Fawkes glanced around to make sure no one was giving this girl the wrong sort of look. “Okay, there’s something you should do for your own safety. Go into your options menu.”
Rhiannon’s eyes went wide. “Umm. Safety?”
“Creeps.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip. “But, I’m only ten.”
“Your character doesn’t look like it. Trust me. Go into options/social.”
The Niath gazed into space for a second before a small holographic panel appeared in front of her. “Okay.”
“Go to the voice option, and select ‘character natural.’”
“It’s on pass-through now,” said the girl.
“Right.”
“Okay, I did it,” said the Niath with the voice of an adult woman. “Oh, wow. I sound like my mom now.”
Fawkes smiled. “Correct. Now people won’t know right away you’re a kid and try to take advantage of you. And for heck’s sake, you’re still wearing the starter tunic. Have you been doing missions in that thing for six levels?”
“It looks angel-y,” said Rhiannon. “No, I have quest armor in my pack. I just wear this in town because it’s pretty.”
“It’s going to attract creeps.”
“Eww. Okay.” Rhiannon stood still for a few seconds. Thin armor bits appeared piece by piece, including a guard along the leading edge of her wings, all permeated with a neon pink glow. The highly stylized (and physically improbable) armor covered a little more than the tunic.
“Much better.” Fawkes nodded.
“Hey, thanks. Did you just take a mission? Can I help? Wanna team up?” The Niath bounced on her toes.
“I would, but this is a level thirty-eight mission. You’d get smashed.”
“Oh.” The girl shrugged. She probably didn’t care that much, but the Niath avatar’s ‘disappointed’ face overstated sadness. “Okay. I’ll find something lower. Can I whisp you if I get stuck or have questions?”
“Sure, why not.” Fawkes accepted a friend invite.
“Bye!” Rhiannon waved with one hand and one wing before scooting back up to the giant mission-giving monitor.
Holy crap. Fawkes sighed out her nose. Why do people let children play this game?
On the way out of the starport, she stopped at a weapon store to check on upgrades for her ‘getting old’ handgun. A few laser pistols on display had slightly better stats, but nothing offered enough of a boost to be worth the steep price. She couldn’t justify dropping 14,000 credits for another twenty points of top-end damage.
“Argh. Dammit!” said a man, one hand grasping a rifle sitting upon the store counter. He appeared to be trying to pick it up, but couldn’t manage to lift it more than a few inches off the countertop.
Fawkes glanced to her left at the black-haired guy in soldier’s armor. He held his arms slightly to the side, staring down at his chest as if someone had spilled something on him, but the white armor looked clean.
“Stupid useless crap.” A box about the size of a loaf of bread appeared out of thin air and fell to the floor to the side. “Inventory is full my ass.” With that, he picked up the rifle.
She glanced at the dropped item, which scanned as a ten-pack of limpet mines rated at 2500-4000 damage to all targets within a twenty-six meter radial area.
Holy shit! She gawked and stared up at the soldier, SgtBoone, who had a little ‘60’ next to his name. Wow, and I thought Nighthawk had no life. Someone already at level cap had to have started playing the day the game launched (probably in open beta, too), and put in like full-time-job hours and then some. She entered stealth, crouched, and picked up the box of mines. SgtBoone didn’t seem to notice or care. Hell, to him, they might’ve been worthless throwaway junk.
She scurried over to the counter and opened a trading interface. When the NPC merchant offered her zero credits for the box, she frowned. Hand grenades for sale within the same level/damage range were going for 40,000 a box. She about screamed until she noticed the description text on the mines. They came from a quest on some other planet, required to blow open an old mine tunnel, and could be replenished endlessly from a particular NPC. Obviously, they had no sale value to prevent people generating unlimited money by getting the free mines, selling them, getting more free mines, and so on.
Well shit. Guess I’ll keep them.
Disappointed at not getting an easy ticket to a better gun, she trudged out of the store and headed into the city, staring at the minimap leading her to the lair of ‘Bruno Black,’ the crime boss she needed to eliminate. Naturally, the blinking quest indicator sat most of the way across the city.
