Harvest, page 3
Aspen nodded to the trio of glyphis, and they straightened. Viqa rested one hand on her heart, and Aspen noticed that her palm was broad; the fingers little more than single-jointed stubs without fingernails. When Viqa spoke, her voice had some of that breathiness that he had heard in Jesiqa’s few words, but it was much clearer than her daughter’s.
“We thank you for the return of our child whom we had thought lost to us, Lord Aspen. Lord Nekthadt has told us that without your aid, and that of your companions, he and Jesiqa would undoubtedly have died in that vile city. Our debt to you is great.” With this, the woman bowed again, and her son followed half a heartbeat later, though Jesiqa just shrugged and grinned at Aspen from her brother’s shoulder, baring rows of vicious triangular teeth.
Aspen stepped forward, and lifted his hand as if to rest it on the water mage’s shoulder, though he hesitated and dropped it again. He had a feeling that the heat and dryness of his flesh would be painful to her even through her robe, and he had no wish to discomfit her in even a minor way.
“If anything, I owe you for protecting this Tree when I couldn’t. Stand, though, and we’ll call all debts even, though if you’re willing to stay and continue to aid us, we could perhaps find some way to pay you.”
The mage straightened, and bared her vicious teeth in a display more ferocious than that of her offspring. It was all Aspen could do not to step back, but he prayed that this was something akin to a smile, and held his ground.
“We have been sent here by Giqa,” Viqa said. “We have no need of payment at this time, and we will stay until our goddess sends us elsewhere, or the Tree falls.” She paused before continuing. “Though, once you have tasted the fruit of the Tree, perhaps you might permit us to share one as well? We are not ones for the flesh of plants, but I think, this once, we should attempt it.”
With those teeth, Aspen was certain that what their diet lacked in fiber, they more than made up for in protein, but he nodded easily. “Once I’ve completed this quest, anyone may have as many fruits as they like. There certainly seems to be enough to share.”
The glyphis nodded in satisfaction, and stepped aside, allowing Aspen easy access to the Tree. The boughs drooped low, the pale, creamy bark nearly entirely obscured by silver-green leaves that were also vaguely reminiscent of an aspen tree, and a multitude of fruit, which no aspen had ever borne.
Feeling Stick quiver again, Aspen pulled the staff from his belt, and allowed it to grow to its full length. The delicate silver chains from which hung filigreed metal leaves chimed eagerly, swaying toward the Tree. Carefully, Aspen leaned the staff so that it rested against the Tree’s trunk, and Stick almost seemed to sigh, its music hushing from clear tones to quiet murmurs of sound.
At long last, Aspen reached up and grasped the nearest fruit. This one looked a little like a star, with a center that was a lovely yellow, and blushed to deep orange at the ends of the rays. He pulled at it gently, and it split in half without effort, juice welling up from the open flesh and running down his fingers. A smell of strawberries and watermelon rose to his nostrils, and he could no more stop himself from biting into it than he could give up breathing.
With the slice of his teeth into the pulp of the fruit, his mouth filled with an indescribable sensation. All of the best things he’d ever eaten, several of which had been produced by Millie, came together in an impression of… Fulfillment? Perfect gratification? Whatever it was, he’d never felt it before, and with each bite it grew, until he swallowed the final sliver of fruit, and it was over in an explosion of euphoria.
He realized his eyes were closed so he could more fully savor the experience, but words formed in the darkness behind his eyes nonetheless.
Quest: “Nice to Meta You” completed.
You have planted the seed of the Meta tree. This tree has never before grown outside of Gina’s Garden. Thanks to the aid of friends and strangers alike, you have finally eaten the first fruit. You really need to work on your timing.
* * *
Success: A Blessing of Gina.
The Goddess Gina has heard your prayer. As Her Champion, She grants you the following Skill to be used in pursuit of Her goals.
* * *
[Clarity] Every sapient being within your line of sight will be struck by a Moment of Clarity. They will take a moment to reflect upon the choices that have led to the situation in which they find themselves, whether they like it or not. They will have an opportunity to Repent or Persist, which may lead to unforeseeable consequences, so use this Skill with great caution. May be used only once during each Encounter or Event.
