CPC-02. Couch Potato Crisis, page 32
part #2 of Couch Potato Chronicles Series
Tasha wandered the deck of the airship. The Dea Latis wasn’t an especially large ship. It had already been crowded when it carried only the crew and her friends. With the addition of the elven refugees, little standing room remained on the deck.
Tasha moved from one refugee to the next, handing out bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwiches, and juice. BLTs were one of the foodstuffs she always purchased in bulk, so she had plenty to share.
“I don’t understand.” Kegan narrowed his eyes. “Where’s Princess Kiwistafel?” He cocked his head. “And where did all these slaves come from?”
Tasha raised her hands to ameliorate him. “The mission went all kinds of sideways. Kiwi wasn’t there, but we found these people and didn’t want to leave them. I hoped you’d warp them back to Brightwind.”
“That’s unfortunate.” He set his jaw. “I understand why you felt you needed to rescue them, but it was too great a risk. In light of your mission, it was an illogical move. Next time you should consid…” He stopped midword, staring at the space behind Tasha.
Tasha turned to see what he was looking at. Kegan put his hand on her shoulder. “Tasha… I…”
“What is it?”
He walked past her, toward an elven woman. It was the elf with yellow hair that Tasha had rescued. She stood among the other escaped slaves, her eyes darting this way and that reflecting fear and bewilderment. Dressed in a pair of simple pants and a short-sleeve shirt, she had bruises on her face. Her dirt-filled hair was unevenly cut, and deep cuts ran across her right cheek. One of her eyes was missing, covered by a blood-stained strip of fabric.
Kegan approached the woman hesitantly, “Gwenestry?”
The woman backed away. “No, please don’t hurt me, master!”
He paused. “It’s... me. Don’t you recognize me? What have they done to you? Gwen, please don’t look at me with such fear. I’m your husband, Kegan. Don’t you know who I am?” He removed a health potion from his inventory and handed it to her. “This will heal your wounds.”
She tried to back further away, but the deck was so filled with people that she lost purchase and fell. She shook and quivered on the deck, and her posture was one of fear. Her eyes were glassy. “It isn’t you. It never is. This is another cruel illusion.”
Kegan knelt by her side and removed the stopper from the vial before putting it to her lips. As she drank, the scrapes and bruises faded, though patches of blood remained, covering unblemished skin. She cowered as he reached for the piece of cloth covering her right eye. He took it away revealing her newly healed eye.
“It’s me, Gwen. I promise.” He held out her hand. “What have they done to you?”
Gwenestry blinked both eyes and stared. “Kegan, is it really you?”
He nodded. “You’re going to be okay, love. I promise. Let me take you from this place. Let me take you home.”
Her glassy eyes overflowed with tears. “Home?”
The grim general nodded softly, and his eyes were also wet. ““I’ll take you back to Adreála with me. We’ll be happy again. I’ll never leave you alone again.”
After that, the tears ran freely and she didn’t try to talk. They held one another in an embrace until she fell asleep right there on the deck.
He looked up as Captain K’her approached. Kegan rose to his feet and looked the pirate captain right in the eye. “Captain K’her.”
“General?”
“I’ll only say this to you once. This isn’t”—he gulped and tried to blink away his tears—“easy for me to say, but thank you for bringing my wife back to me.”
“Is that who she was?” K’her’s look was guarded. “You should know I only did it fer payment. The Player promised me the crown would pay their ransom.”
“Yes, I understand that. Nevertheless, thank you for doing this.”
The captain looked away. “T’was nothing.” He nodded in Tasha’s direction “Like she said, if it was me in their place, I’d want someone ta rescue me.”
Kegan extended his right hand. “I’ll never be okay with what you did to my home, but you’ve given me back someone I barely hoped I’d see again. “For this”—he pointed to his sleeping wife—“I can forgive you.”
“A pirate has no need of forgiveness.”
“Nevertheless, it is there.”
K’her shook the half-elf’s hand. “The question of what to do with these people remains. Can ye warp ’em away?”
Kegan shook his head. “I need a warpable location for that, like the entrance to a dungeon, or a landmark, or a ruined city. Find one of those and I can send them to safety.”
There was a hand on Tasha’s shoulder, and she turned. It was Sigrid Elsander, the silver-haired elf she’d met earlier, accompanied by a silver haired elven woman. The cuts and scrapes all over his body had disappeared. He wore simple leather pants and a shirt someone must have given him.
“Allow me to introduce myself properly. I am Count Elsander, the once ruler of Adreála. You and I need to speak.”
She nodded and waited for him to continue.
“I realize you came for Princess Kiwistafel. I’m sorry she wasn’t with us, but I may know where they’ve taken her. I overheard one of the guards mention she’d been transferred to a laboratory operated by a human named Doctor Penfold. His lab is somewhere east of Ironfall, but that’s all I know.”
Her eyes were wide at the news. She nodded, excited. “Hopefully, that’s enough to go on.”
“There’s something else. I’ve been...expecting your arrival. I was given a message to pass on to you.”
“You were expecting me?” Tasha squinted.
