The Renegades

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “Well, strictly speaking, you don’t actually have to learn anything,” I recalled the players’ explanations. “You simply put in your hours and you’ll start to understand the language of Kartoss.”

  “Topography is a higher priority for us,” Chip reminded me. “If we waste time on the library too, we’ll be here till the carrots come home to roost. But if we stay true to the idea of intelligent labor division, then you can pollinate in the library while I go finish the map. You’ll be my personal interpreter later.”

  “I’d have to complete an advanced course if I want to have any hope of conveying your inconveyable wordplay.”

  “You’ll need lots of military dictionaries too,” giggled Chip. “Although, you won’t be able to choose the right reference materials without my careful guidance. All right, let’s go together. I’ll see if there’s anything interesting there.”

  My conversation with the head librarian brought good tidings: Players with ‘Bardic Lore,’ ‘Wisdom,’ and several other traits could learn languages faster than others as well as do it on their own, reading books in the foreign language or interacting with its speakers. I opened one of the Kartossian books before me and read aloud with much emotion: “Chahbah urtik abrik tyuk-matyuk geem.” I shut the book at this point: Nope. I’d rather run errands around a library then read about ‘tyuk-matyuk.’ I signed up for community service (of which there was little, owing to the surplus of library volunteers seeking to learn the new language), received a brief tutorial and wandered into the stacks to seek information about the bards.

  This turned out to be easier said than done. There were of course books about bards but…There were about thirty of them, no less, but instead of class information they were all about legends and stories featuring various bards. Sensing the pointlessness of this activity, I paged through several of them, chose one that mentioned the deeds of the Tenth and began to read.

  Chip remained beside me. He was very busy being very sincerely and very eloquently outraged. It turned out that he could only turn to the first page of the book and couldn’t go on to the next one until he’d read that first one all the way through. A player mage whittling a figurine at the library desk next to ours explained that this was the intended game mechanic. Books, with rare exceptions, had to be read sequentially from beginning to end. And only bards and players with special secondary traits could open a book to any page and flip through at will. This really got Chip’s goat and he fumed and ranted for a short while. When he calmed down, he began to open the folios and scrolls one after the other and then toss them back to their spots on the shelves with contemptuous snorts. During the last half hour, he had opened several dozen of these texts and cursed every one. Only a single one, treating of local legends, earned his tentative sympathy and was placed aside in the ‘to read’ pile.

  “There are certain authors who would do better to keep from ruining good paper with ink and limit themselves to toilet paper,” Chip shook another book. I have to admit that the writing of most of the books had led me to a dead end too. Many of them were dull, composed in a plain language, and dealt with some incomprehensible trivia. At least reading them increased my Bardic Lore. A glance in the fora brought some clarity to the matter and I hurried to show off my erudition to my partner:

  “Most of these books are required for various quests. They come down to ‘read this unbearable gibberish from beginning to end, answer the comprehension questions and you’ll get a reward from an NPC.’ And they’re written to waste the player’s time as much as possible.”

  “Bastards,” Chip rendered his verdict dumping a solid folio without much respect back onto its shelf. Next, he drew a scroll from its tube. Opening it, the pirc perused its verses and began to groan again:

  “Do they even have anything to read here? Bunch of nonsense. The author clearly suffers from a truncated lexicon and there’s even strikethroughs in places. He repeats himself every other line. ‘The sun in the heavens is the mien of the Lord, a miracle that bore the family of planets. And the sun is a miracle of the Milky Way, granted by the Lord, a miracle, a miracle of the Lord…,” he read and immediately interrupted himself: “Do you think the local astronomers know what a planet is? Or is it like in the olden days—a clockwork movement of concentric orbs and pinhole stars? Bunch of religious mumbo jumbo. Back in the Lair they tried telling me about the local brand of polytheism. I didn’t really get it, but the text doesn’t really jive with a pagan belief system. What are you staring at me like that for?” Chip asked surprised, noticing my expression.

