My fixation on the frowning face in the pool of the fountain is dashed to droplets with the reflection as a player runs beside me to splash up some water into his face and massage his temples.
“Ah, wakey, wakey, Sage,” says the spindly archer, whose long, thin pony tail sways to lash me in the chest as he rapidly turns away from the fountain.
“My bad, dude! Still learning to control this-”
His expression sours into a glare when he reads my nameplate. His reads:
SageofStorms - lvl 2
“No problem,” I reply, stifling some unrulier words and tugging my hood further over my eyes, gathering the rest of my cloak up to cover my features as fully as possible.
“What's this dead weight doing here?” Sage asks Rainmaker, who shakes his head and raises a hairy, stubby-fingered hand in protest. “He fought in the van yesterday,” says Rainmaker in his new voice like a struck anvil. “And he and Adelaide are people we can trust.”
Sage’s new thick, angular eyebrows contort angrily, but he lowers his voice and slouches into a more dejected posture, his new purple tunic hugging a chiseled physique on which he must have lavished hours of painstaking slider tweaking to impress the virtual ladies. “He abandoned Xeno at the end. I saw it.”
“Sage!” Rainmaker yells, “He did not! If anything,” he says, his warm eyes flashing at Ad and I, “these two extended Xeno and Cyn’s lives and made their sacrifices worth more. Who knows what would’ve happened if we’d lost one second of stalling those goblins.”
“The bastards would’ve broken through and killed the kids and newbs,” says a new, sonorous woody voice: Prim21’s. The player who could easily be considered the underdog hero of that battle strides forward beside Rainmaker. He looks largely unchanged from the glimpses I remember, but he wears fresh leather armor that covers his entire torso and has large shoulder pads. This piece is braced to his limbs with leather straps so that he looks more fortified than any player I’ve yet seen closely; his leather gloves appear thicker and extend further past his wrist than ours; and running from his forehead, down the bridge of his nose, and then diagonally under his right eye, is a virtually old scar. “Be grateful, Sage. Could’ve been any of us yesterday, and it could be any of us today.” His distinctive cobalt-blue hair falls over his face in sharp clumps, barely screening those eyes like simmering coals.
“I’ll be grateful when this is over,” Sage says, pivoting back to the fountain and splashing more water in his face. “Wait!” he says, and whips back around to grab me by the front of my cloak and stare deeply into my dark eyes. In an instant his look turns from one of horrified surprise to
“. . . Bahaahahaha!”
and he falls back against the fountain, pointing and laughing tearfully at my avatar. “FeeFiFoFum! Bet you’re regretting that, dumbass! Bahahaha!”
“I didn’t see you anywhere near the goblins yesterday,” Ad says, staring him down. “Guess it’s easy to be an archer—you just sit back and let others get hurt.”
Sage’s laughter falters at this, and he eyes my sister nervously before stretching and starting slowly toward the street we searched for an inn. “Yep—archers don’t make great tanks, genius. Well, whatever,” he says. “I’m gonna go see about that lost necklace quest. Catch you guys later.” And with that and a wave at his friends, Sage exits as abruptly as he entered.
“Don’t let him bother you,” Rainmaker says. “He’s only eighteen, and yesterday was hard on him—Pen was his best friend, and he really looked up to Xeno.” He winces and shakes his head. “Ah . . . yesterday was hard on all of us. Speaking of—have a nice nap, Prim?”
“Slept fine. And we’ll kill the goblins and scorch their spawning grounds for it before we get out of this hell,” Prim says. His voice and demeanor are perfectly composed, but there’s an intensity in eyes that’s hard to maintain contact with. “But now is for gathering strength.” He reaches out his right hand to shake mine, then Adelaide’s. “Good to meet you two, despite the circumstances. You fought well.”
“We did our best,” Ad says with a sigh that suggests Sage’s accusations got to her.
“You two must be Knights vets, right?” I ask.
Rainmaker and Prim look at each other before the former grins at me. “That we are, Phil—since the pre-Elysium days. Prim’s run with the same paladin since launch, while I’ve been leveling up a spellsword—wait, goddamit!” He breaks his train of thought in a way that grates against his noble appearance. “We’re gonna miss Green Night! They said it’d be big this year to try and steal back some players from Last Advent!”
