Forever Fantasy Online (FFO Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  James didn’t know if those were the right words. He wasn’t even sure he could keep those promises, but he had to say something. He couldn’t leave this loving old grandfather in a pile of broken hopes on the floor. He just couldn’t. Thunder Paw’s struggle was a world different from his, but James knew all too well the hopelessness of facing an overwhelming problem by yourself. He knew what it was like to try your hardest and still fail, so he said to Thunder Paw what he wished his parents, his sister, or anyone had said to him.

  “We can do it. I’ll help you until it’s done. You don’t have to do this alone.”

  When he finished, the gnoll’s legs had stopped shivering. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” James said, giving Thunder Paw a big smile. “We may not even have to go far.”

  His sudden change in attitude made the old gnoll blink, but James was rolling. He’d been so caught up in pulling the Red Canyon questline off, he’d hadn’t bothered to think about how it ended until this moment. Now, though, he remembered, leaving him vibrating in excitement. “We don’t have to go far at all,” he said, grabbing the short gnoll by the shoulders. “There are four pan-elixirs right here in Red Canyon!”

  The Naturalist tilted his head. “We have such things?”

  “The gnolls don’t,” James said. “But the lich does. It’s been so long, I’d forgotten, but listing the ghostfire remedies just now made me remember that the lich of Red Canyon has four pan elixirs in his loot cache! They’re in the chest at the back of his boss room. We just have get in and take them.”

  The gnoll’s ears fell. “Then it impossible. Lich control Grand Pack. Is very, very strong.”

  “Not as strong as you think,” James replied. “I actually came here tonight to take him out.”

  “You can defeat lich?” said Thunder Paw, awestruck.

  “Yup,” James said proudly. “He should be way easier to beat than this bitchy ghostfire infection. The main problem is—no offense—you gnolls. Back when this was a game, Red Canyon was just a militarized village. Now you’re an army, and I can’t handle that.”

  Thunder Paw stamped his staff in renewed determination. “You save Grand Pack? Then Me, Thunder Paw, Speaker of Storms, will help you! What you need?”

  “I need you to take me to the lake on the north side of the village,” James said immediately. “There’s a locket hidden underwater there. Once we get it, I can use it to take down Gore Maul. My friend in the city should be handling the other two chieftains as we speak. Once they’re all down, we can sneak into the lich’s lab.”

  “Then we have big problem,” Thunder Paw said flatly. “There is no more lake.”

  “What do you mean?” James asked. He hadn’t seen the village’s reservoir earlier when he’d been looking from the tree, but things were bigger now, so he’d figured it had moved. Surely an entire lake couldn’t just vanish.

  “Lich ordered lake gone,” Thunder Paw explained. “Said it useless waste of space. Need more land for war. You were almost thrown into it earlier.”

  So that was where the giant spike pit had come from. It was the drained lake bed. James closed his eyes with a curse. If the lake was gone, that meant the locket quest was, too, which meant he was going to have to face a full-strength Gore Maul. He didn’t even know if that was possible without his gear. When he explained the situation to Thunder Paw, though, the old gnoll scoffed.

  “Me can fix that,” Thunder Paw said proudly. The one-eyed gnoll got up to retrieve a coil of rope out of a basket. “You missing weapon and armor? Me get you those. Tons of dead players not using gear anymore. You take, then you kill undead and give Me pan-elixir.”

  James frowned. Horrors of looting the dead aside, that would have been a good idea save for one critical problem: the game’s equipment-binding system. In FFO, magical gear bound itself to you the moment you equipped it. After that, it became forever unusable for anyone else. When he opened his mouth to explain this to Thunder Paw, though, James remembered the Eclipsed Steel staff he’d seen in the dead Cleric’s hand. In the game, dead players always respawned with their equipment. Now that death seemed permanent, though, maybe that broke the binding system as well. After all, the lore explanation was that magical items were bound to your soul, but if your soul was no longer there, that was another story.

  “Okay,” James said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

  Thunder Paw nodded. But when he advanced with the rope, James put up his hands. “Whoa. What’s that for?”

