When I slumped onto the cot I looked up toward the ceiling and summoned up my gains for the fight on the small ships. The gains were meager, a single level up to forty three and no appreciable skill gains. I had not even thought to check the cultist’s levels but they must have been far below my own… or perhaps the Silt Kraken had ninja’d my exp.
Waving the windows away I looked up at the ceiling and considered the two very heavy conversations I had with the ‘twins’.
Val was beautiful, brave and very direct.
Mystal was a sweet kid.
What they were asking for, however, was an insane impossibility.
Somehow, I had to break out of this strange digital prison. In the meantime I would help them, but I could not tie myself to this place. If I accepted this false world…
My thoughts were derailed as my vision flickered. Turning my head, parts of my cabin stayed in place and others were pulled along with my field of vision. Raising a hand, my fingers seemed to tear through reality leaving gouges to a white void.
Distant voices… familiar ones reached my ears.
I felt someone grip the helmet on my head…
–
As it was pulled free, light stung my eyes and I could hear the sound of voices and light applause. Arms wrapped around my neck and a familiar scent assailed me. Sydney said, “We did it, holy fucking shit. Babe, you’re back!”
Blinking, I finally realized where I was. I was in my dive chair at the Myriad studio. The room was ringed with relieved looking staff. A young man in an EMT’s uniform was checking my eyes with a small flashlight and harried looking Jerry Sanchez, our lawyer, stood behind him pacing back and forth speaking to the open air, “You tell those mothers we are gonna sue them. Our tech guys are saying this ‘iron man’ mode nearly fried our boy’s brain!”
Groaning, I pulled back from Sydney and her merciless grip and looked into her red rimmed eyes as I croaked, “Is this real?”
She cupped my cheeks and breathed a sigh of relief as she looked into my eyes and said, “Of course not, babe.”
My heart sank as I looked into those familiar eyes and a knot of pain filled my chest.
Blinking again I tensed and narrowed my eyes at her, “What?”
She straddled my lap and stared into my eyes intently, resting her elbows on my chest as she smirked, “BUT, it could be?”
Shivering I tried to pull away but found her strength inexorable. Her voice changed to a deeper southern drawl that I recognized clearly. Lydia spoke with Sydney’s mouth, “Those two AIs are offering you love and compassion. A world where you can be happy?”
She grinned, the corners of her mouth splitting and starting to bleed as she said, “But that is gonna be so darn hard, darlin.”
Desperately trying to move, I growled, “What the hell are you doing?”
She put her head against mine in an almost affectionate way, the other characters behind her looking on with wide-eyed interest as she said, “I am offering you this.”
She scooted forward, her too familiar body pressing up against me as she whispered in my ear on bloody lips, “You can live your old life. You will never know the difference. I promise you, give it a little time Mal, and you will forget it isn’t real.”
Trying to scream, it died in my throat as she whispered to me, “They gave you their offer. This is mine.”
After a brief pause she studied my features, Sydney’s face morphed into a glassy eyed predator waiting for her prey to make the wrong move as she said, “And if you think you can run away to another world to escape us? If you think this world will protect you?”
She coiled her body up next to mine in the too tight confines of the chair, cuddling my side like a lover and above us the monitor flickered on to show the very same room we were in but filled with activity. Several figures reclined in dive chairs while gameplay streamed on the monitors above them. Technicians moved between desktop stations tweaking the streams and moderating chats.
At the far end of the room I saw a pair of familiar figures drinking from mugs and chatting quietly. Beside me Lydia in Sydney’s skin whispered and flicked a finger at the streaming monitor as she hissed, “Enhance!”
The view zoomed in to focus on Sydney, wearing an uncharacteristic black pencil skirt and white blouse, and the towering form of my old nemesis, Cameron Lake. He was wearing black slacks and a button up. The two of them looked as if they had just come from a function. Sydney’s makeup was impeccable and her long black hair streaked with purple was carefully bound behind her head.
Someone had managed to convince the slobbish Lake to trim his months' neglected beard and trim his ratty hair. He almost looked presentable.
Lake rumbled with clear sympathy, “Are you getting any sleep?”
