Chapter 14 - Jackson

You Have Died. Due to the nature of your death you will respawn in 30 minutes.

30 minutes. It should have been instantaneous. That was a good sign. I stared at the text for a long time, thinking over the events of the last few days and that last battle in particular. Was I making a mistake? Nothing was going according to plan. I mean, I expected some problems. No plan survives first contact with the enemy and all that, but it was really going off the rails.

Why, Calen? Why’d you do it? Wasn’t it obvious that I was antagonizing Zion on purpose? No one starts out a new game and goes straight for the raid boss thinking “this should be fine.” I had plans, and those plans didn’t include her. I needed everyone to think that I was out of control and out to tear down the world. It was the only way to keep them away. To keep them safe. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to anyone else again.

What really scared me though was how close to the surface those feelings really were. I couldn’t tell where the act began and where I do. I tried not to look too deeply inside myself lately, after everything that happened with mom. There was a monster lurking down there, and I just hoped the cage held. All I can do now is to work toward something that might help and hope it doesn’t destroy me in the mean time.

Deathclawz, you had better be right about all of this, because if you’re wrong I just screwed my best chance at getting strong enough and influential enough to find out who hurt mom. If that happened—the beast in my chest snarled and rammed the walls of its prison. I took a deep breath.

Calen. I sighed. I guess my plans had better make room, because we we’re stuck in it now.

Wait. Where was my body? I reached out my arm in front of me toward the text and the 30 minute count down timer that had appeared. My hand pressed against a smooth surface and a light show went off in my brain. My arm screamed at me that I’d made a big mistake moving it around. That pain suddenly brought to light all of the aches and pains across my body and bruised face.

At my touch the lid to the immersion capsule slid open. I closed my eyes and moaned for a bit longer. I felt worse than when I had gotten into the capsule. All of the muscles on my body felt tired and strained. A sweat had broken out on my forehead from the sharp pain in my arm. I pushed it all to the back of my mind, gritted my teeth and slowly got out of the capsule. I checked the time. We’d been in for about an hour, though it had felt longer inside the game. Quincy had mentioned a time dilation affect. Time in the game moved twice as fast. I shook my head. This technology was going to wreak havoc on intellectual based jobs. You could log into Infinity just for the time delay and knock out an 8 hour work day in 4 hours, cram for that exam. I wondered what would happen if you logged in just to sleep. Could you sleep four hours and get 8 hours worth of rest? I decided I’d have to test it out and see.

I used the restroom, checking on the apartment and everyone in it. They were still logged into the game and the cameras and security equipment showed that everything else looked normal. I made my way back to my room and worked my way through a series of stretches Gerald regularly browbeat me into working into my morning routine. I did them more days a week than I didn’t, which I felt was pretty good. I stepped into a movement Gerald called the “spiderman.” I groaned as my sore muscles protested. I felt like I’d been in a fight. At that, I thought back to the arena. I considered the strikes I’d made with the sword and the movements I’d performed. As I worked my way through the memory I realized that all of those muscle groups I had used were what was most sore on my body. What was going on here?

I remembered the pain I’d felt in shooting the arrows with my arm. The one I had broken in real life, yet was undamaged on my avatar. I glanced down at the cast that wound up my wrist and around my thumb. I flexed my fingers. A dull pain throbbed at the movement. I took a shooters stance and mimed pulling an arrow.

I couldn’t tell.

There wasn’t any draw weight from an actual bow and my shoulders and arms were without a doubt the strongest muscles I had. They’d developed over long hours and thousands of arrows shot down range, not to mention rolling on the mat, and sword training with Gerald. If anything, they were the one place that wasn’t sore. I didn’t feel like any of the wounds I had taken in the game were bothering me. That was definitely a plus. I didn’t need to wake up from the game with a perforated kidney. I set the mystery aside as I finished up my mobility exercises and used the foam roller in the corner to work out more of the stiffness. I moved more easily as I made my way to the fridge. My muscles were still sore but now there were loose and warm.

The fridge was stocked with bottled water, lunch meats, and vegetables. The freezer had chicken breast, bags of microwavable steamed veggies and the remaining space was packed full of hot pockets.

I climbed back into the rig, popping the last bit of pepperoni and crust into my mouth and finishing off the rest of the water bottle. I touched the close icon and was met with a system message after the capsule had encased my body.

