Esther walked through Zamora’s city gates as the eastern sky flamed with light over the distant desert landscape, dawn only minutes away. Traveling the dunes outside the city in daylight or navigating the dangerous city streets in darkness was not advised, so entering the volatile settlement at 6 a.m. was a common practice for players and NPCs alike.
The four barbarian guards flanking the city’s main entrance barely noticed Esther amidst the steady stream of traffic. Their eyes were looking for coordinated groups, large wagons, or non-sanctioned monsters trying to gain entrance. As a Hostile PVP zone, Zamora catered to everything, and limiting traffic would reduce the effectiveness of the city as a hive for adventurers, criminals, and heroes alike. However, if you tried to smuggle in taxable contraband, a large army, or a troll, they had regulations to control that. Esther was a single, diminutive NPC huddled under a hooded black cloak. She didn’t warrant a second look from any of the guards.
The celebrity rogue wasn’t used to the anonymity and knew that if a player recognized her, she wouldn’t stay innocuous for long, so she hurried through the crowd, using her grace and dexterity to slip toward the side streets and then Shadow Stepped into the lingering darkness the tall buildings provided against the rising sun.
Zamora was an oddity in the realms. Space was not usually an issue, especially in a computer game were more land could be conjured up for no cost. Towns were typically spread out, allowing for unimpeded flow and uncrowded encounters. Buildings rarely exceeded three stories unless it was a castle or wizard’s tower. Zamora resembled a pyramid. A prominent hill lay in the center of the five-mile-wide city, but even if it didn’t, the shape would remain as homes and shops were thrown together like discarded crates into a landfill, one stacked upon the other with little regard for uniformity or architectural integrity.
Esther dared to peek up and out of her hood to regard the city’s mesmerizing design. Dwellings rose before her like a mountain, held together by ropes, boardwalks, and the occasional iron beam. Handrails were a luxury not every building could afford, and she saw children moving about like mountain goats, scampering across narrow walkways and swinging around older pedestrians on ropes that hung over a fifty-foot drop. It gave Esther chills to watch, but it also looked amazingly fun. Unfortunately, she wasn’t meant to go up.
{How is it going?}
Gracie’s voice still felt weird in her ears, and Esther looked around frantically to find the source of the question before she relaxed and remembered she had an operator for a change. “It’s fine,” she replied. “They let me in, no problem.”
{Good,} Gracie said. {Then find our contact and be quick. Jace and the rest of the team are waiting for our signal to proceed. We don’t want to take too much time.}
Esther nodded and replied verbally, remembering Gracie couldn’t see her. The woman wore magical earrings that Gromphy had designed. Her usual diamond studs gave her one additional spell each, but she had to remove them because – for some reason – she couldn’t wear two earrings in the same ear. Gracie and Jace said it was a restriction of the realms. She didn’t like it. Gromphy’s floppy goblin ears had multiple rings and studs in each, and he could wear these and communicate with Gracie without removing any of his usual jewelry. In response, Jace only shrugged and asked her if she would like to be transformed into a goblin for the duration of this mission. That had shut her up, and she accepted the limitations of her human form.
With the earrings, Gracie could communicate directly with Esther, monitor her condition, and relay that information to Jace. However, the magical items didn’t let the operator see what Esther did or gain any information about potential enemies around her.
As the rogue ducked in and out of alleyways, consciously trying to remain in the shadows, she detected dozens of potential enemies around her. She was careful not to look directly up, for fear her hood might fall back or someone above might recognize her face, but she could see on other distant rooftops sentries and archers keeping watch on the streets below and knew similar guards likely patrolled above her. Windows and balconies decorated the sides of the haphazard structures in an equally unorthodox pattern, providing dozens of potential sniper locations. Even at ground level, doors were often cracked open, or peepholes shone with a True Sight spell, letting her know her passage wasn’t invisible to everyone. She even felt motion within the occasional sewer grate she passed and knew the tunnels beneath the city streets teamed with nasty creatures.
Esther found her left hand instinctively reaching up to her head to tug on the brim of her magical black hat whenever she felt prying eyes upon her. Unfortunately, the shadow-producing magical item was tucked away in her inventory. It also appeared she was only allowed to have one item on her head at a time, and the hooded cloak was more inconspicuous.
