Booth resisted the urge to open his quest journal. He was almost positive he hadn’t seen anything in it about returning to his character’s hometown. He’d just been there.
Except, had he? Booth realized the whole thing felt like an oddly long time ago. Years, even. He could remember what had happened but everything about how it had felt was dulled.
Anonche smiled at Booth with what he read as fond pride. “Booth’s first official act as a Tilier will be to offer a formal address of gratitude and blessing on the people who sponsored him here.”
That tracked. Booth wasn’t sure how to feel about it. It seemed an awful lot like this game kept yanking him around with promises of a family he had yet to even catch a glimpse of. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet them. Under the circumstances, it felt cruel.
Administrator Anonche returned her shrewd gaze to Chanford. “Lord… Master Chanford and his guard are traveling to…?”
“South. Traton will suit my purposes.”
Anonche’s plain face scrunched into an expression that veered close to disapproval. Booth frowned, too. Something about the way Chanford answered made Booth think the man was being as evasive as he was brusque.
Is he a PC with an agenda of his own, or an NPC generated to play out some part in my quest?
That spiral of thinking made Booth dizzy before he could even really get started on it.
You can’t know, and you’re not supposed to ask. Maybe just treat everyone like you would if they were real and go from there.
Since Chanford, lord or not, wasn’t deigning to look at Booth, Booth turned another openly assessing look on the man’s bodyguard. As before, she returned his gaze with no particularly readable expression on her face.
She was tall, Booth noted once more. The planes of her face and nose were big-boned, and while she was covered head to toe in her leathers, the way she stood suggested strength and poise. The casual sling of the greatsword over her shoulder said she was comfortable with it.
Useful in a fight, PC or NPC.
However inscrutable or abrasive the noble and his bodyguard might be, Booth didn’t seem in any immediate danger from either of them.
Dice whispered in his head.
[You rolled 19 for Appraisal]
A request to travel with a journeying Tilier is not out of the ordinary. The mission of Voshell’s knights is akin to that of the farm implements from which their name was derived, to figuratively break the soil and remove weeds and make the land suitable for crops to grow. In practice, that as frequently takes the form of escorting travelers as wielding weapon and shield on a battleground.
Fair enough.
Booth realized that Anonche and Chanford were now both looking expectantly at him. For a moment, he choked. He still hadn’t seen any indication of a typical dialogue system at work. Remembering his experiment at speaking aloud—and the warning that had prompted—he carefully tested the very simple system of simply speaking naturally.
As he figured was befitting a Tilier of Voshell, Booth kept his tone mild as he turned and addressed Chanford. He didn’t put a lot of effort into sounding especially warm, though.
“You say you’re ready to leave tomorrow, Master Chanford?” Booth inquired. “I plan to leave very early.”
He didn’t know that he’d had any such plan, but it sounded good.
The other man finally looked directly at Booth. Clear hazel eyes over a hawk-sharp nose stared without blinking. He didn’t answer right away, as if Booth’s question held some level of complexity Booth hadn’t intended.
Or because he’s a PC struggling to figure out the same controls as me?
“Indeed,” was Chanford’s eventual reply. “My given name is Karon. You may call me that.”
“Mine’s Booth.” He sounded like an awkward idiot, Booth thought. Shouldn’t he sound more formal, since he was a paladin or knight or whatever? He tried to remember how Anonche had phrased things. “We leave in the morn, then.”
A faint chime rang in Booth’s head. Text floated into his view.
[You have reached Level 2! View your Character Sheet to complete the level up process.]
An instinctive satisfaction clicked in Booth’s gut. For the moment, he ignored the text’s instruction as it flashed before him and then faded. That seemed like a process he’d like to walk through later, when he had more time and the NPCs weren’t watching him.
NPCs or “other Agents of the System.” What does that even mean?
He surprised himself with a twinge of anticipation at seeing what his level 2 options would be. Not much, maybe—level 2 was still early in the scheme of things.
Which was when it occurred to Booth that he had no idea what max level of this game would be. The strength of each level’s power increase depended a lot on how many levels there were altogether. How long it would take to get through each level depended on that, too. The old urge to rush to end game woke in the back of Booth’s head, rumbling like a waking dragon.
He had no idea what end game would be like, either. Raids? PvP battlegrounds? This didn’t feel like that kind of game. But if there was no end game, then what point was there to playing at all?
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You don’t really have a choice.
Everyone in the room was still looking expectantly at Booth. He self-consciously thanked Anonche and nodded to Karon Chanford and his bodyguard before escaping again into the sunlight. He strode directly to an out-of-the-way spot along the chapter house’s side and assumed a pose which suggested he was staring out at the scenery. Then he opened his character sheet.
[Level 2!]
The words sparkled across the top of everything else before circling down and settling into the usual spot on his character sheet. An icon of a 10-sided die appeared and spun briefly, rattling as the virtual sides rolled.
The die landed on a 6, and Booth’s hit points updated to a whopping new 22. That was far better than his level 1 hp of 13—his END apparently got added to it, too—but it still felt like a very small number compared to the multiple digits of his highest-level MMO characters.
Booth set aside his uncertainty about the unfamiliar number sizes and looked to see what else had changed.
His Actions list now included something called Voshell’s Protection which allowed him to use his shield to take hits for other people. It also listed Earthmother’s Chastisement, which allowed him to spend mana points to add damage to his attacks—a variation of the class-defining smite ability familiar to him from playing paladins in other games.