“I guess having quests fifteen feet from the job board would be too easy.”
She walked outside, opened her inventory control panel, and tapped the icon for her bike. Blue light flashed in front of her, forming the wireframe outline of a souped-up e-motorcycle. A second later, it filled in solid with gloss black body panels and glowing lime green accents. Fawkes hopped on and cranked the accelerator. The bike gripped the metal roadway like a magnet as she zoomed into the sparse randomly generated traffic.
A mixture of hovering vehicles, wheeled cars, and other bikes dotted the streets, reminding her a bit of those old screen-based games where the player ran around dragging people out through the windows and stealing the cars―not that she’d try that here. For one thing, being in such a realistic world made the idea of running up to a moving car terrifying. For another, she figured the developers of Axillon99 had heard of locks on car doors. Besides, evading or blowing up the police in this world wasn’t ‘expected.’ The devs over-tuned the authorities. Security officers would sometimes spawn in out of thin air even if the ‘crime’ couldn’t possibly have been witnessed by anyone. Also, on the ‘static’ planets hand-built by the development team, all the law-enforcement troops were level seventy, ten levels over the game’s current level cap.
The game did a fairly reasonable job of simulating the real world physics of how it felt to ride a motorcycle. For most of her life, Dakota had regarded them as little more than two-wheeled suicide machines. Being unable to die in the virtual reality of Axillon99 gave her the courage to try one, not to mention the lack of a ‘mount’ made traveling planetside tedious as hell. Having gotten used to it in the game, she debated trying one out for real… but hadn’t quite gotten over her fear of serious bodily injury.
Also, the pleasant wind whipping her hair around would probably be a lot less pleasant in the real world while doing 180 MPH. She ripped by other cars like they stood still, weaving in and out of lanes, cutting across sidewalks, and going over at least two grass fields to avoid blockages at intersections. She caught a little air off a small hill next to a picnicking family who didn’t react at all to her shooting past them.
Heh. If I ever do this for real, I’ll need to keep reminding myself to stay on the damn road.
Citizens showing zero reaction to some idiot on a bike cutting through a park broke immersion and reminded her she played a game. That brought her mind back to the quest at hand, a quest she probably shouldn’t have taken.
Ugh. This guy is gonna be at least level forty, with friends. Oh well. I’m already out here, and it’s not like I’ll lose much if I die.
Quests that involved an instanced area (a separate section of the game world that only existed for the people doing the quest) or a raid would lock out if all the players inside died. Groups who attempted raid content (missions that required a full five-person team or in some cases multiple five-person teams banding together) hated wiping, because no one in that group could re-enter the instance until the weekly reset on Wednesday. One crappy player screwed up and caused everyone to die, the whole group would be unable to re-try that encounter until next week. This, of course, resulted in most of the ‘pro raiders’ being elitist douchebags.
Eric could fit in with them, not for his being a snobby dick, but he fit the mold for a ‘hardcore’ player. He’d think nothing of spending all Saturday in the
same small area killing creatures over and over to farm up components for a device or spell he had that would help them out on a raid boss.
Fawkes sighed. That sounded way too much like work.
She drove into a bad part of the city where graffiti covered the walls of abandoned storefronts. Metal armor panels replaced glass here and there, some bearing phrases like ‘Vos Dur go home.’ Another alien race, the Vos Dur were a silicon-based life form the game described as ‘androids with souls.’ Few biological races trusted them thanks to decades of fiction about AIs going crazy and wiping out life. The game had tons of missions with themes of discrimination against the Vos Dur. Sadly, the ‘difficult moral questions’ the missions tried to ask usually boiled down to a simplistic choice between the player either deciding the Vos Dur lied and the evil AIs had to die, or the player saving the poor maligned machine people.
A group of four men loitering by a wall drew handguns and started firing lasers in her direction. Not wanting to deal with a random encounter, she gunned it and kept driving. The men chased her on foot for about a quarter mile before giving up and running back to where they started.