  “Let me see that scroll,” I asked, without looking up from the holy parchment.

  “Here,” the pirc shrugged his mighty shoulders and handed me the sacred object.

  I greedily read the text, took the tube from Chip’s paws, examined it and began rummaging in my bag for the drafting kit. I could of course use the notepad in my interface but in these kinds of cases, I preferred to work the old-fashioned way—with paper and pen. The drafting set was typically used exclusively for scrolls and wasn’t much good for writing (the corporation offered fairly expensive stationary for that) but I didn’t need to take notes either. I’m a bard and bards can compose songs. This meant that we can write down musical notation. And what I was looking at was in fact musical notation.

  “I’m afraid to ask what profound wisdom you found in there,” Chip remarked, surprised by my odd activity.

  “Check out the etching on the tube,” I stuck the scroll’s container under his nose.

  “Ah the same babble here too.” The pirc scratched at the flower of life etched in the leather. “You think that the Tenth marked this scroll with his sigil? Have you received a quest ‘to incinerate the cursed text and spread its ashes to the winds?’ Because this junk doesn’t deserve anything better—even if it were autographed by all the local nobles.”

  “Have you heard of ‘solmization’ before?” I asked without glancing up.

  “Unless it’s to do with intestinal parasites…no,” Chip gibed, dispelling my illusions about his erudition.

  “Roughly speaking, solmization is a method of learning melodies by associating notes with syllables. It’s called solfeggio too. Simply put, it’s what you know as ‘do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si’—a way of naming notes.”

  “Got it,” Chip nodded. “What’s this garbage have to do with it?”

  “In the Middle Ages, an Italian music theorist named Guido de Arrezo came up with the solfeggio system and the names of the notes as we use them. Instead of ‘do’ though, he used the syllable ‘ut.’ He took them from an acrostic of a hymn in honor of John the Baptist. In the 18th century, some of the European countries changed the ‘ut’ to ‘do,’ but that’s not important. Over the intervening centuries, the acrostic was forgotten and the notes began to be interpreted differently: ‘do’ for Dominus or ‘Lord’; ‘re’ for rerum or ‘matter’; ‘mi’ for miraculum or ‘miracle’; ‘fa’ for familias planetarium or ‘family of planets’ (or the seven planets, which is the solar system); ‘sol’ for solis or ‘the sun’; ‘la’ for lactea via or ‘the Milky Way’; and finally ‘si’ for siderae or ‘stars.’ Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si…Got all that?”

  “You trying to say that these are musical notes?” the pirc poked the parchment.

  “A hidden melody. I still have to work out the articulation, dynamics, inversions and other issues, but all of this seems to be encoded in the rest of the text, the punctuation and, as you put it, the scratch marks.”

  “Say, how do you know all this?” the furball asked surprised. “My more musical buddies tend to limit themselves to power chords.”

  “I used to drink at this bar next to the conservatory. So tequila Thursday rolls around and I get blackout hammered. And the next morning I wake up with a killer hangover and perfect proficiency with musical notation. I still don’t remember exactly what happened,” I said sarcastically, getting Chip back for his earlier ‘I only use my head to eat because I’m a dumb soldier’
gibe.

  “Touché,” the pirc guffawed, comprehending. “The only thing I don’t understand is what you need to decode this nonsense manuscript for.”

  “First of all, sheer curiosity. Second of all, I believe you’ve come across something pertaining to the bards. An encoded, rare songbook, the beginning of some quest or something else perhaps. Maybe I’ll play some melody and figure out why the Tenth left his sigils all over the Tree. Or unlock some unearthly power. Or go straight to Level 100. Or get a mound of gold. Or an army of Shadow that will conquer Barliona. Who cares? Should be interesting.”

  The pirc nodded in agreement and examined the scroll with greater care.

  “Judging by the situation, my sonorous Tinker Bell, you’ll be here awhile. And in that case, I’m going to get on with our community initiative of mapping the Tree. But you owe me a recitation of this mysterious melody. I’d like to see what the hoopla is all about.”

