Metropolis - Goldilocks: Capsule Bay 57 - Unit 4

Tuesday, May 12th, 2089 | 7:12am

The moment Aya logged in, she was bombarded with messages. One was from Ackman telling her the shop was complete, one from Xavier telling her the weapons were being moved to Nelson’s, two from the accountants she’d met with, a bunch from a people she didn’t even know requesting her ‘services’ and one from Donovan. She read through the first two while she started making her way over to Nelson’s farm.

Eventually she got to Donovan’s message.

[We need to talk.]

She’d spent the entire previous day PMing the boy, asking for information about how things were going, if he’d found anything usable, but, after basically telling her to shove it, he never even bothered with a reply. Aya checked the time-stamp of the message; he’d sent it hours after she’d logged out. As she walked up to the farm, she checked on Donovan’s status and sure enough, he was offline. She wrote him a quick reply to PM her when he logged on again, but she knew it would only happen at ten a.m.

She came across Ackman first. He was laying the groundwork for the chicken coop they had designed. A quick check with him confirmed her assumption: he was going to need more wood. Then she moved to the shop site and was shocked by what she saw.

Over a dozen players were walking back and forth from the shop, unloading things from an oversized wagon being pulled by two oxen. The shop itself was complete, its wooden walls gleaming with the dark varnish stain she’d chosen. It had a little portico all around it, covered by an overhang. As she approached it, she could envision the things missing.

The windows still needed glass panes, the veranda could do with some benches to give the place a homier and more comfortable feel, the area around the shop could do with some serious landscaping, but, most of all, the place needed a name. Right then, there was nothing that differentiated the shop from a normal house. She needed to come up with a name and find someone to put up a sign or a banner.

“Lookin’ good, right?” Xavier asked, approaching her. She’d never seen the man voluntarily start a conversation before. She’d also never seen such a happy and enthusiastic look on his face.

“Yea,” Aya said. “It is.”

“People are already coming in,” he said nodding towards a trio of players. Aya could tell that they weren’t hired hands because they were missing the colorful icon above their heads.

“Oh wow,” Aya said, thinking about how useful an icon like that would be in the real world. “How’s the word getting out so fast? I thought I was going to need to hire some more people to shout it out through city square or something…”

“That might not be a bad idea,” Xavier said, “but all the blacksmiths have been talking about it and it’s become a hot topic in forums… Check it out for yourself…”

Xavier swiped a link toward her and it appeared in her field of vision a moment later. She opened it up and saw that, for the region of Durrenheim, the shop was the most-talked-about discussion.

[NEW SHOP OUTSIDE OF TOWN! GOOD WEAPONS, FAIR PRICES!]

“Unless you want the shop to be known as the ‘new shop’, I’d give it a name if I were you,” he said, big grin on his face.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “I was actually just thinking about it. I don’t really know what to call it, though. I can’t really call it ‘Weapons Shop’ if I want to sell other things in it as well… It has to be neutral. But calling it Aya’s would be… Oh, I got it,” she said finally. “Nelson’s.”

“Nelson’s, eh?” Xavier asked.

Aya nodded, feeling right about her decision. It was a perfect way to honor the man, even if he had probably brought her more grief than happiness. She helped with organizing the goods on the shelves until Xavier walked up and told her to go find something else to do. Aya laughed, watching the large man frown at and scrutinize at each piece before carefully finding a place for it.

He obviously knew more about the price and value of weapons than she did, so she put him in charge of finding and training someone for the position. They filled out a Contract together and she left it with him until he could find someone appropriate. She stayed long enough to watch the large man sell one of the players a sword for fifty-six gold. With a grin on her face, she left the shop and picked another player who worked for her. She gave him a quick sketch she’d made with her idea for the shop’s banner and told him to find a tailor to commission the work from.

Giving the kid her last gold reserves to cover the costs, she signed a Contract with him and told him to advertise for the shop in town while he waited for the banner to be embroidered. He nodded and went on his way, leaving Aya with just one more thing to do before she could get back to leveling.

Sitting at the base of a tree, she spent almost an entire hour working on Forum Contracts; all proceeds immediately went into paying her interest costs for that day. When she’d finished paying it off, plus a little more, she got up, dusted herself off and checked on the shop one last time.

The wagon was gone and all the hired players had gone back to their normal positions. She’d received notifications of Contract extensions and was glad the mining was still going on. If the number of players showing up at the shop was anything to go by, they might need to start to mine even more before too long.

