Terramyr Online: The Undiscovered Country: A LitRPG Adventure Page 30

  Rhonda gasped and dropped the handful of treats she’d been holding to coax Little Man to do tricks for them. Oblivious to the humans’ distress, Little Man bounded over and began helping himself greedily. Augustin was shaking his head incredulously, a frightened look on his face. Mike rocked back onto his haunches and just sat there, stunned.

  Chris was the first to speak, “Come on Brian, that… that’s not very funny. We’ve all been worried about him, but he can’t be dead.”

  “I’m being stone cold serious. I wish there was anything else to tell you about what has kept Barry away. It looks like it happened few days ago. I… I…” Brian felt as though his insides were vomiting lava. Some part of him was not computing what reality was trying to force him to cope with. He was with Chris. Barry couldn’t be dead. If the lingering memory of the smell, the feel of that stiff arm, and the image of the waxy lower half of his face under the VR headset weren’t there pushing their way to the front of his mind, he would be inclined to believe that Barry’s death was no more than a mere trick too. Wasn’t there some way to reset reality? How could it be that this was really happening, that it couldn’t be undone?

  “BRIAN!” Chris was right next to him, yelling his name. Brian startled. Chris must have said his name a couple of times without Brian realizing.

  “Yeah?” Brian responded weakly.

  “What happened to him? Was he attacked by something? Was there an accident at the cave?” Chris prompted, placing a hand on his shoulder as if to steady him and keep him present with them.

  “He still had his gaming equipment on him, and the computer console was active. I don’t think anything was missing. It looks like he died while actively gaming. Like I said, from the level of decomp, I can only guess it was two or three days ago. He… smelled, and his,” Brian gestured with his left hand to his right elbow, holding it in the approximate position of Barry’s, “his arm was rigid when I tried to move him.” Brian looked at each of his friends, suddenly hoping that maybe one of them would miraculously tell him that his assessment had been wrong, that he had panicked too quickly. Maybe there was something else to explain it all and he could run back to the other cave right now and do something to help Barry. Even at the moment the hope sprang to his mind he knew it was ridiculous, but it didn’t stop him from mentally willing the universe to give one of them the power to tell him the way to fix this problem.

  “Where are you located right now?” Chris asked.

  “Cave 3,” Brian replied.

  “Rhonda, what do you think? You were an EMT, what do we need to know to understand this better?” Chris asked. He was handling this better than any of them. His voice sounded strained but calm.

  “I don’t know, I was only around a dead body once,” Rhonda sounded stressed and unsure of herself. “Rigor mortis sets in a few hours after death and can last for several days, especially if it’s cold. Were there insects?” she asked hesitantly.

  Brian nodded his head, trying to separate the information he needed to provide from the image of those flies crawling up under Barry’s headset. He was beginning to fear he would see that every time he closed his eyes for days.

  “What could have happened to him? Could someone have killed him while he was playing? You know, distracted by the game and not aware? Those living quarters aren’t exactly built for security. We’ve always assumed our remote locations were the best security,” Chris was still staying calm. Brian sort of hated him right now. “What were the readings from the air quality monitors and the geological equipment?”

  Brian didn’t know. He hadn’t looked. It had seemed like the time he had spent in the cave was never-ending. Pulling it up in his mind, it was like each second took hours to replay. “I… I didn’t think to… I mean, I’d checked for blood, and nothing was missing, but I didn’t check the air readouts,” he was starting to feel frustrated, and stupid. Why hadn’t he checked the air quality? Barry had been working inside of a geologic feature for heaven’s sake! A pocket of noxious air poisoning him was a much more likely scenario than a bunch of bandits.

  “I don’t know!” Brian was on his feet now, walking to the door, suddenly painfully hyperaware of it standing open. It should be closed. This wasn’t something to talk about where NPCs could wander by with their inane dialogue functions. He closed it loudly and then walked back to the chair.

