by Rachel Aaron
“You do need me, because you guys can’t win this alone.”
Everyone turned to glare at him, and James gulped. It was too late to bail now, though, so he plowed on. “I’ve done these quests dozens of times. I know every inch of the Red Canyon gnoll village, and I’m telling you, it’s not something your warriors can handle. I don’t know what the gnolls were like before FFO was a game, but the undead’s arrival seriously upped their power level. The Once King’s forces have militarized their village into a fortress, given them weapons and armor and magic. Also, with the exception of Arbati, every gnoll in Red Canyon is at least five levels higher than your best warriors. It’s just not a fight you can win.”
“But you can?” Lilac’s father sneered.
James nodded confidently. “Of course I can. I’m a level-eighty player! This is a low-level village in a quiet part of the world, so you’ve never seen what max-level players can do, but me and my kind have killed dragons and giants and lichs fifty times more powerful than the one beneath Red Canyon. You guys carried me off before I could collect my gear, but I use a staff I took from one of the Once King’s own lieutenants. Trust me, I can handle this.”
“Ludicrous boasting,” Lilac’s father said, but he no longer looked so sure. His eyes were full of the same fear James had seen in the crowd when they’d turned on him before: the fear of players. Now as then, it made him feel dirty, but it was also useful, because if he was going to get his chance at saving Windy Lake and gaining his safe haven, he needed every tool he could find.
With that, James reached up to snag a tiny string of lightning magic out of the air. It wasn’t enough to make a bolt, but it still filled the square with the crackling of ozone, making the crowd step back. When he was certain they believed in his power, James let the lightning go and put his hand to his chest.
“I understand that you don’t trust me,” he said quietly. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me, either. But if you want to save Scout Lilac and all of Windy Lake, you need me. I’m not just going to Red Canyon to break a curse. I’m going to wipe out all the undead, including the lich who’s pulling their strings. Once they’re gone, the gnoll menace will be over, and the savanna will finally have peace.”
He hadn’t actually planned on it, but as he spoke, it dawned on James that he had the power to change an entire zone for the better. His biggest complaint back when this was a game was that questing never actually fixed any of the world’s problems. Even if you worked your way through an entire story line, solving every single problem in a zone, it would all go back to how it was the next day when the servers reset. Now that things were real, though, James had the chance to actually make the world a better place! He’d have to fight his way through the gnoll village and the dungeon below it to get to the orb anyway, so why not go for broke? Once he got his gear back, it would be easy for him to do what was impossible for the villagers of Windy Lake. He was getting excited about the prospect of being an actual hero for once when Lilac’s father sneered.
“Pah,” the old cat said. “Big words and long tails. My money’s on you winding up as gnoll food, but if you can pull it off and save my daughter, I’ll sponsor you to the tribes myself.”
He said that last part with incredible sarcasm and bitterness, but James started grinning like he’d just won the lottery. “Thank you, sir,” he said earnestly. “I’ll be happy to hold you to that when I come back.”
The old jubatus turned away with a sour look, and Gray Fang sighed. “You’d better get going after all that bragging,” she said quietly, motioning to her grandson. “Ar’Bati will go with you to be witness to your trial.”
“And to make sure you don’t run out on us,” the big warrior added, eyeing James suspiciously.
“Fair enough,” James said. “But would you mind waiting an hour? I’d like to get my gear back and power through the opening quests that lead to Red Canyon without worrying about being stabbed in the back.”
It was meant to be a joke—well, sort of—but Gray Fang and Arbati both gasped as though he’d insulted their ancestors.
“If you wish to join our clan, you must start learning our customs,” Gray Fang snapped, wagging a clawed finger at him. “Ar’Bati has not treated you well, I know, but we do not accuse tribesmen without proof! Now that I have accepted your petition to join, Ar’Bati will have to treat you with honor, and you likewise for him, so no more foolish words! Lilac has no time for your ignorance.”