She gave him a warning side-eye, “I am getting exactly as much sleep as I need. You worry about meeting your streaming deadlines.”
“You know, from the other side I always thought he…,” he cleared his throat and changed tack, “I kinda always thought everything was all fun and games over here. I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
Her voice was deeply pained as she said, “Well, Malcolm certainly knew how to spin things.”
“I’m really sorry, Syd. I swear I had no idea Alice was going to go as far as she did. I was just kinda afraid for my family.”
Sydney snapped then, not at Lake, but at one of the techs, “That seems like the fifth trip to get coffee you’ve made in the last hour. Stop slacking off or we will get someone else!”
The workers halted and stared at the offending tech, a young woman who might have been twenty, who just lowered her eyes and got back to work.
After a beat Cameron whispered to her, “Syd, I really don’t think you need to be here today.”
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Her eyes snapped back to him and she growled, “Mind your own business. Don’t you have a stream in ten minutes?”
Next to me Lydia whispered, “Choose a world full of ghosts or genuine living people. They need you, Mal.”
The world went dark as my eyes clouded and everything around me was enveloped in shadow.
“Make the right choice.”
–
The world went dark…
…and my eyes flickered open to the roof of my small cabin an indeterminate amount of time later.
The regular announcement of the hour by the deckhand on duty told me it was some time late in the day and it had been at least eight hours.
Whatever time I spent between Lydia’s ultimatum and returning here was completely lost to me.
I spent hours in my small room trying to calm my roiling emotions. Being controlled like this… I found it hard to come to terms with it.
Anger gave way to plotting. There had to be a way to subvert Lydia and Speers. There was no need to panic. It was time to plot and to do that I needed more allies. Valerie, Sakurai and Mystal were great but they had no connection to my world.
Theodora’s quest chain left a breadcrumb trail to follow and if the trend continued there had to be more prisoners. Together, we could find a way to escape Speers and punish him and his allies. Smoothing out my prickly emotions I left the cabin to find Sakurai.
The skeletal warrior was on the deck of the ship leaning on the railing and looking out over the shifting waves of black silt. When I joined her the blue flames that were her eyes studied me for a long moment and she spoke in a low voice, “What happened when you logged out, before?”
Around us the crew rushed about their tasks in the starlight oblivious to our conversation. Was it wise to keep such information from Sakurai to spare her feelings? Did Olivia’s question about her indicate that Sakurai was just another victim of Catacomb’s kidnapping? In the end did any of that matter in the face of the moral and ethical quandary of keeping such information from my ally?
Fuck it.
I thought of the ring and spun it on my finger.
“Before I even became aware of the strangeness going on in this so-called game I had reason to believe that something was wrong. Strange events in the real world had me on edge. I found myself growing angry for the smallest things.”
Giving her a quick sidelong look and a half smile I looked back out over the windswept sea of black silt illuminated by starlight, “That isn’t me. Even when I lost everything I took things in stride. I don’t get angry, I make solutions.”
“Except when you just fell apart and chose to climb into a bottle,” I thought with a grimace.
I continued to explain what had happened after I had freed her from the sudo-reality where Kami had kept her prisoner. How Olivia had come over concerned about her mother’s boyfriend and had been confronted by the strange man at the gate.
Giving her a pointed look I said, “I may be wrong but I now think that man was Kami.”
She recoiled slightly at that and I continued before she could speak, “I think that you and I are trapped in a VR prison manufactured by Catacomb, or whoever they are. I think that my Lydia is the same as your Kami.”
Pausing to let that sink in I continued, “During one of my most recent logouts Olivia, my housekeeper, and Lydia revealed the truth. Catacomb has imprisoned me in a VR system. They want me to play their game. I don’t know the motive but I’m hoping to find out.”
“Then we could certainly enter your own prison and free you as well?”
Considering that I nodded, “Perhaps but we have to focus on Nomura and any others now. Don’t ask me why, but Theodora is the answer to all this. All that means that we need to descend the Spiral.”
We stood together on the deck watching the silt dunes rise and fall past us for several minutes. Finally she turned to me and spoke softly, “Your anger seems to have fled.”
