PWNED: A Gamers Novel
Page 12
The one that had stuck with him the most was the Muddy Road:
Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, were walking to the temple through rain so thick it had turned the road to mud. They came upon a young woman in a silk kimono standing by the side of the road, unable to cross. Without hesitation, Tanzan said “Well, come on, then,” picked her up, and carried her across the road.
Ekido didn’t speak to Tanzan until late into the night. He fumed in silence all the rest of the day until they’d reached their destination. Once they had arrived at the temple, Ekido could contain himself no more.
“Our order forbids us to interact with women!” Ekido shouted at Tanzen. “Especially the young and beautiful ones. It could lead to us breaking our vows! Why on earth would you do that?”
“I left the girl back at the road,” Tanzan told Ekido. “Why are you still carrying her?”
Reid signed off on another return. He didn’t realize that was the last one until he reached for the next, and there wasn’t one. “Well. How about that.”
Lodge peered into the room. “Hey.”
“Not just yet,” said Reid. “I’m so close to done.”
“Trust me,” said Lodge. “You’ll want to make time for this.”
Reid glanced at the clock. The numbers were blurry, but he figured he could probably afford a break. “Sure, what is it?”
Astrid stepped in past Lodge. She looked decidedly humble, almost deflated. Her mascara had been running. “Boo-Bear?”
Reid’s heart leapt into his throat and carried him to his feet. “Astrid?”
“Hey. It’s me. I’m… ah—sorry for leaving. And everything.”
Reid rubbed his eyes. She was really there. “Are you okay? I was so worried.”
She fumbled off her glasses. “Look, we don’t have to do this here, and I don’t really want to. I just—” She sniffed her tears back in, wiped her eyes; she hated crying. “I really want to come home, Reid. Can I just come home?”
“Of course.” He folded her into his arms. She hugged him back, hard.
Lodge watched them for a moment before closing the door behind him.
Reid dried her cheeks with the cuff of his sleeve. “Don’t,” she protested. “You’ll stain your cuff.”
“It’s okay.”
“It was one of Frank’s favorites.”
“It’ll wash out.”
She smiled. God, she was beautiful. She pulled off his glasses and kissed him gently. Lightning arced down Reid’s spine, crackling into his toes and sending his heart racing.
He could stop now. He could stop and go home and everything would be exactly the way it had been.
He brushed his lips against hers. With a light moan, she kissed him—hard—almost a bite out of his mouth, and tackled him.
Reid landed on his back on the conference room sofa he hadn’t known was there. Astrid straddled him. “Here’s something else I’ve missed,” she purred, and reached for his belt.
Reid pulled her hands away. “We can’t! Not here. Not at work. It’s in the manual.”
She smiled coyly. “Oh, we can’t, can we?” She ripped open her blouse.
The white of her bra stood out starkly against her dark blue skin. That seemed odd. “Honey?”
Astrid reached under her chin and ripped off her mask. Yanker was perched atop him, an impish smile on her indigo face. She reached for his belt again. “Let’s go find your sword, Noob.”
Reid jerked awake at the conference table. Someone else in the room yelled, but he couldn’t see who it was: a page was drool-glued to his face.
He ripped it off and saw Lodge crouching defensively in the doorway. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry.” Reid checked the table. It wasn’t the file he’d been working on in the dream. Come to think of it, the file in his dream had been labeled “Last File,” which should have been a giveaway.
Reid looked back at the wall of boxes and groaned. He was barely a third of the way in. “Is it one yet? Did I sleep through lunch?”
Lodge pointed at the clock. It was after 6:00pm. “You slept through the day. Good thing Habermann didn’t see you.”
“Yeah,” said Reid. “Lucky, lucky me.”
“Do you need a ride home?” Lodge asked.
Reid gestured to the mountain of boxes. “I’m not getting home tonight.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m super glad I don’t have the skills to help you.”
Reid chuckled. “You’d only slow me down.”
“Well, hey, it could be worse. At least you got some sleep.” Lodge started tugging on his coat. “I could bring you a coffee if you like.”
