The Bathrobe Knight (35 page)

Chapter 8: Mountains out of Molehills

Kass
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Kass rushed the login process as fast as she could. She knew Darwin had said they weren’t going to leave for an hour and she had plenty of time to get a good nap in, but she didn’t want to be late. Regardless of the fact that Darwin had never left her behind, she still had a sinking feeling that he would leave on schedule with or without her. To prevent this EXP bot loss tragedy, she had even set her alarm so early she would have at least ten minutes to spare. She was almost tempted to do away with the nap altogether, but she knew she would need sleep, and everyone but her seemed to be fully rested and ready to do it in one push.

When she finished logging in, she started running towards the meeting spot.
Why does running feel like a more natural thing than walking in a video game?
she thought, remembering that other than in this VRMMO, she had never bothered even hitting the walk button in any other video game. In fact, she often found herself jumping around in circles like she was allergic to the ground and a dog was chasing her when she had to wait even a few seconds for a friend or raid group to finish getting ready.

“Lady Kass,” a Guard yelled out to her from up ahead. “You’ve made it early! Great! Darwin said we were leaving as soon as you appeared.”

“Everyone’s ready?” she asked, happy that running didn’t wind her in the game like it did in real life.

“Yes, Lady Kass,” he said, joining her as soon as she reached him in the run towards the entrance. “Lord Darwin and the Guards were able to get the whole population packed and into formation in less than half an hour. Darwin’s blessing is truly a great thing.”

“Darwin’s blessing?” she asked, her brows wrinkling.

“Yes,” he answered without even looking at her. “When the great Lord Darwin blessed us with the blood of his people. What would have given two men a struggle to carry, one man can now carry while running.”

“The great Lord Darwin, ey?” she thought aloud.

“Indeed,” the Guard responded as he ran slightly in front of her.

I wonder what he’s like in real life,
she couldn’t help but wonder. In most games, she found herself a rogue opportunistic player, always leaving groups because they couldn’t keep up with her growth. On more than one occasion, the group she started playing with at level one wouldn’t even be at the halfway mark when she was finishing up the end game raid content.
But now, now I’m always running just to keep up.
She frowned.

She ran with the Guard in silence until she exited the cave, at which point she was greeted with something that looked as if it was straight off of the History Channel. Darwin had organized two three-by-ten Turtle-Wolf formations that closely resembled Roman soldiers in marching formation. Each of the two groups was flanking the people of the town, who stood in formations of five people wide with a few wooden carts that appeared to hold the sum of their possessions splitting them in half.  Behind them there was a string of five Turtle-Wolves with the two ZombOgres, and in front, a dozen Guards stood with Darwin and Fuzzy Wuzzy five paces ahead of everyone else.

“Wow, you got all of them together this quick?” Kass did her best not to gawk. When she had first heard about the development of the game, she knew that there would be massive fights and large organized raids. It had even been one of the most exciting points of the game to imagine the epic clashes that would occur as thousands of players crashed into each other with hundreds of unique spells and weapons as they battled it out for territories, cities and items, but this was the first time, even considering the thousand soldiers that had gone out to fight the White-Horn Minotaurs, that she had seen such an intimidating organized force. Other than the villagers pulling the six carts, every single child and adult was in perfect formation holding a Turtle-Wolf Spear as if they had years of military training.

Kass did her best to collect herself and looked over at the Guard. “Lord Darwin says you are to join him at the front,” the Guard said to her, breaking into a run again to join the other Guards behind Darwin.

I know he is supposed to be the great Lord Darwin, but how is it that everyone can take a guy wandering around in his Bathrobe with insufficient flap protection seriously?
Kass thought as she ran behind the Guard, deciding to herself that she was never going to call him Lord Darwin.
I mean, he plays video games all day and somehow thought Fuzzy Wuzzy was an appropriate Bear name, so why do the NPCs take him so seriously?

“Good, you’ve made it,” Darwin said when Kass finally reached him. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah. I even managed to scarf some ramen down right before I logged in,” she said.

“Actually, how come there isn’t any ramen-ish snack served in the game?” he said, raising his Sword before she could answer him. “MOVE OUT!” he yelled, dropping his Sword to point it in front of him in the direction of the dungeons that would lead them to the White-Horn territory.

The little Valcrest Demon army moved out at once. While their formations looked perfect, their marching was still lacking, and it took away from the effect a little. It was much more like very fast walking than actual marching, but the speed they were moving at was definitely commendable.

“Well, not sure if you’ll ever get to try it, but in the Beast-Race kingdom there are a lot of good ramen-cooking Were-Pandas,” she resumed the conversation as soon as the group was moving and the pace had steadied. “I’m generally a bigger fan of udon than ramen; it’s just that my dad prefers ramen, and he’s the one who always does the shopping.”

“If someone else took the time to buy groceries for me, I might even put up with eating pizza rolls,” he laughed, looking at her with a big smile. “Maybe you’ll buy me udon sometime, and I’ll try it to see if it’s better than ramen.”

“Nuh uh, if I’m buying, you’ll be trying air with a side of water,” she said indignantly.

“What? Can’t afford to even add bread to the menu?” he shook his head at her.

