Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  When she regained consciousness, she found herself staring at the green letters ‘session interrupted’ floating in a field of black. She’d fainted for real. Annoyed at herself, she logged back in to find her tweenaged Niath safe in the arms of a teacher, who carried her back up to the roof to try again.

  Nerves rattling, she approached the edge and let her toes curl over it. For whatever reason, the Niath had a super-casual relationship with clothing, and wore airy, thin garments that didn’t cover much. Staring down at a child-body she hadn’t seen in about ten years felt so bizarre she used that to distract her from the concept of willingly jumping off a building. Jaw clenched, she spread her wings, let gravity pull her forward, and jumped like a kid learning to dive into a pool.

  The wind caught her wings; falling became gliding. Before smacking into the street, she pulled up and glided higher, feeling out the interaction between physically moving her wings and the game responding to her simple desire of wanting to go in a particular direction.

  Eventually, flying became as automatic as walking. When the tutorial ended, her adult Niath stepped into the city to begin her journey of leveling. Dakota felt ‘unclean’ at having made a character who used magic, and being level one again stank. However, the newness of the environment plus flying, plus relying on magic instead of a laser pistol and stealth was so different and intriguing that she stayed up too late.

  The next day, she shivered constantly, her brain not quite having been able to divorce itself from the feeling of wearing Niath-style clothing that universally left her back exposed. Most Niath men went bare-chested unless they wore armor, the women had garments that attached to a neck ring and covered their front. Some of the Niath armor protected the back, but having to accommodate wings made it expensive.

  As a starting auramancer, she had a few neat spells: a temporary armor buff, one that put enemies to sleep for a little while, and a couple different forms of healing, along with a fairly weak attack spell based on ‘un-healing.’ Fawkes had to struggle to deal with a group of three or more enemies at once when alone, but despite the weaker damage output, the auramancer simply put the extras to sleep and whittled down the one while self-healing. It took three times as long to kill anything, but felt super easy. Also, the auramancer’s spells would get more potent as she gained levels, which made her less dependent on equipment. She wouldn’t be as crippled as Fawkes had been while stuck with a crappy gun.

  On Thursday night, Dakota contemplated buying passage to the nearest civilized planet around where the coordinates pointed, but the info text showed the starting quest there as level fifty, plus the population breakdown of ninety-two percent Kazalor scared her off. It didn’t strike her as likely Fawkes ran any risk of winding up on the end of a leash. She figured having a character locked up would be a sure way to piss players off and make them cancel their subscriptions. Mostly, she didn’t feel like dealing with NPCs talking down to her constantly.

  The highlight of the past three days at work had been a news report on the TV about a group of super-hardcore Axillon99 players who wore adult diapers and binge-ate so they could play for extreme stretches. She worried for a bit that crazies of that magnitude would run off with the prize money, but the interview never mentioned it―only their drive to be the first ship crew to beat Tetratheon, the current ‘big bad’ tier two raid boss.

  Friday, she rushed home after work and spent the next twenty minutes warming and eating a ramen packet while trying to decide between doing missions as Fawkes or playing around with the Niath, Triani (she had not mentioned this to Trini at the café) to kill time until everyone showed up.

  Right when her butt hit the bed, a lingering bit of ramen flavor still in her throat, she decided to focus on Fawkes. The crew wanted to raid someday, so she figured she’d get one character to sixty before throwing large amounts of time on another one. So, she hopped in on Fawkes and burned two-ish hours running around the city of Prosperion (where the crew had last landed), doing missions. She wound up getting one that unexpectedly turned into an ‘assault a room full of bad guys’ situation when a little NPC boy she had to rescue from a pack of mercenaries proved impossible to do with stealth alone. The instant she took the child out of the little room the mercs kept him in, the whole place erupted like a smacked hornets’ nest.

  Ugh. I really goddamn hate this bullshit. Like these guys are all psychic and just know I let the kid out of the room.

