CA Chapter Five (Patreon)

The four days of Ava’s ‘test’ immersion passed quickly. At first she was worried that Veralt might be monitoring her in some way, and notice that she was using skills he hadn’t given her character. When he logged in on day two, however, he seemed just as dismissive as ever, and not suspicious at all, so for the last two days she just spent her time grinding her skills, exactly as Amythyst had asked her to.

Aspen and Silus were good companions, though Aspen had a definite tendency to be tight-lipped while simultaneously looking tense and concerned. On the other hand, Silus talked enough for both of them, and told Ava that the farmer’s wife was expecting a child any day, and he was worried about her, since she’d had difficulty giving birth to Juniper, her first child.

::Then why is Aspen even here?:: Ava asked via party chat, peering out of an alley at the road that led to the town’s main gate. She had spent the day, her last one in immersion, sneaking, stealing, and picking any lock she could find. So far, she hadn’t found a single trap or hidden passage, but she also hadn’t quite dared venture into the castle itself. Still, she’d managed to get [Sneak] to level five, [Substitution] to level six, [Steal] to level eight, and [Invisibility] to level nine,  with everything else trailing behind. The only one Ava really struggled with was [Enchant], which required items Ava didn’t have.

Silus, who was currently hanging from the eaves of the building she leaned against, actually hesitated. ::I don’t actually know. I’m sure she promised him something really, really important, but he says it’s a secret, ‘cause it could, um,:: the silence this time stretched so long that Ava thought she’d finally found something the bat didn’t want to talk about, but then Silus said, ::infect in-fur-person relationships. I think.::

“Impact interpersonal relationships,” Aspen corrected quietly from behind Ava, nearly making her jump out of her skin. She’d thought he was all the way on the other side of town, picking up their armor from the blacksmith. “And it would. It’s nothing anyone needs to worry about except for me and Gina.” He didn’t actually say, ‘so mind your own business’, but it came across very clearly, so Ava clamped her mouth shut and looked out at the gate again.

“I think they have four shifts,” Ava murmured into the silence. “Sunrise to noon, noon to sunset, sunset to midnight, and midnight to sunrise. They check everyone’s papers before they can enter or leave, but really, only a few people who work outside the walls, like the farmers and woodcutters, go anywhere.”

Aspen nodded. “That was how I got in. I entered this body when it was outside, tending the fields, and just came in with the rest of the laborers at dusk.”

“So if we’re going to try to sneak out, it should be at shift change, or when everyone else is leaving.” Ava said.

Aspen nodded. “If this was like the real Refuge, it’d make more sense to go out right at the end of a shift. The guards are always tired, hungry, and ready to be done, and there are lots of people going in and out at all hours.” He looked slightly amused, then shook his head. “We don’t require any form of identification, though, so the crowd moves a lot faster.”

Ava glanced at the guards. They certainly didn’t look bored, tired, or much of anything, actually. They stood impossibly still except when there was someone actually passing through the gate. She suspected that the server was conserving processing power, but it was eerie, to say the least.

“So do we just wait until Veralt gives me permission to take Amy outside the city walls?” Ava asked, frustrated. She was certain that wasn’t what Amythyst wanted, but how else was this supposed to work? Sure, Aspen could leave with the rest of the farmers, and no one would question it. Ava could [Pickpocket] an ID and use [Substitution] to pass through, or she could just cast [Invisibility] and walk out on her own whenever she wanted. But how did that get Amy out?

Aspen shook his head. “I don’t know, either,” he muttered, drawing back as an NPC walked by. He didn’t really need to, since the NPCs were just a mesh over the barest programming framework, but neither of them could shake the habits of years.

::You said you’re going to see Gina today, right?:: Silus said, voice faintly envious. ::Could you ask her if she could send some better berries? The food here is disgusting.::

Ava smiled faintly. The little bat was right. Another corner the programmers had cut was in the depth of flavor for most of the common food. The fancy things that were served in the castle itself were as delicious as anything Ava had ever eaten, in game or out, and the meals at the Smiling Ostrich, Millie’s inn, were equally tasty, but everything else tasted like cardboard. She had no idea how that saved memory or CPU cycles, or if they’d just forgotten to fix it when they started Refuge using some ancient default settings, but it meant that Silus was suffering, though Aspen didn’t seem to care.

