Vault of the Magi: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 5) Read online

  Religious streams aside, most AR experiences had some sort of game mechanic involved. But despite so many years spent gaming, AR-type titles had never appealed to Devon. The goggles did nothing to—for example—change the fact that it was colder than the underside of an iceberg outside. Why modify only your visual input when you could get in a VR pod or install a set of Entwined implants and enter a whole new reality?

  “Remind you of Fort Kolob?” Tamara asked, nudging Devon with her elbow. They’d met while working together at the cheesy Wild West tourist trap. The Fort had used a mix of augmented reality and actors to deliver its hokey experience.

  “I’d be totally fine if nothing reminded me of Fort Kolob again.”

  Tamara laughed. “With you there.”

  A few paces ahead, Tamara’s parents walked arm in arm. Without goggles, they gazed at the thousands of twinkling lights that had been installed on the buildings and desert palms. Overhead, tiny glittering drones danced and flitted like fireflies, sometimes flocking together, sometimes swirling in streams down the mall. It was pretty. But still not worth freezing her toes off for.

  Devon pulled her coat tighter.

  “I know,” Tamara muttered, seeming to notice the movement. “Colder than usual this year. The worst was probably fifteen years ago, though. We had wet slush falling out of the sky and a nasty wind. I think me and Mom and Dad were almost the only people down here.”

  Devon grimaced. “Why come then?”

  Tamara gave an ironic-sounding laugh. “Tradition, I guess. I suppose it helped that I still believed in Santa Claus, and he was supposed to be sitting near the roundabout.”

  Devon ran the math in her head. Fifteen years ago, Tamara would have been seven or so. Still believing that a jolly fat man somehow came down her chimney and left presents. Meanwhile, Devon had already learned to hate Christmas because it usually meant that her mother gave herself an extra-large bottle of vodka or a handful of pills to celebrate. If there was a time she’d believed in Santa, Devon no longer remembered it.

  She pushed the bad memories away. “So was he there?”

  Tamara’s mom looked over her shoulder. “He was a no-show. Can you believe it? I thought we’d never get Tamara to sleep that night because she was convinced Santa was dead and there’d be no presents. The city council heard an earful from me after that.”

  Tamara smirked. “I don’t remember that part. Anyway…so, yeah. I guess compared to that Christmas Eve, this is pleasant.”

  Devon glanced at her friend, trying not to see the oxygen tube. Other than a belief in Santa, what other things had that seven-year-old girl dreamed about? Had she hoped to be a sponsored mountain biker someday? The crash that had damaged Tamara’s lungs—and nearly killed her when her body had a severe reaction to the nano-surgeons introduced to repair her lungs and spleen—had stolen far more from her than the no-show Santa had. Devon hoped that Relic Online would bring back some of the adventure that Tamara could no longer experience. But seeing her friend’s face, cheeks pink from the chill air, Devon felt a wave of paranoia. Had she over-promised? What if Tamara didn’t enjoy the immersion? The surgery couldn’t be entirely without risks, especially given Tamara’s weakened state.

  She swallowed, torn over whether she should say anything. When Tamara nudged her with an elbow and pointed to a stand selling chocolate truffles, Devon forced the worry away. Tamara would be okay. And she would do whatever was necessary to make her friend’s experience in Relic Online amazing.

  After indulging in way too many treats and wandering through countless pools of music from carolers and harpists—as far as Devon was concerned, anyone who could play an instrument bare-fingered in this cold was some sort of mutant—they finally finished the circuit of the mall. Devon parted ways from Tamara’s family, grabbing her own autocab home.

  On the way, she thought of her guildmates. It was hard to imagine what Owen had been going through over the last few days. Immediately after she and Chen had pulled their friend from Zaa’s clutches, freeing his mind from the demonic AI’s influence and his avatar’s body from the underworld, Owen had logged out. Devon assumed that E-Squared had remained in touch with him and his girlfriend, Cynthia, but she hadn’t heard any specifics. Right now, she figured that Owen needed time to process—it wasn’t just that his brain had been co-opted. His own father had tried to use him as a political pawn. Whether Governor Calhoun really understood the danger he’d put Owen in was up for debate. But the fact that his motivation had been more for his campaign than his son’s safety must have devastated Owen.

