CA Chapter Ten (Patreon)

“Good catch!” Amythyst said, shooting Aspen an approving grin. “Now, hold Amy out. Carefully.”

Aspen sent her a look that suggested he didn’t need the reminder, but he awkwardly pulled Amy’s limp body around until he could catch her under the arms when he released the sheet holding her up. As gently as if she were made of spun glass, he held the woman out to Amythyst, who stuck her hand into Amy’s chest, poked around for a second, and then pulled out a glowing orb.

“That’s it!” Amythyst said triumphantly, holding up the fiery spark. “You can take her back now, Aspen.”

Gratefully, Aspen pulled the now completely flaccid body back to his side, grumbling, “Couldn’t you have picked someplace more convenient for this?”

Amythyst snorted, lowering the orb from where she had been staring into it, though she kept it cradled protectively in her palm. “I didn’t choose it. This is as far as Veralt’s pet programmers have bothered to edit. When Refuge was where it was supposed to be, this would have been exactly ten yards from the outer wall, which is where the city limit falls. Blame OG Gina for the extremely inconvenient Pit of Despair; she’s the one who designed this area.”

Silus fluttered to a landing on Aspen’s shoulder and tilted her head curiously. Alpha wasn’t in her party any more, so she couldn’t hear the little bat, but she was pretty sure she knew what Silus was asking.

Amythyst bit her lip. “Um, it’s short for ‘Oh Great’. Because it’s really embarrassing to admit how, uh, awesome I am.”

Knowing how persistent the bat could be when she was curious about something, Alpha stepped in, though she smirked at Amythyst as she said, “So, Oh Great Gina, am I back on the regular server now? Or one of them?”

Amythyst just laughed back at her. “It’s about time you recognized my awesomeness.” Growing serious, she said, “We’re still on Veralt’s server, but it’s actually communicating with the regular game at the moment. I sent one of the programmers a ‘special invitation’ from his streaming service to watch the premiere of a new movie from his favorite franchise. He made a nice big hole through security so he could take me up on it. It was a little tricky, since I didn’t know exactly when you’d get here, but I set it up as one of those, ‘only the first one hundred to click the link can win!’ deals, and he swallowed it hook, line, and trojan horse. Still, we only have until he gets caught or the movie ends to do this, so let’s move things along.”

Looking from Alpha to Aspen, then down at Lady Ava, Amythyst said, “Who has the enchantments?”

“Oh, damn it,” Alpha muttered. “Aspen, they’re in my - her - pouch. I made them after dinner, while we were waiting for everyone to go to bed, so they should still be good.”

Aspen knelt and rolled Ava over so he could open her pouch. It was surreal to watch someone handling ‘her’ body, but Ava shook the feeling off and nodded when he held up the bracer, a simple but pretty necklace with a complex knot of leather strips for a pendant, and a bracelet that had ended up so large it fell off when Ava tried to wear it.

“The bracer has [Steal] and [Substitution] on it. The necklace is [Substitution] and [Report], and the bracelet is [Invisibility] and [Lockpicking],” she told them.

Amythyst nodded and held out her free hand. “Aspen, hold out the items.”

Aspen did as he was told, and Amythyst touched each one, looking satisfied. “All right. Veralt’s server knows these items belong there, and that they were enchanted there, so as far as the code is concerned, they ‘belong’. I just tweaked how many uses the enchantments have, and what level they are. You can put them on now.”

Aspen put the necklace around his neck, and the bracer on his forearm. It was almost too tight, but by loosening the laces, he made it work. Finally, he held up the bracelet. “What’s this one for?”

Alpha shrugged. “For emergencies. If something goes wrong, [Invisibility] will probably help you more than [Substitution]. I just threw [Lockpicking] on there so I didn’t waste an enchantment slot.”

“I understand,” he said, pushing the bracelet up his arm so it was hidden beneath his sleeve. Then he concentrated, and a moment later, Alpha was looking at two identical copies of ‘Lady Ava’. One lay prone in the mud, while the other stood over her, looking slightly uncertain. “Did it work?” Aspen-Ava asked.

Alpha repressed a shudder. Seeing so many of ‘her’ was just disturbing, and now Aspen sounded like her, too. Which was the point, but still… “Yeah,” she said, “it worked.”

Looking satisfied, Amythyst nodded. “The trickiest part is going to be finding time when you’re alone so you can recast the spells, but you look good.”

She pointed at the empty Amy avatar. “Now, you just need to take Zombie-Amy and put her back to bed. And don’t forget to use [Report] at least once a day to let us know what happened. Be as detailed as possible, since unless you can sneak out of city limits, that’s the only method of communication we have. Just remember, Veralt’s minions may be able to read them, too, if they happen to be looking at the right log when one comes in, and they probably won’t appreciate it if you call him names.”

