“Wanna fill him in on the short version?” I asked.
I was about to despair of finding what I was looking for when my eyes fell across something interesting.
“Trelor’s Oddments?" I asked. "What the heck is that?"
"Trelor's Oddments?" Keia repeated. "Never heard of it."
"It's down in the Magic District,” I said. “That sounds promising."
“This town has a Magic District?” Kris asked. “And are either of you going to tell me what the hell Spellcrafting is?”
"You think you're going to find a forge in the Magic District?” Keia asked. "What are you smoking? That’s a bunch of wizards and mages and magic types running around in their robes blowing stuff up with powers beyond the understanding of man. Hardly anyone goes there because of the risk of getting blown up, or turned into a newt.”
“They got better,” Kris muttered, earning a snicker from me.
“It says there’s a crafting hub there,” I said. “Maybe they’ll…”
“Trouble,” Kris growled.
I looked up from the map to see a bunch of Horizon Dawn tabards standing close enough to be threatening while staying far enough away that they wouldn’t raise any goblin guard’s ire. Though a glance beyond the Horizon tabard showed goblins also hanging back a little from the Horizon people with hands on their short swords like they were open for business.
It occurred to me that maybe it wasn't the greatest idea to be talking about anything to do with my crafting endeavors where they could listen in. Sure we were talking in party chat, but it only took one slip of the mind, literally, to push our conversation into general chat which would seriously fuck things up.
"Let's get a move on," I said. "I don't like the company around here."
"Good call," Keia said. "Let's get the hell out of here."
“Aww, are you sure I can’t smash one of their heads in?” Kris asked.
A few of the Horizon Dawn people frowned. Meanwhile Kris grinned. She’d sent that one out in general chat intentionally. Which was yet another illustration of why it was a bad idea to be standing here having this conversation. What if she forgot to switch back?
“Come on,” I said. “Act casual. Like we’re out for a stroll and don’t see them.”
“Pretty hard to act like that after what Kris just said,” Keia muttered.
So we turned and walked. Which wasn’t a great escape plan, but I figured they wouldn’t try anything with the guards obviously watching. Then again I’d underestimated Horizon Dawn’s stupidity a few times before and been unpleasantly surprised.
And it looked like they didn’t care that there were goblins out looking for an excuse to turn them into pincushions, because they followed right along behind us. They didn’t even bother to look like they were sneaking around.
"Looks like we still have company," Kris said.
"Fucking great," Keia said. "They're probably hoping to catch us unawares off in some back alley where they can fuck us up.”
"Wholesome bunch, these Horizon Dawn assholes,” Kris said.
“Idiots, too, with all those goblins watching,” I said.
"You don't know the half of it," Keia said.
"So what do we do?" I asked. “I’m not worried they’ll be able to catch us, but I also don’t want them following us to see my crafting.”
"You keep walking," Keia said. "Make yourself look like a nice juicy target and walk into a side alley. Me and Kris will take care of the rest."
"Are you out of your elven mind?" I asked.
Kris grinned. “How does it feel being the bait for a change?”
“You’re going to be the bait too,” she said. “Keep walking when he ducks into his side alley. I want to split them up. The better to shoot their asses.”
Kris’s face fell.
Then Keia was gone. I wanted to protest, but it wasn't like I could stand and argue with nothing.
"For the record," I said into party chat where I knew she could hear me. "I didn't agree to a single bit of this, and I'm not happy about it!"
“The more you stand around talking to nothing the more chance you give away that we're doing something even if they can’t hear what you’re saying,” Keia said. "So you might want to shut up and start looking like a big juicy newbie who’s easy to kill sooner rather than later."
I said a few choice words about her not giving me much of a choice in being the "big juicy target," but I also knew I needed to play along since I didn't have much choice. I’d pulled this with Kris often enough that I knew the drill. From the way she was grinning ear to ear and waggling her eyebrows at me she was enjoying the ever loving fuck out of me being put in this situation.
I could only hope Keia was just as crafty as I was when it came to making up a plan on the fly. Otherwise we were going to be in some serious trouble.
“Remind me to never do this to you again,” I growled at Kris.
“I remind you every time you do it to me,” she said. “I don’t think this time is going to be any different though.”
“Probably not,” I said as I walked along with her trying to find an obvious alley to duck into as we got closer to the Magic District.
Besides, she was right. There wasn’t a chance I wasn't going to do something like this to Kris ever again just because I was in the boiling pot right now.
Putting Kris in awkward and potentially life-threatening situations in the name of pulling off a good plan was one of the things I enjoyed the most about playing games with her. Even Kris tended to agree, eventually, if the way she continued to allow herself to be put up as the sacrificial offering was anything to go by.
"Okay. I need to look like a nice juicy noob who's waiting to get the crap kicked out of me in a dark alley," I said. "That shouldn't be too hard. Especially since I am a complete noob and they could easily kick the crap out of me if they wanted to."