“I’ve been waiting to speak to you for more than six centuries, Tasha.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I knew your father. I was a companion of the fifth Player, Jak. The man known as the Slayer of the Lich Queen.”
“Wait, you knew my father?”
“It was nearly six hundred and sixty years ago. When he was on his deathbed, he trusted me with an object to pass on to you.”
Tasha shook her head vehemently. “My father died ten years ago. In the real world.”
“Ah, the real world. Jak often mentioned that place. I tried to convince him this was the real world and his world was most likely an illusion that only existed for the purpose of producing Players. He, in turn, tried to convince me my world was nothing more than a game. To me, this is the real world. That place you and Jak refer to is only a land of fantasy as far as I’m concerned. A world without magic or stats where only humans live? That’s a difficult thing to believe.”
Tasha blinked several times, struggling to come to grips with what he said. “Sigrid, can we go back to the part where you said you knew my father?”
He nodded. “We traveled together. I was one of his party members. I helped seal away the Lich Queen, freeing humanity from her tyranny. Regrettably, humanity has replaced her with a different form of tyranny.”
She tried to absorb what the count said. “You say my father died here in Etheria, but I remember him dying in the real… in my world, I mean. Both can’t be true.”
Sigrid shrugged. “I won’t pretend to understand how our two worlds connect. The fact is, I remember him. I stood by his deathbed and made a promise to him. He told me that someday, his daughter—a woman named Tasha—might arrive in Etheria. Were that to happen, I was to give her an object he left in my care. Fortunately, once I realized that I was about to be captured, I rearranged my HUD and set a password so they wouldn’t be able to force me to turn it over. It’s in my inventory now.”
He tapped the air in front of him, swiping several times, until an object appeared in his hands. It was a large leather case sealed closed with a latch.
“Jak wanted me to have this?”
Count Sigrid sighed. “He was quite adamant I give it to you as soon as possible. I tried to reach out to you when I first heard a new Player had arrived in Etheria, but Captain K’her leveled my city and sold us to Murderjoy before I had a chance.” He glared at the captain before returning his gaze to Tasha. The captain, for his part, made a show of ignoring the count’s glare.
Tasha placed the leather case on a nearby crate and undid the latch. Reaching in, she retrieved a single thin plastic object. She recognized it instantly. She’d seen this thing many times before. This object was sitting in her bedroom on a small desk. It was a pink Windows 98 PC, the same one her father gave her over a decade ago. How could it be here when it was also in her apartment?
“This is impossible,” she said. “I don’t understand how this can be here. Has it really been sitting in your inventory for six hundred years?”
She paced back and forth on the deck. “No, this is impossible. This can’t be real.” She opened her in-game menu, picked up the controller, and pressed the rubbery start button.
The moment she pressed it, she appeared in her apartment, sitting on her couch with a controller in her hand. The words “PAUSE” spread across her large plasma TV. There was the sound of raindrops tapping on the window, and a distant thunderclap.
She stood and ran to her bedroom. There, on her desk, was the pink Windows 98 notebook. It was the exact same one she’d seen in Etheria moments before.
“What the hell is this?”
A flash of light emanated from the window followed by vibrations from rolling thunder.
She ran back to her couch and pressed the start button again, unpausing the game and returning to Etheria. She was staring at the same notebook PC.
She backed away. If this notebook could be in both worlds at the same time, what did that mean about her father? Count Sigrid said her father had died over 600 years ago in Etheria, but he also died on Earth. It was a contradiction. The notebook’s existence in both worlds didn’t make any sense.
She slowly reached out to press the power button and waited nearly five minutes for the ancient computer to power up. A password prompt appeared.
“Did…did he say what the password was?”
“Something about your birthday and no dashes. I swear half the things that man said made no sense.”
Tasha typed in her birthday and a few seconds later, the desktop appeared. The laptop was still going through its post-being-turned-on lagginess common to computers of that era. After another five minutes, the laptop had settled into something resembling stability.
There were several folders on the desktop. This particular laptop had both a trackpad and one of those joystick nipple things between the G and H keys to control the mouse pointer. She used the nipple to move the mouse over the folder titled, “To Tasha”. Double tapping on the left mouse button at the base of her laptop caused a folder to appear on the desktop that contained a document named “Readme.wpd”. She double-tapped on it, waited for three minutes for Corel WordPerfect to boot up, and began to read.
Dear Tasha,
If you’re reading this, it could only mean you’ve arrived in the world of Etheria. It has always been my hope you’d have the chance to see this strange alien world. It would also mean that I’ve passed on.
I’m afraid the truth is I’m dying. I’m old, you see. 88 years, if you can believe it. The elven medics say I won’t last the night. While I appreciate their directness, their bedside manner sucks. I hope human/elven relations have softened some in your time.
The hour grows late, and it’s harder for me to keep my eyes from slipping shut. My moments of full lucidity grow further from one another and my final sleep beckons. I’ve lived a blessed life filled with adventure, love, and companionship. In these, my final hours, I’m surrounded by my friends and loved ones.
I’ve made my peace with each and every one of them. My only regret is that I never got to say goodbye to my only child.