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“Even now, you’re worried about making it for Green Night?” Prim laughs. “I do miss Knights already. The soft class system here gives a lot of room for error.”
“Soft class?” Ad says.
“Oh—you’re not a fan of RPGs?” Prim asks. “Surprising considering how you fought. Most games give players a list of classes to choose from that have set abilities. They always include some degree of choice—skill trees and whatnot—but essentially, a paladin is always a tanky warrior with support abilities, a rogue is always a sneaky trickster with light weapons . . .” He gestures at the panorama of players around us, each with a slightly unique combination of features, gear, and, invisibly, skills. “But Last Advent lets players choose any combination they want from a large pool of skills, so every resulting ‘class’ is more experimental.”
Like mine. An explosively botched experiment.
“And the outcomes of these experiments count for a lot more, now,” Rainmaker says. “So it’s the duty of players with a good set of skills to protect the failed experiments, we think. With great power—that old spiel.”
Ad smiles. “That’s admirable of you both. Do you think mine are any good? Aven-”
“I’d refrain,” Prim says, “from telling anyone about your skills or items until things calm down.”
“Might not be safe to show your hand like that,” Rainmaker says. “But the fact that we all survived on the front lines yesterday means we rolled decent characters.”
A dense crowd is building beyond the fountain in a corner of the Forum that stretches off in one direction into another large square filled with colorful awnings, tents, and umbrellas—probably a marketplace—and briefly in the other before funneling into a huge circular structure of smooth, irregularly shaped stones stacked miraculously, layer by layer and column by column, into an intricate building: a colosseum. Rust-colored flags on black poles shoot out from the topmost stones. In the corner dividing these two central areas, a wax-colored rostrum of something like sandstone—bone?—stands empty before the crowd.
Prim21 wants to be your friend!
(Accept!) (Deny) 10 sec . . .
(Accept!) <= (Deny) 9 sec . . .
Prim21 is now your friend!
Ad and I briefly lock eyes when we realize: we still haven’t added each other as friends! and I click on her nameplate
Adelaide - lvl 1 <=
(Party) (Guild) (Friend) (Info)
(Party) (Guild) (Friend) <= (Info)
“. . .”
Adelaide is now your friend!
(Party) <= (Guild) (Friend)(Info)
Adelaide has joined your party!
and add her to my friend’s list and party.
“Some trustworthy players have told us a VIP is making a speech over there at one o’clock,” Rainmaker says, clasping a hand to his brow to shade his eyes for visibility. “It’s probably no big deal, so we won’t hold you up any longer. But if you want, you can watch with us.”
“When you say VIP, do you mean an admin?” I ask.
“Nothing like that, I’m afraid,” Prim says, gazing through the spray of the fountain at the rostrum. “Apparently someone’s taken it upon himself to make a plan for the future of Last Advent. He’s a famous Knights vet—an absolute monster of a swordsman and a popular streamer at that.”
“Kinda charismatic, I admit,” Rainmaker nods.
Ad looks lost, but I jump at this and step forward so that my hood falls away and I have to pull it back over my face as I say, “No way! Are you talking about igNoble?”
“That’s the one,” Rainmaker says. “I fought him once in the Grand Carousel. Didn’t get whooped too badly.”
“You lasted three minutes,” Prim jeers.
“You lasted three and a half,” Rainmaker retorts, and both laugh.
“I don’t really follow any gaming media,” Ad says, scrutinizing her surroundings and looking at Rainmaker, Prim, and I as if we’re benevolent but bewildering aliens. “Does it make any difference if this streamer is here? Not really the time for meet-and-greets.”
“Well,” I say, my dark eyes lifted by a momentary hope, “igNoble being here raises our chances of getting out soon dramatically. First, because he’s an obsessive gamer with the sort strategic mind that could find a way out of this game. Second, because his fame is sure to rally the scattered playerbase behind one banner—and also—”
I grin toothily down at Adelaide,
“he’s a like a milk carton kid. I mean, as if there weren’t urgency enough for Mimmisoft to free us, his millions of fans will protest day and night for his release so they can get back to watching his streams.”
Cheers and shouts erupt from the far side of the Forum as a group of elite players with wooly and furry white and gray pelts enters from a nearby street and wedges up to the rostrum. At the back of the group is the silhouette—barely visible through the crowd of waving and jumping players—of a hero.