by Brian Simons
>> Goblin Patrolman takes 822 Damage. [CRITICAL]. Goblin Patrolman dies. You receive 34 XP.
>> Congratulations! You have unlocked the Backstab ability. Frontstabbing is so behind you. +5% chance of delivering +50% total to damage when attacking a target unseen.
“Well done,” whispered a voice into Daniel’s ear.
Daniel spun around. Someone in a black cloak had snuck up on him, his face hidden in shadow under a black hood.
“I could have killed you in one hit,” the strange man said, “while you were busy stabbing that little guy. Your back is never more vulnerable than when you’re stabbing someone else’s. Don’t forget that.”
“Who are you,” Daniel asked, narrowing his eyes at the stranger’s face. If he stared long enough he might make out some features.
“Oh, stop Surveilling me,” the man said, removing his hood. His dark brown hair fell to his shoulders, framing a pale gaunt face. He stroked his beard as he continued. “I’m Devon Shirk. And I recruit.”
“I’m not looking for a job,” Daniel said. At least, not in Travail he wasn’t.
“But a job may be looking for you,” Devon said. “I’ve watched you stalk through the forest. You have a certain subtlety about you. A natural carefulness that cannot be taught but can be developed. I can help you hone your skills very quickly.”
Daniel stared at him. He hoped silence would compel the man to keep talking. Instead, the man just stood there. Then, with a lightning fast movement, Devon reached into his cloak, pulled out a dagger, spun around, and threw it straight into a bush twenty feet away. A shriek came from the bush and Daniel saw a bloodied goblin slump forward into view. A bow fell from the dead goblin’s hand.
“What do you want?” Daniel asked.
“I want you. You have certain skills that someone like me can appreciate. I have a number of operatives at my disposal, but few that match your potential.”
“I still don’t see why I would align myself with someone like you. You’re a Rogue.”
“Danger lurks in the shadows, friend. Better to be the shadows, no?”
“Now you sound like the drow.”
“The dark elves get a bad rap,” Devon stopped stroking his beard and pulled his hood back over his head.
“I can offer you a new class, one with limitless improvements to your ability to sneak up on enemies undetected, to slit their throats before they can lay a hand on you, to steal the strongest of weapons away from powerful foes before they can attack you with them. If that interests you, I have a little task for you to complete to prove yourself first.”
Daniel thought about the skills he had already learned. He imagined wresting Otto’s Soulkeeper Axe away from him before Otto could permanently eliminate anyone else. It would be a useful skill to have, but he didn’t trust Devon Shirk to teach it to him.
“When you accomplish this, we’ll speak again.” Devon hurried away through the woods and quickly vanished, no doubt activating a high level Sneak ability of his own.
New Quest: Commit Murder
Requirements: Motive, opportunity, and intent. And a sharp blade wouldn’t hurt.
Reward: Option to change class to Rogue and apprentice with Devon Shirk.
No way was Daniel even contemplating this quest. He would have declined outright if Devon hadn’t disappeared as soon as the notification box popped up. Daniel turned the other way and pressed on through the forest, hoping not to run into Devon again.
The hike was uneventful after that. He killed a few more goblins, but never found more than one of them at a time. An hour after he encountered Devon, he finally found the entrance to the cave. He thought about his map, and it came up in front of him so he could place a marker on the cave entrance. Now to find his friends.
He took two steps back toward the forest when he heard a scream.
24
Coral, Sybil, and Sal walked into the forest as Daniel took off in an alternate direction.
Sybil was singing in a low voice. The words were hard to make out, but Coral thought she heard the word “torture” more than once. Maybe Sybil was singing the same song on repeat.
Coral took the risk of interrupting her. “Sybil, how old is your sister?”
“Farah is 12 now. Soon she can join Travail though.”
Sybil couldn’t have meant what Coral thought she meant, could she? It sounded like Sybil planned to put her little sister to work. One of the quirks about playing Travail was that it wasn’t a traditional “job.” Once you were 13 you could start the game, and grinding away to earn up gold wasn’t considered child labor. It left a bad taste in Coral’s mouth.
As if reading Coral’s mind, Sybil said, “If I can just earn up enough gold, she won’t have to. I want her to enjoy her childhood and stay in school as long as she can. This is no life for a little girl. Hell, it’s no life for an adult. The violence, the actual pain, the paltry earnings. But for now, it’s what we have to do.”
“I’m an only child,” Coral volunteered. “My parents left the country a few months ago to find work. They said they were too old to try their hand at Travail.”
“Good for them,” Sybil said. “My father left. Years ago now.”
“To find work?”
“No, because I beat him senseless.”
They walked in silence for twenty minutes. At first Coral wasn’t sure if she should press Sybil for more information about what happened with her father. As they continued walking, she felt the opportunity slip away. Unsure what to say, she said nothing else at all. She worried that she had upset Sybil, since she hadn’t resumed her singing.