Shortly after my arrival in Etheria, I began to write you letters with the full knowledge that in all likelihood, you’d never have the chance to read them. A chance encounter with the Eidolon Libra gave me the information I would need to bring you to Etheria.
I’m going to entrust this laptop to Count Sigrid, my friend and one-time traveling companion. Please read the attached letters, as they may prove useful for whatever journey you find yourself on. They might also give you insight into the person I’ve become.
May it reach you safely, and may this world bring you the same joy it brought me. Know that I love you and have thought about you every day.
Yours,
Dad
Tasha wiped a tear from her eye. She never thought she’d hear from her father again. When he died, it was unexpected. She hadn’t said her goodbyes, either. By some unexpected quirk of the universe, she was allowed this one final chance to hear from him.
She hit the page-down button, bringing up the first of many letters and began reading.
Chapter 22
The Fifth Player
Day 1
It was a dark and stormy night. I would later learn that the storm, the rainclouds, and the thunder reverberating against the office window were illusions, projected into my mind by an alien god. More on that later.
Every Friday after work, I would meet with my coworkers for a game of cards. The game was Five Card Draw, and honestly, I suck at it. I’m still not sure how it was possible, but that night I was winning. Looking back on it now, I wonder if Charles threw the game and was letting me win.
The hour had grown late, but I wasn’t ready to go home. This was just a few months after the divorce. Your mother had just gained custody of you, and I wasn’t ready to face the apartment. Its emptiness was oppressive, a constant reminder of what I’d lost. So I turned back to my colleagues for one more game.
Four of us sat around a wooden table in the smoke-filled basement. The man across from me was Charles “The Beard” Rodrigues, and to either side were Aaron and Chet. Charles was a shifty fellow—his eyes always darted this way and that—but he was good people.
We started a round. Chet raised and I took two cards. My hand showed two sevens, a three, a four, and a six. It wasn’t a great hand, but I did my best to pretend I had a royal flush instead.
I raised, throwing twenty dollars into the pot. Chet and Aaron both folded. It didn’t seem like Charles had enough cash remaining to see my bet, so I expected him to fold as well.
Instead, he made an offer. “Instead of cash, will you accept this as collateral?” With shaking hands, he pulled out an object and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“You like video games, right? Then you’ll love this one. It’s worth way more than your twenty dollars.”
I took it from his hands and inspected it. It was a Super Nintendo game cartridge, one I’d never seen or heard of before. At the time I thought it must be a bootleg. I did think it curious he just happened to have the game on him at the time.
I nodded and handed the cartridge back to him, and he added it to the pot.
He took two cards and watched me closely. I considered the best play. I could try for a straight, but that seemed like a long shot. It would be smarter to discard the three and four. I was about to do so, when I saw something most peculiar.
Hovering in the air above the seven of hearts was a small blue glowing box with the word “Adventure”. It shone with a glow similar to a really small TV-screen. There was a second, similar box with arrows pointing to the three and four. In that box was the word “Safety”.
With my free hand, I picked up a pencil and poked at one of the boxes. It went right through as if the box wasn’t really there.
“Are any of you guys seeing this?” Had I gone crazy?
Chet looked at me like I was an idiot. “Quit stalling and play already.”
I looked at my hand. Adventure or safety. I didn’t know if I’d gone mad, but it seemed like I was being offered a chance to go on an adventure. All I had to do was play the seven of hearts. Or, if I discarded the three and four, I would choose the path of safety.
At the time, I thought it was some kind of stress-induced hallucination. I was certainly under enough stress. Even though I thought that the case, a sliver of doubt remained. What if this was real?
If I had seen this a month earlier, I would have chosen “Safety” without question. With you and your mother, I had too much to live for. Too much to protect for me to take needless risks. But your mother had left and taken you with her. At that point in time, a nice distracting adventure was exactly what I needed. I placed the seven of hearts on the table, face down. Aaron, who was the dealer, handed me a single card. The six of spades. That gave me a straight, which was a reasonably good hand.
I passed the last round of betting and we both placed our cards on the table. He had three jacks. Thanks to the strange blue boxes, I’d won. Had I traded in the two low cards, he would have beaten me.
Charles grinned a mad smile and laughed nervously, “I…I can’t believe it! You’ve won! I’m….I’m finally free!”
I looked at him strangely. “What do you mean, you’re free?”
“That game. It’s cursed, señor. A devil lives inside it. I’ve tried to throw it away, but it always comes back. I would come home and there it would be, señor, sitting on my nightstand as if nothing happened. I’ve tried to sell it or give it away to strangers, but it vanishes before I can finish the sale. But now, you played me for it, you won, and it’s yours!” Charles let out a heavy sigh. “It feels so good to be free!”
I looked at the cartridge., “But it’s just a game. How could it be cursed?”
Charles looked at me, “Listen, amigo, I have to tell you something. This isn’t an ordinary game. The things that happen in it are real. Your actions are forever. But know this, you only get one game. After that, it’s over. No matter how many times you try to play again, no matter how badly you want to, the game won’t start.”
