanced Navigation
You earned 1 XP for using your Sneak skill
NEW QUEST: Homo Homini Lupus
Rewards: 15 XP, Wolfskin Armor
“Ah, so the old man gave me a quest,” Zack said, putting back the journal, which stopped glowing now, and then crumbled and dissolved in the wind like magical sand. “Come on, Dante, just point me towards something to kill.”
This was of no use of course, because Dante the Welcome Wagon must have already despawned.
The Copper Dagger returned into his hand though he didn’t even remember thinking about “combat” this time.
He was alert and quick on the draw. He was good at this.
Objectives:
Find 3 Sourberries
Find 2 Liferoot
Craft 1 Healing Salve
“Ah, so no combat yet,” Zack said, his hand once again empty. He wished weapons were this handy in the real world. Zack could have been a real-life superhero if he could wish an item into his hand, and it would appear. This is what he found captivating in the games. Boring parts of life disposed of. Fun added everywhere. Always an invisible hand of a kind and friendly game designer fellow guiding you through the game world, making sure there’s a key to every door somewhere, a solution to any problem, or maybe several solutions, for different classes, or solely for your class when it’s time for you to feel unique and lucky.
The woods turned out to be a pretty maze of giant pines and long pillars of sunlight trapped between their towering evergreen crowns. Zack quickly realized not every direction was open for him. In some places, the leaves parted and allowed him to pass. In other places, the briars pushed him back and tickled Zack’s hands through the VR gloves, an invisible tactile barrier thrown in here and there, making the woods more of a complex system of intertwining paths.
Here, the invisible hand of a level designer was also guiding him. Zack quickly learned where he could go and where he couldn’t, and where the main road leading towards Hawkspoint was, and where its side appendices lay, and even if something was there to find for him.
So Zack spent some time poking around, peeking under fallen logs and behind predatory-looking stumps entwined in briars. And for sure, soon, he saw a bulging glowing root sticking out of the ground right underfoot.
Item Harvested:
Liferoot (3 gold)
Now as he knew what shape to look for, he easily found one more, and next to it, spotted a special intricate briar lush with glowing and pulsating red berries.
Item Harvested:
Sourberries X2 (2 gold)
Sourberries (1 gold)
The sun slowly crawled up and shone from above, the real air around Zack’s face feeling hot and stale enough to make the game image realistic. This is why what happened next made him jump and nearly threw Zack off his chair.
Just as he picked the bushes clean, something rustled overhead, then a branch snapped loudly, and his attention was drawn up. Reacting as a gamer would, he jumped back and swirled around to make sure nothing tried to spawn behind him. Something heavy whispered and rustled down through the pine branches above. And then a human corpse crashed on the ground straight in front of Zack; a corpse dressed in drab traveler’s garment, a pouch thrown across one shoulder, a piece of torn rope tied to his bloodied ankle, and an Orkish throwing axe stuck in its helmet-covered head.
“What a cheap jump-scare,” Zack grumbled, genuinely scared a little. What if it’s a player’s corpse? he thought. What if Orkish players hunt Human noobs here right near their spawn point? It was a possible exploit.
Search Item: A Dead Traveler
Phew, Zack thought. Just a prop then. Not even a real corpse.
Items Collected:
Leather Cap +1 (4 gold) BROKEN
Recipe: Healing Salve
“Now we’re talking,” Zack said. He held the Leather Cap in his hands, wondering how realistic it felt. Even the crack on it where the Ork axe had hit, now lodged magically in the fake Dead Traveler’s bloodied skull like no problem at all. Physics, huh? I’m an axe!
Craft Healing Salve
Alchemy Lvl 1 Recipe
Items Required:
Liferoot X2
Sourberries X3
Think ‘Craft Now’ to Confirm
“Just as many as I have,” Zack muttered. A big surprise, in there. Still the tutorial sequence. Let’s hope at least this village he mentioned is a real place, and not a training prop. Hawks-something.
“WOOOOOOOOO”, a wolf howled right nearby.
“WOOOOOOOOO”, the echo answered from everywhere.
From underneath the pines, three wolves emerged, two of them grey and one brownish, its hair bristling and its teeth glaring, its mane of hair theatrically backlit by the mountain sun. Special effects are really cool in here, Zack thought absently, his right hand filled with the Copper Dagger, pleasantly heavy. After a second though, he placed an item into his left hand as well.
Item Equipped:
Potion of Dizziness (3/3)
Area-of-Effect.
Stun your enemies for a short period of time.
You encountered a Pack of Wolves!
New Objective: Defeat Your Enemies (0/3)
Wolf Lvl 1 Wolf Lvl 1
Wolf Lvl 2
The sneaky AI-driven wolves apparently followed his strategy. They instantly broke formation. Yet, their pack leader, a second-level bristling brown wolf, was still advancing while two grey wolves seemed to flee and now started circling him from the flanks, their approach trajectories prolonged and parabolic, not the best in terms of given fight location, but this could have been exactly the point.