At some point she would need to look into the Rockynos; they were still the bottleneck of the production process. She needed to find a way to domesticate or at least contain them so she could use them more effectively. Right then and there, though, she didn’t have time to worry about anything that might not give her results within the next three days.

Aya checked the forums for a good party to team up with, but they all wanted to go to dungeons she’d never been to before. Wanting to be in Durrenheim when Donovan showed up, she posted an offer for the Slither dungeon. It wouldn’t be very interesting to do it again, but she knew how to clear it quickly and she liked the skins she looted from the Slithers. Fiddler paid really well for them and if Aya wasn’t so worried about her rank, she would have invested some time into processing them into more profitable finished goods.

While waiting for an interested party, she headed back to Old Ma’am Lulo’s place, picked up an axe and got back to choppin’. The task was still a surprisingly good source of stat points, even with her so close to her level fourteen’s max. She worked at it in silence for an hour, bringing her 93% to 97%. The last two percent were going to be the hardest yet. She took her usual break when her Scribe skill cooled down and knocked out a Contract, finally bringing her skill level up to ‘Barely Novice’.

Every time she leveled, she thought about how fortunate she was to have found her Manic Creature the way she had. There she was, constantly using the skill and only now was she considered a ‘Novice’. She shuddered at the thought of how long it would have taken her to learn runes the traditional way. From what she’d seen at the library, she would have had to reach the ‘Expert’ level at the very least.

Absentmindedly, Aya started sketching. Her drawings tended to raise her Scribe skill a lot faster than any of the Contracts she did, especially when she’d already done the same type of Contracts many times before. She wondered how long it would take to get her Scribe skill up to ‘Expert’ before her thoughts wandered over to her second Manic Creature. Other than getting more mana, Aya hadn’t noticed any effects from it. It was just as well. Most Manic Creatures had at least one small bonus tied to them, even if it was just a couple extra stat points here, or slightly higher recovery speed, but usually it was so small that the players didn’t even notice themselves.

She checked her Manipulation tree to see how far she was away from completing Stage III, 39%. Aya’d been getting so many notifications about it over the last couple of days that she’d set them to silent. Compared to when she was working on her first and second Manic Creatures, the progress was a lot slower.

Aya’s sketch of the Serpent King was finally coming together when she got a PM from an unknown player. She gave the permission for contact and read their request for a dungeon crawl. With twelve Era hours left until Donovan logged in, she had more than enough time to accept the request.

She outlined the deal and the party of two mages, a priest and a warrior accepted. It would take them at least twenty minutes to make their way to the dungeon; at most, it would take her five. Aya put her unfinished drawing away, gathered her things, returned the axe, collected her reward and reputation and made her way to the entrance of the dungeon.

Finding a cool-’ish’ place to wait under the shade of a tree, she pulled out her notebook and worked on a couple more Forum-commissioned Contracts. She put the reward toward paying back her debt. By the time the party she’d grouped with was about five minutes away, the Forum ran out of requests. Killing time, she fed Henry a dose of blood, noticing she was running low on reserves, then took out her unfinished drawing once more.

Aya finished the rough sketch of the Serpent King, but was artistically unsatisfied with how it turned out. She tried putting herself back in the moment, trying to get the beast’s expression just right. Wanting to capture the total essence of the mob, she concentrated hard, thinking of every movement he had made. Inserting movement into a stationary picture was hard, and she ended up drawing out the scenery all around him.

The more she thought about the moment when she’d attacked the Serpent King, the more she could feel herself actually being there. She paid close attention to every cobble she sketched, to every scale of the King Serpent’s body and at some point, her Scribe skill must have cooled down because suddenly, she could see the exact lines she was missing.

Her pencil flew over the paper, filling out the missing details until finally the painting was perfection. Her heart was beating fast like it did every time she got a drawing just right and she lifted her hand slowly from the page, enjoying the slow reveal of the sketch. She breathed out slowly, comparing her memory to the image before her. Focusing on the scene, she nearly felt herself being sucked into the drawing.

The more she thought about it, the more uncomfortable she got, remembering the vicious eyes of the Serpent King and the fear she’d felt around him. Luckily, she’d had backup at the time, but looking at him now, she felt like she was about to face him on her own. Uncomfortable, she tried to break the feeling of being pulled in by looking away, but she couldn’t.