“Yes, Elder,” James said, lowering his eyes. Apparently, scornful grandmother voice was universal.
The old woman nodded curtly and waved him away. “One of the warriors will escort you through town to collect your belongings. Meanwhile, Ar’Bati will prepare runners and gear for the journey to Red Canyon. You can meet him by the lake when you are ready, but do not leave without him. He is your witness. Your trial won’t count without his say so.”
“Yes, Elder,” James said again, doing his best to ignore the murderous looks the head warrior kept shooting him. “I’ll be right there.”
The old cat-lady nodded and walked back into the lodge. Arbati followed her, tail lashing, leaving James alone with the angry-looking young warrior who’d been assigned to babysit him. Thoroughly dismissed, James headed back to his yurt to collect his gear.
As awkward as it was having a cheetah-man stalking behind him, James liked having a guard. It helped minimize the alarm his presence generated in random villagers as they walked through town.
Now that every soul in Windy Lake was no longer packed into the square, James could see how empty the village was. Of the hundreds of white hide yurts that crowded the lake’s shore, most looked abandoned. Counting as he walked, James estimated this village was built to house five, maybe even ten times as many jubatus as he saw walking around. The decimated emptiness of the abandoned homes was haunting, especially since he could look inside and see the lives they’d left behind. All the common objects left sitting out, as though their owners had just set them down for a moment and never come back. Worst of all, though, were the jubatus who walked the empty rows, their faces bleak with sorrow for the missing who weren’t alive or dead and thus couldn’t be mourned, rescued, or buried.
Watching them pace was the saddest thing James had ever seen. He was wondering how it had happened—why these people had vanished instead of becoming town NPCs like Arbati and Gray Fang and everyone else here—when he suddenly remembered just how much bigger the world had gotten the moment it stopped being a game.
Of course. No online role-playing game used a map or population on a real, Earthlike scale. Aside from being way too much work for developers to make, a realistically sized world with a realistic population just didn’t make for a fun game. No player wanted to be that insignificant or to have to run that far.
As a questing game in which every inch of the world was important, FFO had been scaled smaller than most. It took only four hours to go from one end of the world to the other on a standard flying mount. No actual planet could be that tiny and support an atmosphere. Now that everything else was real, it made sense that the distances had grown back to realistic lengths as well. Looking at the distant acacia trees shimmering in the morning heat—trees James remembered being right next to the village—he estimated the scale of the landscape had increased by an order of magnitude. A hundred, maybe even a thousand times larger than it had been in game. And if the world had been shrunk to fit, why not the population as well?
The implications of that made him shudder. Assuming this world had had a realistic population before the game, a lot of people would have had to be cut when it was scaled down. But while the land had returned, it seemed the people hadn’t. James had no idea what happened to them—if they’d died, vanished, or been sent to some other place entirely—but if the population had shrunk on the same scale as the land, then it was possible that ninety percent of the people living here had been obliterated. Forget nightmare—that was apocalyptic, and a good reason for th
ose who survived to hate James and every player like him.
That depressing thought stayed with him all the way back to his yurt. The tent was still empty when they reached it, which James took as proof that its owner was one of the missing. Though sad, it was convenient right now, and James hurried to the backpack he’d dropped when the sensory overload hit, eager to get out of his dirty, bloody clothes and into his lovely enchanted armor. Level advantage aside, he needed the extra power his equipment and weapon provided to make good on his boasting. He was down right now, but once he equipped some proper gear and his weapon, he’d be an unbeatable god, which sounded very nice after this morning’s humiliation. But as he shoved his hands into his pack, his fingers found nothing.
Cold sweat bloomed over his body. Normally, when he shoved his hand into his bag, the dark space lit up with a grid of pictures showing the items inside. Now, though, no such grid appeared. The thing he’d shoved his hands into was just a sack, a sturdy but perfectly normal cloth backpack. Out of sheer hopeful denial, James waved his hand through the inventory gesture, but just as there was no health bar, mini-map, or shortcuts for his abilities, no window full of loot appeared.
