NOVEL NEXT Chapter 29: Quick-draw
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Marie: So what do you think about the L word? About using it.
Gordon: I think it's meaningful, and if we were both sure about using it, that would be good. And if one of us wasn't, less so..
Marie: I've been watching my parents fight all day, and they kissed and said 'love you' on the way out the door. I think I want to be more sure than they were, first.
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Monday, November 11th, 2091, about 2:00 pm MST, Ghostlands, Kingdoms Server, Wutaar (7,802 viewing)
Gordon was the first one online. This wasn't unusual, but it did mean he was left to handle most of the chat wrangling—Harry always forgot it was open, Karen would fall into a cycle of saying increasingly explicit Karen things—and Claire usually managed it for the group. Something about the way she openly mocked anyone who said something stupid kept the chat in line.
Spicy language. Linking their IP addresses to strip clubs. Remembering their names across dozens of streams, only to give callbacks like she cared about them personally.
Some of it was the optics at play. Some of it might not be.
Gordon's approach was a little different.
"Nice to see you online, BustyPhillips6, Zinger3, PantsToday," he greeted the chat. "I'm hoping I've got a little treat for you guys in store. We're gonna be doing an Old West shootout today, and I've never actually gotten to do one of those in person. I'm really excited."
He glanced at his interface. "I've been told by a third-party messenger that the draw time will be determined by the clock tower, and we're gonna be meeting up in 'Atalante Square', pacing out our thirty-foot zone of engagement, and dueling to the death."
He paused. "Wait. Pantstoday? Like… they don't have suspender hookups anymore?"
The chat was silent.
Gordon grinned, continuing. "This wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I first worked on the quick draw mechanic. It was just the only thing I could think of to reliably beat the gate guard. And I had other, personal reasons for having the skill IRL—but yeah. If Claire and I had been allowed to stay in the fight, there was a real chance we'd end up with a Pyrrhic victory at best—or just lose outright. The AI wasn't about to just give us a Claire who throws lava spells. She probably would've had acid or something else we weren't prepared for as a test group. Nice to see you too, Randoon_the_Wizard"
He leaned back, stretching his shoulders. "So with that in mind, I set out to take both Claire and myself off the table. This was the only thing I could think of to do it. And now that we've got that done, I guess I've got a reputation to uphold as the fastest gun." He smirked. "Which is awesome. Thank you guys so much for your support."
> DandyMcFarsight: Don't thank me, I never supported you
Gordon snorted. "That's really kind of you. Thank you for your openness and honesty, then."
He glanced at his map. "That being said, I still have to get all the way to the square, and you guys know how much I hate fast travel."
Reaching into his inventory, Gordon pulled out a carved bone flute and blew a short sequence of notes. Mist swirled in front of him, condensing into a massive serpentine beast with two large wings and small rear talons—like a parrot, if parrots were pissed off and the size of a car. The creature squawked angrily as it fully formed.
A Quetzalcoatl. Claire's.
"I don't usually do this," he told his audience. "I swear I'm not using this just to show off." He sighed. "If anything, this is probably gonna make me look stupid, because I have no idea how to fly solo. That's Claire's job."
Claire had purchased a pay-to-win item–Quetzal Flute–during a limited edition auction. The result? A baby dragon serpent. As it matured, she'd had to tame it, train it, feed it, and … well, it loved her. That's why it didn't eat her when it became an adult.
Most players from that auction couldn't say the same.
Mounting the magic-tamed beast was effortless. The creature shifted its position as he approached, making it easy for him to climb aboard, and the saddle practically lit up with indicators showing where his hands and feet needed to go. "What a good boy," Gordon praised him.
And that was where the artificial difficulty curve ended.
With a piercing screech, the Quetzalcoatl launched itself skyward, snapping its wings flat and kicking off the ground with enough force to send both mount and rider hurtling forty feet into the air. Then, just as suddenly, it tucked its wings and dove.
Gordon had picked his apartment in the new city for one major reason: location. He liked having an impressive backdrop for strategy sessions, after-action reports, and all that good streamer content.
At no point had he ever planned to skydive off of it.
And now, as he plummeted toward the skyline on the back of a very large, very pissed-off serpent-bird, Gordon was discovering something deeply unsettling.
A secret fear he had never acknowledged before.
He was afraid of heights.
Which made no sense, right? Gordon had spent years doing parkour—vaulting rails, scrambling up walls, flipping over obstacles. That should've done it. That should've cured him.
But that's not how it works.
The reason parkour didn't give you a fear of heights was because by the time you were doing it in public, you'd already been doing it in the gym—over foam mats—for years.
You still had a fear of falling, a fear of failure, a fear of bad footwork. But those fears were minimized. You knew what to expect. You knew how to fall. You knew how to catch yourself.
The transition to real-world parkour had been effortless for Gordon.
The first thing he'd done was a front handspring over an AC unit, and he had never looked back.
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But a fear of falling was not the same thing as a fear of heights.
At a certain altitude, nothing you do will save you.
And as his lizard brain aggressively reminded him, falling from the sky on a diving bird was not a naturally tenable position for a human being who planned to live to reproduce.
His stomach dropped into his mouth. All he managed was a quiet, strangled "Ha."
Balconies flashed past. Windows. Other players turned to stare.
A Quetzalcoatl wasn't exactly a common player mount, after all.
Then, abruptly, the creature snapped its wings out.
The shift was instant and brutal—a sudden, overwhelming surge of G-force. If the haptic suit had been able to accurately mimic what that felt like, it probably would have knocked him unconscious on the spot.
Instead, it just felt like crushing pressure and intense discomfort. His vision went black at the edges.
All of this took maybe three or four seconds.
He still had no idea how to control the damn thing.
A personal message pinged from Marie.
