Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  The sword flashed past Tina’s face, cutting so close it flicked a single drop of silver blood from the tip of her nose. Reeling from the powder, the huge skeleton staggered backward, but the cloud surrounding its head followed every move, obscuring even the white ghostfire of its eyes.

  With its ally blinded, the second skeleton took its chance to attack. When it raised its sword to chop at Tina, though, SilentBlayde appeared from thin air at its side, one of his gleaming silver swords already wedged perfectly into the joint of the monster’s arm. The flat of the blade prevented the ball from rotating fully in its socket, locking the monster’s arm comically over its head.

  “I’ve got you, Roxxy!” SB said, keeping his eyes on the skeleton he’d just locked down. “Sorry I’m late. Anders was supposed to heal you while I got David up, but the A-man flipped out on me.”

  Tina rubbed her numb arm in relief, glad it was still attached. “You got here when I needed you, Blayde. Thanks.”

  SB took his eyes off the enemy just long enough to give her a wink. “Here,” he said, plucking something from his belt pocket with his free hand and tossing it at her. “Drink!”

  Tina scrambled to catch the glass vial before it shattered on the ground. Fumbling with the cork, she didn’t look at what it was before she downed the contents in one gulp. The half cup of liquid tasted like normal water when it hit her tongue, but it washed away all the weakness in her arm and leg.

  “What was that?” she asked, looking down at her once-again functional hand in wonder.

  “Unfallen Water from the Age of Skies,” SilentBlayde replied proudly. “Ghostfire is purged with water magic, so—”

  He cut off as the skeleton he’d trapped suddenly gave a violent shake. It didn’t look like much to Tina, but the force of the motion sent the wiry elf flying over her head. She was moving to catch him when he flipped in midair and landed on his tiptoes on top of the ruined catapult.

  “Did you see that?” SB cried, pointing at his pose. “I’m like freaking Legolas here!”

  Tina laughed. “Thanks, SB,” she said, pointing at the skeleton that wasn’t currently reeling blindly with a purple cloud over its head. “Play with that one for a minute. I need my sword and shield if we’re to have any chance here.”

  SilentBlayde saluted and leaped at the towering undead knight, smacking the skeleton across the knees with his left-hand sword as he landed. It looked like a solid hit, but the ten-foot-tall monster barely noticed. It was still locked on Tina, almost trampling the slender elf in its rush to get to her.

  “Umm, Roxxy?” SB said nervously as he danced back. “You kinda still have its attention. Looks like aggro system still works.”

  “Just stun lock it,” Tina ordered, looking longingly past the skeleton at the crater where she’d gone down earlier.

  The ninja mask hid his expression, but Tina could hear the panic in SilentBlayde’s voice. “I’m trying, but there’s no interface! I’m used to having all my macros and mods for abilities. I don’t remember how to activate everything by gesture only!”

  Tina gaped at him. “What? How’d you use the blinding night powder, then?”

  “It’s just a packet I throw! There was one in my belt!”

  “I told you running all those mods was a bad idea!” she cried, ducking the skeleton’s sword as it swung over SB’s head. “This happens to you every expansion!”

  They danced back and forth, with the monster striking at her while SB harassed and parried in between. A few feet away, Tina could already see the night powder’s purple haze thinning around the other skeleton’s head. Losing her patience, she leaned down and wrenched the lower half of the old stone signpost she’d cracked when she’d first woken up out of the ground. She was about to throw the hunk of rock at the skeleton’s face when SB sheathed his left sword.

  Pausing with her rock held high, Tina watched in amazement as SilentBlayde pulled a glowing crystal bolo out of one of his many pockets and whipped it at the active skeleton. As the bolo twined around the monster’s exposed ribs, the crystal ends crashed together, and electricity coursed over the skeleton, immobilizing it.

  “Three seconds!” SB yelled as he pulled his sword back out.

