When character creation had given Dorri a bow, she’d assumed the System knew what it was doing. She often chose snipers and archers and classes that played well without a group—sneaky ranged classes with the ability to kite anything that didn’t die before realizing she was even there. Not that she was remotely athletic in real life. She had tried archery once in high school PE, and she’d hated it less than anything else they ever made her do. She might even have liked it, if she hadn’t been surrounded by people watching everything she was doing wrong instead of having the chance to work things out for herself by herself.
The bow-wielding archer type of class was great.
The rest of this, though.
A circus was struggle enough for Dorri. Performing in front of people? But on top of that, a circus that was a front for a criminal organization?
What the fuck is up with that?
Dorri’s Origin tutorial had been awful, especially in the aftermath of what she’d been through during her last days as a living person. Logically, she understood that Redemption Wars had been repurposed in a necessarily expedient manner which had left little room for fine-tuning what parts of a person’s psyche were acceptable to use for things like building backstory or creating personally meaningful links to their in-game persona.
That hadn’t made it any easier to experience, even if the ugliness the game had picked up on was solely hers to begin with. Echoes of it returned to her now, an instinctive quickening of her breath and tensing of her muscles. Dorri breathed through it and reminded herself that she should be grateful, because she could just be flat out dead.
That helped, but in the stress of the present moment, it helped only a little.
She’d thought once her “present day” questline started, her discomfort with the situation would improve. So far, it hadn’t.
Mosaics and gilt-trimmed columns filled the covered the Garden’s outdoor halls. Open air balconies overlooked the main garden in the temple complex’s courtyard. Here and there, small alcoves cut back away from the hall, containing upholstered benches and sometimes even a flower bed or miniature fountain—places for quiet contemplation or meditation.
Dorri fought the urge to let go of Nildeyr’s arm and dash away to hide in one of those alcoves.
“It’ll be fine. Just let me do the talking.” Nildeyr added a wink to his smile.
She’d met Nildeyr almost immediately at the start of this questline, when she’d first joined the Order of Riddles. So she’d been around him long enough to know he meant what he said. He was very good at talking, and his programming made it clear he enjoyed it.
Nildeyr leaned his head conspiratorially closer to Dorri’s. “Just keep your eyes open and watch for opportunities. Jaxon said Lord Dindale carries his secret missives inside a hollow-bodied pen. You have the fake message, right?”
The slip of parchment crinkled against her palm, hidden beneath the flute. To Dorri, it felt impossible that no one would see she held it.
All depends on the roll, I guess.
But she nodded in response to Nildeyr’s question.
Nildeyr grinned, a flash of white teeth against his freckled face. Wearing an emerald green doublet that matched his eyes, he was the very vision of rakish charm.
“All we need to do is swap that for the one inside the pen.” Nildeyr said that as if it would be the simplest thing in the world.
Beads of sweat prickled across Dorri’s forehead. “I’ve never done anything like this before. Odds are—”
“The odds mean nothing.” Nildeyr gave Dorri’s hand another pat. “You’ve practiced a lot, and you do great then. You’ll be fine. I’ll be right there with you.”
Dorri considered telling Nildeyr that his reassurances reassured her not at all. But he didn’t seem an entirely bad person. NPC. Whatever. He just wasn’t the sort she wanted to run with.
Just get through this. Don’t get caught, and then get out of here and away. That’s all.
Dorri suppressed a sigh and allowed Nildeyr to guide her out of the gilded shadows of the covered walkway and down marble steps into the central garden.
At the garden’s center, a statue stood like a gleaming white spire, presiding over all else.
Mizan is the goddess of love, peace, and diplomacy worshipped by the people of the Mindet River Valley.
Given the statue’s details, Dorri probably could’ve made a good guess about that, but she silently acknowledged the narrator’s information, anyhow. She’d talked to herself a lot before uploading, so listening to herself hadn’t been a difficult adjustment.
Mizan was rendered as a stately woman holding her arms out to the sides in perfect symmetry, with a shallow bowl balanced in each upturned palm. Robes adorned with roses flowed down her voluptuous body. A shallow pool surrounded the statue’s pedestal, ringed with a series of burbling fountains and benches. Paths spiraled away from that central area, so that no matter how you wandered through the maze of side areas created by carefully-placed hedges and rose bushes, you always ended up back at Mizan’s feet.
Dorri thought that perhaps, given the chance, she might like Mizan. The goddess seemed somehow both fierce but also welcoming. Like she might know how to hold a person accountable but also help them to be forgiven.