Thankfully, Sal interrupted the silence. “Does anybody know anything about Daniel’s new class yet?”
“No, I don’t. He’s a Scout, right? I had never heard of that before,” Coral said, trying to inject as much buoyancy in her words as she could. Sal had created an opportunity to change the group’s mood, and she planned to use it.
“Me neither,” Sal said. “But he’s been walking on tippy toes a whole lot, so he must have some kind of ability he’s trying to train. Can you imagine me walking like that, on these big ol’ feet?” Sal propped himself up on his toes, illustrating the absurdity of a massive ogre trying to be discreet. He gestured wildly with his arms as if he couldn’t keep balance. His pot belly jiggled from the rapid movement, jostling his platevest armor. A moment later he had crashed to the ground.
“Congratulations!” Coral said, “You’ve unlocked the Clumsiness skill. Minus 5% to your dignity.”
“Hush!” Sybil said, pointing her spear into the treetops. Tree limbs were shaking. A dark shape moved from branch to branch. So much for lightening the mood.
Coral took out her bow while Sal readied his mallet. The dark shape stayed in the treetops but wouldn’t sit still. It started making a chittering sound, a series of quick clicks and clacks.
“Shoot it!” Sybil said. “It’s calling a horde!”
Coral wasn’t sure what she was shooting at, but she drew back her bow and shot into the treetop. She heard a squeal and saw a few long, brown legs poke through the leaves overhead. They were covered with short bristles. Soon the legs had vanished again as the monster climbed higher into the trees, the dense layer of leaves hiding it from view.
“Arackids,” Sybil said. “Let’s dispose of them before they call in the Aracqueen.”
Spiders started to encroach on their group from all sides. They were spindly things, no higher than a jack terrier. Which is to say, they were freaking huge for spiders. Coral had never stared at a spider long enough to notice how many eyes they had. Now she knew: too many.
Sybil thrust her spear at a nearby arackid. She pierced its body and something red oozed out. Coral’s arrows had the same effect as she shot them one at a time at the oncoming mobs. Sal, however, squished each one like a blood-filled water balloon as they got close. A mallet was an effective but indelicate weapon against squishy foes.
They had five or six spiders clo
sing in, but they had worked out a good system. Coral stood in the middle, rotating as she shot, weakening the nearest spiders so Sybil and Sal could finish them off. Coral aimed for the eyes when she could, inflicting a blindness debuff on two of the monsters. Once she got a critical hit by shooting a spider directly in the neck. That spider died on the spot, providing a nice XP boost. The melee fighters knocked out the rest of the spiders with ease.
When Coral looked up she realized they hadn’t cleared all the arackids yet. One last spider dropped down from a high branch on a long thin thread and let go just above Sal. It spread out its legs as it fell, landing on Sal like a rope net, where the rope was made of creepy spider legs and the net was hungry for blood.
Sal hadn’t been looking up and was caught totally off guard, but Coral saw the whole thing unfold in the blink of an eye. The second the first bristly leg grazed Sal’s skin, he screamed. It was a high pitched sound, higher than Coral thought an ogre would ever be capable of screaming.
The spider sank its teeth into Sal’s neck and Sybil swung around, stabbing the spider with the bottom end of her spear, which thankfully had a spearhead every bit as sharp as the top end. Coral shot several arrows into the beast before Sal was able to hoist it off of him and flip it onto the ground, upside down. He lifted his mallet but saw that the thing was already dead.
“Thanks,” Sal said, sheepishly. “That thing took me by surprise and landed a critical hit. Lucky I have a lot of HP or I’d be in bad shape.”
“Coral,” Sybil said, nodding toward the spider.
“Yes?” Coral asked.
“The spider silk. You’ll want to feel the spider’s abdomen until you feel two lumps. Those are the web glands. Apply gentle pressure to squeeze the webbing out in thin strands. I assume you have spools handy?”
Coral checked her sewing kit. She had plenty of empty spools. What she lacked, however, was the desire to fondle a dead spider. “Shouldn’t it just ‘drop’ the silk? I thought loot was supposed to ‘drop.’”
“Those were the good old days,” Sal said. “With virtual reality things get a little more… real.”
Coral sighed. She walked over to the spider and placed her hand on the spider’s underside. She pressed down and saw blood pulse out from the punctures her arrows had made. Then she felt the web glands. She forced some spider silk out slowly and tried winding it around an empty spool. The webbing was sticky and difficult to spin neatly, but she gradually got the hang of it. She emptied one web gland and then felt around for the second one.
She also noticed that the arackid had something shiny on its leg. It was a ring. She yanked it off the spider, knocking a few bristly hairs off its leg.
>> Ring of Force. Activate once per day to obtain immense strength for 5 seconds. May the ring be with you! Durability: 43/50.
