CHAPTER 2: NIETZ
WC: 1768
“Don’t take another step—”
“I’m not,” I squeaked, in a baritone rumble that I didn’t expect to come from my mouth.
“—toward Straßburg Castle. A devastating plague has befallen this part of Haut Rhin, stranger.” A weird upbeat trumpeting of music erupted from thin air.
A message flashed in the upper corner of my vision, but I missed it.
The horse whinnied and the knight tightened his reins. “You’d be well advised to turn around. If you proceed, you do so at your own risk.”
“So…I can put my hands down?”
“We could use your help, stranger. We once had a temple full of healers, but the High King’s new advisor exiled the priestesses of Bragda some time ago. I’ve been tasked with warning travelers of the danger and cannot leave my post, even to go find help. If you could find the priestesses, they may help us dispel this terrible curse. Anna is their high priestess and the wisest of Bragda’s healers.”
I put my hands down. Slowly. To see if he would say anything. My right hand felt weirdly tingly, or maybe sweaty. When the knight didn’t react, I relaxed just a little. “So…I should go find Anna the high priestess?”
The knight sighed. “I only hope it isn’t too late.”
“I don’t suppose you know where to find her?”
“I don’t know where the priestesses went after they were exiled. You could ask in the village of Nietz.”
“Nietz. Okay. And how do I get there?” The music sounded again, like a trumpety celebration. I looked up to try to catch the message, but the sunlight was so bright I closed my eyes…missing whatever the letters said again. Wherever I looked, it seemed, the words were in my periphery. If I looked up, they moved too. So, maybe the trick was to look down? Try to read them against a dark background? I stared at the horse, which was dark brown. No words popped up. When the animal turned to head back up the road, I stopped staring at its rear end.
“Thank you, traveler,” the knight called back to me. “You may be our only hope.” The horse kept walking, and I stood next to the well, wondering what exactly my next move ought to be. Up the hill or down? Up seemed the logical place to put a castle, so I opted for down the hill. I grabbed the last coin from the well before I left and headed down. I wasn’t even sure what direction it was, or where in relation to the town I was headed, but moving felt the right choice, so that’s what I did.
I soon realized that the road was a predictably boring place. Pops of bright color occasionally caught my eye, but they were always away from the road. After about the fifth one, I grew curious and decided to investigate. A clump of rocks a few meters off the road sheltered a spray of wildflowers. When I got within reach of them, my left gauntlet tingled. Or, rather, my fingers tingled like I was holding a vibrating phone. I looked down at my hand and turned it over, but nothing looked unusual. I mean, except for the fact that my hand had been replaced by a huge meaty hand wearing a leather and metal gauntlet.
Unsure what to do about the tingle, I closed my hand. The moment I did the flowers disappeared from the ground and appeared as a bouquet in my fist. I stood there just off the road, with a bouquet of purply-blue weeds in my hand, looking around for what to do with them.
Get to the village, find the healer, I thought to myself. I opened my hands and the flowers dropped from my grip, disappearing into the prairie grass. “Okay, so I’ll just stay on the road and stop wasting my time picking flowers,” I mumbled. At least I figured out how to pick things up.
That got me thinking. Mostly about the two-handed sword on my back…
I tapped my hand closed again.
Nothing happened.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The bracer on my left forearm had a number of silver buttons, so I pressed one. A menu appeared in my field of vision. It didn’t block what I could see, because it was translucent, but it made it impossible to keep walking. He world was sort of grayed out a bit. The first menu option was CHARACTER and that seemed the place to start. Except I didn’t know how to select the CHARACTER tab.
Everything else was grayed out. I couldn’t select any of the options, so I pressed the button again and the menu closed. The other buttons on the bracer looked exactly the same so I pressed the others and found they functioned similarly, most options were grayed out and I couldn’t select anything. The only other one I found interactive was one called QUEST JOURNAL.