As she and Nildeyr walked, perfume-scented rose blooms brushed against the sleeves of Dorri’s brocade and velvet dress, an affair in deep purple far fancier than anything she’d have ever chosen to wear, left to her own devices. Not to mention it was an actual dress. A necklace of fake gems rested against her throat like a snare waiting to be tightened.
In her life before this one, it had taken all Dorri’s spoons to go sit in programming classes at Bakerton East Technical College three days a week, more than all if she had to deal with a client in the course of one of the freelance coding projects that helped her pay bills.
Gaming and reading were Dorri’s escape, her chance to recharge. Even when she’d gone off on imaginary adventures, though, she tended to wind up wandering alone, avoiding even virtual cities and big crowds. When she’d first heard about Neuroconnect and Redemption Wars, her pulse had picked up. The allure of slinking through the wilderness with only a bow and her wits, discovering sights untainted by human encroachment, had put release date on her calendar and kept her daydreaming for months about how real the experience promised to be.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
She thought she might still be excited about the game, once she dug past all the recent trauma. But the current scenario was the opposite of untouched by human involvement. It felt to Dorri, as all such situations did, like way, way too much for her to endure.
Nildeyr nudged Dorri. “There.”
A ways up the path between the roses, a man with a pointed beard and gray at his temples perched on the wide rim of a fountain. He’d crossed his legs and had a small book open across his raised knee. He was writing in the book—with an ostentatious-looking ivory or perhaps bone fountain pen, the kind that held an ink cartridge rather than requiring a separate inkwell.
You know little about Lord Odold Dindale, save that he has connections to the Chanford noble family of Chanford Falls and that he is the current target of your mission.
From seemingly nowhere, Nildeyr produced a silver coin from his free hand and began to flip it across the backs of his knuckles. Flashing his smile at everyone they passed, Nildeyr strolled along the path, towing Dorri along with him. His steps meandered from side to side, never once turning directly toward Lord Dindale.
Dorri followed Nildeyr’s lead as best she could. She thought she was smiling; she was trying to remember how her face should feel. Her pulse beat so hard that she thought anyone could surely see the vein in her neck throbbing.
She and Nildeyr weren’t the only entertainers working the crowd. A man in a crooked hat held the attention of a half dozen people by crafting creations of colored light and smoke from thin air, accompanied by little fanfares of tinkling music. Given where she now was, Dorri assumed it was real magic and not just illusion or sleight of hand like Nildeyr’s coin tricks.
Elsewhere, a girl with long blonde hair and perfect body performed some kind of dance with colored scarves and flame-like spinning hoops. Instinctive envy sparked in Dorri’s gut.
It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone here has the same body.
Before upload, Dorri had been chubby and self-conscious about it. She wouldn’t have cared except that her mother and all the rest of the world seemed to care. She’d simultaneously wanted to meet their expectations and hated herself for giving a damn. At character creation, she’d been presented with the predictable two body types per gender, which was of course ridiculous in that it put anyone of any gender into the position of making a binary choice about their body image with no gradation in between. Her body, when it had been alive and real, had fallen somewhere between the unrealistic ideals at either end of the scale.
The System had assigned Dorri’s character the smaller body type. After agonizing longer than she’d have liked over whether to defy expectations by insisting on the larger variant or feeling like a vain faker by keeping the smaller one, Dorri had finally resigned herself to feeling eternally like a fraud. She’d left the rest of her settings alone—brown hair, brown eyes, brows drawn slightly down and mouth set in a constant look of disapproval. What she’d ended up with was an avatar of the slender, unassumingly pretty, girl next door type.
Once in game, Dorri had realized it didn’t matter anymore, maybe. How could anyone judge appearances in a place where everyone was exactly as beautiful as they wanted to be?
While Dorri was musing about things she probably shouldn’t care about anymore, she kept following Nildeyr’s lead. Suddenly, they were standing in front of their target, and Dorri had no recollection at all of how they’d gotten there.
“Might we provide a bit of light-hearted distraction to your day, m’lord?” Nildeyr bowed in front of the man. At the last moment, Dorri remembered to curtsey.
Lord Dindale looked up from his book with the slightly befuddled expression of a person interrupted from their thoughts. Then the coin flipping along Nildeyr’s knuckles, as if with a will of its own, caught the man’s gaze. A smile that turned his middle-aged face into a boy’s curved his mouth.
“Some sleight of hand? Of course. Show me what you can do.”
As he spoke, Dindale folded closed the little book he’d been scribbling in and set it beside him on the fountain’s curved edge. The pen, lovely and carved with some delicate design, he set alongside the book.
Don’t look directly at it.