“Should I meet her?” Reid blurted.
Lodge froze, his coat halfway on.
“Yanker,” Reid continued. “My guildmaster? I think I want to meet her.”
Lodge extracted his arm from the coat. “Wow. Okay.” He folded the coat to give himself time to consider his answer. “All right. I’m gonna base my answer on three premises. First one is that she’s actually a girl.”
“She is a girl,” Reid said. Reid hoped.
“Second, that she’s geographically close, no farther than say a six hour drive. Because a flight to meet somebody who won’t tell you her name is beyond the borders of weird.”
Reid’s face fell. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“The weird part, or that she could be anywhere on the globe?”
“Doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”
“Bit late for that. Third premise: the fact that you’re asking me this at all means you see this woman as something potentially serious.”
“Hey, now, I never said—”
Lodge held up a hand. “I’m just walking through what you’ve told me—I can only go off the information I’ve got. So. You say she’s nice. You deserve better than nice, but nice is a good start, and it’s leagues beyond what you’ve been getting. You think you don’t deserve to be happy, so I won’t bring up how you are when you’re with Astrid, but I will point out that when you’re talking about Mystery Girl—”
“Her name is Yanker.” Except no, it’s not. Shut up, brain. “And when exactly was I talking about her?”
“The ride home from the hospital. You wouldn’t shut up about her. You were pretty well sedated at the time, but the whole time you were babbling about her, you weren’t panicked. You weren’t pretending that everything was perfect like you do with Astrid. You were more… I don’t know, human. Real. I won’t say happy, because that was probably the painkillers. But even now, sleep deprived and buried under this mountain of shit work, we’re talking about her. And you’re about as calm as I can remember. It’s nice to see you not pulling your hair out because you’re not measuring up to some impossible standard you’ve set for your relationship. So, to summarize: I don’t know. Good night, Crotch-Priest.”
“Later, Ass… Butt.”
Lodge could only shake his head. “Man, you really need to get some rest.”
The last of the office workers departed around a quarter to eight. That gave Reid fifteen minutes to get ready.
He filed away the last of what he’d gotten done—three full columns, only six boxes to go—and tucked a picture of Astrid into the edge of his laptop. He pulled his copy of Fartherall Online out of his backpack and violated about a dozen rules in the manual by installing it on his office computer.
Once the game had loaded, Reid plugged in a headset from customer service (rule violation #13). “Here we go.” He dialed up the guild’s GroupSpeak channel and pulled on the headset.
He heard a ping, and then staticky silence. “Um… hello?”
“Hello?” The voice was a young woman’s. “Noob? Is that you?”
“Reid, yeah. Who is this?”
“Who do you think it is? It’s Yanker.”
Reid let out a massive sigh. She is a girl. I told you, Lodge. Relief massaged his brain. But there was something odd about her voice, her… acce
nt? “Yanker?”
“Yeah?”
“You sound Australian.”
“I am Australian.”
Reid didn’t know how to parse that. “Why are you Australian?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Australia. Way out of his time zone—an ocean away. “I’m sorry.”
“She’ll be apples, mate,” she said with a laugh—her real laugh, not a canned sound file from the game, a long chuckle that ended with a dingo yip of a gasp. “Kidding, sorry. I don’t actually talk like that. Nobody talks like that anymore. I’m betting half of that old ANZAC lingo was based a dare: ‘How stupid an expression do you think I can get to catch on?’ Anyways, I babble a bit when I’m nervous. You can tell me to shut up.”
Reid didn’t say anything. He was still thinking about her goofy laugh.
“You there?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s just…” The picture of Astrid had fallen out of his laptop. He set it back in. Focus, Reid. Back on track. Goals and shit. “I just didn’t expect you to sound like that.” To have a laugh that sweet. No. Focus. “Where are you guys?”
“The Graveyard of the Gods, near side of the Bleak Continent.”