The crowd seemed to be thinning out as we got closer to the Magic District. That seemed about right. In my experience there weren't all that many people who were interested in a nice squishy magic glass cannon when they could get out there and smack stuff around with sharp pointy weapons or thick blunt weapons.
Or maybe the lack of people was simply the fates aligning and creating the perfect opportunity for me and Kris to get ganked.
Whatever the reason, I wasn't sure if I should be happy or upset that I’d suddenly found myself in a much thinner crowd.
“I think I see my exit up ahead,” I said, looking at an alley that, oddly enough, ran right behind this Trelor’s Oddments place and the crafting hub for the Magic District. Not that there was any way to get to that crafting hub from here. The alley was a dead end.
I really hoped Keia knew what she was doing.
“Good luck,” Kris said.
“You too,” I said.
“No worries for me,” she said. “I’m used to it. Try to dodge when they shove their daggers at your kidneys, by the way, that seems to be one of the premade combat moves the stealth types use.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach as I imagined a dagger sinking into my kidneys. Virtual or otherwise, pain slider aside, that sounded like it’d hurt like a motherfucker.
I turned into a surprisingly well-maintained alley. Not the dank and dark alley good for some surreptitious roughing up I’d been hoping for. Though on second thought I wasn’t sure why I should be hoping for a place that was conducive to having a bunch of people roughing me up.
Intricate stonework fit together on either wall. The one nearest me was carved in the shape of a wizard calling down fire from the sky. We’re talking the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been out of place airbrushed on the side of an ancient conversion van back when internal combustion vehicles were still a thing, and subsequent generations of nerds were created within.
"Okay then," I said. "I'm here. What are you doing Keia?"
"So you are here," a mysterious voice said from behind me.
A myste
rious voice that didn’t belong to Keia or any of the Horizon Dawn assholes I’d run into so far, though that didn’t mean this wasn’t a new Horizon Dawn asshole. I turned towards the shadows gathering in the back of the alley, though that seemed like an odd place for shadows to be gathering considering the sun was almost overhead and more than capable of beaming its nuclear fire down into the alley.
"Though my name isn’t Keia,” the voice said from behind me and towards the alley entrance. “It is nice to finally meet you, Conlan.”
I jumped and turned from my inspection of the shadowy back wall. And found myself facing a man who looked an awful lot like the wizard depicted on the alley wall.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Nice to meet you too," the wizard said. "It's good to see manners are still alive and well in the younger generation."
I looked the man up and down. He wore long robes and a hat that was just a touch too short to have the classic Merlin vibe to it. Also his beard wasn't long, flowing, and white. Rather it was close cropped. More of a bright orange Van Dyke than a traditional wizard beard.
Which had me wondering if this guy was a good wizard, or a bad wizard. That sort of facial hair was usually associated with asshole mages who preferred using their powers to mess with heroic transplanted football players trying to interrupt their plans for universal domination and not the friendly good sort of wizard who did nice things for their friends like handing out oddly flavored jellybeans or singlehandedly taking on a balrog.
"Well you already know who I am," I said. “Now who the hell are you?”
I tried to project a confidence I didn’t feel. Especially when Horizon Dawn was at my back and Keia would be appearing any moment now to take out anyone attacking me. I hoped.
The problem being I wasn’t sure if this guy was attacking me or not, and I had the strange certain feeling that attacking him would be a bad idea.
“I do know quite a bit about you, Colin” the wizard said.
I jumped. This guy knew my real name. I mean sure Torian and company also knew who I was, or at the very least they probably strongly suspected they knew who I was, but I didn’t like some random asshole knowing who I was.
“So it seems only fair that you tell me who you are?” I asked. “Maybe in and out of the game?”
This guy had “player character” written all over him, though oddly enough when I tried to inspect him nothing came up. Which had me wondering what the hell he was, but I figured we could start with a name.
"I am Trelor,” the wizard said. "And I was hoping you would make your way to my little neck of the woods here. Or my little corner of the town. Whatever. My part of the game.”
Okay. He knew this was a game. Which meant there had to be a human behind the wizard, right? Unless the machines had risen while I was in here, which seemed unlikely since I was still alive. Unless they wanted to trap us in a game in a Matrix style apocalypse instead of the kind of apocalypse that featured Schwarzenegger killing shit well past his prime and long after the world had stopped caring about the franchise that launched his movie career.
"Right," I said, suddenly figuring it might be a better idea to take my chances with Horizon Dawn than to stay around this enigma who knew who I was. "Well I've kind of got some people who are after me and some friends who are trying to kill them, and I know they're not going to like it if they see me chatting with strange wizards, so…"
"You mean those friends?" Trelor said, gesturing towards the end of the alley.
I wheeled around just in time to see the assholes from Horizon Dawn who'd been tailing me looking down at the alleyway. Right at me. Us.
They should’ve seen us. Only they stared right through us. Obviously something was cloaking us from those assholes.