  “Me tie you up,” the gnoll explained. “Take you as prisoner to player weapons.”

  James didn’t want to be tied up yet again. He’d just gotten free. He didn’t want to go back to being helpless while someone else decided his fate, but the gnoll Naturalist was having none of it.

  “This only way,” he snapped, the black collar turning his angry yips into stern words. “I take you to weapons, you get power, you kill undead. Easy plan. Good plan.”

  “Can’t I just prowl after you?” James pleaded. “I’m pretty sneaky.”

  “No,” said Thunder Paw. “You say many good things, make good promises, but other gnolls tell Me players kill my people lots during Nightmare. Something called ‘farming.’ You not friend of gnolls.”

  “Wait,” James said, confused. “You were only told about the Nightmare?”

  Thunder Paw ignored his question, brandishing the coil of rope in James’s face like a stern grandfather. “We have saying. ‘Do not follow he who never follows. Do not trust he who never trusts.’ Me not trust you with player power if you not trust me with rope. You must follow Me first.”

  James sighed, filing his burning curiosity away for later. It was probably a long discussion, anyway, one they didn’t have the time for right now. He still didn’t want to be tied up, but he couldn’t back out after all he’d said, so fur flat in distress, he stuck out his hands.

  “All right,” he muttered, trying not to look as the gnoll wrapped the rope around his wrists. “I trust you. And the name is James, by the way.”

  Chapter 9

  Tina

  Tina woke up with an ax in her back. After a second of freaking out, she realized the curved blade was merely hooked into her armor rather than into her.

  “Welcome back, boss,” said the gruff, tired voice of Killbox.

  “Thanks,” Tina said, amazed she was here to say that at all. “How’d you save me?”

  The Berserker lowered her gently off his giant shoulders. “I had the easy part. GabbyBlade and Frank the Tank did all the hard stuff.”

  That was a relief to hear, until Tina realized that she didn’t see SB or Frank standing with the rest of the raid on the dark road. “Where are they?”

  Killbox shrugged. “Not sure.”

  Fear tightened Tina’s throat. “Then we have to look for them,” she said angrily. “If we’ve got MIA, we gotta send a rescue.”

  “What about David?” someone asked from the back of the group. “He got stomped. If we’re going back, we gotta raise him.”

  Tina shuddered as she remembered the shredded robes and red splotch that was all that remained of the healer when Grel’s foot had come up. “I don’t think there’s much left to raise,” she said quietly. “And I’m not sending anyone back up on that hill. I won’t follow one death with more.”

  A grim silence spread through the group, but no one argued. Looking around, Tina could see why. Even in the pitch black of the road, the raid looked terrible. The Knight closest to her had a bloody gash across his forehead no one had healed yet, and he wasn’t alone. Everyone in the raid had an injury of some kind, and no wonder. The healers were wrecked. With David gone, there were only five of them now, and every one was being supported by another player to keep from falling over.

  The Sorcerers didn’t look much better, but it was the nonphysical damage that bothered Tina the most. Several of her veteran raiders looked crushed in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness or injury. Watching them sink to the gr
ound, Tina was awkwardly aware that she should have felt the same. David was an original Roughneck, someone she’d known for years. His death should hurt like a knife in her side, but nothing could pierce the wall of anxiety she felt over SilentBlayde or the anger she felt at herself.

  She’d blown it. Again. The battle on the hill had been a complete rout, and it was all her fault. Why the hell had she let everyone fall asleep at the same time? Even teenagers playing D&D knew to set watches. Grel was a skeleton the size of a building, leading an army of rattling, clattering undead. If she’d been smart enough to put anyone on watch, they would have heard the danger coming from miles away and given them all a chance to run. Now David was dead, and SB and Frank were missing, possibly dead as well, and it was all her fault.

  The only silver lining in this disaster was that at least the others were finally taking this seriously. For the first time since they’d woken up in front of the Once King’s mountain, no one was complaining or goofing off. They were all just looking at her, quietly and expectantly, waiting for her to tell them what to do.

