The Lag (The Game Master: Book #1) (3 page)

Game mode alert!

You can choose one of the two following game modes:

IMITATION MODE

FULL IMMERSION MODE

(More Information)

Warning!

Once the game is running, you won't be able to change the game mode!

The two game mode inscriptions blinked, inviting the player to click them. Attila pressed on
More Information
. A window popped up informing him that
All sensory suit users have the choice of two basic Gryad game modes
. It went on to tell him that Imitation Mode came with a large number of prompts while preserving all the usual stat bars and menus; the world's map was visible in the right upper corner of the player's field of vision. Basically, it preserved all the usual bells and whistles of a standard computer game.

The Full Immersion mode, however, had none of the traditional interface. As the Information writers put it, this mode
"switched the gaming experience to the domain of intuitive logic"
. The idea was, the player's very own body began to affect the gameplay. Which was only logical because of all the tiny reactions of his reflexes, muscle memory and other psychosomatic stuff.

Had he wanted to use Imitation, he wouldn't have bought the suit to begin with. No. Only full immersion. He needed to walk again, otherwise he wouldn't have splurged all his money on the suit.

Attila clicked on the second button. It went out.

What's New. | Forums | Support | Workshop | Settings

No, not that.

Options | Profile | Last Modified | The Map

He opened the map and focused on the Frontier Valley icon to click it.

Once again the back of his head tingled as if stroked by a feather. The world around him blinked and came back, slowly revealing the insides of a log cabin. Its narrow door stood open; behind it he could see a stone landing and the ruins of a castle wall.

The log cabin was a portal station. The portal's blue circle glowed in the center of its only room. A column of spark-speckled blue light reached out of it toward the low roof, disgorging Attila.

He walked out of the cabin and took in his bearings. A translucent diamond-shaped blue sign hovered in the air above the roof, sporting the holographic image of a spiral topped with a skyward-pointing arrow: the portal icon familiar to every player.

Attila looked up at the grim skies of the Dead Canyon and rearranged the round shield on his elbow, then ran his hand along his sheathed sword.

His heart missed a beat. Disbelieving, Attila took another step. And yet another. His heart pounded now. He beamed, his face lighting up with a wide happy smile.

He could walk. He really could walk!

Chapter Two

H
is head spun. Attila staggered but kept his balance. He could walk! Okay, let's try it again.

He took another step. And again, trying to relax and breathe in synch. That was it. He was fine. He wasn't wheelchair-bound anymore. He wasn't a cripple. His legs were there: strong and healthy, his amblers, his supports, his very own limbs! He could will them to move! It wasn't his cartoon character on screen but he himself, Ivan Attila, happily sauntering around!

Attila ran his hands down his thighs, then did a few sit-ups. He laughed. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been this happy.

The wind rippled the grass around the portal station; it ruffled the branches of the towering poplars whose tops pierced the clouds. The sun came out, revealing patches of bright blue amid the menacing clouds and spotting the valley below with gold. Then the clouds closed in, submerging the world below in a chilly gloom.

Shaking his head, Attila took in the cool air. So this was the Dead Canyon. The land of sorcerers and necromancers, of witches and the undead, vagabond Pioneers and Royal legionnaires, peddlers and Dark Knights; of humans, dwarves and Elves as well as monsters of every possible caliber.

Right. Time to turn to business. No matter how good he felt, he had a few debts to pay. Which meant he had to get the God's Eye off his hands and pretty quickly, too.

He shifted his shield from his arm to his back. Off we go, then! All the way to the Unicorn Tavern, chop chop!

Yeah right, dream on. Immediately he noticed a Rot glowing in front of the castle wall. This was one hell of an acid-like aberration that could eat right through you down to the bone. Next to it lurked an almost indistinguishable Butcher, betrayed only by a slight quivering of the fabric of reality by one of the poplar's roots. This was something much worse: a gravitational aberration that could, if you weren't careful, suck you in and grind you into bone dust, then spew you out scattering your powdered remains to the wind. In daytime you might just about notice it if you were lucky but at night it was virtually invisible.

Aberrations were localized phenomena of magic nature that had been discovered at the Dead Canyon after the first Magic Storm. Although dangerous, they could generate artifacts of unique and useful properties. This generated a considerable infusion into Gryad's economy as its artifact market was estimated at several million dollars.

The area bordering on the Dead Canyon was known as the Frontier Valley and the ruins of a castle and the wall around it, the Fortress. It used to be controlled by the Awesome clan but recently they'd been driven out. Afterward, the area had been trampled by one of the occasional monster stampedes. These days it was a quiet location, neutral and sparsely populated.

