NOVEL NEXT Chapter 5: The Stoners
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Karen: I named myself Cuts_by_Karen, and I'm a pirate-ninja, and you could be a pirate-ninja too if you wanted–
Gordon: Hang on-they have guns.
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Friday, November 8th, 2090, about 5 pm MST, Ghostlands, Kingdoms Server, Nameless Ruins (1,485 viewing)
"Don't shoot me!" screamed the corpse, jumping from the corner and throwing itself at him. "I'm human!"
Its pallid flesh looked as real as his did, lips tearing slightly at the corners and exposing too-long canines, filmy sunken eyes locked on his torso, a battered shortsword caked with dirt jabbing with one arm even as the other groped for his wrist, dust flying from beneath its wrapping-clad feet.
With no time to ironsight, Gordon fanned his pistol, sprayed from the hip, and sent a hail of four bullets at the lunging revenant. It juked, fingers and toes gripping the shattered marble flooring with unnatural, bestial strength.
Two shots connected—he could see the puff of grey-pink corpse matter—and he tumbled sideways, pivoting off his shoulder, as the creature flew through the space he had been occupying, bouncing off the wall behind him. Two more shots made sure it wouldn't get up again, the recoil feeling just that little bit unnatural and muted, like all sensations from the VR suit.
His real neck felt tense under the haptic suit. He set his character to AI autopilot mode for a second, firing off a quick-reload animation: his character deftly pulled a speed reloader from his close-fitting gunfighter's costume and got to work.
Gordon popped his neck, scratching his close-buzzed hair where the haptic helmet met his hairline as he did so. His shoulders were sore after all that virtual combat—but they were nearly there. Probably. He removed the helmet entirely to get the chin strap re-adjusted, catching the reflection of his own abstracted green-eyed gaze as it came free, and the dark circles beneath them. He looked like hell. He glanced over at Karen, in her omni-directional treadmill setup only feet from his own, and at the circle of streaming cameras set up around them, taking pride of place in his living room. He rubbed his eyes, then put the helmet back on and clicked the strap in place.
"Somebody's tense," said Karen. Her character was much more high-fantasy than his, with close-fitting dark leather armor that did little to hide a lean-muscled frame. A high, golden-blonde ponytail whipped behind her as she moved. Even through the game's engine, his best friend's eyes were a striking, clear blue, framed by expressive brows that were currently arched in amusement. "Need me to come over there and help you relax, cowboy?"
She stalked confidently over to the door, glancing through with a slight lean of her body that kept most of her lean-muscled silhouette out of view from the hall.
"Wired," Gordon admitted. He pulled his knife and started cutting the purse strings from the corpse's belt, trusting her to keep an eye out. "I pulled a Karen and put the coffee pot on my desk so I'd be awake for the stream."
Her avatar didn't turn towards him, but he could picture her real-world grin. "Yeah?"
"My kidneys hate me." His wandering fingers found the rough leather of a healer's kit, along with the copper sword he set to the side as dead weight. He held the kit up until he was sure she'd seen it, then put it away.
"What use do the dead have with healer's kits?" he asked her idly, standing up and securing his guns in their holsters with leather loops. Twin guns and a knife at his belt—he'd been feeling old west when he rolled up his character, just doubling down when called out for wanting to play a cowboy in a medieval game. If they didn't want cowboys ,they shouldn't have included revolvers in the game.
"That's like asking what use zombies have for brains," she told him. Their voices were both somewhat absent, checking inventory or chugging a real-world energy drink, in her case. Gotta keep the sugar up. "You just accept it, and move on."
The door squealed convincingly as she kicked it all the way ajar, and they were moving once again, her steps nearly imperceptibly soft, his rapid and sure. The mansion they were looting had, apparently, experienced a house fire at some point in time—the floor beyond the door was largely missing, jagged holes lined with frayed, blackened fabric leading down to nowhere, glistening with the rain the ruined roof was allowing to pour in in torrents. Karen didn't pause, flowing into a wall run with a leap and three quick, sure steps, kicking off to land, still running, beyond the chasm.
Utterly impractical in real life, in foot wrappings like that, but they went with her character—twin sabers, split-toed foot wraps: a pirate-ninja.
Gordon had helped her record that run, on his bedroom wall, wearing running shoes. His own recording lacked her fluidity, focusing on power and speed—but his two steps of wall running, followed by a side flip, landed him no less surely beyond the obstacle. His footwear, in a somewhat larger size, hadn't been available with the right sorts of traction on the underside and just hadn't afforded the right sort of grip on the wall's surface, even with a rubberized spray for adhesion. He wasn't the sort to cheat a Ghostlands animation. Some streamers wanted to watch the original footage from an animation, and if you cheated it showed.
A corpse swung a streaming, mottled fist at Karen as she passed, and a saber flashed, relieving it of the appendage. "No! Don't h—" it said, its pleading aborted as Gordon kicked it in passing, sending it whooshing back into the darkness with a gust of foul breath. Details like that were the reasons Gordon usually played with the olfactory output dangling off his chest rather than in his nose, where it belonged.