I wheeled around and faced the youngish wizard again. I looked at him with a newfound respect, and a healthy touch of fear. This time when I spoke my voice was almost reverent. I got the feeling I definitely wasn’t looking at a mere NPC, and I didn’t know what to make of it.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"A friend," Trelor said. "Now come. Join me in my shop. I can assure you no one will bother you while we have a chat about some of the new abilities you’ve discovered.”
45
Trelor’s Oddments
Trelor the Magnificent leaned back and eyed me. Like he was eyeing me long enough that the moment started to get a little uncomfortable. Finally he spoke.
“Y’know it’s frightfully convenient that you came to me rather than making me go out into the world to try and find you,” he said.
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of a mysterious figure from within a video game going out into the world to find me. That sounded like the kind of thing a Horizon representative might say.
Two days ago the thought of someone representing Horizon showing up in Lotus Online would’ve seemed ridiculous, but I’d learned a lot since then.
So I wasn’t going to give anything away until I knew more about this guy and what he wanted from me.
“Oh yeah?” I responded. “It would’ve helped if I had some idea you were looking for me in the first place.”
Trelor smiled. “Yeah, well I figure anyone clever enough to fulfill the requirements to access the Spellcrafting system would be the kind of person to eventually head to one of my shops in one of the many magic districts that populate the towns and cities of the Lotus world.”
“One of your shops?” I asked.
There was a lot to unpack there, but I figured I’d focus on the most obvious thing first. Especially when I didn’t know who or what this guy was. He sure as hell wasn’t a player. There was another option that was the obvious answer, but that seemed impossible.
I glanced around his shop. It was a one room deal, with bubbling and glowing potions and magical reagents, and a small bookshelf dedicated to magical tomes.
Trelor sat behind a desk covered in glowing crystal balls. Most of them glowed with various colored mists that made them look like props from The Wizard of Oz or the original Star Trek, but there was at least one crystal ball that looked like it held some sort of code in green text on a black backdrop.
“Yeah, my shop is the same no matter what town you’re in,” he said, then frowned. “Some of the people in the game design department got pissy with me that I was copying and pasting into areas where this shop’s look didn’t fit, but they shut up when I pulled seniority on them.”
I shivered. Yeah, that impossible answer was seeming more and more likely. This guy wasn’t NPC, player character, or Horizon representative.
“Pulled seniority?” I asked, happy to let this guy keep right on talking as long as he wanted to.
“Yeah, well it helped that I was just as relentless at ignoring the city planning people as the city planning people were about bitching in emails,” he said. “Seniority didn’t hurt.”
“Right,” I said. I figured it was time to ask the obvious question. “So I’m assuming that means you work for Lotus?”
“Of course I work for Lotus!” he said, slamming his hand down on a desk and causing a crystal ball filled with a glowing green mist to go tumbling off the edge of his desk where it shattered and released a small mushroom cloud of that same green mist.
“Um, that’s not going to hurt me, is it?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t,” Trelor said, then waved a hand and the thing disappeared. “Better safe than sorry, though. I put some stuff in here because it looked pretty. Didn’t bother to check whether or not it could hurt someone without immunity.”
“Right,” I said. “So you work for Lotus and you’re telling me you work for Lotus. Are you a gamemaster?”
“Gamemasters,” he said with a snort. “Minimum wage keyboard jockeys who spend all their time doing low-level tech support for idiot gamers who can’t figure out how to play the game properly, chasing after bugs the developers haven't bothered to stamp out because they’re putting out real fires, or babysitting players who can’t g
et along with each other without someone official laying the smack down.”
“So that’s a no on the gamemaster thing?” I asked.
“I’m so beyond any of those tasks,” he said.
“If you’re beyond those tasks then what are you doing here? Have I done something wrong?”
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had an up close and personal meeting with someone a little higher on the org chart than a gamemaster lately, after all. The encounter with that Horizon prick was still fresh in my mind. I figured the recent incident with blowing people up with a gem might qualify for some intervention from on high.
“I don’t know,” Trelor said, leaning over his desk and winking. “Have you done something lately that might grab the attention of those knuckle draggers down in the babysitter’s club?”
It took me a moment to realize that when he referred to the “babysitter’s club” he was talking about the gamemasters. The people who were tasked with keeping an eye on things in the game and making sure people didn’t step out of line.
“You really aren’t a GM, are you?” I asked.
“What would make you think that, Conlan?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. “Aside from the fact that I just all but told you I’m not with obvious disdain for the trained monkeys reciting from scripts because it’s cheaper to have humans do that than to develop an AI to replace them?”
I was liking this guy more and more. He was a smartass after my own heart, so I decided to respond in kind. “Well you don’t have a stick perpetually shoved up your ass like most gamemasters do.”
Trelor barked a laugh. “I think I’m gonna like you kid. And no, I’m not a gamemaster. Dealing with that shit is well below my paygrade, though some of’em might be getting close to what I make in a week this month with all the overtime they’re putting in trying to keep up with gamers exploiting this new world we’ve made for them.”
He stared at me as he mentioned exploiting the new world. I got the feeling that hadn’t been a slip of the tongue.
Spellcraft Page 34