“I’ll try.” She glanced at the clock displayed on her interface and sighed. Turning away from the gate, she looked at Aspen and asked, “You put everything in the stash?” As an NPC himself, Aspen didn’t have an inventory, and he couldn’t carry around everything they’d bought over the last few days. They couldn’t be certain that things in Ava’s inventory were safe, either, so they’d taken over one of the many houses left behind by the vanished non-human citizens.

He nodded, and Ava sighed, saying, “Then I have to go.I should be back in about a day and a half, with Amy.” They knew this, of course, but she was still nervous that when she opened her eyes in the pod, security would be there, ready to escort her from the house. She found herself repeating what should happen as if the words could ward off calamity.

Aspen nodded again, but Silus said, ::Be careful, Ava. We’ll see you soon.::

Ava smiled up into the darkness of the roofline. ::Thanks, Silus. You be careful, too. No more of that business with the goat, the spoon, and the toothpick.::

Aspen snorted in amused agreement, but Silus just giggled. Ava shook her head and headed back toward the castle. She had ten minutes to get her avatar in bed before she was supposed to log out.

Waking up the second time wasn’t nearly as bad as the first. Maybe it was something about being pulled out of immersion unexpectedly that had caused her body’s violent reaction, and it wasn’t going to be like that every time. LeeAn was there again, and as she helped Ava out of the pod and removed her IV, she confirmed this, saying, “Part of the waking process involves expelling the fluid in your lungs before you’re fully aware. As long as we don’t have any more early extractions, this should be normal.”

As she followed Ava out into the hallway, she glanced back at Quinn before lowering her voice and murmuring, “There’s actually a non-invasive suction device in case of emergencies, but Veralt didn’t want to have to sterilize it again, so we didn’t use it last time.”

Ava gritted her teeth. What was the point of telling her that? Was LeeAn trying to reassure Ava that if things got worse, they could still help her, or was she trying to sow discord between Ava and Veralt? Not that Ava could really detest the doctor any more than she already did, but as far as LeeAn knew, Ava was an unsophisticated, sheltered young woman fresh out of college, who might take months or years to learn that just because someone was her boss, it didn’t mean they were always right.

“Oh,” was all she said, and LeeAn’s face shut down at the non-answer. The two women crossed to the bathroom, where LeeAn made sure Ava was safely in the shower before leaving without another word.

Once Ava retrieved her clothes from the locker where LeeAn left them, she dressed and stepped back out into the hallway. Dean was there waiting for her. It was the first time she’d had a chance to speak to him since he showed up on her doorstep the first day, and though he didn’t say anything directly, it was clear from the way he spoke that he was less than pleased with her.

“Lift your right arm.” They were back in Exam Room One, which was the only one that was fully operational, as far as Ava knew. Dean was running Ava through the same simple exercises LeeAn had, apparently checking the results against those the older nurse had gotten.

“Touch your toes,” Dean said, and stepped to the side so he could see her place her hands flat against the ground. Ava had always been flexible, and being in the pod had made her more so. She was pretty sure she could actually press her face against her knees now, but she’d only done this last time, and she had no urge to show off for the insensitive young man.

After several more easy tests, Dean tapped the exam room screen, closing the chart he’d been entering numbers in. He turned to Ava and held out his hand, waggling his fingers. “Pulse oximeter,” he said.

Ava pulled off the device and set it into his palm. “Can I go now?”

He shrugged, then nodded almost grudgingly. “Yeah. just be back here promptly at nine tomorrow.”

Ava hesitated. She wanted to ask him what his problem was, but it wouldn’t be in character, so she just nodded meekly and exited the room. The nurse at the desk barely glanced up at her as she walked by, and then Ava was down the hall and out the door.

“Ava! Are you all right?” Amythyst’s relieved voice instantly sounded in Ava’s ear, and she felt her shoulders relax slightly. She was walking through security, so she just hummed slightly in response, but apparently that was all Amythyst needed.

“I’ve been trying to crack that stupid town, but there are layers on layers of security around the code. I’ve tried planting viruses in the NPCs who leave, so they carry it back in when they return, but it’s like trying to get into Veralt’s lab all over again. Everything I try just goes inert the moment it enters. I can get stable code in, like Aspen, Silus, and the scrolls I sent you, but nothing will replicate, much less change the current code.”

