“You can?” Dean blinked. The online world had never seemed so complicated as it did now.
“Sure. And so, we take a look at this Sub-Unit Minerva log-in site, and we get…” A pause. “Oh crap. Jesse Creek, Baja, California.”
Oh crap indeed, Dean thought. “That’s the place Ramesh talked about. It was where Odge did their trials for the early VRMs.”
“Maybe not just the early versions,” Marcy said. There was a change in her tone, and Dean recognized it as the same one she used nearer the end of their rehabilitation sessions, when he was getting tired and annoyed, and Marcy was going to just push him through the last leg of whatever torture she was putting him to. It meant she was getting serious.
“Look. We need to work out what it is they’re doing to Jay in there. As much as I don’t like the girl, she doesn’t deserve to be lying in a coma thanks to corporate negligence,” Marcy said.
“You’re right,” Dean agreed. “And more than that: we need to get her out of there.”
“Ahh… What are you suggesting, Dean?” Marcy sounded, at last, unsure.
“I don’t know quite yet. But couldn’t you, sort of, discharge her or something?”
“She’s in a coma, Dean!” Marcy hissed quickly. “We can’t just unhook her from whatever machines they’ve got her on.”
“Well, maybe … a medical transfer?” Dean said, his heart pounding. “Is that possible?”
“No,” Marcy said quickly, before sighing. “But you have a point. Whatever really is going on here with Odge, we know that patients who go to Jesse Creek don’t come out again.” She paused, then said, “I’ll look into what I can do.”
“Thank you,” Dean said. “But…”
“I know, just do it quick. I’ve got a graveyard shift coming up, but I should knock off around two in the morning. I’ll see what I can dig up after that.”
“Thank you, Marcy. You’re a lifesaver,” Dean said.
“Not yet, I’m not,” Marcy grumbled. “But, Dean? How are you going to warn Crusher? You can’t be seriously thinking of going back into the game, can you?”
“I have to,” Dean said, without thinking. “I have to warn him about the visor, and he might be waiting for me at the hide-out, right now. And besides that ... I think I have a plan…”
“What plan? Dean – no, as your medical professional, I forbid it!” Marcy said, but she was speaking to a dead line, as Dean had already hung up.
*
“She’s what!?” the dwarf’s moustache quivered with fury.
“In a coma,” Winters the mage repeated. He stood in the tumble-down cottage in the wild woods of the Outer Realms that was the Red Hand’s hide out. It looked exactly the same as when he had left it just a couple of hours ago; the same coals still burned merrily in the hearth, and there were still the rows of unguents and pots on the sagging shelves. The only thing that was different was that it now had a very irate dwarf in it instead of an upset enchantress.
Crusher had arrived just a little while back after receiving Winters’ dream message, and had got bored. So now, at his feet stood the twin tusks of a forest ogre — 300 XP the dwarf spy had told him happily as he whittled the bone. But now, all trace of the joy he had been feeling was clearly gone, as Winters explained one more time just what had been happening.
“Odge is still running this Jesse Creek place. And now Jay – or Josephine – is in it, and I can’t do a thing about it until I get back to the King’s City and work on this.” Clunk. Dean thumped the activated Ouroborax Crystal on the desk.
“And every second we spend in here, it means risking our minds?” Crusher said slowly, pulling at his beard.
“Yes,” Dean said heavily.
“Holy spitballs,” the dwarf growled. “Well, then I say we had damned well get on with it, don’t you think?”
“I guess…” If I only knew what to do next. “But the others? Ramesh, the Red Hand?” Dean picked up the note he had left on the table, where it had sat undisturbed.
“I think we have to just leave him to do his own thing,” Crusher said. “I asked for his offline details – but it wasn’t happening. He said he had to keep on moving from place to place, and that he would be the one to find us.”
“Well, if he’s still got some of his Controller powers left, I’m sure he can manage it…” Winters sighed, picking up his backpack of provisions. He checked his status.