Above the blasted and preternaturally dark landscape of the Graveyard of the Gods swirled a vortex, an inverted whirlpool of crackling energy and mournful winds. Lightning fell from it like rain. Shattered monuments jutted up from the red sand, surrounded by the detritus of the fallen and forgotten, the flotsam of dead gods and dead worlds dumped unceremoniously onto the ground from the vortex.
Noob found the rest of
Yanker jogged down the hill to meet him. “Cutting it a bit close.”
“Hey, I ran halfway across the world for this.” Below the ridge, the angry mouth of a temple squatted in the side of a collapsed mountain.
“What is that place?”
“Ord-Anmuhr,” said Yanker. “The ancestral home of my people, back when the orcs and the ord were the same race. Then the dwarves took some of us captive, tortured and experimented on us, and blah blah blah, poof, orcs.” She grinned. “The only thing that does matter,” she continued, “is that the Moonchart Door opens in the back of that dungeon. In less than an hour.”
“No pressure.”
“All the pressure. Okay, I’m patching you in to the guild line… now.”
“—so the cop says ‘Did you know you have a dead cat back here?’” a young man was saying. ‘And Shrödinger’s like, ‘Well, now I do.’”
Reid reached the top of the ridge right as a woman replied ‘I know not of this “Schrödinger.” This is some powerful wizard, I assume?’ That was Bandaid. The game matched her toon’s speech animation to her player’s voice. It was almost like watching a real person talk.
“Ahoy, ahoy!” Noob called to his guild.
“Well met, noble sir!” Bandaid clasped his hand and hit him with a health buff that increased his hit points by 10%.
“Nice to hear you in person,” he said.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asked. “You’ve known the sound of my voice since we met.”
“It’s okay to break character once in a while,” said Yanker.
“This expression, ‘break character…’ does that have something to do with shattering one’s will?”
Yanker shook her head. “She’s a lost cause.”
Bandaid winked.
“All right,” said Noob, “I’ve heard Yanker and Bandaid. So what does Mansex sound like?”
“There’s lots of panting,” said Mansex—in the man’s voice Reid had heard earlier. “And groaning.”
“Wait,” said Noob. “You’re a dude?”
Mansex threw back her hair. No, his. Hers? “Duh.”
“You didn’t pick up on that?” Yanker asked Noob. “How?”
Noob shook his head. “It does explain a lot.”
Bandaid wrinkled her face. “I cannot believe I danced with you.”
Noob turned away from the wizard. “Okay, that’s three. Where’s The Truth?”
“The Truth doesn’t talk,” said Yanker. “Thought you’d have picked up on that by now. Enough of the meet and greet. We all have real voices and nobody sounds like what we thought they would. Let’s go kill something.”
“Right on,” said Mansex. “Looks like we’ve got some competition to get through, too.”
“There is?”
The Truth pointed down towards the temple’s recessed entrance. An army of rock monsters (“Golems,” Bandaid whispered) were patrolling the entrance in tight clusters. Outside the temple, well out of the golems’ aggro range, a pair of 50-man raids had squared off. Taunts and the occasional water balloon flew between the groups, but nobody attacked. Yet.
“Methinks ours was not the only guild to complete a Moonchart,” said Bandaid.
Yanker nodded. “Looks like Design compensated accordingly. Those golems are ten levels higher than normal.”
Below, a player who was tired of waiting or just plain crazy raised his axe and charged the golems, bellowing like a horny gorilla. His raid ran after him. Whether that was to restrain him or join the attack, it didn’t matter—the golems converged and pounded the disorganized raid to death in seconds. The other raid cheered and jeered and shot off fireworks.
“I think we can safely cross suicide charge off our tactics list,” said Mansex.
Noob stared down at the dead raid. “I must be missing something. If fifty people couldn’t get past those golems, how are we supposed to with five? We’re outnumbered twenty to one.”
“We’re not gonna fight,” said Yanker, “we’re gonna sneak our way in. And by we,” she turned to Noob, “I mean you. You stealth your way past the patrols, find us a clear spot on the inside, and Mansex teleports us to you. Lather, rinse, repeat.”