"Hey, it's Harry!" said Karen, sounding delighted.
"Incoming!" screamed a light baritone voice as a sudden patter of footsteps started up out of sight. An armored figure, tall and brawny, hurled itself around the corner of the trail, weapon pointed back the way he'd come. Harry. His avatar affected a full set of plate mail, which clattered like the genuine article, with an expensive enchantment. He didn't quite look like a knight in shining armor, more like 'dirty' than 'shining', and the decision to base his face off his real-world one had probably been a mistake—it was like someone had given Jughead a braided Viking beard. But the warmth in his brown eyes was pure Harry, earnest and cheerful even in the middle of a ghoul swarm.
Behind him came the dead.
A tide of grey-skinned, mannish figures flooded up the path, numbers impossible to quickly estimate visually. Experience told Gordon there were between one and two hundred of the things. Ghouls were made to repopulate, with an immortal matron back at their home who would restart the process if all the ghouls were killed.
"It isn't me! I didn't do this!" one screamed, raising a rusty axe. "Mercy!"
Ghouls swarmed, retreated, raised revenants, ambushed, wore armor (if they could find any), wielded the weapons of defeated players, abused their immunity to poison to their advantage, feared fire, and couldn't cross running water without a bridge. They were the closest the game had to vampires, or goblins for that matter. Experimental, unnatural, Frankensteinian, bloodless freaks.
Somebody had screwed up the spawn logic—badly. Two ghouls would become thirty ghouls in a game hour, needing only corpses to reproduce themselves, and the world was huge. Their hive would be full of them, endless ravenous waves. It had been redundant to make the queens unkillable.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
It had been two years since Ghostlands had been released, and ghouls owned the world.
> MrTParty: The Stoners are assembled!
"We are not calling ourselves 'the Stoners,'" Gordon said flatly as he picked off a spell-casting ghoul from the back ranks.
"Why not?" Harry said cheerfully. "It's branding!"
He stepped forward, his knightly persona in full force. Harry liked the idea of being a knight, he just. . .wasn't quite there yet. "Have no fear, lady, for I shall protect you!"
He was also a cringy actor.
He cut down several ghouls which attempted to approach Karen. At least his swordwork was improving. She regarded him with a complicated expression, but busied herself with chugging another energy drink in real life.
Gordon yawned, his avatar mimicking the action of his real-life body. He'd been burning the midnight oil for months, and he felt it with every dodge and stair step. Two days of continuous rest would do him some good. His hands blurred through the familiar motions of his six-shooters—motions born of obsessive, real-world practice on a real, emptied, firearm.
His father hadn't been thrilled to know he had a real six-shooter in the house. It wasn't dignified. Gordon had responded by buying another to match.
Karen was a dervish, a spinning nightmare of steel and lithe limbs in dark leather, leaving twitching pieces in her wake with every step. Claire—he looked around blearily. She'd never logged in. Perhaps he would see her at the dinner table.
The chat scrolled by near the bottom of his vision, a minor annoyance, but part of the job.
> BaneofChickens: Gordon's quiet tonight
The stream follower count wasn't anything special today: 1,485. Perhaps they were as bored as he was. Their average count, 12k-ish, would net them an extra thousand dollars a month—pocket change for Claire, but meaningful for Harry and Karen—and a ticket to Mars for Gordon. Eventually.
> Peppercorn_Bupkis: Karen's carrying, lol.
If Claire were here, she'd be running the chat. He could've closed the overlay and focused.
"Where's Claire?" he asked, idly refilling a speed reloader, a bit of tin which held, and could snap free from, six bullets.
"Said she had work stuff to go do. Bor-ing!" Harry's cheerful quip was followed by a step away from his book and a two-handed slash with his great sword, the movement showy but effective. Gordon turned to pick another target, snapping off shots from behind the cover offered by his friend's armored form. Ghoul arrows, wildly inaccurate, rained around them, amidst their shouted pleas for mercy, food, flesh, and death.
The revolver clicked empty. Gordon triggered an alternate reload animation, his character executing it with a bit more flair than usual. At least that might get a chuckle from chat. If nothing else, the stream was predictable and easy to please. Playing a spaghetti western star would keep up their spirits for a little while until they realized how uninteresting the session was going to be. Grinding.
"How close are you to your level-up?" asked Gordon over the comms, keeping the question out of the stream.
Harry closed the leatherbound book with a thump and a puff of dust, then sneezed violently. Harry always kept his olfactories in, for the immersion. "Those ones you got earlier put me over the edge," he said. "I'm level 200—and this book is my Delver's Tome."