I opened my quest journal and it read:
LOCATE ANNA AND TELL HER ABOUT THE PLAGUE IN STRAßBURG
Selecting the quest seemed a good idea. Was it already selected for me automatically? I poked random bracer buttons but they just opened or closed menus. How was I supposed to make a selection? I tried opening and closing my fist, but nothing. Tried waving my hands and tapping fingers, but no. Maybe the buttons had the ability to scroll? I lightly dragged my finger along the button while the quest menu was open, and the curser slid down and highlighted my quest.
Yes! I pressed the button and when the menu closed, a little arrow remained in my field of vision, right above where my line of sight was, and it stayed exactly in that spot whether I looked up or left or right, or wherever. The point of the arrow was red, so it worked in my periphery just fine. I stopped playing with my menu bracer and got going toward where the arrow was taking me.
It became clear pretty quickly that the arrow was an as-the-crow-flies sort of marker. It took me through bushes and about fifty more flowers that tingled my left hand. When it told me to cross a river, I deviated. A quick jog along the bank and I found a stone bridge to cross. On the other side was another red-roofed well.
Up the hill a village came into view. A dozen or so buildings in old timber-frame style scattered haphazardly around a few dirt roads and what looked like a marketplace with tents and wagons.
A man in dirty white tunic and brown woolen trousers passed by and grumbled, “I don’t like all these strangers coming to town.”
“What?” I said.
He continued on his way.
A woman stood outside a lumbermill with a basket in her hand. “Help!” she called. “Has anyone seen my brother!” The odd thing was my right hand tingled when I got near her, and since I didn’t want to accidentally pick her up—or worse, punch her or something—I backed away and headed toward the colorful tents.
When I got to the market, vendors called out prices and hawked their wares for passersby. At every booth my hands tingled. Sometimes my right, other times my left.
“You won’t find a better sword!” a man in a yellow tunic and chainmail armor yelled.
Someone else said, “Shop at Petra’s Potions!”
On and on, the yelling and tingling continued until it became quite disorienting. I hurried through the marketplace, not stopping to look at any of the tents or speak to the shop keeps. I scanned the town for anything that looked like a church or whatever the Medieval fantasy game equivalent might look like. That had to be the logical place to find priestesses, right?
I didn’t see anything that fit the image in my mind, so I went back to the lumbermill and approached the basket woman cautiously. She wore an apron over a blue dress and her blonde hair was tied in two braids. I tapped my right hand closed when I got near, and a celebratory burst of trumpet music came from all around us once again. A name appeared above her head when she spoke to me. Hilda said, “Oh, thank you, kind sir! Fritz and I were out collecting berries in the forest when we were separated. I looked all around but couldn’t find him!”
The arrow at the top of my field of vision moved slightly and two white dots appeared. A message flashed at the upper left part of my field of vision:
NEW QUEST: SEARCH THE FOREST. And a second message came after:
NEW QUEST: FIND FRITZ.
Okay, I had a new quest. At least it seemed a straightforward one. Find a boy who was lost in the forest. At least the two markers looked close together.
I followed the arrow toward the two white dots, first out of the town center, and then through scattered farmland. It wasn’t as large a scale as real farms, but the design of the landscape was clever and pretty. Waving golden wheat, fluttering leaves on trees—the designers did a very nice job of making it all look realistic. Down to the scurrying squirrels and wildflowers everywhere that made my left hand buzz.
The land gradually went from field to wild, and then to a scattering of trees with only a dirt path. The arrow drove me toward a rickety wooden sign leaning over on the edge of the path into the forest. It read: Bärenwald.
Hm. Weird that the place names were in another language. It sounded like BEWARE, which gave me pause. But then I remembered I was in a game, and everything was supposed to feel like an adventure. And what is an adventure without a little danger? Whatever it said wasn’t something I learned in six weeks of German, so I just ignored it and entered the forest to find Fritz.
Strolling in the direction of the quest dots, I left the path behind.
A few minutes into the forest my right glove started tingling. I balled my fist and shook it, shouting, “I’m not interested in stupid flowers and mushrooms!”
But when I brought my arm back down, clenched in my dwarfy fist was a two-handed sword. I stared at it for a moment, wondering how to put it away, but a bellowing roar came from ahead, the bushes shaking and shuddering as a huge bear crashed through the underbrush, heading straight toward me.