Offline #2
Lancelot nodded jerkily, sniffling against Merlin's shoulder before drawing back and retrieving his chopsticks. "I couldn't believe it when I realized. He has a collar around his throat with Maleagant's marks all over it."
"Collar of Binding, more often called a Collar of Enslavement. I can break it, though not easily, and the longer it's been in place, the harder it will be, but it can be done."
"Good." Lancelot resumed eating. "This is delicious."
"I'm glad you like it." Merlin walked around the bar this time, retrieved his own plate, and they ate in companiable silence until Lancelot was near to bursting with food.
And still his plate was a third full. He watched as Merlin put it all away, then followed him up a set of stairs that seemed plainer and more utilitarian than everything else in the house, then down a lavish hallway into a bedroom that could fit at least twenty of his apartment. "Who needs this much space?"
"Rich people, for their fragile egos. Come on, my personal set up is through here.
I've got sufficient for three players, and I've already started ordering what I need for more.
Going to do an entire setup downstairs in one of the spare rooms, enough for ten people.
" A door slid open as they reached it, and lights snapped on, revealing three fully-immersive VR sets, the phonebooth style, though Lancelot hadn't known what the hell a phonebooth was until he'd played a retropunk game back when he was a kid, had been dragged into it by a fellow student he'd been crushing on.
They'd moved away months later, and Lancelot had gone back to the high fantasy games he preferred.
There was constant debate over what was better for long gaming, which was a gaming session that lasted more than eight hours.
Everyone agreed sitting wasn't great, but between lying down and standing up, there was endless arguing.
Wasn't even a price-point debate, as they evened out by the end of it. "Nice rigs."
"Thanks. Even before all this, I've always been an ardent gamer.
I thought that was something we'd all have in common, but Morgan could not give less of a damn about VGs.
But as this is clearly going to be vital to the war we're trying to win, I've already ordered some more.
Had to do some finagling, order them all from various places, with alt addresses and reroutes and forwarding, so nobody would question why so many top of the line rigs were going to one address, but they should all be here in a couple of days.
In the meantime, we've got enough to get by.
Shall we do some exploring together? Morgan won't be home for a few hours. "
"What about your other friend? The one you were with before?"
"He can only play on his days off, and he's on a ten-ten schedule. We won't see him for eight more days." He looked pensive but said nothing, only stepped into one of the booths and motioned Lancelot to take the one on the right.
"You think he might be one of us?"
Merlin hesitated as their booth doors closed, and their conversation shifted to the built-in coms. "Maybe.
I think he uses an alt-av not a match-av, which makes it hard to know which knight or mage he could be.
If he is one of us, I'll figure it out eventually, and at worst, we'll realize who he is when it's time to wake him. "
"Why couldn't they just wake with you?" Lancelot asked with a sigh.
Merlin didn't reply, but Lancelot hadn't expected him to.
The answer was that nothing involving fate or magic was straightforward or easy.
"Well, let's see what trouble we can get into it while we wait for your lady love to show up.
" He mashed the go button and closed his eyes as he was pulled into Edge of Knight.
For once, they didn't start at the tavern, but at a campsite by the lake. Lancelot made a face at it. He loved water, but the lakes around here could all go fuck themselves.
"I can't believe I didn't notice that huge ass knight was Galehaut," Merlin replied. "I'm so sorry. We will get him back. Leave it to Maleagant to lock down your greatest weakness."
"He is my greatest strength," Lancelot replied softly.
"The two aren't mutually exclusive, and oft go hand in hand. Come on, I think there's a dragon not far from here, and the prize for defeating it is supposed to be barnon."
Barnon. Bar none. That wasn't a piece of slang he'd heard yet. He must be getting old. Impressed he'd figured it out so quickly. "Sure, why not. Fighting a monster that actually exists in-game will be a nice change of pace. Though I always really hate killing dragons."
"Don't think you have to kill it," Merlin said thoughtfully as they mounted their horses and headed off at a leisurely pace.
"I mean, that's an option, but my impression reading up on it is that there are multiple solutions and different prizes based on whether your choice was one of strength, wisdom, cleverness, on and on.
I certainly don't want to go around killing dragons.
No dragon ever hurt me except when I was asking for it. "
Lancelot laughed. He'd once startled a dragon and gotten whacked in the chest by its tail and sent right off a cliff.
Luckily, the landing had been a lake. Dragons, real dragons anyway, preferred to keep to themselves, protecting their troves of whatever had become their deep, abiding obsession.
He'd met a dragon that liked to collect bones, another that had a hoard of shoes…
and one dragon, mad with age, who had decided to start collecting children. That had been a sad day.
The sky was a beautiful blue, nothing at all like the dull gray of the real sky, but more like pictures of the world before they'd had to release a special gas that mitigated global warming.
Supposedly in about a hundred years or so the problem would be fixed and the gas could be destroyed, but Lancelot wasn't all that convinced the ruling houses would do anything that risked the status quo.
Gradually at first, and then sharply, the foothills rose in height and then were absorbed by the craggy mountains. He brought up his map. "So where is the dragon?"
"Somewhere in this area," Merlin replied, calling up his own map and sharing the location.
"Not much further then." Lancelot pulled up his stats, but he'd been out of the game long enough that everything had fully recharged.
He'd need to get his sword into a smithy for repairs soon, but not quite yet.
The benefits of having shelled out for a super fancy, if grossly historically inaccurate, sword.
Off in the distance, he could just barely see another group of players, four of them. "Surprised we haven't seen more people. Thought we'd already be inundated."
"I think the game has something to prevent that kind of Mt.
Everest nightmare." Merlin made a face, and Lancelot agreed whole heartedly.