Levels 25, 50, 100, and 200 had special dungeons which must be completed with the leveling-up character in the party to unlock further leveling. They'd been waiting for Harry to level up for aeons—but it would be worth it. Higher levels unlocked new world areas—in practice, if not in theory. There weren't gates that said 200 or above only—but there were guardians who could hit you hard enough to make up for it, or critters that could take advantage of weaknesses. Liminal levels like 200 came with perks, and the tank class perk, Antimagic Mind, gave damage resistance vs magic and spells. And mind control.
The end result was, practically speaking, that Harry's level-up would finally allow them to reach the far lands. And that was something Gordon was very excited about indeed. For Marie's sake.
The last two upright ghouls vanished into a mist of rancid meat as Harry fired off another of his class perks—Shield Bash. The clunky default animation took an eternity to execute, but the damage numbers didn't lie: it was ridiculously overpowered. A massive, leather-bound tome materialized in the air with the sound of trumpets and crashed to the floor in front of him. Harry snatched it up, idly swatting away a final, crawling ghoul with its heavy spine. "My tome!"Gordon's friend took a wide-legged, dramatic stance and held his book over his head. "LEVEL 200, baby!" he shouted. He was too old for his voice to crack, but the pitch belied the fact.
For the first time in weeks, Gordon felt a spark of real excitement. He found himself grinning as he performed a final reload with a flourish. "Tier UP!" he roared, his own voice much more fitting to the performance.
Karen sheathed her sabers and turned to Harry, grinning with open approval. "Finally! I was starting to think we'd be stuck farming ghouls forever." She'd never given any sign of annoyance. Sometimes Gordon thought she was a better person than he was.
The book contained a single line of text, as Gordon knew it would. It had always struck him as a bit goofy, and he said so.
"Presentation is important," Harry insisted, closing the tome with a thunk. "Back me up on this, Karen."
Karen turned her gaze from Harry to Gordon, her eyes lingering as they slowly traveled across his character's form. "I think he's got that covered," she said, almost purring. "He looks fine to me."
"Don't feed the shippers," Gordon said tiredly, holstering his pistols.
> Randoon_the_Wizard: I've got money on Marsgirl, just saying. Don't hurt me, Gordon.
Gordon saw the comment and pinched the bridge of his nose in the real world. "Well," he said, forcing a grin back on for the camera. "At least the long grind is over."
He'd felt the rut setting in for weeks—project Gallant hadn't been intended to sidetrack the whole stream like this. He'd finally be able to go back to more group-oriented content.
Nobody had really complained, but he'd been feeling a bit selfish.
"It's been a slog," Harry admitted, "But hey, worth it."
He scrambled to his feet, brushing off imaginary dust. "I've got dibs on the legendary."
"We're your friends," Gordon said, his voice dry. "We're not going to rob you." The rule for a Delve was that the team that entered had to clear it in one go, and that the leveling character was required to open the door. If he died, someone else would claim his legendary item. Could.
"So what do you guys think?" Harry asked, already scrolling through his new perk list. "Titan's Growth? I could be a dozen feet tall twice a day." Gordon knew he was fully aware of their expectations for him, but if he wanted to play for the stream. . . fine. Every viewer was a fraction of a dollar in Gordon's pocket, another inch closer to Mars.
"Antimagic Mind," Karen warned, her voice channeling Claire's icy menace. "Or I'll leave you there next time."
"We'll," Gordon corrected, holstering his pistols. "We'll leave you there."
Harry had fallen prey to the sirens EVERY SINGLE TIME they'd tried to approach the far lands gate. No willpower at all. It was embarrassing to watch your tank turn and walk mindlessly off a cliff, and worse to have to retrieve his gear afterward. Gordon hadn't wanted to learn that to retrieve plate armor from an underwater corpse without drowning sometimes required breaking its bones.
"Tough crowd," Harry complained, but there wasn't any heat in it.
Gordon clapped a hand on Harry's shoulder, a genuine grin finally breaking through. "Now we delve."
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Excitement at the impending Delve notwithstanding, Gordon was still too tired to keep playing. After settling on the timing of their next session and muttering a quick goodbye to the stream, he logged out. The world of Ghostlands dissolved into darkness, replaced by the dim glow of his bedroom.
He peeled himself out of the VR suit, the flexible fabric clinging to his sweat-damp skin. Karen was still in session nearby, her figure hunched and focused, the faint sounds of her battle filtering out through her headset. She'd probably keep going for another few hours. He waved his hand in front of her face a couple of times, without reaction. Man, he needed sleep. Secure in the knowledge that she couldn't see him, he scurried to the bathroom, discarding articles of clothing as he went. His Roomba wouldn't thank him for it, but he'd pick them up later.
The shower was warm, and his eyelids were heavy as he dried himself off, the menthol-coolness of his body wash relaxing tense, knotted muscles. He flopped onto his bed, sinking into the rumpled cotton sheets. The cool fabric brushed his skin, and he exhaled deeply, his body sagging as the tension drained away. Within moments, he was gone.
Unnoticed on his wrist, his portable device pulsed softly. A single message blinked on the screen, the icon a tiny mail envelope next to the name: Marie.