EVEN IN THIS desolate, mangled world, where the foundations of all things have collapsed, there were some things that endured. There still existed things of everlasting value. Whiskey, for example.
Jack had noticed the shine of bottle glass in the truck bed on a previous walk and decided to stop here, should he need the money. This is what those items of eternal value were for - to help one through rough times.
There were no longer automobiles that ran on liquid fuel and few people knew that these kinds of truck were called pickups. Jack knew. He generally knew quite a lot about the old world because he earned his living as a Walker, which meant that he roamed the Wasteland in search of old-world treasures. If he were to be honest, though, he simply liked to travel. He always dreamed of making his way to some far-off place, where no one had been before. At least, not any of the residents of the Clusters dragging out their boring, miserable existences near the Barrier of New Atrium. The problem was that the further you got in the Blighted Wasteland, the more dangerous it became. You won't get very far...
The rear tires of the pickup had sunk into a deep hole, so the cabin had gotten stuck raised toward the sky, and in the truck bed, bottle glass gleamed under a layer of dirt and mud. Jack looked around, detected nothing new on the grey plain under the grey sky... and tossed his backpack down, pulled on tarpaulin work gloves, and got busy excavating.
He raked aside the broken fragments and tugged an unearthed bottleneck out of the caked trash, then shook off several years' worth of hardened dirt. The remnants of wooden boxes turned to dust under his gloves and the infernal flies buzzed overhead. When he had reached about halfway to the cabin, he found the first intact bottle. Jack wiped it reverently with his sleeve, gently shook it to hear the sloshing of eternal value inside, checked the sunlight... and began to dig again.
Half a day's work and his haul amounted to nine bottles. Jack stowed them in his backpack, each carefully wrapped with rags. No one travelled at night in the Wasteland - he was stuck here for the night. The cabin door, naturally, was locked. He would have to break it. It was easy, as everything here had rotted away or rusted through long ago. It was odd that the glass was intact. The driver, too. There was even a half-smoked cigar hanging between the yellow teeth of his skull. In the skeleton's right hand was a revolver, in the left - a crumpled, blackened lump. Jack wondered what the dead man had grabbed when he set out on his final journey. It turned out to be a charred banknote with a barely recognizable "100" on it. The driver had thoroughly filled up on the whiskey from the truck bed - an empty bottle stood on the dashboard in front of him. Then one last cigar, lit with a hundred-dollar bill. Then... bam.
Very carefully, so as not to disturb the driver, Jack sat down beside him in the passenger seat.
"You ever been to Alterra?" he asked the man, who died God only knows how long ago. "I bet you'd love it. Judging by the end you set up for yourself here, you were an okay guy, knew a thing or two about games. Pretty classy, deciding for yourself when and how to die."
In front of the driver and Jack, through the thick patina of dirt on the windshield, a huge, red sun sagged toward the straight line of the horizon. The pickup was heading west when it broke down. Maybe it had been evening then, too, and the sun had shone like this on the driver's face as his lit his last cigar with the bill...
"Decide for yourself, when and how you die," Jack repeated, uncovering a bottle. "It has a lot of class."
He planned to deliver most of the whiskey to a merchant for a very nice sum of money, but he did open one bottle. Took a drink. He felt a pleasant wave of heat slide down his throat... and reached for the glove compartment.
"Hey, brother, I see I wasn't wrong about you!" Jack declared, pulling out a small console tangled in thin cables. He had to set aside his bottle so that he could carefully fish out the sensor gloves and blocky goggles, which were fitted with a plastic ring that wrapped around the head. "You were one of the originators! In the beta version of Alterra! I'd heard that it dated back to before the catastrophe, that we inherited it from you, our ancestors."
Jack almost reverently tried on the antique VR headset, fiddled with the sensor gloves, and carefully wound up the cluster of long sensor cables. It was a pretty unwieldy system. Nowadays, the console to enter the virtual world looked much more compact. The batteries had obviously run down. He decided to recharge the device and try to enter Alterra from the pickup driver's account. However, it could only be charged in his trailer and then... And then he could try to enter Alterra from the driver's old account.
