Spark(9)

Non-player characters, NPCs, thronged the streets, selling their wares: bunches of herbs and flowers, loaves of bread, shiny knives. One corner boasted a juggler, while another featured a yellow-haired girl playing the fiddle. Sounds and smells filled the air, and Spark did her best to describe the mix of fresh-baked bread, dust, and lavender.
“We’ll swing by the Lucky Tavern,” she said, cutting through an alleyway. “Always good to start your questing with a refreshing beverage.”
The crowd laughed at that, as they were supposed to.
Spark entered the tavern and ordered a tankard of ale. She took a swig, then set it with a clunk on the wooden bar.
“Doesn’t taste too bad, though nothing like real ale. Not that I’d know, being below the drinking age.” She made her character wink, and the crowd joined in her amusement. “I heard that in the early stages of development, everything in-game tasted like bananas. Compared to that, ale is divine. You can order fruit juice or water, too, if that’s more your speed. VirtuMax tries to cover all the bases—though I’ve yet to see an espresso stand in the city.”
“Maybe someone should start one up!” a guy called from the crowd.
“He’d get business,” Spark said. “Actually, one of the upcoming expansions includes an interactive life simulation, so if your dream is to become a shopkeeper in Stronghold, with a few adventures on the side, you can do that. Or you can just spend all your time killing monsters. Speaking of which…”
She activated the final demo sequence. Her character materialized at the edge of a lake. Sunlight sparkled off the silver-blue water, and behind her stretched a field of golden grain. In front of her, though, the earth was charred and barren, a blackened swath leading up to a tumbled pile of boulders that were obviously the lair of some dire creature.
“One of the interesting things about Feyland,” she said, sending her character toward the stones, “is that the fights change, depending on your characters and party members. If I were in a group with a heavily armored fighter and a caster, for example, I’d find a different monster waiting ahead. As it is, the fights are challenging, though not impossible.”
Unless the gamer stumbled into the Realm of Faerie. But her job was to make sure that didn’t happen.
“So, you’re on easy mode?” some heckler called.
“No. I might die in this fight, which would be embarrassing.” The crowd chuckled along with her. “Just like in other games, dying is pretty inconvenient, and involves corpse-running. That is, taking time to run your ghost from the graveyard back to where you died, so you can reincorporate.”
She strode up to the very edge of the rocks and drew her bow from her back. Then, cautiously, she crept forward. Past the first outcropping lay an open area of bare ground, and behind it gaped the dark maw of a cave.
“It smells bad here—like charred hair and rotten meat. The developers had fun with the scent-scapes, though not everything is nasty in-game. I should have mentioned that the tavern smelled like wood smoke and baking bread.”
Something stirred in the back of the cave, and adrenaline spun through her. Quickly, she nocked an arrow and ducked for the partial cover of the granite boulder beside her.
With a scuttling rush, a creature charged into the clearing. Half lizard, half fighting rooster, it had the sharp-beaked head and nasty talons of a bird and a long, whip-like tail ending in a wicked spike. The whole hideous package stood over ten feet tall. It scanned the clearing and let out an angry shriek.
“Basilisk,” she said in a low voice. “Paralyzes for two seconds with its gaze, highly venomous bite, lethal tail spike.”
Spark’s focus tightened until she forgot she was in a demo game. The watching crowd faded until there was nothing but her character, and the fight.
Aiming for one of the creature’s yellow-crusted eyes, Spark let her arrow fly, then ducked back behind her boulder. The basilisk let out a squawk that sounded more annoyed than pain-filled. Damn, she’d missed. Which meant she now had a fully pissed-off bird looking to kill her.
She bent low and ran to a smaller tumble of rocks. Barely in time. The spike of the creature’s tail stabbed through the air where she’d just been. It was hard for her to take aim at the basilisk while avoiding its line of sight. She shot another arrow, this one landing in the joint of the creature’s leg.
Unfortunately, its lizard scales plated the basilisk in nearly impenetrable armor. She had to find its weak spots. There might be one behind its ankle, though with that sharp spur it wasn’t an easy target. Better than the eyes, though, which were going to be hard to reach unless she got a perfect shot.