Following a waypoint arrow, Fawkes drove a few more blocks before she rolled to a halt. She stood in the road, straddling the bike, and observed the façade of a bar named The Wormhole. A pair of big-busted holographic women danced on either side of the door. One man in a shiny black coat, tight pants, and sunglasses stood next to the entrance.
She figured him for one of Bruno’s thugs, but his lack of aggression gave her confidence. These guys wouldn’t go straight to combat, so maybe she could be sneaky. The crime boss NPC might also be a quest giver for players going the ‘evil’ route, so players would need to be able to walk in without forcing an immediate combat.
At a mental impulse to put the bike away, her motorcycle degenerated back into a wireframe image and disappeared.
“I wish cars did that for real. Parking in the city sucks.”
Fawkes tried to put Dakota out of her mind and get into character. Walking alone into a bar like this felt like exactly the wrong thing for a young woman to do alone. The realism of dark alleys, a breeze cutting through clothes, and shadows that seemed to watch her sometimes got overbearing. In fact, this isolated alley struck pretty damn close in overall color tone, arrangement, and mood to a spot back in the real world where first real boyfriend, Jimmy Tran, decided he didn’t like hearing ‘I’m not ready for that yet.’ Only, they’d been parked by a crummy little diner instead of a dive bar-slash-organized crime front.
For a moment, Dakota became sixteen again, fighting to get out of the car and away from him. Fortunately, being young and stupid, he’d attacked her right in the car instead of making a move somewhere she couldn’t have gotten away. She hit the horn and screamed, attracting the attention of a pair of biker dudes who came to her rescue. To this day, no one but her, Jimmy Tran, and those two guys with beards knew what happened. She hadn’t even told Nebraska.
It had to be a coincidence that this particular alley came so damn close to that street in appearance. Obviously, the real world didn’t have parked hovercars or removable armored panels replacing shot-out windows, but things like an eerily familiar yellow air scrubber standing where she remembered a yellow newspaper vending machine, or the brick-red wall where the old ice-cream place stood across the street from the diner… too many things lined up too perfectly to be a coincidence.
And the smell.
Simmering grease. The same smell that lurked in the diner, that same cloying vegetable-oil-and-bacon foulness she spent an hour sucking in her nose while crying in the bathroom.
The line between Dakota and Fawkes blurred. Going in there felt like an awful idea. The mission could go fuck itself. She took a step back, but froze when her hand brushed the laser pistol on her hip.
What’s wrong with me? I’m over that. Jimmy didn’t even do anything but grab my tit. I got away. I won. He’s nothing.
She scowled at the area. Just a coincidence. A creepy ass coincidence. That yellow box had to be random. Maybe she remembered wrong and there hadn’t been a newspaper machine right at that exact spot. Shaking off her doubt, she concentrated on the idea of being in a game, being a badass character in a made up world on a planet other than Earth.
Fawkes rushed to the surface of her consciousness. She put on her ‘I own the world’ smile, walked past the thug by the door―who didn’t even look at her―and stepped in to a room awash with the scent of beer and buffalo sauce. Plain round tables filled the middle of a fairly large area. A black-Formica bar stood at the left, a pair of pool tables all the way on the right. Random laser scorch marks decorated the walls around a bunch of nonfunctioning old neon signs. The only one that worked, a glaring pink ‘restrooms’ sign, flashed on and off over a hallway leading deeper into the building.
Four men who could’ve been brothers of the thug outside, wearing almost-identical outfits, stood around holding up the walls. Three NPC customers drank and munched on bright orange chicken nuggets. The older man behind the bar had a standard ‘vendor’ icon floating over his head, so she doubted he’d be a threat if a fight started. Another ridiculous truth: a place like this, players could usually kill all the NPCs in full view of the ‘merchant,’ then sell all the dead people’s crap to a person who theoretically just watched them murder everyone. As long as the player didn’t shoot the merchant, they’d remain calm. Though, if this vendor had a flag making him belong to the organized crime group, he’d probably go hostile. And of course, if a player killed him, all the stuff he had for sale would automagically disappear from his inventory.
Fawkes meandered among the tables, heading for the back hall. None of the men reacted to her until she came within a few steps of the one posted by the hallway.
