Name

Gwen Baird

Armour

3

Class

Hunter

Health

20

Level

4

Dodge

1

Species

Half-Elf (Wood/Human)

Species Skills (Half-Elf)

Strength

6

Elf Sight

3

Agility

5

Base Skills (Hunter)

Body

5

Stealth

2

Mind

6

Perception

2

Sense

6

Tracking

4

Charm

5

Archery

1

Removing a half dozen layers of armour and clothing was an odd thing to do when you didn't remember putting them on. The laces and buckles holding things in place had no creases or bends from long use, they sprang apart with the barest pressure.

There were buckles and laces in odd places, too, and while she was trying to take off her gambeson Gwen realised a strap still had to be removed only after the armour had become caught over her head and she was forced to unpick it from inside the dark cocoon the layers of linen had made around her.

Eventually, she was free of the extraneous layers, a simple white shirt and dun tunic lying over her breast, with leggings and her knee-high leather boots completing the outfit. Grabbing her belt from the mess of armour she had left dumped on her bed, Gwen looped it around her waist. It was long enough to cinch her waist in and still have a sizeable strip left over to hang at her side. There wasn't a mirror in the room, but she thought she probably looked pretty good.

Curious to see what had been packed for her, she opened the canvas backpack up. She had rifled through the upper layers while they had been walking to the village, looking for non-existent snacks or water, but hadn't managed to get a good look while they were making their way through the forest. It was a little too terrifying to really dig in with the potential for a monster to be hiding behind every tree.

There were two spare tunics and shirts, a single other pair of leggings, a week's worth of woolly socks and underwear. There was a spare bra that had a certain sportiness that she appreciated, though the lace tie would take some getting used to. That was probably anachronistic, but she didn't give a damn. It was a relief to know that the game, when given the option to pick between the comfort of the players and a strict historical accuracy, had gone with the former. Ropes, an empty water skin, and a sewing kit which Gwen was definitely going to become familiar with, there were already a few scratches that could turn into tears on her clothing.

No food, which might have been a worry. Unless? Was it luck that they had ended up in a village a few hours after arriving in the game, or someone else's plan? She shook her head.

At the bottom of the bag in a satchel were things that she could dimly remember picking in the character creation bubble that she had drifted through on first waking up from the cryogenic centre. That was hours ago now, and more importantly, it was on the other side of an adrenaline rush. It felt like days had passed since she had carefully made her choices.

Fishing through it she found the comb made from antler, the pins and bits of wire which were what you started off with as a lock pick set; the threadlike rope that was supposedly made from spider silk; and, finally, the set of cards with printing errors and splotches that could be easily learned by an apprentice cardsharp. It hadn't been her favourite grift to run in the real world, too much face-to-face time for her, but she'd known the basics.

Gwen gave a sigh, slipped a dagger into each of her boots and started to walk back down to the bar, taking her money bag and the deck of cards with her.

***

Gwen laid claim to a table in the back of the room; it was comforting to find that even in the strange world of a virtual reality having your back to a wall so no one could creep up on you was still an instinct she carried with her. It might even be one that was particularly useful in a place like this, built on the bones of fantasy and added to with whatever ideas the developers had had buzzing around in the days leading up to the end of the world. There had been all sorts of theories about what shape the space to occupy them in their century of cryogenic sleep would take.

Monsters aside, Gwen quite liked what she had seen of the virtual reality she was currently occupying.

She looked around the bar: one side of the room looked as if it had been cleared for dancing, but the side Gwen was on was filled with tables and chairs.

A barmaid came over with a tankard and a wink, Gwen accepted the tankard and did her best to laugh off the wink in a way that wouldn't cause any offence. She took a sip and settled into her seat to look around and people watch for a bit. While she had been out of the room there had been a change in the folks occupying the seats. Like an animal breathing in and out, people had come into the bar and left it.

But none of them seemed to be overly interested in her.

So Gwen started to play with the cards. Over the years she had picked up a few card tricks, mostly out of boredom and because there's only so much time you can spend around other types of thief without learning a thing or two about their specialities. In particular, there had been one job where they had waited for over three weeks for someone to leave a house. She had learned a lot in those three weeks.

Shuffling the cards, Gwen started by trying to collect all the queens in one hand. It was a mix of card counting and sleight of hand that should have been easy. When she tried it the cards spouted out of her hands like a broken fountain and she ended up having to pick them up from the floor.

A notification popped up, "You have insufficient levels of Skill: Card Sharp to achieve this outcome," reading it she bit back the words which wanted to spring to her lips. Having a tantrum in the middle of a pub wouldn't win her any favours.