[2:08] Marie: I think I'm in love. Could I please have a Quetzalcoatl? Pretty please?
The mention of the 'L' word stung slightly, and he wasn't sure what to make of that.
Gordon's chat wasn't entirely surprised—or even on his side.
The debate over fast travel had been going on since the earliest 2D games: Does fast travel ruin the game?
On one hand, it makes the world feel smaller, lets players skip past content developers spent hours crafting, and disrupts immersion by eliminating the natural separation between locations. Many games relied on that distance to create a sense of scale and progression.
On the other hand, nobody wants to walk the same road ten times. If travel felt like work, players would get frustrated—or worse, bored. And that could hurt retention and profits.
Gordon was a purist—travel the game world by in-world means or not at all.
His group, as a whole, did not share this principled stance. Marie did. But the others? Not so much.
Thus, the solo flight.
> newbity_public: I don't understand. Why isn't he using the flying interface?
> x_TremeSnooze: Because he's a try-hard. No fast travel, no interfaces
Gordon dug his feet in between the Quetzalcoatl's shoulder blades and yanked back on the reins. His arms quivered with the effort, muscles burning. His vision still hadn't returned, but chat was blowing up—enough to tell him he was on the right track.
The wing beats steadied. The rush of air slowed, and the world faded from black to iron-gray.
"There you go," he murmured to his new friend.
From above, the Ghostlands were beautiful—if in a way that would send medieval historians into apoplectic convulsions.
Walled cities. Wizard towers scraping the sky, hundreds of stories high. Walled farms, because open fields were a death sentence.
Dragons and giants' redoubts. Elf-trees taller than either. Cliffs thousands of feet high. Forests, untamed and towering.
Seven kingdoms. Total war.
And, of course, the ghoul menace.
The Quetzalcoatl only tried to kill him twice on the way to the duel.
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> Cuts_by_Karen: There's a reason we fast travel
Gordon climbed off, shaking with exertion, into the town square at Atalante, a dozen minutes shy of high noon.
He had to admit—that was harder on his arms than he expected.
Idly, he wondered if he'd even be able to quick-draw at all.
"I got here," Gordon argued preemptively.
"Hmm-hmm," Karen disagreed. "Gordon's famous 'I don't use the help menu' strikes again. Now you're shaky, exhausted, and at risk—when you could've just teleported like the rest of the damn world. Not to mention—Gordon, here's a challenge for you: point north."
"What?"
"North. Find it."
Gordon wasn't stupid. "I need to stop asking you where north is if I won't use the compass overlay."
"Hmm-hmm," she disagreed again. "You need to actually learn to find north without the compass overlay if you're going to play without it. Yeah, skipping overlays makes the stream look cooler—more cinematic. It's good for the team. But right now? You're half-assing it."
She sighed. "Gordon, as much as we all love you it would be nice if you took our advice sometimes."
There was that word again.
Gordon squinted up at the high circular walls, spaced evenly with towers, that surrounded the city. It looked a lot like a cookie cutter had been dropped onto a series of low hills and rivers, from above. "Hate the aesthetic," he commented, ignoring her hint. Twelve—ten minutes to showdown was the wrong time to discuss team policy.
Karen glanced up at the sun. "Almost that time."
Across the square, a sallow, dark-haired half-elf player was doing trick spins with his revolvers, cycling them into and out of his holsters, spinning around his forefinger and thumbs in fancy figure eights. "Hope he's done that a lot," commented Gordon.
"Hmm?" asked Karen.
She wasn't usually this hard to talk to.
"Okay, have I actually upset you?"
She shook her head. "No—I just wasn't sure what you were referring to."
"His fancy spins. Hope that's muscle memory by now. He'll be garbage." Gordon paused. "Also, you're usually a lot more talkative."
"First stream with our new sponsors, and we're doing a duel at high noon," she confessed. "And you were absentee for like a quarter hour because you wanted to ride a snake."
He felt her real hand on his for a moment. Hers was shaking slightly.
"Nerves are normal," he tried, comforting. He wasn't feeling them the same way at all but he assumed it was true.
The creature in question was roosting on the bell tower, ignoring all the little mortal snacks milling beneath it like so many ants. Its handler sat astride its head, holding onto its horns and petting it between the eyes.
"I could have reconsidered my priorities," he admitted after a moment. "My bad."
"Worry about it after you win, cowboy," she ordered.
The clocktower's mechanical innards shifted, a deep 'clunk' sound. "It's engaged the gears to change the minute," warned Harry. "Older clocks, especially the bigger ones, take time to move the hand position, but we're about there."
Gordon loosened his guns in their holsters. His hands weren't shaking, but still felt like his grip wasn't at one-hundred percent yet. It would have to do. He walked to the center of the field, mirrored by the gunslinger on the other side. Gordon extended a gloved hand. "Best of luck," he offered.
"If it's all the same to you—drop dead."
Well okay then.
Courtesies observed, they each strode out fifteen paces, then turned.
"I want a nice, clean duel," announced Claire. "Or I burn the city to the ground." Her seat made the threat believable. Which was for the best, since it was completely on brand.
"She won't do that," assured Gordon. "Probably."
She could, and possibly would in the future, but he doubted this would be the day.
The NPC spectators shuffled backward, just in case.
And the clock struck noon, an instant before he'd expected.
Gordon's hands blurred, the other man's already touching his own, as he drew out and back—not up, that had been a mistake from when he'd been first learning the draw, immortalized in his stored Ghostlands animation. That would be why his doppelganger had lost.
Three shots rang out in unison. The challenger's second gun slipped from his grasp, thudding into the dust.
The feathered serpent hissed in displeasure at the tolling bell and gunfire, its cry effortlessly drowning out both as it echoed across the city.