Back in the earliest days of full-immersive games, people would form long ass lines to get their turn at various quests.
Even with all kinds of fixes, it could still be a problem in many games.
The trend had been named after some old-school tendency to climb stupid ass mountains, to the point that a line had formed on the most famous ones, people lining up to freeze to death or suffer oxygen deprivation or vanish into the void from a terrible fall.
Edge of Knight had accounted for that, though, apparently. "They really meant it when they said this would be a whole new level of gaming. If only turning off the pain sensors actually worked. Not enjoying that we lack the one good thing about virtual ass-kickings. Doesn't seem fair."
"I wish I'd had more control over how this would all come to pass, but the spell I used…" Merlin swallowed and looked away.
A chill ran down Lance's spine. "I remember. I was distracted by everything else, but you said the cost will be great. What does that mean? What price did we pay—or will we pay?"
Merlin's mouth set into a grim line, and he stared off into the distance, silent for several minutes before at last saying, "I don't know, exactly.
The spell I used was called, in short, Second Chance.
But to reclaim a fate that was forced awry, delay something as pivotal as our last stand against Maleagant…
we will lose something important. Split between us, it will not be as bad as it would have been if I had done it alone, but I am still sorry for the likely pain that will befall us.
I'll try to learn more, now that I am back, though it will take me time to locate all my old resources.
" He brightened. "But I can get my garden back!
Even if it's only digital, it will suffice. "
At that, Lancelot laughed. "Your garden? I'm pretty certain that garden belonged to Morgan and Guinevere and no one else."
"I started it!" Merlin said, heaving a sigh. "Maybe I can get to work on that after we've seen what this dragon has to offer. Should have thought of that sooner; Morgan will kill me if I don't have her spell components already growing."
"Especially the deadly ones," Lancelot said with a laugh.
"Morgan without her nightshade and hemlock and everything else is a danger to us all.
Well, everyone but Gwen." Because despite their drastically different upbringings, the daughter of a harlot who grew up on the streets and the daughter of a powerful lord who'd spent most of her life in a convent, they had been thick as thieves.
At any given moment, when they weren't needed elsewhere, Morgan and Gwen would be in their beloved garden.
Morgan had loved Arthur and Merlin, and Gwen had loved Elaine, but they would have committed atrocities for each other without hesitation.
They were as close as Merlin and Lancelot.
The road turned from difficult to dangerous, a narrow strip along a cliff face, where one wrong move would send them plummeting right off the edge. It wouldn't kill them, as game mechanics seemed to hold when they weren't battling Maleagant's forces. "Camelot mode."
"What?"
Lancelot replied over his shoulder, "At the moment we're just playing a game, right? The whole 'the game stops responding to commands and pain is way too real' never seems to activate until we're in battle, or at least in danger from Maleagant's goons. Like we go into a special mode. Camelot Mode."
Merlin laughed from behind him. "I should try to track when that does in fact kick in. I was focused entirely on if I could track them, be alerted before they show, but I didn't think to track the game itself. I was focused on Maleagant's particular energies. Hmm…"
It wasn't hard to tell he was lost in coding or something after that, the same way it had once been easy to tell when he was lost to his books and scrolls. Lancelot left him to it, putting his own attention on their surroundings, which were growing increasingly treacherous.
Eventually, the road fell away entirely.
Literally, right before their eyes. The group that had once been far in the distance collapsed with the road, and there was fuck all Lancelot could do about it as they vanished into the valley far, far below.
"That's gonna suck. Hope they have what they need to heal up. "
"Environmental deaths drop your stats by at least one fifth, all the way up to half, and then they continue to decrease by one percent an hour until you either reach a healer or create the healing components yourself.
" Merlin pulled up what looked like a guidebook.
"That valley has plenty of everything they'll need to heal up.
And this particular hazard will reset in an hour.
We can either wait for the bridge to reappear or find another way. "
"May as well find another way. It's not like we're on a schedule, and the more we know about the game, the better.
" Lancelot scanned the environment, the back of his neck prickling all of a sudden.
"We're being watched." He called up his master control screen and tried to turn down the pain sensor—to no avail.
Like it had seized. "Hope you're ready, because we're in Camelot Mode. "
Merlin swore softly. "I need to pin down how they find us, because we're walking into an ambush every time we log in."
A booming roar, loud enough to shake the mountains, snapped their gazes to the sky.
"Guess we found the dragon," Lancelot said grimly. "We can't fight here, and if we go back the way we came, we'll get pinned or worse."
"We can't fall, either, because it could very well actually kill us. Shit, shit, shit."
Lancelot kept one eye on the dragon and the other on their immediate environment—and nearly laughed, from hysteria and relief, when he spied something that looked just out of place if you stared hard enough.
"There. A secret cave entrance." He dismounted, banished his horse, and the very moment Merlin had done the same, he ran like a thief from the Reds, not slowing down even as the wall got closer and closer, stamping down on the parts of him that screamed stop.
Then they were through, in a tingling rush of bitingly cold air. He'd barely stopped, heaving for breath, when the cave entrance slammed closed behind them.
Merlin groaned. "Fuck me. Got away from the dragon, but now we're stuck inside the mountain. If this turns into some Lord of the Rings bullshit, I'm burning the whole goddamn game down."
"If I hear a single drum, I'm pissing myself, and it's every dumbass for himself."
Snickering, Merlin summoned up spheres of light and set them in various points by them, ahead of them, and behind them. "Let's go see what kind of trouble we've gotten ourselves into now."
"Stay behind me," Lancelot replied with a sigh, drawing his sword as he led the way deeper into the dark.
"Nice katana, by the way."
"Fuck you."