Aspen looked down. A metallic greenish-silver tattoo of a twig wrapped around the base of his ring finger. Tiny spade-shaped aspen leaves grew from it, quaking in an unfelt breeze. Green light suffused the tattoo, which was by far the smallest and simplest of the markings now nearly covering his hand from wrist to fingertips.
The soft low-level glimmer that constantly emitted from his pinky seemed stronger now, barely visible even in the light of day, and suffused the entire right side of his hand from top to bottom. The aspen leaves on his ring finger tilted toward that light as if soaking in the glow. The ever-metamorphosing insects and creatures on his middle finger crawled and flew over the entire back of his hand now, and tiny butterflies drifted in to land on the bottommost leaves on his new ‘ring’. Even the solid metallic-looking coating on his index finger had spread to cover most of the palm of his hand, which gleamed as if he’d dipped it into a pool of mercury. When the creatures from the [Metamorphosis] tattoo came into contact with the pool of silver, they took on a metallic gleam of their own before flying or crawling away. Finally, the blue ribbon-like knot that wrapped around his thumb and the fleshy was now even more solid and complex. Aspen felt that no matter how long he stared at it, he would keep finding new paths or shapes in the intricate twists of azure. The silver creep of [Winnow] halted where it touched the ribbon of [Detect Evil], but it seemed a harmonious boundary, rather than a contested one.
Aspen looked up into the sky, which was a brilliant blue through the leaves of the Meta Tree. He pressed his hand to his heart, much as Viqa had when she bowed to thank him for aiding her daughter. Thank you, Gina. I’ll use these powers well.
Breeze wound through the damp strands of hair at his nape, twisting and tugging at them playfully. I know, the wind whispered, and he smiled.
CHAPTER TWO
ROUGE
Doom Bloom, Rouge, and Silus were exploring. The system of caves that William the fructipire had created was a-maz-ing. Silus, who had woken up when the wagon she was sleeping in stopped, was finally back in her natural element. The last few times the bat had been able to fly around in caves, they had been full of monsters, which kind of took the fun out of it, at least when you were as small and squishy as Silus.
::Wow! There’s another big cave down this way! Oooo, he put a crystal skylight in this one. I wonder how he did that? There are rainbows on the walls!:: Silus’s excited squeaks hadn’t stopped since she’d launched herself from Rouge’s shoulder, and the sisters had exchanged more than one amused grin at the bat’s adorable antics.
It hadn’t taken long for Rouge and Doom to figure out William’s labeling system for the walls. It wasn’t that different from street numbers and addresses in the real world, and Rouge was already wondering if they could actually set up some kind of postal system using those addresses instead of just ‘Noni Piper, two doors north of the Incompetent Cup’. Surely that would be good for some kind of achievement, right?
She paused, half expecting the system to generate a quest as soon as she thought of it, but then remembered she wasn’t in the fancy pod. While the game had a slightly creepy tendency to generate appropriate quests whenever and wherever you were, it was only in full immersion that it almost seemed to read her mind.
Doom Bloom looked back at her. “Are you all right? Do you want to keep going, or should we head back to Zero?” ‘Zero’ was what they had naturally fallen into calling the huge entrance cavern. All the hallways counted down to it, but it had no number itself, so, of course, it was Zero.
Rouge shook her head, making a face. “I like sim games, but not strategy sims, and they were talking about how many buildings of what kind they needed before we could upgrade to a Hamlet and get bluestones.” She waved a hand dismissively, deliberately ignoring the mildly intrigued look on Doom’s face. “Motte loves that stuff, so he and Aspen and whoever else can figure that out. I want to explore, and fill in my map! Did you get an achievement for being the one of the first players to delve into this place?”
Doom’s eyebrows shot up. “No, but you walked in before I did. What did you get for it?”
Rouge pulled it up and flicked it over to her sister.
