Book coming out in weeks. Some chapters while you wait.

Thank you all for your patience.  The book is done and almost finished in editing and the cover is being refined.  I should have it out on Amazon in the next few weeks.  Here are the first chapters for you in the meantime.

CHAPTER 1

    Behind me was the hidden entrance to my old home, a brutal instance I had been trapped in for weeks. In front of me was an unexplored savage wilderness.

Whatever you tell yourself, home is where you spend most of your time. If it is at the office, that is home. If you spend your life with your nose in a book, then books are your home. It turns out that my home had, until just a few minutes ago, been the Mines of Madness! Or, as I often thought of it, that stinking prison where I had murdered my best friend.

I hated that pit, but a lot of people hate it at home so that doesn’t change anything. Lots of people also can’t escape their home situation so that didn’t disqualify my dungeon for home status either.

Before the world ended, video games were home for lots of people: they spent as much of their lives in them as they could. People used to fantasize about actually living in a video game.

Fantasies are never as good in reality as you thought they would be. That is why they are called fantasies.

If you haven’t much experience with humanity let me clue you in. It turns out people are idiots. Not that I am any better. I’m people too. Look at where I was. I was living the dream that millions held before we broke the world. I don’t know who was stupider, them for thinking life in a video game would be great, or me for actually living in a video game.

The Mines of Madness! was in Professor Brady’s territory.  Given how he ran his turf I was probably the only person ever to come to this slice of the Crib.  Thank God for that.

Wiser heads have said that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. My head is ok, but not one of the wiser types. I was having trouble considering my inconveniences to be adventures. I had to admit it felt great to be out of the mines.

Remus, my wolf-brother, was lolling around waiting for me to decide what to do next. Wolves don’t worry about much. He’d use the time I spent philosophizing licking himself and know that he spent his time more wisely.

Me, I had about thirty weeks left of my year and a day bet with Maya Eastman. First prize if I win the bet is a bunch of nano. Second place wins a lifetime of slavery. All I had to do was finish off four more of the five beginner’s quests. Everyone left alive is issued one -- one of them -- when they grow up and get to start playing the Game. I had to finish all five.

Well, now you are all caught up on my situation.

In the months I’d been playing, I had finished the Trade Quest and that’s it. At this pace things weren’t looking good. Especially since it had been a fluke that I’d finished that one. I could do enough worrying for both me and Remus.

On the positive side, for the moment I was safe, at least from my human enemies. Slavering monsters hopefully abounded down there in the valley. I needed the experience. You can see that I embrace the optimist’s view of life since I noted being alone, surrounded by monsters that wanted to kill me, and cut off from any civilization as a check-mark in the plus column.

I pulled up my quest log and focused on the Beginner’s Quests:

·        Settlement Building

·        Crafting/Gathering

·        Trade (completed)

·        Problem Solving

·        Combat

Settlement Building and perhaps Crafting/Gathering seemed like the ones to tackle. I opened Settlement Building and a Blue window popped up:

Settlement Building “Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.” –  R. A. H. “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.” - Player Marx Humanity needs you to create safe spaces for the people! Develop settlements that meet the needs of the people and keep them safe from the monsters of the wild. Recommended minimum number of players 18. You must increase the settlement quality or capacity by a minimum of 10 times the size of the party used to develop the settlement.

The Party had this quest locked up just like all the others. They had claimed all the land and controlled all the settlements. A new player would have to come to them, cap in hand, and at best get permission to work on further developing towns and hamlets the clans owned. Pretty good deal if you can get your laborers and contractors to pay you for the privilege of remodeling your castle or enhancing your walls.

I decided to make a quick check and stacked together some of the loose timber around the mine entrance. Even this crude effort should be enough to trigger the building menus. After the third beam I received a message:

**Temporary Encampments Only** This territory is claimed by the Goldman Sachs Group* Building, agricultural cultivation or permanent enhancement is prohibited without permission. Development inquiries contact: Professor Brady, Room 3, Town Inn, Quartzite. *a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast

Brady was the gray market crime boss who sold me off to the Eastmans and threw me down a mine shaft. He had no love for me. That wasn’t personal to me. He universally had no love for people. He had no hate for people. Just uses for people.

