Tutorial

The party had journeyed deep into the caverns of the hanging gardens of Babylon. It was not a place that knew true darkness, so no matter how far down they went they would always be able to see their way. Still, it was as dim and cool as it ever got in their paradise, and it had them all on edge.

They hadn’t constructed the gardens, and they didn’t know any of those who had, so all of the small questions about its functioning were allowed to fester and grow into giant frightening shadows in the back of their minds.

Mushrooms were a good example. The gardens were supposed to be deathless, that was the reward for reaching them, and for giving up your humanity to do so… but then why were their mushrooms? Such organisms thrived only where there was death and decay, and their pale white caps were visible everywhere in the caverns. They had to be feeding on something that no longer was.

Not so naive as to think they could spend their time lounging on clouds and letting waterfalls and canals take them wherever they pleased, the party had all brought their weapons. The gates were open to people from all over the world, and all over time. There was no telling where their fellows had come from, or what value was closest to their heart.

Each of them served a purpose in the mission to recover the chest of Uxul. The weathered gargoyle led the way, antelope horns and massive shoulders pushing through hanging ferns as long and wide as crocodiles. He suspected traps as much as the others, but did not fear them. Explosives couldn’t threaten his rocky shell, blades bounced off, and poisonous fangs couldn’t find a vein anywhere in him to infect.

Behind him skulked a most loathsome creature, though you wouldn’t know it by his smile, unless it was full enough to show his pearly fangs. In place of a right hand he had a prosthesis of two metal hooks, together perched as replacement fangs should his supernatural set fail him. Back on Earth he had stalked the seven seas endlessly, never having to worry about being invited in when the waters were lawless and your property was mostly defined as whatever solid object you were currently standing on. Nobody could call the thieving parasite anything affectionately, but if they could they might name him the vampirate.

He would slit throats if need be, but he could only do so in close quarters combat. The woman behind would have the opportunity to strike first should they spot their foes from a distance. Ready in her arms sat a bow and arrow, its surface tarnished by splashes of soot and ash. Her quiver contained arrows, but at the tip of each was a firework packed with brilliant colors. She did not disclose which civilization had forged her, but it was apparently one where they felt their enemies needed to explode in flashy displays to get their point across.

Behind the firework archer was the grape stomper: a citizen of Arcadia. The place the Greeks grew in those blessed hills was arguably close to the glory of Babylon, and she showed many signs of having lived there without a care for centuries. Her feet and ankles were permanently stained dark purple from entire seasons of dancing that produced medicinal wine. She wore a circlet of leaves that looked alive despite no roots. Over her shoulder, and with just three fingers on one hand, she carried a sloshing jug with ease, even though it weighed nearly as much as she did.

If need be the wine within could be poured onto any wound to rapidly speed the healing process. It was the height of foolishness to descend into the lower levels of the gardens without someone like her by your side.

Together they would reclaim the chest and make sure its golden contents couldn’t be used for alchemical evil, but first they had to find it. Luckily, during the theft, it had sprung a leak, and was leaving a trail of coins from a hundred different civilizations. A periodic sparkling upon the ground had led them deeper and deeper, until there was no hope of reinforcements from the less lawless and wild sections.

There came a sound that made them all freeze in their tracks, like a cross between the chatter of a dolphin and the song of a loon. They’d heard it before, and understood what it meant all too well. The sound was echolocation, and the being generating it was pinpointing their position. Their only chance to maintain the element of surprise was to charge toward it, and to do so immediately.

“I’ve got the chest!” the gargoyle shouted as he burst through the undergrowth and smashed low-hanging stalactites.

“Look away,” the archer followed up before firing an arrow directly into the ceiling. It exploded in a brilliant yellow flash, hopefully blinding their foes for a moment. The vampirate had already disappeared, to do his work from the shadows. The grape stomper knew he could handle himself, and her medicine would be much more needed by the other two.

She took up a position between her other teammates and moved with them, but the first attack came from above. A hand with pearl talons dove and scratched the stomper’s shoulder. -15. She didn’t stop, just aimed her jug at the flying creature as it completed its swoop. One of the many secrets of the Arcadian vintners was giving wine loyalty; what she carried would heal her friends and poison her enemies.

A liquid ball blasted out of the jug and into the sky, striking the creature. -10. The splash of wine dyed its slick body a magnificent color, and through the raining droplets they saw that they had identified their foe correctly. It was the flying mermaid, woman from the waist up, flying fish from the waist down. Her dolphin cackling was unmistakable, but it didn’t tell them who she had allied herself with.

