The four stood staring at the door that the Avatar of Life had just exited through.
“Right you,” Pham said to Peter as the awe wore off. “The time has come for you to get a proper Traveller experience.” He gripped Peter by the shoulders, turned him around and pushed him into the seat at the writing desk. “You’re the weirdest guy I’ve ever met so we’re going to try some normalcy for a bit. Look what you’ve done to Woz.”
Both of them looked over at Warren who was rubbing the hem of his cloak in his fingers and mumbling to himself.
“Did… Did I break him?” Peter stuttered.
“He just needs to pwn some mobs. He’ll be fine.” Pham put his hands on Peter’s shoulders and looked deeply into his eyes. “It’s you that I’m worried about. I knew you weren’t playing the game the way the devs intended from the first time I met you, and sure, it’s worked out for us. Phat lewt coming out our asses. But your Skills are dirt league. You, son, need some grinding. We can power level the crap outta you, but it’s gotta be you that does the work. Right now you ain’t gonna stand up to a particularly determined slime.”
“...ok?” Peter looked away. He knew his play style was at the bottom end of the bell curve, but he’d learned a lot since that first day and most of it had been for a real world purpose. But, now that Bully isn’t a problem maybe I could afford to try playing the game the way it should? Maybe even relax a bit? “So what are we going to do?”
"Give me a minute," Pham turned away and looked into the fireplace pensively. Finally he spoke up. “I have… a plan.”
“How much of a plan?” Warren asked without looking up.
“Twelve percent of a plan.”
“That’s barely a concept.” Warren dropped the hem and paid attention for the first time. “We’re not going there again, are we? You know what happened last time.”
“Just take the cloak off if you’re worried about getting muck on it. Peter needs to learn how to fight properly. We damn near got TPKd by the last boss. The forest has enough mini-bosses to practice tactics. You heard the lady, we need to work as a proper team. That means we’re going to need you to pick up the pauldrons again. You ready to be the captain once more?”
“Damnit Pham, you know I can’t. I left that behind when I left the guild. Let Peter lead, he’s the only actual Paragon here.” Warren grumbled and hugged the cloak around himself.
“Fine, but he’s not got the level or the gold for a Guild Charter yet. You know we’re going to need one. How about coaching? You can come up with the plays he leads?”
“Do I get a say in this?” Peter raised a trembling hand in the air.
“NO,” both his companions shouted.
“He got us into this,” Warren growled. “He can damn well get us out.” His shoulders slumped. “But Peter, I will help you figure out how. Fjor wasn’t kidding about how long I’ve been here. When I first got hurt they dropped me in here while it was in Beta. There’s been a lot of changes since launch day. One thing that hasn’t changed is that skills take a lot of work to master. I... read somewhere that the devs took the saying about it taking a thousand hours to master a skill," Warren looked shiftily around for a moment as though expecting something to happen before continuing. "There’s buffs and other factors that make it easier, and some debuffs that make it harder too. What skills have you got so far?”
Peter took off his bracer and scrolled through the interactive tattoo on his forearm, reading off the results. Warren nodded along as he spoke, clearly making mental notes of the significant points.
“Right. So you’re a pretty decent crafter, but in a different stream to Pham. He’s trap and mech specialised, whereas you’re, well, I guess a mad scientist? Alchemist? Chemistry, weapon forging and a few others. Decent progress on polearms, which you need for melee, but you’re going to need a lot of work on small arms now that your sythe has an alt-fire mode. That said, how the hell are you only level three?”
“Three? I levelled up from the boss fight?” Peter rechecked his arm. Sure enough, he’d read out his level without thinking. “I missed it. Level ups are better than sex.”
“You’ve never had sex. None of us have,” Pham smirked.
“I might have, you never know,” Warren protested.
“Woz.”
“Fine, I was waiting until we’d won the big game. But I might have. I had the opportunity.”
“Have you ever considered that the whole purity culture thing is just another method of control by the patriarchy?” Pham scoffed.
