Gracie slammed her hand down on the alarm clock before the third chime. It took her a while to remember where she was, but she woke up instantly when reality struck her in the face. This wasn’t her house. They had made that mistake before and wouldn’t do it again. The government gave them plenty of funds, and renting this safe house was necessary. As she sat up in bed and looked out the window of the second-story bedroom, the early dawn light filtering through the bulletproof windows, she realized that in addition to being a fortress, this carefully designed house also made a good prison.
Their German “hosts,” who had interrupted proceedings last night, had been well informed. Gracie wasn’t sure how they had overridden the key fob security checkpoints to get in the house, but assuming she and Conor got out of this alive, there would be a full review of the security measures. The two of them had been understandably distracted, but some alarm should have gone off before Hans and Frans burst in on them.
They had real names, but Gracie insisted on referring to them by caricatures, refusing to put in more of an effort. Other than shooting Conor, they had treated the two hostages reasonably well, and Gracie was grateful there hadn’t been some creepy man watching her sleep all night. But they didn’t need that kind of security. The house was minimally stocked, and only the knives in the kitchen could be considered weapons. The government was willing to build them a castle, but they were only supposed to hold up inside if attacked and call the cavalry for support.
It was summer, and Gracie felt comfortable sleeping in cotton shorts and a tank top, but she wasn’t going to let her captives see her athletic body like that, lest they get any ideas. Saving her brother-in-law’s life (and her own) was already proper motivation for her to guide Jason through the game. Thinking about their new recruit playing for the last five hours by himself, Gracie got in gear, grabbed a full-length robe, and made her way to the ensuite bathroom. Five minutes later, she was downstairs, guided by the smell of coffee.
Frans was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for her to wake up. They had confiscated her phone and turned off the Wi-Fi in the house. The computer downstairs was hardwired to the internet. There were no other phones in the house and no way for her to call for help. The windows upstairs didn’t open and were unbreakable. There had been no need to keep a close eye on her while she slept, but the German was now closely guarding one of the two doors out of the house. The front door was just for show and was screwed and bolted shut. Only the entrance through the garage and the door to the backyard in the kitchen were viable exits. Both lay beyond her prison guard.
Images of her trying to take out this man flashed through her mind, but she discarded them. She had spent enough time in ROI to develop good hand-to-hand combat reflexes, but Frans was holding a gun on her, and she didn’t know many ways to dodge that.
“Your friend almost died last night,” he said in a thick accent.
Gracie had assumed that at least one of them had stayed up to watch Jace’s adventures on the big screen downstairs. She had already pegged them as non-gamers, at least not in the ROI sense, but they must have at least watched to make sure Jace didn’t do anything off-script. There weren’t many options Jace had to affect the real world from within the game. Perhaps if he made it to Safe Haven, he could contact one of the agents they worked with, but he didn’t know whom to ask, and none of their employers knew his name yet.
“Almost got himself killed by a pregnant witch. And a bunch of giants. And a demon-thing. Not sure how he survived any of them.”
Gracie smiled, wondering how accurate the descriptions were but appreciated that Jace had survived. “He is a good player.”
“He better be. We need to be done with this soon.”
Gracie shrugged. “Might still take a day or two. Once you get high enough, levels aren’t easy to come by.”
“It don’t need to be pretty. No need to craft him into some super warrior. Just get him to Level 10, then bring him to Drescher.”
Gracie knew that Drescher was the name of their boss. He was a pretty well-known player in the game too. He was at least level 24 and had surrounded himself with some powerful PCs and a few NPC companions that would make taking them on suicide. She had no idea how they could avoid giving them the Level 50 crystal. And, after that, how could they convince these two goons to let them go? If Jace was as good at the game as she thought he was, they might decide to keep them hostage so they could go after more exclusive loot hidden behind complex modules.
She shook her head. Thinking that their situation was hopeless would do them no favors. She just had to play the cards she was dealt and look for an opportunity. As she approached the coffee pot, Frans wasn’t going to give her an opening now and waved the gun at her to back off.