Then suddenly, it wasn’t just a feeling. For a moment, she felt like she was falling through space and the next, she was sitting in the boss room, looking at the Serpent King in the exact same pose that she’d drawn him in.

Her fingers, still clutching her notebook, were shaking and she looked down to find the page with the drawing gone. Aya felt like she’d been hit by a truck, and sure enough, her health was reduced to half while her mana was completely gone. Her overlay was overloaded with notifications, but before opening them, she slowly inched away from the boss as much as she could.

The room was empty except for him, and from what she remembered, he wouldn’t attack unless she attacked first. Backing up as far as she could, she tried to catch her bearings. All of her things were still with her, but Henry wasn’t. She’d taken his constant presence for granted for so long that his absence now weighed heavily on her, especially when she felt so vulnerable.

As she read the notifications, her situation became clearer and clearer.

You have learned a new Skill!

Teleportation: Instantaneous travel to a place you have already been to before.

Automatic memory system assist.

Pre-requisite Skill: Scribe (Scholar Level)

Current Maximum Teleportation Distance: 500m

Cool-down: 120 hours

Yet simultaneously, the circumstances that led to her situation became more and more puzzling. She was nowhere near Scholar Level, and there was no explanation for why Henry hadn’t come with her or why her mana bar kept ticking back to zero every time it looked like it was going to start recovering.

Her health bar was slowly starting to recover, but with her mana completely exhausted, the healing process took almost four times longer as it normally would have. Aya spent the entire time staring across the room at the big snake that could decide to attack her at any moment.

Even with the dagger she’d gotten from Xavier the day before, she didn’t stand a chance against the Serpent King, not by herself. She sent out a message to the party and asked them if they could meet her at the bottom of the dungeon. Their reply came seconds later, a big fat no. She tried to explain without giving away the fact that she’d teleported there, but her vague explanations just made them more suspicious and angry.

They disbanded the agreement, which, thankfully, hadn’t been Contracted yet, and immediately gave her scathing reviews in the Forums. She got pinged when they mentioned her and cringed as she read through them. Aya started to wonder if the real explanation would have gone over better, but a quick browse of the teleportation skill in the Forums told her she’d made the right choice in being quiet.

The skill was not unheard of, but it was definitely in the top 5% rarity-wise, and the earliest recorded instance of acquiring it was level 38. Seeing as how difficult it was to get the Scribe skill in the first place, not to mention level it, this made perfect sense. In fact, if Aya continued to improve her Scribe skill at the rate she was, she doubted she’d reach the Scholar level even by level 40.

Teleporting 500m once a day didn’t seem very useful to her in that moment when she was stuck in the bottom of a dungeon with absolutely no mana, no backup or even Layhen companionship. It took almost forty minutes for her health to heal up, and when it finally did, she started to move.

Leaving the dungeons was always easier than entering them since you didn’t have to kill each and every mob. There was a kill requirement to access lower floors, but not for going back up. It still didn’t mean it was going to be easy. Her Stealth skill out of commission, and getting around the Slithers unnoticed would be a lot harder. Without mana, she was going to have to rely on her litheness and speed.

Sneaking out of the boss pit was relatively easy considering the Serpent King never left his corner. She could not say the same for the rest of the trip.

The moment she got through the narrow passage, she knew she was in for trouble. There were three Slithers just waiting to attack her the moment she emerged. Two of them attacked immediately, while the other hung back and released a poisonous vapor from his fangs. For most players, it was one of the more powerful Slither attacks and the ability was spawn-dependent, with most Slithers not having it, especially in the upper floors. For Aya though, it was the least harmful. In the two times she’d cleared the dungeon, she’d increased her poison resistance a lot, and she’d specifically raised her Slither poison resistance to 82%. She took some damage, but it was nothing compared to what the two attacking Slithers could do to her.

Aya took out her dagger and assumed her fighting position. Her body was loose, her knees were bent and she was ready. Luckily, she remembered the trap in front of the passage and activated it the moment the right snake got near the exit point of the arrows. The mob took some damage from the hit, but none from the poison. It took maybe a tenth of its health, but at this point, any little bit helped.

The rattle Slithers on the last floor preferred to attack with sudden strikes, more so than any other species of Slither and Aya used it to her advantage. She waited until the mob was about to strike before she moved aside and let it slam into the wall behind her. Taking advantage of its incapacitation, Aya sank her dagger all the way to the hilt in the little weak spot they had right under their ear holes.