Esther’s only sense of security came from knowing she was not alone. With her keen eyes, she saw dozens of other rogues, pickpockets, and street urchins moving as she did, careful to stay in the shadows and appear unobtrusive. Other adventurers strode proudly through the streets, wearing shiny armor or colorful wizard robes, inviting all the attention they could. Esther still lacked Jace’s skill in differentiating between players and NPCs, and she guessed a combination moved through the city.
Gracie had also told her about the guilds and factions operating within Zamora, and Esther noticed crests and emblems worn by many of the characters around her. Aligning oneself with a guild was the best form of insurance in a city like this. To kill a guild member would bring the rest of that faction down on your head.
So, on one hand, proudly displaying that symbol allowed you to walk freely throughout the city. However, many guilds didn’t like each other, and letting everyone know which you belonged to might limit your access to shops or entertainment venues. Many people had learned to hide their allegiances. At first, this made them targets, but after several guild wars had started because members were killed while incognito, potential assassins learned not to assume anything.
Since it was foolish to try and operate within the city without aligning yourself with one of the powerful factions, not displaying your allegiance just meant you were cautious. This allowed someone like Esther to remain unattached yet not paint herself as a target.
However, another group of residents moved through the alleys, keeping to the shadows, and they likely had no qualms about attacking whomever they wanted, regardless of guild affiliation. Esther had to look to the ground constantly to avoid stepping on them. “Gracie,” she finally said. “Why are there so many snakes?”
The operator’s laughter sounded odd through the magical earrings. {Sorry. I should have warned you. Lord Vulder is a snake worshiper. Zamora is teeming with them. As long as the people follow his commands, they won’t harm anyone within the city.}
“What happens when Jace defeats him?” Esther asked. “That’s what we’re here to do, right? Won’t the snakes suddenly kill everyone?”
A hooded viper suddenly reared up before the rogue. Its forked tongue smelled the air between them as it swayed back and forth. Esther wasn’t particularly scared of snakes, spiders, or other creeping things. They just annoyed her. She contemplated for a moment using one of her rapiers to slice the thing's head off but wisely chose not to.
{Perhaps you shouldn’t say that out loud,} Gracie said. She could tell that Esther had just made a fear check and guessed what she faced. Esther shrugged her shoulders, and Shadow Stepped past the creature.
The rogue moved quickly through the streets, truly at home in an environment like this. Too often Jace took her sailing on ships or traipsing through a forest. This environment was more her style. As shops began to open up around her, preparing for the morning rush of customers, the smell of baked goods, fried bacon, and chocolate proved a powerful distraction, impairing her ability to stay on task. She made the mistake of muttering, “Mmm, waffles,” when she saw a plate of them covered in whipped cream and berries advertised in a window.
{No time for food,} Gracie scolded. {You can eat later. You should be getting close.}
Esther shook her head in frustration but knew the operator was right. Based on her directions, their contact should be three blocks away. A minute later, she found a precariously narrow plaster and wood building leaning slightly to one side. The top of the three-story dwelling touched a neighboring structure that was somewhat shorter, and someone had built a small shack above the intersection. Esther swore the whole thing swayed slightly in the wind and feared it would all come crashing down if she dared knock on the front door. She was spared the experiment as her contact had been watching her approach through holes in the wall that looked like arrow punctures.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Esther Xerxes?” the small man whispered toward her through the cracked doorway.
Esther had her hands on the hilts of her swords beneath her cloak. “Damon?” she replied.
The squirrely man nodded and opened the door a few inches further, barely enough for Esther to squeeze her curvy frame through, then closed it quickly behind her. The building’s first floor barely measured eight feet square, with a single chair, a table, a cabinet, and a ladder leading to the second level. Esther didn’t spend long examining the room and turned her attention to her host. Damon stood shorter than her, though his stooped posture made it impossible to know for sure. His slight frame gave the impression he hadn’t eaten a plate full of waffles in months, if ever, and Esther felt confident she outweighed him. He wore tattered brown trousers and a gray vest with no shirt underneath, showing off his sunken stomach and rib cage.
“You, you, you are actually here,” he squeaked in excitement, his gaze searching every inch of her impressive form, unsure of where to settle. Esther cleared her throat to draw his attention upward, and the look in her eyes let him know where he should focus. “Uh, sorry, I, uh, don’t get many visitors. And they, uh, usually, aren’t, uh, like you.” His eyes began to drop again, and Esther inhaled sharply to draw them back up.