“I need my coffee if you want me to get anything done,” Gracie protested.
He nodded but wouldn’t let her get anywhere near a glass pitcher filled with scalding liquid. Keeping one eye on her at all times, he flipped over a hard plastic mug sitting on the counter and poured coffee into it. He set it on the round kitchen table and slid it in her direction. “I like sugar and cream.”
“I bet you do,” he leered at her. “But today, you are going to drink it black.”
“Did you make breakfast?”
“There are donuts downstairs.”
“Yummy,” she said. Maybe she could get some sugar frosting and cream from the donuts to help her choke down the coffee.
Frans was still standing when she picked up her drink, and he motioned with his gun for her to move through the kitchen and over to the door that led into the basement. He weighed at least 50 pounds more than she did and was several inches taller, but he treated her like some legendary assassin, not letting her get within ten feet of him or near anything that might be interpreted as a weapon. Gracie knew this was not her chance to escape and followed directions.
In the basement, she saw Conor tied to the couch he had bled on last night. He was sleeping, and she didn’t make a noise to wake him. Hans was nowhere to be seen, and she guessed they would sleep in shifts, and Frans got the first watch.
The TV on the wall was blank. Or mostly blank. She saw the familiar border on the edge of the screen that let her know they were still in the game, but the image was dark. “Been like that for a couple hours,” Frans said. “He escorted the witch back to town, met with a few people, and then the screen went black. It was like this earlier in his adventure too, but only for a few minutes.”
Gracie nodded. Many of the deity quests were considered private, and in the end, when the player met with their god, it was always private. She wasn’t used to those meetings lasting a few hours, so something else must be happening.
“Maybe he’s sleeping,” she offered, though even then, they should see a third-person view of his body wherever he was.
“That’s where I need to be,” the man said. “Now wake him up and get back to work.”
“He probably needs sleep,” Gracie argued. “I have some research and planning to do, so I will let him be, and he will wake up shortly. If you want to wake your brother, you go do that. I will be down here.”
Frans muttered something in German and then sat on one of the recliners. She understood he wasn’t going anywhere and that Hans would wake up on his own to relieve him. Gracie pulled out her chair, set her coffee on a coaster, found a cream-filled glazed donut, and got to work.
They had loaded a complex virus into her computer that had obviously been designed by one of Drescher’s more competent underlings and not either of the two buffoons guarding her. It prevented her from accessing anything on the internet other than this game, and even in the game, she was only given Viewer status, so she couldn’t post on message boards or engage with the forums. She could still search all the user-created content, though, and she began planning their next moves.
----------------------------------------
Jace woke with a start. He sat bolt upright, and water rushed off him. His hands went wide, and he braced himself against the sides of the bath. He looked around and remembered he had been put in a trance in the temple. The priest who had brought him here looked on passively, but Snowy, who had been napping, also sprang to attention and gave her master a dirty look for waking her.
Jace smiled at the wolf, and the animal didn’t stay mad at him for long. “Were you watching over me while I slept?”
{No, I just sat down an hour ago. Or were you talking to the dog?}
“Gracie,” Jace said with excitement, standing from the bath and letting the water drip from him for a few moments before exiting. “I’m glad to hear your voice. Is everything okay over there?”
{I got a few hours of sleep. I have coffee that tastes like it was made in a diesel engine, a donut that will destroy my diet, and Conor made it through the night without bleeding out. So, we are doing fine here. It’s not breakfast at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe like you wanted, but we can’t all live in a fantasy world.”
Jace grinned. “So, you looked it up. I’ll try to tone down my obscure geek references going forward.”
{That wasn’t the only thing I looked up this morning,} she said. {Looks like you had a rough time of it. I finished going through the game logs a few minutes ago. You had some close calls there.}
“Are deity quests always that violent and dangerous?”
