PA-01. Den Of Thieves, page 19
part #1 of Pantheon Online Series
“I didn’t fail… I was set up. Basically screwed over my chances in this place. That orc was the closest I’ve come to another good mark since I got you.”
“My trial’s tomorrow,” Gunnar said.
Sheira shrugged. “Good for you.”
“Which guild did you try out for?” Gunnar asked.
“Doesn’t matter. They’re all the same. Chew you up and spit you out as soon as it suits them. Look, I’ve got work to do.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” Gunnar said.
Sheira looked at him suspiciously. “What do you want?”
Gunnar reached to his belt and produced the dagger she had left him back on the rooftop. “Why’d you leave this?”
Sheira grimaced and then nodded. “All right, I’ll have a drink with you, but not at a pub.”
Gunnar looked up quizzically. “Where else would we get a drink?”
“Someplace neither of us has to pay.”
32
DRINKS ON THE HOUSE
Sheira led Gunnar into the western portion of the city. Not far off from Hel’s Oasis, the city walls and most of the buildings in the area were shorter. There were small inns with rowdy crowds, but the streets themselves were largely empty. They passed a row of nicer townhomes, set back against the walls, each secured by several personal guards. The black-cloaked sentries glowered at them from doorsteps as Gunnar and Sheira walked by.
When they passed the row and moved into a quiet business district, Sheira turned to him. “Those houses belong to some of the lesser merchants. Merchants in this district conduct most of their business themselves. They aren’t backed by the bigger trading companies like the sea merchants are.”
“Not sure I follow.”
“Merchants like that leave for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Most have families, but there’s a few that stand empty, except for a few guards outside.”
“But how do you get in?”
Sheira motioned for him to continue following. They passed through a winding market and soon reached the square where Hel’s place was located.
The western gates towered above all else in this corner of the city. Even from the streets, Gunnar could see the imposing crimson cloaks of several members of the city watch posted upon the battlements on either side. Large torches cut through the night like fiery blades high above.
The gates themselves were twenty-foot-tall slabs of thick wood, and they were barred shut with large metal locks all the way up the sides of both doors.
Sheira pointed at the gates.
“You taking me out to the woods?”
Sheira smiled. “We’re breaking into Xander Fero’s house.”
“From the woods?”
“From the unguarded back side.”
Now, Gunnar smiled back. He’d instantly liked the elf woman, that is, until she shanked him, and now, he remembered why. That same spark was showing again, and he had to remind himself that she could still be a threat. He knew this might be a stupid idea, but his gut told him this was important.
Sheira was important somehow. The AI had tried to turn him away from her, and he was beginning to wonder if there had been a reason.
There was a smaller door cut into the gate to monitor travel into the city. A pair of guards stood watch, but as they approached, the two stepped aside and let them go without a word.
“The Thailen government don’t care about who’s leaving,” Sheira said, “just who’s coming in.”
A trader’s road winded off into the night, but Sheira led the way off the road and into the woods. After twenty minutes of trekking through bramble, they emerged along the western wall in a small clearing. The spot was midway between two towers, about one hundred yards in either direction. As usual, the night was cloudy over Thailen and offered sufficient darkness for them to sprint across the clearing undetected.
Sheira removed her shoes and stowed them in her Inventory, then gestured for Gunnar to do the same. Without another word, the elf woman began climbing. In less than a minute, she had reached the top. The wall was a good thirty feet high, taller than anything he’d climbed yet. He was about to begin his ascent when a rope smacked him in the face from above.
Gunnar had kind of wanted to test his abilities, but a thirty-foot fall would not exactly be good for him. He took hold of the rope and began to climb. The stone was freezing on his feet, and the rough-hewn rope left his hands feeling raw, but he reached the top with no trouble. Sheira was crouched behind the crenellations along the wall-walk, gathering up her rope. She glanced over the other side, then moved a short distance down. Below, the wall was lined with rooftops about ten feet down.
Sheira slipped over the parapets and quickly climbed down the short distance.
Gunnar glanced up and down the wall, but there was no movement from either of the towers.
Just Red Cloaks gathered around torches.
The wall was formed of rectangular stones about two feet in length and one foot in height, and the mortaring between them left just enough space for Gunnar to wedge his fingers and toes. The cold sent aches shooting up his bones.
Gunnar reached the roof, which was flat and covered with bird shit and crumbled pieces of stone. He quickly put his shoes back on and blew warm breath on his hands. Sheira led the way to a locked door, which she swiftly picked.
Inside, the townhome was silent but for the creak of their footsteps on the floorboards. It was nice enough, Gunnar supposed, though the walls were decorated with rather generic tapestries.
Even he could tell that this place was owned by someone who wanted to be like the rich, but wasn’t one of them. The wood paneling on the walls was painted white, but was cut at plain, sharp angles, with no decorative engraving.
The entire top floor seemed to be an office. There was a plain-looking and very untidy desk at the far end of the room, some shelves lined haphazardly with scrolls and ledgers, and a table with a pair of chairs.