  For most people, being stared at by a crowd like that would be terrifying, but Tina was different. This was her raid. They needed her to lead them, and as always, that gave her strength. It was the reason she played FFO so relentlessly. When she was here, she wasn’t the fluffy-haired library sciences undergrad no one ever listened to. Here, she was Roxxy, guild leader and world-class tank.

  No one at home ever looked at Tina the way raiders looked at Roxxy. No one in the real world ever asked, “What now, Tina?” In FFO, though, she could always see it. The same question that had been in their eyes in the game was there now, asking her, “What now? How will we make it out of this?”

  Given how much she’d screwed up, Tina wasn’t sure she had the right to answer that, but it didn’t matter. She had to step up, because no one else was going to do it. There was no room for doubts or weakness when nearly forty people were depending on you. Meeting their eyes, Tina clenched her shield’s grip and straightened to her full height so she could look down at them. Not as Tina, but as Roxxy, guild leader of the Roughneck Raiders, one of the best damn guilds in the game. It didn’t even matter that there was no game anymore. They’d earned their place at the top, and Tina would be damned if she wasn’t going to live up to that now.

  With that, she launched into roll call. Since fighting Killbox, she’d been working on learning the raider’s names. She still slipped up a few times, but after several corrections, she’d determined everyone had made it down the hill except for the ones she already knew.

  “Okay,” she said when she’d finished. “Looks like we’re only missing three people: David, Frank, and SilentBlayde.”

  Her voice shook when she said SB’s name, but she covered it up with bluster. She turned to the raid’s two remaining Assassins, who were standing together at the rear of the crowd. “ZeroDarkness, KuroKawaii, go south to the graveyard and see if David has come back to life there.” They hadn’t had a chance to check the graveyard by the Dead Mountain to see if the Sorcerer she’d let die had raised there, so Tina felt there was still a small chance that David wasn’t gone. A very small chance, but she refused to let go of the hope.

  “Right-o,” said KuroKawaii as both Assassins vanished into the shadows.

  Next, Tina turned to Zen, the dark-skinned, bright-green-haired elven Ranger whom she’d asked to shoot the Flare Arrow back on the hill. Zen wasn’t a Roughneck, but she was one of Tina’s most reliable fill-ins on pickup raid nights. She was also a nurse in real life, which might prove very useful in their current situation.

  “Your boots are still enchanted with the speed-bonus, right?”

  When the elf nodded, Tina jerked her thumb back toward the hill. “Go see if Frank or SB is coming up from the rear. Don’t take any chances, though. The enemy is still right behind us. First sign of trouble, you come back.”

  Zen gave her the thumbs-up and took off, long ears bobbing as each step carried her half again as far as it should. Tina watched her race away with a sigh. She wished they all had that enchantment now. She also wished she could be the one to go look for SilentBlayde and Frank.

  Tina shoved that desire down. Zen would make much better time, and Tina was the only one who could keep this mess together. Speaking of mess, the rest of the raid was still waiting for orders, so Tina raised her stonekin’s booming voice again, belting out the words until they rang in the dark.

  “We’re not dead yet!” she cried. “The plan is still the same: get to the Order of the Golden Sun’s fortress before the enemy gets to us. We outpaced Grel’Darm once. We can do it again. Undead don’t rest, and neither will we until we reach that fort. Now let’s march!”

  Everyone winced at the word march, but once again, no one complained. They just nodded and started shuffling down the broken old road. Watching them go, Tina felt as if she should say something comforting like “we’re almost there,” or “it’ll be okay.” But those lines lacked credibility even in her head, so Tina just let them walk, watching from the back to make sure no one lagged behind. She’d just gotten them to a slow but steady pace when something caught her eye.

  “Anders!” she snarled, stomping through the crowd. “Why the hell are you carrying NekoBaby?!”

  The fish-man Cleric turned his head, scales glinting dully in the light of his magical staff as he stammered in fear. “I-It’s not my fault! Frank threw her at me and told me to carry her. I haven’t done anything!”

  It was good for all of them that Tina was too tired to be as angry as she should have been. “Give her to me,” she said, exasperated. “We don’t need any more complications, and you don’t look like you can go much farther on your own power, anyway, let alone hauling double.”