Alpha snorted. “Oh, they might appreciate it, but they’ll still report it.”

Aspen-Ava nodded, picking up Zombie-Amy with enviable ease, then glanced toward Silus, who flew off toward a nearby stalactite as Aspen slung the empty avatar across his shoulders instead of trying to redo the sling by himself. Hesitating, he said, “What about this version of-” he tilted his head toward Alpha, then nudged ‘Lady Ava’ with a toe.

Amythyst shrugged. “You’ll have to stash her somewhere. You have to have recently touched the person you’re copying to use [Substitution], so she needs to be nearby. I maxed out the spell level, so each use should last about a day, so maybe bury her in the garden or something, and dig her up when you need her.”

Alpha glared at the AI. “Bury me?”

Lifting her hands, Amythyst shooed Aspen-Ava away. “Sure. Nobody’s home, anyway, so what does it matter?” She grinned teasingly at Alpha, then sobered. “The important thing is, my little pet programmer is almost done with his movie, and we need to get this,” she held up the glimmering sphere, “off Veralt’s server.”

Aspen-as-Ava hesitated, then leaned over and picked the body up off the ground, finally looking like he was actually struggling a little as he tried balancing both avatars. Finally, he just stacked Lady Ava on top of Zombie-Amy like so much dirty laundry, and started making his cautious way back down the narrow crevice behind him. Silus dropped from her place on the ceiling and winged after him, leaving Alpha and Amythyst alone.

Alpha looked at Amythyst and opened her mouth, intending to ask what happened next, but what popped out instead was, “You look beautiful.” Instantly her face flushed, feeling even hotter in the coolness of the cave.

Matching color rose in Amythyst’s cheeks, and she looked down, closing her fingers around Amy’s data-ball. “You were supposed to say that last night.”

A dozen excuses cascaded through Alpha’s mind; everything from ‘I was tired’ to ‘I was distracted’, but she just said, “I’m sorry.”

Without looking up, Amythyst took a step closer to Alpha, walking on air until her bare feet hovered just above the mud. The extra two inches brought her closer to Alpha’s height, so when she lifted her eyes, she barely had to look up to meet Alpha’s gaze. “Me, too.”

They smiled at each other, and then Amythyst spun, gauzy skirts and trailing vines twirling as she pirouetted down the passageway behind Alpha and started running. “Hurry up! There’s only about ten minutes left in the movie, and we need to get going if we’re going to make it out before Albus closes the port.”

“Albus?” Alpha asked, hurrying to join Amythyst as they burst out of the cave and ran down a muddy riverbank. The AI’s beautiful gown morphed into the familiar brown leathers of the avatar she’d been using when she and Alpha first met. Her long, loose hair twisted itself up into a ponytail, and her feet began digging up soft clods of dirt as her boots met the earth.

“The programmer. Poor guy. I mean, he was pretty much doomed to be a geek with a name like that,” Amythyst laughed wildly as she leaped over a tussock, then settled into a sprint when she landed on the other side. Alpha, whose dexterity was apparently still lower than Amythyst’s, nearly tripped over the tall grass and tumbled down the other side, but managed to keep her footing and race after the sound of laughter lingering in the night.

Soon after, Alpha stumbled again as the ground beneath her feet shifted from dirt, grass, and sticks to dirt and gravel, then just gravel, and finally the familiar flat solidity of a road. The world was painted in the faint silver light of the double moons, but it was still too bright to trigger her racial [Darkvision], so Alpha could just make out the dark gap of the road winding away up toward the blackness of the mountains against the horizon.

“How much further?” she gasped out, eyeing her Stamina as it slowly dwindled. While Stamina was mostly used for skills in Veritas, it was possible to run out through simple physical exertion. Alpha was nowhere close to that point - her already high Endurance had been boosted even more when she became a vampire - but it was disconcerting to see it vanish so quickly just from running.

“Just to the bottom of the foothills,” Amethyst called back, her clear voice showing no signs of strain. “We’ll make it, but it’s going to be close. Can’t you go any faster?”

“Yeah, sure,” Alpha mumbled, but she dug deep, pulling on every trick she’d learned when she’d been on the track team in high school. Her breathing evened out, and her long legs stretched into an easy stride that started closing the gap between them.

When Amythyst heard Alpha’s boots on the stones close behind her, she glanced back, her face split into a grin so broad that dimples Alpha had never seen before danced in her cheeks.

“I could never do this before,” she said, wind whipping her hair into her face. “No matter how hard I exercised, my body just wouldn’t do this. It’s the best thing about-” she broke off, eyes flicking away, back to the road ahead.