Dorri caught herself just as Dindale glanced her way. She smiled—again? More? How was her face supposed to feel? Surely not as tight and contorted as it did. She lifted her flute as if to indicate that she was merely the musician. Letting go of Nildeyr’s arm and taking a calculated step to one side of him, she waved her hands in a little flourish toward Nildeyr, directing Dindale’s attention back that direction.
“Sleight of hand, oh yes!” Enthusiasm spilled from Nildeyr’s tone and dripped from every pore of his being. “A fellow enthusiast, are you?”
As Nildeyr spoke, more coins joined the first one. They danced together, across the backs of Nildeyr’s hands, from finger to finger and hand to hand. Cards would come next, and Nildeyr would keep up his constant patter the entire time.
Dorri shuffled another step to the side, angling to move closer to the fountain’s edge. The tell-tale clatter of dice whispered in her head.
Here we go.
[You rolled a 9 for Stealth.]
Dindale’s gaze immediately shifted back to Dorri. His brows drew together, as if he was irritated at being distracted from Nildeyr’s show.
I don’t want to be here. I could just run away, right now.
But if she did that, everyone would most certainly know she’d been up to something. Dorri lifted the flute to her lips, careful to keep the parchment scrap pressed into her palm, and began to play. At the same time, she forced herself to take another careless-seeming step in the appropriate direction and lowered herself onto the fountain’s edge a few paces away from Dindale.
“You will love this one. Tell me if you can see how it’s done.” Nildeyr brought out the cards. The whisper-slap of the shuffle turned Dindale’s head back toward Nildeyr. Dindale’s frown eased but did not go entirely away.
This isn’t going to work. I can’t do this.
But there was no way to say that to Nildeyr. And if she didn’t accomplish this now, then…
Then what? She didn’t want to succeed at this quest, after all. Hope flickered momentarily and died again.
If she didn’t accomplish this now, then Nildeyr would just make them stay and try again until they had succeeded. She hadn’t figured out enough about the game’s mechanics yet to know how feasible it would be to just walk away from this quest and never complete it.
Just get it over with.
Earlier, Nildeyr had informed her that she’d been taught not just how to play the flute but how to play it with only one hand. When he’d asked her to show him, Dorri had been surprised to find she actually could. Not well, necessarily, but she understood that was what was expected of her now. She pressed the instrument into place against the curve just beneath her lip and held it with one thumb. The tune became simpler, and she played with just four fingers.
Her other hand, the one with the parchment scrap, she lowered slowly toward the pen lying on the fountain’s edge.
[You rolled a 7 for Deftness.]
Shit!
Dindale’s head turned almost immediately. Dorri missed a note but managed to turn the lowering of her hand into a simple lean against the fountain’s rim.
“Or what about this one?”
But Dindale didn’t look at Nildeyr. He kept looking at Dorri. With one hand, he waved absently toward Nildeyr, palm out.
“Stop your foolishness. And you.” Dindale’s frown morphed into a deadly stare. “Did I invite you to join me? Back to your place.”
Dorri stopped playing. She’d have had to, anyhow, because her mouth had gone completely dry. Her trembling fingers turned the last lingering notes discordant. Her face burned, and she felt with horror that tears were forming in her eyes.
“So sorry,” she mumbled. She flung herself off the fountain’s edge and back toward Nildeyr.
Nildeyr caught hold of Dorri’s elbow and folded her arm back into his. “It’s all right. Hold onto your flute. Take a breath.”
Hold onto your flute. Hold onto the damning piece of evidence that parchment scrap would be. That was what he meant. Dorri tightened her grip on the flute and felt the tell-tale crinkle against her palm that indicated she at least hadn’t messed that up.
“You’ll have to excuse my apprentice.” Nildeyr made a little bow toward Dindale. He spoke in that warm and gracious way that seemed so easy for him. Sotto voce, he added, “We’re still working on her social graces. You understand.”
Dorri’s face burned even harder. The tears, however, dried up.
Don’t be angry. He’s trying to help. He’s not even a real person.
But Dindale relaxed, even smiled a bit. And that was the point, Dorri understood.
Understanding didn’t help her feel much less mortified. Or attacked.
Dindale snorted softly. “Indeed I do. On your way, now.”
Dorri would have fled immediately, but Nildeyr had hold of her arm, and he didn’t budge. He gave another little bow and ended with his hand just slightly extended, the expectant stance of an entertainer waiting for a tip. The move was perfectly in character for the stereotype he was playing, Dorri had to admit. Now just didn’t feel like a smart time to be pushing their luck.
Dindale stared at Nildeyr.