  Having been through her own demonic possession, Devon thought that, someday, she and Owen might be able to help each other. She didn’t really know what that would look like—Devon’s “Talks about Feelings” skill was lower than her abysmal in-game Stealth score. But after what he had been through, she would try, if it would help him.

  But that was in the future. For now, she had to hope that he was having a good Christmas Eve.

  As for her other in-game friends, it wasn’t entirely true that Devon had always spent her Christmases alone in game. More often than not, Hailey had been online doing the same thing as Devon. Solo quests, character maintenance, that kind of stuff. By unspoken agreement, they’d generally avoided one another, perhaps because neither wanted to have a guildmate witness to their loneliness. But thinking about it now, Devon couldn’t help but want to reach out. She and Hailey had grown closer after the conflict over Hailey’s secret livestream of their last raid in Avatharn Online. Maybe it was time to take that extra step and make sure Hailey didn’t feel too alone this Christmas. The woman hadn’t been responding to Devon’s attempts to contact her via messenger outside the game, but Devon didn’t want to let her own insecurity over being ignored get in the way of reaching out.

  She opened her messenger and subvocalized a note.

  “Hey Hailey. Merry Christmas and all that. Want to break tradition and group up tomorrow? Let me know!”

  Chapter Four

  HAILEY JERKED AS a knock came at her door, both shocked and embarrassed that she was lying in bed with a dinner tray over her lap. It wasn’t like she let the robot bring her meals to her bedside every day. But today was Christmas Eve. The decision to stay in bed was an early present to herself, a temporary respite from having to walk to her table with what felt like knives in her joints and a tourniquet squeezing her rib cage when she tried to breathe.

  Well, okay. It wasn’t just today. She’d taken two other meals in bed last week claiming to herself that it was a reward for helping rescue the little dwarf kid from his adopted capybara mother. And the week before, there’d been another excuse. The truth was, it was getting so damn hard to force herself to move.

  The knock came again, proving it wasn’t some weird figment of her imagination. Swallowing, she smoothed the covers and pulled fingers to her tangled hair. Why did someone have to show up now?

  “You can come in,” she said, then grimaced. Had that sounded rude? Aside from her weekly meetings with the doctor assigned to the care facility, she hardly ever saw people. Robots cleaned her room, and even though she was supposed to have human contact to keep her spirits up—that was what the law said even though most of her needs could be met by the bots—she suspected the nurses skirted the requirement by checking in while Hailey was sleeping. Slumbering patients didn’t need to be talked to or reassured. Made it easier for a small staff to cover the resident population.

  Or maybe Hailey had agreed to reduced visits, waiving her legal rights when they’d wanted to pull her out of the game at an inconvenient time. Her memory was a little fuzzy these days with all the medications. Plus she made an active effort not to think about her life outside of the game whenever she entered Relic Online. Acts of willful forgetfulness.

  Hailey set down her fork when the door opened, and her doctor stepped into the room.

  She cocked her head. “Were we…Did I miss our appointment?” They
usually met outside her room in a different sterilized chamber where the doctor had access to more equipment and screens.

  The man shook his head. “I sent you a message. I mean, my assistant did. Are you having troubles with your connectivity?”

  Hailey swallowed. Yeah, so not getting a message would be her fault. For the last six or eight weeks, she’d been constantly harassed at her public messenger contact by members of the griefer guild from Relic Online. Recently, none of her attempts to block them had worked because if they were good at nothing else, they were the experts at harassment. She’d gotten fed up with deleting their nasty-grams and had decided to take a few days off. At the very least, the one-avatar-per-player rule that still held in Relic Online meant that they couldn’t create new characters just to hassle her, and so she’d been able to block them there. The interaction with her friends inside the game was all she needed anyway, or so she told herself to make the situation tolerable.

