by Rachel Aaron
That settled it. After clicking the female stonekin, Tina messed with the customization settings until she had a beautiful but stern-looking lady with emeralds for eyes and copper-metal dreadlocks for hair. Maybe it was her shitty week doing the decision-making, but she set all the sliders for muscles and height to maximum.
The result was an eight-foot-tall monster with legs the size of tree trunks, which was actually pretty exciting. ClaraSpell had been only four inches taller than Tina. She had no idea what playing this beast was going to be like, but just thinking about piloting that much power around was thrilling. She also liked the full-coverage chain armor her new Knight was wearing. The stonekin lady was still strangely busty--why did asexual rock-people even have boobs, anyway?--but there were no bare midriffs or exposed cleavage in sight, a vast improvement over her elf's pinup girl costume. All she needed now was a name.
Since this character was only being made to annoy David, Tina went with the first cheesy thing to pop into her head.
"Roxy."
Name already in use, the game system replied. Chose another.
Tina sighed in disappointment. Stonekin weren't exactly popular, but FFO had been out of beta for two years now. It made sense that all the good rock pun names would already be taken. "Okay," she said, passing her fingers through the glowing keys of her virtual keyboard. "How about 'Roxxy?'"
Name accepted, the system said cheerfully. Would you like to log in as Roxxy?
Tina clicked YES and leaned back in relief. By FFO character creation standards, that hadn't taken long at all, which was good. David was an impatient guy, and he seemed to be in a particular hurry today. Tina was ready to get into the game and see what the rush was about when the virtual world around her suddenly went dark, and then spacey music started to play as lines of white text began to float past her face.
Infinity has no ending and, thus, no beginning.
Such as it is for the Sky, knowing no limits of time and place.
The Unbounded Sky is infinite. It reaches all worlds and all worlds lie within it.
Or so once was believed by Sun, Moon, Wind, and Water...
"Oh no," Tina groaned.
It was the , the stupid, cheap, scrolling text intro all new characters had to sit through before they could play. Desperate, Tina looked around for an escape, but she was already trapped inside FFO's character-loading sphere, a milky-white bubble floating in a vast sea of endless stars. It was very pretty, but there was no way out of it until you actually loaded into the game. Normally, that only took a few seconds, but when you made a new character, the game held you hostage until you'd sat through the entire , which was still going.
The Celestial Elves were born to wander infinity, their spirits endlessly curious and enduring.
The Birds were born of the Moon. Theirs is a nature of always returning.
Neither knew why the Sun burned the Moon, but both knew it was the end of forever.
And the Sky beyond the tragedy grew cold...
"Gahhhh," Tina groaned, mashing the escape key on her virtual keyboard as the text crawled by. "Why is this unskippable?"
All were trapped. Bounded by limits and cut off from eternity.
The immortal elves learned that their nature could not withstand the finite.
With no other choice, they descended to the last unknown realm.
But the Birds fought back...
Some developer must have threatened to quit if they didn't include his literary attempts, she decided. When she couldn't take it anymore, she brought up her chat client to message David that she was stuck in Vogon poetry torture, but he didn't reply. She was trying him again when the last stanza of the poem finally scrolled past her nose.
Good luck, hero! May you bring new hope to this tragic world.
"Finally," Tina said, grinning as the stars and the loading sphere vanished. But the grin slid off her face as the world around her lurched.
"Whoa!"
The purpose of the loading sphere--when it wasn't trapping you in word torture--was to let FFO's Sensorium Engine take over your senses so that when you entered the game, you felt as if you were actually in your character, not lying on your bed with a helmet on. The process was always a bit disorienting, but loading into her elf had never felt like this. The moment the game started, Tina felt like she'd been thrown on top of a pair of stilts. Very, very tall stilts at the top of a very large stone statue.
"Whoa," she said again, throwing out her arms for balance as her senses finally settled into her new character's body enough for her to look around.
