The search was pretty quick. The AI’s game rules meant that I could just touch a body and then have access to everything they carried. I briefly thought about stripping them completely, but decided that with a neighborhood income behind me, I really didn’t need to be selling rags for credits.
You’ve received: Sharp Attack Pipe (1), Minor Healing Salve (3), Sneakers of Stability (1),
Bloody Knuckles (common card), 263 credits
Sharp Attack Pipe
Damage 2-8+1
SPD Medium
‘Mungo make weapon. It many sharp!’
Minor Healing Salve
Heals 8-12
Heal time 5 seconds
‘Watcha whining about? It was just a flesh wound!’
Sneakers of Stability
Armor: 5 physical, 10 energy
0% resistance, +3 Stability
‘Even drunk and pulled over, Simon always walked a straight line. He never did get taken in.’
The pipe was probably what had cut Patches.
It didn’t seem to be very useful behind its deceptively blunt appearance, but I didn’t have anything better at the moment, really, so I kept that. And the sneakers of course I put on right there on the spot. Honestly I didn’t ever want to go slipping and sliding down a slope like that almost into traffic again.
They didn’t look as badass as my boots but I had gotten lucky on the slide down and didn’t want to press my luck any more than I had to.
And besides the loot, I came away from the encounter with another level (thanks xp bonus!) and a new card.
Bloody Knuckles
Level 1 (Common)(1CP)
Usable 3 times per day, 5 minute cooldown.
Grants the ability to do 1-8 barefisted damage to opponents.
Grants +2 damage resistance to physical melee attacks
‘Come on if you think you’re hard enough.’
Learn Chance 90% Would you like to study this skill now? Y/N
I stared at it. I still had 16 open slots to fill, and the card seemed decent enough. The fact that it gave me a little bit of extra physical armor was nice as well. I clicked Y and then the dice roll.
39% I grinned. With two card fails already under my belt, I really had been expecting a third. The card sparked and faded, adding itself to my existing card slots.
It wasn’t To the Victor!, but nothing really was.
With the card done, I checked my notifications.
WELCOME TO LEVEL 4. Congratulations on not dying yet.
And underneath that was another card, one that I’d no doubt gotten from the level up. I clicked it and watched the cards splay out, the AI offering me a selection to choose from. I picked one, and groaned.
Another copy of Bloody Knuckles.
It was only disappointing for a second, though, because a pop-up exploded into view.
YOU’VE RECEIVED A COPY OF A CARD! TRY TO MELD THEM TOGETHER AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!
This was very much low-level tutorial style stuff here, and I couldn’t have been more grateful for it. I took the card and merged it with my already slotted card, then waited for the sparks to fly.
But the process turned out to be a different kind of showy. There was no razzle dazzle prettiness. Instead the cards flew out into the air before me and simply merged. The new single card floated down into my hand. There was a professional tough with slate grey eyes on the image now, a powerful body underneath a suit and tie.
Bruiser
Level 1 (UnCommon)(1CP)
Activate up to 3 times a day. Allies within 15 feet of you gain +3 Intimidate, +2 damage reduction against bare-handed attacks, and +2 damage on all bare-handed or melee attacks. This lasts 2 minutes.
‘He could take the hits. He could dish them out too. But that wasn’t what made him great. It was the way we all listened to him, and how he’d turn that into victory.’
Learn Chance 100% (Known Skill Level Up!) Would you like to study this skill now? Y/N
I selected Y and it made its way back into where I had previously had my bloody knuckles card. A stream of text poured across my vision.
Card copies offer a variety of opportunities within all Prestige Gaming boroughs. They can be merged to form new, often better cards. Or they can be put together to level up the card and their effects. Higher level cards often offer +1 or +2 bonuses to their effects.
I narrowed my eyes, thinking it through. Yeah, I was alright with the fact that the tutorial AI had just forced me to throw away bloody knuckles. Even though it just told me that I could later merge cards with cards to simply level up the card I already had, and level their effects.
This card was better.
But I wasn’t happy about not being given a warning. I’d be a bit more careful about following the AI’s words next time.