"If you left any unfinished business, buddy, I'll try to finish it," he promised the dead man. "It can't be that fate accidentally brought us together. Nope. This is a quest line that someone thought up, up there."
Jack took another sip, his eyes narrowed at the red rays of sunset and thought: this guy brought all the most important things - whiskey and Alterra. Fantastic choice! The only choice. Definitely things of everlasting value.
* * *
ALL THE NEXT DAY, while he walked across the grey plain, Jack wondered what the late pickup driver could have left in Alterra. When the Gendemic began, it destroyed everything - daily life, culture, laws... and Alterra. Civilization survived on a few small, safe islands. Those like New Atrium. Evidently, it was to one of these splinters of the safe world that the driver was trying to escape. He brought with him only what was most important... but never made it to his destination.
Gradually, life of the survivors adjusted, namely when the alpha-citizens of New Atrium restored Alterra. They even allowed the omegas, the residents of the ghetto, to log into this wonderful world. But in the restored Alterra, just like in real life, the alphas had far more opportunities. The driver had seen a version of Alterra, where everyone had equal rights, where all the joys of the virtual world were equally available to everybody.
The Blighted Wasteland were behind him, and the Clusters of the ghetto stretched out before him. Walking through the slums, Jack could barely restrain himself from running home, so he could leave this filth and try to dive into Alterra, not through his own avatar, but through another older character - a sort of granddaddy of the virtual world. And all the while, he had to constantly look this way and that because these areas were rotten to the core.
Admittedly, even the most bat-shit crazy creeps didn't bug Jack, as a rule. That he was one of the veteran drifters was enough to scare off the riffraff. Jack took deliberate care to look menacing. Husky, slouching, with a shock of sun-bleached white hair sticking out from under a wide-brimmed hat and his face covered in scars... and, of course, a large, formless canvas cloak with dirty, frayed flaps. You could hide anything under that kind of cloak.
Today, Jack only once noticed a group of teenagers, who had stopped as he approached and begun to whisper. Dangerous guys - too puny to fight. These guys might use any dirty trick to bring you down fast, with the first hit. It was enough that he held back a step and stuck his hand under his cloak. The little suckers scattered like cockroaches. Jack liked this cloak. It always worked like a charm.
Here were the trailers, scrapped together from the trash of dilapidated buildings, iron containers, tangles of thorny bushes, and above it all - an intricate web of cables. In the distance, the shining towers of New Atrium stood, petitioned off from the poor Clusters by the unassailable Barrier wall. The fortress of the alphas, masters of Alterra.
Near his own hovel, Jack was met with another delay. When he emerged from the cluster of trailers, his neighbors came pouring out, complaining over one another that every night, Phil, after smoking his fill, would holler and scare the children. Jack internally screamed. So many obstacles on the path to important things! But he preferred to maintain good relationships with these women. They looked after his home in his absence, meaning that they scared suspicious drifters away from the trailer. It was better than any pack of guard dogs. He would have to deal with Phil, who, of course, screeched that he was singing very quietly and that he just couldn't control himself when performing. In Alterra, he was a famous bard. When he sang before crowds of critics, they all loved him - but those old geezers knew nothing about art...
Jack didn't say anything, just bent down and very pointedly picked up a rusted reinforcement rod. That did the trick. Phil changed his tune at once and began to moan that he'd try to restrain himself and sing a bit quieter.
He finally managed to shake everyone off and make it to his own trailer. He needed to eat, organize his equipment, clean the revolver from the pickup... but Jack just couldn't wait any longer. He hooked the strange device up and stared at the blinking light indicating that the batteries were charging.
The driver had been a simple fellow - the password to Alterra was written in marker on the plastic case of his console and retinal identification hadn't existed then. The camera set in the old headset didn't have that option. Not that way anymore...