  “There’s no problem with my connection. I just haven’t been online.”

  An indecipherable expression crossed the doctor’s face. “Well, I sent you some materials to look at before we met. I…I figured you would have had a chance to look through them and process the information.”

  “Process?”

  “I imagine you haven’t been feeling well, lately.”

  Hailey snorted. The last time she’d felt well was before she could legally drink alcohol.

  The doctor had the grace to look ashamed. “Worse than usual, I mean.”

  “I guess. That or my willpower’s been a little weaker.”

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself when you need to rest. I wish we could’ve done more for you over the years.” He clasped his hands before him, his expression genuine if nothing else.

  “Wait a minute. Could have?”

  “The numbers don’t look good, Hailey. Your liver especially. Your disease…it…”

  “I know. My body attacks my own organs like they’re some kind of crazy invaders.”

  “I’m afraid it’s ramped up its efforts lately.”

  “Okay…?”

  “I put in another request to Cornell University. They have a new experimental treatment going into trials this month.”

  Hailey sighed. She appreciated the effort, but she wasn’t an idiot. Maybe if she had a governor for a father like Owen, or maybe if she had some spectator-friendly super-talent for something other than livestreaming her video game exploits. Lacking any publicity or political leverage, she was pretty much a dead fish as far as applications for experimental therapies went.

  “We should hear back within the week,” the doctor said. “But if it’s another ‘No’…Hailey, we need to start looking at end-of-life options.”

  Chapter Five

  “I CANNOT TOLERATE this,” Greel said without preamble. “The incompetence around here is already pervasive. And apparently, it will only get worse. I know what happens with starborn first experiencing this realm. They can scarcely find their way out of the tavern without running into walls.”

  Devon was sitting on a simple bench outside the head leatherworker, Gerrald’s, specialty workshop. When she’d knocked on the door, he’d cracked it open, then gone wide-eyed with apparent panic at seeing her. Apparently he was putting the finishing touches on her new armor.

  “So you heard we’re expecting a bunch of noobs soon,” Devon said with a sigh.

  The lawyer curled his lip and started pacing. “It can hardly be missed with that…woman lurking near the base of the cliff.”

  “Uh…what woman?”

  “She calls herself a fighter trainer. Says she can instruct in the martial arts, rogue training, even ranged combat styles. But I saw her working through a training exercise. She was stiff as a scarecrow, and the sapling she targeted scarcely trembled with her blows.” Greel scoffed, shaking his head in disgust. “Frankly, if we allow these people to instruct newcomers, we might as well line them up outside the walls as human shields for all the good they’ll do when your demon army comes.”

  Devon sighed. “Who told you about the demon army?”

  The man sneered. “Truly, do you think I have no powers of observation? It’s been written all over your face since you returned from the hell plane. Hezbek simply confirmed my suspicion when I questioned her. You could have considered confiding your fears in me as well. If you wished Stonehaven to survive the coming trials, that is.”

  “Okay, so you don’t like the offensive fighting trainer. Maybe you could lend a hand in getting these newcomers in combat shape, then.”

  Devon tried not to laugh at the look of abject horror on Greel’s face. She was still holding out hope that Veia would reconsider the plan to drop a bunch of level-one players in her lap, but the torment the impending arrivals appeared to be causing the lawyer almost made the situation worth it.

  “It should be obvious why I’ll choose not to dignify that suggest with a response. I will, however, inquire as to whether or not you’ve put forth an agreement to the new trainers as to exactly which roles they shall be allowed to fill in the settlement. I assume they’ve gone through the same naturalization process as our other citizens.”

  “Uh…naturalization? Sounds like a druid thing.”

  The man’s upper lip trembled. “Tell me you’ve requested their allegiance to Stonehaven in the same way you’ve asked the refugees to swear fealty.”