Full Health. Full Mana.
“I guess we’re never going to be more ready, are we?” Winters said with a wry smile.
“Not against the Controllers we’re not.” Crusher was already moving to the door, but Dean hesitated.
“It’s … it’s just such a long way. We have to find a route past the Oak Grove, with that psychopathic Captain Vaniel after us, and then back up the Wyvern Mountains, back through Shardwick Forest, all the way to the Near Realm…” Winters sighed. “How are we ever going to make it back in time?”
Crusher shrugged; a dwarfish gesture that showed he was no stranger to hardship. “If Red was here, I’d ask him just to zap us back there, if he can… But I guess we have to go the long way round. You humans,” he said with a snort of displeasure.
“What have we done now?” the mage said.
“The Outer Realm is entirely uncivilized, you know. The Duma is out here as well.” Crusher was nodding. “If we can get out of this accursed elf wood in one piece, then all we have to do is to get to one of the Hearths, and then we can find a passage home.”
“Hearths? What are they?” Winters asked.
“Oh, you’ll see. A guy like you will just love it.” Crusher grinned, and they trudged out of the door and into the unknown.
Chapter 25: Gargants & Game Logic
Dean noticed the change in the forest as soon as they rounded the ‘hedge’ where the Forest Guardian had led him in. Somehow the forest lost some of its overcrowded, sheltering look, and now looked ancient and solid.
“I think we just passed out of the Red Hand’s patched code,” he mentioned to the dwarf ahead of him, who grumbled a yes. The dwarf, it appeared, had no innate love for the forests of the elves. If Dean had thought his character was terrible in the woods, then clearly, he had not had any inkling as to what the dwarf felt. After just a little time of wandering, Crusher had managed to fall into two creeks, bounce off a tree the size of a shed, and trip over enough roots as to make it embarrassing.
“This damn place has it in for dwarfs,” he muttered, as Winters tried not to laugh.
Thunk. Crusher bounced off another tree. “Ow!”
Thud. Another slap of something heavy hitting the soil.
“Really, Crusher – you should be getting experience just by getting through this!” Winters laughed as the dwarf to freeze.
“That wasn’t me that time,” he said.
“What?”
“That noise, it…” Thud. “Argh!” A black-and-white fletched arrow was stuck in the dwarf’s shoulder. Even though Winters knew neither of them could really feel pain, he also knew they could feel ghost pain, as the nurse had put it.
“Down!” Winters shouted, shoving the dwarf to one side as—
Thud. Another arrow hit the tree where he had so recently been. There was a sound high up in the trees.
“It’s the damn pointy-ears! They’ve found us!” the dwarf was shouting, as shapes did indeed start to appear in the trees above. Figures swinging on ropes from branch to branch, or leaping, as graceful as cats. They wore tight-fitting leather-leaf armor, and held bows or curving sabers in their hands.
“Trespassers! Thieves!” shouted one of the figures, and Winters saw a flash of light through the trees illuminate an elf pointing his sword at them. It was Captain Vaniel from the Shrine of Oak.
“Run!” Crusher bellowed, immediately tearing off into the growth.
“Where!?” Winters shouted.
“Anywhere there isn’t a goddamned elf!” Crusher retu
rned, vaulting over broken tree trunks and hopping across boulders with a much greater skill than Winters had seen him trail hike.
“The Judgment and the Duma have been at war for centuries!” Crusher shouted, as more black-and-white fletched arrows hit the dirt around them. “Do you think they’re going to miss an opportunity now?”
They dodged and weaved through the woods, as the magician tried to count how many elves were coming for them. At least six, he thought, maybe more. Too many to fight, he knew instinctively.
But don’t I have magic? He ducked as – Thud! – another arrow hit some tree bark centimeters from his head. I even have the Spell of Efen, he thought. He could summon her to get rid of her problem for him. Would she do that? Or would she side with them?