Desperate, James turned his backpack upside down, dumping the sack out in the hope that it was bottomless. A magical bag of holding, or something like that. But other than a pile of carefully packed herbs and a few random coins, nothing fell out. Not his weapons, not one of the three alternate sets of armor he carried at all times. Not even one of his hundreds of carefully collected in-game toys.
James sat back on his legs in disbelief. In hindsight, it made a horrible sort of sense that a single backpack couldn’t actually hold multiple full sets of armor, three staffs, one hundred iron bars, two hundred thousand gold coins, four dragon mounts, and so on. What he really couldn’t believe was that he hadn’t realized the truth sooner. All his boasting, his promises of power—they were worthless without the gear to back them up.
That was what he should have been most worried about, but honestly, the loss just plain hurt. The stuff in his backpack wasn’t just powerful. It was the product of hundreds of hours of work. Some of those items had taken him months to get. His staff was a literal artifact of legend, one of the few top-tier items he’d scored from the nights Tina had managed to guilt him into raiding. And his mounts! He’d had nearly every rideable animal, machine, kite, ghost, and dragon in the game, and now they were gone.
The loss of so much hard work almost brought James to tears. How was he going to achieve anything now? Plan A had been “rain lightning down on gnolls from the back of a flying fire-breathing dragon.” There was no Plan B. A level eighty without gear had a lot of health, but damage-wise, he was little better than an NPC. He had no idea how he was going to beat the lich like this, let alone the entire dungeon guarding the lich. Or the town full of gnolls guarding the dungeon. Or the three deadly bosses guarding the town. Or—
“Is there a problem?” the warrior accompanying him asked, poking his head through the tent flap.
“No problem,” James said quickly, gulping down his panic as he swept the pile of herbs and coins back into his bag. “I’m ready. Show me to Arbati, please.”
His voice shook despite his best efforts, but the warrior didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he just didn’t care. He just turned on his heel and marched back through the village, leaving James to hurry along behind him.
As they walked, James struggled to pull himself together. There had to be some way to get his stuff back. After all, the interface for his abilities was gone, too, but he could still cast spells. Maybe his backpack had a trick to it as well? Some word he could say or motion he could make to send his gear tumbling out. The very ordinary nature of the rucksack on his back didn’t give him much hope, though. He couldn’t see any glowing lines of magic inside it. Just normal old burlap, and the more he poked it, the more depressed he became.
As promised, Arbati was waiting at the edge of the lake. He had a pack at his waist and a large sword on his back, and he was standing beside two of the most terrifying animals James had ever seen.
Back when this was a game, the jubatus-racial mount had been a beautiful snow leopard that, granted, made absolutely no sense for a bunch of cat-people living in an arid grassland. These animals were entirely different. They looked a bit like a greyhound mixed with a horse, with long, slender bodies, short brown-and-gray mottled fur, graceful legs, and small, sharp hooves. Their necks were ridiculously long for their bodies, and their small heads were almost completely taken up by a set of razor-sharp fangs big enough to bite a jubatus in half. Arbati was fitting a set of reins between the teeth of the larger one when James walked up.
“What in the world are those?”
“Runners,” Arbati replied as though he couldn’t believe he was having to answer this question. “Don’t tell me you can’t ride.”
It was on the tip of James’s tongue to say of course not, but the moment he thought about it, the information came to him. He hadn’t even known what the runners were a few seconds ago, but now, somehow, he knew the trick of mounting them from the front side, along with how much food, rest, and water each animal would need. He knew that they would run tirelessly for hours, and spit on you if you annoyed them. James didn’t know how he knew all of that. It was simply there in his head, just as magic, his knowledge of herbs, and the jubatus language of Wind and Grass had been.