While the console buzzed back to life after its decades-long sleep, Jack untangled the sensor cords. A different person wouldn't have been able to figure out this antiquated mess, but Jack was a Walker. He'd seen his share of all sorts of strange things and could imagine the thought processes of the people who had lived before the Gendemic.
The sensor gloves were obvious, and the old console also came with several sensors on cords, the longest of which attached to his ankles and others like a belt, circling his chest. It was a lightweight analogue to a virt-suit that was sensitive to the player's slightest movements and transmitted it into the form of a full-fledged virtual character.
Jack placed the sensors and put on the VR goggles. The console was ready for operation. A prompt appeared requesting him to enter a personal code and Jack typed in the string of letters and numbers that were written on the case. Finally, another prompt popped up addressed to Andrew Vigo, the character name of the console's previous owner.
"Nice to meet you, Andrew," Jack mumbled. "Let's see where you left off."
* * *
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ANDREW VIGO had left off in the dungeon of a dilapidated temple. Or maybe a palace. At any rate, the developers had had something massive and pompous in mind. It was a spacious vaulted room with columns and buttresses, built from inky black stone, and completely empty. No furniture, no signs to show what the cellar had been used for before the building above it collapsed. It was indeed destroyed - sunlight pierced through a huge hole in the dome.
Jack loved new places. Loved open spaces, the distant horizon... but he also loved all kinds of unconventional dungeons. If he had his way, he'd travel all over Alterra. For the moment, though, the only continent known to omega-players was Stoglav. However, it was huge, as even Jack hadn't discovered all its areas, not even close. His dream was to discover a new land. They had to be out there, somewhere. Fit a ship, fill it to the brim, gather a team, and set off into the uncharted virtual expanses... maybe he didn't need anything else to be happy.
Wonder how long it had been since someone visited this place? If it survived since the oldest versions of the game... perhaps, it was some kind of isolated location that could no longer be entered or exited? Or maybe just the opposite and the dungeon was standing right under everyone's nose. However, it was so neglected that it was of no use to anyone. Alterra was huge, after all, and there were many nooks and forgotten places.
Piles of stones, the fragments of broken columns and carvings, had crumbled inside, evidence that the outside walls had been demolished from above. Something large and powerful had broken into the dungeon and created the enormous hole. The pickup truck where he had found Vigo's final refuge could have easily fit through that gap.
Attention!
This version of the game is out of date. Update download in progress!
Update download in progress!
Update download in progress!
The character froze and the image of the basement was obstructed by static. He would have to wait. Jack used the time to check out the weapon and equipment slots. Andrew had reached level twenty-four and, it seemed, made a career as a warrior and adventurer.
"Twenty-four. Not much by today's standards," Jack mumbled. He had already reached level thirty-three himself and planned to keep going. "But who knows what kinds of resources there were in your time? Maybe by those standards, you were pretty awesome."
A lightweight helm and chain mail armor with some defense bonuses, nothing special. A bastard sword in the weapon slot... and a dagger. That dagger was the most interesting of all. In virt, it looked completely black, both the handle and the blade. When Jack drew it from its sheath, a murky haze flowed around the blade, as if the weapon were emitting a stream of dark mist. Conversely, it seemed to glow. The dagger radiated darkness around itself just like a candle emitted light. If he looked at it for a while, an info window would appear:
Shadowkiller Dagger
Level: Legendary
There was nothing else - no bonuses, no instructions. The ancestors had been terse, but the modern design of Alterra provided much more informative descriptions.
The updates finally finished downloading and the image smoothed out. Jack took a few steps into the basement depths, to wherever Andrew Vigo had once set out. Because that man trekked down here for something. This place might have nothing valuable, or there might be something there. Jack walked around several pieces of black debris covered with carvings. Ahead, something glittered among the stones. Jack started to move closer, but the image in front of him began to shake and an admin message floated before his eyes:
Attention!
