by L. E. Price
He was back down in the security room, shrugging his heavy and acid-pitted overcoat over his shoulders and preparing to face the toxic storm outside the arcology walls, when Woody called him back.
“This is…interesting,” he said.
“The software?”
“Illegal,” Woody said. “Some of it. Not the felony kind of illegal, more gray market and very purpose-built. I’m still checking it out, but I think I know where we can find a lead. Can you meet me in-game? Dutton Village, maybe two hours or thereabouts?”
“On my way back to the office now. I’ll log in as soon as I get there.”
* * * *
In the span of two hours Jake had traveled from the antiseptic, artificial perfection of the arcology, to the choking yellow air outside and the crumbling fortress of his office building, to the pristine blue skies and warm springtime winds of Paradise Clash.
It was clean, here. He could rub his thumb against his palm and it wouldn’t come away gritty. No soot building up in his lungs, no wet tickle in the back of his throat, just clear breath and bright, open eyes. He was early for the meeting. He wandered Dutton’s crooked and muddy main street, taking in the sights. Mostly set dressing, villager NPCs going about their scripted day, running errands. A peasant woman with an armload of laundry crossed his path twice, once on the far side on the street and a second time brushing past him.
“Good day, sir,” she said with a nod of her wrinkled brow.
“Afternoon,” he replied. Just as if she was real.
He’d read something, once, about how humans instinctively anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Give a machine a face, and we want to give it human qualities too. He knew, logically, that the woman was nothing but a piece of clever code, but—
She let out a puff of frustrated breath at his back. He turned. She’d dropped her wicker basket, linens scattering in the dirt. His philosophical reverie broke as he jogged over to help her, picking up stray tunics and catching a tablecloth just before the wind could snatch it away.
“You are gods-sent, sir,” she said as he loaded up her basket. “Most would just let an old woman fend for herself.”
“Happy to help,” he told her.
She paused, crouched with her basket perched on one bent knee, and looked at him with a twinkle in her faded eye.
“You know,” she said, “I’m a bit of a soothsayer. Normally I charge copper for a glance at the fates, but I’d be willing to scry yours for free.”
Jake half-smiled. They both rose up, the wayward linens captured once more.
“Sure,” he said.
“Give me your hand.”
She held the basket under one arm and took his wrist with the other hand, studying the lines of his weathered palm. Her warm demeanor turned to frost as she read something there, something she didn’t like.
“You have enemies,” she said.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Her gaze flicked up to meet his.
“You have enemies,” she said, “and they know your name. Death chases your footsteps. You will need to be nimble, and quick, and trust in your allies to survive.”
Creepy, he thought, but a good bit of character design. After all, Dutton was a starter village, a place for new players to find their footing in the game. All adventurers had enemies, it went with the territory when you battled monsters and explored dungeons for a living. Like a well-written horoscope, her omen sounded deep but really applied to a hundred percent of the people who heard it. He played the prophecy off with a bit of a chuckle.
“Guess if things go wrong, I can just respawn outside the village, right?”
Her grip became a band of cold steel, trapping his wrist. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“There are ways to die,” she said, “from which there is no return. Not in this realm, or in the far one. Beware the deep magic, Jacius of Cam’s Den.”
He blinked. He hadn’t told her his character’s name, but that was explainable; he’d spoken it enough times, in this very village, that some clever programmer could have set code to capture it for NPCs to recognize him by.
Or in the far one, though. He remembered Woody’s explanation. The “far realm” was a roleplayer’s shorthand for the real world.
“What do you know about the far realm?” he asked.
The old woman glitched.
She jerked in space, jumping in the blink of an eye, standing half an inch from where she’d just been. Her hand was no longer squeezing Jake’s wrist: she had both arms cradling her linen-basket, and her gaze was fixed on the road past his shoulder.
She turned, as if just noticing him. “Never heard of it, dearie. Now if you’ll excuse me, a washer-woman’s workday is far from done.”