Afterwards I put +1 into my Constitution, and a +1 into Wits. The fact that Initiative was a thing told me that I’d probably want to have a lot of it, and I was banking on Initiative in becoming a deciding factor in future combats. Felt like one of those fastest draw in the west sort of things, and I’d rather be shooting first than always having to dodge and run.
My stats now read:
I closed it all up, well pleased with what I had chosen.
“Hey, Boss,” Eric Joel called. “It ain’t a car. Just placed high beams. Looks like they’d set up some sort of camp over here.”
I ambled over, seeing a garage next to the rotten remains of a long-abandoned home. There were piles of sleeping bags and an old 2000’s big screen in the corner, broadcasting world news. Apparently the nano-wave had just reached the Canary Islands. People there weren’t even fighting it. Just congregating in masses, praying to the sky or cross. I moved over and hit the power button. Not the time to be watching that stuff.
Then I turned around and started searching the sleep sacks, nudging them first with the toe of my new sneakers to make sure they weren’t trapped.
There was nothing really worthwhile, but they did have some old-school beef ramen packets and a can of coffee. I took it all.
“You know about cards?” I asked Joel while we scrounged.
“What, like poker? Rummy? What's the mark, Boss? I can run cards with the best of them.”
Good information to know. But not really useful for what I was getting at now.
“Can you equip them?”
“Equip them like what? Like a hat? Gear? Don't get me wrong, Boss, but I'm getting a little weirded out here. Is this another one of those game things that you sometimes go on about?"
I nodded. It was shocking how much into the veil my new NPC friend had already ventured, and I didn’t want to see what might happen if he was pushed too far too quickly.
Visions of the terminator swam through my head, and I shuddered. Best to play by the rules.
To him, I probably sounded like I'd gone completely bonkers. Hell, maybe I had. I hadn’t left the service with the sanest mind in the army, that was for sure. There was a good chance that I was at this exact moment sitting in the mental hospital, in a straitjacket, rocking back and forth yelling, "Cards! Who can equip cards?!"
It'd make a lot more sense than what I was experiencing thus far. But I had a hard gut feeling that this was all real. The rain was too wet and cold, the asphalt too hard, the air too fresh for it to have come from my unimaginative self.
A writer I was not.
"Sorry. Yeah, it is game stuff and I'll try to explain it to you over time. But that isn't now."
For a few seconds I just basked in the ceaseless thrum of whatever magnets or hover power made the cars zip by on the freeway. This was all nano, and only for this city… so it stood to reason that these cars were built out of nano-goo somewhere along the way.
They’d spawn, reach the town’s border, and simply dissipate into nothing. It was either that or the place that used to be Colorado Springs was growing block by block. The map didn’t indicate any new buildings, and a tiny red line encircled the city limits. Zooming in, I could now read the words Game Boundary.
“We need to run an experiment,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Head back to base and coordinate patrols so the Boss doesn’t try anything stupid while I’m gone. Patches and I are headed out that way.” I pointed out into the middle distance.
Eric Joel shrugged, his huge catman shoulders bobbing up and down in a way that’d make any thug think twice about taking him on, and he made his way back to East Gojira-X without another question. I didn’t think the Boss would retaliate so soon, not with what I’d done to his three enforcers, but stupid was incurable and it was better to hedge bets.
I turned a look Patches’s way.
“You ready to do a little recon?” Patches cocked his head, tail wagging mightily, and gave a delighted bark.
He had to be loving this, honestly. I hadn’t taken him out this often, or this far from home for… man. Maybe the last time had been to the vet. It’d been a while since we just kicked back and lounged in the hammock. That had been while I was dating Evie, so over a year ago.
I made my way down the embankment to the patchy area of nothing between the two intersecting highways. This was one of those places people kept passing day in, day out, that practically never saw human encroachment.
You could barely get here normally without stopping up freeway traffic entirely.
It felt strange being in a place at the very edge of raging traffic, but still and almost quiet. Down in the middle, I found a bit of stick to throw to Patches a couple of times, and ever the good boy, he dutifully fetched it.
