Sorcerer's Quest Read online

  Sorcerer’s Quest

  L.E. Carter

  Copyright © 2018 L.E. Carter

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1: The Glitch

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part 2: The Quest

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Part 1:

  The Glitch

  Chapter One

  Jane drove home on her small motorcycle from work to her shelter. The motorcycle ran all but silent through the empty roads. She hardly noticed her surroundings. The barren landscape where only scarce weeds grew was all too familiar. Soon her shelter came into view, tucked away alone amid some rocks. It was small, a single story building that looked just like a giant rectangular box, easily missed unless you knew where to look. It was made of metal, which had dulled in the rough environment, but never rusted. The only features were on the roof: a couple satellite dishes and a black strip that looked like a strange solar panel. She pulled her bike into the the large entrance built into one end and let the door close behind her. When it sealed, she started the decontamination cycle for the airlock, stripping harsh contaminants from her environmental suit and bike. As she waited she stored her bike next to one wall and walked to the hatch leading in, favoring her right leg as she moved. Once the cycle finished, she entered her shelter, removed her suit, and hung it up.

  Her short brown hair fell to her shoulders. She was average looking. The kind of person no one would look at twice in a crowd. She was on the short side, but barely. The only thing noticeable about her was her limp. The result of an accident years ago. Even with the marvels of modern medicine she would always have it.

  Her shelter had all she needed to live. A small table sat near the airlock, which was by the sink and food synthesization station. On the far side of the shelter was a bed and the bathroom. Both the sink and bathroom tied into the water reclamation unit, and the air was regulated and filtered by the shelter’s climate control system. But in the middle of the room was the real prize: a pod. It was a device that looked like a narrow bed with a glass canopy slid over it. It was all white, and sat in the center of the shelter, almost like a shrine.

  Part of her wanted to hop into the pod right now, but she knew she ought to check her diagnostics first. If there had been a large malfunction while she had been working, she would have entered her shelter to the sounds of sirens and the sight of flashing lights. She would have resupplied her suit and wore it until the malfunction was fixed. But small malfunctions were only reported to the diagnostics panel. And those lead to larger ones. Nipping those early made life easier. She limped over to the panel and brought up the report for the day. The display showed everything was in the green. She checked it over twice, just to make sure the system hadn’t missed anything. Once she was satisfied, she nodded and hurried over to the food dispenser and got herself a little to eat. She ate it fast, barely chewing it or tasting it. The tray went back into the machine for cleaning.

  She moved over to the pod finally and climbed in. Even those few minutes felt long. In the harsh conditions of the world the one thing everyone had access to was a pod. The system was built into every shelter. Multiple pods could be placed in a shelter with multiple inhabitants, but Jane lived alone. The pods were efficient on electricity and, since no one wanted to go outside anymore except when work required it, they were the ubiquitous entertainment of choice.

  She laid down and slid the canopy shut. Tonight, like most nights, she was going to play. There was only one game to play: Numinos. The pod allowed perfect virtual reality, and Numinos took full advantage of it. Everyone played it in some respect or another. And the more one could afford the more one could do. Even those who decided not to log in to one of the many game worlds still watched player feeds or made bets on races or competitions in it.

  But, in many ways, Numinos was more than just one game. It had many game worlds, with different themes, but all ran by the same system. The worlds were as complex as one could imagine. Choices were nearly limitless within its programing, and the Artificial Intelligence was so deep that players couldn’t always distinguish between players and computer controlled characters.

  With the canopy shut, she logged in. The process felt like going to sleep and waking up in a new body. Jane experienced the familiar change wash over her, and she was suddenly taller and more muscular, wearing a different set of clothes. The most common played world was Arantor, the fantasy world of Numinos. It was also the cheapest per hour, and so the one she chose to play. It had the typical fantasy gaming classes, although most were truly just archetypes, a starting point for a class system which allowed for plenty of mixing and matching of abilities. No two players had to play alike. Jane’s character archetype was currently the warrior, a protector of those she journeyed with and a fighter against those who would choose to do harm to others.

  At least in theory that’s what a warrior could do. In actuality Jane had a problem. Numinos was very complex and, even though she had played it for years, there was something about it she could never quite get right. The power of a player’s character was based on many factors: character level, the quality of a character’s items and armor, how well the player skilled up certain abilities, their reputation with the many in-game factions and, most importantly, an attribute called Alignment—not good or evil alignment, or lawful or chaotic or anything like that. In fact, despite being the most influential stat for a character, in many ways it was a mystery. Numinos game designers never talked about it or answered questions about how it worked or even why it was included in the game.