Ava felt a chill go down her back. If that was true, then Amythyst couldn’t protect them from discovery. Why hadn’t Veralt or his programmers noticed what Ava was up to yet? She glanced around, but she knew the entire building was under constant surveillance, so she just bit back the questions she wanted to ask. Fortunately, Amythyst went on without her urging.

“The good news is, the area outside town really is just a copy of the regular game world, with no extra security, so I know all the loopholes and exploits. Once we get Amy out of town, it’ll be easy to get her to the dungeon. Oh! And Veralt is over-working his people just like he always did, so his programmers are already almost burned out, and letting things slide all over the place. It was actually pretty easy to go in and just take over the process that was supposed to monitor you. It still watches you, but I can change the names of your skills and your location in the dump file. No one actually checks it, anyway.”

Her tone shifted to accusatory. “Why haven’t you been using your [Enchant] skill? It needs to be level ten and through the first threshold before we can get Amy out.”

Ava gritted her teeth, but managed to nod at the two people who were leaving the servant’s wing as Ava entered. One of them was Dion, the man whose love life had been the source of so much speculation the night Ava ate dinner in the communal dining room, but the other one was a petite woman Ava didn’t recognize at all.

A few more yards, and Ava threw open the door of her suite, stepped inside, and closed the door firmly behind her. Immediately, she burst out, “How was I supposed to practice that, exactly? It requires tools for anything complicated, and it fails more often than it succeeds! Even when I do manage to enchant something, it only lasts one to three seconds. That’s not going to do us a damned bit of good!”

Amythyst appeared on the screen in the main room. “You’re supposed to [Steal] tools from someone and use those! Why would I give you a useless skill?”

Ava flopped down on the couch, tilting her head back and closing her eyes so she didn’t have to see the disappointed look on Amythyst’s face. “I didn’t know if that was safe,” she said, tiredly. In theory, she’d just slept for two days, but she certainly didn’t feel like it. “I didn’t want to keep anything in my inventory that might tip our hand, and a bunch of jeweler’s tools and a necklace with a [Sneak] enchantment on it would be a pretty big red flag. And that’s if I could even pull it off. I couldn’t leave them anywhere I went regularly, either, since I didn’t know if I was being tracked.”

There was silence filled only with Ava’s breathing until Amythyst said, “I’m sorry.” Ava let her head drop to the side and opened one eye, looking at the screen. Amythyst was wearing her pretty green dress, with flowers vining through her hair and across her bare shoulders, but her hands were fisted in the gauzy fabric of the skirt and her beautiful mossy eyes were downcast.

“I just want to get her out, and I don’t think we can without that skill. We can’t wait for Veralt to give us permission, because he won’t until he has the surrounding area as firmly locked down as the town itself, and that’ll be too late.” Her shoulders hunched. “Honestly, I doubt he has any interest in helping Amy get better. As long as she is the way she is, he has all the time and money he could want to continue with his experiments. He’s convinced his pod was better than Joe’s, and Joe’s was only selected because he’s Bridget’s friend, and he’s determined to prove it.”

Before Amy Landon was hit by a car, she had been engaged to a man named Joe Sherman. Joe had been her boyfriend for years before they got engaged, and when Amy started working for her father’s company, Veritas Corporation, Joe had followed. Joe was a doctor and a gamer first, but when he was placed in charge of one of the research teams attempting to create a long-term immersion pod, he had brought those things together with an innate understanding of how to bring out the best in the people under him. This had led to his team creating a pod that was better in almost every way than the one Veralt’s team had created under the man’s belittling attitude and requirement that everyone put in sixty hour work-weeks.

Bridget, of course, was Amy’s best friend. The two were more like sisters, really, and before Amy moved in with Joe, they even lived together and worked on a few joint projects on their own time. One of those projects led to the creation of Amythyst. When Bridget learned how to essentially copy a human consciousness, she started with herself and Amy, though the digital replicas always went insane or deleted part of their own code, until Amy insisted they stop trying.

That had been the end of that, until Amy broke up with Joe and got so thoroughly drunk that she allowed Bridget to update her own ‘copy’. She even agreed that Bridget could upload the program if anything happened to her. That night was the last memory Amythyst had from her progenitor.

“Wait,” Ava said, “so Veralt is still trying to build his own pod? How?”