  I spent no less than five hours trying to decode the scroll. Once the notes before my eyes began to dance their own jigs, I understood that it was time to give up on my musical inquiry for today. My head hummed, my eyes were beginning to stick together and I still needed to do some chores and rest before our party headed out to the Arras. There wasn’t any point in looking for Chip, so I sent him a brief letter and exited to reality.

  In my gig inbox I found an order from my lady goatherd, the one whose gentlemen suitors all invariably turned out to be goats or rams. It didn’t do to neglect my freelance work, so I locked myself in my room, unpicked the most recent drama and quickly rattled off a juicy message with an acerbic contents: the kind of message that doesn’t violate typical forum guidelines but at the same time really makes its recipient feel the sting of scorn. Someone would surely say ‘ugh, how revolting,’ but I don’t share that opinion. People will always insult each other, so let this happen within the bounds of censorship and with a deal of creativity—call it what you will, but it’s progress. And I’ll earn my pennies for my contribution to Internet discourse. Something has to pay the rent after all.

  Having sent the completed message, I set my alarm to give myself two hours of sleep. It would do good to clear my head before making a foray into unknown territory. And who knows how long we’ll spend in VR today?

  And I dreamed a dream of an old goat, mechanically chewing the scroll with the mysterious melody.

  Chapter Twelve

  Upon returning to Barliona, I ran past the instructors for the various trades. The mining instructor looked at me with immense doubt but taught me the basics and at the same time sold me a basic pickaxe, forcing a smile from me. The guys in the band would have a nice laugh seeing me with a pickaxe in my hand. It’s too bad that my reputation was too low to take a screenshot. But no big deal. I’ll get a chance at my selfie later.

  The herbalist doubled as the lumberjack instructor. At first the combination surprised me but the explanation wasn’t long in coming. It turned out that the biota only had one way of gathering these resources. To pursue herbalism, a player of another race had to first study the rules of harvesting the given type of plant. Daisies, for instance, had to be cut right under the bulb, whereas blue bottles had to be cut at the lower third of the stalk. If you erred with the location of the cut, then instead of an alchemical ingredient, you’d end up with a snack for some cow. As a result, players who occupied themselves with harvesting grasses and herbs, measured the plants with rulers repeatedly, made mental calculations, measured again and only then dared to snip the stalk with one quick pass of the knife. Just like carpenters in meatspace. Due to this mechanic, it was practically impossible to harvest an unfamiliar herb. The chance of harvesting it properly was close to zero. For biota, all of this was rather simpler. Being related to the vegetable world, we could simply see the right place to cut if we spent enough time looking. As the instructor explained, the higher the skill, the faster you’d see it. Accordingly, if you were trying to harvest high-level plants, the chance of finding this sweet spot was tiny, while the length of time it took to find the right plant was great. The upside was that I could harvest familiar herbs as I traveled without even pausing.

  Besides this, during the gathering of herbs and the felling of lumber, biota could identify strawberries, onions, brood buds, shoots and other vegetative wisdoms. All of these things lent themselves to cultivation and growing. It’s not that I was dreaming of starting a vegetable patch, but who knows, maybe, some greenthumbs would buy what I found from me. While I was at it, I got a quest for gathering local plant seeds—which was nice too.

  Another nice bonus was that I unlocked the passive ‘Nature Literate’ trait, which helped me identify certain plants by looking at them, as well as see which factors affected their growth (both the negative and the positive) and determine the status and needs of my green cousins. In addition, this trait allowed me to determine soil conditions and other properties. I could level up my Nature Literacy by gathering grasses and seeds, growing plants, as well as, to a lesser degree, traveling around the natural world. In general, if the opportunity presents itself, I’ll be able to chat with country folk about the coming harvest and even perhaps advise them on the best type of manure to dump in their vegetable garden. Fantasy, what can you say.