Lots of things could change in a game. Players came and went; the internal balance of power could shift and so could the map of aberrations. Some things, though, remained the same. Like the Unicorn Tavern, always open in the Fortress donjon: a place to stretch your legs after a raid and to sell or swap your findings.

Attila gave the aberrations a wide berth. He climbed through a breach in the wall and walked past a couple of ruins overgrown with moss. The donjon rose before him. He slapped his belt bag where he kept God's Eye and hurried on, not forgetting to watch where he was going. The Dead Canyon was one dangerous place. If he was killed now, the cheat would probably stay on his corpse. Which meant he'd have to retrace his tracks from the portal station, risking being late for his RV and — much more importantly — risking someone else picking God's Eye up from his dead body.

The tall angular donjon made of large slabs of stone towered before him. A squawk came from above. Mechanically Attila reached for his sword, then swore under his breath. This was Bestia, a harpy that lived alone in her nest on top of the donjon. She was as mad as a bat. Harpies were, normally, but this one had a couple of screws seriously loose. Every time someone approached the center of the fortress she would scream her head off warning the tavern's guards about a new visitor and showering him with her fossilized feces. Although she'd never actually hit anyone with it.

The breach in the donjon wall faced north, offering access to the tavern. Attila was approaching it from the west. Instead of entering the building, he stole a look around and turned toward a tall copse of bushes. He climbed inside and crouched on the ground. Then he opened the Book and reached for the God's Eye in his belt bag.

No player was ever without his Book. You couldn't lose, sell, steal or give it away. The Book's appearance differed depending on your level. At first it was little more than a miserable-looking journal bound in cheap leather, but as you progressed through levels, it transformed into a precious manuscript inlaid with precious gems. You could leaf through it; alternatively, you could transfer your interface onto its cover. As a level 29 Ranger, Attila owned a beautiful Book bound in embossed morocco leather and topped with a fancy frame surrounding the magic screen. Instead of all the buttons and the joy stick he had four oblong crystals, one in each corner of the Book: white, blue, green and black. You could press them, sinking them into the soft leather, and also turn them knob-like... overall, this was an excellent thing available to everyone level 20 and above. It had cost Attila two hundred gold but it was worth every penny.

He pressed the white crystal, then turned the green one. The bag on his belt twitched. The silver disk of God's Eye soared into the sky, clicking; it splayed its arms out, unfolding into a steel six-pointed star. An open eye glowed in its center, its black pupil floating in a hemispherical pool of mercury. Its arms dripped magical runes that slowly melted in the air.

The artifact stopped about fifty feet above the ground. Attila pressed the white crystal slightly, activating its stealth mode. The star streamed charges of lightning, dematerializing. It wasn't a hundred percent invisible but if you didn't know it was there you'd be hard pressed to find it.

He reached into the bag again, producing his pride and joy: a pair of large copper goggles complete with a leather strap. Attila had modeled them after the Goggles of Underground Gloom which he'd bought from a dwarf player who'd managed to come back from the Steam Tunnels alive and in one piece. The goggles allowed you to move in the dark dungeon without a torch or other source of light. But these ones, modified by Attila, also served a new purpose.

Attila put the goggles on and secured the strap around his head. He turned the black crystal on the book cover. A small round window appeared in the goggles' left lens. He turned the blue crystal slightly and the Eye in the sky rotated, following its movement.

The little round lens blinked. Overlapping the view around, it offered a bird's eye picture of the area. Bestia soared over the donjon, oblivious to God's Eye watching her. Ruins bared their grinning stumps of walls from the sea of greenery. Slowly God's Eye began to rotate, offering a panoramic view.

So, what did we have here? The Eye offered a view of the donjon's flat roof complete with Bestia's nest made of a paraphernalia of twigs, bones and withered pelts of small forest creatures. Then she was back, landing and taking her place in the nest. Harpies were sharp-fanged creatures dressed in scruffy tunics made of animal pelts. They had female bodies, emaciated arms and a pair of scraggly skeletal wings on their backs. Harpies were known for their nasty and quarrelsome character, aggressive with newbs and cowardly with established gamers.

Bestia crouched in her nest and froze, staring into space. Attila couldn't see her face from above but he could well imagine it, spiteful and dumb. Despite the fact that harpies walked around half-naked, they were about as sexy as a geriatric frog.

He motioned the Eye further on and squinted, focusing on a hole in the wall overgrown with brambles. This was the entrance to the Tavern.

A man clambered out and stood up, looking about himself. He wore a checkered bandana, a gray and green hunter's jacket and a tartan kilt. A Highlander, oh right.