He had offered me a job in order to ingratiate himself with my father. But it was clear that once he made use of you, you stayed his. I already had someone I was in a desperate struggle to avoid being enslaved to. One should be monogamous with that kind of thing. I was old fashioned that way.

Part of me had hoped that my time in the Mines would qualify as completing the Combat or Problem Solving quests but no notices had come when I finished soloing the end boss. Well, by process of elimination, Gathering was the quest to focus on.

The mine exit was at the top of a bluff overlooking the valley floor. Looking over the edge, there didn’t seem to be a decent path down. Descending looked like a scramble at best. The cliff-side was mostly packed earth and rock that looked like it could just as easily come loose as support my weight.

Remus cocked one brow as he waited for me to decide what to do. My large-scale Lincoln Log game hadn’t interested him enough to do more than the aforementioned brow cock.

With a gesture, a length of rope I had brought into the dungeon and never gotten the chance to use came out of my inventory. I tied it around one of the well planted beams framing the entrance back into the instance and threw the rest of the coil over the side of the bluff. This caused Remus to lazily get up from his flop and sniff along the edge of the cliff-side.

As soon as I grabbed the rope and started backing down towards the valley floor, he started working his way down on his own. Four legs and a lower center of gravity made it a piece of cake for him. He didn’t seem to care that he was causing lots of dirt and loose rocks to fall on me as he made his way down. Thankfully after a few switchbacks above me he got bored of kicking dust into my face and sped down below.

Slowly but surely, I scaled down the cliff. I couldn’t tell if or how my Beginner Spelunking skill was helping. I was only 177 skill points away from Journeyman status.

Most of the time the Game was attempting to create a rule-set that simulated real life. But reality is endlessly more fluid and subtle than any artificial set of rules can ever be. The more explicit the rules, the more the Game could be bizarre compared to reality.

I wasn’t in a cave, so technically I was rock climbing not spelunking. Did the game care one way or the other? Clambering down a cliff was the same inside or outside a cave. Why should it matter if I was in a cave or not? Even more oddly, some skills in the Game might trigger depending on proximity to things. So, since I was climbing down a hillside filled with mine tunnels my skill boost may have been in effect. I was cave-adjacent and that might be good enough for the Game.

My father had made a better simulation of reality than I was giving him credit for. Inside or out of the Game we are always impacted by rules, forces and influences we have no idea about.

The sun beat down on me, creating shadows so black that I couldn’t make out details of where to find footholds, so I ended up mostly using feel to work my way down. I found that if I leaned out from the wall it was easier to use the cliff face to brace myself but it also gave me a huge sense of vertigo. I wanted to hug the cliff but that was bad technique. Maybe my skill was working.

Beyond spelunking, I had other skills. Just before she dropped the dime on me to Brady and the Eastmans, my master in the arcane arts, Maddie the Witch, had given me some scrolls, one of which increased my Wildlife Knowledge (local).

I was counting on this skill to give me a shot at beating the Gathering Quest. It was also Wildlife Knowledge (local) that allowed me to properly identify the hissing giant spider as an example of Menemerus bivittatus (Gray Wall Jumper) when it came out of its burrow to see who was clambering around in its territory.

Gray Wall Jumper Menemerus bivittatus Found almost exclusively on the exterior walls of cliff faces, dungeons, abandoned buildings or other structures, this is a common example of a monstrous spider. All monstrous spiders are aggressive predators that use their poisonous bite to subdue or kill prey. Monstrous spiders come in two general types: hunters and web-spinners. Hunters rove about, while web-spinners usually attempt to trap prey. Hunting spiders can spin webs to use as lairs but cannot use their webs as weapons the way web-spinners can.

It would have been nice if the blue box had told me whether I was facing a hunter or a web-spinner. I must not have had a high enough knowledge skill. In the end it didn’t really matter as I only had one plan either way. I started what someone might charitably describe as a controlled fall down the cliff side. As I tumbled down I’d tighten down on the rope now and again, creating rope burns but getting my speed down to something I thought I’d survive when I ran out of rope.

The spider aggro’ed in on me and gracefully made its way towards me. Its hairy legs had no problem finding purchase, and despite me tumbling downward at near freefall it was closing fast. It was a hunter. If not, it would have already spat webs at me.

At just over ten feet from the bottom I ran out of rope. I was going too fast to stop and free climb the rest of the way down. Instead I dropped into a roll. It hurt like a son of a bitch but I received no damage notices. Another sign that those spelunking skills might be in effect.