  The alchemist’s store, in addition to furnaces, alembics, and vials was furnished with a rocking chair and a respectable fireplace. The fire in the fireplace was an unusual purple color and emitted a strange odor. A biota named Paun snoozed in the chair with a heavy tome still open in his lap. The folio teetered precariously and—at last—tumbled to the floor.

  “Eh?! What?!” Paun woke and jumped from the abrupt clap.

  “Pardon me, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I was told that I could learn the basics of alchemy here.”

  “Yes, of course, of course.” Stifling a yawn, the alchemist trudged over to one of his desks and produced a hefty-looking case. “It will be one gold for the alchemy set. You need that to prepare potions, elixirs and infusions. It will be another twenty silver to unlock your specialization. Recipe scrolls are ten silver apiece. At the first skill level, there are only five available to you.”

  “I’ll take the lot.” I didn’t want to waste time and placed the money on the desk. The mysterious case, the alchemist’s set, passed to my possession.

  “Okay…” muttered Paun, patting around the folds of his cape, which had been singed in places by some chemicals. “Where are they then…? Just one minute…”

  The alchemist left the room, leaving me at a loss. For whatever reason it seemed to me that an alchemist should be more…collected? This one could easily confuse a mouse tail with a toad’s paw and cook up something nightmarish.

  The time ticked on but the scatterbrained alchemist remained absent, so I decided to examine the room around me. My wandering gaze alighted on the rocking chair.

  Item: Rocking chair. Effect: +1 XP for every hour of rocking. Class: Unique.

  I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. The devs had a sense of humor after all.

  “There,” Paun returned at long last. “Five recipes as promised.”

  Recipes learned:

  Small Mana Potion

  Description: The weakest potion—restores 20 MP.

  Crafting requirements: Alchemy Level 1.

  Ingredients: 2 cornflower stalks.

  Instruments: Alchemy set.

  Small Health Potion

  Description: The weakest potion—restores 20 HP.

  Crafting requirements: Alchemy Level 1.

  Ingredients: 2 daisy flowers.

  Instruments: Alchemy set.

  Small Stamina Elixir.

  Description: The weakest elixir—reduces Stamina cost by 5% for one hour.

  Crafting requirements: Alchemy Level 1.

  Ingredients: 4 briar berries.

  Instruments: Alchemy set.

  Ore dust

  Description: Ingredient required for certain alchemical and culinary recipes.

&
nbsp; Crafting requirements: Depending on the Alchemy level, various types of ore may be processed.

  Ingredients: 1 piece of ore.

  Instruments: Alchemy set.

  Soil Infusion

  Description: An ingredient required for certain alchemical and culinary recipes.

  Ingredients: 1 clod of soil.

  Instruments: Alchemy set.

  “Now I’ll teach you the foundations of our arcane and vaunted science.”

  To my immense relief, the lecture was brief and informative. The instructor showed me how to use the alchemist’s set and demonstrated how I could prepare a health potion. There didn’t seem to be anything complicated about this so I didn’t hang around to ask further questions—I had several other affairs to attend to. I didn’t have the time to prepare the strategic reserve of potions I needed anyway, so I bought some flasks with the finished product from Paun directly. Thankfully, this biota had no issue with selling his goods. I imagine that for low-level players, the price of five silver coins per potion would seem exorbitant, but the business Chip and I had launched allowed me to make this expenditure without much anxiety.

  I had less than an hour left before our rendezvous and I decided to try my fortune with Coleus as well. It was true that I hadn’t yet completed my class quest, but perhaps he’d answer some questions anyway?

  The tent was once again reverberating with the cello. Reed was in his former spot as if he’d never left. And yet he was now at Level 4. I didn’t see any prospective bards—either the virtuoso was making the other players shy or everyone had already tried this class and was now trying out the other options around the Tree.

  “I can see that you have still not completed my quest—although you have made progress,” Coleus remarked as soon as I sat down next to him on one of the benches.