{Not everyone does them, so I don’t know, but from what I had heard, it is mostly a game of 20 questions with candles and incense. You don’t typically fight off a level 15 incubus after facing five ogres.}
“An incubus,” Jace said. “I wondered what type of demon he was. That wasn’t even a question I was going to ask you.” Jace thanked the priest, who was looking strangely at an orc who seemed to be talking to no one in particular, and walked out of the temple. It was nighttime in the game, and the darkness gave him good cover as he moved for the travel node beyond the city gate.
{I think I should have answers to most of your questions.}
“The goblins hit harder than I thought they would,” Jace started.
{Ah, yes. I bet you are familiar with flanking in combat games. If two people attack someone on opposite sides, both attackers get +5 to hit. Most goblins fighting in a troupe also get Swarm, which adds a flanking bonus for each creature next to you. So, if you have four goblins near you at one time, they each got +15 to hit. Even the archers got that bonus since they were all in the same group.}
“I also could only get criticals every other attack.”
{I should have told you that, but I didn’t think you would be doing that much fighting. Combat works on a three-action system. Two of those can be attacks, and only one can be a critical. You can’t make a critical attack in the second round if your first attack does anything over normal damage. There aren’t many characters like you, who get free 20s on every hit, but for those that do exist, they can’t abuse the system.}
“What about the third action? If you get three actions per round, and only two can be attacks, what is the third?”
{The three main ones are defensive: Raise Shield, Dodge, or Parry. You experimented with parry a few times. The goblins were all dodging. And I believe the ogres had shields, but it doesn’t look like they used them properly. Each action can be improved with feats and skills, significantly improving your effective armor class.}
“I felt I dodged a few times,” Jace said.
{There is a difference between stepping to the side as a rock flies past and using your Dodge ability with a capital D. Everyone gets a base armor class. For all medium creatures like yourself, you get a base of ten. Using that basic mobility isn’t Dodging an attack. You walked around with an Armor Class of 26 most of the time. If someone tried to hit you with an attack of 22, you could step aside or lean out of the way. You can’t move your feet to avoid a hit when you are Flat-Footed, but you can angle your body. When you are paralyzed, you lose all mobility and are vulnerable to just about every attacker.}
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“What are the advantages to each?”
{I think it will be easier to show you. For the next mission I have planned, you will have to do a fighting tutorial to get into it, and the game will explain all of this.}
“You’re going to give me a tutorial on how to fight after I went against five ogres and a demon?”
{Better late than never.}
Jace was moving through the town and passed the general store and wondered if he should buy anything, but he assumed Gracie would let him know. “I also found I couldn’t cast my totems when I wanted.”
{You can only cast each totem once every ten rounds. You are already broken; if you could keep recasting your Damage Sink Totem, no one would ever be able to damage you.}
“But I also couldn’t cast it when fighting the incubus.”
{Yes, he had you in a Helpless condition. When you are Helpless, you can’t do anything. You become Helpless when you have a level four bane.}
“Bane?”
{Yes. Positive conditions are called boons, and negative ones are called banes. He had you securely grappled, which is level 3, and then he pinned you to the wall, which elevated the restraint bane to level 4. At the end of the fight, he was dazed by your lightning attack, which is level 2. He was prone on the ground, which elevated it to level 3. Then you pinned him to the ground, which made it a level 4, so he was Helpless to defend your attack. I’m sure he had a bunch of magical defenses to prevent criticals, but they were all disabled because he was helpless.}
Jace was walking out of town and told Snowy to be alert. They were in a non-PVP zone, but it was nighttime, and he wanted a warning if they accidentally wandered into the hostile area. “What about my spell and the feat that I got? Gandhi wouldn’t tell me what they did.”
{Wai- Wha- How- You talked to Gandhi?}
“Yes. She guided me through the quest. We had an interesting conversation before and after. I think she is on board with what we are trying to do.”
Gracie turned to look at Frans dozing on the chair, wondering if he was listening to all this. The sound was up on the TV since he had watched Jace play while she slept, so they didn’t have the privacy they once did.