As she strolled past him, he scrambled to untangle a sudden whirlwind of questions.
“What’s the deep magic?” he called out.
She didn’t even break her stride, giving him a flippant glance over her shoulder.
“Magic? You’d ask a washer-woman about magic? Might as well ask me the best way to slay an ogre. You might have time for adventures and grand foolishness, but some of us have work to do, young man.”
And with that she was gone, vanishing between a pair of buildings, and re-emerging to start her loop all over again on the far side of the street. The next time she passed, she didn’t even glance his way.
15.
Woody turned up fifteen minutes later. The dwarf huffed and puffed as he jogged down the boulevard with his mammoth war-hammer slung over one shoulder.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, stopping bent-over with his hands on his knees as he gasped for breath. “Forgot how far away I was when I left last time. And I got a little distracted, poking through that treasure-trove you sent me.”
“What’ve we got?”
Woody shot a look behind him. “Not here. Let’s get off the street.”
Last time Jake visited the Dented Chalice, it had been packed with reveling adventurers. These were off hours, too early for the nighttime rush, and they were the only real humans in the room. The barmaid gave them a wave of greeting with her rag, still mopping up the same puddle of ale she’d been cleaning the other night. They grabbed a seat at the back-corner table. In passing, Woody held up two fingers to the bartender. He wasn’t far on their heels, ambling over and plopping a pair of dented metal steins on their table. Ale, smelling of chestnuts, sloshed over the rim of one stein and soaked into the knife-scarred wood. Woody pressed a few copper coins into the man’s expectant palm.
“Keep the change,” he said. He lifted his tankard, lowered his voice, and leaned closer to Jake. “Okay, so there are casual dragon-hunters — people who follow the feeds, read up on the lore, just out of curiosity. Then there’s the hardcore variety.”
“And Trevor’s friends are—”
“Hardcore. Those programs are mostly hacking tools. Not like, ‘steal your account and your credit card’ kind of hacking. More like utilities to skim the game’s surface data and gather information that’s normally kept out of players’ reach. One app is designed to read info from the textures on the game’s graphics; nothing nefarious, just stuff like how big each texture is, how much memory it uses up, things like that.”
“My first night here,” Jake said. “When I found Timothy — Rolen the Blue — and his wizard pal Magnolto, they were taking measurements out in a farmer’s field. He said something about a…sixty-four by sixty-four terrain chunk?”
Woody nodded and slurped down his ale. “Dragon hunters are big on texture seams, the places where the graphics line up and repeat, like floor tiles. Hunter wisdom says the dragon always appears at intersections in the seams.”
Jake had a sip from his tankard. The old metal was coppery against his lips, with a tang of dirt, but the foamy ale went down smooth.
“That true?” he asked.
Woody shrugged. “To know if it’s true, you’d have to prove the dragon even exists, and the ju
ry’s way out on that one. Point is, these guys are all-in on the hunt, to the point of risking their accounts. Like I said, these utilities aren’t felony-illegal, nobody’s going to jail for getting caught with one, but SDS seriously frowns on any kind of unauthorized datamining. Worst case scenario, you can lose your account.”
“Here’s the triple-A-credit question: does any of it connect to Trevor?”
“One app,” Woody said, “it’s some kind of item tracker, not really sure how it works, but it’s got his account’s fingerprints all over it. He was using it in conjunction with Market Master; that one is common enough that SDS gave it their tacit blessing. It breaks every time they update the game with a new patch, but the devs always have a new version up and running within a day or so.”
“What’s it do?” Jake asked.
“It’s for dedicated merchants. Basically pulls trade activity from the markets you visit so you can track down points of supply and demand. Helps you find the best places to sell your loot. Did I tell you about the Fallen Paradises yet?”
“One of your books did,” Jake said, tapping his memory. “The places where currently-dead gods used to rule, right?”
