Gamelit Novel 18 (Patreon)

            By the time Mom logged in, Nick had found and looted six more bodies, including a [Petrified Harrier Heart]. He’d also picked up several [Pork Hanks] and [Cow Ribs], along with an entire new class of herbs he’d never paid much attention to. Once the cooking skill hit around 150, it started asking for herbs and spices that could be purchased from vendors, but Nick had hoped he could find some of them wild… and he had. He’d also had a conversation with the AI about the pros and cons of making those herbs seasonal. Nick had been for it: “Lots of people love playing the economic part of the game… you know, the auction house speculation stuff. The first year it’ll be annoying, but by year two enough people will have hoarded herbs that they’ll be available. Just expensive. It’ll be interesting.” He considered, then offered, “You could make them age into ‘dried herbs’ that aren’t as potent if you want to encourage the realtime gathering parts without punishing the people who don’t want to bother. And then there can be a gardening skill that lets you learn to grow some herbs in pots, and then you can have greenhouse tech and magic, and maybe some plants never grow well when domesticated—”

            He’d been pleasantly surprised to be awarded the Gardening skill when carefully uprooting one of the plants. Holding the rootball cupped in his hands, he said, “Seriously? You’re going to run with that?”

            The AI darted in a circle around the leaves, lending them a viridian glow. “The experiment is worth running. If it proves tedious, changes can be made or rolled back.” A pause. “You should be rewarded for the contribution of viable ideas, particularly when they expand the game’s potential userbase outside the projected audience.”

            “I guess I should figure out how to transport this thing without killing it, then. Adventurers don’t sit around at home much. Which reminds me, the player housing in this game always sucked….”

            Bouncing into camp with the plant, Nick said, “Morning, Mom! Can we cook? I brought stuff. Maybe we can turn it into bacon!”

            Hah, he’d surprised her. She did the high eyebrow expression she reserved for trying to be more calm than she actually was and said, “You… want to cook? Aren’t we supposed to do whatever the caravan’s doing?” She looked around. “Wait, why are they dressed like they’re going to war?”

            “You noticed that?” He beamed. “It’s so cool, Mom! The game’s actually evolving! Something’s killing a bunch of animals in the forest and no one knows what. Me included!”

            “Should we be worried?”

            He guffawed. “You’re traveling with a level-capped assassin. Nothing in the Greenweald’s going to scuff my leather.” He kneeled next to her and started bringing out the pieces of meat he’d wrapped in linen bandages, because shoving them in his pack still sticky and floppy had grossed him out. “I’ve got beef and pork! What should we do?”

            His mom was watching the caravan start to amble down the road. “Are you sure we shouldn’t be traveling with them? To be safe?”

            “Totally sure. The game is not going to spawn a high level questline in a low level area. It would be too dangerous for the lowbies. They’d get slaughtered, and no one would have any fun.”

            “What if this new thing is only interested in challenges? You know, like a samurai who only wants to fight other samurai and ignores villagers as unworthy targets?”

            Nick felt his eyebrows climbing and wondered suddenly if it was the same expression she’d just used on him. Did families copy each other’s facial expressions? “Seriously?”

            “I like samurai movies!”

            He laughed. “Okay, maybe that will happen. But I doubt it. So… bacon first, or steak?”

            “Bacon.”

            Cooking in the game was a lot more fun than cooking in reality. Could he actually say that? He’d never tried to cook, other than microwaving stuff or toasting it. Maybe it was as fun as it was in game. Would the motions carry over into the kitchen if he tried them? Frying bacon on a stove should be easier than doing it over a fire, and if it was less fun… didn’t Dad have a grill he never used? Nick tried to imagine himself grilling and grinned. Fish would burst an internal organ laughing. What would Shellie think? Guys cooking—was that cool or tox?

            Mom snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Down here, buster. You don’t want to burn an arm off because you’re not paying attention.”

            Ordinarily the reminder would have irritated him, but for some reason here it was just funny. “I might actually, if I fail my cooking attempt!”

            She pursed her lips. “I have exploded things now and then.”

            “Like what?”

            “Oh, when I was fourteen, I decided to make a baked potato but your grandmother neglected to tell me they needed holes poked in them first. And I seem to recall forgetting an egg I was boiling….”

            “You detonated an egg? Was that messy?”

            “More smelly than messy, but I did have to throw away the pot. There, that’s sizzling nicely. I wish we had potatoes now!”

            “Me too, but I haven’t got any on me. We can pick them up at Donner’s Beck, there’s a vendor there for foodstuffs.” He grinned. “You’ll love the village, Mom. It’s like that Medieval Faire we used to go to before they moved to the other side of the county.”

            She brightened. “That was fun. And your father’s not here, so I don’t have to worry about the washerwomen trying to drag him away!”

            They filled breakfast with memories of the faire, all of them ridiculous, until Nick’s ribs hurt; she let him cook, and he didn’t blow anything up, and when she decided the old bread from his pack was too stale, she cut it, dipped it in pork grease, and toasted it and that was amazing. Breaking camp, they caught up easily with the slower-moving caravan, and Nick caught her licking her fingertips.