"I've never seen a shuffling technique quite like that before."

Gwen looked up. An older man was grinning at her, and she let out a sigh, he was holding one of her missing queens.

"It's one of the best, don't you know it? No one can dare say a deck's not properly shuffled when the cards end up on different sides of the room," she said with a grin.

He laughed and passed her the missing card, "Aye, you might have the right of it there. But if you can keep to less majestic shows of shuffling, I'll join you for a game or two."

"Gladly. I'm Gwen," she said, slowly passing the last quarter of the deck up to the front and then the first half back around to the back, simple shuffling techniques that even her low levels could manage.

"Jeffrey Hoyle, I'm the baker here abouts," he told her.

"Ah, so that's why you are so willing to play with me," Gwen joked, "you knead the dough."

The baker laughed uproariously, Gwen was getting the feeling that he did everything in a big and voluminous way. "Ha, that's a good one! Aye, well, the truth is we don't hear much from folks outside of the village. Oh there's a few people, merchants mostly, who travel up and down the roads here and there. But we've been sorely missing news of the outside world, got any to tell?"

Gwen dealt him a hand of cards, somewhere in the back of her mind unfolded a tutorial on how to play, but after a brief glance at it she waved it away, she knew how to play Go Fish. After giving herself a matching hand she pushed the rest of the cards into the middle of the table. "I've been on the road a while, I'm probably as out of touch with the news as you," she said.

"Now that I doubt, especially since I heard you got into some trouble on your way into the village, some sort of monster attacked you?"

"Hmmmhmm, two attacks, actually. One a big beetle-looking boar thing, the other a whole pack of wolves with scorpion bits added on."

Over the course of the game they fed gossip back and forth across the table. Given that Gwen had essentially been born just that morning into the world, she was very happy to hear anything that put the world around her into a bit more detail. The village was one of hundreds in the border lands between the dwarven empire to the west and the elven republic to the east. There had, apparently, been several centuries of fighting across the land, the border moving almost quicker than the armies could march to keep up with it. It had ended with a devastating battle in the north, a battle that had corrupted the land surrounding it to the point where the necromantically raised armies still marched and fought across it.

Apparently, this had been sufficient to shame both sides into agreeing to back off and be polite neighbours. The lands had been stripped of anything militaristically useful and left to anyone who wanted it, the anyone had mostly ended up being the humans who had been around at the time, half-elves, and any others of the less populous species who could get there. Both sides, of course, had rules and laws they had to abide by and it had left the two sides with a cold war fought principally through passive-aggressive smarminess. But this was better than two sides with the ability to make people fight to the death, and then, long after that death, having a tiff every time summer came around and the weather was good enough for camping again.

When Gwen asked if there were ever any issues with the two sides she was assured that things were really much more peaceful now and while there had been a bit of scuffle a few decades back, that had been sorted out when some human guides had grabbed the main parties and marched them out to have a good look at where the war was still happening. For two species who could live for centuries, they had perilously short memories, but seeing armies of the dead still locked into never-ending battle had apparently been enough to scare everyone back to being polite.

There were a few issues with laws that she would have to keep in mind. No maps that could be carried around was the most awkward and which put a spanner of the spokes of her plan to learn where in all the many and varied hells they currently were.

There were also various ones about how war machines like ballistae and trebuchet were outlawed, but that seemed fairly reasonable. Like not letting people have tanks or rocket launchers.

After a while the baker begged off, as he had an early morning and couldn't stay up too late.

His spot was filled by a cheerfully dishabille middle-aged woman who was one of those ladies who, it was clear, had decided to grow old disgracefully. She introduced herself as Patty and she was much harder for Gwen to lie to. Her eyes were just that bit too bright and her smile a little too sharp for Gwen to feel confident that she could get anything past her.

They had a good game of cards nonetheless, though it didn't stop Gwen giving a sigh of relief when she lost. The other woman drew a hand of cards that was implausibly good, if not quite impossibly, and left with a cackling laugh.

After that, the night became more about how much parsnip wine and mead and beer she could hold and it became harder to get any reliable information. Or to be able to tell what was reliable and what was nonsense.

Wobbling up to fall into bed she lay spread-eagled across the soft woollen blankets and stroked her face back and forth on the fabric. There was a joyful little cloud of bubbles living inside her now, and they liked the feel of the snuggly wool very much

Blearily, with her eyes closed against the world around her, she waved off a few notifications and paid attention to some others just long enough to add a point to Charm thanks to a recent level up, confident that sober Gwen would approve.

Then she toppled off the cliff of consciousness into the dark and mysterious realm of sleep.