“Yes. But Denise and I had discussed it and we agreed. I’m not going to pressure a girl when she’s not ready.”
“That’s surprisingly not-jock of you Woz. You learn something every day.” Peter clapped him on the shoulder.
“Wheest, awa’ wi’ tha Jock talk. Unless ye wan’ a face fulla heid!” Warren rounded on Peter who cowered in sudden surprise.
Pham just fell over laughing. “Yer accent is back ya big lummox,” he managed between gasps. “I swear you’re a part-time Scot. You only ever go full ranga when someone insults your heritage.”
Dani wandered in through the back door with an armful of syringes. Saw Pham rolling on the floor busting a gut, Warren with steam coming out of his ears and Peter looking confused. “Huh, must be a Tuesday. Hey, mate. I’m all out, gimme a hand reloading?”
Warren’s flow interrupted, he subsided and they all helped Dani sort out her ammunition. “So, I collected these because this thing does regenerate them if they’re lost but only at a rate of one every ten minutes or so,” Dani explained. “I did some tests, the first pump just shoots an empty shot. I don’t know the damage numbers but I reckon it hurts. Two pumps and it loads the shot with a specific toxin. There’s presets for health over time, mana over time and stamina over time, which is pretty basic. I found a panel on the side that lets me dial up new ingredients if I know the combination. Which I don’t yet. Three pumps adds an area of effect to the shot. I tried it by dialing in nothing, nothing and nothing just to be safe, and the area is about five meters across. Ish. I’m sorry Peter, I kinda left a mark on your shed out the back.”
By the time they’d aligned the syringes and packed them back into the magazine, Pham, Peter and Warren had explained to Dani how she had missed the visit from Fjor and how their own new equipment worked. Dani was curiously unconcerned about missing an audience with the Avatar of Life but that was just how she normally was, in Peter’s experience. He put it down to her having been a long time player uninterested in the politics of the local equivalent of a god. To be fair, I couldn’t tell you what’s happening in the Vatican at any time either, he thought to himself. Some people stay out of the affairs of dragons, for we are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
Pham got to talking to Dani about the possible combinations of reagents, as chemicals were known in-game, dialling up the code for each in turn to see if it produced a result. It was slow going because they first had to figure out what the approximate real world equivalent of each reagent was, convert it to the rune on the little wheel, set all twelve wheels and twist the valve marked “concoct”. A failed attempt locked the display for forty-five seconds. Not long enough to be a problem in a safe location like this but could be the difference between success and a respawn in a fight.
While they were twisting and poking at the launcher Peter and Warren pored over a map Peter had spread over the writing desk. “So, this is the peninsula as I know it,” Peter said. “Here be dragons.”
“Nay, thar be nae dragons oot here.” Warren’s accent was still in full swing. “What we’re looking for is saprolings anyway. Ye’ve been to the mines, aye? Weel, the forest betwixt is home to these wee buggers like angry bushes and one in ten or so are decidedly less wee. Thick as thieves in that area there,” he pointed. “Right by the Heart of the Forest. We’ll nae want tae bother yon beastie, that’s a raid boss.”
“You’d need to be stacked with fire weapons if you want to take that thing on,” Pham added from the other side of the room. “I have a flamethrower attachment for my offsider, and Woz has his flaming sword, but that would be peeing into a volcano for all the good you’d do. Besides, we’re after saprolings for the very reason that they’re resistant to your kind of damage. They’re weak, so they probably won’t kill you, and you can’t kill them fast. You get to learn how to fight monsters without respawning.”
“Peter not waking up in a box after a fight? D’you think he’ll be ok?” Dani flipped the brass flap closed and shouldered the launcher.
“Oh ha ha guys, very funny. I don’t always die.”
“You know the point is to not die at all, right?”
“Bite me.”