Sheira scanned the room, then made for a cabinet by the table. She produced a pair of glasses and poured from a decanter of yellowish liquor.
“Nothing fancy,” she said, handing it to him.
“You break into a lot of these places?” Gunnar asked.
Sheira shrugged. “When I feel like it. Merchants like these are just wealthy enough to have a liquor cabinet to try to impress business partners, but they’re also just wealthy enough to keep their real valuables in banks, so it’s not good for much. Unless you like thrift store tapestries.”
Gunnar glanced at one of the decorations, which boringly depicted a caravan traipsing along a road in a meadow. The colors were muted and everything was very linear and uninteresting to look at.
There were a couple small cushioned chairs at the back of the room, and they took their drinks and sat. For a while, they just sipped what Gunnar thought was probably gin in silence. It stung his throat but warmed him up quite a bit.
“Drinks on the house,” Sheira murmured, downing her glass with the second swig. She filled it again. “It’s the simple pleasures, am I right?”
Gunnar nodded and much more slowly sipped his own liquor.
“You had a spark,” Sheira said after a pause. “That’s why I left that dagger behind. Most noobs in this game are cutthroats from the moment they get here. But you were different. And a bit helpless. Figured you’d need it.”
She might not have said it, but the dagger was as close to an apology as he figured this woman ever got.
“Looks like I may have underestimated you, though,” she added. “A trial, eh? Who with?”
Gunnar hesitated. “I’m not really supposed to say.”
“Nighthawks, then?”
“You heard of them?”
“Enough to know they’re powerful, and other guilds envy them. Could be good fortune for you.”
“Could be?”
Sheira sighed. “You need guilds to advance. But it doesn’t mean they need you.”
“What happened?” Gunnar asked. “How did someone like you fail their trial?”
Sheira downed another drink and sat silently for a moment, weighing her words. “I was betrayed by my guild, and a player I’d grown close to. Gave me up to the Red Cloaks. Nearly got deported from Thailen. Barely escaped. I’ve just been scraping by ever since. This isn’t a fair game, Gunnar. I was the most promising recruit in my guild. I did everything right. And I still got screwed.”
“Why would they betray you?”
“Don’t know. Maybe I was too ambitious. Maybe they didn’t want me to get too far.”
With that, Sheira stood. She returned the decanter of gin to its rightful place, but she set her empty glass in the middle of the desk.
She wants Fero to know someone was here.
Gunnar shook his head with a smile and did the same.
“We should go,” Sheira said. “We can drop on this side of the city with my rope. Then, split up.”
Gunnar nodded. “Thanks for the drink.”
Sheira turned to him from the doorway. “Don’t forget who runs this show, Gunnar.”
PART 4
GUILD TRIAL
33
IRL
He swam back into consciousness. Real actual consciousness. Not because he died. This time, he chose to return.
After successfully descending from the rooftops in-game, he’d returned to his apartment back in Sykes’ tenements and gone to sleep, but before he had, he’d selected the option to exit the game while his character rested.
My character…
Because Gunnar was not his actual name. He was Jake Darrow, the convicted felon.
The machine whirred as tubes retracted from his body and the needle withdrew from the receptor in his spine. He sat up, feeling dizzy as his mind adjusted to his actual body.
“Wanted to feel what the old bones are like again, did ya?”
It was Shad. The prison guard loomed over him, looking uncannily iridescent in the harsh light of the room, a reminder that he was only a hologram. Jake blinked hard, and the image returned to normal.
“Something like that,” Jake said. He carefully stepped out of the chair. His legs felt shaky for a moment, and his head spun. He held on to the chair’s edge, and the vertigo faded away, though there was a mild ache in the back of his head.
Jake massaged his neck for a moment, his fingers repeatedly brushing against the disk of metal attached there.
“The headache will go away shortly,” Shad said.
“How long was I in there?”
Shad shrugged. “Same amount of time as the last time. It’s the morning of your second day in Grid Eight.”
Jake shook his head. It was what he’d expected, but it was no less disorienting. He’d spent three full days in-game, and as far as a sense of time went, they’d felt like very long, full days.
And it could have been much longer.
He’d chosen to come back.
“Most prisoners come back of their own will early on,” Shad said. “You’ll get over it after a couple times. Eventually, you’ll wish you could stay there forever.”
“Can’t they just pull us out?”
“No need to. It’s the same time here either way. You come out after a good night’s rest. Time’s relative and all that shit, right?”
It was hard to get his head around.
“Does it work that way for you too?” Jake asked.
Shad smiled, but didn’t answer.
“Reckon it’s time to go to work. That sludge ain’t gonna shovel itself.”
It didn’t take long shoveling sulfurous gunk before Jake regretted coming back. It was monotonous, backbreaking labor. He worked alongside two other dudes, who were assigned to a specific skid steer. The only breaks they got were while it unloaded its bucket into a larger truck.
The other guys kept quiet for the most part, except to complain about the stench, which was persistent despite the hazmat suits. But it was the worst when they had a water break in between loads and had to pull back their hoods.