  The statement brought actual tears of relief to Anders’s huge fish eyes. Tina had never seen an exhausted ichthyian before, but his scales had a papery look to them that couldn’t be good. He was handing the sleeping Naturalist to Tina with a murmur of thanks when NekoBaby’s eyes popped open.

  “Aw,” she said, sliding off Anders’s back with a pout of disappointment. “Ride’s over.”

  “What?” said Anders and Tina at the same time.

  NekoBaby gave Anders a cruel fanged grin. “I was just letting you carry me so I could shove my boobs into your back,” she said, poking the Cleric in the ribs. “By the way, I’m actually a guy. How’s it feel to get a boner from carrying a dude, huh? Ready for all the ‘Anders is gay’ jokes?”

  Anders stared at her in disbelief, and Tina smacked her forehead with her palm to keep from strangling the cat-girl right then and there.

  “Anders,” she said in a cold voice, “go rejoin the others. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

  Clutching his arms around himself, Anders nodded and shuffled back toward the main line of players. Once he was far enough away, Tina turned angrily on NekoBaby.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Uh-oh,” the Naturalist said. “Mom’s mad.”

  “Fucking right I’m mad,” Tina yelled. “This group of ours isn’t some caveman collective like DrunkChicksCantSayNo, so I highly doubt Anders is afraid of being called gay. You’ve been scamming too many manly-men if you believe that’s even an insult anymore.”

  Neko’s ears went back at that, and Tina rubbed her stone temples. “I know you want revenge for earlier,” she said, more quietly this time. “But this isn’t the time. We’re down a healer after what happened to David, and I need Anders functional. Can you please wait until we’re not hauling ass two steps ahead of our deaths before you resume your campaign of attempting to make his life miserable?”

  “Maybe,” NekoBaby grumbled. “I’ll think about it. I still have my damaged armor to get back at him for.”

  “Has it occurred to you that we’ve got more important shit to deal with right now than your revenge?” Tina snapped. “You took your joy ride on his back at the worst possible time. Do we look like we can afford
to have half the raid carrying the other half?”

  “Why are you defending him?” Neko demanded. “He ripped off my clothing, Roxxy! He was going to rape me! You’re a girl in real life. How can you excuse that shit even for a second? The creep deserves whatever I do to him and then some!” She crossed her arms angrily over Frank’s undershirt, which she was still wearing over her ruined robe. “If you aren’t going to punish him, I will.”

  Tina didn’t know what to say. She’d felt the exact same way back at the Dead Mountain, and she hadn’t even been the victim. Neko had every right to feel the way she did, but they didn’t have time to deal with it right now. Still, Tina didn’t want to tell Neko to just store it ’till the crisis was over…

  She bit her lip, trying to think of what her brother would say in this situation. For all his other faults, James had always been the politic member of the family. Unfortunately, channeling James came about as naturally to Tina as bike riding did to a fish. No matter what angle she tried, nothing felt right, so Tina just sucked it up and told Neko the truth.

  “There’s no question that what Anders did was horrible,” she said firmly, “but I can’t kick him out of the raid. That would be a death sentence for him, and maybe the rest of us, too. We only have five healers now. I can’t punish all of them for something he did.”

  The jubatus’s fur puffed in anger. “So I get the short stick, huh? No consequences for trying to rape an unconscious girl?”

  “Maybe not the ones you wanted, but there have been consequences,” Tina said. “You’ve been staying away from Anders, so you haven’t seen the hell he’s reaped, but I’ve been in the back this whole time. I’ve done nothing but watch the raid march, and while we’re all pissed as hell about having to do this, Anders is the only one who cries.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo,” Neko sneered. “Fish-boy has a case of man-guilt.”

  “That’s not it. At least, that’s not all of it. Everyone in the raid knows what he tried to do to you. I hear the bad names they whisper at his back, just loud enough for him to pick up. The whole group hates him. No one will let him walk close, and people trip or spit on him when he does. Hell, I’m pretty sure one of the Assassins knifed him just because they could.”