  Tina dropped her rock and dove, sliding past the immobilized skeleton to scoop up her sword from the broken ground behind it. She was going for her shield next when the crackling lightning went quiet, then the leather cord of SB’s bolo snapped like a whipcrack as the skeleton broke free.

  The night powder keeping the other skeleton at bay ran out at the same time. As the air cleared, the skeleton whirled on her and charged, screaming that horrible scream. Wincing at the sound, Tina dropped and rolled, sliding her arm into the straps of her shield. The moment the comforting weight of the wall of metal was back on her arm, she pushed herself up and leaped to the edge of the gravel pit she’d created with her stomp. Too simpleminded to go around, the skeletons both charged directly into the pit again, floundering when they hit the loose soil. Tina was bracing to meet them when SB appeared at her side.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked, gripping his blades as the skeletons struggled to climb up the rolling gravel toward them. “These guys are both two-skull rated. We’ve never beaten a pack like this with only two people.”

  “Forget the game,” Tina said, gripping her beloved sword and shield tight. “We’ve got to fight for real now.”

  SilentBlayde’s confused look was lost as the two monsters reached the top of the pit and slammed into her guard. Tina grunted at the impact, but this time, her feet stayed firm, stopping them cold.

  “Sorry, assholes,” she said through gritted teeth, glaring over the top of her shield into the burning eyes of her enemies. “We’re not dying today. SB!”

  The elf was moving before she said his name. In a single graceful motion, he leaped over her head to land on the closest skeleton with both swords, sending bone chips flying as he began carving into it from behind.

  Chapter 2

  James

  James Anderson should not have been playing FFO tonight.

  Work had been worse than usual. He’d pulled his shoulder saving a student from a bad throw at beginners’ jujitsu class, and now his whole arm was on fire. It was his fault, too. He never should have agreed to teach four classes in a row, but the money had been too good to pass up. Now, ten hours later, his muscles were shot, his brain was fried, and the dread of having to get up and do it all over again tomorrow was throbbing like an ulcer in his stomach. A smart man—a responsible man—would have gotten his sleep while he could, yet here James was, sitting on his futon, staring at his VR helmet like a fucking addict.

  His calloused fingers tightened on the sleek black plastic. He’d ripped it off his head after Tina had hung up on him mid-apology, not that that was new. He’d apologized to her a million times over the years, and she hadn’t listened to any of those, either. Yet another reason he should put the helmet down. If he logged into the game, guilt would eventually drive him into raiding with the Roughnecks. Staying up late running a super-stressful dungeon was the last thing he needed, but he couldn’t stop looking at the inviting glow of the Forever Fantasy Online screen shining inside the helmet’s visor.

  He wanted to play. Bad idea or not, he wanted to escape to the beautiful world in which the disaster his life had become didn’t exist. The one place where he could pretend he wasn’t a failure, if only for a few hours.

  “Addict,” he muttered, shoving the VR helmet over his head.

  The moment the warm plastic covered his head, his tiny bedroom vanished, replaced by the endless blue-black expanse of the character-selection screen. As his eyes adjusted to the sudden change, bright 3-D images of all his characters appeared in front of him and immediately started jumping and waving, pointing at their chests in a “Pick me!” gesture whenever James turned his head in their direction. After considering his options for a moment, James lifted his arm to point at the first in the line, his main character. The
motion sensors on his helmet detected the movement, and the tall, catlike jubatus Naturalist pumped his fist in victory. Bad decision made, James lowered his body carefully onto the bed as his characters vanished, leaving him staring into the swirling dark of the loading screen.

  “Initiating Sensorium Engine,” said a soothing female voice. “Please relax. Full immersion in 10… 9… 8…”

  The countdown moved from the helmet’s speakers to inside James’s head as the virtual reality expanded to take over his senses one at a time. By the time the countdown hit “1,” he was barely aware of his body or the hard bed beneath it. Then the soothing voice reached zero, and James sucked in a breath as he fell into complete sensory deprivation.

