“Isla is almost dead! I’m going back to check on her. Fall back, dude.” Ewtain did not acknowledge him. Instead, he swatted his short sword at a pincer strike before stepping left and turning right. The scorpion had finally made an attack with its stinger, which passed in front of Ewtain, and it would have hit him somewhere on his torso if not for his evasive maneuver. Ewtain was already bringing his sword down toward the tail before it could recoil fully. The sword went through the second segment below the stinger. The creature brought its claws up in a defensive posture, lowered itself towards the ground, and began to back away from Ewtain.
Taloc ran towards Isla, and Ewtain was able to pass him, even with the bad leg.
“Let’s get to Isla!” Ewtain said. They quickly found her lying on the ground, face down. Taloc picked her up with relative ease; his strength had certainly increased from what it was when he had woken up that morning. Her HP was still dropping, but it looked as if the loss had begun to slow. They continued to run and shortly made it back to the stream.
Taloc laid Isla down in an area that was free of blood. “She’s poisoned,” he said simply. Vanya kneeled down next to her and held her hands out over Isla’s still form. Taloc watched her life drain away on the group window of his HUD, but finally, after several seconds, her health points stabilized. He breathed a sigh of relief. After at least a minute had passed, though, Isla was still unresponsive with no health increase.
“Is there anything else that you can do?” he asked Vanya.
She nodded. “I’m going to have to cast neutralize poison multiple times to fully remove it. The cooldown on that spell is two minutes, so do you want to fill us in on what did this to her?”
“There were two scorpions hiding in the bushes. It was my fault.” Taloc shook his head in annoyance. “I could see them hiding there, but I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The description of my see invisible ability said it could detect things trying not to be seen, but I didn’t recognize that for what it was. After they attacked, I shot one and got it to back off, and Ewtain took a stinger off the other one. You should have seen him—he was dodging even before the thing made an attack, as if he knew where the attack would come from.”
“Well, I did know.” Ewtain said. “My ability, prescient reflexes, was probably triggering. I was able to dodge even before a strike came, but one time I moved away from one strike into the path of a different one. I sensed that one after I had committed to the dodge, and I couldn’t react fast enough to avoid it. Also, the pain was real, but I had assumed that something like that would hurt way more. I barely feel anything now, and my health is almost back up to 150.”
“Her HP is coming back,” Taloc said as he watched Isla’s health bar start moving towards the full side, similar to that of a recharging symbol on an electronic device.
“Hey, how did you know what her HP was at when we were fighting?” Ewtain asked.
“I have a box with the health, mana, and energy bars of every party member on my screen,” Taloc said, and he waved a hand in front of his face to emphasize where he could see it.
“How did you put that up?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and he began to think. “Maybe I have it because I’m the party leader.” He looked into the matter on his interface. He opened his HUD and willed information on the subject. To his surprise, he was informed that he could focus on the info box and will the others in the party to have the box as well.
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“Nice!” Ewtain said after Taloc made the change.
Vanya cast her spell again. “I think that we’re probably here in the flesh,” she said, “but our bodies were altered to simulate whatever rules the game has for us.”
“Unless we’re all sitting in goo and hardwired into the Matrix,” Vultressant offered.
Taloc laughed. “Our new quest is to each find a red pill and have Morpheus come get us out.”
“I don’t know,” Vultressant said. “The weasel guy made a good point. Take the blue pill and eat the steak. Blissful ignorance and all that.” Vanya turned to him and frowned, and Vultressant held up a hand to her. “I know… I generally oppose ignorance, but the world inside the Matrix seemed orders of magnitude better than the mess outside in that world. I’ll let you guys take down the machines, build a nice world, and then you can come get me. For now, though, I say we try to stick together. It looks like Isla almost died, and if we had all been along, Vanya could have done something sooner.”
They all agreed on that course of action, and when Isla was ready to travel, they decided to go retrieve the stinger of the scorpion. “I suppose that if we had known about the group feature, we could have run towards you guys,” Vanya said, “but we would have been running into the unknown.”
They went back to the site of the encounter. Taloc kept his distance from the bushes and tried to see if the scorpions were still there. He saw nothing in the bushes, but he decided to throw rocks into them just to be on the safe side.
Ewtain picked up the stinger, careful to avoid touching the pointy end. “What do I store this in?” he asked. Then he stared off, appearing to access his HUD. A black slash appeared in front of him. He extended the arm holding the stinger, and it disappeared—it looked as if he had lost his arm just below the elbow. He lowered his arm, and his hand came back into view, but he was no longer holding the scorpion tail.
“What did you do?” Vanya asked.
“Apparently, we have inventory space. Just focus on your inventory, and it should open for you.”
They all accessed their personal containers. It might go to a pocket dimension. Taloc had played several games in which players had a bag or a box, and they contained slots that could contain any lootable item. He experimented by putting a few items into his inventory, and when he accessed it again, there was a list of the items contained within. He focused on one of the items, a waterskin. He stuck his hand into the inventory opening. A waterskin appeared in his hand. He put it back but left his inventory open. “Hey, Vult. See if you can grab the waterskin from my inventory.”
Vultressant closed his own inventory and came over to Taloc. When he tried to put his hand into Taloc’s inventory, his hand just passed through and was visible on the other side. “No dice, man. Is there any sort of permission that you can give?”
Taloc looked around the interface but couldn’t find anything that would allow access to anyone else. “I don’t see anything. It’s probably for our own protection that there isn’t an easy way to do it. There’s a capacity bar that moved when I put stuff into the inventory, so there’s either a volume or weight component, or possibly both. I suppose that it might just take a certain number of items.”
Vanya repeated her spell on Isla, whose HP began to rise more quickly. After two more administrations of the spell, Isla looked much better.
“That was awful,” she said, rubbing her butt for emphasis.
“Sorry about that, Isla,” Taloc said.
She looked like she was fatigued from a long run. “So, do you think that was a random encounter?” she asked.
He thought about the question. “I don’t know. We need to figure out the rules of this place as soon as we can. Some games have level-appropriate sections, and the newbie characters get to kill a bunch of low-level mobs to level up without much danger. There are other games I’ve played that had high-level bosses roaming around the starting point.” He shrugged and saw some nods of recognition. “Well, we need to wait for our Skirmisher to heal up, so I’m going to see what this inventory has in the way of food.”