The gargoyle could feel it; the chest was through a final wall of vines. He reared back to rip through them with slate claws, but the chest beat him to it. Levitated by magic, it shot through the veil and struck the beast’s chest, cracking his armor and knocking him onto his back. -60.

“So what are all those red numbers?” Mr. Vallet asked.

“They’re damage values,” the archer said quickly to quiet him. In the gardens she was known by several names. Today it was the firework archer. In another battle it might be lightning conductor or burned witch. Outside Babylon she was called Jenny Handerly, but her handle online was Handzy thanks to the impressive liberties she could take with a keyboard when the chips were down and the stakes were high: high enough for two full experience levels. Handzy focused back into her second set of eyes, those of the archer, and lit the fuse of another arrow.

This time it was with the intent to destroy rather than blind. The rest of the thieves had burst out from their hiding places. The flying mermaid was their ranger, so that left a brawler, an assassin, and a medic. They were easy enough to identify: dragon knight, master of disguise, and water witcher. The gargoyle was already getting back up, putting himself in the way of the charge.

A ball of wine sailed over the archer’s head and struck the stony behemoth’s back. Several of his cracks sealed. +25.

“That one was green,” Mr. Vallet said, pointing at one of the four monitors.

“Yeah Dad, because she healed me,” his son Marco snapped, lifting his hand off his mouse just long enough to slap his father’s pointing finger out of his peripheral vision.

“She healed you with her gun?”

“It’s a wine jug,” the grape stomper said. Outside the gardens she was a he, and his name was Elijah. Handle: Plusplus. He was able to explain much more patiently, even while keeping the others’ health pools topped off. “This is a first-person shooter, so it always looks like you’re holding a gun, but it’s a fantasy game, so the ‘gun’ can be basically anything.”

“Uhuh… Uhuh,” Mr. Vallet muttered. “Man, video games sure have come a long way since I was a kid. I think the last time I played one I was just jumping on platforms and whipping zombies.” None of the four teenagers responded to that, so he did his best to discern some information on his own by squinting at their screens.

It mostly just looked like a mess to him, like a spatter painting that might cause a seizure. Every second was a tangle of beams, bullets, splashes, rainbows, and electric sparks. There was a chest, he could see it sometimes when the fire died down, and it seemed pretty important. It was floating, following around whoever was closest to it, and a big gold number at the top of the screen, perhaps the king of all these numbers since it was the only one that didn’t immediately disappear, kept counting up whenever the chest followed one member of his son’s team.

The chest looked harmless enough, but it had nearly broken his son’s armor. Picking it up and throwing it was an ability exclusive to the dragon knight. He lit the cave more aggressively than all the others, belching streams of fire from the slats in his helm. The swirling rumors of the gardens said he was cursed, a dragon slayer in life back on Earth. Now he looked like them, reptilian slit eyes, green scaly skin, and a dagger-tipped tail poking out of one leg of his own suit of rusty armor.

Now that the chest had been thrown the ability was on cooldown, and couldn’t be used again for some time. That gave the gargoyle a window of opportunity to get in close, where the flame stream would be useless as well.

“You got this,” Handzy encouraged him as she pumped exploding arrows into the water witcher and the master of disguise to keep them off him.

“Of course I do,” Marco, whose name was displayed in-game as Granslam, boasted. The gargoyle grappled with the knight, rolling his body that was mostly mountainous shoulders forward. The tumbling wheel toss dealt injury each time the knight’s back hit the cavern’s floor. -9 -9 -9 -9.

Their enemies were suppressed, but the chest was tailing water witcher. They needed to get it back, and only one of them had the opportunity to strike. The vampirate emerged from the shadows, in fact from one shadow specifically.

His pale form emerged from under the water witcher, and with his twin hooks he began covertly siphoning away health as a stream of red mist. If it reached a critically low level the chest would detach and follow him instead. Once time ran out whichever squad had more accrued seconds of chest stewardship would be declared the winner.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“And what’s Glenn doing?”

“When we’re playing he’s called Flippers,” Marco said for him, knowing full well his friend needed to concentrate. “You know, like pinball flippers. He’s playing our assassin. He’s supposed to sneak around and kill people without them noticing. Shit!” The dragon knight blasted the weathered gargoyle away with an explosion from his mouth.

“Hey language,” his father scolded, taking a sip from his coffee mug. “What would your mother say?” That always made the boy reel it back in. Mrs. Vallet had passed nearly five years ago, from a serious infection. Even in the hospital, even with her eyes fluttering open and shut, she had watched her little boy’s language like a hawk. If he wanted to swear when he was older he could do it in Spanish, so all the white people in public wouldn’t know he was being rude.