{She? Everyone always thought Gandhi was a guy.}
“No,” Jace replied. “She reminded me of the Ancient One from Dr. Strange. She basically knows everything.”
{Of course. She listens to everything. Since we are talking to each other through the game right now, she can hear us. She’s not the only one, too. It isn’t as quiet as it used to be.}
Jace understood the code for telling him that the TV volume was up and that he needed to be careful what he said.
{I think Snowy is a bit chatty right now,} Gracie said in her cryptic voice.
That was another code, but Jace didn’t know what it meant. He pulled up Snowy’s options but didn’t see a chat function. She did have a Party Member selection that Jace hadn’t explored, and when he activated that, he did see the chat option. A chat screen appeared before him, taking up a third of the screen. There was a QWERTY keyboard where he could type with his eyes. He didn’t bother now because Gracie was typing, and the hacker could type almost as fast as she could talk.
It felt the same as when Snowy communicated with him, and at the end of her chat, Gracie must have hit enter, and the wolf barked, letting Jace know he had a message. He didn’t bother going through the process of selecting the animal and navigating to the chat screen since he had watched her type it, but he understood how it would work.
{So,} Gracie continued in his head, {on to your abilities. I assume the magic defense is obvious. As for the spell, it looks like it is called Righteous Judgement. It is basically Holy Smite and does extra damage against people unaligned with you.} She paused for a moment. {%&*$, it does a lot of damage. Usually, a spell like this will do 50% more against someone who is Chaotic or Guile if you are Ordered or Honest, but this actually gives you a multiplier for each of the three alignments. The incubus was the opposite of you on all three, so you got an 8x multiplier for your damage.}
“And if the target is the same as me on one of those alignments?”
{Then you get a 0x. I think you are good enough with numbers to know that anything times zero is zero.}
“Is that how Caitlin was spared any damage?”
{Yes. Lightning attacks always jump to the next closest person in the room, doing half damage. So, the demon’s alignment turned your 36-damage lightning attack into a 288-damage apocalypse storm. Half went into the first half-orc, then it was cut in half again for the second guard. Then 36 points of electrical damage went into Caitlin, but because she was Traditional, it was multiplied by 0, and she took nothing.}
“She was considered Traditional? She was about to sacrifice her child to a demon to gain power.”
{That brings us to the feat you got, Convict. I told you that people take three main actions with their third combat round action. There are many more. One of them is called Stand Your Ground. It is when you stand there and do nothing. When you do this, you lose your natural AC bonus, which is replaced with your Intimidation value, which is your Strength base plus your Intelligence base. For you, that is twelve plus negative six. Some feats use the Stand Your Ground action and allow you to strike fear in your attacker or possibly even daze or stun them. It is used mainly by powerful fighters who are attacked by much weaker players and don’t want to bother killing them. They let them swing and miss, and when they do, they can disable them without attacking.
{So, you swapped your natural 10 AC with an Intimidate of six. It looks like you get the same multiplying bonus as with your spell, but Caitlin was Pragmatic, Chaotic, and Liberal, so you only got a 2x bonus, and the 12 AC you got was not high enough to make her miss. She had just cast a Strength boon on herself while fighting the priest, so she was hitting you pretty hard. Then it looks like she rolled a three and missed you. Your Convict triggered, and you were able to change one aspect of her character. It looks like the game took care of this for you and changed her alignment to Traditional. I guess this means all those touchy-feely traditional family values convicted her, and she realized she loved Faylon too much to go through with it. Pretty cool, but I can’t imagine it ever working again. It is way too risky. You cannot know what someone’s alignment is when they attack you. I only know hers because your Convict ability revealed it. I see the demon’s because your damage was multiplied by eight. I won’t be able to tell you others when you meet them, so you are much more likely to take a -10 penalty to your AC than any benefit.}
Jace nodded, able to do the math, but he trusted Gandhi and Dexmachi had plans for him. “What about my spells? You said you would run down how memorizing spells works once I got one that does damage. Plus, I should have two divine spells now, right?”
