CPC-02. Couch Potato Crisis, page 35
part #2 of Couch Potato Chronicles Series
My hesitation didn’t last, as her attacks were furious. The Orb of Death is simple compared to the other orbs. It deals damage. Lots of damage. She was level 120 and had sixty-seven heart containers, so every time we hurt her, it chipped off only a small amount.
I’ll tell you the weakness of the Orb of Death: its wielder cannot heal. If you use healing spells or items on them, it deals damage. That’s a trick I picked up playing Japanese RPGs. Ceridwen was the MVP for this fight. She used healing spells on her, continuously draining her health. Blobby and I did our best to keep Ceri safe, blocking Tiamat’s nonstop attacks.
We all tried to keep away from her, but she closed the distance to Ceridwen. The Lich Queen put her right hand on Ceri’s chest. Tiamat’s snake eye opened, staring my elven fiance in the eye. The mouth of my beloved went wide, and a stream of white ghostly haze flowed from it into Tiamat’s. As soon as it reached Tiamat’s mouth, the Lich Queen fell backward, gagging. The haze reversed course, re-entering Ceridwen’s mouth, restoring her life.
I circled her, my deck of cards floating before me. “What did you do to her, Tiamat?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I tried to drain her, but I can’t. It had been so long since I tried to consume an elf’s soul. I had forgotten. They aren’t mortal and don’t have finite life spans for me to take. But I can drain the rest of you and add a fraction of your lifespan to my own.”
“That’s why you’re so young,” I said. “Your youth comes at the cost of the people you sacrifice.”
The Lich Queen smiled, as her snake eye blinked and scanned the room separately from her human blue eye. “How long do you have left in your lifespan? Maybe fifty years? That should buy me a few months.”
“His life isn’t for you to take, Lich!” Ceridwen got to her feet and pelted Tiamat with more healing spells, slowly draining her life.
Franklin hit her with a slow spell, which served to curb her movement. That gave Sigrid the opportunity to move in and slice off her right arm—the very arm that held the Orb of Death.
Once the Orb was separated from her, we easily overpowered the Lich Queen, and finished her off. Blobby drowned her with the Orb of Water, and there was nothing she could do to escape. Her body fell to the ground before crumbling into a blackened pile of muddy ash. All that remained was a black and red snake eye.
Unwilling to touch it, I picked it up with a cloth and put it into a metal lockbox for safe keeping. It wouldn’t keep her for long, but we didn’t need much time.
The next few hours were consumed by our opening of the Hallowed Chapel. We borrowed a temple in the nearby settlement for our purposes. We placed each Orb in a circle around it. A beam of light came from the sky, and just like that, the Hallowed Chapel had been consecrated.
I won’t go into details about the interior of the temple, except to say it’s bigger on the inside in a Doctor Who sort of way. We found an empty shelf and placed the lockbox on it.
After we left the Hallowed Chapel and retrieved the orbs, the building reverted to its previous condition of being a standard temple.
That night, we celebrated at the nearby city of Bastion. The humans were overjoyed that the tyrant had finally been killed. I should say most of them were. I think some had gotten used to the stability she offered, but the woman was a tyrant and a monster. Humanity is better off without her.
The celebration lasted long into the night. Ceri and I embraced and kissed in public for the first time. That turned out to be a mistake, because Blobby Bjurstrom saw everything. When Blobby gets nervous, sometimes he breaks into rhyme. Someone scribbled down what he said, and I’m including it here.
Oh Ceridwen, what have you done?
To me you were my heart
But now I see the pair of you
Would rend my soul apart
Oh Jak, oh Jak what did you do?
To show me such a sight
Was this not our victory
That we had won tonight?
I tell you now that you have brought
Our friendship to its end
I plainly witness that the orb
Is now My Only Friend
I shan’t forget what you have done
To break my heart this way
And so I shall henceforth become
The TERROR OF THE BAY!
After that, he dove into the ocean, leaving his rusty trombone abandoned on the beach.
Like I said, it had been a busy day. I feel sorry for Blobby, but I’m sure he’ll bounce back (metaphorically speaking). At least I hope so.
The people were so happy, they offered to make me their new king. I refused, but they made that same offer to Franklin Zhakara, who accepted. He promised to turn Southland into a land of perfect freedom where humans would be free of oppression. He declared that the first law he’d enact would be that no person could have mastery over another. It was meant as an explicit ban on all kinds of slavery, including indentured servitude.
And as for me and Ceridwen, we got married that same night. Elves tend to have long, lavish, and expensive weddings, but neither of us wanted to wait that long, so we eloped.
That evening, when I opened my menu, the controller that was normally under the menu had vanished. I no longer had a way to exit the game. But that was fine. This world has everything I need.
I can only hope the other me, the one in the real world, was able to deliver the game as planned. Maybe one day you’ll see the same sights I have. I doubt I’ll be alive to see you when that happens, but know that I lived a happy life and I still love you and think about you often.
Tasha stopped reading. What did her father mean when he wrote “the other me”? The one from the real world? What would happen to Tasha when her adventure ended? Would there be two of her as well?