            “What?” she said. “I’ve already established I am barbarian pony mom!” She rattled her new necklace of fur and beads. “See? Trophies and everything!”

            “Fair! But if Dad catches you doing that….”

            “He’ll laugh and call me his little berserker.” Her eyes sparkled. “Still, no meal is complete without dessert. I don't suppose this place we're going to has a chocolate seller.”

            “Sadly, no chocolate until we reach EverVigil. We import it from the Tlaloraptor nation on the southern continent they opened in the second expansion.”

            “I’ll pretend like I understood any of that.”

            He laughed. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

            Nick half-hoped there would be some excitement, what with the centaurs gunning for a fight, but nothing interrupted the journey, and maybe that was for the best. The point was to get her to the capital, get his evolved class, maybe see a cut scene or two hinting at the forthcoming theme for the AI-driven expansion… it was mostly accidental that he was enjoying making up Cervinaethi songs and identifying herbs and learning mandolin and, apparently, cooking: his existing cooking skill no longer had a number associated with it, but the status bar had turned an encouraging bright green and now said “improving.”

            He was scrolling through the rest of his character sheet, superimposed in translucent gray over the right side of his vision, when the centaurs started singing a traveling song. Two verses in, his mom started singing the choruses. A memory punched him hard, of warbling along with her in the car on the way to elementary school. She’d sung all the backup singers’ lines, or the harmonies, and let him butcher the melody lines. He hadn’t heard her sing in a long time like that, and until this moment it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d been doing it on purpose… letting him be the star.

            Well, he wasn’t bad at music, and it wasn’t hard to improvise a harmony line, so he did, and surprised a delighted smile out of her, and that… that was how they rolled over the hill, and saw what was left of Donner’s Beck.

***

            Amanda did not have to be a gamer to guess that Nick’s Medieval Faire-like village was not supposed to be a smoldering wreck. “Is this the place, or did they move it? Maybe for that new quest you were talking about?”

            One of the centaurs stepped up alongside them, an arrow sitting on the bow he had pointed at the ground. “A great evil did this.”

            Had she ever seen a look like that on her son’s face? So stern… there was nothing of the boy in it. He reminded her suddenly of his father. “Come on. There might be someone left we can help.”

            Amanda trotted after him, and the stink of ashes made her skin tighten up her shoulders and along her flanks; for once, she didn’t question how the game made that work in her brain. She was too unnerved by the smoke still rising from the destroyed buildings. Some of them had survived enough of their fires to still have a wall, or part of two leftover… but most of them were grimy heaps with tumbled chimneys spilling stones across the ground. There were no bodies—thank God. The sight was bad enough without them.

            Nick had come to a halt at what looked like a large stump in the middle of what must have been the village square. When he looked up, his eyes were glassy and his face thunderous. “They cut down Daisy’s oak. Not just set it on fire. They cut it down first. It was older than the village… big enough to spread over the entire square. And they killed it!”

            “And everyone else,” the centaur who’d accompanied them said. When she wondered at his name, a floating plate appeared above him: Panos, Level 6 Hippeis.

            “I refuse to believe it. There were twenty-seven people in Donner’s Beck. And twelve kids! Someone must be alive! Maybe Eadric was out hunting game? Or Oswald? He had sheep, maybe he was away from the village with them… we gotta find someone who knows what happened!”

            “Nick,” Amanda began, and faltered.

            “This is wrong,” her son said. “We’ll find someone. We have to.” And almost to himself: “We have to, or we won’t be able to figure out how to fix it.” When she started toward one of the buildings, he said sharply, “No, Mom. Stay with me. Something strong enough to do this would one-shot you.”

            Suppressing her sigh, Amanda followed.

            After the idyllic first hours of her gameplay, Amanda didn’t know what to think of the game parts of Omen Galaxica… because surely this was the kind of thing that people played the game to do: quest, fight evil things, solve puzzles and mysteries. She wasn’t sure what she’d imagined that to look like: people wandering dark caves and killing spiders, maybe, or in labyrinths or stabbing dragons. The pathos of wandering a ruin like a miserable Search and Rescue dog, hoping for and never finding a survivor, though, was definitely not it. When they surprised a coughing girl out of hiding near the outskirts of the village, some tension in her shoulders drained away… or it did until that girl burst into tears.

            “Two cruel men!” she wept. “How could only the twain cause such destruction! All were put to the sword… even the innkeeper’s dog! Oh mighty adventurers, will you not avenge us?”

            Nick was vibrating with anger, but the only thing Amanda kept thinking was that the girl looked awfully young. “Nick?” Did he growl? She hoped not. But he looked at her so fiercely that she was forced to reconsider. She pressed on. “I don’t know much about games. But I thought I read somewhere that kids couldn’t be hurt in them. When you were younger and wanted to play, it was one of the few things that convinced me to let you.”

            He sat up a little, ears flipping back against his hair. “You’re right, yeah.”

            “And you said there were twelve kids in this village. So if legally they can’t portray kids being hurt, maybe those kids are somewhere around here? Maybe lost in the forest or with those sheep you were talking about?”

            Before Nick could answer, Panos stepped up behind them. “Softfooted ones. I thought I heard a cry near the stream.”

  Amanda exchanged glances with her son, and then both of them were running.