“Well, I don’t intend to stay long. You have a secret way to get me underground? To avoid the levels of security?”
He nodded eagerly and turned to squat in front of the floor-level cabinet. Inside the narrow cupboard sat a few dusty mugs and wooden plates. Damon hastily discarded them onto the dirty floor and then paused. He turned and looked back up at Esther, a shiver coursing through him as he appreciated this new angle of his beautiful guest. He shook his head and regained some measure of composure. “I don’t think this will work for you. I didn’t realize you would be so . . .” he couldn’t find the right word.
If he said, “Fat,” Esther was prepared to cut his head off. He didn’t. Instead, he returned to the cabinet and removed the fake back panel. This home was built into the base of Zamora’s hill, and when Damon stepped back from the open doors, Esther knelt beside him to peer into a pitch-black tunnel barely two feet across that angled deep underground.
Esther frowned. “You couldn’t dig it any bigger?” She turned to regard him when he didn’t immediately respond. He was shrugging his bare-boned shoulders, and Esther realized the diminutive man could probably squeeze himself through an opening half as big.
{What’s the problem?} Gracie asked.
“I found the tunnel into the hill,” Esther reported, “but Gromphy would have a hard time fitting inside.”
{We prepared for this,} Gracie said.
Esther sighed and didn’t bother replying. She had hoped their backup plan wouldn’t be necessary. Turning to Damon, she found the NPC’s mouth open in shock. “Are you a PC? Do you have an operator? I always thought you were . . .”
Esther waved her hand to shut him up. “This is it, right? This is the tunnel I need to take to get to the mines?” He nodded. “And there is no way to make it bigger?”
He shook his head. “The beginning is sandstone and easy to dig through, but once you get deep enough, you find limestone, which is much harder. Even then, I could have made it bigger, but the stone is laced with iron ore. I had to backtrack and dig new branches several times before I could find a clear path all the way through. This is as wide as I could make it.”
Esther shrugged her shoulders in defeat, removed her Athletic-boosting necklace, and swapped it for Jace’s illusion medallion. For whatever reason, he said he wouldn’t need it. Esther had used the magical device to disguise herself as Mur Calumis, Psycho’s sister, in a previous mission, and she called up that illusion now. Her body transformed into a slender elf, a few inches shorter and several dress sizes smaller. They had discussed trying to transform her into a gnome or halfling, but the further the illusion was from the truth, the more mana it took, and they didn’t think it would be necessary. Plus, if she had to fight while disguised, she would be disadvantaged if she were too small.
The rogue also saw she would have to remove her armor and weapons. Those and her cloak went into her inventory, leaving only her underclothes. Damon’s jaw was on the floor, but a disapproving look from Esther helped him recover. She wasn’t quite as alluring as a wood elf, and he found the willpower to turn around and give the woman her privacy. Knowing time was of the essence, Esther got to her knees, wrinkled her nose at the warm, musty air wafting out of the hole, and was about to crawl inside when she hesitated.
“There aren’t any snakes inside, are there?” she asked. When Damon didn’t respond right away, she turned to find him staring at her butt. “Snakes,” she repeated. “In the hole. Are there any?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think so.”
Esther swore and crawled into the darkness.
----------------------------------------
The tunnel was miserable, even without snakes.
As a vampire, Esther wasn’t exactly scared of the dark, and with her incredible strength, the crawl wasn’t too taxing, but other game mechanics worked against her. Even with the more petite frame of Mur Calumis, Esther got stuck repeatedly. Since she hauled herself forward with her elbows, each time she felt resistance, she just pulled harder. The game treated these tight spaces as Grapple checks, which needed to be escaped through her Athleticism, not Strength. When she tried to muscle through instead, she became Securely Grappled and had to lay Helpless for a few rounds. When the game released her, she used one of the diamonds in her bracelet to cast an Athletic boon on herself and wriggle free. Eventually, after the fourth or fifth time, she began to sense when the space was too tight to struggle through and immediately used her Athletic skill.