  He was no longer in his bedroom. He was standing in a translucent white bubble surrounded by a vast starscape that stretched to infinity. It was unspeakably beautiful, but the anti-deprivation loading sphere was actually James’s least favorite part of the entire FFO experience because he couldn’t move. He supposed a few moments of paralysis were a small price to pay for the miracle that was full-sensory VR, but it still felt terrifyingly like being trapped inside his own body, held down by a force he couldn’t understand or fight.

  Thankfully, the servers were on the ball tonight. After only a few seconds, the Sensorium Engine succeeded in taking over his kinesthesia, and James’s body was returned to him. He was hopping from foot to foot just for the sake of moving again when the soothing system voice spoke his favorite words.

  “Loading world.”

  James’s face split into a grin. No matter how many times he logged in, this part never got any less cool. As the game connected, the FFO servers took over control from his helmet, and the endless stars vanished as the inside of the transparent loading bubble became mirrored. Smiling like a doofus, James watched as his reflection grew taller. His face flattened, and his eyes became slitted. Claws and fangs appeared, followed by fur, ears, and a tail. The sequence was accompanied by a full orchestral score complete with martial brass and pounding drums. A dazzling show of bursting golden lights completed the celebration of his log-in, and James silently thanked whichever developer had decided to make this happen inside the privacy of the loading sphere. If anyone saw how happy the transformation into his character made him, he’d have died of embarrassment.

  “Connection complete,” the system voice said proudly. “Good luck, hero!”

  As the words faded, the mirrored ball of the loading sphere vanished, and the world of Forever Fantasy Online blossomed around him.

  It was morning in the game. Bright sunlight streamed through the white hide walls of the large yurt he’d logged out in yesterday. It was just an empty tent in a low-level quest hub no one went to anymore, but in his own mind, James liked to pretend it was his character’s home. He could have bought an actual place on the player housing islands, but the disconnected dimension of floating mansions felt too artificial. As part of the game world, the yurt felt much more real, even if it wasn’t actually his.

  Smiling, James stretched his long arms over his head to settle himself into his character’s catlike body only to stop again when the movement made his injured shoulder twinge. Pain in full immersion was a bad sign. Yet another reminder that he needed to take it easy tonight. A quick glance at his friends list showed that Roxxy and SilentBlayde were both still in the Deadlands, but neither had messaged him yet. He was reaching for the tent flap to head outside and catch a flight to the Verdancy to see if he couldn’t sneak his way into that unfinished zone before they did when a sudden pain stabbed into his chest.

  Gasping, James dropped to his knees, clutching his ribcage, which felt as though it were full of knives. The agony quickly spread down his limbs, filling his entire body with pain. He was trying to breathe through it when his head went WHAM, then SPIN, then WHAM again, making everything go blurry as he pitched forward onto the floor of his tent.

  When he came to again, every perception he had was ratcheted up to eleven. His skin burned, tickled, and itched all at once. Every fine hair of the hide rug he’d fallen on stabbed like a needle, and his ears were being hammered by the cavernous whooshing of his own breath. Even the normal dustiness of the yurt was like a sandstorm crammed up his nose, drowning him in the musty scents of earth, leather, and grass.

  Cracking his eyes open was like looking straight at the sun, but closing them didn’t help, either. Even with his eyelids shut, there was a world of dazzlingly colored streamers drifting in the dark behind them. While not as bright as actual sunlight, the luminescence still overwhelmed James’s vision, making everything blur together into a swirling, prismatic soup.

  Chest heaving in panic, James frantically waved his hand in the log-out command, but instead of hearing the familiar bing of the interface, he felt his arm collide with the tent’s wooden support pole, causing him to yowl in pain. Desperate and confused, he tried again, going slowly this time to make sure he did it right. But though he was certain he hadn’t made a mistake, there were no familiar chimes of his fingers passing through the virtual buttons of the interface. He didn’t even hear an error.

  “Help!” he yelled, thrashing on the ground. “GM! Stuck! Report! Emergency! 911!”

