Thursday, November 28th 2052, 15:42 OWO Server Time

Dusk came on with unexpected swiftness as the sun dipped below the mountain peaks behind us. The path had started to slope consistently downward and according to Macha, we only had a couple hours of hiking left.

“...a small village with an inn once we get off this damned mountain,” Macha broke through my continuing thoughts. “Unless we want to camp in the woods again. It’s only gonna get darker.”

“Hell no! I vote for the inn!” Bryn exclaimed. “Feels like forever since I slept in a proper bed.”

“We’ve got the coin,” Elias agreed.

“But aren’t we supposed to be avoiding notice?” Bolton asked skeptically.

“Faversham’s pretty far off the beaten path,” Macha explained. “Probably won’t be many players around, if any at all.”

Everyone’s gaze turned expectantly towards me for a decision. However, I’d been so distracted thinking over the poem that had popped up from the Sword that I had only been paying half attention to the conversation. The text of the poem was now displayed in a small window in the corner of my HUD where I’d been glancing at it regularly. It didn’t actually look overly complicated, but that immediately made me think I must be missing something.

“Earth to Zee,” Macha called and I jolted back to the conversation.

Glancing around I mentally scrambled to replay the last few seconds, as the rest of the party watched me weigh the options. Everyone had some degree of night vision so walking under starlight wasn’t much different than walking at dusk for any of us. Despite the appearance of the monster, this area was rated fairly low level. We could probably handle any monsters that might come at us. Though that didn’t take into account any PKers that might be out looking for noobs like us.

“Let’s head for the village,” I announced. “We’ll scope it out. We can always pull back and make camp if it isn’t how Macha remembers it.

Not long after, the path began to dramatically slope downward through a series of snaking switchbacks down the mountain. At the edge of my night vision, I started to see a riot of autumn colors, reds, oranges and browns, and soon we passed the thin canopy of hardy, but spindly, trees that clung to the lower slopes of the mountain. I felt a nearly instant release of tension in my shoulders under the thin canopy of branches and leaves to no longer have nothing but exposed mountains and open sky overhead.

Despite the urban sprawl of Denver that I’d lived in for much of my life in the real world, the simulated natural environment of Gygax, which at first had felt as alien to me as the surface of Mars, was beginning to feel more and more like home. After one last steep switchback, the ground leveled out into a gentle roll. The ground became more dirt and soil than dusty stone and the tree trunks and foliage thickened. Dry fall leaves rattled in the breeze coming down the mountain slope. The forest floor was littered with crunchy golden leaves that had already fallen.

It always felt like summer in Rowling, I thought to myself with amusement. Sure, there’d been the occasional storm, and it could get cold at night, but always pretty temperate and comfortable. Turns out, outside of the OZ there were seasons, and it appeared to be fall. I hadn’t checked the exact date in a while, it hadn’t seemed to matter, but now I wondered if we had to start getting ready to travel overland through snow.

I was worn out from the day’s march, and my Endurance bar was lower than I would have preferred. Being that the Endurance stat was derived from our Strength scores, I wasn’t the only one feeling the burn. We’d had to gradually slow our pace, so that Bolton, Elias and Bryn - none of whom had high Strength scores to start with - didn’t begin to lose Hit Points from exhaustion. Archer and I had even started scouting ahead, leaving Bryn creeping along as the rear guard.

Just as I was about to suggest that we give up on reaching for the village, and find a spot to make a camp, I caught the glimmer of multiple light sources through the trees ahead. Archer and I broke out of the color blazing treeline and came to a halt. Ahead we spied a small collection of quaint wooden cottages with thatched roofs. They looked rustic, old and vaguely European to my eye. Smoke trickled from the chimneys of each cottage, and flickering candles danced in most every glass-paned window. The moon had risen, its gentle silver illumination giving my half-elven enhanced eyes more than enough light to see by, even if the village buildings hadn’t been lit.

“Welcome to Faversham,” Macha announced as the rest of the party caught up.

“Cute,” Bryn observed lightly.

“We can take the tour in the morning,” Bolton grumbled. “Let's find that inn you mentioned and get some food, drinks, and rest.”

“Preferably in that order,” Elias agreed.

Archer beside me let out a huff of agreement.

“Everyone keep your hoods up until we’re inside the inn.” Macha took the lead and I dropped back to watch our six.