A little ways off to the right, the land sloped down and I could make out a place to travel under the highway, because there was no way in hell I was going to do this overland. I’d have to carry Patches, which I could probably do since my Strength was beastly, but there was no way I was faster than an endless stream of high-speed hover cars.
I got to the edge, where a deep darkness lay beneath the highway, and the first of the buzzing notifications popped up.
Attention! One or more of your workers has leveled up! You should continue back to your territory and optimize the progress of your workers.
“In a minute,” I muttered, and headed on. The darkness beneath the highway enveloped Patches and I, and I noticed a distinct lack of tail wagging going on. I could definitely see some whining beginning shortly.
Attention! You’ve succeeded a Perception check!
A little +1 Notice appeared and disappeared in my periphery. That wasn’t all: a thin blue outline now appeared deeper in the darkness, outlined by the faint moonlight filtering in through the fog. The tooltip that appeared said ‘foreign object: unknown at this time’ but was something blocky and geometric. When I squinted at it, I was informed that it was too dark to Inspect, but I received another floating, disappearing +1 inspect for the effort.
And cue the whining.
“I know,” I told him. “Maybe if we steer clear of it, it won’t bother us.”
A pair of headlights came on, bathing us in unnatural white light, turning this whole area into a glaring nightmare of junk scrap, human bones, and fleeing rats. Big ones.
Attention! You have succeeded at an Intelligence check. You’ve gained an Insight!
No telling what the hell had just sighted us in, except that it was making a deep metallic sound that sounded like something segmented rubbing against something digital. Best way I could explain it. The sound resolved into ‘Intruder Alert’
“Okay, we run then!”
I took off at a sprint, with Patches right beside me. Several more Attention! alerts appeared, but I willed them away with a thought. Still, in the split second they were in front of my face, I noted ‘you’ve entered hostile territory’, ‘you’ve alerted a hunter-killer sentry drone’ and ‘your workers need your leadership, o mighty hero’.
At eight lanes wide, it was a pretty good little run, and the headlight-having hunter-killer sentry drone leapt up to keep pace with us. Patches naturally got ahead of me, but not as far as he should’ve. Pumping my legs, I was easily running faster than I’d ever run in my life.
In fact, I might’ve even been making better time than any human on record. With my 17 Strength and Finesse, however the nanobots modified my body, I was running at or above Olympic levels. Fast enough that the hunter-killer didn’t veer to intercept, but instead paralleled Patches and I. Lucky for us, the blaring spotlights provided enough illumination to avoid a twisted ankle every other step.
We came out from under the highway, and Patches leapt over a chunk of ripped out concrete with snarls of rebar poking out. I vaulted it a second later, landed hard, stumbled, and grinned.
A metallic voice said, “Hold and receive instructions.”
The thing that emerged from the highway was quite fearsome. It was like a centaur had allowed itself to be turned into a full-on cybernetic version of itself, but by some centaur ideal that made no sense to me. A stocky, giant-shouldered upper body sat upon the tremendous body of what must have been a draft-horse, its sable fur barely visible through the flashing neon links of his chainmail barding.
Up top, the arms were enormous, the size of my body, and the head was fully encased in a thickly slabbed helm. As I watched, a viewscreen thrust out from the creature’s chest and I scrabbled backwards in shock, readying myself for the inevitable assault.
But it didn’t come. Instead, on that slightly-curved screen, I saw the stern-looking face of a bonafide Ft. Knox 19-D Drill Instructor. Under the cavalry brim, he was all muscle and wore an angry expression that brooked no-nonsense.
I stared, waiting for whatever would come next.
“These areas are off limits,” the sergeant growled. His face disappeared, replaced by text.
You have reached the limits of the gaming area. Due to the gaming experience, and the possibility of nano-contamination of the real world, players may only exit the system via marked and monitored exits. Any attempts to breech the borders of a gaming area by means not approved by Prestige Gaming will result in the termination of your account. Thank you and have a nice day.
I growled and started forward anyways. Termination of my account sounded like they’d kick me out of their game. And if that was the case, I could get over to the Prestige Gaming Headquarters and have this nightmare apocalypse done in no time.