The moment it was in, she activated her Bleed skill and cut a large gash into its neck. It started spouting poisonous ichor out of its neck and Aya backed up to get out of striking range before the Slither recovered. Even with the use of the trap, the critical hit and the subsequent perfect Bleed execution, the level 18 beast still had over half of its health remaining.

Aya considered taking the snakes into the passage to activate the traps there, but she couldn’t think of a way out for herself on the spot. If she went in there, she’d have to either fight the boss and win or wait for someone to rescue her. Neither was an option. She was barely able to manage the level 18 goon; there was no way she could manage the level 24 beast inside on her own.

Instead, she repeated the process one more time on the other side of the same Slither, striking the moment it hit the wall. This time, however, it had attacked with less strength, and Aya had less time to execute the maneuver. Luckily, she managed and even more luckily, the Bleed skill stacked. With the stacked Bleed, it was a matter of minutes before the Slither ended up in a writhing heap on the ground before dying.

Aya had no time to rest; the third Slither once more activated its poisonous fog and the higher concentration of poison in the air affected her health a lot, bringing it down by almost a sixth. Between the distraction of the poisonous gas and the dying Slither, the second one managed to get a tail swipe in. Its long tail hit her small frame with such strength that she was thrown against the wall like a rag doll.

Her ribs crashed painfully against the stone, making all the air in her lungs leave in a painful rush. The moment she took to regain her composure, stand up and find the dagger she’d dropped was more than enough time for the two Slithers to encircle her. Feeling like prey in a barrel, her mind worked double-time to figure a way out of the situation. There were two of them and one of her. If she wanted a chance to win this, she’d have to focus on one at a time like she had with the first. The only question, then, was how to do it when they were both closing in on her like that.

Seeing how the gas-skill Slither was leading the charge, Aya stuck her hand into her pack and rummaged for her last goblin dagger. It was nowhere as nice as the one Xavier had given her, but the stingy man hadn’t given her two, so this would have to do. The Slither kept getting closer and closer as her hand became more and more frantic inside her pack, not being able to locate the damn weapon in her fear-induced haste.

A cut to her hand with the edge of a blade was the sweetest pain she’d ever felt in her life. She took the knife out by the blade and flipped it in her hand. Her own blood was making the grip slippery, but she didn’t have the option of dying right then. She crouched and waited for the attack. Because of her previous poison collection, she knew that the gas-Slithers had much smaller fangs, so small, in fact, that they wouldn’t be able to go through her entire pack.

So the moment it attacked, she sprang forward, latching onto its scaly body like an angry koala bear. She didn’t wait for the Slither to bend over and try to get at her through her pack. Instead, she kept sticking the blades into its body, over and over and over again. Aya activated the Bleed skill when she could, but in her frantic attack, she managed maybe five or six in the dozen or more stabs that she gave. Three of the Bleeds stacked, resulting in pretty good damage per second, even without the Critical hit.

As a gas-Slither, its health was lower than the others and at level 17, it was a much easier kill than the previous one. The moment the Slither’s death convulsions started, Aya backed off, putting its dying body between herself and the last monster.

She took a moment to take stock and noticed with shock that her health was down to 18%. The moment she realized, pain flared in her neck with sudden clarity, revealing what adrenaline had disguised in the moment. Surprisingly, the last Slither had also lost a significant third of its health, probably due to its mate’s convulsions.

Aya was shaking with a mixture of emotions ranging from fear to anger and even pride that she’d managed to kill two of the damn beasts by herself. They were all multiple levels above her and she’d somehow managed to hold her own, even without the use of her Stealth skill. Hopelessly, she checked her mana bar and saw the slowly recovering blue line.

Before the last Slither could take action, she fell down to the ground behind its friend’s body and activated her Stealth skill. She had just enough mana to pull it off once, meaning she had thirty seconds to do what she wanted with it. She got up as quickly as she could while keeping quiet. Aya snuck around the corpse, keeping an eye on the confused Slither, who was now looking behind the body, trying to locate her.

Aya took advantage of the moment when the mob leaned over the body, positioned its long arms on the ground and attacked by climbing up the back of its body, using the ridged scales on its back as foothold for her climb. When she reached the top a moment later, she sank to her knees on its neck, putting unexpected force on its head, making its arms buckle under it as it tried to support their combined weight.