Due to the intervention of a System Administrator (Zion) your resurrection bind point has been established.

Do you wish to resurrect?

Yes/No

My heartbeat began to quicken. Instead of reaching out with my hand, I tried thinking the command to accept the resurrection. My vision went black as all of my senses seemed to switch off at once. I blinked to check my vision again.

The moment my eyes flicked open I found myself laying on a bedroll in front of a fire.

Congratulations! You have discovered a new location, Greenwood Forest! 4/5 locations discovered until next achievement.

A branch snapped behind me and I sat up quickly, running my hands over myself and on the ground around me for a weapon. I turned to find Calen pushing through the branches of the trees behind me. Her arms were full of heavy dead branches. She moved past me, glancing quickly at my eyes and then back to the fire.

“I was beginning to wonder how long it would take for you to come back.” She piled the wood up next to a much larger pile. She’d been busy.

“Uh, yeah. I had to wait for the resurrection timer to finish.” I ran my fingers through my hair awkwardly. “What is this place? Did you make the camp? How long have you been here? How’d you know that I would show up at all?”

She turned back to me. “I’ve been here about an hour. I resurrected pretty much immediately after…” She trailed off. “When I woke up I was in this camp. I got an achievement for being the first to discover the Greenwood Forest. I was pretty scared at first, being here by myself, but I noticed there was a second bedroll set up, so I just figured… I’ve been collecting extra wood to keep the fire going and looking around. I wasn’t sure how long it would take and a lot of things in the forest are scared of fire. So I didn’t want ours to go out.”

That, that actually made a lot of sense. She didn’t just sit around and push off the responsibility for taking action and making something happen. She got to work. It was like seeing her in a whole new light. We’d always been friends, ever since I could remember. Living with Jane and having Kaylin always there it had always felt like I’d had two sisters instead of just the one. I let my eyes move over her for a moment. She was outfitted in the standard beginning adventurer kit. Leather boots, belt, and rough spun tunic and trousers, but her bearing transformed the garb into something more. A flash of green caught my eye as I noticed something I hadn’t before. A series of thin silver links wove through her hair and caressed an emerald as it lay suspended on her brow. It matched her eyes perfectly. I couldn’t look away. I knew I had to say something. I cleared my throat.

“Calen.” I said softly. “About… what happened in the arena. I’m sorry.”

She held up a hand forestalling anything else I might say. “It’s not your fault, Ja—” She laughed gently. “I guess its Walker here.” She straightened her shoulders. “It’s not your fault. You don’t have anything to apologize for. I made my decision and I knew that I’d have to live with it, even if I was unsure of just what those consequences might be, I accepted that as well.”

“But why? Why’d you do it?”

She paused a long moment. “You know why I did it, Walker. You have been trying to push everyone and everything away from you since the accident. I haven’t said anything until now, because I know how hard it is to lose someone you care for and the last thing I needed when I was in your shoes were empty platitudes. All the “everything will be okay’s”, “I’m sorry’s”, and “I can’t imagine how you must feel’s” in the world don’t help and don’t change anything. But I think after everything that’s happened, I’ve earned the right to this conversation. Right now you’re angry, confused, and looking for something to fight against. Some enemy that you can lash out against and you don’t know what to do, because as things stand there isn’t anything to fight. Cancer has a way of making you feel the same way.” She said the last very quietly. “You haven’t even considered the possibility that what happened do your mom was an accident. And before you say anything, I’m not saying that it was or that it wasn’t. What I’m saying is that you want to go out there and find a dragon to fight. Some villain who’s caused you so much pain. Let me tell you. You’ll find it. Whether they are real or not, you’ll find someone or something to fight. If they actually have anything to do with what happened to you or not will be irrelevant. And Jack?… When you win?… It doesn’t make you feel any better… You want to push everyone away so that when you find that hornets nest and kick it, you wont have to face the guilt of being the cause of the backlash hurting someone you care about. Jack? The people you care about? They care about you too.” A tear traced its way down her face. “When you push them away and when you put yourself in danger and they can’t be there to help you?” She turned back to the woods, walking slowly. She paused before entering the trees. Her voice drifted back to me on the breeze. “That hurts worse than anything anyone else could do to them.” The branches of the trees and leaves seemed to draw her into them, and away from me.

I sat staring into the fire for a long time afterward. I never even wiped the tears from my face. I wouldn’t have, even if I had realized they were there.