Within NPC-owned inns and taverns, there were no player tags displayed, allowing players to remain anonymous without head coverings. Instead of focusing on quests and monster slaying, there were players that had started their own businesses within the game. There were players that had dedicated years to becoming renowned in-game crafters like blacksmiths, forging high value rare magical weapons and armor. There were tailors who designed and produced fantastical outfits for other players. Some players had also opened their own restaurants, inns and taverns within the game. These businesses didn’t have all the same features as an NPC establishment, like the player handle filter, but I’d been told they also offered a wider variety of food than the game designers had included for the NPC menus. You could find traditional cuisine like French or Chinese, and some exotic, like manticore roasts or elven fruit salads, that were impossible in the real world. However, most of these players tended to gravitate towards areas of Gygax with dense player populations, not a sleepy little NPC village like Faversham.

We found the one inn that Faversham had to offer near the center of the little village, a large two-story wooden structure with a fieldstone foundation and brightly lit windows on the first floor. From outside we could hear the dull roar of the kind or raucous pub we were hoping for: raised voices, the clatter of dishware, and the light strumming of a stringed instrument partnered with a gentle male baritone. The sign hanging over the door proclaimed the inn to be The Laughable Owl.

“Someone should scout it out first,” I stated. Unless we got hostile, we didn’t have much to worry about from generally docile NPCs. However, taverns and inns were also natural gathering spots for other players.

“Last time I was here, there weren’t any players in this town,” Macha said.

“Still, it wouldn't hurt to take a peek first,” Elias agreed with a reluctant sigh. It was clear that the portly cleric was eager to get inside. I was suddenly reminded that when I’d first met Elias, only a few days ago, he’d been passed out drunk behind the White Horse, and it had only been midday. Since joining the party, Elias had been a sober and reliable companion, but we’d also been out in the wilderness away from temptation.

Gotta remember to keep an eye on him tonight, I told myself.

“I’ll go,” Bryn volunteered.

Macha, Bolton and Elias looked at me for a judgement, making it clear that it was my call whether to trust Bryn or not. The reaction of the other three didn’t go unnoticed by Bryn and she turned her own softly glowing red eyes to me. The same red eyes in the same slightly familiar beautiful face that had dazzled me while she tried to pick my pockets the night we first met.

If she’s going to stab any of us in the back, I’m the most valuable target. Or the Sword is, I told myself. It’s still weird to feel like the others have decided I’m in charge. Would’ve been nice for someone to tell me!

“Go on Bryn,” I decided, giving her what I hoped was a trusting and reassuring smile. “Give a shout if you run into trouble.”

“As you wish,” Bryn responded with a mocking shallow bow. She activated her Stealth skill and faded away once more. With an effort, I kept my attention focused on her, allowing me to see her blurry shadowy form as she slipped up to the door of the inn. She paused, almost fading away to complete invisibility in a deep shadow. I was certain that if I’d had plain old human vision or even a slightly lower Perception skill, I wouldn’t have been able to see her at all.

Bryn lurked there in the shadows for several minutes until a couple of NPC villagers exited the inn’s front door. Swift and graceful as a cat, Bryn slipped unnoticed behind the villagers and through the entrance before the door closed. The rest of us waited, holding our collective breaths and listening for any disturbance in the noise coming from the inn.

After what felt like an eternity of tense waiting, but was probably less than a few minutes in actuality, I broke the silence. “That’s it. I’m going aft -”

The door to the inn swung open, and Bryn leaned nonchalantly in the doorway. The dark elf’s hood was thrown back, her thick silver braid of hair draped over one shoulder, a stemmed wooden wine cup dangled casually from her right hand, and a cocky smirk was spread across her red painted lips.

“Miss me?” Bryn inquiried before taking a sip from her cup.

“Everything alright?” I asked.

Bryn winced and glanced at her cup, “It’s drinkable.”

“Arrogant bitch.” Macha’s knuckles cracked as her hands clenched to fists and she took a step forward. Bolton put a gentle restraining clawed-hand on Macha’s shoulder.

Bryn laughed, the sound light and merry, yet somehow still mocking. “It’s a ghost town in here. Nothing but villagers.”