Alpha wondered what the end of the sentence would have been. After all, AI Amythyst had only existed for about a year, and the body she remembered having actually belonged to Amy Landon, whose consciousness was currently contained within an orb the size of a ping-pong ball clutched in her fist. Amythyst didn’t like to talk about what it was like to be a purely digital being, and Alpha was fairly certain she didn’t actually believe she was ‘alive’ in the truest sense. So, would she have said, “the best thing about having a virtual body”, or “the best thing about being dead”?

With a final grunt of effort, Amythyst pushed off the washed-out stone of the road, leaping through the air at the point where flat ground began to rise, climbing toward the peaks. As she flew through the air, her body shuddered, then split in a strange kind of aerial mitosis, which left the Amy avatar she had been using clutched in the arms of Myles2Go, the male Sword Reaper who claimed to be the Holy Executioner of the gods.

Myles landed gracefully, setting Amy down on the road. Gently, he tucked Amy’s windblown hair back out of her face and lifted her hand, carefully removing the gleaming sphere from her grasp. Alpha caught up as Myles pressed the orb against Amy’s chest, and it sank into her flesh without even disturbing her clothes.

Alpha looked around. “Is that… it? Are we out now?”

Myles looked up, shrugging. He looked like Amy’s slightly taller twin brother, and seeing the two side by side brought home just how similar they were. “You change servers all the time in Veritas. Sometimes a dozen times in a dozen steps, as the system shifts people around to lighten server load or to put you on the same server as a friend. If you noticed, it would break you out of immersion, so the developers - and Bridget - really focused on making sure you wouldn’t. But yeah, we’re in the real game, now. Which means all the regular rules are now in effect.”

Alpha swallowed hard. Veritas Online was all about realism. Unlike other games, they allowed players a great deal of control over their own experience, with a wide range of options including setting their own desired level of sensory input, to whether or not labels were constantly visible over the heads of other players, mobs, and NPCs. One thing that couldn’t be changed, however, was that when the player logged off, their avatar remained behind, instead of vanishing, as it had in all previous games. A real body wouldn’t just go away, and neither did a character in Veritas.

However, during beta testing, the developers had discovered that these empty avatars, or Zombies, could be used to harass or prank the player. People would log off, leaving their Zombie behind, and their friends, enemies, or complete strangers would pick them up and move them somewhere else. It might be somewhere innocuous, like the top of a nearby building, or it might be in the middle of a lake, where the avatar would drown, leaving the player to deal with a death debuff when they logged back in.

After testing several solutions, the developers decided to dilute the realism of the game slightly by making avatars essentially immovable. Trying to shift them was like trying to pick up a black hole, though they would still travel a short distance if they were hit or kicked during combat, and the player could grant someone else permission to move them.

Generally, that permission came as part of a set of instructions the player gave their Zombie before logging off. For instance, ‘Follow Player X to Location Y’ was used to allow one player to lead another somewhere, sometimes over very long distances that would otherwise take days to travel. In fact, that was how Alpha’s avatar had gotten to Refuge; before logging out, Ava had told her Zombie to follow Amythyst, and Amythyst had led Alpha to the meeting point.

Once she’d gotten access to Veralt’s server, Amythyst had learned that Veralt told his programmers to allow Amy’s avatar to be moved, since Amy couldn’t move herself. Then, whoever had actually made the change did it in the easiest possible way, which made it possible for any avatar to be moved, not just Amy’s. This discovery opened up all kinds of intriguing possibilities, which eventually led to the plan that allowed them to get Amy out.

But now Amy was out. She was in the real game, and she could neither move on her own, nor grant permission for Alpha to move her. Which all circled around to the reason Amythyst had turned Alpha into a vampire in the first place: while the AI hadn’t been certain that Amy was even still alive, she had known that if Amy could get out on her own, she would. Which led to the inevitable conclusion that Amy couldn’t, which meant it was likely she was still in a non-responsive state, and the only way around that was the vampiric skill, [Turn Ally].

[Turn Ally] did exactly what its name implied; it transformed an ally into a servant capable of assisting their vampire master. After the first use, the ally became a servant, which granted them something like a very weak form of party chat, and made their blood more effective at restoring the vampire who bit them, while also allowing the servant to recover more quickly from being bitten, among other minor buffs.

The second use turned the servant into a thrall, strengthening all of the previous effects and adding one more; the thrall couldn’t disobey the master. This meant that a thrall who was ordered to go somewhere or do something had to do it, and this held true even if the player wasn’t logged in. As far as Amythyst knew - and she pretty much knew everything - this was the only loophole in the ‘no moving avatars without explicit permission’ rule.

And it all started with a vampire’s bite.