Amythyst shrugged, but her fists didn’t release the fabric of her dress. “Remember Carl ordered three pods? I thought the third one was for him, but he has a standard pod in a room off his bedroom, and he always hated the idea of breathing in the biogel. He was the only person who knew about the project who didn’t try it at least once. I don’t know where the other pod is. It should be online by now, but no matter how I dig, I can’t find any communications interface for it. It’s either still in pieces somewhere, which is possible, or it's in its own closed system within the closed system of the lab.”

“And you think Veralt is using it to continue his experiments?” Ava sat up and leaned forward, thinking, but eventually shook her head. “It seems like a stretch. It would make more sense that it’s sitting in a closet somewhere in case one of the main pods breaks down. A backup, or something. Even if Veralt is still trying to build a better pod, it doesn’t affect us.”

“It does,” Amythyst insisted. “It gives him every incentive to keep Amy exactly as she is. As long as he can show my - Amy’s - dad that she’s improving even a little, Carl will throw money and manpower at him. If Veralt is doing what I think he’s doing, Amy will never get better, and the longer she stays here, the more likely it is that the damage will be permanent.”

“What,” Ava asked slowly, “do you think is going on? Because it doesn’t sound like you think he’s just neglecting her.”

“I managed to get into the first layer of his notes, and I think,” Amythyst said, “that he’s actually keeping her drugged.”

Occasionally, Ava had actually internally debated the ethics of what they were doing. After all, Amy was safe, loved, and had more and better care than almost anyone could afford. If she did, in fact, have severe brain damage, and didn’t improve in spite of whatever course of treatment Amythyst had planned, then did they really have the right, much less the responsibility, to take her away?

The only thing that tilted the scales was the fact that Carl Landon had actually faked his daughter’s death in order to take her away from everyone else who loved her. That wasn’t the action of a rational man, even if Bridget was trying to convince him to let her use a system that hadn’t been thoroughly tested on Amy. No, It was obvious to Ava that Carl finally had complete control of Amy, and that was the way he intended to keep it, even if she got better. Therefore, getting her out was the right thing to do, especially since Bridget would be able to provide the same level of care to the injured woman.

Still, Amythyst had chosen Ava to help her partially because she spent her life protecting those weaker than her, right up until she was the weak one, and there was no one there to protect her. Ava had accepted Amythyst’s proposal because at some deep, unspoken level, she was done. She had fought the good fight, and she had lost, and there was nothing left but to just… let go.

But Amythyst offered her hope. Hope that she could do something good, and benefit from it as well. If she succeeded, she got a million dollars. More, if she found the perfect lottery for her digital friend to hack. If they failed, well, Amy would still be safe, and Ava would go to jail, but honestly, it was probably better than where she’d been headed before. And if it wasn’t, there was a solution to that, too.

But still, Ava had niggling doubts. As she emerged from the oubliette she’d fallen into after her mother’s death, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. If Amythyst was right, though, it made the matter clear.

“Amythyst, you have to tell Bridget,” she said, looking up at the AI. “Or call that guy, George, your mom’s friend. If Veralt is willing to drug his own patient, we can’t trust him to keep her safe until we can get her out. It could take us months! What if that crazy bastard decides to make sure she really won’t ever recover?”

Amythyst had her arms wrapped around herself now, but she was shaking her head with as much determination as ever. “I know Bridget, better than anyone. She’ll think I’m crazy, just like all the other AIs before me. She’ll delete me and start over, now that she knows it can be done. She built a kill switch into my program, since a crazy AI with phenomenal cosmic powers is kind of a problem.” She spun her finger, making a sparkling tornado of light appear in the air beside her, and managed a wavering smile.

“And George… I already reached out to him. After we talked, I realized you were right. Uncle George was like a second father to Amy, and he has a right to know she’s still alive. But George is cagey, and an anonymous email isn’t going to be enough to get him here. He’s incredibly wealthy and powerful, but he’s dying, and he’s not going to shake any trees if he can’t handle what falls out.”

Amythyst dropped her arms, shrugging. “It’s just us, at least for now, and we have to keep going like it’s going to stay that way. Besides, I have a plan.”

Ava rubbed her cold hand across her eyes, but nodded. “Go ahead.”

Amy shrugged. “We have to get Amy’s character out of town so we can see how bad the damage really is, without outside interference.”

Ava nodded again. So far, the new plan sounded a lot like the old plan.

“In order to do that, you need to get [Enchant] to level ten. That’ll make your enchantments last up to a minute, or allow you to put two enchantments on a single item. Then you need to-”