“Bingo. Kill a god, their realm becomes a Fallen Paradise. The gamemasters turn it into a hard-as-nails dungeon with some of the most unique loot in the game. Three open up at random, any given month, out of almost fifty. And to get in, you need…?”
He trailed off, and Jake realized he was waiting for an answer. Quizzing him on the game.
“A realm key,” Jake said. “Assembled from five realm fragments, which can drop anywhere, anytime.”
Woody gave him a tombstone-toothed grin. “Nice. You are learning. And that, grasshopper, is what Trevor was tracking when his brain went AWOL. He was making spreadsheets filled with nothing but key and fragment sales, tracing price-swings over time. Reams of data, going back a year or so.”
“But he was a lone wolf,” Jake said, his brow furrowed. “He just hung out with an ascension guild, he wasn’t a member. You can’t tackle those dungeons alone, can you?”
“Not in a million years. Maybe a small guild like the Elect could do it, absolute masters of the game with top-of-the-line gear, but they’re a breed unto themselves. An ordinary player would get slaughtered two feet past the front door.”
“So, he wasn’t buying realm keys for himself. Was he a merchant? Trading ‘em to make extra cash?”
“Don’t think so,” Woody said. “But I know someone who can tell us for sure, if you’re okay with bringing another conspirator into this little fold of ours.”
“Who did you have in mind?”
“Prentise Roquelaure. She’s not exactly game-famous, not like the Elect or the top ascension-guild contenders, but she knows more about Paradise Clash’s economy than anybody. People in the know call her the merchant queen, and buddy, she earned that crown.”
Jake remembered her from his first night in the game. The bedraggled woman in ragged hunting furs, a bow and a quiver of barbed arrows slung over one shoulder. She’d been giving some guy hell for screwing her on a deal; Jake hadn’t gotten a chance to introduce himself, but he’d liked her attitude. Tough. No bullshit. Exactly the kind of person he needed in his corner right now.
Then again, he had to be careful. The washer-woman’s prophecy was still fresh in his mind. And the glitch, after.
“Side question,” he said. “You know of any NPCs in Dutton that do…fortune-telling? Palm reading?”
Woody thought about it. He shook his head and tossed back another swig of ale.
“Nah, not in Dutton. There’s a caravan of NPCs that roams the southern provinces, and they’ve got a fortune-teller. There’s an NPC in Vangelis City that reads horoscopes, too; same deal but more expensive, just like everything in Vangelis.”
Between Cybele and the washer-woman, this was the second time an NPC had broken character, going off-script. Just for Jake, and his ears alone.
“One other question. Does ‘deep magic’ mean anything to you?”
“Not offhand, no. There are a bunch of schools of magic in Paradise Clash — enchantment, illusion, necromancy, transmutation, a few others. A dedicated mage can either specialize in one and become a master or spread their skills out and become a jack-of-all-trades. Trading less power for a more diverse bag of tricks.”
“But no deep magic,” Jake said.
“Never heard any of ‘em called by that name. No shortage of wannabe Gandalfs who think they’re deep.” Woody pantomimed puffing a joint. “Whoa. Deep, man. Anyway, what do you think about Prentise? Yay or nay?”
“I like it. Obviously, we can’t tell her everything about Trevor—”
Woody held up his open hands. “Hey, no argument. The only thing bigger than SDS’s wallet is their legal department. But we can give her the non-classified parts. Prentise is cool; we might have to scratch her back a little, but she’ll help us out.”
“Scratch her back by…?”
“With her,” Woody said, “you never know. C’mon, I’ll see if she’s around.”
Jake downed the last of his ale, tasting the aftermath of bitter chestnuts as he followed Woody outside. A pigeon swooped in and ruffled its ash-feathered wings as it landed on the dwarf’s shoulder. With a flourish of his hands, now Woody was holding a quill pen and a thin scrap of yellowed parchment.
“Going to send her an instant message,” Woody said as he wrote. He shot a look at the bird as it cooed and preened on his shoulder. “Well…more or less instant. If she’s in the realm, she’ll get it shortly.”