Given that all of those had come from his skills in game, he could only assume this had as well. After all, he’d learned the Master Riding skill years ago back when he’d first hit level fifty. If being an Herbalist in game meant he now knew which plants were poisonous, why shouldn’t he know how to ride this animal?
He was about to hop on the mount closest to him when Arbati turned around. “Wait,” the warrior said, grabbing his arm. “Where’s your fancy armor? Players normally dress like they’re going to a costume party, but you look the same.”
For a frantic moment, James considered making up an excuse before he realized how stupid that was. Whatever story he told, his gear was still gone. Might as well come clean now before Arbati saw the truth of his new uselessness in the field and cut his throat for lying.
“It’s gone,” he said, shrugging helplessly.
Arbati went still. “What?”
“I don’t have my stuff,” James explained. “Everything was in my backpack when I logged out, but whatever brought me here must have destroyed the magics that stored it, because it’s not here anymore.”
For a several heartbeats, the warrior stared at him in disbelief. Then he threw James to the ground. “You liar!”
“I wasn’t lying!” James said, scrambling back to his feet. “I really did think it was all there!”
“How are we going to save Lilac now?” Arbati yelled over him. “What do you intend to do? Talk the gnolls to death?”
“I’m still level eighty!” James yelled back. “That’s a lot higher than you!”
“Gnollshit!” Arbati snapped. “You couldn’t even defend yourself against the people in the square! You told us you would be an unbeatable demon, but I could kill you right now.” He shook his head in disgust. “I should leave you here to rot.”
“I can still cast spells,” James said angrily. “And I’m the only one who knows the quests.”
“There are no more quests, player!” Arbati spat at him. “The only thing you’ll be good for is bait!” He growled a moment longer then reached down to grab the long knife from his belt. “Here,” he said, throwing it at James. “If you must come, at least try to die while stabbing a gnoll.”
James caught the dagger reflexively then stared at it in wonder. The Naturalist class wasn’t supposed to be able to equip bladed weapons. In FFO, he’d been physically unable to hold a dagger, but he didn’t seem to have a problem now. The short knife had no enchantments or special properties, which made it total crap by FFO standards, but it wasn’t as though he had anything better. Arbati would prob
ably take it as an insult if he tried to give it back, anyway, so James meekly tucked the dagger into his belt, lowering his head respectfully.
“Thank you, Head Warrior Arbati.”
The tall warrior grunted and hopped onto his mount then slapped the reins to send the runner dashing down the road, leaving James coughing in a cloud of dust. Clearing his throat, James turned to climb onto his own animal, taking care to stay clear of the runner’s sharp fangs. He was settling his new body onto the thin padded blanket that served as a saddle when it suddenly occurred to James that he could still run.
They were at the edge of the village, on the bank of the lake, where the water met the open sky and endless golden grass of the savanna. His mount was just as fast as Arbati’s, and the head warrior had already started down the western road. If James made a break for the north, there was a good chance he could get away. Arbati was on a timeline, and he thought James was useless now, anyway. If he ran, the warrior might not even give chase. James wouldn’t have to face the consequences of just how badly he’d screwed them all over with promises of power he could no longer deliver.
For a tantalizing second, the prospect of escape was impossibly tempting. Even with the new distances, the capital city of Bastion couldn’t be more than a week’s ride away. If there were other players like him trapped here, that was where they’d be. And the bank! His inventory might be gone, but the bank in Bastion would certainly still be around. He had tons of spare gear in there, including his raiding set. He could get his power back! All he had to do was get to the city.
He’d actually turned his mount toward the north road when shame washed over him like a hot tide. What was he thinking? He always did this. He always ran away. He could almost hear Tina’s accusing voice in his ears, calling him a coward, and she was right. Gear or no gear, he was still level eighty. He might not be the all-powerful force he was used to being in these low-level zones, but he was still miles more effective than Arbati or any of his warriors, and he’d promised to help save Windy Lake. If he backed out now, what did that make him?