She was standing in the sun-drenched expanse of Founder's Square, the crowded, colorful central hub of FFO's capital city, Bastion. Beside her, a large fountain burbled at the feet of giant white marble statues portraying the heroes of the Battle of the Heraldsford River in overly dramatic, physically impossible poses. Beyond them, the square itself was lined with elegant white limestone buildings interspersed with tall palm trees swaying in the warm equatorial breeze. It was the same bright, cheerful scene Tina saw every time she made a new character, except now she was seeing it from a totally new angle--one from eight feet up.
"This is freaking sweet," she said, turning her character's giant stone head, which stuck more than a foot above rest of the crowd of milling players looking for groups. Grinning at her new-found power, Tina messaged David to let him know she was in and started pushing her way through the crowd, only to discover that no pushing was necessary. She didn't even have to say, "Excuse me." People just took one look at her giant stone body and moved out of her way on their own.
It was pretty fantastic. She'd never even considered playing a stonekin before because they'd seemed inconveniently huge, but for perks like this, Tina could handle bumping her head on a few doorways. She'd never been interested in the melee combat classes before, either, but now she was starting to see the appeal. Even with the weird feeling of being on stilts that came from having to pilot a virtual body so much bigger than her real one, she could feel the strength flowing through her stone arms and legs. She felt as if she could crush anything, and that was unexpectedly intoxicating. She'd made this character because David had pushed, but now that she was in the game, Tina was legit excited to play Roxxy. Now she just needed David to message her back so they could get to that dungeon.
When he failed to respond to multiple texts, Tina rang him on voice chat. "Dude," she said when he finally picked up. "Where the hell are you?"
There was a lot of blasting and other combat noises over her speakers, and then David's frustrated voice sounded in her ear. "Sorry, Tina," he said in a rush. "I tried to wait, but you took a million years, so I had to go without you."
"Are you shitting me?" she cried. "Dude, I made this character just for you, and you couldn't wait for me? And it was not a million years!"
"It is when I've bet my brother I can get a Cleric to level thirty before he can," David said distractedly, his voice muffled by the swelling sound effects of a healing spell. "He's already a level ahead of me cause you were dragging your feet. I had to pay another group to take me along."
Tina felt zero sympathy. "What am I supposed to do, then?"
"Just wait there," he said. "My current tank has to go to work after this dungeon. We'll switch you in on the next run."
"But you just started," Tina said in disbelief. "You want me to wait here doing nothing for an hour just so you can have a tank the moment you pop out?"
"Pretty much," David said without a hint of shame. "And after you tank two runs for me, I've got a level-thirty guy lined up to carry me through the whole Red Canyon quest line. Anyway, I gotta shut up and heal. Just wait there, and I'll TTYL."
"Jerk!" she yelled at him.
This player has activated Do-Not-Disturb mode
Tina closed the conversation with a punch of her new, giant fist and glanced at the clock floating at the edge of her character's vision. It was already eleven a.m. She'd wasted her entire morning on this b
ullshit. She should've just told David no and played ClaraSpell. At least then she'd be doing something useful right now. As it was, she might as well log out and go get lunch. Hopefully her parents had remembered to leave something out for her today. With James home, leftovers weren't a thing she could rely on anymore. She was trying to remember if there was any more instant mac and cheese in the pantry when someone cleared his throat behind her.
"Excuse me, good Knight," someone with a formal, stilted voice said. "Are you occupied at this moment?"
Blinking in surprise, Tina looked down from her interface to see a golden-haired elf standing beside her. He was dressed in starter armor just as she was, and the lower half of his face was obscured by the Assassin's starter Bandit Bandanna. Encouraged, Tina glanced at the status bar over his head. Level one, just like her.
"Nah, I'm not busy," she said, turning to face him. "What's up?"
"I was hoping to enlist your aid," the elf replied, his voice lilting in the "ye olde" manner that was a sure sign he was using the in-game translator. Some people would see that as a reason not to play with him, but Tina was fine with the translator. It did a perfectly acceptable job most of the time and a hilarious job when it messed up.