He wrapped the strip of parchment around the pigeon’s leg. It took flight, shooting up into the clear blue sky, taking a slow turn across the village rooftops before veering off to the east.
“You unlock that at level ten, by the way. Base messenger is a pigeon. If you’ve got cash to burn, you can change it to a raven, a few kinds of owls, bunch of options.”
“Are they faster?”
“Nah,” Woody said, “but they look really cool. Never underestimate how much effort someone will go to, or how much money they’ll spend, to look cool. Speaking of levels, did you replace that broken club of yours?”
“Haven’t had the chance. Also, I don’t have any money. I’ve got a petrified wolf eye, and a fang. That’s about it.”
“You can sell those at a hunter’s lodge,” Woody said, “but this one’s on me. Prentise doesn’t come out to the newbie towns unless she has a deal going down, meaning we’re going to have to go to her. Let’s get you equipped for the road while we’re waiting on a reply.”
Down the street, gray smoke streamed from the chimney of the village blacksmith. The smith — a stone-muscled dwarf, like Woody — labored away at the forge under an open pavilion roof. His hammer rang down on a bar of orange-hot steel.
“Mornin’ to ya, lads,” he grunted. “What I got’s all on display, take a gander and let me know if anything catches your eye.”
Jake glanced sidelong at Woody. “What’s good?”
“It’s all still pretty newbie-level gear—” he paused as the smith gave him an irritated snort. The hammer rang down, loud and hard. “—but it’s more durable than what you started with. Remember, there’s your character skill, and then your real fighting skill. Pick something you’re comfortable with.”
Jake would have been comfortable with a gun or his souped-up jazzer, but he was good at adapting to change. He scanned the racks with a connoisseur’s eye, looking for a weapon with a profile like his tactical baton.
And there they were. At the bottom of the farthest weapon rack, the prizes he was looking for. Two stout sticks of lacquered cherry wood, just a little shorter than his forearms, each with a leather-corded grip a few inches along the shaft. He picked one up, testing its weight, and a small window of glowing text blossomed in the upper-left corner of his vision.
Weapon: Tonfa
Attack power: 50 / Damage type: blunt
Level required: 1 / Relevant s
kills: blunt weapons, dual wield
Material: Blood Oak (durability 100%)
Merchant price: 2sp, 75cp
Woody let out a low whistle as Jake picked the other one up off the rack. “Tonfas, huh? Kind of a high-skill weapon. You know how to use those?”
Jake took a step back, clearing a little room, and took hold of the twin grips.
Then the batons spun in his hands, twirling with a deadly hiss as they sliced through the air like a pair of fan-blades. They snapped into position along his forearms, shields against attack. Then they swung outward while he bent his knees and dropped into a fighting stance. He stepped through the old kata as muscle-memory took over, swinging one tonfa high and one low, bracing the batons before him before whipping them down in a brutal sweep. His arms shot down straight and the wooden shafts flipped upward, following the line of his forearms like an extension of his body.
“Damn,” Woody said.
“These should do,” Jake said.
Woody tugged open his coin-pouch. He gave Jake a curious look as he paid the blacksmith.
“You weren’t always a private eye, were you?”
“Meaning?” Jake asked.
“I know two kinds of people who know how to use tonfas like that. One, dedicated martial artists—”
“Told you. I know some a little Judo and just enough Aikido to get by. Helps in my line of work. I run into a lot of situations where I need to knock some heads together, but I’m not looking to kill anybody.”
“One, dedicated martial artists,” Woody repeated. “Two, cops. Riot cops.”
A messenger pigeon swooped down and landed on the fence ringing the blacksmith’s yard. It strutted back and forth, cooing, a strip of parchment tied to its leg with a bit of blue twine.
“Thought we were supposed to stay in character, out in public.” Jake nodded to the fence. “I think your pigeon is back.”