  Instead of sitting again, he roughly turned the chair around and tucked it under the little table that had been restocked again with food. Stupid food! Why he was suddenly so bothered by the food he couldn’t begin to understand, but the presence of virtual rations, reliably being resupplied according to a logical, obedient algorithm was suddenly insulting. Infuriating.

  “Should I go back? I should have paid better attention. I don’t know what happened to him!” Brian knew he sounded animated, almost accusatory. It wasn’t fair to his friends, but he wasn’t fully in control. “Where is the professor anyway?” It suddenly occurred to him that it should be the professor’s job to know what to do in emergency situations. He was the supervising faculty member. He was the… adult. Never mind that most of them were in their mid-twenties. “And what about Meredith? Where are they?”

  “You were so late,” Mike said weakly. “He told us to remind you about the courtesy of punctuality and to greet Barry for him. He already left to go root out a couple of ‘anomalous NPC behaviors.’ He was so motivated to work as hard as Meredith; said she’d been plugged in non-stop since, maybe, yesterday...” Mike’s strangled-sounding voice tapered off.

  “Brian,” Chris’s voice was calm but commanding. It jolted Brian just enough to help him to focus on Chris instead of continuing to spiral out of control, “the DM system is down, but the old chat system is working. You can log out and send the professor a message from Barry’s station. Also, we need to know whether you are in danger. That work site is located in the side of an active volcano,” Brian was simultaneously grateful for having someone appear capable of taking charge and angry that Chris wasn’t a mess like the rest of them clearly were.

  “You need to log out and go back to Cave 1. Check his monitoring equipment to ensure that the air is safe. You could be in danger too if there are volcanic gases affecting the breathability of the air,” Chris was speaking slowly and calmly, bringing Brian’s illogical, boiling frustration at the absence of the two oldest team members down to a manageable simmer. This was good. A definite set of directions to follow.

  “When you’ve established that you are safe, use Barry’s equipment to send a brief chat message to the professor, letting him know that we are all logging out early tonight to prepare to meet up at his location tomorrow. Hopefully we can track him down here in-game, but send it just in case we miss him. While you’re gone, we’ll head out to try and find the professor. Rhonda, where do you think he was headed?” Chris was leading Brian to the save point as he asked the question. Brian interfaced with it and saved, then turned to look at Rhonda.

  “I know he had filtered through the first half dozen or so leads I gave him the other day. He was excited about an offer some elf had given him to become a ‘purveyor of information’ and run a shop down in the merchant quarter. We should probably start there,” saying this, Rhonda lifted Little Man as she stood and packed him away into her satchel. A job to do was evidently helping her to regain composure too. Mike was still sitting on the ground with his back against the wall, his arms limply resting across the top of his knees.

  “Brian, do you think you can find us there when you’ve finished?” Chris put a hand on his shoulder. Virtual though it was, it felt comforting somehow.

  “Yes. I’ll see you soon.” Brian logged out and found himself back in Cave 3 a moment later.

  12

  Pierced to the Heart

  After removing his headset, Brian sat staring at the darkness in front of him for just a moment, taking slow, deep breaths as he reoriented himself to the real world. He was eager to get on his feet, energized by the specif
ic set of tasks that had been laid out for him. He dug in his bag for a bandana he could tie around the lower half of his face as a mask and came up with a red one his gran had given him in honor of being selected for this very team.

  He felt an immediate sense of tenderness and care as he did every time he took it out to use it. The feeling was replaced just as quickly by an angry sense of guilt for the positive emotion at such a time. Then an anger at himself for packing the bandana in the first place. Now, whenever he went to use it, it would remind him of this night, and the tender memory would be forever paired with a horrible one.

  Moving to the door, he started bracing himself for the relative brightness of the outdoors where the misty, moonlit forms of the monkey puzzle trees would greet him before stepping into the eerie glow of Cave 1’s work lamp and computer console. He moved quickly to the monitoring equipment. The paper readout from the seismograph showed no new tremors in this area. He turned to the computer that logged the readings from the air quality sensors throughout the residential and work caves. The current readings populated the screen:

  — CO2 - 10,000ppm

  — SO₂ - 4 ppm

  — H2S - 0.8 ppm

  — HF, HCl, HBr - negligible

  All of these readings were well below levels that would have been dangerous.