Congratulations! As the first player to explore
* * *
There are still many hidden areas of Veritas Online’s nearly infinite world, and you have stumbled upon one of them! You have earned the title Pathfinder I. Your map is more likely to note hidden objects, and you may now sell maps of previously unexplored areas to NPCs.
* * *
The more new areas you discover and map, the higher your Pathfinder title will rise, earning you fame and fortune!
Fame +5
Doom grinned and waved away the notification. “Very nice! I got that one a year or so ago, thanks to a Corpse Run with a particularly adventurous newbie.” Doom Bloom’s in-game ‘job’ was guarding player’s zombies while they traveled. Unlike other games, when a player logged out, their character didn’t disappear. The avatar they left behind was usually called a ‘Zombie’, though Doom insisted on using the old-fashioned term, ‘Corpse’. Purely, so far as Rouge could tell, so that she could call her escort jobs ‘corpse runs’.
Zombies could do basic, repeatable tasks, or obey simple commands like ‘follow Player Doom Bloom’. What they couldn’t do, however, was either attack or defend themselves. That meant that if you logged out while you were anywhere without bluestones - the special stones that delineated non-combat zones in population centers - and didn’t have a Tent (or at least a Sleeping Bag) to prevent monster attacks, you could return to find that your Zombie died and you had to start over again while dealing with resurrection debuffs.
Of course, once you’d traveled somewhere the hard way, you could always pay to use the teleport stones at a Traveler’s Guild to get back.
Unfortunately, the hard way was sometimes very hard, so if you got a quest that sent you someplace you’d never been before, you hired someone like Doom to escort your Zombie there, dealing with any monsters along the way, so that you didn’t have to suffer through hours of boring travel. Mostly this meant Doom took newbies between popular places like Bright and Bloodhaven, or dungeons near those cities, which wasn’t exactly something Rouge would want to do, but it was easy money, and since not very many people did it, you could charge a lot.
Rouge tilted her head, pondering. “I thought escort quests sucked, but I guess sometimes you get to take people to new places, too, huh? Like, if they get a cool quest, they might hire you to take them to the starting point, if it’s far away?”
Doom’s lips twitched into a slightly evil smile. “Yep. Then, once they’re done, my guild and I can go see if we can figure out what they were up to. I’m not unethical enough to steal it out from under their noses, but I figure once they’ve had a few days to try it, well…” She shrugged.
Rouge stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh! That’s right! You know FantumHat, right?”
Her sister blinked. “How did you get to…” She laughed a little bitterly, gaze sliding to the side. “Oh, unethical, right? Yeah, he is that.” Doom stopped in the middle of the passage, shoulders stiff, until she finally shrugged and looked back at Rouge. “Yeah, I guess I can tell you about him. Just, do you want to keep walking, or sit down somewhere?”
Rouge hesitated. She, like most players, kept a small stack of chairs in her inventory, though honestly she rarely bothered. The stone under their feet looked cold and felt hard, though, so if they did stop, they’d probably want chairs. She shook her head. “William made this place. If there was anything dangerous down here, he would have said something. I want to keep filling in my map. Besides, Silus is still exploring, and I don’t want to lose her.”
Doom shrugged. “We agreed to meet back at Zero if anyone gets lost, but I doubt she’s going to manage to get more than a mile away, even in this maze.” She looked down the empty corridor as if she could see the tiny bat. ::You all right, Silus?::
Silus’s voice was a little faded and distant, but still clear. ::Oh, yeah! I found a cave just crawling with camel crickets. Yum!::
Rouge shuddered. While being around Sumi so much during last in-game winter had helped a lot with her aversion to spiders, she still didn’t appreciate them. The fact that camel crickets were, in fact, not the spiders they looked like from a distance, didn’t really make much difference when one jumped into your face.
::Oh. Good,:: she answered weakly. ::Just, um, let us know when you start moving again.::
The bat sounded muffled as she answered, ::Mmm, ‘kay,:: and Rouge shuddered.
Looking back at Doom, who looked slightly queasy herself, Rouge forced a smile. “Okay then. Tell me about FannyHat.”