She wanted me to find and protect the crystals, he remembered. But then he also remembered how her eyes had flushed black, and she had called for all the crystals to be given to her directly. No. Summoning that crazy goddess would be insane.
As it turned out, Winters didn’t have enough time to think of any more useful magic anyway, as it seemed the elves were running them straight into a trap.
“Woah!” Crusher skidded to a halt on the rocky banks of a raging forest river. “Those treehuggers! They drove us here!” he was saying, drawing his war axe. “Well, if I have to go down here, I’ll do it fighting…!” he snarled, turning and planting his feet wide apart.
Something was glimmering on the other side of the river. Something that even looked familiar.
“Wait, Crusher – look!” The mage pointed, even while whoops and victorious catcalls sounded behind them as Vaniel’s patrol drew closer.
There was movement on the other side of the river. Creatures dressed in white robes, trimmed with gold, and carrying staffs. Creatures with no faces, apart from rows of pointed teeth.
“Don’t look at them, fool!” Crusher turned back to face the elves, clearly deciding which was the sort of enemy he would rather face.
“No, Crusher…” Winters remembered the one that had led them to the temporary safety of the hide-out. “I think … I think the Forest Guardians are on our side.”
“It looked to me like they were on their own side, earlier…” Crusher muttered, but ducked behind a tree and shared a look.
A line of the strange Forest Guardians had arrived on the rocky boulders of the far side, and they were each raising their staffs, before lowering them into the waters of the stream.
“What are they doing?” the dwarf hissed.
“We have you now, thieves!” Captain Vaniel was almost upon them.
“How am I supposed to know? But it seems like…” Winters watched as a radiance started to spread from their staffs, a white glow rippling over the water towards them, and as it did so, the water froze behind it. “It seems like they’re trying to save us,” Winters said, as the white radiance lapped against their side of the river, and he could see the perfectly frozen ripples, bubbles, and waveforms of the stream.
“Quick, come on!” The mage grabbed Crusher’s arm and pulled him.
“It could be a trap…” the dwarf hissed. “Dwarfs are not known for their lightness of step, you know.”
Despite his friend’s concerns, the frozen, still glowing water held as the mage and the dwarf skidded across to the other side, scrambling up the banks before the Forest Guardians.
“What is the meaning of this!?” they heard Captain Vaniel shouting as he reached the far side. “Forest Guardians!?” He glared in astonishment, and, as soon as he looked at them, and they at him, the creatures started hissing and shaking in anger, pulling their staffs from the stilled stream. Dean watched as it reduced into a sudden crash and roll of temper once more.
“They’re reacting the same as when I looked at one,” Winters whispered, seeing them shake and hiss at the gawping elves.
“Then I think we shouldn’t give them time to remember that we’re here, either…” Crusher was already pushing his way into the trees beyond, and running again. Not seeing any reason to argue, Dean did the same. But before he did, he muttered one word to his strange saviors: “Thanks.”
With that, he turned and ran through the woods after the rapidly escaping dwarf.
*
It seemed like their encounter with the Forest Guardians had been epic enough to not warrant any more random monsters until they reached the outskirts of the wildwoods of the Outer Realms. They passed many small elvish shrines along the way; graceful entwinings of rocks, roots, and trees that formed living sculptures with strange, spiral markings scrawled across them. But no more monsters. No more Owlbears or elves, Winters was glad to notice.
Until, of course, they got to the edge of the forest.
“Ah,” Crusher said, looking at the landscape that was revealed.
“Oh,” Winters said, swallowing nervously.
The forests of the Judgment appeared to be on the steps and plateaus of the Wyvern Mountains that separated the Near from the Outer realms. Just a few meters out from the forest’s western edge the ground started to roll and plunge downwards into grand plains, crisscrossed with lines of hills and smaller woods.