“I can afford bread just fine, thank you very much,” she said, doing her best to hide a smile. “I’m just not going to waste money on a man who doesn’t even know that the gentleman is supposed to foot the bill for the Lady, and I am a Lady now, don’t you know?”   

“So I’m a gentleman now? I didn’t know you thought so highly of me,” he joked back, pulling his lower lip up in an exaggeratedly pompous face that broke loose the giggle she was suppressing.

“If you treat me to a nice enough dinner, I’ll be happy to call you whatever you want,” she said, still giggling.

“Whatever I want? Perhaps I’ll have you call me the same as that doctor,” Darwin thought aloud as they marched.

“Doctor who?” she asked.

“Exactly,” Darwin chuckled.

Kass wanted to facepalm when she realized she had walked right into that corny line.
When will I ever be free of Doctor Who jokes?
she grumbled to herself.

Kass turned to look back and admire the marching villager army behind her. “I still can’t believe how far you’ve come in such a short time. You built an underground city in days and took a helpless dying town and turned it into a force to be reckoned with.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m going to do anything else with my free time,” he said, twirling the still drawn Sword in his hand.

“Just saying, I wish I could get you to run our country for a month,” she said, twirling her Staff just like Darwin was twirling his sword. “Our congress is about as productive as a jittery 56k modem trying to load a movie on Netflix in HD.”  

“I don’t think I’d actually be that good if it was in the real world. In the game, I’m focused on the game. I have to protect those close to me, do the right thing, and work towards a greater goal. In real life, I’d probably just be playing a game,” he mused, putting his Sword up finally. “If it was an option, I’d probably be playing a game in Tipqa.”

“So you’d log into a state of the art video game that programmers and researchers spent thousands of hours of their lives to build just to play a different video game inside it?” she asked, trying to keep her jaw from popping open in shock.

“Well, maybe not any video game, but definitely Emerald Gardens. I really miss that game,” he thought, smiling when he saw Kass’s shocked face.

“What? Why don’t you just log out and play it in real life then?” She still couldn’t understand.

“I have my reasons,” he said frowning.

“You mean, reasons like Tipqa is a way better MMO?” she nudged him.

“You could say it’s so addicting I couldn’t bring myself to log off even if I tried,” he replied. This time his smile was back, but it was the creepy one that let her know he was hiding something.

“Anyways, what are they doing?” Kass asked, pointing to Blake and Alex as they pulled ahead of Darwin and Kass in two separate groups with three Guards each.

“Oh, them. I figured we could let them clear out the forest monsters and make sure the lower level Guards were closer to forty before we hit the caves,” he answered.

“And why aren’t we helping?” he asked.

“Do you really think any of these will be worth EXP at all?” he replied with a lopsided grin.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Better let them get some since we don’t need it. I was just worried about the loss of gear.”

“Kass, we have thousands of Spears from the Turtle-Wolf farms running twenty four hours a day while we were clearing dungeons,” he said. “We’ll be fine if we can ever find someone to buy them off us.”

“Okay,” she said, frowning. “Well, can we at least kill a few here and there for fun, or is this going to just be a long boring walk in a video game?”

“Long and boring stroll?” he mused. “Here I thought girls were supposed to like long walks or something.”

“That’s just what people put on their eHarmony profiles,” she said, doing an exaggerated long step walk. “It’s not actually what they mean. Also, you’re missing some moonlight, a beach, and fireflies or something before it even becomes a proper romantic stroll cliché.”

“I see. Am I also missing strawberries covered in dark chocolate before it turns into a real date?”

“Careful with that date word. A lady might think you were asking her out,” she put her hands over her face in a fake attempt to cover up a non-existent blush.

“I would never deign to,” he said. “Us old men are far trickier than that. We just talk the girl into multiple day adventures where it’s just the two of us.”

“Ah. So that’s your scheme,” she asked.

“Indeed,” he signaled to Justin behind them. “Now, if you want some action, I suppose we could get Justin to lead the march, and you and I can sneak off and kill a few things to pass the time. All we’ll have to do is make sure to be back before they get close to the dungeon entrance.”

“Hmmm, and it’s not a date?”

“Nope, just the two of us slaughtering some innocent forest creatures while Bambi looks for a Mother’s Day card.” While he said it, Kass couldn’t help but frown.

Poor Bambi.
“Alright, you’ve convinced me. Let’s go,” she said, happy to get away from just walking in a formation.

They pulled into the forest a few minutes south of the group marching east and started clearing the mobs. She found herself more often than not wishing Darwin was a little slower at clearing the enemies so she could use a fancier spell, but with how low the enemies were compared to them, it was very unlikely that he was going to slow down.

While Darwin was an expert at killing while moving, she was just now getting the hang of running and casting. She hadn’t even figured out how to properly run and channel spells that lasted longer than half a second. No matter how much she practiced it, it didn’t feel like she was  getting any better at casting. In the game, spells were something you intuitively knew how to cast, but no one on the forums had really been able to pull off running and channeling a spell for even a second except for one person. To make matters more difficult for other players, since the magic system was so intuitive for the user, it was almost impossible for the one player who had done it once to explain what happened to the others.