Around midday, they took a longer break in a small nook of a room outside the main bay of the power plant, where the stench was slightly more bearable. Their skid steer driver went off on his own, leaving the three lowly inmates alone, slumped on a bench, chugging cups of water.
Right before their break, there’d been an incident with one of the neighboring crews. A huge dude had flipped out on another inmate, yelling and throwing a few punches. It ended quickly, when an electric shock hit him like a wave and left him twitching on the ground with his tongue hanging out.
“What a dumbass,” said Isaac, a bald black dude on Jake’s crew.
Jake nodded.
“Probably earned himself a week stuck IRL,” said Kyler, a pale blond guy with a Mohawk.
“Hell, he mighta pissed the bed on the game entirely.”
“Can… can that actually happen?” Jake asked.
All three looked hard at him.
“Sorry, new guy,” Jake said.
“Right,” Isaac said.
“Course you can,” Kyler said.
“But isn’t that how we eat and everything? While we’re hooked up.”
“Oh, you get hooked up still,” Isaac said. “You just don’t play. You lay there and try to sleep with a needle up your neck and tubes everywhere else. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“That dumbass has been in trouble before,” Kyler said. “Some dudes never learn.”
A flashing timer over the door indicated they had three minutes left of their break. They sipped their water in silence for a bit.
Finally, Jake just decided to ask. “You guys know what the deal is with this game?”
Isaac and Kyler glanced at one another, then glanced up, as though someone were watching overhead, which might well have been true.
Kyler shrugged. “I signed up to test a game and cut my time. That’s all I need to know.”
The driver of their skid steer returned from wherever he’d gone, and they followed him back out and finished their shift. Both the others were even more quiet while they worked. Gunnar couldn’t tell if they knew more and weren’t saying, or just didn’t know.
When his shift was done, Jake shed his hazmat suit, showered, and donned his jumpsuit once more. Shad was waiting for him outside the facility and escorted him back through the prison camp in silence.
Shad opened the door to his room, and Jake nearly leapt out of his skin. There was a woman in there, dressed in a navy pantsuit, standing beside his Virtuality Core console. She had straight blonde hair and dark brown eyes, and her gaze seemed to cut through him.
She nodded to Shad. “You may leave us, Officer.”
Jake glanced over at the man, but his hologram had already vanished. The door to his cell closed with a clank as metal mechanisms locked him in.
The woman approached. She was several inches taller than him, probably well over six feet.
“You’ve been asking questions, Jake Darrow.”
“Is that a crime? You guys don’t give many answers around this place.”
She nodded. “And you think you deserve answers, do you?”
“Guess I want to know what I’m living for.”
“So says the killer. How quaint.” The woman’s eyes leveled on him with cool indignation. “You’re living because rather than let the world waste scum like you, my bosses decided to invest in you instead. Your life belongs to Virtuality now.”
Jake scowled. “I just want to know how this all connects. The game and the real world. How am I supposed to perform well if I don’t know my audience?”
The woman smiled. “That’s why I’m here.” She stuck out her hand, offering a handshake, but Jake just shook his head at the holograph trick.
“Very good,” she said. “I’m Vera Silver, one of many Virtuality associates monitoring the beta on Pantheon. You’re hardly the first to ask for more details. My superiors like to see your pure reactions to the immersion experience. But I suppose you have been there a few days now.”
“Why are you so concerned with how we perform in the game?”
“It is imperative that you continue down a proper path. The problem with a virtual lifelike environment is that players have a tendency to… lose focus. This seems especially true in the case of prisoners like you, at least early on. When most prisoners enter, they tend to wander. They tend to spend way too much time drinking and screwing.”
“Seems like that would keep people hooked on the game when it launches.”
Vera smiled. “We don’t exactly want to be the whorehouse game. But we also want an open world.”
“But not too open.”
“All games have parameters, and incentives. Early advancement is important.”
“So your solution will be to—what?—shock players if they don’t advance?”
“You’re the guinea pigs. We’re working out the bugs on you as we speak. The key is to leave everything as a tantalizing taste to be chased. We want you to want to play over and over and over. And that starts at the very beginning.”
“What does that do for the people upstairs?”
“The greatest incentive of all—money.”
Jake nodded and moved past her to sit in his console seat.
“Thanks for clearing things up, then,” he said.
“You see, you already want to go back,” Vera said sweetly. “Very well.”
She moved over to the control panel and triggered a few buttons on the screen.
The arms of the machine shifted, and tubes began to attach themselves to Jake’s body.
Vera leaned over him. “Play well.”
Jake closed his eyes as the console whirred, but her face remained in his vision for a moment.
And in an instant, she was gone.
34
FIT FOR A GODDESS
To his surprise, Gunnar awoke in his room alone. Kohli had not come to wake him for their morning run. The thief had been out on his trial the previous night—perhaps it was still going on. So, Gunnar lay still for a moment and enjoyed the quiet of the early morning.