Due to Peter’s lack of a mount and refusal to accept another scooter ride, it took several hours to reach the edge of the forest. It wasn’t an uneventful walk, however, as Dani took every opportunity to take pot shots at all the trash mobs along the road. Her new acquisition made a very satisfying sound as it instantly despawned small groups of monstrous bugs, evil looking birds and terribly threatening rocks.
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“I’m telling you, it was a minor earth elemental,” Dani insisted. “Good thing the empty shots do impact damage on the third pump.”
“And I’m telling you that all you did was disintegrate a pile of stones. You didn’t even get any XP for it,” Pham pointed out.
“Of course not, we’re all too high level to get any XP around here. Obvious exception aside.” Dani deliberately didn’t look at Peter who was still fiddling with his scythe.
Twisting the handle back and forth caused the blade to rotate the way it had when Fjor had done so, but Peter found he needed to be careful not to lose a digit as the blade became a shoulder stock. He was too nervous to actually shoulder the weapon and pull the trigger as yet, but was getting used to the heft and discovered that there were small iron sights that emerged when it was in rifle form. Sighting along them he found that he could bring up basic information about the target as though he had used his examine skill on them briefly. He didn’t get a lot of opportunity to test the function longer as Dani obliterated every target as soon as he aimed at it.
“You’re going to run out of ammo at this rate,” Peter complained as his latest attempt turned into pixels and blew away. “They only regenerate slowly.”
“That’s the plan,” Dani looked at the empty magazine. “Now that they’re all gone I put this here,” she slung the launcher onto her back, “and by the time we get where we’re going they’ve regenerated and I have the skills to use it ready to go.”
“Thaaaat actually makes a lot of sense,” Peter admitted. “But I’m still not ready to pull the trigger on this thing. It kinda scares me.”
“You’ll need to be ready soon,” Warren warned. “This is where we leave the road, things start getting heavier from now on and we don’t have time for you to respawn and walk all this way again.”
Warren and Dani jumped the fence beside the road, both landing nimbly on the far side. Peter clambered roughly over it and dropped heavily onto the grass. Pham shook his head, walked back a few meters and opened the gate. They all crossed the fields that bordered the road unimpeded and stepped into the cool shadows of the outer forest. Things in the underbrush rustled and called out but the bushes were sparse enough that it never felt spooky. Peter could clearly see what was making the sounds and they were just slightly higher level bugs and wildlife that they’d seen the whole walk.
Suddenly Warren raised a fist over his shoulder.
“Uhh, whatcha doing there mate?” Dani asked, leaning on a tree.
“It’s a hand signal. It means ‘stop’, but I was trying to do it silently. You know, so we don’t spook the mobs right over there,” Warren pointed off into the trees with a knife hand.
Clearly Dani had never been introduced to America’s Weapon of Mass Instruction, but Peter had always assumed she was from England or something so it was probably different over there. He peered off into the dimly lit forest and saw what Warren was pointing at. Ambling about amongst the detritus that made up the forest floor were two different but similar creatures. One resembled a knee high red capped mushroom with white dots on the cap. Peter had already run into their brethren before and knew not to mess with them. The others were squat tree-like humanoids. They somewhat resembled a cross between a tree and a dwarf, though that would never happen knowing Dwarven attitudes towards trees. Dwarves famously carried axes for a reason.
“Right, huddle up,” Warren stage-whispered. When Dani, Pham and Peter had gathered close he continued. “We’ve got myconids and saprolings here. Both are super susceptible to cutting type damage, though the saprolings are less so. We’re going to try a straight melee run first. Peter in the lead as DPS, Dani as dodge-tank. Pham will run crowd control as needed and I’ll extract if it all goes sideways. The idea here is to get Peter’s polearm skill up, so don’t worry if it takes a while to take each one down. Everyone’s got health pots ready to down?”
“Point of order, big guy,” Dani shook her new weapon. “Pham and I found that this thing doesn’t just do poison. I can brew up heath shots too, so if Peter’s getting hosed I can pep him right up. It’ll let me work on getting used to using it in combat too.”