Also, Damon hadn’t been lying about the iron ore. Shards of rock and mettle occasionally jutted into the narrow crawl space at every angle. Esther didn’t know if it was piercing damage or slashing damage, and it didn’t matter because, without her armor, she didn’t have the natural Damage Reduction to avoid it. Soon, she recognized slight bends in the tunnel where Damon had to go around large ore deposits, and she could squeeze to one side to avoid the painful rocks. She also understood why Damon couldn’t make the channel wider, as ore often jutted in at her from multiple directions, and the narrow passage was the only way through.
After twenty minutes, which seemed like two hours, Esther sensed light ahead around the next bend and moved with eager yet cautious anticipation. The tunnel emptied onto a narrow ledge just under the ceiling of a tight mine shaft. No torches hung on the walls, and Esther was confused about where the light came from when she heard footsteps approaching from her left. The light grew in intensity, and she knew she had to hurry.
Esther was halfway out of the secret passage, her upper body resting on the ledge, enjoying the relatively cool air against her cut and bruised skin while her hips still fought against the narrow exit. There wasn’t room for her to hide on the tiny ledge, so she angled her head down and intended to somersault out of the tunnel and land on the floor six feet below. As she bent down to pull herself out, the necklace fell off.
Pain erupted in her body as her hips resumed their normal width, and the tight stone passageway dealt 100 points of crushing damage to her.
{What just happened!} Gracie cried, but Esther screamed in pain and didn’t hear her. She ignored the game rules and wrenched forward with all her might. The result of her body and the stone simultaneously occupying the same space at once had caused her damage and had cracked the tunnel, so when she tried to muscle through, rocks popped and broke until her tired, bloody, and nearly naked body sprang free and crumpled into a heap in the center of the mine shaft.
Dizziness, pain, vertigo, and half a dozen other banes swirled through her as Gracie shouted in her head. Esther struggled to push herself up from the stone floor. Sand and blood matted together to cover her exposed skin in dark red muddy patches, further adding to her general sense of misery. She only barely held on to consciousness as two kobolds bore down on her, each carrying a torch and pickaxe.
A sixth sense told her not to try to Dodge the attacks, so instead of rolling away from them at the last second, she rolled toward them. That was unexpected, and the two miners tripped over her much bigger body and their weapons clambered to the ground, their torches skittering out ahead head of them. The lights didn’t go out and illuminated the cavern well enough that neither of the creatures needed to retrieve them before turning to attack.
Now, Esther managed to get her bearings and prepared a defense. She summoned her armor and weapons in a flash but didn’t have time to draw the blades before the first kobold closed on her. He was only level nine and didn’t have a prayer. Still, in her disoriented state, her Dodge wasn’t enough to completely avoid the pickaxe. Even so, the miner only got a normal hit, which didn’t register above her armor’s Damage Reduction. She responded by Grappling the diminutive foe and tossing him hard against the wall.
She didn’t have multiple rounds to put him in a hold, render him Helpless, and then snap his neck, as that would have given his partner a chance to slam his weapon into her head while she was Flat-Footed. But once the first attacker bounced off the wall and suffered banes of his own, she had the opening to incapacitate the second one. She let her armor absorb the blow again, put him in a choke hold, and began feeding.
She let the foul blood restore her health for a couple of rounds and then took a break to look up at the first kobold and hurl an acid spell at him as he gathered for a second attack. The miner dissolved into a grease stain on the dirty floor, and then she returned to her captive until her health and mana were topped off. She snapped his neck to end his misery and took stock of herself.
{You are supposed to be stealthy,} Gracie admonished, guessing what had happened by monitoring her character sheet.
“Accidents happen,” Esther whispered. Still, she knew the operator was right. If she left evidence of her presence, security would increase, and she likely wouldn’t make it to Delly. After retrieving the torches, she found that the melted remains of the first creature burned like oil, and she soon did the same to the second. A few rounds later, there was nothing left but charred remains, and she scooped them up and stuffed them into the opening of the tunnel she had just escaped from. She had to admit that the secret entrance was nearly invisible when she stood in the middle of the mine shaft, even more so if she squatted to the height of a kobold.
Esther chose her hat over her cloak this time and ensured all her weapons and jewelry were in place. She took a few moments to kick dirt over a few random blood splatters and smoothed out the floor to hide the scuffle that had taken place. After extinguishing the torches and hiding them on the shelf as well, she ran silently in the direction from where the kobolds came, trying not to think about the kind of stench that would soon waft into Damon’s home from the burnt corpses she left behind.