Metal screamed against metal, the caravan guards barely managing a defense against the blades of their hooded attackers. Horses screamed and wrenched at their harnesses, threatening to rip the carriage apart in their attempts to run for safety. It was a ballad sung between the desperate and the dangerous, and yet through it all the voice of the lumpy-faced wagon driver rang clear.
“Are you now or do you plan to become pregnant?”
Cho blinked. “How’s that?”
The man repeated himself, more insistently this time. “Are you now or do you plan to become pregnant?”
“Uh, no?” Cho confessed. “And no?”
“Do you have a history or a family history of seizures, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder?!”
“I don’t think so?” Cho scrunched her brow, glancing questioning out at the frenzied melee happening just a stone’s throw away. “So should I get out there and–?”
The driver cut her off. “Are you currently taking the drugs Metzaquin, Sycall and or PraziCon?”
“Prazi-wha?”
He slammed his fist into the side of the buckling carriage.“Godsdammit answer the question! Are you taking those drugs! Do you have a prescription for those drugs! Good men are dying out there!”
The girl flinched back. “Gah, no!”
“Are you currently”–he began ticking items off on his fingers–”The sole guardian of children under the age of two, operating or planning to operate heavy machinery, under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide, living at altitudes of over five thousand one hundred feet, or submerged either partially or completely in non-breathable liquid?”
“Oh, that last one’s new,” Bex interjected. “Everyone’s pretty sure those get added in one lawsuit at a time.”
Cho waved her hands to forestall the driver’s retort. “I’m not! I’m not any of those things! Can we hurry this up?”
The man shuddered, his eyes rolling back as the System responded to the impatience of a Player by instructing him to move things along. Then he gestured broadly towards the side of the carriage, the wall lighting up to reveal a dozen or so different types of sturdy-looking weapons. “Grab one and get out there!”
“Finally oh my gosh.” Cho snatched a dagger, shot Bex a grin, and then jumped out of the back of the carriage. “Let’s gooooo~!”
“Hm.” Mimasu tapped his quill against his still-empty scroll, mulling over a thought as Bex leapt after the other girl. At length, he tilted his head at Shin. “Is our world insane and stupid?”
“Yes,” Shin grumbled. “But it’s the only one we’ve got. So.” The kobold leaned forward, sticking his head through the window separating the cargo hold from the carriage box. “Hey, you. Mustache.”
The lumpy-faced carriage driver seemed surprised that anyone might still want to talk to him. “Uh? Yes?”
Shinn jerked a thumb towards the combat raging all around them. “Do you want us to help out with that, too?”
“Um.” The man swallowed. “The caravan is in danger. It’s those cultists!”
“Well sure, but…”–Shin craned his head around, his eyes drinking in the rumpus–”Are we really in danger?”
Mustache’s eyes bulged slightly in their sockets as he swallowed again. “This, um, that is, they’re attacking this close to the village. They’re getting bolder.”
“Right right, got it.” Shin pulled himself back from the window, waving for the others to follow as he hopped down from the carriage. “Hanbun, you see that right?”
“Hrm.” One of the Banken’s ears quirked to the side as she dropped down beside Shin, slipping her blade cautiously from its sheath. “You mean the fighting?”
“Don’t think we can call it that,” Wren grunted, the elf’s hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword. “Not really. At least, I’ve never been in a fight like this.”
Shin hadn’t, either. At a glance, the situation was dire: the outnumbered guards and merchants of the caravan were putting up a valiant defense against the cultists, protecting their wounded and goods as best they could. But neither cultist nor guard seemed to be able to land a telling blow, the wounds of the injured never seemed to take a turn for the worse, and the tide of battle seemed to be permanently stuck on the tipping point.
Hanbun nudged Shin with her elbow. “Look there.” The Schemer followed her gesture just in time to see a cultist notch a flaming arrow, take careful aim at a carriage barely thirty feet away, and let loose to just barely miss the highly flammable wooden vehicle. Unperturbed, the cultists tried again and just barely missed again, and Shin was entirely confident that if he stood watch for ten thousand attempts he would see ten thousand more near misses.
“So it’s all just a play?” Hanbun wondered. “I guess whoever makes these places doesn’t want it to be possible for the Players to fail at their very first attempt at being a hero, or something.”
On the matter of first-time heroics, Cho seemed a little unsure of herself. “So, uh,” she breathed, eyes darting around the battlefield, “what am I supposed to be doing now?”
“Help out however you want!” Bex threw out an arm, indicating their entire surroundings. “We could fight these cultists, or go try to heal the wounded, or try and get the horses under control…anything, really. The System’ll take note of the way you want to impact the world, and use that as a data point for Classes and stuff.”