  And it was always with you. While certain events could encourage character prestige or change class, and other events could adjust which items performed better than others, no change ever reset a player’s Alignment.

  She woke up in a small room. It was on the second floor of a tavern. She couldn’t afford personalized in-game housing, and tavern fees for their smallest rooms were so low that it wasn’t really a bother. The room hardly had space to move. It was just big enough for the straw pallet and a place to stand next to it. She stood up and put on her plate armor. Armor wasn’t the most comfortable to sleep in, but the quickswap function let her change back into it in a moment. Her body was different here than in the real world, but she was used to her avatar’s body, and mentally slid into it easily. It felt just as real to her as her body laying in the shelter. She flexed her hands without thinking, feeling the differences between this and her real body. With this body, Jane felt like she could take on the world.

  Before heading out of her room, she checked her menus to see if any messages came in. There was nothing. She wasn’t too surprised. She often was the first of her friends to l
og in. At the bottom of her status menu she couldn’t help but see her Alignment number today.

  Alignment wasn’t fixed. It was always in flux. It went up or down based on choices—everything from what quests the player decided to do, what type of items they decided to wear, what specializations they cobbled together, or even their appearance. But it was different for each person. What helped one player’s Alignment could harm another’s. Everyone had to make their own choices and try for the best.

  Jane’s Alignment was nineteen-point-three-seven percent. It always hovered around twenty percent. It had been lower before, and it still dipped sometimes, but never went much higher. She had tried everything and she had played the game for years, ever since her parents had allowed her to as a child. They had been more interested in the chat rooms and watching others play than actually playing with their daughter, so she had to figure it out herself. She had loved Arantor from her first log in, but soon realized how integral Alignment was, and how low hers was.

  Long ago, she had read up on what to do to try raising it, but nothing worked. She had tried combination after combination of classes and specializations to see if any helped. She had even spent an entire year analyzing every quest and quest branch before choosing which ones to take and complete, studied every armor piece before deciding to use it or get rid of it and was constantly altering her appearance, but she still ended that year no better than she was before. She knew that most players below her in Alignment just didn’t care about the game—and even many above her, too. She had tried everything, just to no success.

  She had played every class she had access to. As any kind of healer she could hardly keep her party alive. As a rogue or thief she was spotted before she could sneak close enough to disrupt the enemy without dying herself, and as a ranged spell caster she hardly did any damage. Nothing let her be the in-game adventurer she wanted to be. Her friends never said anything about it, but she knew her low Alignment forced them to work harder with her around.

  The warrior had been the best of the worst. Before trying it, her Alignment had been closer to fifteen percent. It was only after switching to the warrior that her Alignment rose to near its current position. It still wasn’t much though. Most creatures in the game viewed her as no threat to them and would ignore her. That would normally be fine, except it still happened even when she tried tanking for her party. And when she wasn’t tanking, she still dealt so little damage to the creatures that she couldn’t kill or slow them down before they reached other members of her party.

  But despite all that, she couldn’t deny that Arantor was still fun. Even if after every dungeon run or group quest Jane felt gimped she would always come back for more. Each time she always hoped that maybe her next quest would be the one to give her Alignment a bump, and maybe, just maybe it would give her the clue to how Alignment worked and how she could work on raising it higher. Perhaps even tonight she would stumble across that clue.

  She closed her menus and exited her room. She made her way down a long hallway, walking with full, uninterrupted strides. She smiled. Here her legs worked just fine. She could forget about her problems in the real world. Even the hallway was full of so many doors that it could only exist in a game world. The doors were almost one next to each other, but even the smallest room in the inn was wide enough it should block the doors on either side. It was a common sight, but one that reminded her that what was possible here was far more than what could be done in the real world. Certain buildings could defy the laws of three dimensional space in Arantor, but only a few—like taverns, inns, and banks—to prevent players from abusing it too much. Reaching the end of the hallway, she took the stairs down to the common room where players and NPCs—the nonplayer characters that were controlled by the computer—were rustling about. The room was large enough to have two different hearths, both lit with fires. Some players were telling stories by the hearths, others planning their adventures for the night. None of them paid Jane any mind as she entered. She took an empty table and ordered a beer. A serving girl came by and delivered it with a smile.

  Looking up at the girl, Jane tried not to be envious. The girl was attractive, even by game standards. Jane’s face and short dark hair seemed rough in comparison. Appearances were sculpted by the players and had so many settings that it was hard to get features that looked both good and natural. Some players who were experts at it made good gold selling their services to others. Jane no longer bothered to try tried to look attractive, she was more interested in a look that raised her alignment, but she doubted she could look half as pretty as this girl even if she tried.