  Good. The air was safe for the moment. Next task.

  Brian moved to another screen and swiped across it to wake it up. The display popped up, a running chat log with a virtual keyboard below it. He quickly typed a message to Professor Rojas.

  Barry is dead. A few days now it seems. Unknown cause.

  No foul play. Sites 3&4 informed. Trying to locate you in-game.

  If unsuccessful, will rendezvous at your location tomorrow—Brian

  That should do it. He returned to the air quality log and scrolled a full two weeks back. Over the last couple of weeks the average concentrations hadn’t gone outside of safe operating parameters.

  There had to be some explanation! What were the other reasons a man in his late twenties would turn up dead? He’d hate to think it of him, but drugs could mess with you pretty bad.

  Brian went to the living quarters section of the cave. Barry was relatively tidy for a guy living all by himself in the middle of nowhere. Clothes were folded and sorted into collapsible cloth baskets all neatly lined up and down one side of a rattan mat that covered a simple synthetic floor that had been erected to give the resident some level footing. Toiletries were hanging by the front door. He had a couple of hard-shell suitcases at the foot of his cot. Brian went for those after doing a quick sweep through the baskets of clothing.

  The first was mostly empty except for a bit of UC soccer merch, Barry’s favorite team from Chile. The second contained more, but nothing that did much to answer the question of how Barry might have died and did even less for Brian’s emotional state. There was a journal and a small album with pictures of Barry’s family. The moment Brian realized what it was, he dropped it back in the case and zipped it closed. He couldn’t bear to think of how his family was going to react. He realized with a sudden sense of self-loathing that it had taken him this long to think about Barry’s friends and family, and even now it only occurred to him because he had accidentally stumbled across some personal effects while searching for drugs.

  He stood up and turned around, wracking his brain for anything else that he might be missing before meeting up with the group. Nothing occurred to him. He was partially relieved.

  This time, before leaving the cave, he felt he owed some respect to Barry. Having retrieved the blanket from the cot, he gritted his teeth and approached the body. Holding his breath, he removed the VR headset and was relieved to find Barry’s eyes were closed. He gently spread the blanket over Barry’s body and stood reverently to the side for a minute, hoping that his death had been quick and peaceful at least. He considered turning out the lights, but knew he would need to come back at some point and didn’t want to have to fumble around in the dark when the time came.

  He returned to the moonlight clearing outside of the caves and took a deep breath of cool night air as he pulled the bandana down from his face. He rubbed his cheeks and mouth, dispelling the lingering feeling of the cloth on his skin. The image of Barry as a young teenager, gangly and smiling, but still clearly the same guy, was stuck in his mind. He hadn’t taken enough time to really look at the woman who had been standing next to him in the picture, but Brian could only guess it had been Barry’s mother.

  Focus on what you can do, Brian told himself. He still needed to meet up with the others and report. Maybe they had already found the professor. He returned to Cave 3 and got back into position. Opening his laptop, he entered the password. While he waited for the game software to load, he looked about the dark cave.

  He could vaguely see the opposite cave wall beyond the glow of his laptop screen. The irregular surface reflected back to him where rivulets of water ran slowly between patches of algae and slime molds. What a lonesome, dark place for Barry to have spent his last days alive, Brian reflected. Sure, Cave 1 had more to it than a sleep platform, but it sure wasn’t home.

  Brian was rushing through the streets to the merchant quarter within moments of logging in. It wasn’t too far from House Bob. He only drained his stamina fully once before he arrived. Not entirely sure where any of his friends might be, he first circled the square once. Most of the street vendors had already closed down their stalls for the evening, though two or three of them were haggling with a last-minute customer. A few kids were running through the area, playing what looked to be a variant on a game of tag. He stepped in the path of one of the children who looked to be “it” and engaged him in conversation.