Scanning the sheet for a mana bar or equivalent, Booth discovered he had a mana pool of two points. Per day. That seemed like a depressingly low number. Mana conservation had been a thing in other games he’d played, of course.
But that’s just crazy.
He at least had a real weapon and actual armor, now. His Defense Rating had updated from 11 to 18. Now that he had time to think it through, he realized that his level one unarmored Defense of 11 during his fight against that lone Meres Raider was a big part of what had almost cost him his life. His flail damage range was listed as 7-14. A closer look taught him that the flail used a d8 instead of the d4 from the pitchfork. That should help, too.
Booth had never been a math genius or anything, and he was only passingly familiar with the whole tabletop gaming scene. But he’d learned a few things min-maxing his way through various MMOs. He thought he might be catching onto how to handle himself in this new life of his.
For starters, take every number you’re used to seeing and reduce it by about a billion.
Despite his skepticism about this game’s mechanics, the anticipation that had pinched earlier came back more powerfully, now. He had new abilities to try out, maybe as soon as the next day. He’d be protecting this Chanford guy, and they’d be traveling between cities. Despite all stated certainties that the roads were safe and travel was routine, that felt like a set-up for exciting things to happen.
Sooner or later, someone was going to jump his party, and Booth would get the chance to actually win a fight—for real, not from some freebie OP save from a god. He closed the character sheet and took in his physical surroundings with a fresh gaze.
Can’t wait to get to it.
#
Dorrias Greymantle had no objections to her physical surroundings.
The Gardens of Divine Harmony—which according to Dorri’s inner narrator was known to everyone in Diairm as simply the Gardens—centered around a gorgeous white stone building with so many wings that Dorri had gotten lost within minutes of arriving there. She liked to think that was only because she was off kilter from her Origin tutorial and pretty much every step of the quest chain that followed.
Not to mention reality. That screwed me up pretty bad, too.
The central courtyard of the Gardens overflowed with trees and hedges and flowers spilling through all the green. Delicate winged creatures in white wicker cages chirped, crystalline fountains splashed, and their intertwining songs brightened the cool air. Gardeners moved quietly between the plants, carrying baskets with little shears and wearing gloves. More often than using any tools, they simply leaned in and whispered to the plants, breathing shimmers of light that Dorri supposed were magic of some kind.
The Gardens were not the wild forests Dorri would have preferred, but they were the most beautiful thing she’d seen in this entirely too-large, too-much city—everything about Redemption Wars was more gorgeous than anything she’d ever experienced in any game. The graphic and sensory details were stunning in a way that frequently left her breathless.
Everything else about this particular quest was what Dorri had a problem with, starting with the fact she’d felt coerced into accepting the quest to begin with.
Dorothy Mason had left her old life for a virtual afterlife not knowing exactly what to expect. She was starting to believe the vaguely-named System used by Redemption Wars had decided she should get hell with only teases of heaven. Either that, or someone somewhere had seriously screwed up the programming that interpreted a person’s data into an existence which suited them, as all the game’s hype had promised.
Or there was the possibility that her own subconscious was punishing her for her actions in the hours leading up to her escape via Neuroconnect.
I didn’t do anything wrong.
Although that was the problem, really—she hadn’t done anything.
Dorri tested the emotions that welled up—or didn’t, rather—in response to that kneejerk thought. She’d experienced a weird limbo after her Origin scenario that left her feeling like some indeterminate but long amount of time had passed. A game maker might choose to do that to create a sense of distance between the Origin that was supposed to be years in the past and the “current” time of the game’s true start. The mild to moderate dissociation and emotional detachment that accompanied the sense of time passing might have been an unexpected side effect.
Or a deliberate one. What better way to keep a player inside the game than by making them care even less about real life than they might already?
Once upon a time, Dorothy probably would’ve pursued that line of thinking further. Now, whether or not the game was deliberately addicting hardly mattered. What mattered more, in the moment anyhow, was that her assertion she hadn’t done anything wrong was working double-time on becoming untrue in her new incarnation as Dorrias Greymantle.
“I’m a trick shooter, not a spy.” Afraid of being overheard by anyone other than the person she wanted to hear, Dorri murmured the objection almost under her breath. “I can’t even have my bow here.”
Dorri had put her hand on the offered arm of her companion, mostly because he’d insisted it would help with appearances. He’d also told her a dozen times to try to smile more, which felt tone deaf on the part of whoever had written this NPC’s interactions, but she got what he meant.
The hem of her dress dragged across marble floors of the cloister through which they walked, forcing her to be cautious of tripping. The little bone flute in her free hand felt like a disaster waiting to happen.
I’m not a musician, either.
Above all, though, she simply didn’t want to do what her employer for the purposes of this quest had asked her to do.
Smiling on top of all that was asking a bit much, she thought.
Nildeyr Riddle flashed a smile of his own, though, and patted the hand Dorri had placed on his arm. Nildeyr so thoroughly fulfilled all the tropes of a rogue/thief that Dorri had pegged him as an NPC immediately, even if she wasn’t allowed to ask him. Aside from endearingly-mussed red hair, impossibly green eyes, and smattering of freckles, Nildeyr swung from sullen and irritable to boyishly charming depending on what the moment asked of him.
Nildeyr wasn’t personally forcing Dorri to do anything—he was an NPC playing a role, which in this scenario made him an employee of The Order of Riddles as much as she was. Or operative. That was what Nildeyr called it.
Either way, Nildeyr wasn’t Dorri’s real issue, either.
This is not what I thought I was agreeing to. Damn game tricked me.