User "Andrew Vigo", you have been absent from Alterra for 2.#?? / undefined / years.
To verify your identity, enter the six-digit code sent to your personal communication device. You have 30 minutes to verify your identity. If you do not enter the code within this period, your account will be suspended.
Aw, dammit!
Although, not surprising. Without retinal identification, you had to jump through these kinds of hoops. What was with the personal communication device? Jack checked Andrew's conversations but there was nothing resembling a six-digit code. Nothing new, except a few admin messages and a single letter. Andrew hadn't been a very sociable guy.
Out of curiosity, Jack looked at the letter since it wasn’t very long. Someone with the username Doblin-Doe wrote to Andrew:
That passage from the legend that you were asking about goes like this:
"When the Dragon God cast out the King of Demons Azeroth, he, dying, peered at his shadow and said:
'Oh, how splendid my Shadow is!'
The King of Demons let a tear of delight fall, the only tear of his entire life because Demons do not cry, and Kings least of all. This tear held within it all things, life and death, beauty and ugliness, cruelty and compassion. The tear fell onto the Shadow of the King of Demons and pierced it, like a thorn pierces silk."
There wasn’t anything else. I don't know why the hell you need the overwrought crap that the writers come up with.
After he finished reading, Jack suddenly realized - he hadn't done what he should have from the very first minute! It could only be explained by the fact that he was in the body of someone else's character and it still didn't feel like his own. Remembering himself, Jack opened the map of Alterra. He examined it - oh, boy, he was very far north. At the edge of the Fashir marshes. Jack's own character hadn't made it this far north and this area remained uniformly grey for him. In Andrew's version of the map, a bizarre, winding line led to this place from Svetlograd, the capital of Havian. It looked like Andrew had doggedly walked specifically to this place. Jack pushed on, avoiding the debris... He had less than a half an hour to figure out what he was looking for.
Frowning, Jack looked at an area on the map near the spot where the tiny triangle representing his character was. Ruins... and a portal. It was the familiar silver circle of a standard portal, but with a golden lock superimposed on it. A closed padlock. What did that mean?
He shook his head, gathering his wits. It was a locking spell. This sometimes happened when a guild or high-level player discovered a new area or, more likely, got stuck in a place without people, then performed the ritual to seal the local portal, making it difficult for others to use. To ensure no one would block all public portals, this ritual was expensive enough that people didn't use them too often.
Did that mean that there was someone else here? He looked around, thinking. No, not necessarily. The portal may have be locked and whoever did it was outside somewhere. Or he was in here... it was impossible to tell.
Closing the map, Jack looked very closely at the glittering thing he had seen earlier. Dim light filtered in through the opening above, rainbow sparkles playing off the small object that was lying on the floor among the black debris.
He cautiously approached it and bent over a crystal-clear droplet, incongruously clean and transparent in the surrounding black stone.
Tear of the Demon King Azeroth
Level: Epic
Attributes unknown
Epic level? That was high level. Essentially the highest. Epic-level items in Alterra could only be what they called "prime relics". Only a few of them existed and dated back to when the gods created the world. Jack couldn't even begin to imagine how much such a thing might be worth.
"Well, well... So this is where the final battle of Azeroth and the Dragon God happened..."
Now Jack looked around the ruins with a great respect. None other than the Dragon God himself made that hole in the roof when he had caught up with his enemy in his last refuge. It was in exactly this spot where the King of Demons last saw his shadow.
"Whatever its attributes, an epic-level item can't be cheap," Jack said, resuming his conversation with the long-dead pickup driver, "And I understand why you died as you did. In fact, it's a shame. To reach your objective, to see the epic-level Tear, and - bam! The world falls to pieces, the electricity cuts off, Alterra won't load... and then your pickup flies into a pit... Fate - what a bitch!"
Jack bent over the Tear.