  James tried every voice command he could think of, but nothing and no one responded. That left only one option. It took a long time—he couldn’t see, and it was hard to tell where his too-long arms were now—but eventually, he managed to cup his hands over his ears to trigger the emergency logout.

  Hard-quitting out of full sensory immersion would leave him barfing on his bedroom floor, but James would gladly take a few hours of dump shock to escape whatever was going on. Unfortunately, triggering the emergency log-out required absolute stillness, which was difficult when all you wanted to do was writhe on the ground. There was no other way out, though, so James forced himself to concentrate, clamping his hands tight over his ears as he silently counted to twenty. Then thirty. Then sixty.

  When he passed a hundred, James dropped his arms with a curse. Whatever malfunction had caused the interface to disappear must have disabled the emergency log-out as well. Good for him there was more than one way to dump out.

  “Start Console,” James said in a croaking voice then paused. Normally, the game would ding to let him know the voice command had worked. Now, of course, there was nothing, or maybe he just wasn’t able to hear it over the deafening rush of his blood in his ears. Either way, James didn’t know what else to try, so he kept going.

  “Command. New macro,” he said, pausing carefully after each statement. “Name, GTFO. Script start. X equals five divided by zero. Script end. Save.”

  There was no way of knowing if the system had gotten all of that, but James had made a lot of macros over the last eight years, and this one was as famous as it was simple. The UI0013 script bug had haunted FFO since launch. Certain errors in the ability macro system, like division by zero, would crash the whole damn game. He and other players had complained about it for years, but since only a tiny portion of the player base was advanced enough to care about writing their own ability scripts, the developers had never bothered to fix it. Hoping that laziness was still in play, James pressed his hands over his eyes and took the plunge.

  “Command, Run GTFO.”

  He held his breath as he finished, bracing for the dump. When nothing happened, he slammed his hands down in frustration then cried out in pain when the sudden smack of his fingers against the ground sent his heightened pain awareness into overdrive.

  Clutching his hands to his chest, James curled up into a ball on the needle-sharp rug to wait this out. It had to end sometime. He was still logged into the game, which meant someone would find him eventually. It might be his roommates tomorrow once they realized he hadn’t left his bedroom all day, but this couldn’t last forever. To boost his chances of survival until then, James focused on counting his breaths. With each intake and exhalation, he sought to make his breath the center of the universe. It didn’t d
ecrease the sensory agony, but it did help him ignore the worst of it, pushing the pain to the sides of his consciousness as he waited for this to pass.

  After three hundred breaths, James began to wonder if it was going to pass. He wasn’t sure how long this had been going on now, but it couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes. The thought of spending hours like this was almost enough to make him hyperventilate, but he caught himself at the last second, forcing his mind back to his breaths.

  By the time he reached six hundred, he thought his heart was beginning to slow down. By eight hundred, his chest definitely hurt less. His skin felt less sensitive, too, the hide rug poking him less like needles and more like normal scratchy hairs. By a thousand, the dancing lights behind his eyes were more pretty than painful, and James decided to take a chance.

  Gingerly opening his eyes, he pushed himself to a sitting position, keeping one hand in front of his face to limit the glare. Everything was still way too bright and intense, but his senses seemed to be drifting back toward normal, and he wasn’t dizzy. Encouraged, he opened a crack in his fingers, squinting into the bright-white glare until, slowly, shapes began to emerge.

  He was still in the game. Still in his yurt, even. But while that much hadn’t changed, everything else had.

  The tent’s walls were still white, but they were no longer bare. The stretched hide was now lovingly decorated with paintings of animals being hunted by jubatus: the cheetah-like people native to the savanna zone where he’d logged out. The tent’s wood support poles were also carved with intricate scenes of jubatus hunting and battling the gnolls, the other major race in the zone. Similar themes decorated the rest of the furniture that was now scattered around the once-empty tent. There was a bed now, and a bench, and woven baskets holding carefully folded stacks of lovingly mended soft-hide shirts and pants with holes at the back for the jubatus’s tails.