I got unsteadily to my feet just as the spider also decided to forgo climbing the rest of the cliff and launched itself at me from about twenty feet up.

There was just enough time to pull out my Spatha, Wyrmmdigger’s Bane, and get it between us. The rime of icy magic that gave my blade an impossibly sharp edge shattered. The blade itself felt like it was covered in cold oil and even before the spider hit me I could barely hold onto the thing. Right. Wyrmmdigger’s Bane was specc’ed to be one specific tribe of kobold’s worst nightmare. Without it I’d never have made it out of the Mines of Madness! Fighting anything else I might as well as be wielding a wet noodle.

Ever have that dream where you are attacked by a giant spider and you can’t keep hold of your weapon? I hadn’t until then either. Now it was part of my nightmare pantheon for the rest of my life. The hilt wrenched itself free from my grip as I was smashed to the ground with the Spider on top of me. One of its forelegs pierced all the way through my shoulder and its mandibles were inches from my face.

I ignored the damage notice and the pain to focus on the mandibles twitching and lunging for my face. Poison was expressed out of glands that lined the mandibles, coating them like snot. As the thing got more excited at the idea of eating my face it pumped the poison out in small spurts. The venom’s smell competed with the sight of the poison-covered mandibles straining towards my face for pride of place in my future nightmares. Arthropods are horrifying.

You may be judging me harshly for lack of proper preparation leading to my poor performance. Guilty as charged. No excuses. Not swapping out my weapon once I exited the mines was stupid. I hope it redeems me a bit in your eyes that I remembered the spell cached in my recently acquired Ring of Spell Storage and unleashed it into the Gray Wall Jumper’s thorax.

“Maijika Misā'īla!”

Three tiny comets of arcane force flew from my ring, made a short u-turn, and hit the spider one after the other in the exact same spot. The gray hairy body deformed at the first strike and cracked on the second. The third entered the wound and the creature stopped trying to close in for the kill and just twitched randomly as its life drained away. The loot from the Mines of Madness end boss really was the perfect item for me. Yay, Ring of Spell Storage.

As I scrabbled out from underneath the dead spider, adrenaline from the sudden attack allowed me to pull the leg out of my shoulder with a short sharp yank. Pain is odd when you know your wounds aren’t real. I was learning to handle it under the rush of combat. I had no idea if I could do as well getting pierced through the shoulder in real life, and had no plans to find out.

I spun around and searched the cliff face to see if this was part of a swarm. Nothing else seemed poised to attack me. My breathing started to calm and I quickly found one of the least crappy swords looted from the Wyrmmdiggers in my bag of holding and equipped it.

Looking around I found Wyrmmdigger’s Bane lying where it had been flung, covered in dirt and dust. I put it in my inventory on the off chance I ever ran into more of the tribe.

Remus wandered over, gave the spider a sniff, moved away till he was far enough that the leaking body wouldn’t bother him and flopped down again.

“Some help you are,” I said.

All I got in return was a yawn.

It took me a few tries to reload the spell ring with another Magic Missile. Then I pulled out some tools and went to work harvesting what I could from the spider. Dissecting a giant spider is not the easiest of tasks. I had damaged one of the claws pulling it out of my shoulder. So, from this battle I had gained a chunk of experience, a shoulder wound and these items:

Poison Sac x 2

Spider Claw x 7

I had thought I’d start working on the Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest when I got down to the valley, but the spider had given me some points even before I hit the valley floor.

The Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest was the simplest and the most commonly given.

“Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” - Player Marx Humanity needs materials and items crafted from them to survive! Collect or craft items and donate them.

Seems simple right? You could donate just about anything. Anything you made or looted: potions, weapons, armor, devices, scrolls, anything. Any base materials could be donated: herbs, ores, monster parts, eggs, tamed creatures, captured creatures, gold--anything.

This was the quest that almost everyone received. This was the quest that most everyone worked towards. The Party didn’t control access to working on this quest. It had the fewest seeming barriers to entry. In fact, it had only one. But boy was it a doozy. The proof of this is that most people never left The Crib.