“Done,” Warren nodded. “You’re now our main healer. Your, what is it even called? Thingy, your thingy regenerates syringes and produces the chemicals for them, right?”
Dani assured him it did. “There’s a name on the buttstock here that says ‘Finger of Pestilence’, but I’m not going to call it that. Just… ew.”
“Great. Dodge tank and main healer until you run out of shots. Once you’re dry, shout it loud and clear and we switch to healing items. That will save us coin in the long run and time in the short term. That group there is our target,” he pointed at a group of myconids nearby, “so Peter, start us off. Melee first, I don't know how loud your alt-fire is and we don’t want to pull the whole forest in one go.”
Peter’s skill with long sticks as weapons had improved out of sight since he’d begun playing The Age of Steam and Sorcery in both virtual reality and meatspace. He stalked towards the closest mob, careful of where he placed his feet to make the least sound, and planted the blade all the way up to the haft in the cap of an unfortunate mushroom monster. He ripped it free with the ease of a ginsu through shiitake and watched the halved mob drop to the ground. The attack had been so abrupt that the myconid hadn’t made a sound so he reached around the next nearest and whipped the scythe horizontally through the stem just below the cap. He felt a ripple of ice cold shimmer through his body and he uttered the words YOUR SOUL IS MINE instinctively.
With the weight of the sun and the sound of a feather falling on a foam mat, a simple hourglass fell to the ground beside the myconid’s body. Peter stared at it in surprise as the next closest monster registered the killer in their midst. Peter reached down and picked up the hourglass, its glass glimmering in the speckled light that fought its way through the canopy just as the myconid sunk its fungal teeth into his arm. He screamed in agony and headbutted the monster in its speckled cap. A second later a sharp pain in his butt gave way to a warmth that washed though his body and the wounds in his arm closed.
Dani double pumped the launcher again, priming another healing shot and shouted at Peter. “Oi, get your head in the fight. You wanna get eaten today?” She stepped past him and kicked the reeling monster into its fellows and sent them sprawling. The more agile ones rolled to their feet and bellowed their defiance before leaping back into the fray.
Whirling the scythe, Peter stepped up and began hacking pieces off any mushroom that came close enough. The pain in his arm had faded as the healing potion restored his lost hit points and he gave the fight his full attention. One sneak attack and crit was great, two was more than expected. He couldn’t afford to be distracted by the unexpected windfall or lucky activation of his Paragon effects mid-battle. Looting was for after.
The myconids fell quickly before the sustained onslaught of the two fighters, their squishy bodies parting easily under the slashing blades. Dani did her best to avoid killing as many as she could in order to let Peter improve his skills but some needed distracting so he wouldn’t get overwhelmed by numbers. Any time he looked to be hard pressed she’d stick a blade in the red caps of a few myconids to draw the aggro and step back a bit, kiting them until Peter had the capacity to deal with them. Occasionally that was enough to take them down, but that was just how it went.
When Peter had reduced the final monster to twitching pixels they stopped to take a breath.
“What the hell, dude?” Pham demanded. “This whole day was nearly over in the first few seconds. What was that?”
Peter held up the hourglass for them all to see. “These. They power the house. Before I only got them from bosses and then only when I was in the Paragon state. That’s the first time I’ve ever had one drop from a trash mob.”
“They power the house?” Dani plucked it out of his hand. “They look familiar. I swear I’ve seen them before. How do you use them?”
“The house absorbed them through the writing desk, there’s a basic upkeep and then upgrades on top.” Peter looked at the remaining fallen corpses. “Weird that it fell outside the body though.”
“Might be related to the whole ‘your soul is mine’ thing you do sometimes?” Pham offered. “You might not have been in the Paragon chuuni mode but you did, um, flicker? A bit?”
“Fjor did say your weapon had evolved to its true state, so that’s probably going to happen more often.” Warren folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t let it distract you. If an hourglass pops, leave it and move on. If you live, loot it at the end of the fight. If you don’t, it’s not a problem you need to worry about.”