  At least this boy followed her in silence. Not like a similar quest a few planets back where another kid screamed her head off the whole time, attracting the kidnappers right to them. Of course, her being a preprogrammed NPC, no amount of ‘shut up kid’ worked. The developers had designed her to keep screaming to force several combats along the way.

  Fawkes sighed.

  The small son of a local wealthy executive looked up at her with silent innocence on his face. Fawkes peered around the doorjamb of the little room he’d been locked in at a warehouse with about fifteen armed and armored people, including two Kazalor. Their armor stood out as unmistakable due to the overdone pointy bits. That they stood a foot taller than humans helped too. And well, the four-arm thing was pretty obvious. Blocky jaws with bony spikes made her hope dearly that the developers did not program what it felt like to experience their bite. With any luck, it would just use the ‘you’ve taken damage’ wiffle bat smack.

  She opened a crew chat box, focused her attention on it (which would keep her voice out of the ambient game world) and said, “Hey Nighthawk, you busy?”

  The over-handsome face of their gunslinger/fighter pilot appeared a second or two later. “Umm, just grinding a bit, why?”

  “I’m stuck on a mission. Gotta get this kidnapped kid out of a warehouse, and there’s like a million level forties in my way.”

  “Oh, sure, no problem. Toss me an invite. Be right there,” said Nighthawk.

  She poked the virtual holographic display to send a group invite. Her portrait appeared in the top left of her vision with a small green star at the corner indicating group leader. Nighthawk’s somewhat smaller portrait appeared below. She figured Angel813 spent most fights staring at the party list watching health bars go up and down. While playing her Niath, she fell into a random group and learned that abilities other than firing a weapon could be targeted at the portraits. That made it easier during chaotic fights to be able to find allies.

  That had been weird. Fawkes never had people begging her to group with them to do lowbie missions. She couldn’t walk within a quarter mile of a village as a Niath auramancer without being spammed. The first time she broke her ‘I quest alone’ rule happened purely to wind up in a group so the incoming requests would stop. The soldier she’d teamed up with killed things way faster than she could, so she focused on healing him and using crowd control. It wound up being much less tedious than soloing, so she kept going.

  “Oh, wow, you’re not that far away,” said Nighthawk over group chat. “What’s going on now?”

  “I’m hiding in the room they had the kid locked in. Soon as I finished the ‘Hey I’m going to get you out of here and bring you home’ dialogue, all the mercs went on high alert.”

  Nighthawk made an ahh sound. “Oh, you’re doing that mission. The Prince of War or something, right? His mother owns that company that makes space fighters and weapons.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No wonder. That’s a soldier mission. They force you to go all commando to get the kid out, but the little guy’s a dumbass. You’re supposed to shoot your way in. I bet you snuck in, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Fawkes grumbled.

  “More dudes spawn as soon as you activate the kid. That’s why you have so many roaming around at once. It’s difficult because he just stands next to you and gets shot by accident.”

  “Ugh. Why do they make the NPCs so stupid?”

  “Easy though in a group. Hang out in that room and I’ll clear the dudes out of your way.”

  “Umm, ok
ay.”

  Nighthawk hummed to himself. “Oh, the mission reward’s not going to be any good for you, but if you wanna save it for my―I mean Kavan, I’ll give you credits for it.”

  “My?” asked Fawkes.

  “My buddy.” Nighthawk grinned. “We live near each other.”

  Fawkes waited. She tried to make small talk with the boy, but the maybe-eight-year-old’s dialogue consisted of ‘Thank you for helping me,’ ‘Are we there yet,’ and a whiney ‘I wanna go home.’”

  Fortunately, the way he’d been programmed, no matter what happened, he’d not stray from her side, so she hunkered down inside the storage closet. After a few minutes, she glanced down at the boy. He looked so real. It bothered her like an itch beneath the skin she couldn’t scratch that he acted so much like a computer program. His dark brown hair and roundish face somewhat reminded her of Nebraska when he’d been that age. Her brother also went through a period of rather bad nightmares at the time. Despite only having three years on him, she still wound up playing Mom.