With some manipulation of my game interface, I was able to “donate” the Gray Wall Jumper’s loot towards completing the quest. I was rewarded with a completion bar. As far as I could discern my donation had no effect whatsoever. That was how little the loot I had just donated counted towards finishing. With some further manipulation of my interface I was able to figure out that the items I had donated counted .00357% towards finishing the goal.

The number of items I needed to donate was massive. That wasn’t even how the Party screwed people though. They screwed you because the total donation points you needed to complete the quest would change. The total was a moving target that changed depending on how many people currently had the quest and the general level of productivity in the Game. Worse, it also went up with your level.

You could increase each donation’s impact by refining items. Iron ore was worth less than iron ingots. Iron ingots were worth less than iron items. Iron items that were smithed to higher levels of craftsmanship were worth more again. Some people went for quality to finish the quest, mastering different crafting skills. Others went for quantity, harvesting anything they could, anywhere they could, donating it all without slowing down to alter it. Despite all the debates over which approach was superior, the question remained unresolved. Bottom line, no one of either persuasion left the Crib in large numbers.

And it wasn’t like the Clans didn’t get their cut. Want to focus on crafting? They controlled all the settlements where you could safely do things like brew potions without having a giant spider leap out at you. Also, you are going to need someone to collect the materials. That will cost you. Want to wander around collecting mats? You are going to need to get new equipment, replace your potions and scrolls, find food, a place to sleep. Safe places to trade and resupply were all in settlements owned by some subsidiary of the Party. They used to say nothing was certain except death and taxes. Well, we respawn now but taxes are still certain.

It usually took players years to finish this quest, if they ever did.

Sighing, I wondered if maybe it was time to head back to the real world. I had been stuck in that damned dungeon for weeks and I had one of four more impossible tasks in front of me. I needed to figure out how I was going to beat Maya and our bet.

Also, I shouldn’t forget that my actual body was in a public pod station controlled by the GMs. Who knew how long GM Pulling was on shift at the station?

Looking at my quest completion bar, I felt like I was accomplishing nothing here at the moment. Scratch that. I was accomplishing .00375% of my goals. So not quite nothing, just almost nothing.

Taste of a bugle’s call.

The feel between my shoulder blades of the varied reds in a bowl of cherries.

Tiny fireworks popping in and out of existence as I saw the sound of glass shattering.

My senses reconnected to the places where they were supposed to go, and I was back inside the pod at the public station. Kinesthesia used to be a sign of neurological dysfunction. Now it was just a game-loading screen.

The cover slid off and I was out.

“How did it go?” asked GM Pulling.

She was as attractive as I remembered but she looked like she could use a good night’s sleep.

“Ok. Good even. Sort of. The Eastmans can’t get at me for the moment,” I said. I thought of Jude’s dying smile and shook my head. “Have you been watching over me the whole time?”

She grunted noncommittally and gave me room to clamber out of the pod.

“I didn’t want to leave dealing with you to anyone else. Too much temptation to do something unethical about you. Dealing with a Boone is apt to get you fired or exiled to a post like this,” she said.

She really did look almost as tired as I felt. Her brown hair wasn’t messy but somehow it didn’t look exactly as put together as I had seen it in the past. It was pushed back and I could see her ears. They were small and delicate looking. I think I had been alone in a mine for a bit too long since I was finding her ears kind of endearing.

Shaking my attention away from her ears, I thought about what she had just said. Her ex-partner had gotten fired after trying to fit me for a slave collar. He made his choices and got in bed with the Eastmans and it had bitten him on the ass in the end. She had gotten stuck in this dead-end station.

“Sorry you are having some career setbacks,” I said with just a trace of edge.

If she heard that slight edge she pretended to ignore it.

“Yes. My career seems to have led me here,” she said sweeping in the empty public pod station. “Not a lot of opportunity for career advancement or meaningful work.”

A tingle of fear went up the back of my neck. The easiest way for her to get her career moving in the right direction again was to put a quiet word in the right ears.

“Uh huh.” I said.

“Hungry?” she asked offering me a meal pack.

“No,” I fibbed. I was hungry but I needed a few more minutes to readjust to being back in the real world. Eating food was too visceral after going straight from battling giant spiders through the sensory weirdness of log out.

“Can I have some water, though?”

She handed me a water cannister. Which I started draining.

“So, I thought of a way you could help me out with my career problems.”

Water sputtered as I coughed.

“Sorry. What?” I asked once I had gotten my throat clear.