  She sighed, and then pushed those thoughts aside. Jane drank the beer in silence and left. She had somewhere else to be.

  The beer had raised her maximum stamina, at least. Not by much, but a few points. She felt only the smallest of buzzes from the beer. It would pass in a few minutes. She would have to drink more than one for it to last. The pods provided enough neural feedback that everyone could feel what happened to their character in game. There were safeties in place, of course, so nothing too gruesome happened or was too much for someone to handle, but the feedback alone was enough motivation for someone to care about their actions.

  Outside the tavern stood the small town of Carndot, full of little more than the necessary buildings a small hub would need: a blacksmith, a guard house, and a few small buildings holding different quest and profession NPCs. The town was in a low level area, part of Thundershield’s realm, and as such looked like one of dozen such towns like it. It wasn’t a big deal though. The real variety was in player built areas. Guilds and Alliances could build and own towns, even attacking and taking them over from each other, or sacking and destroying them. Many Alliances solely sought to expand their holdings of such things.

  Jane took the short walk to the edge of Carndot, where a grassy field and forest started. She smiled a moment, taking it in. She was used to it, experiencing it almost every day, but it still amazed her. The lush green was a stark contrast to the grey world outside of her shelter. In many ways this made Arantor feel even more genuine. Here was how the world was supposed to be. She could hear the rustle of leaves, the noise of small insects in the grass. She could even smell the freshness of it. So different than even the newly recycled air in her shelter. She walked over to a tree, took off one of her gauntlets, and placed her hand against its trunk. The bark felt rough to her touch. She smiled at the feeling. She had never been close enough to a tree in the real world to touch one, so she couldn’t say for herself if what her hand felt was accurate. She only had an old forum post to go by, written by a botanist, which praised the tree textures—both visual and tactile—for their realism in game.

  She had never known a world with trees besides Arantor. Outside was a wasteland, left by previous generations who strip mined and devoured so much of the planet before mankind learned to rely less on natural resources. Mankind had developed and mass produced small shelters for everyone who survived. Now anyone could survive in a single story, five by eight meter box, with all the energy their dwelling needs to sustain them beamed down by the solar satellites. Building those shelter boxes had stripped the last stability from nature, but it had been doomed to die in any case. Ensuring mankind’s survival had merely hastened it. Efforts to restore the planet to what it had been eventually started but only after a full generation had grown up in the shelters. Jane was among the second generation. The jobs were voluntary, but they had their perks.

  Like earning credit to buy more game time, Jane thought, as she removed her hand from the tree.

  Anyone could play The Game, but the time was limited to just a few hours each day unless the person had a way to buy more. People said that Numinos limited the number of hours to encourage people to work to restoring the real world. Jane wasn’t convinced. After all Numinos had a monopoly on entertainment now. Why would they restore a world that would give them competition? Still she didn’t have any better theories to thro
w out there.

  Job credit could be traded in for other things too, but people spent so much time in the pods that there was no point in spending it on anything but more hours or upgrades in one of Numinos’s worlds. Jane worked her job and bought all the extra hours she could. But it was never as many as she wanted.

  She was still standing by the tree when a notification popped up saying one of her friends had logged on. Finally things could get started. She sent him a message.

  Hey Dave, she whispered. How was work?

  Oh the usual, Dave replied. What’s going on tonight?

  Just waiting for everyone to log in. We’re the first.

  Ok. I’ll teleport to you then.

  A few seconds later Jane heard the soft whoosh of someone teleporting in. She turned to see Dave behind her. He stood there in his plate armor, shining in the afternoon sun. He was a bit taller and bigger than her, but not by much. Her warrior was taller than most girls in game. He had dark hair, cut just long enough to look like it needed a comb. It wouldn’t though. Even if it got messed up, it would return to that state after just a short rest—just one of the many perks of the game world. He had a small green and black cloth hanging on one side of his breastplate. The green made the shape of a dragon. Jane had the same symbol on her armor. It was the livery of their guild. His one handed war hammer sat in a loop on his belt, and even though Jane couldn’t see it, she knew a shield was secured on his back. It was fastened in such a way that he could grab it in a moment.

  Dave also played a protector character, a Paladin, and was much better at it than Jane. His Alignment was in the eighty-eighth percentile. She never held it against Dave, even though he overshadowed her in everything. Their roles overlapped in parties—the smaller groups players could form to work together—but playing as a warrior was still the best way for Jane to help out those around her.