"All that's left is to figure out how to get my avatar here. Judging by your map, that old thing, there is a portal here, but I can't use it because if I sign on my account, this portion of the map will be grey to me. Moreover, the portal is locked, which means that neither of us can use it. To come to you here, I’d have to stomp across half the continent. Maybe while I still have Vigo's avatar, I can take the Tear somewhere and hide it bit better within half an hour? I don't know when I'll be able to come for your legacy."
The Tear was one quarter the size of a fist and was quite light, but when he tried to lift the artifact, he felt resistance. The sensation didn't last long, though, the bottom part simply had a conical shape and was stuck in the inky stone. It wasn't too difficult for Jack to pull the tip out of the pile.
Then the floor came to life. A concentric wave ran across the coal-black tiles. Something made of the same ebony as the room gathered toward the center, toward the little recess left by the Tear. The thing was swelling and rising... Jack backed away and a dark figure, similar to a man draped in a loose cloak, began to grow out of the floor in front of him. It was black, of course. The stooping, silent figure grew and grew... the Shadow! It was the Shadow of Azeroth himself!
"Like a thorn pierces silk," he remembered the words from the letter! The Tear had pinned the Shadow to the floor, the darkness fastened to black stone, and Jack had pulled that "pin", releasing the Shadow. Although the Shadow hadn't done anything threatening so far, Jack sensed danger. A dark, deadly danger. Such a malevolent and insidious creature like the King of Demons couldn't possibly depart this world without one final trick. And Alterra's writers, even those who wrote the texts for the beta version long ago, could not pass up the opportunity. Fortunately, Andrew Vigo had prepared for this. Remembering the black dagger, Jack yanked it out and when the dark, stooping figure lurched at him, he met it with a long thrust.
The dagger pierced the blackness. The impact of steel against the Shadow was noticeable but... nothing happened. The Shadow continued to move toward a recoiling Jack. Who was backing away, stammering:
"Hey, that's not fair! Shadowkiller should have killed you! What the hell?!"
He turned and ran to the opening, shot up the rockslide toward the light and tumbled out. It turned out that, in his hurry, he had climbed the pile of rubble up to the second floor. The ground was three meters below him, so that fall came hard.
You receive damage!
You lose 4 hit points!
To hell with it, it would regenerate.
Judging by the clatter of stone behind him, the Shadow wasn’t far behind. Jack glanced around. Ruins stretched out around the destroyed palace. Fallen columns, statues, remnants of walls - everything was black. Even the creeping shoots entangled in the rock. There was no end in sight to this demon city’s boneyard.
Winding through the ruins in the direction of the sealed portal, Jack glanced behind. The Shadow was headed for him and picking up speed. Daylight didn't scare it. Here it touched a piece of stonework in the place where its shoulder should be under the dark cloak, and rocks sprayed out in different directions. The Shadow raced forward, colliding with remains of the building and destroying everything that it came across.
Among the ruins ahead, Jack noticed movement and swerved toward it. The sound of smashing stone continued, the Shadow on his tail.
On the sunny lawn between the boulders, goblins were scurrying about, little green gargoyles. Jack ran straight for them. The one closest to him let a black cobblestone fall, which skidded away, and bared its yellow teeth. Jack kicked it with his boot and kept running. The rest of the little beasts scrambled after him but the Shadow crashed into them. Jack, already turning the corner of a squat building, heard a piteous squeal. He ran along the wall, hunting for a place he could slip into and hide.
The Shadow tarried a bit. Goblins were screeching so pathetically, that it was clear it wouldn’t tarry long. Then a small green figure flew over the wall that Jack was running along. A dead goblin flipped in the air, its limbs swinging limply, and smashed to the ground. The squealing ceased. Jack, not stopping, slipped into a moss covered crevice, turned again, then once more. It looked like he had lost it, but probably not for long.
Attention!
User "Andrew Vigo", to confirm your identity, enter the six-digit code.
Time remaining: 20 minutes.
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