And monsters. Gigantic forms moved sedately across the plains. So big as to dwarf a tree, dwarf a house. They were the size of small castles – if perhaps not quite as tall as the towers. Large and six-legged, with mottled blue-gray scaled skin, these creatures had no discernible necks at all, but instead their mounds of flesh ended in a hump-like bony protuberance protecting their brows, and underneath that a wide maw at the edge of the bone ridge. Dean saw them run and rub their heads along the dirt and grasslands of the plains, rucking up long meters-wide stretches of dirt, before they started pawing and rooting at whatever goodness they could extract from it. All of their muscle was at the front of their bodies, with their back end tapering into a rounded stump of a tail like a platypus.
“I thought you said the Outer Realms were civilized?” Dean whispered as he looked at the leviathan-like creatures meandering across their view.
“I hadn’t realized the Gargants were south this game season,” Crusher said embarrassedly. “Oops.”
“Oops!” Winters almost exploded. “How could you forget those!?”
“Well, they only appear in the southern Outer Kingdom every other season,” the dwarf shrugged. “Usually they’re no bother, but I wouldn’t get too close, mind. They think most mortals are pretty tasty…”
“Great. Saved from death by psychotic elves to be used as toothpicks for the biggest monsters in the game,” Winters growled, reaching into his inventory for the compendium of lore Crusher had given him earlier.
There is so much in here I haven’t even looked at yet, Winters sighed to himself. Not that it really mattered now, when Jay was lying somewhere in some sort of secret hospital facility. And we all might have our brain fried at any moment. But still, the sweep-in text box rolled out across his inner vision like a page of parchment all the same.
*
Gargants
Level: Unknown
Type: Megafauna (monster)
*
“Outstanding,” Winters growled. “No known weaknesses it says here.”
“Sure they do,” Crusher said, before looking a little nervous. “Well, according to legend anyway. The Duma tell a story of how one of them was brought down when it dared to attack a Hearth.”
“Really? What did they do? They don’t have it in the compendium here,” Winters said, flicking his vision between the book and the massive beasts below.
“Well, first they fired the town’s catapults and ballista, which I think must have done some damage to the thing, right?” Crusher pulled on his beard. “And then a battalion of the Iron Guard went after it with axes.”
“A battalion of the fiercest dwarfish fighters in the game.” Winters sighed. “One hundred fighters, and they managed to bring down just one Gargant, and just the two of us facing about, how many do you count do
wn there, Crusher?”
“Well, I see four, but there’s a line of hills in the way over there…” Crusher said, which the mage thought was remarkably unhelpful.
“Great. Simply great.” Winters started to shuffle his feet agitatedly. “But, I guess there’s no way around, right?”
“Not unless we want to go further north into the Outer Realm… And that is certainly going to lead to more monster encounters.”
“And more hours in the game,” Winters muttered. And Jay will be in that hospital for much longer, too. “That’s the quickest route?” He nodded straight across the plains, due west.
“Uh-huh.” The dwarf gritted his teeth. “You see that dark smoke on the horizon?”
“Uh-huh,”
“That’s the Hearth, and it’s where there’ll be direct transport to the King’s City,” Crusher said, moving to unsling his axe from his shoulder, before Dean saw him shrug and leave it there.
Yeah, I guess there’s no point in holding weapons against these things, he thought, as they started to trudge down the rough path leading straight through the plains, and the largest monsters in the game.
*
Small creatures scurried into the grassy banks on either side, fleeing the large beasts that were destroying their homes below. As they descended down onto the plains, Winters could see herds of larger animals – some six-legged sort of buffalo, or deer perhaps, scattering north. The only creatures that seemed to even like these things were the many different sorts of birds the mage saw circling them, using them like seagulls must use ships sailing across the seas. In the wake of the creatures, too, Winters saw flocks descending to the disturbed dirt to pick over the roots, rocks, and great swathes of dirt kicked and ploughed up by the beasts.
“Okay, we need to be as inconspicuous as possible…” Crusher whispered, hunching as he tried to appear smaller than he already was.
Tales of the Gemsmith Page 26