Three Level 100 rogues from the surviving guild apparently had the same idea. They treaded up to the golems’ aggro ranges and vanished into stealth. A few seconds later, the golems converged on three separate spots in their ranks and pounded craters into the ground. Dead rogues materialized in each.
“Well, suck,” said Noob.
“I wish you had not seen that,” said Bandaid.
“Relax,” said Yanker. “Those guys didn’t have the Purple Ninja Armor.”
“Those two did,” Mansex pointed out. “See? You can see the purple between the smears of blood.”
“You’re not helping.”
The Truth ruffled Noob’s hair. Bandaid cast her shield bubble on him.
Noob dropped into stealth and snuck down the ridge. “Remember!” Mansex called after him. “If at first you don’t succeed, you’re not Chuck Norris!”
Noob wove his way down the ridge, towards the golem-patrolled swath in front of the temple, and through the remains of the dead raid. The first of them were just now returning from the Underworld.
The other raid, sensing an opportunity, signaled an attack on the newly revived. Noob dodged and weaved as spells exploded and arrows fell all around him. Someone must have aggroed the golems, because they started buzzing through the warring raids like wasps through bees, leaving a trail of dead players on both sides.
Noob skittered between charging golems. “I’m gonna die.”
An orc with two golems chasing him was heading straight for Noob. Noob dropped and rolled. The golems passed so close he could see the cracks and lines in their stony faces. “I’m gonna die.”
He hopped up and stealthed past the craters with the dead rogues. “I’m really gonna die.”
An oddly uniform rumbling made Noob stop and look up. The golems had killed the last members of both raids and had lumbered back to their preset posts. Noob found himself in the heart of their cluster, six golems within lunging distance. He kept absolutely still.
“Where are you, Noob?” Yanker was safely back on the ridge.
“About forty yards from the entrance,” he sai
d, “but I can’t move. I’m pinned.”
“You’re stealthed. And maxed for infiltration. They can’t see you.”
“If you can see Chuck Norris,” said Mansex, “he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris, you’re seconds from death.”
“Mansex,” said Noob, “the fuck up: would you shut it for me, please?”
The golem nearest Noob began to move, sliding along its patrol path. Noob fell in after it, matching its speed a pace behind.
The golem’s patrol track paralleled the entrance to the dungeon entrance. The golem rumbled about twenty yards before abruptly turning and starting back the way it came. Noob darted out of its path and into the wake of a golem heading the other way, and rode that back the way he’d come. Twenty yards in the other direction, he jumped to another, and followed this pattern through the mob, stealthing behind the patrols row after row, until he passed the last one and stood before the yawning gate.
“I’m through!” he yelled. His guild cheered. It was the second time anyone had cheered him. It was a hundred times less loud than when he made the shot, but it meant about a hundred times more to him.
“I’m through!” Noob stealthed through the gaping entrance into the temple proper, where the ceiling soared high above the floor. “I’m… !” Of course the ceiling was high—it had to be, to make room for the 50-foot tall titans patrolling just inside the entrance.
Noob was so startled to see the titans that he failed to notice the wall of electrical current until he’d stepped through it. The wall did minimal damage, but enough to his stealth.
As one, the titans glared down at him. “I’m toast.”
The nearest titan punted Noob with a horse-sized foot. Noob crunched into the ceiling with bone-pulverizing force.
Noob couldn’t hear sound of the Reaper over the battle. The ghosts of the raids had carried their grudge into the Underworld. Ghosts killed ghosts, and when one died, its ghost—a ghost of a ghost; how does that even work?—popped out of the ghost corpse and rejoined the fight.
It was fun to watch. Noob kicked back and enjoyed the show until a column of light shone down over him.
Noob stepped out of the column of light Bandaid had called down from the heavens. He was back on the ridge with the rest of the guild. “Titans,” he reported. “Ten of them, maybe more. And there’s a thin lightning wall inside to break stealth.”