“Good point, Woz. Thanks,” Peter popped the hourglass into his inventory as Dani and Pham moved over the fallen, looting as they went. “Guys, I’m here for XP and skill points, don’t worry about any loot for me. Call it the fee for power levelling.”
“Oh,” said Pham, “that’s not what we were doing already? Ok.”
The next half-hour went much the same, Peter’s Stealth and Polearm skills making slow but consistent progress. Only two more hourglasses appeared but this time he let them fall where they did and worried about them after the fights. Pham and Dani cleaned up the battlefield, but they were unable to touch the hourglasses so Peter claimed them. The rest of the time he spent with Warren discussing how better to approach a fight from a tactical point of view.
Peter had only needed one more healing shot in that time, and Dani blamed herself for that as she’d let him get rushed by a myconid mini-boss barely discernible from the rest. It was just a little larger, a little stronger and when it was struck emitted a stunning cloud of spores. He’d been surprised, but had fought through the effects to bring the monster down and had only been mildly gnawed in the process. One shot from The Finger had brought him back to full health and he didn’t blame Dani for not seeing the difference.
Warren, however, had called another huddle. “Right, so we’re moving towards the Heart of the Forest, so we’re going to start seeing more mini-bosses and named mobs. Saprolings are getting more common too, as you have noticed Peter. They take a bit more cutting through than the fungi, gives them time to get a few more hits in. So far Dani’s ammo regen is keeping pace with your hits just fine but that might not last much longer. It’s time to try some ranged combat. We have a clear path back to the road, the mobs won’t have respawned yet, so if we’re in trouble don’t respawn, run. Clear?” When everyone nodded he continued. “Right so, this is how it will go. Peter is going to set up here,” he made a cross in the dirt. “He’ll take a shot at that boss mob over there,” Warren pointed at a shambling collection of rocks, dirt and roots that the system had handily designated as a Thallid. “I’m betting it’ll be loud, so we brace up and take the first wave of saprolings defensively. It’s Peter’s first time using a ranged weapon so I’m betting on a miss. This way he gets a second shot. After that, it’s back to melee. I’ll tank the boss if it lives, Pham, you lock down the adds, Dani, you add some debuffs and Peter,” he looked Peter dead in the eye. “Smash.”
Peter sat down on the cross that Warren had drawn on the ground and switched his scythe to alt-fire. He tucked the butt solidly into his shoulder and rested the handle on his knee. Sighting down the haft, he used his foot to raise and lower the point of aim by lifting his toes off the ground. As he watched through the iron sights the distant mob grew more focussed as everything else blurred out. He drew in a full breath, then let half out.
The front sight aligned on a gem in the Thallid’s forehead and he gently squeezed the trigger.
The weapon itself barely made a whisper. Just a fut sound and the gem shattered and the Thallid dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
The round kept going though. It punched a neat hole in the tree behind the Thallid.
And through the mobs on the other side of the tree.
And the trees on the other side of them.
Somewhere off in the distance, something very big, something very powerful screamed. The ground rumbled. The air shook. Peter’s pants filled.
“Um, oops?” Peter stood carefully. “Should we maybe run?”
“ShOuLd We RuN?” Pham mocked. “You just aggroed a raid boss. Yes, we bloody run now!” He took off as fast as he could towards the road.
“Follow the Dani-shaped blur!” Dani disappeared in a cloud of dust, overtaking Pham within seconds.
“We really need to discuss that weapon,” Warren shouted, lumbering into a run. “But, when we’re outside aggro range. Every mob in the forest is after you. If you reach the road, you’re probably safe. If you respawn we’re definitely safe. Your call.”
“I’ll tell Jacob you said hi,” Peter replied, stashing everything he could in his inventory. “Take care of DB for me, he hates this bit.” Peter tossed his rat to Warren. “I’ll see you in town tomorrow night.”