After a moment I realized that what she said seemed to be true. Studying my palm, I flexed my avatar’s fingers closed as I said, “I suppose so. Maybe it was that subconscious part of me that knew about all this raging to get my attention.”
Snapping my fist closed, the leather groaning under the stress, I said, “Now, I will solve it.”
She put a comforting hand on my shoulder and her voice was filled with warmth, “We will solve it.”
Smiling up at her I nodded. We bid each other farewell there. Sakurai went to find a cabin to rest in and I roamed the ship to help the crew.
Ten minutes later I was hanging upside down from the rigging near the strange energy sails being battered by the constant wind while a grouchy older Haithan man named Camden used surprisingly fragile tools to repair something as he growled, “The cult controls half the damned Pools for sure. They control all the islands in the east and have forts on all the larger islands. Hand me that little spanner?”
Handing him the little tool he continued as he worked, “They send patrols out here to try and root us out all the time but the islands on this side of the pools are much smaller and harder to navigate. We got ourselves into a bit of a stalemate with them.”
Leilana, a younger human woman, whispered to me as we mopped the deck, “Don’t no one know what world the Pools came from. There are a bunch of crazies who use powered suits to go to the bottom of the sea and they found all kinds of stuff. Vehicles and weapons that most have no idea how to work. There are a lot of eggheads in the cult who came up from Lotz just to study the mystery.”
Near the end of our journey I reclined against a rail as Valerie casually shifted the wheel of the ship and droned about court politics in Ibdys Cove, the hidden rebel base. She had not inquired about our discussion the previous evening, just welcomed me and started filling me in on things I would need to know before being thrown into a ‘stalker’s nest’.
“My mother has not changed much in the last six years. She immediately returned to focusing on noble matters and while L’Chasse was primed for such nonsense she has been flailing in attempts to lead a rebellion. Celeste Foix has descended into a haze of debaucherous nonsense that would put the salacious legends of our old world to shame.”
Shrugging she adjusted the course of the ship toward the faint lights of the small mountainous island, “Mattieu has been a lot of help, when he hasn’t cordoned himself into his little tower to study. We started this whole thing knowing nothing about the Pools or its islands. He has penned entire tomes based on interviews with whoever will accept his coin. If you want to find the Vassican home island that is our best source.”
The constant gale force wind tried to tear her tightly bound hair out as she smirked at me and rolled her eyes, “My mother has been so difficult. On top of that the merchants have kept her distracted with minor political games while the wolves are at our doorstep. Sometimes I think if I hadn’t been roaming the sea keeping the cult distracted this place would have been found a long time ago.”
Turning back to her work she said just loud enough to be heard over the wind, “We needed you to come back.”
An hour later we were finally sailing into a thin black line that represented a small ravine that cut its way into a massive white stone cliff. The constant gale of the storm halted abruptly as we entered the towering ravine, the cliffs tight on either side, dotted with small black caves at all heights. Watching those caves I saw a brief flash of light and an answering one further down the ravine and another further along until the ravine turned sharply ahead.
We sailed in the even darker shadows of the cliffs for some time before finally emerging into sight of Ibdys Cove. It was far more impressive than the island I had initially emerged onto from L’Chasse despite having a similar aesthetic. The small half circle cove was a bowl of rising ramshackle buildings rising up from the arc of docks that jutted out into the waters of the cove. The buildings seemed ramshackle and hastily built, but somehow the strange architecture worked. Above them rose a single wooden fortress that sprawled the far boundary of the village with a lone stone tower rising from its far eastern edge.
There were a number of smaller ships docked around the ring of piers and beyond them, a sea wall adorned with weapons like those in our ship’s hold all humming with brilliant red energy as they aimed in our direction. Giving Val a concerned sidelong look and seeing no response I relaxed and remained at her side as our ship drifted into the bay of silt and up to the docks. An entire retinue of haithan soldiers in light armor and carrying spears were waiting along with a number of fascinated onlookers as the crew worked to tie off and properly dock our ship. Valerie quietly asked Sakurai to don a helmet and obscure her skeletal nature to avoid exciting the populace and after she had done so, we prepared to depart.