  “Do you mean where Jarleck or someone he delegates invites them to join the settlement? I hadn’t really thought of that as swearing fealty.”

  Greel scoffed. “Spin it how you like, Miss Overlord. When a prospective citizen accepts the invitation to join Stonehaven, they are entering into a legally binding agreement. They cannot act against our interests without suffering a tremendous reputation hit—though a codified rule set to react to such events is something I’ve wished to propose. We need a formal system of laws to guide our responses to acts of harm against township interests.”

  “Can you speak in plain English please?” Devon said. She had the gist of what he was getting at but didn’t trust him not to weasel her into an unpleasant agreement with too many verbal convolutions.

  Greel rolled his eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. “We need rules, Devon.”

  “Oh? What kind? It seems to me that the settlement is doing fine.”

  “But what happens if a merchant steals from the vendor next door? Or how about if one of these bumbling fools you’re so keen to accept runs over and tries to attack a Stonehaven guard immediately after entering our realm. I hear the stories the starborn tell. There are worlds where such a naive action would be penalized with death. Do we really wish to force our citizens to witness the slaughter of newly arrived humans, even if they are idiots?”

  Devon blinked. Okay, he had a point. In tons of games, attacking city guards—or any members of a settlement—was a sure way to get marked as Kill on Sight by the city’s faction. She’d seen plenty of noobs spawn and make that mistake. Actually attacking a city and taking control was a high-level objective for some guilds, so the guards could usually flatten a level-one player in a single hit.

  Yeah, so getting labeled as Kill on Sight for kicking a guard in the shin didn’t seem like the right philosophy for Stonehaven. Even if she could figure out a way to prevent the new player invasion, what if someone else from the settlement had a little too much dwarven ale and mistook a guard for an attacking antelope? What if a player from the nearby camp accidentally walked out of a shop without paying for a Spool of Cotton Thread? In some games, getting caught thieving could bring the whole guard force down on a character.

  Or what if a player stole an item on purpose? What should the penalty be? Did they need to start recruiting security for businesses and homes inside the walls now too? It often felt like they scarcely had enough fighters to stand sentry against actual attacks.

  Devon hadn’t considered any of this stuff. There wasn’t an interface in the
settlement management screens to configure rules for Stonehaven citizens. She’d just assumed that the game had mechanics built in for handling the NPCs’ responses to aggressive actions. But that wouldn’t really make sense when each of the citizens was self-aware. Any sane person would freak out if they saw a newbie player murdered in the streets for accidentally body-checking a gate guard.

  “When were you proposing to draft these laws?”

  “Well, I was going to finish the resource accounting in consideration of the new flow of iron and gold from the mines. Plus a broader treatment of census data with the goal of determining how truly mediocre a skill set our population represents. And of course my history of the founding and early struggles of Stonehaven—I feel that account will inspire many who find themselves subject to questionable leadership. They should know there is always hope.”

  Devon rolled her eyes. “Yes, I can only imagine how you must have despaired when I freed you from an ogre whose greatest skill was growing moldy toe cheese. How terrible it must have been to be led to a place where we could build an actual town.”

  “Hamlet.”

  “Huh?”

  “At last count, I believe Stonehaven still required dozens of buildings to qualify as a township. We’re still a hamlet.”

  “Have you always been this pedantic?”

  “Have you always been so imprecise?”

  She fixed him with a flat stare. “So let’s assume you put the writing of Stonehaven’s history on hold, despite the two or three people who might read it someday… How long would it take you to come up with some rules? I mean, just the basic stuff. Ten or fewer rules and the consequences for breaking them. If it’s longer than a page, I won’t approve it.”

  Again, Greel’s face contorted with horror. “You understand that there’s a reason legal documents need so much space for so little substance. The risk of misinterpretation, it’s…” He shook his head. “It simply won’t work. If I am to amend the town charter—”