The man carried a leather backpack. In one hand he held a short spear. And if Attila lowered the Eye slightly and looked at him from a different angle... oh, yes. Now he could see the man's short dark beard and his bushy eyebrows. His powerful legs were stuck into a pair of fur boots.

The Highlander shrugged and began forcing his way through the bushes. Luckily, he seemed to be heading in the opposite direction from the portal station. Attila wasn't exactly looking forward to meeting the guy face to face.

In any case, it looked like the Eye was working. True, it wasn't exactly legal. It could easily get him collared by the
legionnaires
: the players hired by the Admins to perform police functions. But now the only thing left was to get paid for it.

Attila stood up. The whole transaction was a piece of cake. He had the goods; his customer was now waiting for him in the tavern, prepared to part with a hefty sum of money. So why did he have this bad feeling? He seemed to sense someone's stare focused on his back.

Attila changed the Eye's settings so that it hovered nearby the donjon, rotating slowly. The image in his goggles and on the cover of the Book also began to rotate. Good. Let it stay there and scan the area. This wasn't some Mickey Mouse business. Attila was playing big time. Security was key.

He shut down the Eye view and began walking around the donjon, keeping an eye on the image in his goggles. Immediately he stumbled into some gelatinous goo. The fabric of reality around him thickened, rippled with interference. Then it all ended. An aberration? There was no record of anyone encountering them so close to the tavern. A glitch? Most likely. Never mind. It didn't seem to have affected anything. Time to move on.

He climbed through the narrow hole and found himself in a room with a door watched by two NPC guards. A torch burned brightly. One of the guards was sitting on an upended bucket; the other was leaning against the wall. Whoever entered the room, their modus operandi didn't change: the one on the bucket raised his loaded crossbow, aiming it at the guest, while the other laid his hand on his broadsword and demanded,

"Who the hell are you? What's your business?"

"Need a drink," Attila dropped as he walked through the door.

"Leave your weapons over there!" the guard barked at his back.

Attila went down a staircase which was lit by another torch stuck into an enormous skull that sat on one of the steps. Below, a copper-lined door led into the tavern. Joel the guard stirred next to the shelves laden with various weapons. He was an NPC too.

"Lay your weapons onto the shelf!" he commanded.

You couldn't enter the tavern while carrying weapons in any shape or form. The door just wouldn't open. Every game had to have safe locations like this.

Attila ran a nonchalant hand across his chest, removing his sword and the shield, then unbuckled his knife and laid it onto the shelf. Joel watched over him, playing with his broadsword. The only thing Attila had kept was a large iron medallion on his neck in the shape of a two-pronged fork. Attila had been allowed through while carrying it hundreds of times before; the game security invariably failed to detect it. And still he breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened before him.

The tavern was lit by oil lamps hanging from hooks. Two patrons were engrossed in a game of cards at the nearest table; they turned their heads for a look and immediately lost all interest in him. A gaunt stooping Elf nursed his mug on a bar stool; he looked around, saw him and reached for his backpack lying on the spare stool next to him, moving it onto his lap.

Two more men were having dinner at the other end of the room next to the door that led to the castle's dungeons. The one that was facing him raised his head, meeting Attila's stare; then he looked back down at his plateful of meat stew. His friend kept rattling his spoon against his own bowl gulping his food down greedily, his ears moving with the effort.

Attila nodded to the landlord behind the bar. His name was Barb — and he was actually a unicorn. Or rather, an animal humanoid. His body was perfectly human, ending in a horse-like neck and head topped with a long horn. A long time ago, when Attila had still been learning the local lay of the land, someone had told him Barb's story. His name was indeed Barb: a seedy vendor dealing in some questionable goods who one day had the misfortune to rip off a Barbarian Shaman by selling him some run-of-the mill deer horns in place of the unique Unicorn horns famous for their magic properties. The shaman — who happened to be a worshipper of the Beast God — saw right through his little scheme and cursed the landlord, turning him into his current shape. After that, no one wanted to deal with him so he opened the tavern instead.

Upon seeing Attila, the landlord shook his mane and neighed curtly, motioning him to enter. Attila found it funny that he could both speak and neigh like a proper unicorn.

Finally Attila saw his customer.

A large bearded half-orc clad in a shiny bulbous cuirass (he'd identified himself as Beast at their initial RV) was sitting at a table not far from the bar. In front of him lay his helmet adorned with a picture of a fanged orc skull and crossbones. It was tacky as hell but it did catch your eye. An enormous mace lay on the table next to it.

The half-orc raised his huge loglike arm, motioning Attila to approach. He bared his yellow fangs in a grin, then raised his beer mug by way of greeting him.