“You’ll wanna talk to the boss if you’re willin’ ta work,” said the NPC.
She looked up at his face. Hmm. Level 38 minion, no armor. Probably go down faster than those two security guards. “Thanks. Boss in the back?”
“Yeah.” He pointed at the alcove two feet to his left. “Down the hall here.”
Past a pair of bathroom doors, a nicer metal door with laser burns led to a well-appointed office with a large, wooden desk like something out of a gangster noir film, anachronistic in a world of spacecraft and lasers. A white bearskin rug lay on the dark hardwood in front of a fireplace flanked by tall bookshelves.
The man sitting behind it all but glowed due to his coral orange blazer with tiger stripes. His puffy hair, fake tan, tank top, and thick gold chain amulet screamed ‘fifty plus trying to be twenty again.’ When she looked directly at him, the name Bruno Black appeared over his head, along with the number forty.
Ugh. This whole place is a reference to something, but I’m missing it. No one makes anything this tacky without there being an Easter egg. She squinted at the décor, trying to figure out what inside joke the developers were going for. Nothing this out of place happened at random.
Three more thugs stood around the room, but all four men ignored her. She explored the bookshelves on either side of a white-and-black tiger stripe sofa, searching around for anything out of the ordinary. A strange object on the left shelf caught her eye. She picked up a flat plastic square with a metal shroud on one end that slid back and forth. A label showed a cartoon middle-aged man with a balding spot and white suit on next to the title Leisure Suit Larry. The other side had a metal disc in the middle with two holes. Small text under the title read, ‘3.5 inch floppy version – disk 1 of 52.’
“What the heck is this thing?”
A faint ping echoed in her ears. She swiped her hand at the air and checked her update log, noticing that the game had awarded her the LSL achievement.
“Whatever. Since I’m not like, old, I don’t get it.” She huffed and dropped the strange object back on the shelf.
When she wandered closer to the desk, Bruno looked up at her. “Who the hell are you strollin’ in here? I ain’t never
heard o’ you. F’you wanna work for me, you gotta make a name for yourself first, kid. Now get gone before I change my mind about letting you walk outta here.”
She wanted to tell him to eat a dick, but that might trigger combat. Plus, insulting computer code didn’t really make her feel better. Instead, she backed away from the desk to stay out of his interaction range. Bruno obviously offered missions, but only to players with enough faction points in the underworld of this city―or maybe if they had universe-wide criminal records. The game tracked players on a hidden ‘good vs evil’ scale, and she clearly didn’t have enough darkness to get any respect from this guy. She thought it pretty sad her video game persona had technically broken fewer laws than her real self.
Hmm. All three gunmen are level forty, too. I’m going to get shredded if I attack. She sighed. Screw it. There’s easier quests out there even if they don’t pay as much.
Fawkes took a few steps toward the door before stopping with a grin. She may as well pickpocket them. These guys owe me gas money. Metaphorically speaking.
She darted over to the back corner, careful to keep far enough away from the desk.
That spot didn’t look like it would fall into any of the NPC’s vision cones, so she tried to invoke stealth. Her body crouched ever so slightly and went semitransparent.
Awesome.
She crept a few steps to her left so she wound up right behind Bruno. Reaching for his belt with an open hand activated the pickpocketing interface. Since a pair of inventory screens appeared floating in front of her (her crap on the left, and a mostly empty one on the right for Bruno) she knew she passed the skill check. Though, if she tried to swipe anything too big, the system would test her skill again with a penalty based on the object. Taking a credit fob was easy. Swiping a character’s pants that they’re wearing at the time―not so much.
Bruno’s inventory contained a combat knife, a pack of ‘jelly candy fish,’ and two Atomix pills. That told her Bruno would probably attack with melee, since the fictional drug Atomix provided a short-term massive boost to physical strength. More reason not to do the job. She’d never flatten a level forty with a single stealth attack using a piece-of-shit pistol she’d out-leveled. Combat would start, he’d eat a pill, then punch her into spaghetti sauce in a single hit.
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