Though there were still so many questions, she grinned. Her father had found happiness and moved on. She’d never have known without the letters.
She returned the laptop to its bag and placed it in her inventory. There were letters remaining for her to read, but there’d be time for that later.
She set the laptop down and returned to the deck where the elven refugees crowded the lower deck. There simply wasn’t enough room for everyone on such a small ship. Kazezu could no longer land on deck, instead forced to fly alongside the ship.
Tasha approached Ari, who was conversing with the captain“ What’s up?”
The figment handed Tasha a small newspaper. “This arrived by swallow while you were below-decks reading that smartphone looking thing.”
She took the newspaper and read the clipping he’d circled in the wanted section.
Help wanted—Suppression of Feral Elves
A human has been brutally attacked and kidnapped by an unknown number of escaped elven slaves. They are believed to have taken shelter in the ruins of an old city. Assembling a large suppression force to capture the escaped slaves and rescue the human prisoner. Payment contingent on abilities and contribution, from a pool of 50,000 GP.
Level 10 and greater only. Nonhumans need not apply.
Contact Caymie Jakobson in the town of Aldrige at The Selkie’s Tear
“What does this have to do with us?” she asked.
The pugilist gave her a single, decisive nod. “If the job posting is correct, a group of escaped slaves found the ruins of an old city. We could use that city to establish a beach-head. Kegan could use it to warp the refugees back to Questgivria.”
Tasha frowned in thought. “Do you think Kiwi might be one of the escaped slaves?”
“That be wishful thinking,” Captain K’her said. “Let’s focus on yer wayward princess as soon as we rid ourselves o’ me passengers. Don’t worry, I shall fulfill me pledge an’ return her to ye.”
“Mister Malarky!”—the captain strode over to the gnome—“set a course fer’ Aldrige.”
Malarky poured over his maps before responding. “Yes, captain. Aldridge is thirty miles east-southeast. I can have us there within the hour, sir.”
“Splendid. Let us know when we’ve arrived an’ set us down out of sight.”
“Yes sir”.
The ship pitched to the right and began a long turn.
Chapter 23
Message in a Bottle
Ten minutes. That was the shortest time Kiwi’s captors kept her alive each resurrection. Some were longer, but she always had at least ten minutes to do something before they killed her again.
She’d exhausted every avenue of escape. The walls were impervious to her magic, as well as every non-magic skill she possessed. She’d tried to bust through what she assumed was an observation window, but the thick pane of darkened glass wasn’t a weak point she could exploit.
She spent several lives concocting a spell to burrow through the ground, something similar to Hermes’s digging ability, but nothing worked. The floor was as impervious as the walls.
Escape was impossible. It was eminently clear her captors knew what they were doing. She needed to find another angle.
She knew exactly where she was. The longitude and latitude of her location was clearly displayed on her personal HUD below the minimap. If she couldn’t escape on her own, she’d have to find a way to transmit her location information to someone who could help her. If her father, the king, knew her exact position, rescue might be possible.
She did have one spell in her arsenal that allowed her to send a magical messenger wisp to one of her friends. Alas, that particular spell had little use in her situation for two reasons. First, she was trapped in an enclosed space, leaving no way for it to leave. A small ventilation hole had been drilled in the ceiling, but there was no guarantee the wisp would find a way outside. Secondly, it consumed mana while in use, which limited its useful range to no more than twenty miles.
She needed to consider alternative methods of communication.
When she was young, she’d received tutoring in every subject she might conceivably need as a future leader. As she had no siblings, it was known that one day she’d inherit the title of high queen. To prepare for this inevitability, she spent her childhood in training. She learned the ways of magic, martial arts, economics, mathematics, language, history, wartime strategy, and various forms of encryption. Her hope was that those skills could help her encode a message and transmit it to someone in a position to help her.
She opened her menu and poured over the options, trying to find something she could use to send a message. The city management option appeared on the right panel, so she tapped on it, bringing up the town interface.
An overview of the town of McBreakfast Sandwiches appeared, revealing population, taxation rates, purchased NPCs, assistant administrators, and so forth.
The assistant administrators tab showed Fin and Mara, both of whom were currently located within the city boundaries. It was good to know they were okay. There was no additional information about them, only whether they were in the city.
Bringing up the administrator menu for Fin revealed the options: “Adjust Administrator Privileges” and “Send Direct Message”. That was exactly what she wanted to do. She tapped “Send Direct Message” and was met with a dialog box that read “You can’t send a direct message to Assistant Administrator Fin unless either both of you are within the city boundaries or you have purchased the “Remote Administration” optional upgrade.
It did seem too good to be true, but maybe she could purchase this “Remote Administration” feature. She backed out and tried to purchase that upgrade before she remembered she didn’t have any money. She’d given Mara all of her GP, a regrettable decision.
She backed out and explored the rest of the city. A city map took up most of the management screen. She could zoom in and out of the map by drawing her fingers together against the surface of her HUD. She focused her attention on the downtown area around the savepoint. A red dotted line showed the extent of the anti-monster field, which only encompassed a handful of blocks directly surrounding the save point.