Coral had never seen an item with such high Durability before, though it looked like the spider had started to wear the ring down. Until now, Coral was used to obtaining items in “like new” condition. She took a closer look and saw that the ring still had a charge available, so the spider must not have used it during the attack. She slipped the ring on her finger and scooped up her sewing kit. When she had packed everything up she noticed that Daniel had joined them.
“I heard you scream,” he said to Coral.
She looked at Sal, then to Sybil. “You know us girls. We’re just terrified of spiders.”
“Well, if you scream like that you’ll just attract more. Come on, I found the cave.”
He turned back toward the woods. Sybil gave Coral a grin. Sal mouthed the words “thank you.”
They followed Daniel into the mouth of the cave. From the outside, it was mostly a wide hole. The ground on one side sloped downward into the hole and under the forest. They descended that slope, and before long they had left the outside light entirely behind them.
Coral stopped. “Guys, I can’t see a thing. It’s pitch black.”
“I can see in the dark,” Daniel said as though it were nothing. “Just barely, but I can make out the ground ahead of us. It’s smooth and relatively flat. I’ll let you know if that changes.”
They kept walking, even though Coral was in complete darkness. She’d have to trust Daniel to watch out for anything dangerous. “That’s a neat trick,” she said. “I want to see in the dark.”
“I used to think it was just a racial bonus for drow and dwarves, but I think I have it from my Scout class,” Daniel said. “Sybil, do you know any songs that might create some light for Coral and Sal?”
“You know I’m a Shadowsiren, right?” she said. No one bothered to reply.
The faint sound of metal clanging against stone echoed from the depths of the cave. It got louder the deeper they went.
“Someone’s mining in there,” Sal said.
“Sounds like it’s just one person,” Sybil added.
Soon, Coral could see again by a faint flickering light that came from the same direction. As it got brighter, she saw a lantern hanging from a hook mounted into the cave wall.
Daniel tiptoed ahead but then stopped. The miner had come into view. “Hi there!” he yelled.
A small rectangular woman jumped back from the rocks she had been mining and gripped her pickax with both hands. She was four feet tall, maybe a little less, with broad shoulders, wide hips, and metal armor that squared off any natural curves she might have had. Her fiery hair was long and thick, pulled into a braid on each side.
“You back off!” she yelled. “It’s my day to mine these rocks and I plan to walk away with all of it. Don’t think I can’t defend myself. I’m hardier than I look.”
That would be impressive. She looked like a very hardy gal.
“We don’t want your ore, ma’am,” Daniel said. “Januar sent us here in search of answers and,” he said, looking at Sybil, “gold, if there is any.”
“Oh, Januar sent you, did he. Like I’m supposed to be afraid of your little deity. I have a god too you know! He’s no midwife like your Januar. He’s a force to reckon with.”
“We’re peaceful adventurers from Havenstock, please don’t let us interrupt your work,” Daniel said.
“Havenstock,” the woman said and spit on the cave floor. “A breeding ground for murderers. Why should I turn my back toward you?”
“What have you heard?” Coral asked.
“Axes are for dwarves, that’s what I heard. You got a man wielding one like he don’t know what to do with it. Wiping out the whole city. And good riddance. Did nothing for its neighbors but crowd our mining sites.”
“If you know about Otto and his Soulkeeper Axe,” Coral asked, “why come here alone? Aren’t you afraid he’ll attack here too?”
“Never met an axe I couldn’t survive, sweetheart. Thanks for your concern.”
The dwarven woman was warmer toward Coral. Maybe it’s because Coral hadn’t snuck up on her with a short sword in hand.
“We’re heading deeper into the cave,” Coral said. “Can you tell us anything about what we’ll find?”
“Critters,” she said. “You can kill ‘em and they still won’t stop. Here, take a light. But I expect it back!” The woman held out a small lantern like the one that hung from the wall.
Daniel took the lantern from the woman’s outstretched arm. “My name is Daniel_the_Maniel. What is yours?”
“Wenda.”
“Well, Wenda, thank you for your help,” he said. He and the others headed deeper into the cave.
“Remember, there’s critters!” Wenda yelled as they walked off.
25
Daniel carried Wenda’s lantern in one hand and his short sword in the other. His shield was strapped to his lantern arm. His Nightvision ability had been improving gradually in the dark forest and the darker cave. With the aid of the lantern’s glow he didn’t have to struggle to see anything underground.
The path ahead continued down until it branched off into several corridors at the bottom of the cave. Unlike the slope the
y had walked this whole time, the ground here was flat and wet. Stalactites above dripped infrequent drops of water into shallow puddles on the ground.
“Which way?” Sybil asked.
“Right down the middle,” Daniel said. It was as good a guess as any, and saved them from debating the merits of each path. Besides, these paths might converge later in the cave.
They proceeded down the tunnel at the heart of the underground cavern system. “The cave floor,” Sal said, “is very cold. This would be a good place for boots.”
Poor Sal, perpetually barefoot. Daniel was grateful for the leather armor he wore neck to toe, protecting him from the cave’s cold dank air.