{We need to pick a new spell for you, but we can only do that at level up, which is another 20k away. We will definitely want to choose a healing spell.}
“I don’t need a healing spell,” Jace replied. “I have this cool ring . . .” he paused as he held up his hand and didn’t see the ring. Jace panicked briefly as he opened his inventory. All his stuff was back, including the halberd and the Level 50 crystal. It took a few seconds for him to find it among all the random equipment he had collected, but the healing ring was there too. He hastily equipped it.
{They let you keep the ring, nice. Do you know how it works?}
“I seem to get two health for every five mana I put into it.”
{Right. Regular healing spells work the same way as damage spells. They operate on one damage per five mana. You have an Ordered healing ring, meaning it will do double healing on Ordered characters and none on chaotic characters.}
“That’s why I couldn’t use it on Faylon.”
{Correct. As for the spell, it also does one damage for every five mana you spend. You have 184 mana when full, so it maxes out at 40 damage. You can only memorize one version of this spell because you know -6 spells, but the game gives you one for free. Spells can be fully customized so they can be cast at a distance, over a wide area, and lasting for a specific time. You can even spend mana to make them more difficult to defend against. I don’t recommend any of those things for you. Keeping it as a touch spell means you can cast it through whatever weapon you use. Any other modifiers will detract from the damage it can do. You can also set one of the values of the spell to All In, which means it will use up all the mana you have left. I recommend that for this. It is risky, as it will drain all your mana, and the spell might do zero damage, but I think you can strategize around it. Just make sure you have the totems you want before you cast it. We could set it to 100 mana for the damage, but if you only had 80 mana, you wouldn’t be able to cast it. This way, even if you have 20 mana, you can still do four damage to someone.}
“Or possibly 32,” Jace countered.
{Or possibly zero. I think you are overestimating how useful this will be.}
“It doesn’t sound like magical damage is that powerful in this game. As a shaman, I have a lot of mana for my level, yet all of my mana at once only does 36 damage. One swing of my halberd does 40 damage. And that is before any criticals, and it never runs out.”
{You have +20 to hit and damage. If you were a mage with the same stats, only focused on Intelligence instead of Strength, you could have +20 to Spell Difficulty and probably +30 to Spell Damage since it is cumulative with the Spirit skill. That means you could do 31 damage by only spending five mana. Plus, some feats increase specific damage types like fire or electricity or feats that increase damage in general. A well-designed fire mage could have killed all six of those goblins that nearly ended you with one fireball that cost less than 100 mana.}
“Wow,” Jace said. “I’d love to see how all that works.”
{It will never be you, but maybe we can get you a mage companion soon, and you can see how it works. Anyway, I have some information for you if we are done reviewing your adventure?}
“Almost; I also noticed that my Mana Generation ability worked differently at different times.”
{Let me guess. During combat, it was generating quickly, but in between fights, it wasn’t?}
“Exactly.”
{That is because rounds work differently at different times. In combat, a round lasts roughly six seconds. That is enough time for you to attack twice, do a third action, and for all the other enemies in your vicinity to do the same. If only two people are fighting, and they are fast, a round can be shorter. Outside of combat, rounds last six minutes. Things like Mana Generation that operated per round go at different rates depending on whether you are in combat. Rounds can take longer or shorter, depending on how characters interact. In a massive fight, a spell caster who can do a spell once per round might have to wait ten seconds between spells because there is so much action around them that it takes that long for everyone to get two attacks and an action. However, if a mage wants to cast multiple spells outside of combat, they don’t have to wait six minutes between them if no one else is holding them up. But if they have a companion checking their inventory or leveling up, the player gets their full six minutes if needed, and the spell caster has to wait. Gandhi does an excellent job of taking care of it, so it is mostly invisible, but if you understand it, you can take advantage of it.}
“Makes sense. I think those are all my questions. Did you say you have some additional information?”