The dark elf stepped out of the doorway and swept out her arm in a welcoming gesture. I took the lead and my friends, including Archer, followed in my wake. The common room of the Laughable Owl was more or less what we’d all expected. A roughly square room, with unpolished, wooden-plank floors. Rough plaster walls, smudged from years of grunge and smoke. To the right of the door stood a large stone fireplace that filled the room with warmth and light. To the left, a staircase led to the second floor of the inn. Beside the staircase sat a short wooden bar, lined with stools. Behind the bar stood a hefty, middle-aged NPC barman filling ceramic mugs with beer from a barrel laying on its side. Long, wooden tables with benches crowded much of the floor. The tables and barstools were sparsely inhabited with NPC villagers eating and drinking. Our arrival drew a couple of brief glances from the dead-eyed villagers before they returned to their scripted behavior.

If this was a movie, then my friends and I were the stars and the NPCs were merely background extras. Through a door on the back wall of the common room a barmaid emerged carrying a tray of plated food.

“Quaint as fuck, right?” Bryn observed snidely between sips of wine.

“It’ll do,” I said, pulling down my hood for the first time since leaving the OZ.

“Let’s grab a table,” Bolton suggested behind me, after we’d all taken a moment to survey the place.

“I’ll get the first round and see about accommodations,” Elias volunteered, eagerly moving towards the bar

“Seperate rooms!” Macha shouted after him.“We’ve got the money! I’m not sharing!”

Elias made a beeline for the bar and I suppressed the urge to lend him a hand. He was new to the group, but known to be a solid drunk. However, I wouldn’t know if he needed bar-monitoring if I didn’t first give him a chance. Instead, I turned my attention to the tables, spotted a small group of villagers near the fireplace getting up to leave and wove my way through the room to claim their table.

As I shrugged out of my pack and rested it on the floor, Archer sniffed out a spot beside the fireplace. The pony sized wolf turned in three tight circles, then with a sigh, dropped to the floor. I sat on the bench as Macha and Bolton claimed seats across the table. Bryn slipped onto the bench at my side, immediately snuggling close while eliciting dark looks from Macha and Bolton both. I held my breath and my tongue. If I had for a moment thought she was doing anything but trying to annoy my friends I might have been titillated, but I knew better. Or at least I thought I did. But when her shoulder slid behind mine and my arm grazed the side of her leather clad breast my body responded as it was designed to, along with mental flashes of how we’d spent our last night in Elmore together. I swallowed and tried to shove the memory aside.

Damn high Charisma stat, I mentally grumbled. Without a perception filter, I was almost as susceptible to Bryn’s high Charisma score as any NPC. Need to raise my Wisdom more.

An uncomfortable silence dropped between us until Elias arrived, somehow managing to carry a large jug of wine and four wooden wine cups. “Rooms taken care of. You each owe me 5 gold.”

“Wine?” Macha frowned with obvious disappointment.

“Feel free to go get something else.” Elias filled and distributed cups, then topped off Bryn’s cup before taking a seat on the bench beside her, though with plenty of elbow room between them.

“Should we toast or something?” I suggested as everyone was about to take their first sip. Everyone paused and looked at me expectantly, but I suddenly realized I had nothing to say.

“Here’s to those who wish us well,” Bryn raised her cup, “all the rest can go to hell.”

Everyone started to lift their cups to clink, but Elias spoke up with a toast of his own. “To absent friends.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Macha agreed.

With the wooden cups, we didn’t so much clink our cups as click them, but we observed the formality, then all took deep sips of the red wine filling our cups. It was my first experience with wine, and I tried not to wince at the sharp, bitter tang of it. Was this really what rich people made such a fuss over?

“So, what’s next from here?” I asked the table, setting my cup down and considering making the trek up to the bar for some beer.

“It’s a long way to Hickman from here,” Bolton observed.

Hickman was the biggest city in Gygax and our ultimate destination. Many of the best quests started in Hickman. It was also the best place to blend into the crowd of other players.

“Lots of quests and treasure between here and there,” Macha agreed. “Anyone have a map yet?”

“I do.” A long leather tube appeared in Bryn’s free hand as she withdrew it from her inventory. She uncapped the tube and slid out a rolled parchment which she then unrolled across the table for us, revealing a map of Mancour, the main continent of Gygax.

“Is this a RadiantScribe map?” Bolton ran a claw tip almost reverently over the map’s edge, “This must have cost a fortune!”

“It was a gift,” Bryn commented with a shrug that brushed against me again. Then beneath the table, I felt her delicate hand come to rest on my thigh. Gulp.

“Someone just gave you a RadiantScribe map?” Macha inquired with obvious skepticism.