Seizing the only opportunity she would be given as her Stealth expired, she brought down the two blades with crossed arms and executed a move she’d never done before, simultaneous Bleed skills in a Critical hit. She opened her arms as she cut the Slither’s throat open from behind. By the time she was done, its head was hanging half-detached from its body. It slumped down, gave two last convulsions and died.

Aya had black ichor painted on her hands, arms and face, but she didn’t care. By the grace of some miracle, she’d just managed to bring down three Slithers by herself. Aya sat down next to the pile of corpses and caught her breath for the first time in what felt like ages. She allowed her health to recover at a much faster rate now that her mana was ever so slowly creeping up. Every now and then, it would look like her mana recovery rate was getting faster, but then it would drop to nonexistence again.

Instead of worrying about it, she decided to work her way out of the dungeon before the Slithers spawned again. She waited ten minutes or so for her health to recover and was up to about two thirds when she decided it was time to move out.

With two daggers, very little mana and no backup, not even a Layhen, she felt very unprepared to exit the dungeon, but she had no other choice. Getting into solo fights with Slithers was not an experience she wanted to repeat. She’d barely managed to get away from the first ones alive; she wasn’t about to chance it all over again unnecessarily.

Aya avoided two traps before she came across the next pair of Slithers. She considered using Stealth, but, seeing how slowly the recovery rate of her mana was going, she would never make it out of the dungeon that day if she used it every time she encountered mobs. Taking advantage of her size and the fact that they had not spotted her yet, she waited until they’d both positioned themselves in a way that wasn’t looking directly at her before she moved.

She slinked her way around them, using boulders that had worked themselves free from the walls to hide behind whenever possible. It was time-consuming, but eventually, she made it through without having alerted the Slithers to her presence. Aya repeated the process for three more groups before she came across five of them at once. Not having an option to get through with sneakiness alone, she activated her Stealth and worked her way through as quietly as she could. Just because they could not see her did not mean they couldn’t become aware of her presence.

Aya continued to clear the dungeon in the same way. Every now and then, she would have to wait by a particularly large group for her mana to recover enough for her to use Stealth, but before she knew it, she’d cleared two floors and was well into her third when she heard voices. Slithers didn’t speak and caution laced with curiosity made her stop short and wait, hiding in a crevice in the wall.

It took a while for the voices to get nearer and it took even longer for her to be able to distinguish the words, but eventually she heard a baritone voice say, “…not looking good.”

“… get them… matter of time,” said a raspy feminine voice. The player was still too far for her to understand all of her words, but as they got closer Aya’s job got easier.

“Maybe we should be getting back,” said the male voice.

“Nah, what’s the point man! We’re almost done here and they’re still rounding up the troops,” said a new male voice, of slightly higher pitch than the first.

Aya wasn’t sure why she was hiding. Players weren’t immediately hostile, but she was alone in a dungeon and PvP deaths did happen. It would be best if she was able to avoid contact with the group altogether. She listened as their conversation which continued to be an argument about whether or not they should turn back or not. Slowly, the words started to sound vaguely familiar until eventually they slapped her in the face.

“I heard the guy’s name is Nelson,” said one of them.

“Nah, I heard that’s just a cover,” said the woman. “I heard it’s actually a little kid that’s leading it all. A convicted kid, no less.”

“A little kid? No way!” said a completely new voice. “I heard it was the blacksmith guy, what’s his name. That big guy, never gave us trouble… until now…”

“Xavier? No, he’s just…” said another new voice.

Aya swallowed, throat suddenly dry. There were at least five players and if her suspicions were correct, they all wanted her dead. She felt her hands grow clammy as the group killed off the nearest pair of Slithers.

“Man, these snakes are gross!” said the girl, Aya heard her rustling with something.

“Just skin it, didn’t you see the price those skins are going for in the market?”

“Yeah, yeah…” she replied grumpily.

A minute of silence passed as they went around collecting loot, but suddenly Aya could see one of them. In the silence, she hadn’t expected one to show up so soon and let out an involuntary gasp. She quickly clamped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late.

A tall human warrior in chainmail swiveled in her direction. She registered the glowing convict symbol in the same moment that he must have registered hers because the next words out of his mouth were, “Well, well, well, what do we have here?”