"Our group wishes to move through the starter tasks with efficiency," the elf went on. "As such, we are in dire need of a Knight. We would be honored to have one as mighty as you to lead us."
The Assassin finished with a bow from the waist, and Tina smiled awkwardly, holding up a finger in what she hoped was the universal signal for "wait a second" while she did a quick check of her skills.
Thankfully, the Knight's gameplay looked pretty straightforward. She had a starter sword and shield in her backpack, both of which grew enormously to match her stonekin's physique when she equipped them. Chuckling at the ridiculousness of it all, Tina turned and saluted the Assassin back.
"I am the stonekin known as Roxxy, and it would be my pleasure to spearhead a band of heroes against the great evil which dwells in the darkness," she replied, matching his ye olde-ness just for the fun of it. Fortunately, the golden-haired elf didn't seem to mind at all. He just extended his hand.
"Then let us vanquish Bastion's foes together," he said, blue eyes twinkling.
Tina's giant hand engulfed his as they shook on it, and her interface dinged to let her know she'd joined a party.
"I am known as Silent Blade," the elf said, triggering the game's privacy settings to reveal the nameplate floating above his head, which Tina noticed was actually spelled SilentBlayde. "I travel in the company of a Ranger, a Naturalist, and another Assassin. We are all new to this world but not lacking in bravery. I have already procured us potions and food. Shall we join the others at the entrance of the first leveling zone?"
"Potions and food?" Tina said, breaking into a smile. "You're exceptionally well-prepared for a level one. I'm hella impressed, dude--I mean, SilentBlayde."
That earned her a jaunty thumbs-up. Tina flashed her own thumbs in return, but the Assassin didn't move. He just stood there expectantly, and then Tina realized he was waiting for her. She was the tank, the group's default leader. He expected her to go first.
The rush that followed that was unexpectedly powerful. In her real life, Tina never went first. It wasn't that she didn't want to, just that no one ever let her. Now, though, SilentBlayde was looking at her as if he expected nothing less, and Tina nearly bowled him over in her rush to grab her chance.
"Come on," she said, striding out of the Founder's Square toward the Bastion starter zone. "I've done these starter quests a dozen times, so I know exactly where to go. Let's rock'n'roll!"
SilentBlayde chuckled when the translator program finished processing that for him. "Rock is what you do, stonekin, so I will have to provide the roll."
He jumped as he finished, doing the flip animation all elves did when they hopped, and Tina burst out laughing.
It looked like today wasn't going to be a total waste, after all.
Chapter 1
Tina
Present day.
Tina stepped through the massive arched entry of the Portal Keeper's Sanctum in the city of Bastion. Her left boot squelched in a pool of congealed blood as she stopped atop the building's front stairs. Her right boot left a massive scrape in the thick layer of ash. There was more ash on the wall beside her, a sticky coating that turned the once beautiful rose-colored stone as black as the rest of the city before her.
The sight made her shake in her armor. Sitting upon a high hill in East Bastion, the Sanctum normally gave an excellent view of the capital to new arrivals teleporting in from other places in the game. Now, though, black smoke billowed from the countless building fires, obscuring the view and blanketing the once-beautiful white limestone of Bastion's upper city in a grimy layer of soot. In the distance, she could hear the clash of steel and cries of pain echoing from the narrow, smoke-clogged streets. In the square in front of her, though, the only movement came from the buzzards hopping and squawking over bloody piles in the street with none of their usual fear of people.
Putting a hand over her nose to keep out the stench of rotting flesh, Tina forced herself to keep looking, her sharp stone eyes flicking between the gaps in the smoke to the only point in the city higher than the Sanctum: the king's royal castle.