  On a lark, she picked the boy up. The game’s physics engine allowed it, and the kid didn’t protest being carried. He even clung like a small boy should. Perhaps the ‘child’ flag for his character did that.

  Hmm. He’s quiet enough… I wonder if I could sneak out with him.

  She engaged stealth and her body went semi-transparent, but the boy’s didn’t.

  “Damn. They’d probably shoot at him.”

  With a resigned sigh, she dropped stealth and paced around inside the little room.

  A few minutes later, Nighthawk said, “Okay. I’m outside the building.”

  She opened the minimap in the top right corner of her field of vision. Sure enough, a blue diamond indicating a friendly party member showed up by the warehouse door. “Cool. So, umm. What’s the plan?”

  “Well, if you just want to be done with this quest, I figured I’d clear the room for you and you could walk out. These dudes are four levels under me.”

  She blinked and glanced at his portrait. “Holy crap you hit forty-four already?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged.

  Fawkes put the boy down on his feet. He dutifully stood by her side, staring up at her with a ‘please help me’ wide-eyed face. “If I ever spawn for real, and my kid makes this face at me, I’m so screwed. I’d give him whatever he wanted.”

  “Huh?” asked Nighthawk.

  “The way this kid’s looking at me is making me feel super guilty and I haven’t even done anything.”

  “Oh. Okay. Here I come.”

  Fawkes dropped into stealth and peeked out of the room.

  Nighthawk, in a new set of shiny dark-grey armor with red highlights―and a cowboy hat―strolled in the door with a confident swagger. A whitish shimmer around him appeared when he activated Showdown. “Howdy, boys. Don’t take this personal like.”

  He drew his pistols and waved his arms back and forth, sending a withering rain of red laser fire into the air. Answering green and blue streaks of energy streamed back at him, but nothing hit. Eight of the fifteen mercenaries dropped within seconds. Red critical-hit damage numbers appeared over most of them. Nighthawk advanced in a slow, purposeful stride, picking off the remaining mercs with two or three shots apiece.

  Fawkes sniped one in the back, her ambush taking him out in one hit. Since Nighthawk had gotten all the mercs’ attention, she didn’t lose stealth and managed a second ambush before he finished off the rest of them. The instant the last mercenary ‘died,’ the boy’s pleading ‘help me’ expression changed to a more natural neutral one.

  She walked out from the back room with the boy hovering at her side, the child oblivious to the spread of corpses lying around. “Holy shit…”

  Nighthawk spun to flash her a silly grin. “Umm, what?”

  “You wiped the room in like fifteen seconds.”

  “New cooldown. Six and Six,” said Nighthawk. “I can hit up to twelve targets and get automatic head shots. Can only use it once every twenty minutes though. Dunno why they called it six.”

  “Probably a reference to Old West six-guns.”

  “Huh? Oh… right.”

  She whistled at the destruction. “Still nice. ’Slingers are amazing at AOE. I don’t get anything like that.”

  “That sucks,” said Nighthawk.

  “Yeah well. My single-target’s a little better… eventually. Thanks for the assist.” She held up the boy by one arm like a sack of potatoes. “Gonna go turn this in and head back to the ship. Almost time for the others to log in.” She lowered the boy back to stand on his feet.

  “Cool.” Nighthawk nodded. “See you there.”

  He summoned a silver motorcycle and zoomed off. Fawkes activated her bike, and the boy climbed on behind her without being prompted to. She drove back to the Security Force building where she’d gotten the mission from; evidently, those mercenaries had been too well armed for the local police to bother with―or so said the quest story.

  Upon turning the quest in, the boy gave her a huge hug. “Thank you for saving me!”

  The joyful look on his face choked her up a little, despite his artificiality.

  As Nighthawk said, the mission reward took the form of a nice blue-quality heavy-armor chest-piece. The game offered a choice between the same armor with stats for a tank or stats for a damage-dealing soldier. She picked the tank one, which appeared in her inventory. The interface showed it with a sell value of 11,500 credits, but she’d give it to Kavan anyway. By the time he hit level forty and could do that quest for himself (or its equivalent on some other planet) he could take the damage-statted version and wind up with both.