Doom giggled, then clapped a hand over her mouth, looking embarrassed to have made such a girly noise. “I’ve called him that a few times, too. He doesn’t like it.”
Rouge grinned. “That’s why we do-ooo it,” she sing-songed, and was pleased to see her sister visibly relax. Whatever relationship Doom had with FantumHat, it was enough to upset her sister, and Doom was usually pretty unflappable. She even had a bit of a reputation as an ‘Ice Queen’ among the male players who thought they could flirt with her and get her to lower the price she charged to escort them.
The two girls began walking again, their path lit only by the glowstones they held and neatly cultivated patches of some bioluminescent plant life. The tunnel was perfectly smooth except for a slight texture to the floor, and their feet tap-tapped into the silence as they walked.
Once Doom put her thoughts in order, she sighed, and said, “It started in high school. I was playing Dragon Lila because,” her eyes flicked to Rouge, and her cheeks pinkened, “well, you and I weren’t really talking, but I saw you playing it on your screen once, and it looked like fun. I was a sophomore then, so I was probably, what, fifteen or so? That would make you ten, and here you were, just a kid, and playing this cool game that all my friends were talking about, but I couldn’t play because mom hates video games.”
The blonde elf shook her head and sighed, gazing blindly into the distance as if seeing something that Rouge couldn’t. “Anyway, I used my savings from my allowance and bought a screen that mom didn’t know about, and wasn’t paying for, so she couldn’t track what I did on it. The first thing I did was install Dragon Lila and start playing. It was the first RPG I’d ever played, and some of the quests were impossible to solo, you know, and PUGs suck.”
Rouge nodded. A PUG was a pick-up group, which usually consisted of a bunch of strangers who all needed to complete the same quest, but didn’t have any friends online. How good the strangers were, and what personalities they had, was complete luck. Rouge had played with great PUGs and made friends that way, but she’d also been abandoned in dungeons when things got too difficult, or someone decided since they’d gotten the level they wanted or whatever, they were just done.
“I met this guy.” Doom smiled in self-deprecation. “He was in a PUG with me, and he was really strong. Like, I think he could have soloed the dungeon, but it was one of those that required a five-person team before you could enter. He was kind of rude at first, but once he saw that I was pretty good, too, he asked me to join him in his regular group. Of course I did, and after a while, I joined his guild.”
She shot a side-long look at Rouge. “He doesn’t do the official guild leader thing any more, since it’s too much work, but there’s no doubt who’s the boss. Anyway, we played together a lot, and after a while, we found out we actually went to the same high school.”
Doom blew out a long breath. “It wasn’t like in Veritas Online, where the game intentionally puts you on the same server as people who live near you. I mean, according to the FAQs, it’s always shifting you without you noticing, keeping population density reasonable, but if someone who lives in your geographic area is in the same game area, it’ll make it so you can interact.”
She chuckled. “Which is great until you see someone you hate, but at least the friends you make are more likely to actually live nearby, which is supposed to ‘foster real-life relationships’.” Doom did finger quotes, and Rouge nodded. She knew all this, but Doom seemed to need tangents to get some emotional distance from her story.
Shaking her head, Doom continued. “I was convinced I was in love. It was my first full-blown crush, and I wasn’t nearly careful enough. He kept pressuring me to meet, and finally I gave in, even though I knew better. We met after school in a little convenience store a block away, and it was terrible. He was nothing like the tall, dark, and handsome character I fell in love with. He was…” She bit her lip, looking ashamed.
“He was… not what I expected. Tall, yes, but fat, and pale, and there was something about his eyes… I wouldn’t have cared, I swear, if I’d just met him, and gotten to know him in real life, but I had all of these expectations, and so I just started crying and ran away. I saw him in the halls a few times after that, but he just watched me, and I was never even able to apologize. I wiped my character on Dragon Lila, and started over. At the end of the year, he graduated, and that summer, Mom and Dad moved to Seattle, so I never even saw him around town or anything.”