She looked for some way to encode information in one of her available options. Fin was a mathemagician and presumably had skill in detecting mathematical patterns. She poked further into the city administration interface, searching for something useful.
Several buildings were highlighted, specifically the NPC operated ones. She tapped on the item shop, which then showed sales figures and presented the option of instituting a sales tax on NPC sold goods. There were also options to purchase upgrades for the NPC merchant, allowing it to sell more expensive but higher quality goods. She considered using the sales tax option as a way to get a message out, but the tax rate didn’t have enough fidelity to encode any kind of message. It also seemed unlikely Fin would merely happen to inspect the tax rate and notice some encoded message.
She inspected the cities and streets adjacent to the save point, then tapped on one of them. A prompt appeared, showing the street’s name, condition, and cost to repair or upgrade. The street was rather uncreatively named Center Street. She tapped on the name and a keyboard appeared along with a text box which would allow her to rename the street.
Perfect! There was a high chance Fin would see the street name. She could use the street name to send her current coordinates, but she’d have to hurry. It must have already been ten minutes. If her captors kept to their previous pattern, they’d murder her again sometime in the next few minutes.
She changed the name of the street to “ThisIsKiwi Avenue” and pressed the rename option. The change was instantly reflected in the map. It was fortunate for her that the modification didn’t cost anything.
She tried to change the next street to “Lon43.436612 Avenue”, but an error screen appeared indicating that numbers couldn’t be used in conjunction with letters on named streets. Apparently, there were restrictions on what city administrators could name their streets. While she couldn’t integrate numbers or symbols into the street name, she could set it as a numbered street, something along the lines of 1st street.
She set the street name to “Longitude” and the next street to “42.436612nd street”, which was accepted by the city interface. She set the next two street names to “Latitude” and “-84.412458th Street”. The next street she named “SendHelp Avenue”. She was worried Fingaerion and Mara might be captured as well, so she quickly named the next street “DontComeAlone Avenue”.
A familiar and entirely unwelcome hissing sound interrupted her. They’d released the poison that would return her to the emptiness of oblivion.
A worrisome thought occurred to her. Though she was asking Fin and Mara to send help, who could they really send? They were alone, hidden in a ruined city, surrounded by enemies. Maybe they’d send a message by a swallow to her father. No, they didn’t have access to any messenger swallows.
The gas cloud was getting closer. Without knowing if it was possible, she named the next street “FindTasha Avenue”. She didn’t believe Tasha had willingly betrayed her. A charm spell could affect anyone. In a way, it was Kiwi’s fault for not being more careful.
As the poison gas reached her, the city administration window closed automatically, replaced by her battle HUD. She resented the mockery it presented. She’d tried dozens of times to fight the gas, but the best she could hope for was a few more seconds. This time, she allowed the gas to overtake her. The burning sensation in her throat lasted only a few seconds before she succumbed to death again.
“Big brother, come look at this!” Mara called from the street corner alongside the save point.
Fin said, “I’ll be right there. Marnie just spawned. Stay out of sight until I deal with him.”
After the human spawned in the caged-off save point, Fin turned the wheel that pushed his former master into the adjoining chamber. Marnie was still at a high enough level to be dangerous, so Fin had to be careful every time the erstwhile slavedriver respawned. Though the human’s class was hunter, he could still cast effective projectile spells. More than once, the human had tried to kill one or both of them with a lightning bolt immediately after respawning.
Fortunately, Marne lacked the ability to destroy or damage the cage that he was trapped in. Fin had no doubt that, left to his own devices, Marnie could figure something out. It was important to react to the human’s respawn and end him as quickly as possible.
The human-designed spawn-camp system provided a second mechanism that released a heavy weight capable of killing nearly anyone. Marnie didn’t possess any defense against that method of execution, or at least he hadn’t employed it the last dozen or so rebirths.
His former master was yelling something, but Fin couldn’t make out what it was. It didn’t matter. Unless they dealt with Marnie quickly, he’d always be a threat. Without wasting time, Fin pulled the lever which released the weight. Shortly after, the telltale thud of metal hitting flesh followed. Gained experience points appeared in Fin’s combat log, but he ignored it. After a few more rounds of killing Marnie he would level up again.
When this had started, Fin felt a pang of joy every time he killed Marnie. After decades of abuse by humans, one of them was finally getting some payback. It felt good; it felt right. But not anymore. He no longer exacted pleasure in killing Marnie, no matter how much the human deserved it.
Killing another in combat was one thing, but assassinating someone at such a moment of vulnerability felt cowardly.
He was growing concerned he was becoming more like the humans who’d abused him and his friends. Still, he couldn’t stop. Marnie was a threat that had to be dealt with, and the experience points gained from killing him could be the difference between life and death.
When he was young, his parents raised him to be kind and never mistreat others. He was raised a pacifist, but he’d now engaged in repeated acts of cold blooded murder. What would his parents say if they could see him now? Would they be ashamed, or would they understand he was only doing this to stay alive and keep Mara safe?
