Owl and the Electric Samurai by Kristi Charish

Author:Kristi Charish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Star

10

WORLD QUEST

11:00 a.m. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, World Quest

“I don’t know. Looks awfully good to be true, Byzantine,” Carpe said over my headset. It was in reference to the town we’d reached, a small, picturesque walled city set in a fjord, modeled after the fortified Viking cities that used to dot the coast. From what I gathered from the buildings and NPCs, it was supposed to represent the early to mid-medieval ages. It was the right city; my in-game map said as much. All we had to do was find the treasure.

I took a sip of my coffee. An Americano this time. I’d finally managed to summon up the energy to run the espresso machine . . . and suffer through Captain’s pleas for food every time I’d set foot in the kitchen. Currently he’d settled for batting the food toy around. I was impressed. It had been out in the apartment for almost twenty-four hours and it wasn’t in pieces. Yet. “Those who never take chances never find resurrection scrolls,” I told him.

“No, but they also don’t get eaten by dragons and fried by fireballs.”

“Gird your elf balls and stop whining, Carpe. It’s barely a Level eighteen dungeon, and as far as the map says there’s only one major monster guarding the treasure.”

“And every map in World Quest should be trusted implicitly?”

“No, but what kind of treasure hunters are we if we don’t give it a chance and hear it out first? I don’t think I want to live in a World Quest where a treasure map has to cough up proof of its good intentions before a couple dungeon crawlers like us will take it out on the town.”

I could hear the sigh along our comm channel. “There is something seriously wrong with you. What level is the monster?”

“Thirteen.”

Carpe swore. Level thirteen meant it’d be packing some serious firepower, and we’d have to do some reconnaissance to figure out what kind of Level thirteen monster it was.

“Giant or a Medusa,” Carpe said.

“A Medusa this far north? More likely an ice troll, or a baby wyvern.” I’d been reading up on Nordic monsters. Most, like the sea monsters and dragons, were in the low twenties, meaning a team of three or more, but the under-fifteens were still more populous than one might ­imagine.

Carpe went silent.

“Look, are you in or not?” I asked, wondering for a minute whether Carpe would play along.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in. Just changing up my inventory. Here, hold these in your magic thief bag, will you?” A set of scrolls and three knives appeared in my inventory, which I transferred into my bag of holding. How did the thieves of World Quest end up the RPG game’s equivalent of a packhorse?

“To be honest, I kind of expected you to throw me something besides a treasure map,” Carpe said.

“Hunh,” I said, as I began to scope out the area for any magic wards we might want to avoid. “As I’m not a mind reader, what were you expecting exactly?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Byzantine.

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