  The experience reward left her a little past halfway to thirty-nine.

  Normally, quest rewards like that couldn’t be traded to other players ‘just because.’ It didn’t make any logical sense in reality that she couldn’t hand it to someone else, but she figured the developers put it in to prevent twinking (loading a low-level character up with high-end gear). However, to encourage people into forming starship crews, that loot rule didn’t apply among members of the same crew.

  She headed back to the Stormbringer and used the food printer to create a decadent dark chocolate mousse cake. Being able to eat anything and everything without caring about calories had been the best part of the game―until she’d tried flying as a Niath.

  Eventually, Rallek logged in and appeared out of thin air in the next seat. “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.” She stuck a giant forkful of sin in her mouth.

  “You tell anyone yet?” asked Rallek.

  “Nope. Bitchin’ hard keepin’ my lips sealed.” She grinned.

  Kavan’s name lit up in the roster when he came online. He walked in from the corridor leading to the bridge soon after. “Hey guys. How goes it?”

  “It goes,” said Rallek. “We’ve got something cool to share once everyone’s here.”

  “Oh?” Kavan’s eyebrows went up. “Something to do with that money quest?”

  “Yeah.” Fawkes nodded.

  Kavan barely suppressed an eye roll. “You know that in all probability, that whole thing is a BS gimmick.”

  “Here.” Fawkes made a gesture like she pulled something out of her pocket, and a full-size combat armor breastplate appeared in her hand.

  Kavan took it. His initial surprise shifted to an expression of OMG after he examined the stats. The white-plastic looking armor in his hand swapped places with the dull olive-drab chestplate he had been wearing, and the old one vanished into his inventory. “Damn, Fawkes… this is ten levels better than what I had… and a blue.”

  “You may express your adoration for my awesomeness at your leisure.” She held out a hand like a queen awaiting a kiss on her ring.

  Rallek and Kavan chuckled.

  Nighthawk walked in from the boarding ramp and hit the food printer for a monstrous bowl of chicken nuggets and fries. When Kavan smirked at him, he shrugged. “What? It’s fake food.”
<
br />   “Great,” said Rallek. “As soon as Christina gets here, we can start.”

  “Who’s Christina?” asked Nighthawk around a mouthful.

  “Angel813,” said Fawkes.

  “Oh. Cool. You guys traded real names?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m Shawn,” he said.

  “Dakota,” said Fawkes.

  “Eric,” said Rallek.

  In a shimmering swirl of blue squares, Angel813 appeared in the main room. Up until now, Fawkes had always assumed the 813 had some personal significance to Christina, but after playing the Niath, she figured there’d been 812 other people at the time who had tried to name their character ‘Angel.’

  “So what’s this announcement?” asked Kavan, still admiring his new chest armor.

  “Right.” Rallek stood. “We―mostly Fawkes―have figured out the clue in the datapad.”

  Nighthawk’s eyes bulged. “Really? You found that three-star system?”

  The skepticism in Kavan’s expression lessened a little.

  “Possibly,” said Fawkes. “But that could be a red herring.”

  “A what?” asked Nighthawk.

  “Fake information.” Fawkes grinned, and explained how the apparently meaningless string of numbers at the end of the message made sense in ASCII as a map reference. “I’m not sure if there’s a trinary star system at that location, but a coordinate is a lot more to go on than trying to find some blue star.”

  Even Angel813 appeared interested. “Wait, you’re serious?”

  Rallek nodded. “Yep. The bad news is, it will send us into Kazalor space.”

  “Hmm.” Kavan tapped at a control console on the giant, round table and opened a star map display. “Give me those coordinates again?”

  Fawkes read them off her notes.

  With a faint chirp, a small crosshair appeared in the lower right corner of the map. The view zoomed in on a brownish planet inside a blue circle highlight.

  “AG148,” said Kavan. A text box appeared indicating the planet as an agriculture world. The ‘economy,’ ‘law,’ and ‘danger’ ratings all showed a dreadfully tame planet.