Bolton leaned forward, I watched him pinch and spread his clawed fingers over the surface of the parchment. In response, the map zoomed in and out, revealing incredible detail or broad landscapes. He tapped on a village and a little box of flowing handwritten text appeared beside the settlement. He swiped the box away, then continued to poke and prod the map experimentally. It wasn’t that different than looking at maps on a tablet or widget out in the real world, but after just a month in the technology-free Gygax, the sight was a little wondrous to me.

“So what’s the best route to Hickman?” I asked before Bryn and Macha could start sniping at each other.

“Depends on what you mean by best,” Bolton commented as he adjusted the view of the map so that Faversham and Hickman were easily visible, along with the territory in between them. Then he pressed the index finger of each hand down on the map, his right on Faversham and his left on Hickman. Dotted lines appeared winding along various routes between the two points, the individual routes began to glow with noticeable differences in brightness that I realized denoted the directness of each route, the shortest routes were brightest, fading to the longer routes which were just plain lines with no glow at all.

Bolton traced the pointed tip of one claw along the brightest and most direct route. It was nearly a straight shot between the two points. “This is the King’s Road, it picks up at Corvin, the small city just outside the southern exit from Rowling Valley. It would take us about ten days to walk it. Less if we got some mounts.”

“It’s also heavily traveled,” Elias said while refilling his wine cup from the jug.

“And choice hunting grounds for PKers,” Macha added.

“How do players of our level usually make the trip?” I asked.

“They either hang out around Corvin for a while, farming EXP until they level up enough to make the journey, usually 15 to 20 makes you pretty safe if you’re in a party,” Macha explained. “Or larger groups of lower levels will form a caravan for safety in numbers, A lot of times those are organized by clans for their new recruits. If we had exited Rowling from a more popular route clan recruiters would have been all over us.”

Clans were large player-run organizations, usually with a particular purpose or theme. The most common were clans dedicated to questing, dungeon delving, and adventuring. They shared resources, information, offered financing, and protected each other. However, there were also clans specifically for other game strategies, crafters, thieves, assassins, and bounty hunters. They were the closest thing the Mega-Corps had to organized competition within the game, though a lot of the larger clans had corporate sponsorship as well.

“There are also portal terminals in Corvin,” Bryn chimed in. “But they’re pricey, five-thousand crypts for an instantaneous trip from Corvin to Hickman.”

“Pricey,” I agreed. I currently had over sixteen thousand in crypto-currency, represented as gold coins in the game, attached to my character’s account. So a gate would cost almost a third of my current reserves.

“Let’s rule out the King’s Road and teleportation for the moment,” I said with a sigh. “What else is there?”

“We should head for the Grind-again Trail,” Macha suggested.

“The Grind-again Trail?” I asked.

“Sounds like my kind of place,” Bryn commented with a smirk. Her hand on my thigh slid a bit higher then squeezed to punctuate her innuendo.

Macha rolled her eyes, then leaned over to peer at the map. She pressed a slender finger down and held it to a dotted line that was glowing in roughly the middle of the brightness spectrum. The route glowed brighter in response to her touch and the color switched to green. Like the King’s Road, it started in Corvin, but took a more twisting, meandering route over the intervening land, passing through several forests, mountain ranges, and smaller settlements along the way.

“That’s what players call it. It doesn’t have an official name,” Macha explained. “It’ll take a month or more, depending on our pace, and how many quests we detour for. But it gives us plenty of opportunity to level-up along the way. There are countless little off-shoots and alternate paths.”

“PK activity?” I asked.

Macha pursed her lips and shrugged. “Nowhere is completely safe out here, but it’s less juicy to Player Killers because players tend to be less densely packed together. There are also more wandering monsters. Great for EXP grinding, not so much if you’re just looking to pick off noobs for easy wins.”

“And casual players tend to not bother with it since it takes so much longer,” Bolton agreed, this was Bolton’s first jack in, but he’d done a lot more strategy research prior to jacking in, and unlike Macha and me, he had outside net access.

“Everyone good with the Grind-again Trail then?” I asked, then looked around the table to gauge the group.

“Seems like our best option,” Bolton ventured. Beside him, Macha nodded her agreement.

“Agreed.” Elias was staring down into his wine cup as he swirled the contents.

“I’m in,” Bryn said cheerily, drawing fresh scowls from Macha and Bolton. I was sure the two had been hoping that Bryn would volunteer to cut ties with us and part ways. I was positive that annoying Macha and Bolton was at least half of the reason Bryn was sticking with us.