Right, now Shin saw the shape of things. Everything about this clearly scripted fight was balancing on a razor’s edge because the System couldn’t guess what the Player would decide to do.
So if the Player decided to personally fight the cultists, that would retroactively become where they’d been needed the most. But if they went to tend to the wounded, Shin had a suspicion that the Citizen guards would muster the strength to throw back the cultists all on their own.
Cho tilted her head. “So I can just do…whatever to help the caravan?”
“Yep!” Bex confirmed, flashing the elf a thumbs up. “Anything you want!”
“Um, okay.” The demigod-turned-Player bounced on her heels for a moment, the endless possibilities of true freedom of choice racing across her face. Then, she threw herself towards the nearest cultist with a triumphant cry. “Hiyah!”
It happened so quickly that Shin was almost uncertain that it had happened at all. But when Cho grabbed two handfuls of the cultists’s pants and wrenched them down, leaving the previously intimidating man standing in his underclothes with his trousers bunched up around his ankles, the System Itself paused.
hm, Shin could almost hear the System thinking. no one’s ever done that before.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
And then, before another flicker of time could pass, the System decided to roll with it.
“Yes, that’s it!” one guard shouted
“Pull their pants down!” another joined in.
“Embarrass them! They’ll be too ashamed to continue their attack!”
The caravan defenders immediately rallied, following Cho’s lead as they began to pants their foes in tandem. The once deadly assault of the cultists was soon reduced to a pratfalling, pantsless full retreat as they stumbled their way back into the woods.
“You’ll pay for this!” one of the cultists screamed over his shoulder, doing his best to sound intimidating while running away bare-legged in a duck walk. “You’ll see! The Great Priest will make you all pay!”
As a cheer broke out among the merchants and guards, Shin could feel Wren’s eyes burning into the side of his face. “If you think I’ve got an answer for all of this, general,” the kobold deadpanned, “I’m going to have to disappoint you.”
The weathered elf grunted. ‘There has never been a moment in my entire life that I have not been too old for this shit.”
Cho certainly seemed pleased with how things had played out, the girl beaming with impish delight as the lumpy-faced wagon driver joined them. “That was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” he confessed, pressing a cloth to the wound an arrow had gouged across his arm. “But they’ll be back.”
“Can’t say I liked the sound of this ‘Great Priest’ character, either,” added another member of the caravan, this one a hard-boned woman with a mace in one hand and a pair of cultist pants in the other. “We’ve got to let the mayor know. How much of the supplies did we save?”
“Just two packs,” the wagon driver automatically replied, not even bothering to check. “Barely enough to get Brightly through a week, let alone the whole season.”
Hm. Shin didn’t recall the cultists spending much time destroying the goods the caravan was carrying, but it only took a glance back to confirm the smoldering heaps that had once been sacks of dry goods and other commodities.
“Godsdamned cultists,” the woman spat, flinging the pants to the ground in disgust. “Better than nothing, I guess. But only barely.” She hefted both sacks onto the back of one of the horses, setting about unfastening the beast from its harness. “I’ll take the supplies into the village, and these heroes too. If you turn the caravan around as soon as you can, you could maybe be back with more supplies in a week. We can survive that long. Maybe.”
So this part was all scripted, then. The cultists always destroyed most of the supplies, so Brightly was always left in a precarious position: dwindling food, dangerous people lurking just outside of town, future uncertain. Shin could guess the next step himself: the caravan would leave, and it would be up to Cho to fight for Brightly’s future.
“Or, um, we could stay?”
Huh. That wasn’t what Shin expected. And the tough-looking woman didn’t seem to have expected it either, shooting the wagon driver a look. “What? Stay?”
“Yes. We don’t have to leave right away, do we?” The lumpy-face man fidgeted, seemingly unable to meet the woman’s eyes as he picked at a thumbnail. “Right?”
“Yes you do,” the woman shot back, her voice flatter and gruffer than it had been before. “The more time you waste, the less of a chance the village has.”
“But wait, see, this is to help the village though,” the man insisted, his face brightening as a thought seemingly struck him. “We’ve got our own rations! That we’d need for the trip! If we came to the village instead of leaving, we could–”
“No.” the woman intoned. “That’s not even close to enough. Go get more supplies.”
By now the guards and merchants of the caravan were all listening intently to this standoff, even the moans of the wounded falling quiet as the wagon driver took another swing. “But, oh wait, the caravan took a lot of damage. It might take a day or two to do enough repairs to–”
“Caravan’s fine,” the woman retorted, and sure enough she was right. Shin was certain that the carriages had been in significantly worse shape a moment ago, but as he looked again they seemed up to the task of another long journey. “You’ve got a long journey ahead of you. Daylight’s burning.”