“There are four roles required for a team,” Handzy told him to get the heat off Granslam. “Brawlers absorb damage and disrupt enemy formations, assassins flank and kill, rangers pepper with damage from a distance, and medics heal their teammates.”

“But the bad guys don’t look like you.”

“That’s because each role has several characters within it that you can choose, and no character can be in the same match twice. I’m the ranger, but I’m playing firework archer. The enemy ranger is playing flying mermaid.”

“There, now that we’ve explained the whole game to you can you go away Dad? We’re practicing for the tournament.”

“I would love to go away,” he said, stepping around the unpolished granite counter top to put it between them and lean on it, first rolling up his sleeves so the stone dust wouldn’t dirty his elbows, “except you kids are using all the bandwidth. I can’t watch my shows. You’re the only entertainment in the whole workshop.”

Their voices didn’t echo in the utilities room, which barely had enough space for the stack of unfinished counters, one row of computers and chairs, and the various fuse boxes the business needed, but if they moved thirty feet to the right anything they said would bounce around the high metal ceilings and hanging lamps of Granite Valet stonework company.

It was late in the evening, so none of the employees were there, just the owner, his son, and his son’s friends. Or, he had to correct himself, they might prefer to be called coworkers. They were really trying to make a go of this E-sports venture of theirs. It took a few hours, but eventually Joaquin Vallet understood there was some money in it, if you had the skills.

That was why they insisted they needed to use the warehouse’s business class internet. Apparently, E-sports professionals were only as good as their connections. One microsecond of lag could cost them a point of damage, and thus a kill, and thus the round, and thus a tournament with a prize pool of one million dollars.

Mr. Vallet really didn’t mind their presence. It was good to have kids running around the place again, though they were all nearly out of high school, and they were more ‘glued to their seats’ than ‘running around’. Still, sometimes they would finish up a practice and walk out into the open space between all the leaning slabs of swirling earthy colors and play catch with whatever office supply they had nicked on their way out. He had taken to leaving them something on the counter there to see if they would pick it up and toss it around. Today it was the coffee mug, but he had to empty it first. He took another sip.

Marco even seemed annoyed at that, so he figured he might as well keep talking if every single sound was going to set him off. The boy could use a thicker skin; it was a shame he wasn’t taking cues from the stony gargoyle he was controlling.

“So does this game have a story or something?”

“It has lore,” Plusplus said.

“Is that like a story?”

“More like backstory,” Flippers said, finally speaking up now that his target had expired. “It’s a multiplayer-only game so there’s no need for story while you’re playing, but you can look up a bunch of information about the characters and stuff in the menu. Plus the company that makes it has a bunch of tie-in comics and books.”

“So give me the exam notes,” Mr. Vallet said, finally draining his cup. It was too late for coffee, he could already feel it frying his nerves, but the kids always stayed up late and he agreed to keep an eye on them all since it was a Friday and Glenn’s parents specifically asked that he not be allowed to stay up past one. If they didn’t call it quits by midnight he was going to have to wrangle them all and drive them back to the house against their will. “It’s called Hanging Gardens of Babylon, right?”

“Yeah,” Flippers continued. He was a pale skinny kid, with his narrow focus, like the path of an arrow, coming across with every word. “It’s about a bunch of mythical lost civilizations that were super advanced: Atlantis, El Dorado, Ys, Arcadia, Shambhala, the city of the pillars, Cockaigne, and Norumbega.”

“I’ve heard of some of those. What, no Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

“Huh?” three of the kids said at once.

“Nothing, it’s an old song. Keep going Glenn.”

“Anyway, the lore is that each of these civilizations, where they reached near-utopia states thanks to combining science and magic, all had the same goal in mind. There was a true utopia out there, one where you could be immortal, and if they kept advancing they would eventually be able to reach it.

It turned out they were right. There is a place… the hanging gardens. It’s bigger than a mountain range, loaded with plants that hang off its ceramic sides and grow into a bright cloudy abyss. It just floats there, in the middle of no place we’d ever recognize. There is no age there, so the vines keep growing down and down and down, never dying, never finding land.”

“But your characters are fighting in the gardens right now, right? How did they get there?”

“That’s why all of these civilizations fell or vanished. It’s how Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the sea. Their rulers eventually figured out the gateway to Babylon is locked, and the key is a mass sacrifice of human life.”

“That’s… really dark.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Each time the ruling party or figures sacrificed their people and made it the gardens, there were a few lucky stragglers managing to sneak or buy their way in at the last minute. Those people and beings are the characters we play.