Zack didn’t mind slaying a couple of Wolves. He could see this was a tutorial fight, not made to be hard, more like impressive enough to make him believe in his fighting skills. The destiny of these poor creatures was defined by the nice friendly game designer, who sentenced them to graciously die by Oh Chosen Hero’s untrained and excessively heavy hand.
Still, he could see the fighting mechanics in Aetheria were not dumbed down, which was a good thing. Zack slightly adjusted his position so the three wolves would converge on him at the same moment, then BASH! – popped his first Potion of Dizziness right underfoot.
Piercing light flashed around him, blurring out the surrounding pines for a second and making briars curl, twis
t and turn to ash. For a second, Zack even felt the now-familiar artificial vertigo that seemed so real at first. The Potion of Dizziness didn’t have a smell, but this sudden rush did seem like a smell. Cool, Zack thought, swirling and slashing every wolf in turn with the dagger, then jumping out of their stunned circle just as they snarled at him again, and slashing through them in turns once more, taking down their brown leader first, then kicking one of them in the ribs – his knee twitched for real! – and scoring a critical hit in the neck.
Wolf Lvl 2 was CRITICALLY hit by Zack, lost 16 hit points, and was killed! 3XP earned
Wolf Lvl 1 lost 7 hit points and was killed! 1XP earned
“Not much difference,” Zack muttered through clenched teeth, his heart pounding in his ears – another special effect of course. “First and second level, instakilled.”
Just as the last remaining grey beast tossed itself at him, Zack graciously backflipped, hovered in the air for a breath-stopping second, and then crashed down on the wolf with all the force he could muster, putting the dagger bloodlessly through its evil glowing eye.
Wolf Lvl 1 was CRITICALLY hit by Zack, lost 7 hit points, and was killed! 1 XP earned
You earned 1 XP for using your Acrobatics skill
The battle was over, and he was hardly troubled at all, disregarding all the huffing and puffing and the crazed heartbeat the headphones played for him. Zack was a bit disheveled by the foray – he had to admit combat in Aetheria felt even better than YouTube videos could describe.
The woods were quiet now, mountain echoes gone, nothing but songbirds twittering above in the pines. The wind sighed quietly, and the burlap on his body flapped like it was totally real. Zack caught his breath and went straight for the pack leader’s brown corpse, in order to check it for the loot.
Wolf Lvl 2 reveals Play Dead!
Play Dead: Pretend to be killed in order to attack later
RRAR! All of a sudden, he was tossed back and hit the ground. Not for real of course, but the subwoofer thump in his ears felt so hard this next wave of artificial dizziness seemed real again, because the next moment, a pair of jaws locked on his virtual neck, and the world around him congealed like blood. All of Zack’s attention was drawn by the bloody pair of jaws snapping at him and trying to tear out his throat, and the throbbing pulse in his ears increasing rapidly, signaling his time for taking action was growing shorter still.
“No, no, I hate QTEs,” Zack groaned, his hands frantically flicking in front of him. He thought he dropped his dagger, but the next moment it filled his hand again, and Zack, not paying attention to the fading world around him, executed the wolf in one well-aimed blow. The devious beast was tossed back like a cannonball and rolled down the slope, this time dead for real.
“You are wounded, my friend,” Zack heard a voice behind his back, and he swirled around, ready to continue the fight.
It was the old NPC sage again. His beard fluttered in the wind and his cartoonish grey eyebrows were frowned in mock concern.
All Zack could do is laugh. He understood it only now.
“It was a setup all along, huh?” he said. “Now I will have to use this Healing Salve I made.”
The next moment, sunlight seemed to engulf him, and the blood-tinted world around him grew lush and green again, slowly, in stages. Zack even breathed easier now, when thumping pulse, wheezing breath sounds, and ominous combat violin music were gone from his surroundings once more, replaced by peaceful strings of a relaxing journey theme.
Item Used: Healing Salve
HP Regeneration +1/min
“So it’s not even good for combat.” Zack sighed. “Slow regeneration.”
“Follow me,” the old man said, then turned around and walked away. After making three steps he stopped, and waited until Zack followed him. As they started moving, the old man led him through a gap in the briars, a shortcut that became available only now, after Zack mopped up his first scripted encounter.
A lush meadow full of flowers, reminiscent of some ancient cartoon by Walt Disney, spread out in front of Zack as he squeezed between two towering pines, following the old sage. There, it was midday, and here, it looked a bit more like evening, and frogs ribbited in the pond nearby, and the crickets sung in the grass. Straight in the middle of the meadow, a campfire was burning, its logs crackling pleasantly and launching sparks into the sky non-stop.
“Approach the bonfire to recover your strength quicker,” the old man said, his arm outstretched, his white sleeve flapping in the wind. Zack even felt the warmth of the bonfire on his cheeks. The illusion of sitting next to a fire was incredible, and the quickened restoration of his character’s hit points was a pleasant number to check once in a while, glowing runes replacing each other in the corner of his eye.