  “Have you seen a couple of elves with a Konnon and a large man in a metal mask come through here recently?” Brian asked, unsure if the programming would be sophisticated enough to respond to such a specific question. Evidently it wasn’t. The child only stood there with wide eyes, staring at him unblinkingly. A moment later though, a girl, maybe two years younger than the boy he had stopped, approached him and pointed down the street that led to The Finer Points.

  “Down there,” she said. “They went down there to look for their other friend. They asked me about a dark-skinned warrior with no armor. I told them he went that way.”

  Surprised by the helpful answer, he offered her a gold coin in return.

  “Oh thank you greatly, sir. I can finally buy the doll I’ve been wanting,” she skipped happily over to one of the lingering vendors and exchanged the coin for a simple rag doll. Some of the other children gathered around her to ooh and ah at the new acquisition. Having forgotten about his situation for the most fleeting of moments, the sight of the girl’s friends reminded him he should be looking for his own. He turned down the street the girl had indicated, keeping his eyes sharp.

  Only a minute later, Mike came running the opposite direction, evidently looking for him. “Come and see this, it looks like we’ve got another glitch on our hands.”

  Brian followed him for a couple of minutes until they came upon Rhonda, Chris, and Augustin gathered around the professor’s avatar lying in the street with a Morr’Tai feathersteel dagger in his back. There was a note pinned to the corpse by the blade.

  For disorderly conduct and a refusal to cooperate with his betters. Outlanders beware.

  –Rored Wandal

  “Why hasn’t his avatar disappeared?” Chris asked.

  “Yeah, and why are the guards not getting involved? Another glitch?” Rhonda asked

  “Barry’s didn’t either when he fell off that cliff during the Overdue Books quest,” Brian answered, feeling very creeped out.

  “Do you think that had anything to do with Barry’s death? Dying in the game during a glitch? You remember how painful it was to be kicked out of the virtual world Meredith built for our simulation?” Augustin asked Brian.

  “I don’t know, but we definitely need to talk to the professo
r. Where would he have respawned?” Brian asked.

  “I’m not even sure. The save point at The Drunk Imp is damaged, remember?” Rhonda pointed out.

  “Are you sure that’s the last place he saved?” Mike asked.

  Rhonda shrugged. None of the others seemed to know for sure either.

  “Maybe we should double-check,” Brian suggested. Better to be moving than standing here over the body of their friend.

  “Somehow it just seems wrong to leave him lying here,” Rhonda whispered. “I know it’s not him, but everything is wrong tonight.”

  Brian nodded his agreement. He looked around him for a moment. There was no name for the shop directly in front of them and the door was slightly ajar. “Didn’t you say the professor had been looking into opening a shop? Do you think this was the place he meant?” Brian pointed to the darkened building. There didn’t seem to be any merchandise displayed in the window.

  Chris opened the door the rest of the way and moved to light a lamp on an empty table a few feet inside the door. Meanwhile, Brian bent down and checked the inventory on the professor’s body. Among an assortment of books and historical artifacts, Brian found a key and the deed to The Age of Wonders Bookshop and found that it added a marker to his map indicating their exact position.

  “Let’s move him inside and then take a quick look in the Drunk Imp,” Chris suggested. The others agreed and helped to move the body inside, then pulled the door closed behind them. Turning to lock the door before following the others, Brian noticed Freya standing several doors down in front of her shop, watching them with worried eyes, her arms wrapped around her waist. He shook it off and hurried after his friends.

  When they arrived at the Drunk Imp, Brian was unsettled by slight changes in the atmosphere. There were no laughing sailors at any of the tables, and the minstrel was absent. All he cared about, though, was getting his answers and then getting out of this game. The group hurried up the steps to the conference room. Brian was the last to enter, and saw the same, strangely deformed save point as had popped up in the Morr’Tai lairs. This time, though, it was the professor and Meredith’s player ribbons that were dangling from the mangled pedestal.