Protected by eighty-foot-tall walls of solid granite, the soaring towers of the castle's inner keep seemed to be the only structures left in Bastion that were still white. Behind them, verdant mountains rose like green knives from the plains beyond Bastion's walls. The mountains were a big part of why the city was here. They surrounded the city on three sides, hemming it in like a bowl. Unfortunately, this also kept in the smoke, blocking the winds and turning the sheltered capital into a cauldron of smoke and ash, most of which seemed to be concentrated in the lower city. But while Tina could see fires rising above the roofline to the south, nothing moved in the streets immediately in front of the Sanctum except scavengers.
As bad as it looked to her, though, the blood- and ash- covered street must have been a lot worse for the fleshy races behind her. Tina heard several people from the raid break ranks to retch behind the soaring pillars. Those who didn't lose their breakfast seemed to be shocked still, pushing through the arched doorway as they fanned out on the sooty and scarred landing of the Sanctum's front steps to get a look.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Frank said quietly, crossing himself.
"Why'd this happen?" a Ranger demanded. "Bastion is supposed to be safe! PVP isn't even allowed here!"
"Who's fighting?"
"What are we going to do? There's nowhere else to go!"
"We're totally fucked!"
Tina couldn't say they were wrong. All through the grim, desperate march through the Deadlands, the mantra had been "Just get to Bastion." Even Tina had clung to it when she'd had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. Bastion represented safety, wealth, order, and possibly even a good time.
She'd worried there would not be a kind welcome for them here, but she'd hoped that the Roughnecks' contract from working with the Order of the Golden Sun could be used to smooth over the initial mistrust. In all her worst case scenarios, though, she'd never imagined this. She never would have thought the game's safest city--the entry zone for new players, the one place where you could go AFK without fear--would be torn by anarchy in the streets. It was the damn Order Fortress all over again. Everything they'd done, all that sacrifice and pain to get here, and once again, here was not worth having.
It was so damn unfair.
Clenching her armored fists, Tina turned her back on the ravaged city to face her guild. They looked how she felt: horrified, shocked, as if the whole world had been yanked out from under their feet. But she absolutely understood they couldn't afford to fall apart here, so she banged her armored hand on her shield, filling the smoky air with the harsh clang of metal until she'd dragged their gazes back to her.
"Listen up, people," she began in her
usual booming voice, but then she stopped. Something was different. Everyone gave her their attention--a nice change from the Deadlands--but people also winced or pulled their hoods up defensively. Tina wasn't sure whether they were traumatized or she'd just stepped in something again and didn't know it yet, but after the mess she'd made at the Order Fort, it was enough to make her change her tone.
"We'll be okay, folks," she said in a much gentler voice. As gentle as a stonekin could sound, anyway. "This isn't the Deadlands. We have food for several days, we have water, we have ammunition, and most importantly, we have each other."
She pulled out the contract she'd had Commander Garrond of the Order sign. Flipping it over, she showed the crowd their golden signatures they'd had to sign to officially be part of the Roughnecks.
"Don't forget," she said, holding the paper high. "We've already fought an end-game raid boss and won. That makes us one of the deadliest things in the world right now, so don't let this banged-up city intimidate you. Whatever did this to Bastion, it should be afraid of us, so buck up."
"But what are we going to do?" a Cleric in the back wailed.
"That's what we're trying to figure out," Tina said, pulling out her sword to use as a pointer. "For now, I want everyone to--"
She froze. She wasn't even in reach, but the moment she'd drawn her sword, all the players in the front row twitched. Some even jumped back, putting up their hands to ward her off. Tina frowned at this new reaction. She was trying to think of what to say when she noticed Zen watching her with her arms crossed and her sharp eyes disapprovingly wary, as if the Ranger was gearing up for another fight.
Damn, what have I done this time? Confused and on guard, Tina shot a look at SilentBlayde. He was watching the crowd as well, his slim blond eyebrows scrunched in a frown, which perversely made her feel a little better. Whatever she was missing, at least it wasn't obvious to him, either.