Objective Complete: Defeat Your Enemies (3/3)
Reward: Crafting Recipe: Wolfskin Armor
New Objective: Craft a Wolfskin Armor
“Your robe is no good for this place, oh Chosen Hero.” The old man was droning while logs crackled and spit, the orange reflections dancing across his face infernally. “Aetheria is not what it used to be. Wild beasts roam these lands, and people you meet on your travels, they are often even more dangerous. Make sure you always have your Healing Salve at hand. But that’s not enough. You will also need a basic armor, maybe a tunic, oh Chosen Hero, made out of…”
“Wolfskin,” Zack finished in unison with him. “I get it. But how do I… collect their skins?”
Leaving the pleasant bonfire behind, he backtracked through a corridor of briars, reached a grey corpse of Wolf Lvl 1, and prodded it carefully with his gloved hand. The feeling was unpleasantly jiggly, even though he tried not to think of real animal corpses while doing so.
“You need to skin it with your dagger, oh Chosen Hero,” the old sage’s voice said behind his back.
“S-skin? How?” Zack gulped. He didn’t expect this level of realism. He was even afraid of cutting apart a raw chicken his mother asked him to prepare that one time.
“Just keep sawing at it with your dagger,” the old man said, oblivious to his disgust. “Until you hear a snap. Then you may collect the skin.”
“O-okay,” Zack said, crouching over the suddenly lifelike animal corpse, its grey fur so realistically bloodied where he had hit it. He prodded it with his Copper Dagger a couple times, trying to steady his hand against its rubber-like resistance, then started to saw the resisting organic hulk back and forth, suffering through every moment of this unpleasant jiggliness and hating the game’s artists for so much love to gory details.
On the other hand, it was kind of cool. Something to boast about in front of Nick and Scoot, whose experience of the summer will be limited to mosquito bites. And I’m sawing through it, and it’s disgusting, man, and then a SNAP, ew, and it’s like this hide, it snaps loose, and then I hold this bloody pelt in my own hands, and it FEELS like fur, and it’s like you can even smell something metallic, and this skinned wolf corpse at my feet, like the real thing man, EW.
Yes. It was a decent gaming experience indeed.
Item Harvested:
Wolf Hide X3 (9 gold)
You earned 1 XP for using your Trapper skill
“You also want to look in the wolves’ stomach,” the old man suggested next. “These wild animals, they eat all kinds of things.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Zack said, examining the red glistening dagger in his hand. “Now THAT’s cool. I mean wow.”
The process of opening up a wolf’s belly, even though not as bloodless as the Red Riding Hood fairytale disembowelment of Big Bad Wolf, wasn’t as disgusting as Zack expected. It could have been because of another auto-adjustment of the vertigo generator, or could have been him growing braver and more a mature adventurer. Hack, slash, slash, he opened wolves one after another like tin cans.
“Besides, they look like some tropical vegetable inside, not real meat,” he muttered, hacking away at the fir
st skinned wolf.
No Items Found
The wolf, dropping no loot, popped like a balloon and despawned, leaving nothing but a dark puddle on the ground, which started sizzling in the sun and soon also cleared away. Zack moved on to another corpse. Hack! Slash! Slash! Pop!
Item Found: A Ball of Twine (1 gold)
“Nice,” Zack said as the second wolf despawned. “Totally realistic and most likely useless.”
Still, he kept the ball, and stepped up to the pack leader’s Lvl 2 corpse, a bigger loot container he saved for last.
Hack! Hack! Hack! Slash! Slash! Pop!
Item Found: Iron Needle X5 (25 gold)
Item Found: Bag of Gold (10 gold)
“How ironic,” Zack said, pocketing the pleasantly heavy leather bag of coins and switching to a dirty papyrus with the Wolfskin Armor recipe:
Craft Wolfskin Armor
Trapper Lvl 1 Recipe
Items Required:
Wolf Pelt X3
Ball of Twine
Iron Needle
Think ‘Craft Now’ to Confirm
Immediately, Zack thought, and the next moment his body was wrapped into a badass patchwork robe made of shimmering grey pelts, an upper jaw of the wolf snarling above his brow, about as big as his own head.
“Cool,” he said. It wasn’t hard to admit at this point he liked the game. He was hooked up.
Objective Complete: Craft Wolfskin Armor
Reward: Crafting Recipe: Poison Dart
Craft Poison Dart
Alchemy Lvl 2 Recipe
Items Required:
Iron Needle
Poison
Feather (X3)
Not Enough Ingredients!
WARNING: Requires Alchemy Skill Lvl 2
“Now you have everything you need in your travels, and you can go on wherever you like,” the old man said. “Let me wish you luck, Zack the Alchemist, and if you’re favored by gods and truly Chosen, you shall never see me again.”
“Bye, old man,” Zack said, happy to be rid of the droning old sage at least.
The Alchemist of Aetheria: A LitRPG Adventure Page 3