{I think I know how you are seeing the dial.}
Jace stopped walking at this, and Snowy turned to look at him. “That is kind of my cheat code, and I am worried you are about to say it isn’t going to last.”
{You must be psychic. Actually, it explains how you are even in the orc. That medallion you are wearing was designed to do two things. The first is it was supposed to give us an anchor to a PC so we could control him with the AI and eventually have a human possess him through VR. Second, it was designed to give data back on NPC die results. I can typically see the result when an NPC rolls dice against a VR player, but our AI-controlled player wasn’t getting that feedback, so I had to write a hack. When we lost a fight, I didn’t know if it was because the NPC got a lucky die roll or if they were just too powerful. Also, the amulet was explicitly designed so only the paladin could wear it.
{Then I thought about the orc shaman taking the most powerful weapon available after he defeats someone at the end of the level 50 module. There are several weapon quests you can go one where a powerful NPC craftsman will make a weapon specifically designed for you. That way, you won’t tempt other PCs to kill you since they can’t use your weapon anyway. But the orc was scripted to take his opponent’s most powerful item and use it. That wouldn’t be possible if the best weapon were personal, so the orc was programmed with a cheat script that allowed him to change each item he picked up, so if it was personal for someone else, it became unique to him.}
“And when he picked up the amulet,” Jace jumped in, “since it was designed for your paladin, he made it personal to him so that he could wear it.”
{And, because it was programmed to hack NPCs and show us their die rolls, every time you need to roll a die in an attack, it shows you the results as it happens.}
“That might explain something else that’s been happening,” Jace said. “I’ve noticed images flashing through my mind when people around me cast spells. It is fast and confusing, but I get the idea that numbers are associated with the die results.”
{When you defend against a magical attack, you roll a die. I’m guessing the game is showing how you can manually defend against the attack, the same way it shows you where to attack to get the 20. Next time it happens, pay attention. You might have found another hack to get 20s in defense against magic, which would be really nice. However, it isn’t going to last forever, I fear.}
“I knew you were going to say that.”
{The paladin charged the item for 36 hours. So far, it has been about twenty since he put it on. So, you have another half a day with it at best. Probably until nighttime today.}
“Can’t we recharge it?”
{You don’t know the spell; the paladin did. He obtained it from a specific module I programmed that had the amulet as the prize. It is a SIM, so a bunch of people aren’t walking around with the necklace.}
“If we destroy it, then the SIM will reset, and I can go get it again, right?”
{You can’t destroy a unique item from a SIM. The only way to reset the SIM is to delete the item from the game, which happens if you die and the amulet is in a SIM or MIM that you own. Those modules are reset or deleted along with everything inside them. Plus, I’m not sure it would work the same. When the orc picked it up, he was an NPC, and it bonded to him. Now you are a PC. If the amulet were reset and connected to you again, it would be as a PC, and it wouldn’t show your dice rolls anymore.”
“I guess I’ll have to use it for training. Try to predict where the 20s are so I can still get them after the amulet dies.” Jace was quiet for a while and noticed that he was still stopped outside the city, standing in the dark with Snowy looking at him. It dawned on him that if another PC came upon him in this situation, they would probably try to attack him again. He continued moving toward the travel node.
“I need a spell to disguise myself. Gandhi made it clear that she wouldn’t help me with my appearance anymore. People will reject an orc, and I’ll never be able to go into a PVP zone looking like this.”
{Yes, I see that as an issue too. The problem is that all the good illusion items are either in PVP zones or are Gandhi-enabled modules, meaning they will react to you being an orc. I had to find a very early module written before the VR and Gandhi were incorporated. Everything is backward compatible, but you don’t get all the features.}
“Sure, whatever. I can adapt. Is this where the combat tutorial is?”
{Yes, and it is actually accessed through the real Realm of Infamy game that the designers intended people to play, not just all the modules that people do now.}
“Going old school,” Jace said, though everything was new to him.
{Right. Get to the travel node, and I will tell you where to go.}