“I thought you could help me out with my career problems,” she repeated.

Looking around I didn’t see any GMs or Eastmans lying in ambush. I could only think of one way I could be of help to her, and asking my permission to inform the Eastmans seemed an unlikely way to go about cashing in that particular lottery ticket. Still, just a minute ago I had been ambushed by a giant spider. I had been jammed into a pit by my best friend and a cabal of the most powerful people in my world. My social interactions were apt to be a bit muddled. She picked up on my heightened anxiety level.

“I’m not going to turn you in to the Eastmans. And why would I tell you if I was going to do that?”

“Sorry, trust issues. I don’t know you that well and your uniform throws me,” I said.

“You want me to take off my uniform?” she asked with 99% deadpan rejection.

Startled, I met her eyes, which startled me even more. Was there 1% something else in what she said? Life and death struggles, even virtual ones, get your adrenaline pumping. Whatever was in her eyes I couldn’t suss it out in the brief amount of time I managed to look before chickening out and looking away.

“What? No. Sorry.” I said reflexively.

“You know you have apologized like four times since we started talking.”

Using all the willpower I had developed in the mines I somehow managed to not say “Sorry” in response. I took a deep breath.

“GM Pulling, it strikes me that among all the other reasons that people don’t typically use the public pods to play, a huge part of it has to be how hard it is to be fighting one second, then logging out and making polite conversation right after. Can you give me a little space for a second?”

“Yes. We are actually counseled to keep that in mind when working these positions. Let me apologize. You Boones just seem tougher than most. Sorry.”

Ah. A glimmer of what she wanted came to me. I stretched a bit and just looked around at this dumpy little section of the real world while I mulled the idea over.

“What do you think I can do for you?”

She sucked in her breath.

“I was hoping you could introduce me to your father,” she said.

I had guessed right. Nice to know my father wasn’t the only one in the family with a few brain cells to rub together.

“No,” I replied.

“Hear me out.”

“We haven’t known each other for very long. And looking over our relatively short acquaintance I can’t see how you figure that I owe you anything.”

“I watched over you. Kept my mouth zipped about where you were. I’ve taken overtime and swapped shifts to keep your playing here confidential,” she argued.

“Things are pretty screwed up when you not abusing your uniform or stopping your colleagues from doing it means I owe you.”

She smiled. It really was a nice smile.

“Hello. We live in a postapocalyptic hell hole. Things are screwed up.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” I said turning away.

“This isn’t just about my career. You are right. Things ARE screwed up. Me not abusing my uniform shouldn’t be something you owe me for. But I didn’t. You want only those who play the Party’s game to succeed? If I do the right thing as a GM, don’t you have some sort of obligation to help?”

“You brought me in with Arneson. You walked me into that jail pod,” I reminded her.

“I did as much as I could within my orders.”

“Just following orders, huh?”

“Yes,” she said earnestly.

Goddamn no one knows any history anymore.

“’Just following orders’ was an excuse that the… never mind. I was wrong to say that. Damned Godwin’s Law,” I muttered.

She clearly didn’t understand what I was on about but my trailing off gave her an opportunity to keep making her case.

“Wait. Just wait a second.”

She was weighing something in her mind. Her lips pursed around words she was holding back for some reason.

After giving her a moment to decide one way or another I gave up and started to leave. I had a bet to win. I just wanted to get back to my apartment, have a shower, sleep for a bit and hope my unconscious could help me figure out some new strategies to get back in the game and win my bet.

Now that I had finished off the instance I thought I could play at my place without being interrupted. At least until Maya and her mom figured out a new line of attack. Endearing ears or no, I needed to stay focused.

“I think there has been an incursion. For all I know, maybe more than one,” Pulling said to my back as I walked to the exit.

My eyes whipped around to hers. She met them levelly--anything humorous or flirtatious was long gone. We hadn’t had an incursion of wild nano past the barrier since I was a child. Over a decade without anyone being disintegrated or even more horrifically consumed and… and altered into something… other. My mind couldn’t help but bring up a flash of the last time I saw my mother. I put that image back in its box and sealed it away.

“The GMs and the Party are keeping this hushed up but I think the barrier was breached. I think wild nano is inside the walls. You have to let me talk to your father.”

Damn it. I really didn’t have time for the world to end.