“But, but…” the wagon driver’s mustache drooped as he failed to come up with another excuse. “But…can’t we just stay a little longer?” His eyebrows beetled together, a plaintive quaver coloring his voice. “Please?”
“No,” was the woman’s reply. “Get going.”
Hanbun’s ears folded back as she watched the caravan members trudge back to their stations, the group’s celebratory air now replaced with a faint but mistakable malaise. “What’s this all about?” she whispered to Shin. “That was weird, right?”
Shin silently nodded, giving his teeth a thoughtful clack. Weren’t these people Scripted? There was no way that this little confrontation had been part of some writers’ grand vision. Everyone had told him that Starting Zones were strange, but this was not precisely what he’d been expecting.
The Schemer watched on carefully as Cho hurried to the side of the morose-looking wagon driver, giving his sleeve a quick tug to get his attention. “Hey, um, we can stay a while?” the girl suggested, concern pooling in her large gray eyes. “If that’s what you really want?”
The lumpy-faced man waved her off, not bothering to look back as he heaved himself back up into his wagon’s carriage box. “No. It’s fine. The village needs supplies, and we’ve got a long ride ahead of us.” His eyes fell onto the sight of Brightly, just a little ways further down the path, staring as if it were a thousand miles away. “Another long, long ride.”
Cho frowned, but before she could respond Bex put a hand onto her shoulder. “We should probably keep moving,” the Player suggested. “The game can be pretty unsubtle when it wants you to pick up the pace.”
“Ugh, fine,” Cho huffed, moving to follow the taciturn woman as she led the supply-laden horse towards Brightly. “But that lady’s a jerk, and I’m totally going to pants her the moment I get a chance.”
“Hm.” Bex couldn’t help cracking a smile. “That’s probably not the silliest way anyone’s ever become a Red Player? But it would be close,”
Cho snorted a laugh at that, the two girls breaking into their own conversation as Shin fell in besides the woman. “What was your name again?”
“Baird,” the woman grunted, not bothering to ask Shin’s name in return. “Brightly needs these supplies. And Brightly needs to know the danger that’s coming for them.”
“Right. Definitely.” Shin slipped into silence, Bex and Cho’s whispered parley and the scratch of Mimasu’s quill the only sounds as Brightly drew closer. Then, Shin spoke up again. “The driver didn’t want to go.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Of course.” Again silence overtook the group, until again Shin raised his voice. “Why didn’t the driver want to go?”
“Brightly needs these supplies,” Baird declared, unshakable in that axiom. “Brightly needs to know the danger that’s coming for them.”
And then the group passed some invisible barrier separating the stretch of rural road that held the Starting Zone’s introductory fight and Brightly itself, and the world briefly folded in on itself.
Once it had unfolded again, Shin found himself staring in the face of a very different Baird than he had been a moment earlier. Up to this point the woman had been carved from stone, unyielding and unmovable. Now, something very close to desperation stained her craggy face. “Where’s the caravan?” she demanded, grabbing hold of Shin’s shoulders. “Did they come this time? Did they?”
“What?” Shin attempted to wriggle free, but the woman’s fingers were digging into him too tightly. “No? You insisted they leave?”
“And you just did what I said?!” She released Shin with a shove, whirling on Bex and Cho. “These ones can do anything they want!” She poked an accusing finger into Bex’s shoulder. “You stayed with them for a while after the fight, right? For a rest? Didn’t you?!”
Cho pushed her way between Baird and Bex, knocking aside her arm. “Hey lady, I tried too! But they were so depressed from the way you bullied them into leaving that they wouldn’t listen!”
Baird screwed her eyes shut at that, her fingers curling into claws as some internal war waged within her. Then she reached out and unfastened the supplies she’d tied to the horse. “Brightly needs these supplies,” she snarked, peevishly letting the bags dump onto the ground. “Brightly needs to know the danger that’s coming for them.”
She stalked off, not bothering to look back at the baffled group. “I’ll go tell whoever’s in the pub. Don’t follow me.”
Bex watched the woman go with wide eyes, tail twitching in confusion. “I never did a normal Starting Zone? But I don’t think this is how they’re supposed to start.”
“Yeah,” Cho murmured her assent, “this is weird. Not like any of the starter guides I read. Maybe we bwah~?!”
The elf clapped her hands over her mouth but was unable to stop the startled gasp that burst out from her. And once he’d spotted what she’d seen, it was hard for Shin to fault her: just up the road, at the charming little gates of the pleasant village of Brightly, what must have been the entire village had gathered. And each and every one one of them was staring directly at Cho.
Mimasu was right, but not complete. Yes, the world was insane and stupid. But it was also frequently disturbing as hell.