They’re constantly dealing with the guilt of what they had to do or ignore to secure their own immortality, but their presence makes the gardens imperfect. They don’t age, but they can still die from violence, and they’re surrounded by people they already know to have committed thousands or hundreds of thousands of murders, all for a ticket to paradise.”

“So they’re all fighting because they don’t trust each other… and those fights are the matches that you guys are playing?”

“Now you’re getting it Mr. Vallet,” Handzy said. “And so are we!” They all howled victoriously, Plusplus taking his hands off his mouse and keyboard for one brief moment to clap. Mr. Vallet thought they had won, but they were right back into it. Apparently all they’d done was wipe the enemy team completely, meaning they had several precious seconds of peace to accrue treasure chest points while their foes were ‘respawning’.

“So you guys are all playing your favorite characters right? Marco your favorite is the gargoyle? It’s because your old man’s in the stone business right?”

“It’s just a coincidence,” his son said with a roll of his eyes. “This is serious Dad. We can’t afford to play our favorite characters. We’d lose if we did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Balancing every character perfectly is impossible,” Handzy said, picking up the thread. “They release software patches all the time to try and make it as close as possible, but there’s always a character that’s dealing .01 more damage or healing per second than all the others, so you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not playing them while they’re strongest.”

“It’s called min-maxing,” Flippers threw in. “Minimizing damage taken and maximizing damage put out. You’ll never win a tournament without it.”

“Doesn’t that take all the fun out of it?” the middle-aged man asked, realizing they’d finally hit the wall he’d always known was coming. Everything they’d said so far sounded kind of interesting, but there was always a generational divide lurking somewhere, ready to smack him in the face. “I don’t think video games are supposed to be about math.”

“Life shouldn’t be about math, but we’re still forced to think about money all the time anyway,” Plusplus said with uncharacteristic bite but typical insight. As the group’s healer perhaps he hated min-maxing the most, and just wanted to help people without getting bogged down in the details of why it couldn’t be done.

“You’ve got me there,” Mr. Vallet admitted, “but I didn’t invent the stuff and I don’t think I ever would have. Still, it’s a shame you have to play this way. Who are all your favorite characters?” They paused, which they could afford to do since their enemies weren’t quite back yet.

“Party animal,” Plusplus said. “He’s a fat drunken satyr. When the enemy damages him his blood comes out as big wobbly wine bubbles that heal his teammates when they pop them.”

“I like the time traveler,” Handzy said. “She has an hourglass for a waist. Her projectiles can be delayed in time, reappearing mid-path when somebody steps in front of their trajectory. It’s hard to plan out though, so she’s almost never the meta.” She saw Mr. Vallet’s nodding confusion. “Uhh that’s the metagame. It’s whatever the most efficient version of the game looks like at any time.”

“My favorite is the master of disguise,” Flippers said. “He does pretty much what’s on the tin… disguises himself as the enemy in order to get close and take them out.”

“And I like the half-petrified Vesuvian,” Marco finished. “He’s a guy from Arcadia who was there when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, but thanks to magical protection only half his body got blasted, now one side of him is all ashy and magma-looking.”

“I see,” his father said with a grin. “So still kind of a rocky look going on.”

“Sure Dad, whatever.” Marco finally chuckled, but they couldn’t be happy for long. The other monsters and sorcerers and tinkerers of the hanging gardens were back, and eager to get a taste of the treasure chest. Mr. Vallet listened to the clickety-clack of their keys. Suddenly he didn’t feel like interrupting them anymore, so he stepped out into the warehouse, where the leaning slabs of rock, some fifteen feet high, absorbed much of the heat, leaving the air chilled. From the side they looked like giant books on a shelf, leaning because there was one space at the end that never got filled.

Marco wasn’t talking about college yet. He only talked about the game. His mother would have said something about that by now, but Joaquin hadn’t done it for her. Maybe they could win; he had no way of knowing how good they were. The tournament they were training for had a grand prize of one million dollars for the winning team.

Or organization, he reminded himself. There were whole organizations, companies, competing in these things. The players lived in team houses, wore jerseys, sold jerseys, and maybe even big foam fingers. No, probably not those things. What use would a gamer have for something that made it impossible to play?

One of those corporate outfits was going to win. Surely that’s how it went in this world, like most other worlds. The hanging gardens of Babylon weren’t a paradise, but a conglomerate with a paradise billboard.

Or maybe Marco, Jenny, Glenn, and Elijah would win. After all, what did he know about video games?